An amazing essay in today�s Guardian Review by Doris Lessing on Lawrence�s novel - The Fox. Shamanism, sex, death, gender, submission- the usual stuff I suppose � but so well handled. It made me think how barmy it was to think that it would do young intelligent adults good to sit in a room and contemplate such material with one of the most opinionated gurus of the age - for that is what happened to people at Hoggwarts when I was there. In fact those involved bottled on so much about the experience that I felt compelled to go off and read as much of DHL as possible � it was catching.

Lawrence stayed with me � as Lessing points out he was a magician who captured people. He captured Aldous Huxley and the quote I put up yesterday about Newton the monster is probably more Lawrence than Huxley. I suppose the Hoggwarts experience pushed me towards AH. Huxley became my obsession in 1972 and 1973 � I tried to give an account of how he arrived at Brave New World, starting at Crome Yellow (his first novel) which contains an outline of the scheme

Point Counterpoint has a sage-like figure � Rampion I think his name is � who floats in and out of the action and condemns all and sundry. Most people think that Rampion is Lawrence.. The 1929 book of essays that Huxle published � between Point Counterpoint and Brave New World was called �Do What You Will� � which is an odd title all things considered. Anyway here�s a bit of Point Counterpoint.

�In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts. The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist. It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything.

And a quote from a letter of the time.

�All the most perfect statements and human solutions of the great metaphysical problems are artistic especially, it seems to me, musical. Beethoven�s late quartets and Bach�s Art of the Fugue have always struck me as the subtlest, profoundest and completest metaphysical works ever composed.�

I had thought that Huxley visited Lawrence in Mexico � in fact the Mexico trip is in 1933 after the publication of Brave New World. Huxley wants to find the country that Lawrence wrote about in the Plumed Serpent and undertakes a very hazardous journey across Mexico. I think he falls in love with the New World and by the end of the decade he�s settled in LA at 701 Amalfi Drive, Pacific Pallisades � together with another of his guru figures � Gerald Heard. These two become friends with Stravinsky and are involved in setting up the Esalen Institute up the coast at Big Sur which some people blame for the hippies.

I see from the net that a new Huxley biography has just been published which seeks to re-establish his credentials as an intellectual � I think I might get this. There�s yet another local link in that Huxley�s father taught at Charterhouse which is where James goes to do rock climbing (on the artificial wall).

The kind of question that Huxley explores in these novels is also at the heart of a book I bought just before Christmas for �7 � a Penguin called Metaphysical Horror by Leszeck Kolakowski (born 1927). Its not long but he chases the big questions around � starting with Wittgenstein�s idea that philosophical questions are not there to be solved but dissolved. He ends up with the question of whether it is legitimate to look for meaning at the level of say �the spirit of the age�. I always liked the bit in Forster�s The Machine Stops where someone gets into trouble for doing something which is � contrary to the spirit of the age�. It�s a great excuse for not doing something � indeed anything � �I came to the conclusion that it would be contrary to the spirit of the age.�

There�s a discipline in Germany called hermeneutics and one of its leading practitioners � Gadamer � died last year. Its like practical criticism in some ways n that it involves trying to get at the truth of a text by being as sympathetic as one can to its context � by trying to enter the spirit of the age. Whoever wrote the play that Kenneth Branagh starred in last night in TV � about the Wanansee Conference did a cracking job on that score � right down to finishing with the enthusiasm for Schubert.