‘The Sciences of Life’: Living Form in William Blake and Aldous Huxley

Abstract

Of all the genealogies of Romantic phrases or ideas, perhaps none interests today’s students more than the line of descent by which a gnomic statement from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite’) becomes the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1954 exploration of psychedelic drug use, The Doors of Perception, and, in a subsequent transformation, the name of Jim Morrison’s band The Doors, founded in 1965. (For the chain of transmission to be complete, one should also include the vital link of Timothy Leary, who had read Huxley’s book and met with him at Harvard, and who served as a conduit for his ideas to the California counter-culture of the 1960s). For the teacher of British Romanticism seeking to inspire in undergraduates an enthusiasm for the topic that can be turned to serious study, the aura of cool surrounding this textual series is invaluable. But the precise nature of the relation between Blake and Huxley has for the most part been ignored or, when considered, largely trivialised. Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, for instance, in their wide-ranging survey of Blake’s ‘influence and afterlife’ in the years since his death, identify a ‘particular brand of Blakean mysticism’ as Huxley’s main borrowing, welcome in the American post-war context because ‘it appeared to celebrate the individual’s free will to create a universe in his or her own image’. As such, Huxley’s reference to Blake fits into a pattern Dent and Whittaker identify, whereby later users of Blakean imagery and language repeatedly suppress or avoid the inherently social or political force of his work. Leaving aside for the moment the question of the political implications of Huxley’s drug experiments, the suggestion that Huxley finds in Blake a strong instance of ‘individual free will’ sits oddly beside some of his explicit statements about Blake’s particular value. Far from being merely a product of his psychedelic works, Huxley’s interest in and regard for Blake (along with a multitude of other touchstones, literary, scientific and philosophical) was of long standing and the result of careful study, and tends more to a shattering of the form of individual subjectivity than its upkeep. One comment that sounds the ground note for his view of Blake occurs in the 1936 novel Eyeless in Gaza, where Blake’s doctrine of states – that ‘[g]ood and evil can be predicated only of states, not of individuals’ – is heralded as ‘the end of personality in the old sense of the word’. Earlier still, in the major novel of 1928, Point Counter Point, Blake plays a key role in the philosophical argument of Mark Rampion, Huxley’s spokesman for a D.H. Lawrence-inspired vitalism: