“The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
“Never?” I questioned.
“Maybe from God’s point of view,” he conceded. “Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Maxwell and Thomas a Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance.” And when I asked, “To what?” he waved a square brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves. “To the Best that has been Thought and Said,” he declaimed with mock portentousness. And then, “Oddly enough, the closest to reality are always the fictions that are supposed to be the least true.” He leaned over and touched the back of a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov. “It makes so little sense that it’s almost real.”
There are a lot of paradoxes inherent to fiction writing, and this is definitely one of them. Any novel that tries to mimic reality -- and there are a few of them out there -- tends to bog down in trivia that doesn’t lead anywhere. Because that’s what real life is like. Novels in which important things lead to important conclusions are generally more satisfying to read, but are definitely more unlike the world most of us find ourselves in.
Here’s another writer’s insight that jumped off the page at me.
“How impossibly crude our language is! If you don’t mention the physiological correlates of emotion, you’re being false to the given facts. But if you do mention them, it sounds as though you were trying to be gross and cynical. Whether it’s passion or the desire of the moth for the star, whether it’s tenderness or adortion or romantic yearning -- love is always accompanied by events in the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes, the glandular and erectile tissues. Those who don’t say so are liars. Those who do are labeled as pornographers.”
I’ve struggled with this one myself. I once tried to write a love scene in which the characters actually made love -- frustrated, I think, by years of reading novels in which that act was always obscured, sometimes to the degree that the reader was unsure if it had, in fact, occurred. It was an experiment, and I have no fear in admitting that it failed. Yes, those are the “damned things” that happened, but writing about them so explicitly, I think, gives them an importance that they don’t really have. There are reasons for not explicitly describing the sex act in fiction, and not all of them are prudishness.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a good deal of The Genius and the Goddess is about sex -- and the ways that its various characters exercise their power in a sexualized environment.
The Genius
First up is The Genius -- a Nobel prize winning physicist named Henry Maartens. The John Rivers we are introduced to in the opening pages is Maartens’s lab assistant, who lives with Maartens, his wife Katy, and his two children, Ruth and Timmy. In the thick of the novel’s drama, Maartens comes to suspect his wife of having an affair -- who is away in Chicago tending to her sick and dying mother -- and it mortifies him. In the scene where he shares his suspicions and his fears with his lab assistant, Rivers analyzes Maartens and his attitude toward sex in a way that is clearly more Huxley than the relatively inexperienced Rivers.
“Henry, as I’ve said, was a broken reed, and broken reeds, as you must have had innumerable occasions to observe, are apt to be ardent. Ardent, indeed, to the point of frenzy. No, that’s the wrong word. Frenzy is blind. Whereas lovers like Henry never lose their head. They take it with them, however far they go -- take it with them so that they can be fully, gloatingly conscious of their own and their partners’ alienation. Actually, this was about the only thing, outside his laboratory and his library, that Henry cared to be conscious of. Most people inhabit a universe that is like French cafe au lait -- fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage. Henry’s universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual.”
Rivers is here speaking to an unnamed narrator -- as he does throughout the novel, the work actually being one long discussion between an older Rivers, reflecting back on these events, and the narrator who, being unnamed, is presumed to be none other than Huxley himself. It’s a device often used in older fiction -- the need to give the words a reason for existing on the page rather than just letting them represent the story abstractly -- but here it provides an added dimension, since there is clearly more than a little Huxley in Henry Maartens -- the intellectual who, nonetheless, exists as a sexual creature, and who can’t help but bring his brain into the bedroom.
Maartens is so disassembled by the idea that his wife may be unfaithful to him that Rivers suggests that he go to bed, and Rivers goes to prepare a warm milk toddy to help him relax.
“I poured it into a thermos and went upstairs. For a moment, as I entered the bedroom, I thought Henry had given me the slip. Then, from behind the catafalque, came a sound of movement. In the recess between the draped chintz of the four-poster and the window, Henry was standing before the open door of a small safe, let into the wall and ordinarily concealed from view by the half-length portrait of Katy in her wedding dress. ‘Here’s your milk.’ I began in a tone of hypocritical cheerfulness. But then I noticed that the thing he had taken out of the recesses of the strongbox was a revolver; my heart missed a beat. I remembered suddenly that there was a midnight train for Chicago. Vision of the day after tomorrow’s headlines crowded in on me. FAMOUS SCIENTIST SHOOTS WIFE, SELF. Or, alternately, NOBEL PRIZE MAN HELD IN DOUBLE SLAYING. Or even MOTHER OF TWO DIES IN FLAMING LOVE NEST. I put down the thermos and, bracing myself to knock him out, if necessary, with a left to the jaw, or a short sharp jab in the solar plexus, I walked over to him. ‘If you don’t mind, Dr. Maartens,’ I said respectfully. There was no struggle, hardly so much as a conscious effort on his part to keep the revolver. Five seconds later the thing was safely in my pocket. ‘I was just looking at it,’ he said in a small flat voice.”
As we read on, remember that the safe from which Maartens retrieved the revolver is behind a picture of his wife in her wedding dress.
“‘Can we shut this up again?’ I asked. He nodded. On a little table beside the bed lay the objects he had taken out of the safe while looking for the revolver. These I now replaced -- Katy’s jewel box, half a dozen cases containing the gold medals presented to the great man by various learned societies, several Manila envelopes bulging with papers. And finally there were those books -- all six volumes of the Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a copy of Felicia by Andrea de Nerciat and, published in Brussels, an anonymous work with illustrations, entitled Miss Floggy’s Finishing School. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said in my jolliest bedside manner as I locked the safe door and returned him the key. Picking up the portrait I hung it again on its appointed hook. Behind the white satin and the orange blossom, behind the Madonna lilies and a face whose radiance even the ineptitude of a fifth-rate painter could not obscure, who could have divined the presence of that strangely assorted treasure -- Felicia and the stock certificates, Miss Floggy and the golden symbols with which a not very grateful society rewards its men of genius?”
It contains the trinkets of both his intellectual and his sexual mind. Even I don’t need to be hit over the head to understand the symbolic significance of the safe and its contents.
The Goddess
So that’s the Genius. Now, the Goddess -- Maartens’s wife Katy who, during the scene described above, is, as I said, away, tending to her sick and dying mother. But Maartens himself is also in diminishing health, and Katy eventually must return to provide him with her restorative presence. Except Katy herself is nearing her limit, exhaustion and worry combining to their most negative effects. Until...
“In the hall, on my way to the dining room, I ran into [the Maartens’s housekeeper] Beulah. She was carrying a tray with the eggs and bacon, and humming the tune of ‘All creatures that on earth do dwell’; catching sight of me, she gave me a radiant smile and said, “Praise the Lord!’ I had never felt less inclined to praise Him. ‘We’re going to have a miracle,’ she went on. ‘And when I asked her how she knew we were going to have a miracle, she told me that she had just seen Mrs. Maartens in the sickroom, and Mrs. Maartens was herself again. Not a ghost any more, but her old self. The virtue had come back, and that meant that Dr. Maartens would start getting well again. ‘It’s Grace,’ she said. ‘I’ve been praying for it night and day. “Dear Lord, give Mrs. Maartens some of that Grace of Yours. Let her have the virtue back, so Dr. Maartens can get well.” And now it’s happened, it’s happened!’”
It’s happened, all right. But it isn’t the Grace of God that has restored Katy. Upon hearing of the death of her mother, and in her moment of need, she and Rivers have begun a love affair, and it is the tenderness and the physicality of their relationship that has refreshed Katy.
“And, as though to confirm what she had said, there was a rustling on the stairs behind us. We turned. It was Katy. She was dressed in black. Love and sleep had smoothed her face, and the body which yesterday had moved so wearily, at the cost of so much painful effort, was now as softly strong, as rich with life as it had been before her mother's illness. She was a goddess once again -- in mourning but uneclipsed, luminous even in her grief and resignation.”
And Rivers isn’t kidding about this goddess business. In this novel, Huxley is examining the deep connection between sex and grace, between the primal restorative power of the procreative act and the heights of intelligence and achievement that man is otherwise always attempting to reach.
“Katy wasn’t the praying kind. For her, the supernatural was Nature; the divine was neither spiritual nor specifically human; it was in landscapes and sunshine and animals; it was in flowers, in the sour smell of little babies, in the warmth and softness of snuggling children; it was in kisses, of course, in the nocturnal apocalypses of love, in the more diffuse but no less ineffable bliss of just feeling well. She was a kind of feminine Antaeus -- invincible while her feet were on the ground, a goddess so long as she was in contact with the greater goddess within her, the universal Mother without. Three weeks of attendance on a dying woman had broken that contact. Grace came when it was restored, and that happened on the night of April the twenty-third. An hour of love, five or six hours of the deeper otherness of sleep, and the emptiness was filled, the ghost reincarnated. She lived again -- yet not she, of course, but the Unknown Quantity lived in her.”
This Unknown Quantity is vitally important to understanding the theme of this novel -- because, as will eventually become apparent, it is not actually Katy that is the goddess. Rather, if anything, it is the goddess that lives within her.
“The Unknown Quantity,” he repeated. “At one end of the spectrum it’s pure spirit, it’s the Clear Light of the Void; and at the other end it’s instinct, it’s health, it’s the perfect functioning of an organism that’s infallible so long as we don’t interfere with it; and somewhere between the two extremes is what St. Paul called ‘Christ’ -- the divine made human. Spiritual grace, animal grace, human grace -- these aspects of the same underlying mystery, ideally, all of us should be open to all of them. In practice most of us either barricade ourselves against every form of grace or, if we open the door, open it to only one of the forms. Which isn’t, of course, enough. And yet a third of a loaf is better than no bread. How much better was manifest that morning of April twenty-fourth. Cut off from animal grace, Katy had been an impotent phantom. Restored to it, she was Hera and Demeter and Aphrodite gloriously rolled into one, with Aesculapius and the Grotto of Lourdes thrown in as a bonus -- for the miracle was definitely under way. After three days at death’s door, Henry had felt the presence of the virtue in her and was responding. Lazarus was in process of being raised.”
Rivers at once does and does not understand this Unknown Quantity. In his intellectualism, he is unable to grasp it firmly, and to understand that although Katy possesses it, it is not Katy, and that Katy is, therefore, not a goddess, but just a woman. Every time he tries to talk to Katy about it -- either at the esoteric level of its power or at the practical level of his emotion -- she rebuffs him.
“Whenever I tried to tell her something of what was going on in my heart and mind, she either changed the subject or else, with a little laugh, with a little indulgent pat on the back of the hand, gently but very decidedly shut me up. Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entrails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep. One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things -- in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses -- a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously. Katy kept our traps firmly shut.”
The Hamlet reference is probably appropriate -- as Rivers is not wholly unlike the Prince of Denmark: vacillating, examining, obsessing, but rarely acting. But Katy? She has a different reason for acting the way she does. And she is certainly no Ophelia.
“She had the instinctive wisdom that taboos the four-letter words (and a fortiori the scientific polysyllables), while tacitly taking for granted the daily and nightly four-letter acts to which they refer. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem, a casus belli, the source of a neurosis. If Katy had talked, where, I ask you, should we have been? In a labyrinth of intercommunicating guilts and anguishes. Some people, of course, enjoy that sort of thing. Others detest it, but feel, remorsefully, that they deserve to suffer. Katy (God bless her!) was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian’s trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there’s really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There’s no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.”
Rivers goes on flagellating like this for another page or two, and what he is eventually driving at is the seeming incongruity of it all -- about how something vile and create something wholesome.
“What I needed most at that time was a dose of justificatory good language to counteract the effect of all that vile-base-foul. But Katy wouldn’t give it me. Good or bad, language was entirely beside the point. The point, so far as she was concerned, was her experience of the creative otherness of love and sleep. The point was finding herself once again in a state of grace. The point, finally, was her renewed ability to do something for Henry. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the cookbook. Pleasure received and given, virtue restored, Lazarus raised from the dead -- the eating in this case was self-evidently good. So help yourself to the pudding and don’t talk with your mouth full -- it’s bad manners and it prevents you from appreciating the ambrosial flavor. It was a piece of advice too good for me to be able to take. True, I didn’t talk to her; she wouldn’t let me. But I went on talking to myself -- talking and talking till the ambrosia turned into wormwood or was contaminated by the horrible gamy taste of forbidden pleasure, of sin recognized and knowingly indulged in. And meanwhile the miracle was duly proceeding. Steadily, rapidly, without a single setback, Henry was getting better.”
These are deep issues that Huxley is examining here. And it is a little surprising -- at least to me -- that Rivers is so prudish about them.
“Didn’t that make you feel happier about things?” I asked.
Rivers nodded his head.
“In one way, yes. Because, of course, I realized even then, even in my state of imbecile innocence, that I was indirectly responsible for the miracle. I had betrayed my master; but if I hadn’t, my master would probably be dead. Evil had been done; but good, an enormous good, had come of it. It was a kind of justification. On the other hand how horrible it seemed that grace for Katy and life for her husband should be dependent on something so intrinsically low, so utterly vile-base-foul, as bodies and their sexual satisfaction. All my idealism revolted against the notion. And yet it was obviously true.”
Here it is, spelled out so clearly that it almost seems likely to be the kernel that Huxley has built his entire narrative around. It is, after all, sex that creates life, not just in the thematic sense that Huxley’s novel embraces, but in the literal sense of biology. And the fact that Rivers considers one to be foul and the other to be pure, and has such trouble harmonizing the two, is a commentary on societies that take the same Victorian view.
But Katy is different. It’s not lost on me that because of Huxley’s narrative choice of telling the story not just from Rivers’s point of view but largely in his words that we seldom see Katy directly, and are stuck too frequently with Rivers’s perception of her as the goddess. But Katy is no goddess and, more importantly, she knows that she isn’t.
Eventually, Rivers will be able to speak with Katy about his perceptions and fears.
“That evening I managed to say a little of what was on my mind. At first she tried to stop my mouth with kisses. Then, when I pushed her away, she grew angry and threatened to go back to her room. I had the sacrilegious courage to restrain her by brute force. ‘You’ve got to listen,’ I said as she struggled to free herself. And holding her at arm’s length, as one holds a dangerous animal, I poured out my tale of moral anguish. Katy heard me out: then, when it was all over, she laughed. Not sarcastically, not with the intention of wounding me, but from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement. ‘You can’t bear it,’ she teased. ‘You’re too noble to be a party to a deception! Can’t you ever think of anything but your own precious self? Think of me, for a chance, think of Henry! A sick genius and the poor woman whose job it’s been to keep the sick genius alive and tolerably sane. His huge crazy intellect against my instincts, his inhuman denial of life against the flow of life in me. It wasn’t easy, I’ve had to fight with every weapon that came to hand. And now here I have to listen to you -- talking the most nauseous kind of Sunday School twaddle, daring to tell me -- me! -- you cannot live a lie -- like George Washington and the cherry tree. You make me tired, I’m going to sleep.’ She yawned and, rolling over on her side, turned her back on me -- the back,” Rivers added with a little snort of laughter, “the infinitely eloquent back (if you perused it in the dark, like Braille, with your finger tips) of Aphrodite Callipygos.”
It is passages like these that make me conclude that Rivers is an unreliable narrator -- for how can anyone view these words of Katy’s as coming “from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement” or, once they’ve been spoken, go back to marveling at the woman’s shapely backside? No, sorry, Rivers, I ain’t buying it. You are so lost in your own misperceptions of reality, that you will never understand who and what Katy actually is.
She is a woman, prescribed by her society to play a certain role, which that society has inculcated to treat as the very well-spring of not just life, but achievement as well. In that way, and in no other, she is a goddess.
And after all of that, I have to wonder. Does Huxley know this? Has Huxley written a subversively feminist novel, or is he oblivious like Rivers, and simply written another male masturbatory one?
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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