Ape and Essence
First British edition, 1949
Ape and Essence (1948) is Aldous Huxley's second dystopian novel, written sixteen years after Brave New World in the aftermath of Hiroshima. The book takes the form of a rejected film script, found on a Hollywood studio lot as it is being carted off to the incinerator, a frame that lets Huxley present his ruined future as a story already written and thrown away. The script is set in a radioactive Southern California in the year 2108, generations after a Third World War, where the survivors worship a devil named Belial as ruler of the fallen world. This British first edition followed the American edition by one year.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue-gray cloth binding titled in gilt over a blue panel on spine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #11211.
Fine in fine price-clipped dust jacket.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue-gray cloth binding titled in gilt over a blue panel on spine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #11211.
Fine in fine price-clipped dust jacket.
Additional Details
Ape and Essence opens on the day of Gandhi's assassination in present-day Hollywood, where the narrator and a self-absorbed studio writer named Bob Briggs find a discarded screenplay on the studio lot. Its author, a man named William Tallis, has had it rejected, and the pages are on their way to the incinerator when the narrator pulls them off the cart. The rest of the book is that screenplay, a vision of the world generations after a nuclear war. Rather than place his nightmare in a distant future, Huxley hands the reader a manuscript that already exists in the present and that Hollywood has judged unfit to film.
Tallis wrote in the full grammar of a shooting script, and Huxley uses the form as a satirical instrument. The screenplay opens on an audience of well-dressed baboons watching a screen, while the narrator recites the lines from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure that give the book its title, Isabella's description of man as a creature whose "glassy essence, like an angry ape" makes the angels weep. What the baboons are watching soon takes shape. Two identical figures of Dr. Albert Einstein, each on a leash, squat behind the uniformed armies of two warring powers, staring at each other across a strip of rubble and corpses. The most famous mind of the age appears twice over, interchangeable, kept like a dog by either side.
The screenplay follows a New Zealand expedition that lands in the ruins of Los Angeles in 2108 and a botanist, Dr. Alfred Poole, who is cut off from his colleagues and falls into the hands of the survivors. They live under a priesthood that worships the devil Belial as master of the fallen world and reads the war itself as proof of his rule. The deformities that radiation has left in their children they blame on Belial rather than the gamma rays, and their answer is the killing of deformed infants at birth. Desire is treated as Belial's mark and forbidden except during one yearly breeding season. The few whose longing does not shut off the rest of the year are marked out as a class the society calls the Hots, and they are beaten, punished, and blamed whenever anything goes wrong. The Arch-Vicar is candid with Poole about why. A people with no enemy beyond its borders will manufacture one within them, because shared hatred is what holds the rest together, and the Hots serve that purpose better than any doctrine could. The cruelty is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working as intended.
Huxley wrote the book in 1948, in the first shock of the atomic age, and its cruelty is more open than anything in his earlier work. Brave New World imagined a system that holds people through comfort and keeps its violence out of sight. This one imagines what is left after such a system has failed, when the managing has stopped and only the appetite for control remains, dressed now in the language of religion. It is the less read of the two books and the harsher, a vision built not from what Huxley thought progress would bring but from what he had just watched it do.
Tallis wrote in the full grammar of a shooting script, and Huxley uses the form as a satirical instrument. The screenplay opens on an audience of well-dressed baboons watching a screen, while the narrator recites the lines from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure that give the book its title, Isabella's description of man as a creature whose "glassy essence, like an angry ape" makes the angels weep. What the baboons are watching soon takes shape. Two identical figures of Dr. Albert Einstein, each on a leash, squat behind the uniformed armies of two warring powers, staring at each other across a strip of rubble and corpses. The most famous mind of the age appears twice over, interchangeable, kept like a dog by either side.
The screenplay follows a New Zealand expedition that lands in the ruins of Los Angeles in 2108 and a botanist, Dr. Alfred Poole, who is cut off from his colleagues and falls into the hands of the survivors. They live under a priesthood that worships the devil Belial as master of the fallen world and reads the war itself as proof of his rule. The deformities that radiation has left in their children they blame on Belial rather than the gamma rays, and their answer is the killing of deformed infants at birth. Desire is treated as Belial's mark and forbidden except during one yearly breeding season. The few whose longing does not shut off the rest of the year are marked out as a class the society calls the Hots, and they are beaten, punished, and blamed whenever anything goes wrong. The Arch-Vicar is candid with Poole about why. A people with no enemy beyond its borders will manufacture one within them, because shared hatred is what holds the rest together, and the Hots serve that purpose better than any doctrine could. The cruelty is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working as intended.
Huxley wrote the book in 1948, in the first shock of the atomic age, and its cruelty is more open than anything in his earlier work. Brave New World imagined a system that holds people through comfort and keeps its violence out of sight. This one imagines what is left after such a system has failed, when the managing has stopped and only the appetite for control remains, dressed now in the language of religion. It is the less read of the two books and the harsher, a vision built not from what Huxley thought progress would bring but from what he had just watched it do.
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