Back to the Classics #10

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Genius and The Goddess – Aldous Huxley

In 2011, I first read this short 1955 novel as part of my ongoing campaign to read lesser-known novels by famous novelists. I kept it because I knew I would have to re-read this novel as I’ve re-read After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Brave New World. Huxley bears re-reading because his novels of ideas are mainly people talking with each other about Huxley’s wide-ranging views of God, sex, literature, art, thinkers of the past, and the perpetual circus of people – being all too human – making terrible mistakes, not the least of which is making trouble for each other out of anger, lust, and greed.

This novel is a narrative by John Rivers, telling a story of his youth, to “I” the writer. Rivers spent about a year and a half living with the family of Henry Maartens, a physicist, and Katy, his wife half his age and the mother of their two kids, child Tim and teen daughter Ruth.

Rivers is an inexperienced and clueless prig because he was raised by a pastor father and a mother who mistook her proud unemotionalism for Christianity. Often lost in the fog of ego and stark clarity of scientific theorizing, Dr. Maartens is like most geniuses – hard to live with. He is a distant father and the kind of selfish husband that expects his wife to take care of everything domestic. Katy is a lovely, giving woman, a devoted wife and mother. She knows how to live life well, to flourish, in every way. Her ability to live life in a fully human way makes her unto a goddess. Used to an arid home life, Rivers experiences a loving family for the first time. He comes to love Katy as Dante loved Beatrice.

Rivers considers himself lucky to be the research assistant to the genius Maartens. But Rivers soon tumbles to the fact Maartens depends on Katy for his reason for being alive. It’s not healthy. For anybody. When Katy is called away to take care of her dying mother, Maartens goes into a tailspin. The housekeeper Beulah knows a psychosomatic illness when she sees it as Katy returns to find Maartens in an oxygen tent. Beulah, alarmed at Katy’s haggard appearance urges her to rest, since she can’t help her husband if all her “virtue” has ebbed away.

Such is Huxley’s brilliance even in his lesser novels. He puts in the mouth of an ordinary person a profound truth. Socrates asserted that our virtue was all we need to be happy. But we are only human and our virtue – that immanent force that urges us to flourish, that impulse to life that we base our bravery, wisdom, fairness, and moderation on – is tested and buffeted by fatigue and prolonged stress.

I can’t possibly give away how Katy got her groove back, but it points to Huxley’s matter of fact view of love, passion, and the transience of life, happiness, and depression. Huxley thought it was important to define things clearly, especially to ourselves. How we describe people, places, and ideas make them our reality. If those descriptions are irrational, we live in fantasy, in Cloud Cuckoo Land like Maartens.