Eyeless in Gaza
Damon LaBarbera
Eyeless in Gaza was written by Aldous Huxley in 1936 and describes, in achronological order, the lives of well heeled characters over the first decades of the 20th century. Eyeless in Gaza is not one of Huxley's best-known books, but is his finest, surpassing in-depth and literary innovation, so some opine, and I am inclined to agree, his more famous books, including Brave New World. Brave . Eyeless in Gaza is a more substantial novel, and has that particular style of which Huxley is so adept, allowing us to enter the inner monologue, acutely and sometimes humorously depicted, of his protagonists (assuming a book can have more than one protagonist), and in his process of developing the story allowing us a glimpse into Huxley's massive intelligence.
The mood of this book differs from Huxley's earlier oeuvre, the latter being "smart" and "modern and in line with the depressed hedonism after WWI that pervaded English culturati . Huxley had earlier gained quite a reputation for his outspoken and modern opinions, so scandalous to the Victorian ear. ."Huxley wrote Eyeless in Gaza at a time in his life when less interested in being the iconoclastic wit, and was not experimenting with more humanistic and spiritual themes. The book is of a period that also precedes Huxley’s involvement the psychedelic culture—an odd end to the Odyssey of this English elite from postwar art society to Southern California Culture. Eyeless in Gaza does not contain any of the new age quality of Huxley's latter period, and is still firmly ensconced in respectable English society.
Meanwhile, the plot is complex, Events are described out of order, a jumble of events that reflect the an essential assumption of the book, the haphazardness of recollection. Memory is a tyranny--as Anthony Beavis, describes, in middle age sorting through photographs, crazily disordered like teh chapters in the book, while speaking with his paramour Helen. While sifting through the photos in an early chapter he provides a memorable description of Marcel Proust, bathing in a tub of the dirty water of his own memories.
Helen, the daughter of a previous lover, permeates the book from beginning to end. She may have been based on the 20s personage Nancy Cunard. She appears as a young girl, and in the last chapter, engages Anthony as he reaps some insight from his various adventures. She has suffered from a series of relationships with him, with her mother's manipulative friend, with a detached curator of assyriology at a museum, and with a German socialist, all the while pining for meaning, dissatisfied in her quest for connection with others. Anthony suffers, meanwhile from his lack of feeling and alienation.
Anthony struggles with his alienation from feeling, and Helen, sensitive to the void between them, verges on leaving. However, an absurd event occurs. As they sun on an Italian rooftop, a dog splatters on the veranda, dropped from a helicopter--a morbid event reverberating throughout the story.
After the photo sorting chapter, the chronology shifts to Anthony’s childhood. Anthony’s mother (Maise) has died. A student at Balustrade, Anthony travels by train to the funeral, passing billboards depicting a cow, obsessively counting billboards. The motto on the billboards repeats in his mind, along with the drumming from the tracks. Sitting with him is his father and uncle. His father is a dry, pedantic philologist with an uncomprehending attitude about his son. His conversation consists of etymology puns, and the character has similarities with Huxley's real life father, the son of TE Huxley, Darwin's bulldog. Nearby ion the train s his Uncle James, an accountant, a convert to Catholicism, and we later see, troubled by homosexuality in an unaccepting world, who finds, during WWI some solace tending to the young injured men from trenches. James frets about timetables and, later, experiences anguished feelings about the handsome men in the funeral entourage.
One of the women at the funeral is Mary Amberly, recently widowed, the bride of a WWI casualty (and actually Helen's mother eventually). In the next segment of this plot, Anthony, who just turned an adult a few years after his mother's death, has an affair with Mary. Mary provides him with a thrilling sense of adulthood, exciting vice, and superiority. But she also taunts him into betraying his gentle and true friend Brian--taunting him into seducing Brian’s ingenue girlfriend. Brian Foxe is a virtuous, self-effacing youngster who is highly moral but enmeshed with a self-structured, overly honorable mother who overvalues self-denial. Also a widow, she consumes Brian with all-encompassing attentiveness. This is a wonderful description of what Orwell said about saints—often, they are saints because real human relations are impossible. This enormity of the betrayal causes Brian to kill himself by hurtling himself off a cliff.
The book incidentally has one of the best descriptions of borderline personality in the person of Mary Amberly, a character whose malicious, impulsive, and seductive antics damage others and, ultimately, herself. The character may have some similarities to Nancy Cunard, wife of the shipping magnate, who took little interest in motherhood. Mary later descends into opiate (“morphia”) addiction. Anthony becomes involved with Helen, Mary's daughter.
At a later age, Anthony recognizes his deficiencies. He is passive and detached and tries with varied adventures, some comically dangerous, to achieve engagement. Traveling to South America with the sadistic Mark Staithes, a bully in his early years now grown into a masochistic loner, they entangle themselves in a revolution for the sake of changing themselves. Mark loses a leg when his donkey collapses onto him on a mountain path, but in the process, Anthony meets a missionary doctor who profoundly influences him. With this mentor, amid the saber-rattling in England, he embraces pacifism. He learns to public speak, something he has always avoided.
A didactic undertone always exists in Huxley’s later fiction, with a pull towards pacifism and spiritualism that, for some, may spoil the literary excellence but are also part of Huxley’s endearing value. At root, the story describes that almost comic discord between what we are and what we would ideally like to be and the false attempts people make to overcome that incapacity, moving sideways into pseudo-solutions. The writing though is acute and accurate, so accurate it sometimes verges on comic.
