Delphic Confusion

YOUR REVIEWER has dutifully perused Gardner Murphy’s Human Potentialities (Basic Books, $6.00), and, to use the professor’s own lingo, he reports that he has had a most difficult time resonating to the structured gradients of the man’s prose. He has also been at pains to ingest the Delphic utterances of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (Harper, $3.00), and feels bound to confess that he doesn’t know whether he was there yesterday or will arrive there the day after tomorrow.

Aside from their commitment to the Sybilline, the two authors haven’t a great deal in common. Where Mr. Murphy is resolutely optimistic, Mr. Huxley prefers an atmosphere of guarded pessimism. Where Mr. Murphy’s prose abounds in the technical barbarisms which all keepers of a “discipline” seem to think is the sine qua non of precision, Mr. Huxley uses a more ordinary vocabulary to the end of producing sentences that combine force and grace. Mr. Murphy, one gathers, is soaked in research, which he drowns in the ocean-swells of his paragraphs; Mr. Huxley, on the other hand, is inclined to pick his “research,” if it can be called that, out of whatever book on social science happens to be popular at the moment. If the good features of each author could be abstracted and put together, we would have a single good writer; if the bad could be amalgamated and the rest excluded we would have a valid candidate for the worst writer of the century.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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YOUR REVIEWER has dutifully perused Gardner Murphy’s Human Potentialities (Basic Books, $6.00), and, to use the professor’s own lingo, he reports that he has had a most difficult time resonating to the structured gradients of the man’s prose. He has also been at pains to ingest the Delphic utterances of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (Harper, $3.00), and feels bound to confess that he doesn’t know whether he was there yesterday or will arrive there the day after tomorrow.

Aside from their commitment to the Sybilline, the two authors haven’t a great deal in common. Where Mr. Murphy is resolutely optimistic, Mr. Huxley prefers an atmosphere of guarded pessimism. Where Mr. Murphy’s prose abounds in the technical barbarisms which all keepers of a “discipline” seem to think is the sine qua non of precision, Mr. Huxley uses a more ordinary vocabulary to the end of producing sentences that combine force and grace. Mr. Murphy, one gathers, is soaked in research, which he drowns in the ocean-swells of his paragraphs; Mr. Huxley, on the other hand, is inclined to pick his “research,” if it can be called that, out of whatever book on social science happens to be popular at the moment. If the good features of each author could be abstracted and put together, we would have a single good writer; if the bad could be amalgamated and the rest excluded we would have a valid candidate for the worst writer of the century.