Huxley's Point Counter Point

Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Chapter III

Point Counter Point has always been read as a roman à clef, and the portrait of Lord Edward Tantamount, the rich, eccentric, amateur biologist, has variously been claimed to have its original in J.S. Haldane or even, rather scandalously, in Sir Julian Huxley. I suggest instead that Huxley has made an ironic adaptation of Eliot’s portrayal of Tertius Lydgate in Chapter XV of Middlemarch.

The two chapters in question both offer us young men, the scions of affluent and titled families, who have no vocation in life and yet are bored by the acceptable occupations of their class. Both read omnivorously but without direction. Both chapters deal with their subjects’ awakening, in apocalyptic scenes set in each case in the family library, to their fascination of biological research. Lydgate idly picks out a volume at random in pursuit of “freshness” while Tantamount takes up a journal to quell his boredom. The former reads an article on anatomy, the latter Claude Bernard on physiology: both undergo a sudden and violent conversion. Both denounce their classical education and its irrelevance for a would-be biologist. For Lydgate valvae denote not the valves of the heart but only folding-doors; Tantamount thinks of Latin verses beaten into him at Eton and reflects “why didn’t they teach me anything sensible?” What is more, these parallel scenes are flashbacks. In each novel’s present, both men are engaged on fundamental biological research stemming from that conversion. Lydgate in the early 1830s is searching for the “primitive tissue” or cellular structure. It is notable that Tantamount too is engaged on just this problem as it had evolved after nearly a further century of work: that is, what makes the primitive tissue differentiate into the tissue of specific organs – by what mechanism does the tail bud of a newt, if grafted early enough on to the stump of a leg, turn into a leg instead of a tail.

Keith May has written of Aldous Huxley’s tendency “to adapt literary sources to his own purposes.” It is true that his literary parallelisms invariably expand the significance of his scenes. In Crome Yellow he expropriated the fortune-telling scene from Jane Eyre, allowing the reptilian Mr Scogan to pursue his lecheries by the same means: the violent clash between the romantic original and its cynical reworking deepens the tone of sardonic nostalgia which pervades that novel. Exactly the same trick is used in Those Barren Leaves, where the warm comedy of the boarding-house occupants in Martin Chuzzlewit is transmuted into the grisly black comedy of Miss Carruthers’ mournful establishment.

Lord Edward is superficially an endearing figure, attractive in his dedication to research, in his lack of interest in power politics and in the innocence of his relationships. We are a little puzzled to know how to take him. Set him in his literary context, however, against Lydgate, and he at once springs into relief. Huxley is inviting the reader to measure the value of his ‘pure’ scientific work against Lydgate’s humanitarian zeal; and his worldly success against Eliot’s grave disarticulation of her hero’s ambitions. By such a comparison he is indeed found wanting. Lydgate is only spotted with commonness whereas Tantamount is one of Huxley’s best studies of total intellectual vulgarity.

Explicator, Summer 1979.