Quote of the Day: Attack of the Giant Faces

Aldous Huxley, in 1929, goes to the talkies ~

“[…] Nothing but disembodied entertainers, gesticulating flatly on the screen and making gramophone-like noises as they did so. Some sort of comedian was performing as we entered. But he soon vanished to give place to somebody’s celebrated jazz-band — not merely audible in all its loud vulgarity of brassy guffaw and caterwauling sentiment, but also visible in a series of apocalyptic close-ups of the individual performers. A benificent providence has dimmed my powers of sight, so that at a distance of more than four or five yards I am blissfully unaware of the full horror of the average human countenance. At the cinema, however, there is no escape. Magnified up to Brobdignagian proportions, the human countenance smiles its six-foot smiles, opens and shuts its thirty-two-inch eyes, registers soulfulness or grief, libido or whimsicality, with every square centimetre of its several roods of pallid mooniness. Nothing short of total blindness can preserve one from the spectacle. The jazz-players were forced upon me; I regarded them with a fascinated horror. It was the first time, I suddenly realised, that I had ever clearly seen a jazz-band. The spectacle was positively terrifying.”

Not his thing, I guess. Beautiful writing, though. Unfortunately, an unpleasant dose of anti-semitism then emerges ~

“The performers belonged to two contrasted races. There were the dark and polished young Hebrews, whose souls were in those mournfully sagging, sea-sickishly undulating melodies of mother-love and nostalgia and yammering amorousness and clotted sensuality which have been the characteristically Jewish contributions to modern popular music. And there were the chubby young Nordics, with Aryan faces transformed by the strange plastic forces of the North American environment into the likenesses of very large uncooked muffins or the unveiled posteriors of babes.”

The writing is still kind of sumptious and evocative, and even touches on things we can recognise even if we don’t agree with Huxley’s distaste: I can almost hear the “sea-sickishly undulating melodies”, and the muffin-faced Nordics remind me irresistably of Martin Milner as the young jazz guitarist in THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. But Huxley’s dislike of jazz (in itself, an allowable blind spot) is informed by a nasty racial prejudice that robs the piece of its intended humour. Huxley’s anti-semitism is not the most virulent: it comes with a belief that Jewish culture is vulgar and inferior (later, Huxley will state that Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci is second-rate but at least stands in some relation to the glories of Italy, presumably in contrast to Irving Berlin), but as notorious bigot Kingsley Amis put it, “One wouldn’t want anybody to DO anything about it. One would be horrified by THAT.”

Such “mild” prejudices are weak things. Their owners should stamp them out.

I suppose one of the benefits of living in a post-Holocaust world is that such attitudes are rarer, and tolerated less. Huxley’s essay was written apparently without any thought of controversy. Today such an outpouring would rightly inspire outrage. We all have our likes and dislikes. It’s quite a good idea to test our boundaries and grow in the field of appreciating different kinds of art. It’s absolutely essential to do so in the field of appreciating different kinds of human being.

Quotes from Do What You Will by Aldous Huxley.