I looked at the books. Three mystery stories in the conventional getup of gaud and grue and one volume without a jacket: Huxley's Ape and Essence, which Yvonne had denuded to camouflage another treatise. I passed up the mysteries—the immunizing doses of mayhem, the habit-forming homicide—with which so many of the better people try to allay their critical sensations in this civilization. I took the Huxley back to my living room and read in it here and there.
It was unfortunate, I thought, that the bright Aldous had seen fit to show the world that he, too, could write a screenplay. Did he need a studio job, I wondered?
But it was only funny that the public and the critics had misjudged the tale. For Huxley's portrait of post-atomic California was not, as most persons assumed, the flight of a delirious brain. It was, by every relevant index, the most likely prediction that an intelligent man could make, these days. It was just what good actuaries and capable business forecasters should anticipate. Six hundred years ago, I reflected, the Great Plague had reduced Western Europe to a similar condition: religion had become corrupt, rogues had seized the government, the expiring feudal system had been finally shattered, and the people had roamed amidst half-empty towns and cities, living by robbery, raping, burning witches, and indulging every horrid superstition, while knowledge vanished and science stood still. This condition had lasted for more than a century.
The intervening twenty generations had not been enough to change man a particle. He was the same specious brainist and therefore the same potential dupe of his unaltered instincts. His opposite possibilities were perhaps even stronger—since he had exploited vanity for six more centuries. Atomic bombs, likely, would be worse than Plague and have long-lasting, ancillary effects of the very sort described by Huxley. And there would be new plagues—-military diseases.
Yet it had not occurred seriously to anybody, so far as I knew, that the mordant scenery of Ape and Essence was a logical extension of current events. Wild fantasy, the critics thought—having insufficient imagination to evaluate past or present and no education in the sciences whatever, as a rule.
Well, I thought, when and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads.
And next I thought that even Huxley made too little of the fact that, after our earth was literally Hell for a hundred years, man produced the Renaissance.
I also thought how no one apparently had realized that the Californian cult of Belial was an inversion of the Roman Catholic parades, liturgies, chants and other idolatrous measures. And I thought how the Huxleyan method disclosed, with considerable vim and penetration, that Christian worship—Catholic or Protestant—is all but completely a paean for Satan today. The Godly serve the Devil through hatred, hypocrisy, materialism, conceit and big death wishes. They need only a change of names and symbols to align what they actually do with their pretension. Belial already reigns over the Church—not God.
Someday, after the atomic wars—I thought—a practitioner of the corrupted religion of his time, a science-hater (for what he deemed science had done to man), a legless character with three arms and two navels (owing to the general damage done the genes of all living things), a cannibal (but one who could still read a little), might discover this volume in the silence of a wrecked library and hail Huxley as a great prophet—a man with valuable new ideas for worship and fresh notions about sex relations in public places. Thus Huxley might contribute (contrary to his intent but in the same fashion as many other prophets) to the majestic rites of human degradation.
No critic, however, could possibly contemplate such a matter as anything but a joke.