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Aldous Huxley versus the Mesomorphs
How the writer was seduced by constitutional psychology – the incendiary idea of the remarkable William Sheldon
Published: 25 November 2015
We hope you enjoy this piece from theTLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. This week’s issue also includes: Rodin’s collaboration with catastrophe; how the brain sees; Jonathan Coe’s tour de force; hope for the future of the Jews?; war and the Raj – and much more.
When Bert Goodrich called the shopfitters into 6624 Hollywood Boulevard, in 1953, most West Coast gyms were low-rent hideaways for a blue-collar army of boxers, grapplers and Herculean bodybuilders. Thanks to Goodrich, a former Mr America and one-time stunt double for John Wayne, a new generation of young and upwardly mobile Americans was about to be inducted into his mirrored palace of barbells, chin bars and pulley machines.
Up in the hills of Hollywood lived a gently spoken pacifist, an urbane man of letters whose personal loathing of sport had taken root on the playing fields of Eton. Over 6 foot 4 in height, with poor vision and the unwieldy demeanour of a “giant grasshopper”, Aldous Huxley was no more likely to be seen at Goodrich’s Gym to the Stars than Joe McCarthy sightseeing in Red Square. To adapt the words of George Orwell, his former student and near doppelgänger, competitive sport was for Master Huxley essentially a crucible of “hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence”; it was “war minus the shooting”.
Huxley may have winced at the grunting machismo on display at Goodrich’s gym, yet he was, in his own donnish way, intrigued by the relationship between physique and personality. In fact, Huxley had, since coming to America in 1937, begun to believe that his literary talents and deficiencies were the congenital offshoots of his elongated shape. “The gut of a round fat man, like G. K. Chesterton, may be as much as forty feet long. The gut of a thin man like myself maybe as little as eighteen and would weigh half what the Chestertonian intestine weighs. It would obviously be miraculous if this physical difference were not correlated with a mental difference.” As “a tall, emaciated fellow on stilts”, Huxley reckoned that he simply lacked the stomach of a good storyteller.
Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist of character and dramatic action, there was certainly no denying the staggering panorama of ideas that Huxley, a self-styled professor of nothing-in-particular, could navigate in his fiction and essays. From the history of scissors to Chinese ceramics, Vedic scripture to medieval gastronomy, his reach was telescopic. But Southern California, his adopted home, ushered him towards a new role. Frustrated by his moderate success as a Hollywood scriptwriter, Huxley found sustenance in a diet of mysticism and mescaline, hypnosis and dianetics. Writing for Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, lecturing to ever-more crowded auditoriums, Huxley took the question of human potential writ large as his intellectual lodestar. What non-revolutionary measures could the godless society pursue to expand the heart and mind? How could co-operation and collectivism replace the urge to control and dominate?
To answer these and other questions, Huxley plundered psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology, psychopharmacology and evolutionary biology. According to his own definition, he was now a “pontifex”, a bridge between science and the general world, a kind of freelance human engineer. But like the hapless Theodor Gumbrich, the inventor of the world’s first pneumatic trousers, from Antic Hay (1923), Huxley’s rapport with new scientific research and technology was sometimes seriously misjudged.
Huxley’s championing of constitutional psychology, the brainchild of William Sheldon, was the longest and most controversial of all his scientific infatuations. Huxley had first met Sheldon in 1935, at Dartington Hall, the progressive school and artistic refuge founded by his friends Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. What captured Huxley’s attention was the anthropometric research that this “remarkable man” had carried out some years earlier as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. These investigations had confirmed to Sheldon that there were, in any human population, only three dimensions of physical variation: in the digestive tract; in the muscles, heart and blood vessels; and the skin and nervous system. Measuring the extent of variation across these three dimensions, Sheldon homed in on a trio of “somatotypes” who were excessively developed in one dimension. Mesomorphs carried little fat on their hard-boned physiques. Endomorphs were large-headed and short-limbed, notable for their excessive weight and poor muscular strength. Ectomorphs had “long, slender poorly muscled extremities with pipestem bones”. Diet and lifestyle had, according to Sheldon, relatively little effect on body type. A pronounced ectomorph such as Huxley could never become a mesomorph or an endomorph. This was, as Sheldon liked to put it, about “as likely as a mastiff becoming a spaniel or collie”.
The three-tiered system of human classification that Sheldon would go on to develop at Harvard extended the work of a number of early twentieth-century physicians, anthropologists and criminologists. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s, the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer had identified three bodily types, each with its own set of pathological dispositions, and George Draper, an American pioneer in the field of constitutional medicine, had similarly come to believe that eye colour and other physical characteristics were markers for susceptibility to polio and tuberculosis, ulcers and gall bladders. With one eye on both Kretschmer’s and Draper’s research, Sheldon brought psychology into the picture. Marrying personality tests and interviews with physical data from analysis of thousands of naked subjects (undergraduate photographs courtesy of several Midwestern universities), he claimed to find undeniable links between “the shape of a man and the way he behaves”. Fuller-figured endomorphs were given to viscerotonia, characterized by “relaxation, extraversion of affect, love of food, sociality, etc”. The sporting mesomorph was driven by somatotonia, “bodily assertiveness and a desire for muscular activity”. And the pipestem ectomorph was a hostage to cerebrotonia, lost in thoughts and daydreams.
Sheldon’s book The Varieties of Temperament (1944) signalled the arrival of a new science of mind-in-body: one that promised to “develop every individual according to the best potentialities of his own nature, while protecting him from the fatal frustration of a false persona and false ambitions”. Huxley was thrilled. Writing in Harper’s magazine, he urged educators and policymakers to take note of what he considered the greatest breakthrough in psychology since Aristotle. Wasn’t it high time for a “rational policy” of somatotyping, or physical analysis, so that every child might be allowed “to realize their natural capacities”?
Huxley’s judgement on psychology had failed him before
Huxley’s judgement on matters of psychology had, of course, failed him before. His invocation in Brave New World of a not too faraway World State whose genetically engineered castes, from the mandarin Alphas to the lowly Epsilons, were the subjects of allencompassing programme of hypnopaedia, or sleep conditioning, was a case in point. Back in 1932, when Huxley was predicting how the science of mind control would come to eclipse “boot-on-the-face” sadism, there had been little credible research into sleep learning. No American or European laboratories had been able to generate evidence of hypnopaedia, and its foremost American proponent, Alois Benjamin Singer, was a serial chancer who recovered from the Great Crash by making outrageous claims for the life-altering effects of a sleep-learning device that he dubbed the psycho-phone.
Now, once again, Huxley fell for flim-flam. As constitutional psychology’s chief publicist, he sang its praises to friends back in England, popularizing its new lexicon in his essays, fiction and journalism. Each dispatch from Sheldon’s new laboratories in Columbia and Oregon, he accepted, and passed on, uncritically. He nodded when told that all kinds of disease, from schizophrenia to diabetes, were “more or less constitutional”. He was not surprised to hear that criminals and inferior types suffered from “defective protoplasm”, that a high percentage of his fellow ectomorphs were found in psychiatric hospitals, or that fewer than ten boys in a hundred were cut out for athletic activity. And when Sheldon personally recommended a diet rich in cream and bananas to attenuate his hypersensitivity, Huxley assented – if nothing else, it would be “a good deal cheaper than going for three years, twice a week, to a psychoanalyst”.
Like many of Sheldon’s sponsors and supporters, Huxley failed to grasp that for constitutional research to have any real validity it needed a robust longitudinal foundation, with a sizeable cohort studied over at least two or three decades. As it stood, Sheldon’s fixed gallery of physical types – heavily doctored, according to colleagues who had seen him splicing photographs – ignored the extent to which nutrition, lifestyle and exercise dictated muscle and fat composition. Moreover, as a growing chorus of Sheldon’s peers pointed out, there was no factor analysis in his data, and the ill-devised methodology that had been used to profile his subjects was egregiously open to experimenter bias. Constitutional psychology had built its three-gabled house on empirical quicksand.
Huxley was not convinced. When Humphry Osmond came to visit him at his home on North Kings Road, in the mid-1950s, the young psychiatrist was taken on a shopping expedition to Ohrbach’s department store. Here, watching shoppers go by, Aldous introduced him to the art of “escalator somatotyping”, offering a quickfire assessment of the shoppers’ physique and character. During one of these outings, Huxley confided to Osmond that he could not imagine what it would be like to be a heavyweight boxer. “To Aldous, lightly boned, poorly muscled, linear, slender and cerebrotonic . . . that anyone could possibly enjoy watching or participating in this bone-smashing, brain-jarring combat, with its bruising impact of bodies, seemed incomprehensible.”
Can-do America had by now thoroughly rejected constitutional psychology’s downbeat determinism, and the liberal Left had turned on Sheldon, pillorying him for blithely claiming that “negro intelligence” generally came to a standstill at the age of ten, and for openly lamenting that the “spawning business” was being monopolized by the runts of the human litter. Huxley ignored the backlash. At every opportunity, Hollywood’s most famous “cerebrotonic ectomorph” continued to flag up his good friend’s convoluted taxonomy:
“The extreme mesomorph is a driving person who loves power, is indifferent to others, and tends to be callous and to trample on other people. He is the typical aggressive go-getter. He may do it very politely, but he is still an aggressive go-getter. He tends to make a great deal of noise. He laughs loudly. He snores loudly. He speaks loudly and he has all the traits of an effective soldier and politician.”
By contrast:
“The ectomorph, the cerebrotonic, is essentially an introvert and lives in a permanent state of restraint . . . . He has great difficulty in communication. He is not a good mixer. He feels that the endomorph, with his pouring out of what he is feeling, is very shallow, very trivial, very vulgar, and he is horrified by the driving energy of the mesomorph.”
This was not Huxley the perennial philosopher: these were the words of a clever man seduced by an incendiary idea. Lecturing at Santa Barbara in 1959, months before being diagnosed with cancer, Huxley caused a slight furore by defending Sheldon, complaining that the importance of genetic factors was being purposefully underplayed in America. “In this country, possibly because of a wrongly interpreted view of democracy, it is felt that too much stress upon the congenital and unchangeable differences is somehow undemocratic – and also very depressing.” Unaccustomed to the sharp rebuke that followed his remarks, Huxley suggested that constitutional psychology was only a working hypothesis. If contrary evidence were to emerge, he would, of course, happily reconsider.
But contrary evidence had been steadily accumulating. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, America was in the grip of an obesity epidemic, with over one in eight of the adult population having a BMI (body mass index) in excess of thirty. Over the course of the century, the average weight of an eighteen-year-old male had increased by over 2 stone. Thanks to fast food, TV, the automobile and the decline of manual work, America was changing shape – discrediting the foundations of a theory of body types.
That genetics played second fiddle in determining Sheldon’s troika of bodily types had also been starkly demonstrated by the biologist Ancel Keys. Over at the University of Minnesota, Keys had recruited thirty-four volunteers, all conscientious objectors, subjecting them to a prison-camp diet for twenty-four weeks. Using various somatotyping techniques, Keys assessed his volunteers at the beginning and end of the experiment. On average, his subjects lost a quarter of their body weight, decreasing in endomorphy by 48 per cent and mesomorphy by 43 per cent. Ectomorphy increased by 78 per cent. The loss of fat and muscle mass in the Minnesota volunteers suggested, contra Sheldon, that somatotyping served primarily as a measure of nutritional history and not biologically determined tendencies.
Huxley was unperturbed by the fact that Sheldon’s laboratory work had been unable to generate real evidence to show that “despite nutritional change the fundamental constitutional pattern remains stubbornly constant through life”. Constitutional psychology had always chimed with his own instinctive and inchoate sense of the body as the key determinant of an individual’s character, and it had always spoken to his deepest fears and regrets. Convinced that some kind of “somatotonic revolution” had led Western capitalist societies to reject inward contemplation for purposive action, he would continue to remind his readers that all civilizations had once faced the “great problem of what to do with powerful muscular men with a tremendous drive for domination”. What was needed, Huxley urged, was a “revival of cerebral philosophy in some acceptable form”, alongside “a practical system of sublimational outlets” – meditation; drugs; tantric sex. Whatever it took to keep those unruly mesomorphs out of trouble.
Antonio Melechi is a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Fugitive Minds, 2003, and Servants of the Supernatural, 2008.
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