Available at IWP Books:
More on the way.
More by Huxley at IWP Books: Grey Eminence (1941) and Themes & Variations (1950)
New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1936, The Olive Tree and Other Essays. The essay on Words and Behaviour published separately, too, and available at IWP Articles.
New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1923, On the Margin. From the Essay on Pleasures:
We have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism; then the Germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening of the same; then, after a time, the Treaty of Versailles; then French militarism — with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor menaces as Prohibition, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery….
Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years since. Where, in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand and Athens on the other, where precisely it stood then is a question which each may answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces to our civilization, such as it is — menaces including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history — have confined themselves in most places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they bite.
No, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers — wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.
Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.” “Pleasure” (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name) “pleasure” — what nightmare visions the word evokes! Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of “pleasure”; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.
The horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort…
New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1956, Adonis and the Alphabet.
New at IWP Books: Aldous Huxley, 1930, Music at Night. From the Essay on Foreheads Villainous Low:
If by some miracle the dreams of the educationists were realized and the majority of human beings began to take an exclusive interest in the things of the mind, the whole industrial system would instantly collapse. Given modern machinery, there can be no industrial prosperity without mass production. Mass production is impossible without mass consumption. Other things being equal, consumption varies inversely with the intensity of mental life. A man who is exclusively interested in the things of the mind will be quite happy (in Pascal’s phrase) sitting quietly in a room. A man who has no interest in the things of the mind will be bored to death if he has to sit quietly in a room. Lacking thoughts with which to distract himself, he must acquire things to take their place; incapable of mental travel, he must move about in the body. In a word, he is the ideal consumer, the mass consumer of objects and of transport.
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Shaw, 1951. From Jacques Barzun’s review of the book:
Desmond MacCarthy has not in this country the reputation that he deserves. A few know him as the one-time editor of a periodical of the Thirties called Life and Letters, as the author of a book on the much earlier but no less significant Court Theatre, and as a critic at large for the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. He is also to be numbered among the band of learned lunatics (I profess to be one too) who take pleasure in the pseudo-scholarship of Sherlock Holmes. The reissue in book form of Mr. MacCarthy’s reviews of twenty Shaw plays should fill out this indistinct sketch and show the author for what he is — a judicious critic of drama who is also a strong admirer of Shaw.
New at IWP Books, Two by Bernard Shaw: On the Rocks (1934) and Geneva (1938). Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence:
In his last years, Shaw extolled Russian Communism, like Bertrand Russell, the Webbs, and millions of other intellectuals. But in Shaw, one suspects a different spirit within the motive. His approval of government by murder and massacre looks like a desperate gambler’s last throw. It contradicts not only a lifetime of clear pragmatic thought, since protracted violence means practical failure, but also the plays written at the same time as the advocacy: The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, and Geneva, the first pair arguing against persecuting dissent, even though democracy is in danger; the third, ridiculing Hitler and Mussolini, whose methods paralleled Stalin’s. The playwright kept to the faith that the wearied propagandist abjured.
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Experience, 1935. Three Parts: Of Human Nature; During the War; Digressions of a Reviewer. From the Chapter on Making Speeches:
What daunts me when I get upon my feet to speak is not that I am unaccustomed to public speaking, but that all my previous speeches have been failures. And yet I think, or rather, to use the formula of words which was constantly on the lips of that cautious metaphysician Sir William Hamilton, — “It seems to me that I think I believe,” that there is the making of a speaker in me. In the first place, why otherwise should I continue to be asked from time to time to address audiences if there were not still a faint glimmer of hope animating those who know me that I might be worth hearing? And secondly, I am certainly endowed with two-o’clock-in-the-morning eloquence — solitary eloquence. But I believe this faculty is not uncommon. When kept awake by indignation or anger I am able to give absent persons a trouncing, which in my opinion falls little short of Chatham or Cicero in that line. Quicken me at that dark hour with a small personal grievance or a gigantic public scandal (like the behaviour of the British in Ireland), and off I go. Sentences of trenchant invective, unforgettable sarcasm, polished irony and thumping directness flow from me easily. Yet at an earlier hour, in the presence of other human beings, it is as much as I can do to stutter through the tamest statement of my case. How is this? What is the explanation? What paralyses me — the sound of my own voice or the eyes of an audience?
Sleepless night (in Israel), some of the time working on: Desmond MacCarthy, Humanities, 1954. Now at IWP Books. Chapters on Ibsen, Chekhov, T. S. Eliot, De Quincey, Sidney Smith, Leigh Hunt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Swinburne, Edgar Allan Poe, & More. Two more books by MacCarthy to appear soon: Experience and Shaw.
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