Mill Slaves

EYELESS IN GAZA--Aldous Huxley-- Harper ($2.50). The literary career of Aldous Huxley has been marked with many guideposts. It has not been his fault if critics have been unable to trace the stages of his development. At the age of 41 he has produced some 24 books, including novels, plays, poems, anthologies, travel books, essays, charting his progression from an accomplished satirist to a troubled moralist, from a contented mocker at contemporary society to an earnest preacher to it. Tall (over 6 ft.), extremely thin, bookish, Aldous Huxley gave up his plan to be a doctor at 17, when he nearly went blind. At 20 he published his first book, The Burning Wheel, a volume of poems. After the War he became an art, music and dramatic critic, was on the staff of London House and Garden when, in 1921, he published his first novel, Crome Yellow. The dominant note of that book, as of Antic Hay and Those Barren Leaves which followed it, was one of unamiable cynicism over the prevailing moods and purposeless behavior of post-War English intellectuals. In Huxley's characters purpose was always identified with hypocrisy, devotion to any ideal with ineffectuality or self-deception. Between long highbrow talks, usually on science or art, his characters suffered from boredom, made love or deliberately created trouble to avoid it, were about as uniformly unpleasant a set of moral idiots as any author has created. Not until Point Counter Point, published in 1928, did Author Huxley give evidence of his dissatisfaction with his mood of vast, all-embracing negation. In Rampion, obviously modeled on his friend D. H. Lawrence, he created a character who was sincere without being stupid, kind without being weak, and whose insistence on the need for the uninhibited life of the senses was dramatized by the wasted lives of the people around him. In his subsequent satire on scientific progress, Brave New World, Author Huxley buttressed his argument without deepening it when he painted a picture of a world in which man's conquest of nature was complete, in which the evils of contemporary society were absent but with them all poetry, all drama, all joy in life.

Even readers who noted Aldous Huxley's increasing seriousness could hardly be prepared for the calm didactic tone with which Eyeless in Gaza begins. The title comes from Milton's line, "Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves," and the author announces his story as that of "a number of attempts to achieve liberty." The central character's life, Huxley says, shows "how easy it is for a man, by nature gentle, sensitive and without consuming passions, to be betrayed by weakness and evasion into disgraceful acts pregnant with the worst consequences." Eye-fass in Gaza is written in a choppy, experimental fashion which seems designed to take some of the curse of banality off this sober theme. It is divided into 54 episodes, each episode dated, but the dates related in an emotional rather than chronological pattern. Thus the first episode takes place in 1933, the second in 1934, the third in 1933, the fourth in 1902. These backward glances are intended to illuminate, in some consequential happening in the past, the buried influences that determine a character's conduct at the present moment. The glimpses ahead in turn show how his reactions at present mould his decisions in the future.

The central character is Anthony Beavis, a dark-haired, full-lipped individual who looks like a meditative child. His particular artistic dislike is Proust, for he considers Proust's absorption with the past repellent and perverse. Anthony is living with resentful, brown-haired Helen Ledwidge in the south of France when the story opens, and he has, Author Huxley establishes with his backward glances, good reasons for avoiding a clear look at his own past behavior. Helen and Anthony are making carefree love on the roof when a grotesque accident violently deflects the course of their lives. A dog falls from an airplane flying overhead. "A strange yelping sound punctuated the din of the machine. Anthony opened his eyes again and was in time to see a dark shape rushing down towards him. He uttered a cry, made a quick and automatic movement to shield his face. With a violent but dull and muddy impact, the thing struck the flat roof a yard or two from where they were lying." Helen went back to her husband and Anthony was left alone with his thoughts.

As the story darts from 1933 to 1902, from 1902 to 1928, from the years of the War to the time of the British General Strike, a queer cast of characters takes shape. Anthony's insincere, foolish fa ther, his boyhood friends, Mark Staithes and Brian Foxe, his first mistress, Mary Amberley who is Helen's malicious, unscrupulous mother, Beppo Bowles, an aging homosexual, all appear and play their parts in forming the combination of interests, prejudices, dislikes, inhibitions, standards, that make up Anthony's character. Sometimes they merely exert a negative influence, as when Anthony recoils in disgust at the spectacle of Beppo's humiliation. Sometimes their influence is destructive, as when Mary Amberley persuades him to seduce his friend's sweetheart, causes his friend's suicide. But each incident exacts its influence or leaves its scar, leading Anthony along some path he has undertaken or blocking his way, strengthening some belief he holds about himself and the world or weakening it, forcing him at last to see that his philosophical detachment has been an escape and his moral indifference no more than self-deception. While Helen, after leaving Anthony and her husband, falls in love with a German refugee, becomes a Communist, Anthony travels to Mexico, meets a Quaker philosopher who teaches him nonresistance. Mary Amberley develops from a complete immoralist to a narcotic addict, while most of the pleasure-seekers and boredom-avoiders go to pieces in unesthetic ways. Anthony turns into a preacher of positive pacifism, accepts William Penn's credo: "Force may subdue, but Love gains." His lectures on peace arouse the hatred of patriots, who threaten him. Always timid, he finds that faith has made him courageous. "Meanwhile there are love and compassion. Constantly obstructed. But, oh, let them be made indefatigable, implacable to surmount all obstacles, the inner sloth, the distaste, the intellectual scorn; and, from without, the other's aversions and suspicions."

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