ABSTRACT
Huxley's critics were slow to realize that he held a different concept of fiction. Like Quarles in Point Counter Point, he readily admitted the problems he had in creating conventional plots: 'I don't think of myself as a congenital novelist-no. For example, I have great difficulty in inventing plots. Some people are born with an amazing gift for story telling ; it's a gift which I've never had at all' (PR, p. 205). But the telling of stories, for Huxley, was only a small part of what fiction could accomplish. He wrote to Eugene Saxton on 24 May 1933: 'I probably have an entirely erroneous view about fiction. For I feel about fiction as Nurse Cavell felt about patriotism: that it is not enough. Whereas the "born storyteller" obviously feels that it is enough' (L, p. 371). The popular style of fiction written by Dumas, Scott, or Stevenson could not satisfy Huxley. Also, as much as he appreciated Arnold Bennett's friendship and advice, he recoiled from the elaborate realism of books like Riceyman Steps (L, p. 228). Throughout his life Huxley sought to write another kind of fiction. 'My own aim,' he told an early inter viewer, 'is to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay, a novel in which one can put all one's ideas, a novel like a hold all' (Maraini, p. 78). The drive to synthesize multifarious attitudes to wards life moved Huxley to develop an integrative approach to fiction which in its breadth, he hoped, would transcend the limits of purist art. In this radically changed sense Huxley believed that fiction, along with biography and history, 'are the forms': My goodness, Dostoevski is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on-like
Coleridge-why, it's nothing compared with the really profound Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing-both in life and in art (PR, pp. 213-14). Huxley at heart cherished the belief that the synthesis of an integrative, not organic fiction, of fiction which would 'bring it all in' as he told Laura (his second wife), would evolve into a comprehensive vision for modern man which could, ultimately, contribute some healing power to a ravished world.2
