The New Lifetime Reading Plan

T.S. Eliot [116] and Huxley had much in common. Both were formidably intelligent, as well as formidably learned. Both summed up in their personalities a large part of the Western tradition. Both moved from a position of destructive criticai irony to one of faith—Eliot to Anglo-Catholicism, Huxley toward a mysticism drawn from the East but also from such Western visionaries as Blake [63], Eckhart, Tauler, and others. Eliofs may have been the profounder intellect, as he was cer- tainly the greater artist. But Huxley's intellect was more adven- turous, more playful, and more closely involved with insistent concrete problems of our time, particularly those pointing the way to race suicide, such as total war and murderous overpop- ulation.

The variety, the flexibility, the erudition, the sheer bril- liance of Huxley's restless mind may be enjoyed through a reading of his essays. He leaves few of humanity's major con- cerns untouched. His skepticism, never cheap or easy, has a cleansing power still to be properly estimated. I know no other single English or American writer of his time who reflected with such clarity certain shifts and modulations in the Western intellect, including a shift toward the thought of the East.

Huxley was famous before he was thirty, a circumstance

perhaps not entirely fortunate for him. But the book that gave him a worldwide audience was Brave New World, published in 1932, reissued in 1946 with an important new Preface by the author. Probably this terrible fable will lose its point and force as unconsciously we take on in reality the condition he describes in fantasy. For our period, however, it is what might be called a temporary classic. No one who really wishes to learn what is happening, not to our environment but to our souls, should remain unacquainted with this nightmare of a book.

The utopian literature of the twentieth century, unlike that of the Renaissance, is negative, dystopian. In it we hear not shouts of encouragement but cries of warning. As Berdiaeff, quoted by Huxley, puts it, our concern now is not how to attain but how to avoid Utopia. For the Utopia we are so busy preparing is, according to Huxley, Orwell [123], and dozens of other thoughtful writers, a hell of dehumanization.

Huxley's Brave New World projected six hundred years into the future, is populated by animais (still known as human beings) and their managers. The managed animais have been taught to love their servitude; they are happy, or, as we proudly say, adjusted. The Constitution of the state has but three arti- cles: Community, Identity, Stability. Religion as we know it, art, theoretical science, the family, emotions, individual striv- ings and differences—ali have vanished.

Not a good novel, Brave New World should be read as a prophetic fable, differing from other prophecies in that it is the product not of intuition but of cold intelligence. Its ideas (and ali its characters are ideas), first advanced more than sixty years ago, have proved prescient. Ali the gambits of then-current cocktail party conversation are prefigured in Brave New World—the conformist, the nonconformist, the relapse to primitivism, the new chartered sexuality, the organization man, the lonely crowd—they are here extended into a future that seems less remote today than it did in 1932.

I do not suggest that Brave New World be taken literally. It

is not a textbook of the future but a purposely exaggerated satirical vision, in the tradition of Gulliver [52]. Doubtless Huxley will rank below Swift. But not too far below. And what he has to say is perhaps more immediate, if less crushing, than Swift's total misanthropy.

C.F.

I 18

WILLIAM FAULKNER

1897-1962

The Sound and the Furtj, As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner has been hailed (except by a few uninfluen- tial dissenters) as the greatest American novelist of his genera- tion. Some critics rank him among the greatest of ali time. In 1949 the award of the Nobel Prize marked the official peak of an extraordinary career.