Eyeless in Gaza

Eyeless in Gaza

Damon LaBarbera

Eyeless in Gaza was written by Aldous Huxley in 1936 and describes, in achronological order, the lives of several characters over decades,  Eyeless in Gaza is not one of Huxley's best-known books, but it is one of his finest, surpassing in-depth and literary innovation, so some opine, and I am inclined to agree, his more famous books, including Brave New World. Brave .Eyeless in Gaza  is a finer novel, and has that  particular style of which Huxley is so adept, allowing us to enter the inner monologue, acutely and sometimes humorously depicted, of his protagonists (assuming a book can have more than one protagonist).  

The mood of this book differs from Huxley's earlier oeuvre, the latter being "smart" and "modern ."Huxley wrote Eyeless in Gaza at a time in his life when less interested in being iconoclastic and concerned with humanistic themes. The book is of a period that also precedes Huxley’s involvement the psychedelic culture—an odd end to the Odyssey of this English elite from postwar art society to Southern California Culture. 

 Meanwhile, the plot is complex, Events are described out of order, a jumble of events that reflect  the an essential assumption of the book, the haphazardness of recollection. Memory is tyranny--as Anthony Beavis, a youthful,  writer at the books beginning describes--with a unbeatable description of Marcel Proust, bathing in a tub of the dirty water of his own memories. He is speaking to his paramour Helen  (based somewhat on the 20s personage Nancy Cunard) as they sift through old photographs of their family--photographs that capture the events later in the book. The scattered chapters are like the photos, as disordered as his memories of his departed friends and relatives. After that, the plot proceeds, with chapters flowing asynchronously, though the dates are labeled. 

As a sort of footprint for themes in the book, the old photographs create juxtapositions and irony, as the plot itself will be. As they view the photos, we learn of a plaintive quality for Helen to get more out of the relationship, with Anthony parrying affection with humor and charm, but not much in the way of actual feeling. 

 Anthony struggles with his alienation from feeling, and Helen, sensitive to the void between them, verges on leaving. However, an absurd event occurs. As they sun on an Italian rooftop, a dog splatters on the veranda, dropped from a helicopter--a morbid event reverberating throughout the story. 

The plot shifts to Anthony’s childhood. Anthony’s mother (Maise) has died. A student at Balustrade, Anthony travels by train to the funeral, passing billboards depicting a cow. The motto on the billboards repeats in his mind, along with the drumming from the tracks. Sitting with him is his father and uncle. His father is a dry, pedantic philologist with uncomprehending attitudes about his son. His conversation consists of etymology puns. Nearby is his Uncle James, an accountant, a convert to Catholicism, and we later see, troubled by homosexuality in an unaccepting world. The latter frets about timetables and, later, the handsome men in the funeral entourage. 

One of the women at the funeral is Mary Amberly, recently widowed, the bride of a WWI casualty (and actually Helen's mother eventually). In the next segment of this plot, Anthony, who just turned an adult a few years after his mother's death, has an affair with Mary. Mary provides him with a thrilling sense of adulthood, exciting vice, and superiority. But she also taunts him into betraying his gentle and true friend Brian--taunting him into seducing Brian’s ingenue girlfriend. Brian Foxe is a virtuous, self-effacing youngster who is highly moral but enmeshed with a self-structured, overly honorable mother who overvalues self-denial. Also a widow, she consumes Brian with all-encompassing attentiveness. This is a wonderful description of what Orwell said about saints—often, they are saints because real human relations are impossible. This enormity of the betrayal causes Brian to kill himself by hurtling himself off a cliff.   

The book incidentally has one of the best descriptions of borderline personality in the person of Mary Amberly, a character whose malicious, impulsive, and seductive antics damage others and, ultimately, herself. The character may have some similarities to Nancy Cunard, wife of the shipping magnate, who took little interest in motherhood. Mary later descends into opiate (“morphia”) addiction. Anthony becomes involved with Helen, Mary's daughter. 

 At a later age, Anthony recognizes his deficiencies. He is passive and detached and tries with varied adventures, some comically dangerous, to achieve engagement. Traveling to South America with the sadistic Mark Staithes, a bully in his early years now grown into a masochistic loner, they entangle themselves in a revolution for the sake of changing themselves. Mark loses a leg when his donkey collapses onto him on a mountain path, but in the process, Anthony meets a missionary doctor who profoundly influences him. With this mentor, amid the saber-rattling in England, he embraces pacifism. He learns to public speak, something he has always avoided. 

A didactic undertone always exists in Huxley’s later fiction, with a pull towards pacifism and spiritualism that, for some, may spoil the literary excellence but are also part of Huxley’s endearing value. At root, the story describes that almost comic discord between what we are and what we would ideally like to be and the false attempts people make to overcome that incapacity, moving sideways into pseudo-solutions.  The writing though is acute and accurate, so accurate it sometimes verges on comic.