Aldous Huxley

Huxley trusts and heirs

Thirty years ago, ecstasy and torment took hold of John Rivers, shocking him out of “half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form.” He had an affair with the wife of his mentor, Henry Maartens—a pathbreaking physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and a figure of blinding brilliance—bringing the couple to ruin. Now, on Christmas Eve while a small grandson sleeps upstairs, John Rivers is moved to set the record straight about the great man and the radiant, elemental creature he married, who viewed the renowned genius through undazzled eyes.

A Novel

The Genius and the Goddess

Julien Nelson Hill

"the trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

“One escapes into reminiscence as one escaped into gin or sodium amytal”

“I’d rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones. And literary oaths are even strawberry than the matrimonial or monastic varieties.”

“…I suppose I could have been kinder to her. But however kind I might have been, it wouldn’t have altered the fundamental facts —the fact that she loved me possessively, & the fact that I didn’t want to be possessed”

That’s our ironic fate — to have Shakespearean feelings and to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teenagers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse, touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”

“I loved her metaphysically, almost theologically — the way Dante loved Beatrice, the way Petrarch loved Laura. With one slight difference, however. In my case it happened to be sincere. I actually lived my idealism.”

“Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself: I am that I am. The girl is who she is.”

“…[she] was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden… The Olympian’s trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there’s really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There’s no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.” 

The Genius and the Goddess quotes

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