Customer Reviews

Ape and Essence

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The only other Aldous Huxley book I ever read was "Brave New World," and that was at least ten years ago. For most people, I think that is the only Huxley book they know about. It's a shame, because this book, "Ape and Essence," is a true Huxley gem. The back of the book says Huxley wrote this in 1948 as a response to the use of atomic weapons in WWII and the emerging Cold War. "Brave New World" showed us a future of soma-laden people cared for by the state from cradle to grave. "Ape and Essence" doesn't have anything nearly as pleasant as soma. In this new world, people are ruled by a satanic theocracy after a nuclear war.

The book is pretty easy to describe. Two Hollywood types find a manuscript that dropped off a truck bound for the incinerator. The script is entitled, "Ape and Essence," by a William Tallis. Somebody didn't care much for his script; they marked it incinerate and underlined that word twice. The two read the script and try to find Mr. Tallis, only to discover that he died a few months earlier. What follows this brief introduction is the script, in its entirety.

"Ape and Essence" is about a post-nuclear holocaust world. New Zealand escaped the holocaust, and now they are sending explorers to America to see how the world is coming along. The main character here is Dr. Poole, a botanist. The survivors who roam the ruins of Los Angeles capture Poole and agree to let him live if he can improve crop production. Poole witnesses some unusual behavior amongst the natives, behavior that is explained to him by the archpriest of Belial.

Huxley uses this odd world as a backdrop for his own views on humanity in the 20th century. Huxley feels that mankind never got past the beast (or ape) inside. The beginning of the script shows apes dressed as humans, engaging in such delightful activities as chemical warfare and mass killing. These apes even keep Albert Einstein on a leash, signifying man's inability to use our genius to overcome our basest instincts. While strange at times (almost David Lynch-like), I don't think this is too strange for an intellectual like Huxley. He relies on extreme images to capture his despair over the state of mankind. The time frame in which Huxley writes is telling. It's 1948, only a few years after Hiroshima and just about the time the Cold War is really cranking into gear. Huxley must have been appalled that just a few years after the most destructive war in human history, even more horrors are starting to lurk on the horizon.

Huxley makes special mention of a few of man's ideas that lead to this type of nightmare. Both progress and nationalism are killers of mankind, according to Huxley. Nationalism, or the idea that one state is divinely sanctioned over all others, leads to useless killing. As Africa and the Balkans clearly show today, Huxley is not only insightful for his own time, but also prescient for today, as well.

The idea of progress is just as important. Why, with man's ability to create, does he so often use his talents for destructive purposes? It is progress that led to industrialization, which led to cities full of people with created needs. These needs found expression through war, when one set of people decided to take things from others to fulfill their own needs.

Huxley is insightful and his views on what makes humanity tick are dead on. I thought his use of a movie script to convey his ideas was clever, even though it is uneven at times. Huxley does seem to recognize the growing importance of media in disseminating ideas, and perhaps that is why he chose the format he did. I had to chuckle over the idea of this becoming a film in Huxley's day. The Catholics, who were keeping a close eye on Hollywood at this time, would have had a field day with this script-Satanism and unusual mating rituals would send them into histrionics. You can't go wrong with Mr. Aldous Huxley by your side.

Not as well-crafted as Huxley's better-known _Brave_New_World_, and I think I can guess why. Huxley, despondent over contemporary events and trends, must have felt crushed with utter despair and yet spurred by the conviction that he could not remain silent. Under such stress it's hard to attend to belleletristic niceties. Huxley also was experimenting with form. The story is presented as a stylized movie script, in the same sense that Goethe's _Faust_ is a stylized drama.

Nevertheless, this is a powerful, passionate, and haunting book. I cannot think of any other book which makes such a frighteningly real case for Evil as an operative principle in the world. Even more amazing, this case is presented under the guise of what looks and sounds like a B-grade horror flick. Imagine if, say, Dostoevsky had written his great novels as comic books -- and they still had the same terrifying, probing depth as the novels. That's essentially the effet that Huxley achieves, and it is uncanny.

Huxley is speaking of the condition of modern civilization *as it is*, under a set of grotesque, phantasmagoric masks. Unforgettable.

Aldous Huxley's Apes and Essence is science fiction combined with the allegorical drive of a Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It ought to assume a proud place beside other works on retro-futures -- novels like, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and films of the Mad Max genre. Huxley is convinced that we opted for the worst of both worlds -- East and West -- by failing to curb the capability of science with the wisdom and moderation of Eastern mysticism. Here too is the brave new eugenicsl, and insofar as Huxley is trying to point to this as a future dilemma, he is decisively on track.

This book is an unbelievable prophecy. I find it more erie than Orwell's 1984. The story lacks the smoothness of Brave New World, yet it's importance is equal. To look to the future of society is to read Brave New World and Ape and Essence, and figure out where we are headed. I can already see some of the philosophies described in the book in our society as we speak, and we have not yet had a nuclear holocaust. All I can say is that this book is a must read and every bit as important as Brave New World.

I read this book quite rapidly (two days) and really liked it.

It's 1948, Ghandi has just been assassinated, and two guys connected to the movie business come across a script that's just fallen from a trash truck. They set out to find the author, whose script makes up the bulk of the novel.

There are a lot of wonderful "postmodern" touches here -- for example, one of the main characters in the script picks up a copy of Shelley that's about to be burned, and ends up reading it at the grave of the fictional author of the script saved from the trash heap.

In addition, this book's scenes of apes lording themselves over human beings unquestionably inspired Planet of the Apes.

And finally, the novel's descriptions of classical music in its portrayal of a dystopia probably influenced A Clockwork Orange. In fact, Anthony Burgess named Ape and Essence one of the best novels in English since 1939:

"Novels like Ape and Essence seem now to be very much products of their time [immediately post-Hiroshima] and rather dated. But this is Huxley -- clever, brutal, thoughtful, original -- and his fictional tract clings to the mind....It is a nauseating vision of a still possible future...."

Well worth reading.

I first read Ape and Essence in a single sitting about 1950. I was then 29 or 30 and so deeply impressed by the novel's power and its comment on the state of our world that I felt it was the end-all of literature and there was no need to read any more fiction. Indeed, my appetite for novels remained sated for more than a year. I read the novel again with its second edition a few years ago and was scarcely less impressed. This novel fully ranks with Brave New World and Point Counter Point, and deserves to be recognized as one of the best 100 novels of the 20th century.

Compared to Ape and Essence, Huxley's more celebrated dystopian comic fantasy, Brave New World, bursts with sunny optimism about the future. World War II, which intervened between the two books, unquestionably accelerated Huxley's depair. In Brave New World, the people of the far future had lost their edge, their creativity, their sense of the tragic; that seemed like a sorry enough fate to readers in the pre-Nazi, pre-Hiroshima 1930s. But Ape and Essence posits a crueller and more desperate post-apocalyptic future.

Huxley delivers the bad news in his trademark style, a savage yet mannered irony that must have inspired Terry Southern a generation later. Most of the story is told in the form of a manifestly unsellable film script by an imaginary unknown. The script's narrator sets the scene by briefly describing World War III in chilling detail: if you're not afraid of thermonuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, just read the few pages that Huxley devotes to them. Your current mundane nightmares will take a serious turn for the worse.

The script does end on an upbeat note. But it's in a '40s movie. Huxley himself gives absolutely no cause for optimism. Nearly sixty years ago he specified fanatic nationalism and contempt for the natural world as the most dangerous attitudes on earth.

Now look around you.

Still scary after all these years, Ape and Essence is for those who like their dystopias blackly humorous and seriously thought-provoking.

I can't read this book (as I have a number of times) without thinking of it as the flip side to Brave New World. I still find myself wandering into the library, grabbing the book and thumbing through the pages for passages that inspire and depress me!

When you are a conservative, here's what passes for optimism : things aren't very good (they're definitely worse than they used to be) and they are likely to get worse still; but there will always be a small, but hardy, band of resistors, summoning the species back to first principles, and, in the long run, we may even prevail--God willing. That's not particularly optimistic, is it ? Moreover, to many, what's particularly objectionable about this dark view is that it flows from a fairly low estimation of our fellow men, which is perhaps best expressed in Edmund Burke's aphorism : "There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men." Unpleasant they may be, but these attitudes are on full and glorious display in Aldous Huxley's novel, Ape and Essence.

The story is told in screenplay form--a narrative device which I found awkward--a script having blown off of a truck which is hauling studio detritus to the dump. The deceased screenwriter, William Tallis, posits a future in which most of the world has been devastated by nuclear war. Their island nation having been spared major damage, the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition to North America lands on the California coast in 2108, looking for survivors. Dr. Alfred Poole gets separated from the rest of the party and taken in by the Belial worshipping natives.

In the wake of the catastrophe--which they refer to as the Thing--the remaining Southern Californians are held in thrall by the sterilized priests of Belial, who seek to limit knowledge and quash human desires, relegating the populace to a single two week period of sex a year (following Belial Day), which produces an annual litter of mutant babies, some of whom are actually healthy enough to replace the dead and dying adults. This suffices to fulfill the rather limited purposes of their decimated society : to serve Belial by accepting the punishment that has been visited upon them and to avoid extinction. Dr. Poole falls in love with Loola, a native girl, and they run away, the book ending with them on their way to Bakersfield, stumbling upon the grave of William Tallis, where they quote from the poem Adonais by Percy Bysse Shelley :

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

and share a hard-boiled egg.

Such are the bare bones of the rather meager plot, but the real meat of the book is Huxley's scorching attacks on Man's faith in himself :

Cruelty and compassion come with chromosomes; All men are merciful and all are murderers. Doting on dogs, they build their Dachaus; Fire whole cities and fondle the orphans; Are loud against lynching, but all for Oakridge; Full of future philanthropy, but today the NKVD. Whom shall we persecute, for whom feel pity ? It is all a matter of the moment's mores, Of words on wood pulp, of radios roaring, Of Communist kindergartens or first communions. Only in the knowledge of his own Essence Has any man ceased to be many monkeys.

and on the idea of Progress :

Progress --the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone can understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what's going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise.

I have to admit that I've always been so intent on using Brave New World as a scourge against totalitarian Utopias, I blinded myself to the deeply anti-technology aspects of Huxley's vision. But you can't make the same mistake here, as Huxley clobbers the reader over the head with his contempt for "science" :

...what we call knowledge is merely another form of Ignorance--highly organized, of course, and eminently scientific, but for that very reason all the more complete, all the more productive of angry apes. When Ignorance was merely ignorance, we were the equivalents of lemurs, marmosets and howler monkeys. Today, thanks to that Higher Ignorance which is our knowledge, man's stature has increased to such an extent that the least among us is now a baboon, the greatest an orangutan or even, if he takes rank as a Saviour of Society, a true Gorilla.

As court jesters once served to deflate the pomposity of kings and as servants followed Roman Emperors, whispering in their ears, "Thou art human," perhaps it is the role of conservative literature, not so much to educate or convert, but to remind men of the signal human sin of hubris. If such truly is the case, it can rightly be said that no writer has done so better than Aldous Huxley.

GRADE : B

According to an online source, Huxley aimed in his writing to produce a perfect fusion of novel and essay. He intended his books to be filled with interesting opinions and striking ideas. In 'Ape and Essence' these goals can be clearly discerned, but their development is somewhat on the sketchy side. To begin, the book is actually a novella, which took around 6 or 7 hours to read, and I don't think I'm a terribly fast reader.

That is not to say that ideas of considerable import can't be conveyed in a story of that length, but if they are going to have much depth of development, they must be pretty focused. Focus is the ingredient which was sacrificed in this book, to try and achieve the goal of a fusion between essay and fiction.

There are two very disparate sections of the book. First, there is the introductory chapter, 'Tallis', where two Hollywood screenwriters stumble onto a mysterious script by an unknown writer. Their interest is whetted and they try to track him down, only to find he had died weeks before. This short portion ostensibly revolves around the relationship between the two screenwriters. The unnamed narrator plays passive analyst as his partner, Bob, rambles on about his financial and marital difficulties. The narrator gives us, the readers, an ongoing sly, ironic and entertaining commentary which he doesn't share with Bob.

The narrator, who is obviously Huxley's spokesman, is a supremely sophisticated and intellectual screenwriter. He weaves into his observations on Bob's predicaments many philosophical and literary references. In these few pages, in the midst of the narrator's commonplace conversations, he is mentally racking up thoughts and reflections on: Gandhi, Christ, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Beddoes, Martin Luther, Rembrandt, Breughel, Piero, Plato, the Parthenon, the 'Timaeus', the "Republic', Marxists, Fascists, Churriguera, Catherine of Siena, Goya, Lady Hamilton, Ninon de Lenclos, and la petite Morphil. If you weren't familiar with all those people, don't feel bad. I made ample use of internet sources to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

After finishing the book, if you return to this introductory section you will realize that the ruminations of the narrator laid the groundwork for the larger story which is contained in the abandoned script. Bob epitomizes the vapid, self-absorbed, materialistic modern world as contrasted with selfless martyrs and saints such as Gandhi, Christ, and Catherine of Siena. The world usually finds it necessary to kill such people, because they interfere with the "order" of the state. The restless striving of the Romantics is a willful ignoring of the simple and nourishing spiritual solutions of the saints. The ivory-tower speculations of philosophers in quest of their proprietary versions of the 'truth' have led to the inglorious tyrannies based on Marxism and Fascism. In particular, this desire of each group to be right has led to the irrationality of wars based on nationalism and ideology. Besides the philosophical themes, Bob's troubles with women foreshadows the sexual adjustments visited on humanity in the script-story.

The second section 'The Script' shows us the results of mankind's willful stupidity. But before we get into the story proper, there is a short sequence of a few pages where we are given an allegorical picture of the events which led up to the main drama. Baboons, with scientists such as Einstein and Faraday as slaves, are busily developing and perfecting ever more potent weapons of mass-destruction. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who the baboons are, and what the likely result of their tinkering will be. But sandwiched in between the first, realistic part of the novella, and the projected world of the future where humans are again humans, although in some cases mutated, it seems disruptive to have this isolated fragment of animals as people.

The remainder of the book, which is by far the largest portion, delves into the way humans have adapted to the destruction of civilization, and endeavors to continue that fusion of fiction and essay. Philosophical and theological ideas are the animating forces behind the events which transpire. To give the story human interest, there is the struggle of a post-apocalyptic man and woman to make a humanly acceptable life for themselves despite the recurring irrational tyranny of those in control.

It is a bizarre world of the future which Huxley imagined, with a new religion devoted to Belial, or Satan. The normal relation of the sexes has been disrupted both by mutation and imposition of the authorities. The weirdness of this future society might have attracted a cult following for the book if the highly cultured essayistic element weren't so blatant.

After reading the book, I can say that it stirred up thoughts that the human race may be on the wrong path, but as the story itself suggests, there seems to be little to be done except try to pursue your individual happiness to the best of your ability. The ideas of the book were too general and spread much too thinly to broaden our understanding in significant ways.