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, who also was 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, which is one of the classical works
of science fiction along with George Orwell's
Nineteen-Eighty-Four. The drug "soma", mentioned in the story,
comes from Thomas More's Utopia. In his later years Huxley wrote
two books about mind-altering drugs.
"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 Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey into a well-to-do
upper-middle-class family. On his mother's side he was related to Matthew
Arnold, the great British humanist, and his father was a biographer,
editor, and poet. He 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 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.
"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 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.
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. In the 1930s he moved to Sanary, near Toulon, where he wrote
Brave New World, a dark vision of a highly technological society of
the future, in which Huxley turned upside down H.G. Wells' scientific
optimism.
"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)
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. 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.
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.'
In 1954 Huxley published an influential study of consciousness
expansion through mescaline, THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION (see Jim Morrison) and
became later a guru among Californian hippies'. He also started to use LSD
and showed interest in Hindu philosophy.
Huxley's 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, in which Huxley compares the predictions of
his earlier work with subsequent developments in science and society. In
1963 appeared LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, a collection of essays.
In 1961 Huxley suffered a severe loss when his house and his papers
were destroyed in a bush-fire. 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 1956. They had one son. In 1956 he
married the violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera.
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. Among 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 and that one has no more to offer
by way of advice that '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 exerted a great influence on the 19th century biology. He
was elected to the Royal Society in 1851 and at the age of 26 he was
recognized as one of the leading scientist in England. Among his
publications is Evidence as to Man's Place in
Nature (1863). T.H. Huxley's grandson Sir Julian
Huxley (1887-1975) became a famous biologist. The writer Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963) was his brother. - SEE ALSO: Charles
Darwin, whom Huxley met in 1851 and maintained a
close relationship thereafter. Huxley was Darwin's first
supporters.
For further reading: Aldous Huxley by Harold H. Watts
(1969); Aldous Huxley by
John Atkins (1967); Aldous Huxley and the Way to
Reality by Charles M. Holmes (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); 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) -
Huxley's influence on Finnish
writers: Olavi
Paavolainen
Brave New World (1932) - A cry of warning and nightmarish
black comedy of a future society.- In the year 632 after Ford (i.e., the 26th century) the world
has attained a kind of scientifically balanced communist utopia.
Universal happines is preserved by psychotropic drugs. Religion, art,
theoretical science - central Western institutions as we know them now -
have vanished. Scientists are able to produce babies who will fit their
future job exactly. John the Savage, raised in a reservation of American
Indian primitives, 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. 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.
Selected works:
- THE BURNING WHEEL, 1916
- THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH, 1918
- LIMBO, 1920
- CROME YELLOW, 1921
- ANTIC HAY, 1923
- ON THE MARGIN, 1923
- ALONG THE ROAD, 1925
- THOSE BARREN LEAVES, 1925
- JESTING PILATE, 1926
- ESSAYS NEW AND OLD, 1926
- PROPER STUDIES, 1927
- POINT COUNTER POINT, 1928 - Elämän kontrapunkti
- DO WHAT YOU WILL, 1929
- HOLY FACE, AND OTHER ESSAYS, 1929
- BRIEF CANDLES, 1930
- THE WORLD OF LIGHT, 1931
- MUSIC AT NIGHT, 1931
- THE LETTERS OF D.H. LAWRENCE, 1932 (ed.)
- BRAVE NEW WORLD, 1932 - Uljas uusi maailma
- BEYOND THE MEXIQUE BAY, 1934
- EYELESS IN GAZA, 1936
- THE OLIVE TREE, AND OTHER ESSAYS, 1936
- STORIES, ESSAYS, AND POEMS, 1937
- ENDS AND MEANS, 1937
- AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PACIFISM, 1937 (ed.)
- AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN, 1938
- TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, 1944 - Ajan täytyy seisahtaa
- THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, 1946 (ed.)
- APE AND ESSENCE, 1948
- THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, 1948
- GIOCONDA SMILE, 1948
- COLLECTED WORKS, 1948 - (in progress)
- THEMES AND VARIATIONS, 1950
- THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN, 1952
- THE DOORS OF PERCEPRION, 1954
- ADONIS AND THE ALPHABET, 1956
- COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, 1957
- THE WORLD OF ALDOUS HUXLEY, 1957
- BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, 1958 - Sääli uutta sukupolvea
- COLLECTED ESSAYS, 1959
- ON ART AND ARTIST, 1960
- SELECTED ESSAYS. 1961
- LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. 1963
- LETTERS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY, 1969
- THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY, 1970
- HUXLEY AND GOD, 1992
- HEARST ESSAYS, 1994
- BETWEEN THE WARS, 1994
- THE HIDDEN HUXLEY, 1994
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