“In Aldous Huxley’s veins flowed the blood of Matthew Arnold and of Thomas Henry Huxley. From both he drew something. Arnold had bequeathed to him a sensitive imagination soaked in the culture of the past, Huxley an adventurous scientific curiosity disciplined by a stern regard for truth” (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 13-14). Combining himself in these two was necessary to his achievement and influence as well as to the characteristics of his writing. “Aldous Huxley did not find it easy to satisfy both sides of his nature: and much of his life was spent in search of a faith…It enabled him in an especial way to grasp the contemporary predicament” (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 13-14). His art was literature and science which, together, he used in a curious way. According to Stephen Spender, his “works do not show the kind of interest in writing something called the novel…which we expect from modern writers…But this may be because we have sense of the writer as someone who uses his experience to create some thing we call a work of art, not his art as vehicle to convey his search for truth” (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 19-20). This au courant search for truth was propelled by his scientific intellect and also by his almost progressionist view on society.
In his novel Brave New World, Huxley adventures into the future some 600 years where pain is non-existent, human mass production methods have been perfected, society is controlled by a world state, and sex is casual and made a game. People are divided into distinct classes by conditioning in the test tube and in childhood for the kind of life their class leads. Here, and in many other undertakings, Huxley never ceased searching for the truth of what the future may bring and warning of it through his writings. His philosophies on the future and progression were continuously fueled by war and conflict, and the unprecedented technological growth around him.
His hopes for men rested on the advance of self-knowledge: he feared that humanity would destroy itself by overpopulation or by violence; from this only greater self-understanding would save them – above all, understanding of the intimate interplay if mental and physical forces…on which so much alternate light and darkness seemed to him to have been cast both by science and religion. (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 144-53)
“Huxley’s own experiences made him stand apart from the class into which he was born. Even as a small child he was considered different, showing an alertness, an intelligence, what his brother called a superiority. He was respected and loved–not hated–for these abilities, but he drew on that feeling of separateness in writing Brave New World” (Aldous). We can also see that Huxley reflected this sense, this feeling of being an outsider in characters such as Bernard Marx and Hemholtz in Brave New World. Huxley’s anti-utopian views were continually and predominately expressed throughout his novels, essays, and short stories that dealt with progression. Also in Brave New World, he “projects a future totalitarian state that is a logical development of the values and trends of the modern world. The inhabitants of this society are free from war, disease, and suffering, and they enjoy an abundance of material and physical pleasures” (Marowski). This type of society that he projects extracts from humans the ethical ability to reason from other than what ‘conditioning’ impresses upon them and, thus, the essence of what he feared the humanity he observed all around him would cause upon itself. Huxley himself said in the forward of this revolutionary novel many years after he had written it, “The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals” (Huxley, Aldous).
More specifically, war and postwar America greatly drove his societal pursuits and greatly resembles the themes that play out in his writing. The new technologies of his time such as television, radio, and magazines provided nonstop distraction while growing nuclear research (which Huxley discusses in Brave New World Revisited) increasingly threatens. In his teens, Aldous was stricken with a virus that left him near blind. This kept him out of the draft of World War I and also prevented him from studying medicine; this is when he turned to literature. Determined to do more than simply register as a conscientious objector, his novels, essays, and short stories greatly reflect ideals of the consequences of a lack of responsibility and war. John, the ‘savage’ who is brought from an ‘uncivilized’ contained environment into this new world, commits suicide in the end which “serves as a final symbol of universal death, or of the ultimate horror of the road civilization may be traveling” (Clareson).
Another significant event that affected Huxley was his mother’s death from cancer when he was fourteen.
This, he said later, gave him a sense of the transience of human happiness. Perhaps you can also see the influence of his loss in Brave New World. The Utopians go to great lengths to deny the unpleasantness of death, and to find perpetual happiness. But the cost is very great. By denying themselves unpleasant emotions they deny themselves deeply joyous ones as well. (Aldous)
When the main character goes to the savage reservation in the New Mexico desert, the utopias are greatly contrasted and challenged. In London, the people’s happiness “can be continued endlessly by taking the drug soma, by making love, or by playing Obstacle Golf, but this happiness is essentially shallow” (Aldous). The people of the reservation are poor, dirty and subject to old age, however, they enjoy a transient happiness that is much deeper and more real than that of the World State.
Huxley’s religious beliefs are also quite prevalent in his thoughts – although, a better word would be spirituality. The search for science and truth kept him discovering the realms of spirituality until his death. He addresses a very broad range of religions and spiritual theologies in his book The Perennial Philosophy which contains chapters on Self-knowledge, Faith, The Miraculous, Spiritual Exercises and more. Although Huxley’s thoughts were primarily scientific, especially in his later writing, and although he does not accept any specific doctrine, he never fails to view his own ideas from a spiritual standpoint. In fact, in the foreword of Brave New World, he also points out that if he were to “rewrite the book,” the ‘Savage’ in the book, would be offered a third alternative in the end – “the possibility of sanity.” Huxley states that the only way achieve this would be if “Religion” were “the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End.
The fact that Huxley was plagued all his life by blindness and certainly new death was coming to him in his last years greatly fueled his attempts to “pin down” spirituality.
He was never able to pin down this awareness in a dogmatic formula: he did not attempt to chart the limits and the extent of this spiritual religion. Nor was there ever any question of his accepting the account of it given by any of the orthodox churches. None the less, the spiritual world was intensely real to him, irradiating his soul with ‘bright shoots of everlastingness’ and imbuing it with a fortitude that stood the shocks inflicted on him by fate. (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 13-14)
These events instilled in Huxley a respect and immense interest in the religions of the world and capacitated him to link the thriving of culture to spirituality.
Greatly affecting Huxley’s spirituality and scientific pursuits conjoined were his experiments with extra-sensory perception. He writes about these experiments in the essays The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, among others, vividly discoursing their effects and what they allowed him to realize. In specie, he experimented with mescalin, the active principle of a cactus in Southwest America and Mexico called peyote, and lysergic acid. Stephen Spender comments on this too saying, Huxley called them “psychedelic since they revealed new capacities of the human psyche” (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 13-14). He continues, “A good many people would regard this last kind of research as aberrant and dangerous, but what should concern us here is that it was one aspect of Aldous Huxley’s passion for the truth.”
Huxley was introduced to mescalin in 1953 and two years later was introduced to LSD. Huxley had a great interest in the process of death and dying as well as in the mental states achieved through psychedelic drugs. In fact, when his first wife Maria was dying of cancer in 1955, he used hypnotic techniques to talk her through the memory of ecstatic experiences she had earlier in life. Then in 1963, at his request, his second wife and partner Laura Huxley administered LSD to him hours before his own death.
Huxley’s writings seem to be all encompassing and, accordingly, in Brave New World he presents a little drug called ‘soma,’ which seems to be the cure for whatever may ail you. There is not a chapter in the book that does not mention this Advil or Penicillin of the future which takes its users on ‘vacations,’ length respective of the amount, and away from the everyday troubles of a perfect society. Happiness is its goal and if it does it at the expense of responsibility, actualization, or realization…that’s only better for the governing. This is another one of Huxley’s great fears based on the thoughts, people, and governments of his time and he greatly stresses it. These people, taught that it is only ethical to do so, willingly transform themselves into bigots of nearly everything.
Aldous Huxley’s writings, inspired by his own search for humanity’s success in science, reason, and spiritual understanding, as well as the many life experiences and dilemmas that shaped him, greatly influence our vision of society today.
But above all, he will go down in history as the greatest humanist of our perplexed era, the many-gifted man who in a chaotic age of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral irresponsibility, used his gifts to enrich man instead of to diminish him, to keep alight humanity’s sense or responsibility for its own and the world’s destiny and its belief in itself and its vast unexplored potentialities. (qtd. in Huxley, Julian 21-25)
References
Aldous Huxley: The Author and His Times. (Online) Available http://somaweb.org/w/huxbio.html
Clareson, Thomas D. ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism – Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York City: HarperCollins Publishers, 1932, 1946
Huxley, Julian, ed. Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963: A Memorial Volume.
Chatto & Windus, 1965.
Marowski, Daniel G. ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol 35. Detroit Michigan:Gale Research Company, 1985.
