Showing posts with label Aldous Huxley. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

My heroes / CS Lewis by Laura Miller and Aldous Huxley by Nicholas Murray

'One of the world's great readers' … CS Lewis.

My heroes: CS Lewis by Laura Miller and Aldous Huxley by Nicholas Murray

Laura Miller cherishes Lewis's literary criticism, while Nicholas Murray admires Huxley's exemplary open mind. Lewis and Huxley both died 50 years ago, on 22 November 1963

Laura Miller and Nicholas Murray

Friday 22 November 2013

History may be written by the victors, but an author's reputation is made by the keepers of the flame. In the case of CS Lewis, who died on 22 November 1963, the keepers are Christians, many of them American evangelicals, and, with the exception of his children's fiction, a glance at the shelf of his books kept in print by their enthusiasm might lead you to conclude he was primarily a popular theologian. But Lewis had a day job, as a tutor and fellow in English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, and if, like me, you far more interested in his literary criticism than his apologetics, you often have to scrounge up shabby used copies of those titles online.

Book Review 056 / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

1932

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 56 / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

September 25, 2015

Set 600 years in the future, Huxley’s “Brave New World” is run by a benevolent scientific despotism. Science has eliminated most diseases and the ageing process, but has also been used to socially engineer society. Many aspects of our present society are inverted, so drug taking is encouraged, as is promiscuity, books (other than instruction manuals) are forbidden or unknown, and, in a convincing piece of cod-science, parenthood has also been eliminated – children are instead grown in factories, and engineered to fill their pre-designated station in life.

Brave New World / The Rise of Mass Man

Ben Frost | Brave New World (2018) | Available for Sale | Artsy

Brave New World: The Rise of Mass Man

by Laurence Brander
November 11, 2019

Huxley’s preoccupation with and concern about the increasing prosperity and numbers of the proletariat found expression in Brave New World, writes Laurence Brander. Huxley felt the masses had grown more menacing with population increases, according to Brander, and he wrote the novel at a time when it seemed mankind could not recover from the problems of war, depression, and explosive technological progress. Brander has also written books on George Orwell, E.M. Forster, and W. Somerset Maugham.

Brave New World / Huxley’s Biology Is Perfectly Right

Amazon.com: Brave New World (9780060850524): Aldous Huxley: Books

Brave New World: Huxley’s Biology Is Perfectly Right

by Joseph Needham
November 13, 2019

In May 1932 Scrutiny, a new quarterly review based in Cambridge, England, published its first issue. Its contents included a “Manifesto” in which the editors lamented the dissolution of standards for critical reviewers, and pledged to pay attention to both “the drift of civilization” and “the plight of the arts.” The following essay met both criteria, as Joseph Needham, one of the leading biologists of his day, strongly proclaims that Huxley (who also came from a family of scientists) has gotten the science—biology and psychology as well as philosophy—exactly right. Brave New World, writes Needham, clearly shows what lies ahead, and it should be required reading especially for those who trust in science to save the world.

Brave New World: The Author’s Second Thoughts

In 1946, fourteen years alter the publication of Brave New World, Huxley was invited to write a new foreword to the novel. The world had just emerged from World War II; although this does not provoke a hopeful response in the author, he does explain why Brave New World made no mention of atomic energy—the explosive force whose power was demonstrated in Hiroshima in the final days of the war. Huxley finds that the world he predicted is approaching much faster than he had originally imagined it might; in fact, much of the basis necessary to make people love their servitude is already in place. Taking note of increased divorce rates, especially in America, Huxley suggests that sexual freedom, “in conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio,… will help to reconcile [a dictator’s] subjects to the servitude which is their fate.” The world he describes in Brave New World, he says, might be only three or four generations away.

Covers / Aldous Huxley / Brave New World

BRAVE NEW WORLD

by Aldous Huxley

Covers

The 100 best novels / No 56 / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Brave New World / Foreword by Christopher Hitchens

Aldous Huxley

BRAVE NEW WORLD: FOREWORD BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

The 100 best novels / No 56 / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Aldous Huxley absolutely detested mass culture and popular entertainment, and many of his toughest critical essays, as well as several intense passages in his fiction, consist of sneers and jeers at the cheapness of the cinematic ethic and the vulgarity of commercial music. He chanced to die on the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 (being cheated of a proper obituary notice as a result, and sharing the date of decease with C.S. Lewis, chronicler of Narnia), so he missed the televisual event which once and for all confirmed the “global village.” But if he were able to return to us, and cast his scornful and lofty gaze on our hedonistic society, he would probably be relatively unsurprised at the way things are going. Sex has been divorced from procreation to a degree hard to imagine even in 1963, and the current great debates in the moral sciences concern the implications of reproductive cloning and of the employment of fetal stem-cells in medicine. The study of history is everywhere, but especially in the United States, in steep decline. Public life in the richer societies is routinely compared to the rhythms of spectacle and entertainment. A flickering hunger for authenticity pushes many people to explore the peripheral and shrinking worlds of the “indigenous.” This was all prefigured in Brave New World. So, in a way, was the “one child” policy now followed in Communist China, where to the extent that the program is successful we will not only see a formerly clannish society where everyone is an only child but a formerly Marxist one that has no real cognate word for “brotherhood.” Intercontinental rocket travel has not become the commonplace Huxley anticipated, but its equivalents have become a cliché: jumbo jets do the same work of abolishing distance for the masses even though, in a strange moment of refusal, the developed world has stepped back from the supersonic Concorde and reverted to the days of voyaging comfortably below the speed of sound.

Aldous Huxley

PORTRAITS

The Doors of Perception / What did Huxley see in mescaline?

Reading group

The Doors of Perception: What did Huxley see in mescaline?

Given his damaged sight, the book's emphasis on the visual is all the more piquant, complicating the question of how much its visions reveal

Sam Jordison
Thu 26 January 2012

isconcertingly, given the detailed discussions of art and the visual world in The Doors Of Perception, Aldous Huxley was almost blind. Or, at least, some people said he was. Like much else in Huxley's life, the state of his vision was a source of considerable controversy and speculation.

The known facts are these: in 1911, while this scion of one of the UK's foremost intellectual families was studying at Eton, he suffered from a very unpleasant illness called keratatis, which left him blind for several years. Huxley's vision recovered enough for him to study at Oxford, with the aid of thick glasses and a magnifying glass, but further deteriorated over the next 20 or so years.

It's in 1939 that things become murky. Desperate for help, Huxley was persuaded to pursue the Bates Method, a controversial theory (now largely debunked) suggesting, among other things, that glasses shouldn't be worn, natural sunlight could be beneficial and a series of exercises and techniques could help improve vision. He claimed impressive results: "Within a couple of months I was reading without spectacles and, what was better still, without strain and fatigue … At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal, is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles."

That quote comes from The Art Of Seeing, the book he published about his experiences with The Bates Method in 1942. Reviews, were mixed at best. The British Medical Journal review declared: "For the simple neurotic who has abundance of time to play with, Huxley's antics of palming, shifting, flashing, and the rest are probably as good treatment as any other system of Yogi or Couéism. To these the book may be of value. It is hardly possible that it will impress anyone endowed with common sense and a critical faculty."

In the same article the author suggested that Huxley's vision may actually have improved naturally with time as some conditions move in cycles. Others, meanwhile, doubted that he could see much at all. Wikipedia cites a Saturday Review column from Bennett Cerfpublished in 1952, just two years before The Doors Of Perception, describes Huxley speaking at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and seemingly reading from his notes with ease: "Then suddenly he faltered — and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment."

In Huxley's defence, he always admitted he still needed a magnifying glass, but whichever way you look at all these arguments, they add an edge to the writer's enthusiastic artistic criticism in The Doors Of Perception. Was he protesting too much? Alternatively, was his delight and concern for the visual world all the more heightened because he had fought so hard to retain his sight – and knew what it means to lose it. Given that The Art Of Seeing had aroused such anger and doubt, was he perhaps using the Doors Of Perception as a way to answer his critics? Is it possible that Huxley's subconscious was operating in ways he didn't care to acknowledge?

Well, maybe. But now I'm in the realm of speculation. Just before I leave, one more conjecture: Huxley wouldn't be entirely delighted at the suggestion the book is somehow about his eye trouble. For him, it was all about mescaline. The message was the drug and its astonishing potential. It marked (forgive me) the high point in a lifelong obsession.

As anyone familiar with Brave New World will know, Huxley's most famous novel also shows the influence of drugs. The citizens of the future are nearly all hopped up on Soma, a powerful hallucinogen that allows "a holiday" from reality, imparts a tremendous feeling of well-being, softens up the mind and poisons the body. In the climactic scene in the book, when John the Savage rebels against Fordist society, his anger is concentrated on Soma, which has come to symbolise all that is rotten in this future-state.

It's fascinating to re-read this earlier book in the light of The Doors Of Perception – especially since, in it, Huxley frequently suggests that Soma is very similar to mescaline in its effects. Back in the 1930s, he even described mescaline as a worse poison than Soma, rendering poor Linda vomitous and even dumber than usual.

Clearly, in the 22 years between the publication of the two books Huxley revised his opinions about the drug. By the time he finally sampled mescaline he was convinced it would offer him insight rather than the distraction from reality offered by Soma. As The Doors Of Perception demonstrates the drug exceeded his expectations. Huxley was to remain a dedicated psychonaut for the rest of his life.

On Christmas Eve 1955, he took his first dose of LSD, an experience he was to repeat often and he claimed allowed him to plumb even greater depths than mescaline. The literary culmination of this self-medication can be seen in Island, the 1962 novel, which can be viewed as an answer to Brave New World. It describes a utopia rather than a dystopia, and this time around drugs perform an entirely beneficial function, providing serenity and understanding. They are as the book puts it, "medicine".

Ironically, Pala, Huxley's utopia sounds even worse than the alternative future Huxley describes in Brave New World. The Palanese are crashing bores. They are the kind of people who (in one of the most inadvertently hilarious passages I've read) think it's OK to rewrite the climax of Oedipus Rex with a lecture from some Palanese children, who inform the luckless mother-lover that he is being "silly" and ought to follow their philosophy rather than tear his eyes out … But never mind that. Although it is awful in many regards, Island still holds the charm of Huxley's cultured prose and fertile mind. The knowledge that he wrote the book shortly after his first wife died from cancer and he himself had received a terminal diagnosis also adds real poignancy to the book's many passages about coping with disease. One of his ideas is that tripping may ease the passage into that good night – advice he famously took on 22 November 1963 when he asked his wife second wife Laura Huxley to give him LSD. "Light and free you let go, darling; forward and up," she whispered to him as he drifted away. "You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light."

We'll never know how Huxley's final trip went, but we do know that his psychedelic experiments had a remarkable afterlife. (Psychedelic, incidentally, was a word Huxley helped coin along with Humphry Osmond. Huxley can lay considerable claim to kick-starting the 1960s revolution in the head. It wasn't just the fact that The Doors Of Perception was so influential. He was also personally instrumental in introducing luminaries like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary to the possibilities of psychedelic experimentation (as described in the early pages of Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams, the definitive story of the way LSD swept through America in the 1960s – thanks to the many contributors Reading group who recommended that).

It's safe to say that Huxley changed the world. Without him there might have been no turn on, tune in, drop out, no Merry Pranksters, no Sergeant Pepper, no Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, no Focus.

I scoffed when I read JG Ballard's introduction to my edition of The Doors Of Perception and he said that the book was "even more prophetic" than Brave New World (and also, incidentally, that Brave New World is more prophetic than Orwell's 1984). As this Reading group month draws to a close, I can see that – as usual – Ballard was quite right. The book didn't just point the way to the future (or one potential version of it), it changed it. The big question now is whether it has opened any doors for you? Has Huxley changed your view of mescaline and/or reality? And are you tempted to follow in his footsteps?

THE GUARDIAN

Monday, October 13, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 56 / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 56

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Aldous Huxley’s vision of a future human race controlled by global capitalism is every bit as prescient as Orwell’s more famous dystopia

Robert McCrum
Monday 13 October 2014

he grandson of TH Huxley, an eminent Victorian scientist, and scion of a famous family of public intellectuals, Aldous Huxley was a precociously gifted young man who grew up on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. In the 1920s, Huxley acquired a reputation for the kind of heartless, satirical fiction that appealed to the Waste Land generation. Today, he is rather out of favour, and mostly read as a curiosity of his time. I’ve put him into this series for the vivacity of his imagination as much as his prose, which is often top-heavy with ideas, and stylistically thin.

Aldous Huxley

Huxley’s most famous novel, a dystopian fable set in the seventh century AF (After Ford), began as a parody of HG Wells (No 39 in this series), specifically of Men Like Gods, whose optimism Huxley disdained. A jeu d’esprit quickly became a vehicle for Huxley’s obsession with the consequences of mass industrialisation and the Americanisation of consumer society. But it retained a satirical edge and is also strikingly aphoristic, with a vivid sense of the power of language and ideas in changing human society. “Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly,” says one character. “They’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

Huxley, the scholarship boy, was steeped in the English classics, and shaped by his education. In Brave New World (the title is just the most visible of countless Shakespeare references in the text), we find the world in the hands of 10 World Controllers who administer a global society, bred in test tubes, tranquillised by the mind-numbing drug soma, and graded according to English public school custom (Huxley was an Old Etonian) from alpha plus to epsilon minus. Huxley revels in his invention of a future world, especially the celebrated “feelies” and also in many adventitious moments of light comedy reminiscent of his early work. The plot, such as it is, turns on the relationship of sexy Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx, a disgruntled alpha plus who imports John, a “Savage”, from New Mexico to London. Here, implausibly, the alien tourist clashes with the World Controller, Mustapha Mond, on the place of the individual in a scientifically controlled society, a theme Huxley would explore for the rest of his career.

Aldous Huxley

Much of the incidental detail of everyday life in AF632 derives from England in an age of all-conquering US materialism, the aftermath of America’s intervention in the first world war. It would be for another Old Etonian, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), whom Huxley actually taught briefly, to recognise that the bigger threat came less from bourgeois consumers than from totalitarian dictators like Hitler and Stalin. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would be the dystopia whose nightmare vision would become an essential text for the second half of the 20th century. And yet Huxley’s picture of global capitalism, fuelled by the soft power of consumer advertising, is every bit as prescient as Orwell’s, and its influence lingers on.

A note on the text

Brave New World was first published by the Bloomsbury-conscious imprint, Chatto & Windus, in London, in 1932 with a striking, and highly collectible, jacket by Leslie Holland. In the US, where Huxley later retired, his humanism and pacifism, combined with his experimentation with LSD, would be taken up by subsequent generations of socially radical innovators. As the author of a radical future vision of society, he was always in demand and became something of a guru. His death on 22 November 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, was rather overshadowed by that domestic political tragedy.

Huxley’s dystopian vision has been widely adapted for radio and cinema and has also influenced many writers, notably Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Kurt Vonnegut (Piano Player).