BIOGRAPHY
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Godalming, Surrey,
in the SE of England. He was the third son of Dr. Leonard Huxley and Julia
Arnold. Huxley belonged to a family whose members were recognised to be
intellectual people. He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, who was
a very important biologist who developed an interesting theory on the evolution.
His aunt, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, was a famous late-Victorian novelist, and
the father of his aunt, Matthew Arnold, was a poet. Aldous's mother was the
granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, a famous educator. One of his brothers was
a great zoologist, also the first direct of Unesco. So, observing the atmosphere
in which Aldous Leonard grew up, we can tell that he was very influenced
by his relatives. If we focus our attention on the book I want to analyse,
we can see that there is a heritage in the book from both sides; there is
the extraordinary capacity of writing, he has a determined style, and of
course there is the knowledge of human evolution and his idea of a utopic
future. The class structure that was so important in the England of Huxley’s
childhood is also to be seen in the society which he presents in Brave New
World.
Huxley had some experiences which made him stand apart from the class
to which he belonged by birth. He was considered different as a child for
his intelligence; we can also see that Huxley reflected this sense, this
feeling of being an outsider in characters such as Bernard Marx and Hemholtz.
These characters used to gather together and speak about their emotions that
life produced on them. Huxley might have felt different from other people,
like these two Alpha Plus men.
The death of his mother from cancer when he was only 14 , in 1908, meant
also a change in his life; it gave him a sense of the transience of human
happiness, and of course, it led to the break-up of the family home. You
can also see the feeling that means the loss of one’s mother in Brave New
World through the Savage’s reactions. In August 1914, one of his brothers,
Trevenen, committed suicide; this also affected him of course, besides because
Aldous was very close to him. Over twenty years later, in 1936, Huxley published
Eyeless in Gaza, were the death of his mother and brother are reflected.
Huxley studied at the prestigious school Eton. At the age of 16, an eye
illness made him nearly blind, and forced him to leave school. Therefore
he couldn’t complete some scientific training that was so interesting for
him; in the beginning, he intended to study medcine, then he turned to literature.
Even though, his eyesight improved after a couple of years and he recovered
enough to go to Oxford University where he graduated in English literature.
He was unfit for military service and didn’t fight in World War I, which
was an experience that marked a lot of his other colleges. Instead he worked
as a farm labourer at Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor. Huxley was
very interested in science, and he had really good ideas related to the subject;
he used some of these in Brave New World, although he never managed to
work in a big scientific project.
While being at Oxford, he met writers like Lytton Strachey, D. H. Lawrence
and Bertrand Russell.
Huxley started his career as a journalist, he also practised music and
artistic criticism and made a few book reviews. Huxley published his first
book in 1916, it was a collection of poems, "The Burning Wheel". The three
books which followed this one, were also poem books, in which the influence
of French symbolism is to be seen. He married in 1919 a Belgian refugee,
Maria Nys, and they had a child, Matthew Huxley, the year after. By then
Huxley was working for the Athenaeum magazine, after that, he became the
first British editor of the magazine House and Garden; he also worked for
Vogue. Huxley's family travelled a lot, especially between London and Italy,
but also to places such as India and the United States. They lived first
near Florence and then on the Côte d'Azur. In Along th Road, 1925,
Huxley describes all the places and works of art he had taken in since his
arrival in Italy.
Huxley he wrote many novels, which were more appreciated by the public
than his essays and poems. He became more famous, with his reputation established,
when his first novel "Crome Yellow" (1921) was published. Huxley wrote
some comic novels, such as "Antic Hay" (1923) and "Those Barren Leaves"
(1925); here he made clear that he had an extraordinary ability in introducing
very intellectual ideas in fiction novels. In Crome Yellow and in Antic
Hay he shows the expression of a mood of disenchantment in the early 1920s
related to the past Victorian mores. His generation had experienced "the
violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current
in the previous epoch", in Huxley's words. Some people criticised the explicit
discussion of sex in his novel Antic Hay, which was even burned in Cairo
due to these criticisms. He published a book of essays about philosophical
and social aspects in 1927, "Proper Studies".
When Huxley first visited the United States around 1926, he was amused
by the extravagance of American society, but he didn’t like how American
people spent their free time, spending it in useless things and not in
trying to improve their mental capacity "Nowhere, perhaps, is there so
little conversation... It is all movement and noise..." was what he said
about this. It was his visit to the United States which made him so pesimistic
about the cultural future of Europe. He said: "The thing which is happening
in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse)
of established standards."
He could see the fascist Italy that was led by Benito Mussolini; this
might have had some influence in Brave New World. Fascism and the incidents
of the Soviet Union helped him when creating his distopia or bad utopia. Huxley
was in each of his writings very critical with Western civilization.
Huxley wrote Brave New World, his most celebrated work, in only four
months in 1931. Three years before this his best sold novel "Point Counter
Point" (1928) had been published; here he tried to mix the novel and the
essay. During these three years, he had written some stories, poems and
some essays, but no big novel. Brief Candles, 1930,was a collection of short
stories, Music at Night, 1931, volumes of essays.
In April 1937, the Huxleys arrived to the United States; he was by then
a very famous novelist and the Peace Pledge Union's celebrity. By that time,
Huxley was more concerned with things such as anarchism or mystical salvation
than with the lamentable situation of the contemporary society. Huxley
has the intention of returning to Europe, but his wife needed to live in
a hot and dry climate. The year after they moved to Hollywood, Aldous worked
as a screenwriter. In After Many a Summer, 1939, Huxley expresses his reaction
to Hollywood and the cult to movie stars. Huxley and Hollywood were not
compatible, and Aldous was unable to write a popular play during the inter-war
years. He became disenchanted with the world of the film studios, and he
reflects this in Ape and Essence, 1948.
In 1946 Huxley wrote a foreword to Brave New World. There he explained
that he intended to find a sane society, and that he believed that it existed.
Even though, he was worried about the dangers that might cause society
fall into insanity.
Huxley was worried about the spirituality of the world citizens by that
time; this led him towards mysticism and drugs. In the 1950’s Huxley became
famous for his interest in a determined type of drugs, like LSD; he looked
for drugs that would release your mind, would make you forget your problems,
escape from your present but that had no negative effect. Apparently, he
consumed drugs like mescaline and LSD a dozen times over ten years.
His ideas and obsessions with drugs are to be seen in a few books: Doors
of Perception (1954), Heaven and Hell (1956), Island (1962)...
Huxley produced 47 books in his life. Some critics say that he was a
better essayist than a novelist, because he cared more for his ideas than
for the development of his characters in his books. Even though Huxley
really in better at writing essays, his most read books are novels. In 1959
the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for
the novel.
During the 1960’s he became a cult figure. The famous music group "The
Doors" named themselves after one of Huxley’s novels, "the Doors of Perception".
Once, there was a fire in his house and all his papers and books burned;
after this incident, he called himself "a man without a past".
Huxley’s interests were very varied. He liked Greek history, Buddhist
texts, philosophy, science, psychology... And he knew a lot of things about
these subject so we can say he had a privileged mind.
Aldous Huxley was a pacifist. He remained blind nearly all his life.
Maria, his first wife, died in 1955 and Huxley married Laura Archera a
year later. He died in November 22 of 1963, the same day that President
John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
http://mural.uv.es/~mifepra/biohux.htm
(Bibliography in this page:
http://www.primenet.com/~matthew/huxley/huxbio.html
http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/BraveNewWorld
Introduction by David Bradshaw; Worcester College, Oxford,
1993 in Brave New World, Flamingo, 1994
© Mireia Ferrandis Pradas)
Other interesting biographies: [1]
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
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