ABSTRACT
Somewhere in this novel the hero quotes the closing lines of the most magnificent of Gerard Hopkins's sonnets-written-in-blood; and the thought occurs that with this book Aldous Huxley proves that his whole career has been moving toward a rediscovery of the truth, restated in the same sonnet, that 'selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours.' At least it will seem true if we take the liberty of identifying an author with his hero, which is here somewhat more justifiable than usual in view of the fact that the hero is a prosperous sociologist, renowned for his ironic detachment and given to a kind of finicking distaste for any form of experience that is too unpleasantly concrete. Anthony Beavis is the Huxley hero, the one and only Huxley hero, aged forty-three, and finally confronted with the ancient problem of salvation for himself and the world. He is a projection, that is to say, of everything that his
creator has thought, felt, and read in the seven years since his last novel (one may ignore the unhappy interruption of the fantasy that appeared in 1932). And to say that he represents a distinct enlargement in every sense over his earlier self is one way of indicating the considerable advance that this book marks in Huxley's development as a novelist. Whatever else remains to be said about it, Eyeless in Gaza is the deepest, the most serious, and the most complete novel of his career.
