Monkey Business
Post-January 20, 2025 AoS Chronicle, No. 54
Here is a quote from a novel I recently encountered at my son’s house in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a novel whose title I had never heard of or at any rate did not remember, and certainly had never before read:
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly designed army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific, and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet—the scientific poet—of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered from morning till night a million schoolteachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.[1]
As extracts from novels, go, this is quite a virtual mouthful, which I mean metaphorically since it is obviously a written product, in this case of just five sentences that feature one colon, three semi-colons, and a set of m-dashes to boot. It entails an entire paragraph, save for its opening sentence, that presents in the form of an omniscient first-person narrator.[2] So now knowing all that, for all it may matter, who is the author of this quote, what novel does it come from, and whatever does it mean?
I know the answers to the first two of these questions; I am still trying to work out a mature answer to the third, it being understood that it may turn out in the end that the author kind of screwed this up and wrote exactly what this extract at first appears to be: an overwrought mangled mess of an attempt to describe the predominant characteristics of much modern ideological thought. We’ll come back to that.
Now if I, very fortunate (I think) to be a reasonably well-educated person with 75 years of at least halfway serious effort under my belt (but maybe ignorance is actually bliss?), either had never heard of this novel or didn’t remember it, then you, dear TRP reader, may be forgiven for never having heard of it either. If you do know it from memory, and can identify it now before I reveal the pertinent information about it, well then bully for you! You’re either some kind of phenom polymath of the humanities, an expert on the writings of famous iconoclastic Brits, or just in this case happenstantially lucky.
The extract is from Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel entitled Ape and Essence, chapter 1, spanning pages 6-7.
If you were to review a pocket biography of Huxley, of which several are readily available online, you will find that all of them, pretty much, cite Brave New World, from 1932, Eyeless in Gaza, from 1936, and Doors of Perception, from 1954. None mentions Ape and Essence. Huxley wrote voraciously, that is I think the right word, as though he was eating through paper, ink, and nibs as he worked—more than fifty books and also many screenplays, poems, critical essays and what-not—in his 69 years of life.[3] But Ape and Essence, coming after Huxley’s name had been made particularly with Brave New World—for every good and enduring reason one can think of—did not do so well. Why?
Amalia modeling, sort of, some Venn diagram truth
Well, for one thing, it is just passing strange from dimple to duodenum. It reads as a stream of semi-consciousness, dreamlike and gargoyled by way of its chosen images, and cluttered with perpetual parenthetical cul-de-sacs that instead of going nowhere go everywhere all at once, which in a way amounts to the same thing. Too much lushness can obscure one’s vision, as if, say, adverbs were leaves and stems were verbs and too many of the former made it impossible to make out the latter. Same goes for digressions.
So structurally diffracted is Ape and Essence that, despite its relative brevity, it feels a long read. Its suggestive but often vague sideways meanderings compose a skein of distractions from the basic storyline, which may accidentally make the prose seem postmodern to today’s cyberaddicted phombies, in the unlikely event that any were actually to read it. Imagine one’s MINI Cooper leaping every hedgerow in Hertfordshire to go putzing about in hayfields and orchards, exceeding the length of the roadway many times over, not to speak of the distance the crow is said to fly—although at this point I must interject that anyone who thinks that crows always or even often fly straight from one point to another point knows rather little about the aerial habits of crows.
Given the frantic, hithering-and-yoning, quasi-hallucinogenic nature of the prose in Ape and Essence, I nearly lurched to the mistaken supposition that Huxley had begun his famous experiments with mescaline before writing it. Not so: It is well documented that Huxley commenced messing with mescaline, under conditions monitored by a bona fide psychiatrist, in May 1953. (The LSD phase came later, in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s.) So Huxley would probably have blamed Mr. Tallis—the fictional (and deceased before the end of chapter 1) author of the discovered discarded screenplay that makes up most of Ape and Essence—for being a poor or at least a too-rushed writer, which is why, he would fictionally reason, Tallis’s fictional screenplay got fictionally rejected in the first place.
As for what the extract means, at the very least it means that Huxley was an anti-positivist who loathed misbegotten copy-cat but scientistic pretensions in the humanities, philosophy, and the then-budding social sciences. It means he was a pacifist, for which reason he was ultimately denied U.S. citizenship after his immigration to the United States in 1937. It means he was an anti-nationalist who despised simpleminded scapegoating ideological cant masquerading as any kind of genuine understanding of a magnificently complex but fraught human nature. Huxley intuitively understood something that years later only someone as innocently savant as Yogi Berra could express with profound simplicity: “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
Huxley also cringed before all performative falseness and pretense, which he grasped as the shadow boxing of a defensive arrogance; when young Huxley was especially unhesitant to call it out, a Joan of Arc-like personality tic that got him in trouble with his upper-class, arch-browed social crowd early in his literary career. Above all, perhaps, possibly due to a childhood illness that nearly left him blind, he developed a keenly sensitive hubris barometer—which brings us to the title of this essay, “Monkey Business.”
Ape and Essence, poor as it was as a literary production compared to most of Huxley’s oeuvre, did communicate a clear message about humanity’s often-exaggerated sense of its own moral and intellectual superiority. What’s the gist of the book? After the post-Hiroshima human march of folly triggers a nuclear apocalypse, some survivors in far-off New Zealand, many, many decades later, after the toxic radioactive cloud has dissipated, set off by ship to rediscover the rest of the world, pointed first to North America. When they get close, according to Mr. Tallis’s rejected screenplay draft, they discover that apes have evolved rapidly and taken control of things. Humans have been reduced to zoo- and pet-worthy objects of fun, derision, and cruelty. In chapter 2, Michael Faraday makes an appearance in a dog’s leash; so do identical twins (somehow…..it’s never explained….) of Albert Einstein.
Little did I know but gradually did I come to suspect that this particular form of monkey business was vaguely familiar to me, not the particulars so much as the general spirit of the thing. So I did a little noodling around, and came to discover that in 1963 a Frenchman named Pierre Boulle, having almost certainly encountered Ape and Essence some years before in a 1949 French translation titled Temps futurs, wrote a book entitled La planète des singes. In Boulle’s version, the year 2500 is the temporal setting for a group of human astronauts discovering an apish planet in the star system Betelgeuse, in which—you guessed it—apes rule and humans are pets and zoo exhibits.
Boulle’s storyline is far more coherent as sci-fi writing, moving from event to event to event, than Huxley’s raucous simian fantasmagoria. Boulle later claimed that he was inspired by a zoo visit and a visit to the Paris bourse where floor traders reminded him of excited gorillas. He also claimed secondary inspiration from Jonathan Swift’s vivid imagination of Houyhnhnms—intelligent horses instead of apes, but you get the basic idea. He never mentioned Huxley, one of the best known and respected writers of his time, despite his presumably easy access to a French translation of Ape and Essence. When literary critics later raised the basic plot similarities and overarching purpose between Huxley’s 1948 Ape and Essence and his 1963 La planète des singes, Boulle turned them aside and changed the subject. We seem to have here a case of une affaire louche! (The direct translation of “monkey business” into French misleads here.) And this with respect to a work that calls out human hubris, self-regard, and petty deception for what it is, of all things!
La planète des singes struck a nerve, partly based on Boulle’s fame as the author of the story that eventually became the hit film The Bridge Over the River Kwai. (Despite not being able to speak or write English fluently, Boulle also accepted credit in 1957 for writing the screenplay for Bridge Over the River Kwai because the actual Hollywood writers, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted.[4]) Then, in 1964 a British army officer, secret agent, and writer in his own right named Xan Fielding translated La planète des singes into English with the title Monkey Planet.
The rest, to an American audience (and not just an American audience), is pop entertainment history. In 1968 the Franklin Schaffner film The Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston—a.k.a. Ben-Hur, a.k.a. Moses, and a.k.a. NRA shill….the combination of apostate chariot-whisperer, God-whisperer, ape-whisperer, and rightwing 2nd Amendment truth-hacker is enough to make one gag with polyglot confusion—won multiple Oscars. It also sired film sequels aplenty as well as two 1970s-era television series, comic books, and ever since a veritable cornucopia of marketable trash, long since disconnected from the authors’ more or less serious intentions.
Did Fielding or Schaffner or Heston know or suspect that Boulle was originally inspired by Huxley? No evidence suggests that any of them did, not even Fielding who would have been the most likely of the three to notice and know. What a deal, huh?: Monkey business and blind man’s bluff frapped together in a literary-historical Cuisinart.
***
It’s not hard to think of other literary uses of monkeys, all the way from the various iterations of King Kong and Tarzan to Chuck Berry’s great 1956 hit “Too Much Monkey Business.” Truth to tell, I could go on iterating examples for quite a few pages. As for “monkey business” in politics, only several long tomes would begin to suffice, and that was before the current Trump 2.0 Administration set new records for magical-thinking attenuated grifting, and for surrealist mendacity so capacious that it’s a day job to distinguish between the outright lies and the sincerely incubated delusions.
Yes, I could go on. And on. But I won’t. I will instead end this shorter-than-usual TRP essay simply by quoting some appropriate lyrics from a Huxleyan-toned 1970 Kinks song entitled “Apeman,” followed by a very, very Huxleyan lyric fragment, a small one, from another Kinks song recorded the next year, “20th-Century Man.” Both sets of lyrics were written by Ray Davies. But of course.
From “Apeman”:
I think I’m sophisticated cause I’m living my life like a good homo sapien,
But all around me, everybody’s multiplying and they’re walking round like flies, man
So I’m no better than the animals sitting in their cages in the zoo, man
‘Cause compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees, I am an apeman.
I think I’m so educated and I’m so civilized cause I’m a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation and the crazy politicians
I don’t feel safe in this world no more, I don’t wanna die in a nuclear war; I wanna sail away to a distant shore and live like an apeman.
In man’s evolution, he has created the city and the motor traffic rumble
But give me half a chance and I’d be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle.
‘Cause the only time that I feel at ease is swinging up and down in a coconut tree
Oh, what a life of luxury to be like an apeman.
I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man, I’m an ape man
I’m a King Kong man, I’m a voodoo man, I’m an ape man
I look out the window, but I can’t see the sky
The air-pollution is fogging up my eyes
I want to get out of this city alive and make like an apeman.
From “20th-Century Man”:
This is the age of machinery, a mechanical nightmare; the wonderful world of technology, napalm, hydrogen bombs, biological warfare.
This is the twentieth century, but too much aggravation; it’s the age of insanity—What has become of the green pleasant fields of Jerusalem? . . .
[1] I am pretty sure that there should be a comma after the word “night” but proofreading errors in published books by reputable businesses—in this case Harper & Co.,—happened in 1948 probably more often than they do now.
[2] The paragraph’s first sentence contains an error concerning Plato’s Republic, a fairly egregious one that would only distract from my aim here were it to appear, so I have omitted it. This matter of the point of view of the author is important to know if one is interested in literature and the study thereof, for novelists may these days, at least since Jane Austen, choose from a good half dozen standard options: first-person (omniscient or limited), second-person, third-person limited (and even unreliable, thanks Jane), third-person omniscient, third-person objective, and a grab-bag of mixed others (multiple points of view, often chapter by chapter; epistolary, so as told by an invented document or diary or letters cache; and what is called “free indirect discourse,” a third-person voice that adopts the consciousness of one of the characters without explicitly saying so. There is no need for TRP readers to learn this information; it will not be on the test. As it happens, the novel here in question adopts the first-person limited for chapter 1, and then shifts to the epistolary for the rest of the book.
[3] Just incidentally, having mentioned Jane Austen in footnote 2, Huxley wrote the screenplay for the 1940 Hollywood film Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.
[4] The screenplay won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1957. In an example of belated reverse monkey business, in 1984 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Oscars to Foreman and Wilson—but posthumously. What the hell took them so long? Probably some kind of monkey business.