Aldous (Leonard) Huxley (1894-1963)
English novelist and critic, grandson of the prominent biologist T.H. Huxley
(see further below) and brother of Julian Huxley, also a biologist. Aldous
Huxley's production was wide. Besides novels he published travel books,
histories, poems, plays, and essays on philosophy, arts, sociology, religion
and morals. Among Huxley's best known novels is BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932),
which is one of the classical works of science fiction along with George
Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
"Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm;
and there is evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual
life, not only of women, but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with
the changes of the moon. There are unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries,
laughters and remorses without a cause. Their sudden and fantastic alternations
constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These moods, of which the
more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we will,
as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But
the blood and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon.
Touching the soul directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark
channels of the blood, the moon is doubly a divinity." (from 'Meditations
of the Moon' in Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931)
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, into a well-to-do
upper-middle-class family. Leonard Huxley, his father, was a biographer,
editor, and poet. Huxley's mother, Julia Arnold, was the daughter of Thomas
Arnold, a brother of Matthew Arnold, the great British humanist. Julia's
sister was the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who published under the name Mrs.
Humphry Ward. Julia Arnold died of cancer when Huxley was fourteen. Later
Huxley said that it gave him a sense of the transience of human happiness.
Huxley first studied at Eton College, Berkshire (1908-13). At the age of
16 Huxley suffered an attack of keratitis punctata and became for a period
of about 18 months totally blind. By using special glasses and one eye recovered
sufficiently he was able to read and he also learned braille. Despite a
condition of near-blindness, Huxley continued his studies at Balliol College,
Oxford (1913-15), receiving his B.A. in English in 1916. Unable to pursue
his chosen career as a scientist - or fight in World War on the front -
Huxley turned to writing. He worked for the War Office in London in 1917,
and taught briefly at Eton College and Repton. His first collection of poetry
appeared in 1916 and two more volumes followed by 1920. In 1919-20 he was
member of the editorial staff of Athenaeum under Middleton Murray, Katherine
Mansfield's husband. Huxley wrote biographical and architectural articles
and reviews of fiction, drama music and art.
"I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing
that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set
to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,'
I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After
that you merely have to write.'" (from 'Sermons in Cats' in Music at Night)
In 1920-21 Huxley was drama a critic for Westminster Gazette, an assistant
at the Chelsea Book Club and worked for Condé Nast Publications (1922).
His first novel, CROME YELLOW (1921), a witty criticism of society, appeared
in 1921. Huxley's style, a combination of brilliant dialogue, cynicism,
and social criticism, made him one of the most fashionable literary figures
of the decade. He was a friend of Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Bloomsbury
group, which included such writers as Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton
Strachey, and E.M. Forster. In eight years he published a dozen books, among
them POINT COUNTER POINT (1928), in which the numerous characters, among
them D.H. Lawrence, Murray, Mansfield, and the author himself, are compared
to instruments in an orchestra, and each character plays his separate portion
of Huxley's vision of life. Later these early works, mostly satirical comments
on contemporary events, have been criticized for their rather one-dimensional
characters, which the author used as a mouthpiece to say "almost everything
about almost anything" - as Huxley once described the nature of the essay.
In DO WHAT YOU WILL (1929) Huxley predicts that Karl Marx's Proletariat becomes
"a bourgeoisie with oily instead of inky fingers", compares the first motion
picture in which spoken dialogue is heard, 'The Jazz Singer', to a "brimming
bowl of hog-wash", and sees that at out time "monotheism has lost the value
which circumstances once gave it. It lacks political utility, and to the
individual it is a poison." In the essay 'Fashions on Love' he defends D.H.
Lawrence's doctrine of the 'natural love' but rejects "the sexual impulse,
which now spends itself purposelessly..."
During the 1920s Huxley formed a close friendship with D.H. Lawrence with
whom he traveled in Italy and France. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived
in Italy with his wife and son Matthew. With her Huxley also traveled in
India and the Dutch Indies. In the 1930s he moved to Sanary, near Toulon,
where he wrote in four months Brave New World, a dystopian vision of a highly
technological society of the future (the word "utopia" comes from Thomas
More's novel Utopia). Huxley turned upside down H.G. Wells' scientific optimism.
Developments in sciences and cultural changes in his own time inspired much
of imagination - such as mass production, which revolutionized industry,
air travel, glamorized by Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, behaviorist
psychology, and explorations in genetics. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in
Samoa (1928) also was among the books he read for the novel. In the book
Huxley answered to fears of hopes of wide variety of his readers and in its
first year it sold a total of twenty-eight thousand copies in England and
in the United States, and enjoyed respectable sales throughout the remainder
of the century.
In the1930s Huxley was deeply concerned with the Peace Pledge Union. He
moved in 1937 with the guru-figure Gerald Heard to the United States, believing
that the Californian climate would help his eyesight, a constant burden,
which he treated with Dr. W.H. Bates's eye-training method. The results he
described in THE ART OF SEEING (1942). After this turning point in his life,
Huxley abandoned pure fictional writing and chose the essay as the vehicle
for expressing his ideas. He also wrote screenplays in collaboration with
Christopher Isherwood for film studios, but did not gain success in this
field. Among their unproduced film treatments was Jacob's Hands, a story
about healing powers and disappointment in love. Huxley also was a regular
contributor to Vedanta and the West, the magazine Isherwood edited while
a discipline of Swami Prabhavananda.
Brave New World - A cry of warning and nightmarish black comedy of a future
society.- The Nine Year War, a global holocaust, has reshaped the history.
In the year 632 after Ford (i.e., the 26th century) the world has attained
a kind of scientifically balanced communist utopia. Universal happiness
is preserved by psychotropic drugs. Religion, art, theoretical science are
unimportant, but life is free of illness and old age. Scientists are able
to produce babies who will fit their future job exactly. There are five
types of humans, ranging from the intellectually superior Alphas to the
semimoronic Epsilons. Alpha-Plus Bernard Marx resists soma, the soporific
drug carried by all citizens. It helps to stop any signs of stress or dissatisfaction
and longing for a fuller life. Eventually Bernard is exiled to Iceland.
John the Savage, raised in a reservation of American Indian primitives and
abandoned by his mother in a primitive outpost, comes into this world. John
is thinking, feeling individual, who has read Shakespeare and witnessed
primitive religious rituals. Bernard brings John and his ruined Beta-Minus
mother Linda to England. When his mother dies of an overdose of the feel-good
drug, John swells a violent revolt. He engages in a dialogue with the World
Controller Mustapha Mond and debates the merits of freedom and passion.
He is harassed as a freak of the accepted social order. In the end the Savage
yields to the temptations of the carefree world, and kills himself in disgust.
- The book received mixed critics. H.G. Wells was offended by what he regarded
as Huxley's betrayal of science and the future. Bertrand Russell and Hermann
Hesse recognized the serious intent beneath the surface of playful wit.
The novelist, essayist and critic C.P. Snow dismissed in a 1959 review both
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and Brave New World especially for
their pessimism about scientific progress and social purpose.
Several of Huxley's screenplays never got filmed. His best screenplays
for Hollywood included MGM's Pride and Prejudice (1940). The first film
project offered was an adaptation of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, which Huxley
turned down, explaining in a letter, ''Even the lure of enormous lucre could
not reconcile me to remaining closeted for months with the ghost of the
late poor John Galsworthy. I couldn't face it.'' In 1938 he wrote an uncredited
treatment for Madame Curie, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. With John Houseman
and Robert Stevenson he worked for the 20th Century-Fox film Jane Eyre (1944),
starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Woman's Vengeance (1947), directed
by Zoltan Korda and starring Charles Boyer and Jessica Tandy, was based on
Huxley's story 'The Gioconda Smile.'
"One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm.
Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel
camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands,
the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare
of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly
to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian
soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every
Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into
death!" (from Island, 1962)
BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISED appeared in 1958. He stated that in writing Brave
New World he had failed to recognize the ominous potential of nuclear fission,
"for the possibilities of atomic energy had been a popular topic of conversation
for years before the book was written." He believed that individual freedom
was much closer to extinction than he had imagined. Huxley's other later
works include THE DEVILS OF LOUDON (1952), depicting mass-hysteria and exorcism
in the 17th-century France. ISLAND (1962) was an utopian novel and a return
to the territory of Brave New World, in which a journalist shipwrecks on
Pala, the fabled island, and discovers there a kind and happy people. But
the earthly paradise is not immune to the harsh realities of oil policy.
BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED (1959) was a sequel to his classic novel. Huxley
compared the predictions of his earlier work with subsequent developments
in science and society. In 1963 appeared LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, a collection
of essays.
In his later years Huxley wrote two books about mind-altering drugs, becoming
a guru among Californian hippies'. While writing Brave New World Huxley
had read about drugs, but it took 22 years before he experimented with them
himself. In a article from 1931, Huxley stated that drug-taking "constitutes
one of the most curious and also, it seems to me, one of the most significant
chapters in the natural history of human beings." THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION
(see Jim Morrison), published in 1954, was an influential study of consciousness
expansion through mescalineand. Huxley also started to use LSD and showed
interest in Hindu philosophy. In 1961 Huxley suffered a severe loss when
his house and his papers were totally destroyed in a bush-fire. Little survived
apart from the manuscript of Island. Huxley died in Los Angeles on November
22, 1963. In the media news of his death were overshadowed by the assassination
of President Kennedy. Huxley was married twice. In 1919 he married Maria
Nys, a Belgian, who died 1955. They had one son. In 1956 he married the violinist
and psychotherapist Laura Archera. They had first met in 1848 when Laura
Archera was planning to make a film on the Palio, the annual horce race in
Siena. She hoped that Huxley would write it.
As a essayist Huxley was concerned about the power of science and technology.
His skepticism caused much controversy among his readers. Huxley's philosophical
cul-de-sac led him finally to seek answers from mysticism and the thought
of the East. One of Huxley's most puzzling ideas was the education of the
human being as 'amphibian', one capable of living in different environments.
Late in his life Huxley remarked, "It is a bit embarrassing to have been
concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that
one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'"
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) - English biologist, who wrote on biology
as a specialist and as a popularizer. His also published books on education,
philosophy, and theology. Huxley's investigations in comparative anatomy,
paleontology, and evolution, such as Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
(1863), exerted a great influence on the 19th century biology. At the age
of 26 Huxley was recognized as one of the leading scientist in England.
He was elected to the Royal Society in 1851. T.H. Huxley's grandson Sir
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) became a famous biologist. The writer Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963) was his brother.
For further reading: Aldous Huxley by Alexander Henderson (1935); Aldous
Huxley by Harold H. Watts (1969); Aldous Huxley by John Atkins (1967); The
Timeless Moment by Laura Archera Huxley (1968); Aldous Huxley and the Way
to Reality by Charles M. Holmes (1970); Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study
by Laurence Brander (1970); Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist by Peter
Firchow (1972); Aldous Huxley by Sybille Bedford (1973-74, 2 vols.); Aldous
Huxley: The Critical Heritage by Donald Watts (1975); The End of Utopia
by Peter Edgerly Firchow (1984); Aldous Huxley by Guinevera Nance (1988);
Huxley in Hollywood by David King Dunaway (1989); Brave New World: History,
Science, and Dystopia by Robert S. Baker (1989); Aldous Huxley Recollected:
An Oral History by David King Dunaway (1998); Readings on Brave New World,
ed. by Katie De Koster (1999) - See also: Charles Darwin, whom Huxley met
in 1851 and maintained a close relationship thereafter. Huxley was Darwin's
first supporters. - Huxley's influence on Finnish writers: Olavi Paavolainen
http://kirjasto.sci.fi/ahuxley.htm
Other interesting biographies: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
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