Recently I've been re-reading Point Counter Point by Aldus Huxley. 

Many commentators call it his masterpiece. Modern Library lists it as number 44 on its list of the 100 best 20th century novels in English yet there it ranks well below Brave New World (that's 5th), also by  Aldus Huxley. 

The book was an experimental novel and consists of a series of conversations, some internal to a character, the character's thoughts, in which a proposition is put and then a counterargument is presented, reflecting a musical contrapuntal motif.

Among his opposed characters are nihilists, communists, rationalists, social butterflies, transcendentalists, and the leader of the British Freemen (fascists cum Brexiteers, as we would now describe them).

Taken as a whole, it's an extended debate on 'the meaning of life'. And at one point, in my young-adult life, Point Counter Point was very influential.

Yet now, later in life, and perhaps more worldly myself, I find some of the intellectualism, that I once thought sophisticated, a little pretentious.

Other commentators, have objected to Huxley's 'unconscious racism' and have objected to the 'class-riddled Huxleyan voice' and one has described his characters as belonging in a mental hospital or to be from the pathology textbooks  - see: Point Counter Point - in Movie Review, September 8, 2021 - by Jay Ruud.

Huxley himself, anticipates this criticism, when he has Philip Quarles, the novelist within his novel, writes in his notebook:

Huxley read 'Classics' at Oxford, (do they still have that?) and grew up among the 'brightest' and 'best' when the British Empire was still 'Great'. And he wrote the 'novel of ideas' in full knowledge  that it would seem a little contrived. So it's little wonder that the characters seem even more contrived today.

As to the class and casual racial prejudice issue. Maybe it's one of proximity? The class-differences and racial prejudices described in Jane Austin novels, for example, are so bizarre that we regard them as quaint and of no practical relevance to us. But Huxley is writing in 1928, when my parents were children; and when my grandparents were his contemporaries.

So he sounds like a typical liberal minded person from my grandparents' generation. Most of whom were inclined to believe in their own superiority.

In other ways he's very modern. He wouldn't have disapproved of my great-grandfather's openly kept mistress, nor of several other skeletons in my family's closets - on both sides. Adults have been setting up home out-of-wedlock for over a generation, so we are no longer as shocked as some of Huxley's, or DH Lawrence's, readers were a the time.

Two of the central characters are based on Huxley's friends, DH Lawrence and his wife, Frieda (the Rampions). 

Huxley himself appears, both as a married man (Phillip Quarles), and as a youthful, more naïve version (Walter Bidlake), who is similar to the protagonist in his early, semi-autobiographical, novel Chrome Yellow.

Nancy Cunard, with whom Huxley had a, somewhat notorious, affair appears as Lucy. And half-a-dozen other characters are based on well-known intellectuals of the period.

We also get a brief but interesting glimpse of India in the 1920's and rising opposition the the British Raj. I sympathised with the Rampions' reaction to the food. See our visits to India on this website. Read More...

There is also an interesting reference to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, and the subsequent outbreaks, that resonate with today's Covid-19 pandemic.

Burlap's character is said to be based on the publisher John Middleton Murry. He's mercilessly satirised, throughout the book, as a hypocrite, and mocked: for his transcendental ideas; his cloying Christianity; and disingenuous sentimentality.  And it's he who we see in the novel's last scene: splashing in the bath with his friend Beatrice: "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

But in many other ways the novel is up-to-date.

In the 1920's, an important character, albeit an eccentric one, is concerned about over-population and over-production, leading to resource depletion:  

Although embedded in the 'arts', Huxley was also very well informed when it came to science; as the nephew of the great Thomas Huxley (Darwin's bulldog) aught to be. Four years after this novel, he proposed, in his dystopian future of Brave New World, that all children, except those born in 'reservations', would be conceived by IVF (in vitro fertilisation) in a kind of Ford inspired production line. For Huxley, this was a dystopia, with science gone mad.

Forty-six years later, Louise Brown was the first child conceived by IVF and there was enormous public outrage, partly inspired by Huxley's vision.  Only one of the team would win a Nobel Prize, many years later, because everyone else had died of old age.

Yet in the next forty years another eight million babies would be successfully conceived by IVF and, eventually, a Nobel Prize would be granted.

On one level, Huxley might have been dismayed. But on another, as he clearly knew, IVF demonstrates that there's no need for a 'divine spark' in the process of conception. Unless it's one dressed in a white lab coat, like his scientists in Point Counter Point.

But the most extraordinary thing is the novel's prescience when it comes to nuclear energy.

Rampion is giving his view 'holistic truth', that echoes DH Laurence's passage about 'knowing', about flowers in a cold scientific way, in his novel Women in Love; and loving wholeheartedly in Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Lawrence was not a lover of industrialisation or 'modern progress' or science.  We gather that Huxley (Philip) was rather more enthusiastic - with reservations:

Point Counter Point was published five years before the Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, is accredited with hypothesising a nuclear-chain-reaction, an idea he actually patented in 1934.

It was not until 1942 that the first nuclear fission reactor was successfully constructed, under the west viewing stands of Stagg Field, at the University of Chicago, as an experiment to test Szilard's hypothesis. A bunch of mad scientists in typical 'to hell with the safety committee' mode.

The team included Szilard, but was led by Enrico Fermi. So, it was Fermi who had the famous laboratory named after him and, subsequently, the fermion, of which all matter has been found to consist. Szilardon is a bit hard to say.

Although Huxley had proposed 'disintegrating the atom' as a source of unlimited energy, for the good of mankind, it was, instead or as well as, the founding technical experiment for the Manhattan Project, leading to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

During this latest reading I've thoroughly enjoyed Point Counter Point again; and I can still recommend it as one of the hundred books one ought to read, before they die.

Huxley, of course, is dead. He died in California, as a result of voluntary euthanasia, on 22 November 1963, the same day that John F Kennedy was assassinated.

I commend his masterpiece to you.