Point Counter Point (Huxley)
Huxley gets far
less respect these days than he did in my youth. His lack of engagement with the major trends
of modernism combined with the intensification of his mystic inclinations
toward the end of his career have diminished his importance for many readers in
recent years. He is left with those who
are like him interested in cleansing their doors of perception as well as a
remnant that relish the social novels of his early days: Crome Yellow, Antic
Hay, and Point Counter Point.
Reading Point
Counter Point one has the innocent amusement of a roman à clef
including, by most accounts, characters based on D. H. Lawrence and Nancy
Cunard, as well as a denatured and belated impression of Baudelaire. There is an all-but-constant stream of weary
Bloomsbury wit. “My wife assures me that
her underclothes are positively Phryean.”
“Quotations have something facetiously pedantic about them.” “He talks
slang as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English.” “[Marjorie] took such horribly small bites
from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea
pig – as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting
affair.” These I found by opening the
book at random; they constitute its most reliable reward.
I thought of
Peacock through much of the book, as one character played off another, none
more than two-dimensional, and then of Oscar Wilde and Saki. Toward the end, when things other than
repartee start to happen, the action seems incongruous and faintly disturbing,
as though a Punch and Judy puppet were suddenly to express real pain. Yet the novels are well worth reading, at
least up through the ‘thirties. I myself
have a considerable tolerance as well for the Vedanta articles and the allied
exploration of the value of psychedelics.
And I have a nostalgia as well, remembering how, as a teen-ager, I loved
Texts and Pretexts, his poetry anthology with comments. He wrote a very great deal, his own poetry,
essays, travel pieces, stage plays and screenplays, supporting himself with his
pen in a way all but unthinkable today.
Men God Forgot (Cossery)
Cossery was an
Egyptian-born writer of Syrian Christian descent who, despite living in Paris
for most of his life, continued to set his fiction in some version of his
remembered Cairo childhood. Though his
own father was well off, Cossery found his themes in the slums, among the poor
scrabbling to survive and smoking hashish to get through the day. Men God Forgot, his first book,
consists of five stories whose titles convey their tone: three are “The Girl
and the Hashish Smoker,” “The Barber Has Killed his Wife,” and “The Hungry
Dream Only of Bread.” The ambiance is
supported by the names of roads in his fictional city such as the Cul-de-sac of
the Cripples, the Street of the Pregnant Woman, and the Lane of the Pissing
Child.
Though his
original inspiration was Balzac and he wrote only in French, his tales are sure
to remind readers of Paul Bowles’ storytellers like Mohammed Mrabet as well as
the sophisticated narratives of Naguib Mahfouz.
Cossery’s successful pursuit of lyricism in scenes of squalid ugliness
is reminiscent as well of Céline.
In Egypt Cossery
found allies in the Groupe Art et Liberté, a largely Surrealist and
anti-fascist formation and associated as well with such writers as Lawrence
Durrell, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller (who contributed a note for a later City
Lights edition). The book was translated
by Harold Edwards, a professor at an Egyptian university and published by
George Leite’s Circle Editions in Berkeley in 1946. The many typos seem to testify to the book’s
authenticity. My own copy, from the
University Avenue Goodwill store near the UC campus, has a penciled price
inside the cover: 25¢. Cossery would
have particularly welcomed, I think, being read on the cheap.
Bel-Ami (de Maupassant)
Georges Duroy is
introduced as a man who attracts attention in public places due to his
masterful military air and, more importantly, his striking good looks. Before long the reader finds that he
acquired his “swagger” during service in colonial North Africa where he not
only indulged in incidents of gratuitous brutality, but then found lasting
amusement in recalling them later.
Ego-driven and amoral, he improbably makes his way to wealth and an
influential position in Paris journalism, his advancement spurred by his sexual
conquests of a series of women. Utterly
cynical about the government and his profession as well as about romance, he
rises irresistibly in Belle Époque France.
In the concluding scene, a glorious celebrity wedding, Duroy (or Du Roy
de Cantel, as he now styles himself) the toast of the town, his ambition
somehow satisfied, gazes out across the city, a master of the universe like Tom
Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy, and his thoughts turn to his mistress’s hair, charmingly
disordered in bed.
The combination
of Duroy’s almost inhuman selfishness with his capacity for a nearly (but not
quite) tender sensuality heightens the dramatic tension for the reader, while
for the character there can be no doubt.
His crass material goals are the only real ends in life. The story of his affairs plays out before the
historical background of French colonial expansion in the Maghreb, a plotline
of unbounded national greed to match the individual avarice of the novel’s
hero.
The book, like de
Maupassant’s stories, is filled with telling specific details in every
scene. While the human landscape is
bleak indeed – the characters generally act from the most venial motives – the
context is described with vivid delight and rich plenitude, with scenes set in
poverty and in wealth, in the city and in the countryside. In part at least the reader is enabled, like Lear
in the end, to look on fallen society with bemusement, to become one of “God’s
spies” in a world that might sometimes seem altogether wicked were it not that
we are inextricably tangled in it and we know, if we know nothing else, our own
vulnerability.
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