Person

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

English novelist and essayist (1894–1963), author of Brave New World — the book that fixed his reputation, and, on the wiki’s source, very likely the only reason he is still read.

Huxley came from the late-Victorian intellectual aristocracy. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was Darwin’s bulldog, who toured Britain debating evolution as popular entertainment; his father Leonard edited magazines and married a granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Tom Brown’s School Days. Three early blows shaped him: his mother’s death from cancer when he was fourteen, his brother Trevenen’s suicide, and an eye infection at Eton that left him effectively blind for two years and, by most accounts, blind in one eye for life. The blindness closed off medicine, which he had wanted, and kept him out of the First World War. He read English at Balliol, took a first, and wrote prolifically — poetry, stories, novels, travel books, biography — while supporting himself with work as varied as farm labouring and staff jobs at House & Garden and Vogue. For a year he taught French at Eton, where one of his pupils was the teenager Eric Blair, later George Orwell.

His first visit to America in 1926 supplied the germ of Brave New World: he found the roaring-twenties United States both intoxicating and repellent, wrote to a friend that what was happening there was ‘a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration for the worse of established standards’, and asked what the world would look like if all of it became America. He wrote the novel in four months in the summer of 1931. In 1937 — incongruously, given the diagnosis — he moved to the United States himself, settling in California, writing screenplays (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, an unused Alice in Wonderland for Disney) and keeping company with Chaplin and Garbo.

Three late enthusiasms defined him: philosophical rather than religious pacifism, Eastern spirituality and the Bhagavad Gita, and psychedelics — mescaline from 1953, which produced The Doors of Perception, and later LSD. Cancer took his speech in his final illness. He asked his wife to inject him with LSD on his deathbed and died on 22 November 1963, on the same day as C.S. Lewis and six hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which eclipsed both.

He was regarded in his lifetime as a great mind rather than a great novelist, a judgement the wiki’s source endorses. He was also, before the war, an enthusiast for eugenics — telling a BBC radio audience shortly before Brave New World appeared that eugenics might be needed ‘to stop the rapid deterioration of the whole Western European stock’ — a position unremarkable among intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, and one he later abandoned. It complicates the common reading of the novel as a warning against engineering human beings.

In the wiki

See also