Huxley, Aldous
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (an interview of about seven minutes; the English auto-captions are slightly garbled in a few places, and unclear words are omitted)
Core ideas
Asked to talk about D.H. Lawrence, Huxley says he met him during the war and knew him best in the last four years of Lawrence's life (he gives the years as 26 to 30). He remembers him as "perfectly extraordinary as a human being": fascinating, stimulating and "a little alarming" to be with. Lawrence was a prickly man who seemed to quarrel "on principle," bursting out against people, yet Huxley and his first wife were among the relatively few friends with whom he never quarrelled; being with him, hearing his comments and his reactions to nature, was always a pleasure. Huxley found some of his views "quite horrifying," above all his anti-intellectualism, which he never understood since Lawrence himself was well read and had been a brilliant examinee as a young man. He describes him writing in bursts of up to eighteen hours a day, "a sort of possession," his hand moving at tremendous speed, never correcting but starting over if dissatisfied, and says that going for a walk with him was a "pleasure and instruction" because of the intensity of his perception of the world.
Huxley speculates on what Lawrence would have become had he lived beyond forty-four: he finds the output extraordinary for someone often sick, praising the short stories, some long novelettes and some late poems, while judging some of the longer novels unsuccessful. In "The Plumed Serpent," for example, he sees an ambivalence between the invitation to return to "the dark gods and the blood" and contemptuous remarks about the Mexicans' slowness and lack of intelligence. He thinks Lawrence would have gradually moved to a more balanced view: "making the best of both worlds," since the blood and the flesh, wiser than the intellect in some respects, and the conscious mind are both within us, and we are "amphibians."
Huxley then develops his own view: the real problem is how to integrate the sensual side of man with consciousness. He points to historical attempts such as Tantra in India and Tibet and the Mahayana doctrine that nirvana and samsara are identical, and to Blake, as efforts to find "the absolute in the relative, the timeless in the temporal." He also discusses passion and marriage, and compares the modern language of the unconscious with Homeric concepts, atē (a state of mind leading to disaster, sent by Zeus' daughter, as when Agamemnon takes Achilles' prize) and menos (a divine capacity to do the impossible, a surge of extraordinary energy), and suggests that some sexual relationships involving friendliness and playfulness rather than "powerful love" can still be valuable interpersonal relations.
Excerpts
“He was perfectly extraordinary as a human being. He was extremely fascinating, and he was always stimulating, a little alarming to be with. [...] It was always a pleasure to be with him and to hear his comments on things, his reactions to nature.”
“It was very extraordinary to see him at work. It was a sort of possession: he would rush on, his hand moving at a tremendous rate, and never correct anything, because if he was dissatisfied he would start again from the beginning.”
“The blood and the flesh are there, and in certain respects they are wiser than the intellect. [...] We have to do both. This is the whole art of life, of making the best of all the worlds.”