Art in the “Idiot Universe”

I’ve just finished re-reading Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer, a novel from 1939. When I first read this novel I wasn’t an art historian, or particularly interested in visual art at all. On re-encountering it, I’m struck by how many references there are to painters and sculptors in it.

I shouldn’t be surprised at this. Huxley was an English man of letters; he knew many artists and aesthetes including those of the Bloomsbury set who are parodied in some of his earlier novels. Tiring of England, Huxley went out to California in 1937 in search of enlightenment, eventually achieving guru status, not least because of his famous book on L.S.D., The Doors of Perception. Ambivalent about the consumerist situation he found out in California, he has an unforgettable phrase in After Many a Summer to describe the encroachment of materialism in paradise: “Gum, not God”.

The central character in the story, Joe Stoyt, is based loosely on the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst who built a castle on the Californian coast- folie de grandeur in marble and stone. Now “Hearst Castle” belongs to the State of California, and pulls in the tourists despite its remote location. The “idiot universe” is a phrase used by a character to describe the baroque, mock-baronial home of Stoyt, who has raised a similar monument in California tricked out with art from all centuries; not because he is an aesthete or a connoisseur, but because he has to possess things, including the land and people around him.

Through the eyes of another character, Jeremy Pordage, an English agent hired by Stoyt, and a thinly veiled portrait of Huxley himself, we’re allowed to view the massive art collection of Uncle Joe. He owns works by many artists: Giambologna, Fra Angelico, Rubens, Vermeer, El Greco, Rodin, Etty, Brancusi, Watteau, Etruscan sculpture, and so on. It is these art treasures that comprise the furniture in his “idiot universe”; it’s these objects which come to signify the banality at the heart of this decadent empire. Huxley is merciless- and very funny- at exposing how these priceless works of art are debased through the materialistic, acquisitive magnate’s desire to turn them into objects of consumption and vanity. Here’s a flavour of Huxley’s writing as he wittily observes how baroque sculpture on Stoyt’s state is electrified and made a gimmick for visitors to gawp at:

  “Floodlighted , Giambologna’s nymph was still indefatigably spouting away against the velvet background of the darkness. Electricity and sculpture, Jeremy was thinking as he looked at her- predestined partners. The things that old Bernini could have done with a battery of projectors! The startling lights, the rich, fantastic shadows! The female mystics in orgasm, the conglobulated angels, the skeletons whizzing up out of papal tombs like sky-rockets, the saints in their private hurricane of flapping draperies and wind-blown marble curls! What fun! What splendour! What bad taste!”

Here’s the Trevi Fountain in Rome, as a reference point.

 

Money and corruption frequently collide with art in this fool’s paradise. Fra Angelico’s Annunciation adorns the dining room, but it presides over mealtime entreaties for money and funding made by petitioners of the millionaire. The Chapel houses an El Greco Christ on the Cross and Rubens’s Nude with A Fur Coat, an incongruous pairing that emphasises the “no-track”, eccentric mind of Stoyt. Actually, the Chapel was “consecrated” by Stoyt’s mistress, Virginia, who happens to be having an affair with his doctor, Obispo, an unforgettable villain- a latter day Marquis de Sade with a stethoscope. A lucid Vermeer Woman at a Harpsichord, found of all places in an elevator, demonstrates perfect geometry, the antithesis of a universe where everything is morally and aesthetically out of true.  And the aforementioned Giambologna nymph in the garden squirts water through its breasts at guests bathing in the grounds, a perfect symbol of how tawdry art has become in the “idiot universe”. Huxley’s vision of art is fairly grim and uncompromising here. We even get a novelistic flashback to a prostitute’s boudoir in London: a room hung with Victorian painters like Poynter and Alma-Tadema, to illustrate how the fruits of conscientious artistic labour are turned into louche pornography.

  The most interesting discussion of art occurs in the closing stages of the novel. Another character asks Jeremy if a Martian could infer from paintings by Botticelli, Perugino and Raphael the conditions that Machiavelli described in his writings. He then goes on to state that “the real conditions at any given moment are the subjective conditions of the people then alive”- the historian has no way of finding out what those conditions were.  Pordage takes the line that the art historian must take: we must look at the works of art themselves, to divine those “subjective conditions.” Doesn’t the nature of Perugino’s paintings- a contemporary of Machiavelli- suggest that the artist opted for cheerfulness despite living through a violent and unpleasant period? And if Perugino contrived to be optimistic and serene, why not others, like Raphael for instance? This is opposed to the famous view of Nietzsche who couldn’t reconcile the beauty in renaissance art with the horror of the times. So Huxley closes his debate about art and the world on an optimistic note, I think.  

An extraordinary book, replete with many interesting ideas about art in the world; it also proves that good ideas about art can be found outside art history textbooks.

Comments

[H Niyazi]

Very interesting review! Of course, I am not suprised that in considering the compromises between history and the interpretation that artists were required to make, that Huxley has firmly ventured into psychosocial territory - examining them as a perpetual set of internal vs external dynamics.

It is sadly true that you have to go out of traditional Renaissance studies to get this type of discourse. This is why it was so refreshing to see Hall employ Formalist concepts in her newest title.

To counter Nietzsche slightly though, not all Renaissance art was idealised and serene. Most of Michelangelo's figures seem an agonised bunch at most times, and Botticelli's Panels illustrating scenes from the Decameron were quite gruesome. Maybe the surly Nietzsche did not see these in his time?

H

[David Packwood]

I guess it is a pyschosocial approach that Huxley takes here. I see it as compensation for not being able to do a statistical analysis of happiness in the renaissance, because nobody knows how they really felt. Huxley does mention Bentham on a few occasions.

I think Nietzsche was mainly thinking of Raphael, not Michelangelo. Raphael's, calm, "happy", serene images he associated with the Apollonian; Michelangelo would most likely have been Dionysian in his scheme. I'd have to check the "Birth of Tragedy" to see what renaissance artists N mentions.