Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley

First published: 1936

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1902-1935

Locale: London, southern France, and Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Anthony Beavis, the protagonist, a middle-aged sociologist
• Helen Ledwidge (nee Amberley), the wife of Hugh Ledwidge and also Anthony’s lover
• Mark Staithes, a friend of Anthony from their school days
• Brian Foxe, another schoolboy friend of Anthony
• Mary Amberley, the mother of Helen and also Anthony’s lover
• Ekki Giesebrecht, a German Communist and Helen’s lover

The Novel

Eyeless in Gaza revolves around the lives of a small group of the English upper middle classes, during a period of more than thirty years. The narrative falls into five distinct time periods: 1902 to 1904, 1914, 1926 to 1928, August, 1933, to February, 1934, and April, 1934, to 1935. A few chapters take place in 1912 and 1931. The narrative does not proceed chronologically, however, but continually jumps backward and forward. Chapter 1 takes place in August, 1933, but the next chapter jumps to 1934. Chapter 3 returns to 1933, and the two subsequent chapters take place in 1902 and 1926, respectively. This pattern continues throughout the book.

In terms of the narrative rather than the chronological order of events, the novel starts and ends with the focus on Anthony Beavis and his lover Helen Ledwidge, formerly Helen Amberley. Their growth to a more mature, less irresponsible way of living is one of the key elements in the novel. Chronologically, however, the novel begins as the ten-year-old Anthony accompanies his father and his uncle to the funeral of his mother. It is here that he first meets Mary Amberley, nine years his senior, destined to become his first mistress and already pregnant with Helen, also destined to become Anthony’s lover. This section of the narrative also relates Anthony’s experiences at private school, in which he makes friends with two fellow pupils, Brian Foxe and Mark Staithes.

The same cast of characters reappears ten years later at Oxford. The ambitious Mark desperately wants to be president of the Fabian society; Anthony, whose talents are more intellectual, discusses the nature of freedom with the serious-minded Brian. Their friendship, however, is destined to end tragically. At the instigation of Mary, Anthony seduces Brian’s fiancee, Joan Thursley, and Brian commits suicide when he discovers the betrayal.

It is in the fourth time period, from August, 1933, to February, 1934, that many of the most crucial events in the novel come to fruition. Anthony and the spirited and headstrong Helen have become lovers (although Helen is married to another of Anthony’s old school friends, Hugh Ledwidge). They have just made love in the hot noon sunshine, when an extraordinary event takes place, an event which provides strong impetus for Anthony’s development. A dog falls from an airplane, lands next to them, and soaks their naked bodies in blood. Anthony, seeing Helen’s distress, feels a wave of tenderness for her, and a complex of emotions which he has before refused to admit to consciousness comes rushing to the surface. Later, he realizes that his dispassionate pursuit of knowledge is not enough; he can no longer pretend to be the detached observer; he must become more directly involved in life itself. He agrees to join Mark on a dangerous expedition to Mexico to help a friend of Mark organize a political revolution, but after they reach Mexico, Mark falls from his horse and severely injures his leg. Riding off to search for a doctor, Anthony miraculously encounters the Scotsman James Miller, whose Buddhist-inspired philosophy of life has a deep effect on him.

Much of the final chronological phase of the novel is told through the medium of Anthony’s diary. Under Miller’s influence, he has been converted to pacifism. He starts to advocate techniques of meditation and acknowledges the need for universal love. He commits himself to a lifetime of continual development and of active involvement in changing the human condition, both physical and mental, individual and social, in the direction he has decided is the right one.

The Characters

The central character, Anthony Beavis, is clearly an autobiographical figure and a mouthpiece for the issues which occupied Huxley’s mind in the mid-1930’s.

Throughout the novel, Anthony is acutely aware of his own weaknesses. Even as a child, he is skilled at concealing his true feelings, and yet he dislikes himself for doing so. He chooses his aristocratic friends not because he likes them but because it satisfies his vanity to be with them. He is also aware that the reason he hides behind the mask of the detached philosopher is that personal relationships have always been disagreeable to him. His relationship with Helen consists entirely of sensual satisfactions, without any sense of responsibility or commitment. He also knows that he is a moral coward (as the sad story of his involvement with Joan and Brian reveals) and discovers that he is also a physical coward when he is threatened with a gun by a Mexican in a hotel bar. What frees him in the end is his acute intellect, his honesty, and his highly developed sense of self-awareness, all of which combine to ensure that he eventually recognizes the futility of his attitudes. After meeting Miller, he is able to redirect his life toward greater integrity and wholeness.

The other main characters embody various wrong approaches to living. Mary’s life demonstrates that the merely sensual life is ultimately destructive. At the outset, she is an attractive, seductively charming woman with a gently self-mocking sense of humor, but she degenerates rapidly during the course of the novel. Becoming a slave to her excessive sexual desires, she lives a dissolute life beyond her means and sinks into poverty and morphine addiction.

Mark is in one sense the opposite of Mary. He is celibate, but nevertheless, his failure in life is no less acute, although more subtle, than that of Mary. It lies in his arrogance and vanity, his need continually to gratify his own ego and preserve his sense of superiority. At school, he always had to be the leader of the pack (“cock of the dunghill,” as Anthony scornfully put it), and as he matures, he develops a cynicism and contempt for other human beings. He feels nothing of the philosophy of “one life” that Anthony comes to believe in, and it is perhaps appropriate, if cruelly so, that he should eventually injure himself and lose a leg. His contempt for others, to whom he is far more connected than he realizes, has rebounded on himself.

Even the kind and upright Brian pays the price for a lack of psychic wholeness. Brought up in a Christian home and encouraged to aspire to the highest kind of love, he cannot accept the sexual side of his nature. It is this which upsets his relationship with Joan and leads to the tragedy of his death. His mangled body at the foot of the cliff is a cruel, outward manifestation of what his misplaced idealism had been doing all along: torturing his own body and denying it the right to desire.

Thus neither the sensual, the egotistical, nor the ascetic life is the right one. Another false alternative is represented by Ekki Giesebrecht, the German Communist who has been forced to flee his country by the Nazis. Although he has courage and integrity, he is committed to a political ideology that, despite its high ideals, is prepared to use violence against its enemies. Anthony notes in his diary that means do not justify ends, but determine them. Thus, it is cruelly predictable that Giesebrecht should die a violent death when he is betrayed into the hands of his enemies.

It is only Helen who shows any sign of following Anthony’s path. Although her behavior throughout the novel can hardly be said to be ideal (she is a thief and an adulterer), underneath her foolishness she has an instinctive longing for purity and often comments on her feelings of disgust with herself and her life. Although she believes herself to be committed to the Communist ideal of her lover Giesebrecht, at the end of the novel she shows interest in Anthony’s new philosophy, and there is a strong hint that she is ready to outgrow a philosophy which aspires to change the outward forms of life without reforming its inner essence.

Critical Context

Eyeless in Gaza reflected a turning point in Huxley’s career. After the satire and skepticism which marked his early novels Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), and the depressing vision of a scientifically engineered future in Brave New World (1932), he revealed a new seriousness of purpose, presenting a solution to the human predicament that formerly he had been content to satirize. In this sense, Eyeless in Gaza is one of the most optimistic of Huxley’s novels. It is also notable because it marks the beginning of Huxley’s interest in mysticism and Eastern metaphysics, an interest later given detailed exposition in The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Huxley’s espousal of pacifism tended to dismay some of his early admirers, however, who could not share his belief that pacifism offered a solution to the rampant militarism of the 1930’s. Others objected to what they saw as his retreat into an esoteric and impractical philosophy, and in consequence, the reviews of Eyeless in Gaza were not entirely favorable, although its first-year sales in England were more than double those of Brave New World.

Eyeless in Gaza is undoubtedly one of Huxley’s most absorbing and challenging novels. It represents his characteristic attempt, never entirely successful, to combine the form of the novel with that of the essay, the attempt to write “a novel in which one can put all one’s ideas, a novel like a holdall,” as he expressed it. Although some critics believe that Huxley’s tendency to use his novels as platforms for his own political and philosophical ideas had a detrimental effect on his work, Eyeless in Gaza represents a courageous and radical response to the latent nihilism and despair of twentieth century life.

Bibliography

Brander, Laurence. Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study, 1970.

Ferns, C. S. Aldous Huxley: Novelist, 1980.

Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, 1972.

Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure, 1969.

Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003.

Watt, Donald, ed. Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage, 1975.