Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous
Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels including
Brave New World and wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine
Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts.
Aldous Huxley was a
humanist and
pacifist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as
parapsychology and philosophical
mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking
psychedelics.
By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank, and highly regarded as one of the most prominent explorers of visual communication and sight-related theories as well.
[1]
Biography
Early years
Aldous Huxley was born in
Godalming, Surrey, UK in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and school-master
Leonard Huxley and first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of
Matthew Arnold and the sister of
Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of
Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother
Julian Huxley and half-brother
Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Huxley had another brother Noel Trevenen (1891–1914) who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.
Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher was his mother who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at
Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908, when he was fourteen. In 1911, he suffered an illness (
keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years".
[2] Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in the First World War. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at
Balliol College,
Oxford. In 1916 he edited
Oxford Poetry and later graduated with first class honours.
- "I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career...His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province." [3]
Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name
George Orwell) and
Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words.
[4] For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the
Air Ministry.
Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced
Brunner and Mond chemical plant in
Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel
Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source for the novel.
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties. His earlier work includes important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously
Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example,
Eyeless in Gaza). In
Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by
F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in
Eyeless in Gaza.
Middle years
During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at
Garsington Manor, home of Lady
Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several
Bloomsbury figures including
Bertrand Russell and
Clive Bell. Later, in
Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian woman he met at Garsington. They had one child,
Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an
epidemiologist. The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend
D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1933).
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend
Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, until his death, but also for a time in
Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote
Ends and Means (published in 1937). In this work he examines the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of "liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love", they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it.
Heard introduced Huxley to
Vedanta (Veda-Centric Hinduism), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of
ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended
J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu
Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced
Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas,
The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.
Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of
Occidental College. He spent much time at the college, which is in the
Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as "Tarzana College" in his satirical novel
After Many a Summer (1939). The novel won Huxley that year's
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a writer. In March 1938, his friend
Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who hired Huxley for
Madame Curie which was originally to star
Greta Garbo and be directed by
George Cukor. (The film was eventually filmed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and stars.) Huxley received screen credit for
Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including
Jane Eyre (1944).
However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of
Alice in Wonderland,
Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word". Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else.
On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to
George Orwell, author of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating Orwell on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:
"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience."[5]
Post-war
After the Second World War Huxley applied for United States citizenship, but his application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S., so he withdrew it. Nevertheless, he remained in the country, and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a
Knight Bachelor by the
Macmillan government. During the 1950s Huxley's interest in the field of
psychical research grew keener, and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with psychedelic drugs.
In October 1930, the occultist
Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to
peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to
mescaline (considered to be the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist
Humphry Osmond in 1953.
[6] Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire
Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis.
[7] On 24 December 1955, Huxley took his first dose of
LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment", famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying. His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays
The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in the book
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by
William Blake), and
Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early
hippies. While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a friend of
Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller's biography of Bradbury, the latter was dissatisfied with Huxley, especially after Huxley encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugs.
In 1955, Huxley's wife, Maria, died of breast cancer. In 1956 he married
Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author. She wrote
This Timeless Moment, a biography of Huxley. In 1960 Huxley himself was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel
Island,
[8] and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the
Esalen institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the
Human Potential Movement.
On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death, in
This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died at 5:21 pm on 22 November 1963, aged 69. Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the
Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near
Guildford, Surrey, England.
Media coverage of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the Irish author
C. S. Lewis. This coincidence was the inspiration for
Peter Kreeft's book
Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.
Huxley's only child,
Matthew Huxley, was also an author, as well as an educator, anthropologist, and prominent
epidemiologist. Aldous Huxley is also survived by two grandchildren.
Association with Vedanta
Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the
Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by
Swami Prabhavananda. Together with
Gerald Heard,
Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices.
In 1944 Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God"
[9], translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California.
From 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to
Vedanta and the West, published by the Society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John van Druten from 1951 through 1962.
Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on CD:
Knowledge and Understanding and
Who Are We from 1955.
After the publication of
The Doors of Perception, Huxley and the Swami disagreed about the meaning and importance of the LSD drug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the Society's journal, lecture at the temple, and attend social functions.
Literary themes
Crome Yellow (1921) attacks
Victorian and
Edwardian social principles which led to World War I and its terrible aftermath. Together with Huxley's second novel,
Antic Hay (1923), the book expresses much of the mood of disenchantment of the early 1920s. It was intended to reflect, as Huxley stated in a letter to his father, "the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the present epoch."
Huxley's reputation for iconoclasm and emancipation grew. He was condemned for his explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction.
Antic Hay, for example, was burned in Cairo and in the years that followed many of Huxley's books were received with disapproval or banned at one time or another. The exclusion of
Brave New World,
Point Counter Point and
Island from
Time magazine's Best 100 novels list in 2006 created an uproar.
[citation needed]
Huxley, however, said that a novel should be full of interesting opinions and arresting ideas, describing his aim as a novelist as being 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay'; and with
Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley wrote his first true '
novel of ideas', the type of thought-provoking fiction with which he is now associated.
One of his main ideas was pessimism about the cultural future of society, a pessimism which sprang largely from his visit to the United States between September 1925 and June 1926. He recounted his experiences in
Jesting Pilate (1926): "The thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards", and it was soon after this visit that he conceived the idea of writing a satire of what he had encountered.
[10]
Brave New World (1932) as well as
Island (1962) form the cornerstone of Huxley's damning indictment of commercialism based upon goods generally manufactured from other countries. Indeed also,
Brave New World (along with Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Yevgeni Zamyatin's
We) helped form the anti-utopian or dystopian tradition in literature and has become synonymous with a future world in which the human spirit is subject to conditioning and control.
Island acts as an antonym to
Brave New World; it is described as "one of the truly great philosophical novels".
[11]
He devoted his time at his small house at Llano in the
Mojave Desert to a life of contemplation, mysticism, and experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs. His suggestions in
The Doors of Perception (1954) that
mescaline and
lysergic acid were 'drugs of unique distinction' which should be exploited for the 'supernaturally brilliant' visionary experience they offered provoked even more outrage than his passionate defense of the
Bates method in
The Art of Seeing (1942). However, the book went on to become a cult text in the psychedelic 1960s, and inspire the name of the rock band
The Doors (although it was originally derived from William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"). Huxley also appears on the sleeve of
The Beatles' landmark 1967 album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Eyesight
With respect to details about the true quality of Huxley’s eyesight at specific points in his life, there are differing accounts. Around 1939, Huxley encountered the
Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher,
Margaret Corbett, who was able to teach him in the method. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (160,000 m
2)
ranchito in the high desert hamlet of
Llano, California in northernmost Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that his sight improved dramatically with the Bates Method and the extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method,
The Art of Seeing which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK). It was from this period, with the publication of the generally disputed theories contained in the latter book, that a growing degree of popular controversy arose over the subject of Huxley’s eyesight.
It was, and to a noticeable extent, still is widely held that, for most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, that his eyesight was exceedingly poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). For instance, some ten years after publication of
The Art of Seeing, in 1952,
Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty:
"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 agonizing moment."[12]
On the other hand, Huxley's second wife,
Laura Archera Huxley, would later emphasize in her biographical account,
This Timeless Moment: "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight." Here, she portrays the accomplishment as both metaphorical and considerably physiological in nature, attributing that which she cites
J. Krishnamurti as naming the spirit of "freedom from the known", which she suggests that Huxley applied, nonexhaustively, in writing
The Art of Seeing and utilizing the
Bates Method. After revealing a letter she wrote to the
Los Angeles Times disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow who can hardly see" by
Walter C. Alvarez, she tempers her more abstract claims with the admission:
" ... Although I feel it was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance, although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a magnifying lens..."[13]
Laura Huxley proceeds to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, is discernibly congruent with the following sample of Huxley's own words from
The Art of Seeing:
"The most characteristic fact about the functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is that it is not constant, but highly variable."
Nevertheless, the topic of Huxley’s eyesight continues to endure similar, significant controversy, regardless of how trivial a subject matter it might initially appear.
[citation needed]
Awards
In 1959 Aldous Huxley received the
American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for the novel
Brave New World. He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1939 for
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
In 1962, Huxley was awarded the Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
[14] Films
Notable works include the original screenplay for Disney's animated
Alice in Wonderland (which was rejected because it was too literary),
[15] two productions of
Brave New World, one of
Point Counter Point, one of
Eyeless in Gaza, and one of
Ape and Essence. He was a credited screenwriter for
Pride and Prejudice (1940), co-authored the screenplay for
Jane Eyre (1944) with
John Houseman,
A Woman's Vengeance (1947), and contributed to the screenplays of
Madame Curie (1943) and
Alice in Wonderland (1951) without credit.
Director
Ken Russell's 1971 film
The Devils, starring
Vanessa Redgrave and
Oliver Reed, was adapted from Huxley's
The Devils of Loudun. A made-for-television adaptation of
Brave New World was made in 1990.
Works
- Novels
- Short stories
- Poetry
- Travel writing
- Drama
- Essay collections
- Articles written for Vedanta and the West (A publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California from 1938 to 1970)
- Distractions (1941)
- Distractions II (1941)
- Action and Contemplation (1941)
- An Appreciation (1941)
- The Yellow Mustard (1941)
- Lines (1941)
- Some Replections of the Lord's Prayer (1941)
- Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1942)
- Reflections of the Lord's Prayer II (1942)
- Words and Reality (1942)
- Readings in Mysticism (1942)
- Man and Reality (1942)
- The Magical and the Spiritual (1942)
- Religion and Time (1943)
- Idolatry (1943)
- Religion and Temperament (1943)
- A Note on the Bhagavatam (1943)
- Seven Meditations (1943)
- On a Sentence From Shakespeare (1944)
- The Minimum Working Hypothesis (1944)
- From a Notebook (1944)
- The Philosophy of the Saints (1944)
- That Art Thou (1945)
- That Art Thou II (1945)
- The Nature of the Ground (1945)
- The Nature of the Ground II (1945)
- God In the World (1945)
- Origins and Consequences of Some Contemporary Thought-Patterns (1946)
- The Sixth Patriarch (1946)
- Some Reflections on Time (1946)
- Reflections on Progress (1947)
- Further Reflections on Progress (1947)
- William Law (1947)
- Notes on Zen (1947)
- Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (1948)
- A Note on Gandhi (1948)
- Art and Religion (1949)
- Foreword to an Essay on the Indian Philosophy of Peace (1950)
- A Note on Enlightenment (1952)
- Substitutes for Liberation (1952)
- The Desert (1954)
- A Note on Patanjali (1954)
- Who Are We? (1955)
- Foreword to the Supreme Doctrine (1956)
- Knowledge and Understanding (1956)
- The "Inanimate" is Alive (1957)
- Symbol and Immediate Experience (1960)
- Philosophy
- Biography and nonfiction
- Children's literature
- Collections
Bibliography
- The World of Aldous Huxley, Charles J. Rolo editor, Grosset Universal Library, 1947.
- John Atkins, Aldous Huxley: A Literary Study, J. Calder, 1956
- Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley, Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 0312302375
- Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment, Celestial Arts, 2001, ISBN 0890879689
- Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1974, rev. ed., Ivan R. Dee, 2002 ISBN 1566634547
- James Sexton (ed.), Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters, Ivan R. Dee, 2007, ISBN 1566636292
- David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, HarperCollins 1990, ISBN 0385415915
- The Human Situation: Aldous Huxley Lectures at Santa Barbara 1959, Flamingo Modern Classic, 1994, ISBN 0006547327
- Conrad Watt (ed.), Aldous Huxley, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0415159159
- Dana Sawyer, Aldous Huxley, Crossroad Publishing Co., 2002, ISBN 0824519872
- Jerome Meckier's Aldous Huxley: modern satirical novelist of ideas, Firchow and Nugel editors, LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006, ISBN 3825896683
References
- ^ Thody, Philipe (1973). Huxley: A Biographical Introduction. Scribner.
- ^ Huxley, Aldous (1939). "biography and bibliography (appendix)". After Many A Summer Dies The Swan (1st Perennial Classic Ed.). Harper & Row, Publishers. p. 243.
- ^ Julian Huxley 1965. Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: a memorial volume. Chatto & Windus, London. p22
- ^ Crick, Bernard (1992). George Orwell: A Life. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 014014563X.
- ^ Huxley, Aldous (1969). Grover Smith. ed. Letters of Aldous Huxley. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 070111312X.
- ^ Martin, Douglas. Friday, 22 August 2008 "Humphry Osmond, 86, Who Sought Medicinal Value in Psychedelic Drugs, Dies". New York: New York Times
- ^ Stevens, Jay (1998). Storming heaven: LSD and the American dream. Grove Press. pp. 47–64. ISBN 0802135872. http://books.google.com/books?id=rKlGAdNUDAkC&pg=PA47&dq=Storming+heaven+Noonday+Sun#v=onepage&q=&f=false. "All sorts of crazy things started happening..."
- ^ Peter Bowering Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels, p. 197, Oxford University Press, 1969 ASIN B0006CDQZ8
- ^ EAN/ISBN13: 978-0-87481-043-1
- ^ Huxley, Aldous (2003). "British Literature (1918–1945)". Words Words Words. La Spiga Languages. pp. 217–218.
- ^ The Times
- ^ From Bennet Cerf’s column in The Saturday Review, 12 April 1952, quoted in Gardner, Martin (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-20394-8.
- ^ Huxley, Laura (1968). This Timeless Moment. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
- ^ Chevalier, Tracy (1997). Encyclopedia of the Essay. Routldge. pp. 416.
- ^ Bradshaw, David (1993). "Introduction". Aldous Huxley's "Those Barren Leaves" (Vintage Classics Edn., 2005). Vintage, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Brigade Road, London. xii.
[edit] External links
- Works by or about Aldous Huxley in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Works by Aldous Huxley at Project Gutenberg
- Aldous Huxley at the Internet Movie Database
- Video interviews of Huxley from the 1950s, exploring Brave New World, Island, and psychedelics
- Aldous Huxley – somaweb.org Extensive information on Aldous Huxley and Brave New World including biography, quotes, bibliography, discussion forum, etc...
- The Ultimate Revolution (talk at UC Berkeley, 20 March 1962)
- Interviewed by Raymond Fraser, George Wickes (Spring 1960). "Aldous Huxley: The Art of Fiction No. 24". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4698.
- Huxley interviewed on The Mike Wallace interview, 18 May 1958.
- Select Quotes of Aldous Huxley
- Aldous Huxley at Find a Grave
Dear Readers, please do not assume that you understand anything you read on this blog. Written here is the language of spirit.
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