"I thought not. Here! _Amusez-vous!_" She threw the books on my bed and
shut the door again.
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.