The best of companions: J. W. N. Sullivan, Aldous Huxley, and the new physics

Review of English Studies

Volumn 47, Issue 187, 1996, Pages 352-368

  Bradshaw, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33744950194     PISSN: 00346551     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/res/xlvii.187.352     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Isaac Newton, p. xv
2. Although Sullivan attended Einstein's London lecture on 13 June 1921 ('Einstein', Nation and Athenaeum, 29 (18 June 1921), 431-2), an unpublished letter from Sullivan to his second wife Vere Bartrick-Baker (whom he married on 23 Oct. 1928) indicates that the interview with Einstein which an enraptured Sullivan conducted in Dec. 1929 was his first private audience with the physicist in Berlin: '[Einstein] is ... completely overpowering. He blots everybody else off the face of the earth ... All my journalistic hardihood left me. I found I could talk to him about nothing but really technical questions ... I have talked to Einstein as the young student, J. W. N. Sullivan of years ago, would have wanted to talk. I have not been false to my quality' (in the possession of Mr Navin Sullivan, 'Friday or rather Saturday' [13/14 Dec. 1929]). In another letter in Mr Sullivan's possession, written on 'Saturday Afternoon' one week earlier, J. W. N. Sullivan mentions that he has interviewed Max Planck, who 'was in London last week to receive the Royal Society's Copley Medal'. The medal ceremony took place during the Royal Society's anniversary meeting on 30 Nov. 1929, enabling us to identify Monday, 9 Dec. 1929 as the precise date of Sullivan's interview with Einstein in Berlin
3. See 'Science and Religion: Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger', Observer (13 Apr. 1930), 19
4. Adelphi, 1 (Oct. 1923), 406-12
5. Repr. in Aspects of Science: Second Series (London, 1926), 123-34 (hereafter Aspects II)
6. 'Art and Science', TLS, no. 1147 (10 Jan. 1924), [13]-14
7. Repr. in Aspects II, 47-66
8. 'Imagination in Art and Science', Adelphi, 1 (Apr. 1924), 977-82
9. Chatto & Windus Archives, Reading University Library, Box 2995, fo. 1223, 11 Jan. 1924. I am grateful to Random House UK Ltd. for allowing me to quote from the Chatto & Windus Archives
10. 'Music and Other Arts', TLS, no. 1077 (7 Sept. 1922), [561]-2
11. Repr. as 'Mathematics and Music' in Aspects, 159-76
12. The History of Mathematics in Europe from the Fall of Greek Science to the Rise of the Conception of Mathematical Rigour (London, 1925), Chapters in the History of Science, iv. 79-92
13. HRHRC, 9 Mar. 1924. The 'Philosophic Dialogues' were eventually published as Three Men Discuss Relativity (London, 1925)
14. Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist (London, 1925), 218 (further page-refs. in the text)
15. 'James Clerk Maxwell', Athenaeum, no. 4721 (22 Oct. 1920), 557
16. repr. in Aspects, 41-8
17. Sullivan also contributed an article on 'James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)' to the Daily Herald (19 Apr. 1922), 7
18. and wrote on him again in H.J. and Hugh Massingham (edd.), The Great Victorians (London, 1932), 251-60, and in his own Contemporary Mind: Some Modern Answers (London, 1934), 65-73
19. 'The New Scientific Horizon', Nation and Athenaeum, 29 (13 Aug. 1921), 720, 722
20. Those Barren Leaves (London, 1925), 34 (further page-refs. in the text)
21. Nation and Athenaeum, 30 (7 Jan. 1922), 567-8
22. 'Psycho-Analysis Examined', TLS, no. 1152 (14 Feb. 1924), 87
23. Sullivan continued his attack on psychoanalysis in Gallio or the Tyranny of Science (London, 1927), 20, 62
24. Sullivan and his first wife met Crowley in Paris in Feb. 1921, when Sullivan is alleged to have solemnly pledged himself to Crowley's 'Great Work' (J. Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley (London, 1951), 167)
25. In 1929 Sullivan was one of the 'Three Friends' to whom Crowley dedicated vol. i of his Confessions (The Spirit of Solitude: An Autobiography. Subsequently re-Antichristened The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (London, 1929)). The dedication reads: 'J. W. N. Sullivan who suggested this booklet'
26. Sullivan to S. S. Koteliansky, Koteliansky Papers, BL Add. MS 48973, fos. 49-50, 'Saturday' [12 Jan. 1924]. Sullivan's celibacy was not long-lasting. He was divorced from his first wife later in 1924 in France, but in a subsequent letter dated 'Thursday' (postmarked 5 Aug. 1927) from Italy to Vere Bartrick-Baker, Sullivan brags about his seduction of 'Jessie ... a "young and juicy" woman [he] picked up some time ago'. In the possession of Mr Navin Sullivan
27. 'Pictures of Experience', Calendar (July 1925), 400-3
28. 'Man and Matter', Weekly Westminster, 4 (15 Aug. 1925), 406
29. Huxley reread Burtt's book in Nov. 1926 while writing Point Counter Point (Letters, 276) and he refers or alludes to it in that novel, 'The Monocle', Eyeless in Gaza, Ends and Means, Science, Liberty and Peace, and other works
30. Bradshaw (ed.), The Hidden Huxley, 21
31. 'Art and Life', Vanity Fair, 23 (Feb. 1925), 35, 82
32. Two or Three Graces and Other Stories (London, 1926), 1-195. Apart from his ability to discourse competently on 'the Einstein theory' (p. 89), there is no reason to suppose that the tedious John Peddley is based on Sullivan. In another story in the collection, 'The Monocle', a character named Spiller gives voice to Huxley's renewed sense of the incompatibility of art and science: 'I really don't see how the vast majority of scientific truths and hypotheses can ever become the subject of art. I don't see how they can be given poetic, emotive significance without losing their precision. How could you render the electro-magnetic theory of light, for example, in a moving literary form? It simply can't be done' (251-2)
33. 'The Idea of God', TLS, no. 1302 (13 Jan. 1927), 20
34. Grover Smith assumed, wrongly, that Huxley and his brother were discussing Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925)
35. See also Letters, 491
36. Huxley again engages with Religion in the Making in 'The Essence of Religion', Proper Studies (London, 1927), 171-91
37. According to Michael Squires, Lawrence based his minor character 'Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about the stars' on Sullivan (Lady Chatterley's Lover: Apropos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. M. Squires (Cambridge, 1993), 31, 344)
38. Gathorne-Hardy (ed.), Ottoline at Garsington, 260
39. Sullivan to Grant Richards, HRHRC, 15 May 1919. Sullivan wrote in this letter: 'I am ashamed to tell you how little I have done and what a millstone about my neck I feel the book to be. I really see no immediate prospect of getting on with it for now that I am married the problem of getting a living consumes me all the time.'
40. Similarly, in ch. 14 the reader is supplied with a technical gloss on how the eye perceives the colour of tulips (p. 253) and in ch. 19 Philip Quarles demonstrates his scientific knowledge of how 'ten generations of cooks have employed infra-red radiations to break up the protein molecules of spitted ducklings' (p. 341)
41. H. Howarth, 'Eliot, Beethoven, and J. W. N. Sullivan', Comparative Literature, 9 (Fall 1957), 322-32
42. The text is Grover Smith's translation from Huxley's French. In 1945 Huxley told a correspondent: 'The conclusion of Point Counter Point is the concentrated expression of that kind of aesthetic mysticism which runs through the book and which is the analogue on another plane ... of the ultimate, spiritual mysticism' (Letters, 538)
43. Vanity Fair, 31 (Sept. 1928), 46, 110
44. See, in particular, the essays entitled 'Spinoza's Worm' and 'Pascal', Do What You Will: Essays (London, 1929), 62-92 and 226-310 respectively
45. Symonds, The Great Beast, 423
46. Repr. as 'Mr. Aldous Huxley', in Contemporary Mind, 141-7
47. Time Must Have a Stop (London, 1945), 86
48. June Deery has taken Huxley to task for his 'inappropriate' use of the term 'Einsteinian' in this passage and has commented more generally on his proclivity 'to gloss over, or entirely miss, more complex or disputed points. His use of physics typifies the layperson's tendency to extrapolate, often in a crude fashion, general psychological or metaphysical principles from its carefully defined postulates.' This may be true in part, but Huxley's response to the new physics becomes a lot more explicable once it is realized that he 'typifies' not the struggling 'layperson' but the Sullivanesque world view (June Deery, 'Cultural Trespass?: Aldous Huxley's Forays into Modern Physics', University of Dayton Review, 21 (Spring 1992), 73-84)
49. Peter Bowering, Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels (London, 1968), 72-5