Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Read more about Huxley at The Gale Group's Literature Resource Center

Biography

HUXLEY, ALDOUS (July 26, 1894-November 22, 1963), British novelist and essayist, wrote: "I was born at

Godalming, in the county of Surrey. My father was Leonard Huxley, eldest son of T. H. Huxley, the biologist.

My mother was Julia Arnold, daughter of Thomas Arnold, a brother of Matthew Arnold. I was educated at a

preparatory school and at Eton, to which I went with a scholarship in 1908. My intention was to become a doctor,

and I had just begun to specialize in biology at school, when I contracted keratitis and became in a few months

almost completely blind. I learned to read books and music in Braille and to use a typewriter, and continued my

education with tutors. At this period, when I was about eighteen, I wrote a complete novel which I was never able

to read, as it was written by touch on the typewriter without the help of eyes. By the time I could read again, the

manuscript was lost. After two years, one eye had sufficiently recovered to make it possible for me to read with

the aid of a magnifying glass, and I proceeded to Oxford. A scientific career was now out of the question, owing

to defective vision, and at Oxford I read English literature and philology.

"I took my degree in 1915 and spent the rest of the war doing odd jobs, such as cutting down trees, working in

a government office, and teaching. In 1919 I married Maria Nys. (My wife, who is Belgian, had come to England

during the war as a refugee, and it was then that I began to work on the staff of the Athenaeum, under the

editorship of John Middleton Murry. For the next few years I did a variety of literary journalism for many

periodicals--dramatic criticism, art criticism, musical criticism, book reviews, miscellaneous essays.

"Having accumulated a little money, I removed with my wife and son to Italy, where I spent the greater part of the

time between 1923 and 1930. In Italy I was free to devote most of my time to the writing of novels, essays,

and short stories. In 1925 and 1926 my wife and I spent the best part of a year traveling in India and the Dutch

Indies. On our return we re-established contact with Frieda and D. H. Lawrence, whom we had hardly seen since

the war, and from that time until Lawrence's death in 1930 were much together in Italy and France.

"In 1930 I bought a small house in the South of France, which became our home when we were not in London.

In 1934 and 1935 we were in Central America and the United States, and three years later returned to America,

where a series of lucky accidents brought to my notice the method of eye-training devised by the late Dr. W. H.

Bates of New York. Working with experienced teachers of the method, I have already obtained very striking

improvement in vision and hope, by patient work, to restore my sight even further.

"At present, I am living in Southern California, where facilities for eye-training by the Bates method are

particularly good. While in California I have worked on a treatment of the life of Madame Curie and a screen play

of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"The most important single event of my life was unquestionably the onset of eye trouble. This had the effect of

isolating me during my years of adolescence and of forcing me to live very largely on my own inner resources.

In recent months the discovery of a method whereby, through properly directed conscious effort, the disability

can be remedied has been for me of the highest significance and importance, as demonstrating, in one

particular sphere, the possibility of becoming the master of one's own circumstances instead of their slave.

The problem of freedom, in the psychological rather than the political sense of the word, is in large measure a

technical problem. It is not enough to wish to become the master, it is not even enough to work hard at achieving

such mastery. Correct knowledge as to the best means of achieving mastery is also essential. In one limited

field of human disability, Dr. Bates has provided such knowledge. Similar techniques for controlling unfavorable

circumstances in other isolated fields have been independently developed and are available for anyone who

cares to learn them. All these techniques, however, are secondary and, so to say, peripheral to a great central

technique. This central technique, which traces the art of obtaining freedom from the fundamental human

disability of egotism, has been repeatedly described by the mystics of all ages and countries. It is with the

problem of personal, psychological freedom that I now find myself predominantly concerned."

Aldous Huxley was a staff writer and editor for both the Athenaeum and the Westminster Gazette from 1919 to

1924. His first published works were volumes of poetry--The Burning Wheel, The Defeat of Youth, and Leda.

But it was as a writer of fiction during the 1920s that he received renown: initially for his wit, later for his technical

originality. He satirized English society ruthlessly (and used his friends and acquaintances as character models)

in his first three novels. Huxley's style in Crome Yellow, the humorous story of a young self-conscious poet visiting

an English country house, was described by the New York Times in 1922 as having "all the vigor, the skillful

employment of words, the economy which we have come to look for in the modernist." Antic Hay was the first of

his books to garner both critical and popular praise. It is the story of a conventional schoolmaster who realizes

that his life has lacked real meaning and sets out on an adventure of self-discovery. In Those Barren Leaves

Huxley replaced action with talk, focusing on a gathering of the near-great at an Englishwoman's Italian villa.

In addition to these novels, the author was a steady writer of stories, producing a remarkable group of volumes

of short fiction during the same period--Limbo, Mortal Coils, Little Mexican, and Two or Three Graces. He also

gathered his essays into several volumes during the 1920s, notably On the Margin, Along the Road, Proper

Studies, and Do What You Will. In Jesting Pilate, a travel diary, he offered his impressions of an

around-the-world tour which included visits to India, the Malay archipelago, China, Japan, and America.

Many critics believe that Huxley's next novel, Point Counter Point, is his best. Discussing it in the Saturday

Review (1928), L. P. Hartley observed that it was "an imposing and a dangerous dish, not meant for queasy

stomachs. Where else shall we find so brilliant and compendious a diagnosis of the modern world?. . .It is not

his technique, excellent as that is, but the unifying power of his vision that exalts his work into the condition of

music." Huxley's theme was the emptiness and decadence of contemporary life and the games and charades

that are played to keep up delusions. Not surprisingly he aimed his sharp and witty criticism at his fellow writers.

The young novelists who had modelled their styles and their epical conceptions on those of the best authors,

who had daringly uncovered the secrets of their most intimate and sexual life were hurt, were amazed, were

indignant to learn that their writing was stilted, their construction non-existent, their psychology unreal, their

drama stagey and melodramatic. A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as

sincerely from the author's soul. But the bad author's soul being, artistically at any rate, of inferior quality, its

insincerities will be, if not always intrinsically uninteresting, at any rate uninterestingly expressed, and the labour

expended on the expression will be wasted. Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent.

Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

Point Counter Point was a best-seller in both America and Britain, and gave Huxley financial independence.

He and his wife traveled widely; they revisited Asia and toured Mexico, the West Indies, and much of Europe.

The royalties from his books also enabled him to purchase a villa in the south of France near Toulon, where he

wrote, painted, and entertained friends from 1930 to 1937.

Huxley's literary output for the first two-thirds of the 1930s remained prolific. He produced another volume of

at least skillfully made verse, his best-known in this genre, entitled The Cicadas, and wrote a comedy called

The World of Light. His nonfiction writings included two volumes of essays (Music at Night and The Olive Tree)

as well as longer works of prose (Vulgarity in Literature and Ends and Means), another travel diary (Beyond the

Mexique Bay), a couple of pacifist pamphlets, and a unique anthology of literary works with his own

commentaries entitled Texts and Pretexts. It was his fiction, however, that created his popular literary reputation.

In addition to two more collections of short stories (Brief Candles and The Gioconda Smile), the 1930s saw the

publication of Brave New World, his chilling, satiric, and prophetic dystopian novel about a future society which

denies the individual by manipulating spiritual aspirations and quickly satisfying all physical wants and needs.

It is a world where technology has created a perfectly functioning human hive.

Next came Eyeless in Gaza, which, through a series of flashbacks, tells the story of a young man's intellectual

and moral development in a rigid environment of dogma, shady politics, war, and economic turmoil, and his

final discovery of personal truth. "From thinking too little of humanity," William Troy wrote of the author in the

Nation in 1936, "the romantic ironist has ended by thinking too much."

In 1937 Huxley visited the United States, and the following year he and his wife decided to become perman-

ent residents, in part owing to fear of a European war, and in part because of the benefits to his eyesight. He

described the success of Dr. W. H. Bates's eye-treatment method in The Art of Seeing. The Huxleys settled in

souths "one of the few English-speaking novelists now operating who actually appears to be decently educated.

He is well read and is not averse to exhibiting the fact, always tactfully, always divertingly." Time Must Have a

Stop put into fictional form Huxley's new religious and philosophical views. In Ape and Essence he presented a

savage world following a nuclear war where mutant survivors are sacrificed to the forces of evil. And in The

Genius and the Goddess he elaborated on one of his favorite themes, contrasting the pleasures of the mind

with those of the flesh.

Huxley's wife Maria died in 1955 and a year later he married Laura Archera, an Italian psychotherapist and

concert violinist. In 1959 he was given the Award of Merit and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of

Arts and Letters, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of California. The following year

he was diagnosed as having cancer of the tongue. At first radiation treatments proved successful, enabling him

to continue writing and to give lectures in the United States and Europe. His chief literary work during this time

was Island, a utopian novel, this time presenting an edenic world based on a life devoted to reason. Critical

reception of the book was mixed, but sales were generally good. He greeted a 1961 fire which destroyed his

home and all of his possessions philosophically, and when his cancer reappeared a short time later remained

stoically calm, using LSD to relieve his distress.

Huxley's reputation as a novelist has somewhat diminished since his death, although he is acknowledged as

an excellent essayist and anthologist. Brave New World is still widely read, but the gloss has been removed

from it, in the eyes of many critics, by the author's unacknowledged debt to Zemyatin's We. Point Counter Point,

too, has not quite achieved classic status, and is not as widely read as classics should be. The nearest to a

definitive biography is that by Sybille Bedford, but a critical estimate is still awaited.

Aldous Huxley's papers are at the University of California in Berkeley.