Aldous Huxley's World

...Two years later, his brother Trevenen, despairing over a broken romance, committed suicide...

...Although Huxley would later describe the world of Bloomsbury as "rather limited," he certainly shared Bloomsbury's doubts about democracy and the fear that rising forms of mass communication, driven by commercial concerns and pitched to the lowest common level, would degrade the role of the artist and the value of art...

...As Nicholas Murray reminds us in his recent Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Huxley belonged to one of Britain's most distinguished Victorian intellecBrian Murray teaches writing at Loyola College in Maryland...

...Huxley's attraction to mysticism isn't really surprising...

...At school Huxley persevered by using magnifying glasses and eye exercises and learning Braille...

...Thought is extinct...

...Thomas Huxley assumed that the wider application of science and education would bring moral illumination to mankind...

...Along with Tony Curtis and W.C...

...It is a bit embarrassing," he admitted to a lecture audience, "to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder...

...Still, Huxley's writings suggest that he didn't wholly free himself from some very worldly—and rather disturbing—preoccupations...

...What to do...

...Murray also points to the occasional displays of anti-Semitism that surface in Huxley's private writings...

...He added that advertising is "the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine ground...

...In The Doors of Perception he approvingly quotes Goethe: "We talk too much...

...Huxley had no more hope in democracy than in organized reli-gion—and only a very guarded belief in the redemptive powers of science...

...his characters are merely "puppets" performing a "marionette show...

...After her death, Huxley said his wife was "more capable of love and understanding than almost anyone I have ever known, and in so far as I have learned to be human—and I had a great capacity for not being human—it is thanks to her...

...I am not a realist," Huxley blithely replied, and "don't take much interest in the problem of real people...

...One of the novel's more sympathetic characters, the outcast John the Savage, is much drawn to both Shakespeare and the idea of God, which he equates with nobility, goodness, and heroism...

...Perhaps mercifully, Huxley didn't live long enough to see Leary end up performing as a nightclub comedian or, worse, to find that he himself had become a pop culture icon...

...For years he was one of Britain's most-recognizable writers: handsome, quotable, urbane, a literary star...

...Consider his 1927 review of The Jazz Singer, the first talking movie of note...

...Huxley also urges the development of other drugs that, without the harmful side effects of alcohol, might provide millions with a mellowing buzz, since the "need for chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will remain...

...He attended Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was well known for the breadth of his reading and the barb of his wit...

...Lured by lucrative commissions, Huxley put aside his hatred of the movies long enough to write or collaborate on several movie scripts...

...But it's also about the 1920s, when jazz was the fad, movies were new, and public intellectuals like Aldous Huxley rued the rise of mass entertainment, mass advertising, and mass production: the making of mass man...

...Brilliant, promising, blessed with a famous pedigree, Huxley caught the attention of Lady Ottoline Morrell, one of the most influential patrons of the age, and she brought the young man into an intellectual circle that included Bertrand Russell, D.H...

...We should talk less and draw more...

...Living in Los Angeles during the final two decades of his life, Huxley attended seances, pondered the plausibility of flying saucers, and dabbled in hypnosis and ESI...

...I was born," he once observed, "in the upper-middle, governing class of an independent, rich, and exceedingly powerful nation...

...That figure, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future—all these are momentous signatures...

...But when Huxley was fourteen, his mother died of cancer...

...Arnold similarly urged his contemporaries to forgo the worship of power and mammon and to pursue instead "the best that is known and thought in the world"—in brief, the high artistic culture that "places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality...

...As Murray notes, Lady Ottoline was not amused, accusing Huxley of ingratitude and betrayal...

...Murray depicts Maria working devotedly as secretary, housekeeper, and chauffeur for her absent-minded husband, a man almost completely at sea in the face of life's more practical demands...

...Spiritual references like these aren't found in Huxley's early novels, where religion, if it appears at all, is mocked and an air of jaded sophistication prevails...

...tual families...

...Huxley at thirty-five hated films and their substitution of spectacle for subtlety, emotion for thought...

...But mention Huxley's name today, and a surprising number of people can name only his futuristic 1932 novel Brave New World—and even then they're a bit confused: "Or was that the one by George Orwell...

...Maria's letters sometimes show a woman frequently lonely, exhausted, and bored...

...John of the Cross...

...But both also assumed that a modern culture unbuoyed by collective ideals—by some kind of ennobling faith—was a frightening prospect...

...Or simple befuddlement...

...Indeed, he equated the Church with "organized sacramentalism"—mere dogma and clerical abuse...

...In Brave New World Huxley depicts promiscuous sex as dehumanizing—another form of mindless escape...

...But Brave New World, published in 1932 when Huxley was thirty-eight, may be as much about the past as the future...

...Like Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World remains a staple of high-school reading lists: sex, drugs, test-tube babies, a sensual but sterile state— no wonder it seems a piece of uncanny prophecy...

...Huxley, however, couldn't accept Eliot's solution of restoring the Church to the center of cultural, intellectual, and artistic life...

...Writing in the late 1940s, Huxley described radio as "nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din can flow into our homes—a Babel of distractions...

...And unlike Thomas Huxley or Matthew Arnold, he found it nearly impossible to articulate any real hope for the future of humankind...

...The "usual explanation" for these outbursts, Murray notes, "is that this was an unthinking feature of the English upper-middle-class milieu" in which Huxley grew up...

...But they can also be used more widely as substitutes for the mystical experience that, as Huxley himself admits, is so difficult to achieve...

...Huxley caricatured some of these figures in the early satirical novels that made him famous...

...Spiritual progress," it stresses, comes from "the growing knowledge of the self as nothing and of the godhead as all-embracing reality...

...The Doors of Perception sold well during the 1960s as LSD became a craze and "psychedelic" a cultural byword...

...Eliot, for example, in a 1939 essay sounds much like the later Huxley when he writes that "for too long Europeans and Americans have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life...

...The publisher Ivan R. Dee has brought out the complete set of his essays in six volumes over the last two years, and they are astonishingly brilliant and wide-ranging...

...And yet, here is Huxley solemnly assuring us that the endomorph—Sheldon's term for a "soft and rounded" person with a "huge gut"—is prone to "nostalgia" and "cer-emoniousness" and is "always seeking company and telling everybody just what he feels...

...But Huxley, Murray adds, "was not supposed to be unthinking...

...He lampooned Lady Ottoline herself as the affected Priscilla Wimbush in the 1921 Crome Yellow...

...One does sense in the later Huxley a certain intellectual fatigue, a disillusion with words themselves...

...Huxley's great-uncle, Matthew Arnold, was also a central literary figure of the Victorian Age...

...Huxley also turned to drugs...

...coarse Philistines run the show, seeking absolute social control...

...In the 1930s, Huxley mocked the use of chemical pacifiers in Brave New World...

...Still, Murray doesn't ignore the ironies and inconsistencies of Huxley's life and career...

...Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Roger Frye—"a roll-call," writes Murray, "of Bloomsbury's most celebrated names...

...This could, of course, be a kind of deep mystical enlightenment...

...For the first time," Huxley writes, "I felt grateful for the defect of vision which had preserved me from a daily acquaintance with such scenes...

...The book leans heavily on Buddhist principles and ideals but also quotes extensively from the Christian mystical tradition: William Law, Meister Eckhart, St...

...At the cinema, Huxley complains, there is "no escape" from "the full horror of the human countenance," amplified and filling a vast screen...

...But by the time he wrote Brave New World, he was starting to realize that spiritual values, even more than aesthetic standards, were dangerously missing from Western life...

...Nicholas Murray's biography is less adoring than Sybille Bedford's influential account of Huxley, published in 1973, but it still offers a largely sympathetic portrayal of a man whose warnings of the dangers of big business, overpopulation, and the prospects of nuclear proliferation make him, by implication, a figure of continuing relevance to the Left...

...And as an adolescent he was afflicted with a serious eye infection that left his vision permanently impaired...

...Huxley first outlined this "existential religion of mysticism" in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), prompting a certain dismay among the admirers of his bitter satires...

...Huxley also hated jazz, calling it "drearily barbaric...

...his final novel, the utopian Island, published in 1962, offers yet more marionettes, however much they mouth different ideals from the marionettes of the 1920s...

...The last word in Brave New World is "east"—the direction to which Huxley turned to find his own language of belief...

...By his own account, he began taking LSD and mescaline in the early 1950s, thanks partly to his friendship with Timothy Leary, the Harvard-trained psychiatrist who grew increasingly screwy with each passing year...

...In fact, although Huxley became more ambitious as a novelist, he never really mastered the form...

...In his final writings, Huxley often uses phrases like "the bottomless mystery of existence" and "the fathomless mystery of existence...

...standards are low...

...Jim Morri-son—not exactly an exemplar of mental and spiritual discipline—named his rock band the Doors, in honor of Huxley's book...

...In the years during and after World War II, other writers and intellectuals were reaching similar conclusions...

...Revealingly, in one late interview, he called Zen "just the sort of inward turning which makes for cushioning an otherwise intolerable existence...

...The novel's characters are brainwashed, subject to "emotional engineering" in the form of inane slogans and hypnotic rhymes...

...They can "open the door" to enlightenment left closed during our daily distracted state...

...Murray's failure to examine these closely means that the full context and genesis of many of Huxley's ideas go largely unexplored...

...The Doors of Perception (1954)—next to Brave New World, Huxley's most famous work—argues that hallucinogens could prove therapeutically useful to patients suffering from schizophrenia and other mental disorders...

...But his bad eyesight discouraged him from pursuing a career in medicine and— after a brief stint as a teacher—he began to write...

...Fields, Huxley was placed in a crowd of celebrities gracing the cover of the Beatles' 1968 album, Sgt...

...Huxley loved his wife, and he worked her like a mule...

...Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...

...I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches...

...Both men saw life as brutal and harsh and both believed that Christianity, as traditionally practiced and understood, was doomed...

...but Hollywood, as he rued in one letter, was squarely in the hands of "Jews with money": "little b—s with curly hair and teeth...

...Still, in the final year of his life, Huxley offered words simple enough that even half-wits could understand...

...They frequent the "feelies," where the movie's illusion of reality is tactilely enhanced...

...he was, after all, cerebral, introverted, and quite blind—already, by temperament and physical fact, withdrawn from the world...

...Perhaps there's no great puzzle why...

...In the 1950s he advocated their widespread use...

...Even in The Perennial Philosophy we find him pausing to evoke "the rules of aristocratic good breeding...

...Brave New World is that review's horror come true...

...In many ways, Huxley never escaped his Victorian roots...

...Happily drugged, they attend state-run orgies and cabaret shows where tuneless music blares...

...But as Murray also implies, Huxley seems to have been largely dense to her own needs and concerns...

...Left with no other options— no galleries, museums, or libraries— blighted citizens have little left but their animality and the license to live thoughtlessly for the day...

...All of this, as Murray understandably suggests, darkened the young Huxley's view of the world...

...It's about the brave new world of eugenic biotechnology into which we are, only now, rapidly descending...

...In one, she tells a friend that Aldous "never realizes what is going on with me...

...The goal, he wrote in 1934, was to encourage "the normal and supernormal members of the population to have larger families," and even more importantly to prevent the "sub-normal"—"half-wits" he called them— "from having any children at all...

...Indeed the review shows not only Huxley's disdain for popular culture, but the misanthropic strain that never quite leaves his work...

...Huxley and Maria remained married for more than thirty years until her death in 1955...

...But Murray makes much of the fact that Huxley and his first wife Maria Nays had "an easy and civilized enjoyment of the sensual life" that included dispensing with "conventional notions of fidelity" and, for several years during the 1920s, sharing the same lover, the novelist Mary Hutchinson...

...Huxley's many fine critical writings include "Wordsworth in the Tropics," "Vulgarity in Literature," and "Variations on a Philosopher," all of them modern classics...

...A throwaway line, it clanks nonetheless, particularly in light of Huxley's advocacy of eugenics—the notion that human breeding requires regulation...

...Still, the biographer provides enough evidence to show that Huxley's undisciplined mind was inclined to attach itself to some fairly dotty ideas...

...He never tired of extolling the teachings of William Sheldon, the American psychologist who theorized that an individual's temperament was determined largely by his physique...

...His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin's most ardent defender, a biologist who addressed scientific subjects in an elegant and accessible style...

...Sheldon's notions are little better than those proposed by phrenology, which similarly proposed that anatomy was destiny, and that a man's character could be divined by examining the shape of his head...