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Aldous Huxley

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Aldous Huxley
Monochrome portrait of Aldous Huxley sitting on a table, facing slightly downwards.
Born Aldous Leonard Huxley
26 July 1894
Godalming, Surrey,
England
Died 22 November 1963 (aged 69)
Los Angeles,
United States
Resting place Compton, Surrey,
England
Occupation Writer (fiction & non-fiction)
Notable work(s) Brave New World
Island
Point Counter Point
The Doors of Perception
The Perennial Philosophy
Spouse(s) Maria Nys (m. 1919–55)
Laura Huxley (m. 1956–63)
Signature
Aldous Leonard Huxley /ˈhʌksli/ (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and a prominent member of the Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian London, The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug, and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He became deeply concerned that human beings might become subjugated through the sophisticated use of the mass media or mood-altering drugs, or tragically impacted by misunderstanding or the misapplication of increasingly sophisticated technology.
Huxley later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism,[1][2] in particular, Universalism.[3] He is also well known for his use of psychedelic drugs. By the end of his life Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.[4]

Early life

See also: Huxley family
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic 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. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevelyan Huxley (1891–1914), who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.[5]
Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then went to Hillside School, Malvern. 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 14. In 1911, he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three years".[6] Aldous volunteered to join the army at the outbreak of the First World War, but was rejected on health grounds: he was half-blind in one eye. 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 (B.A.) with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote,
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.[7]
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 to become George Orwell) and Steven 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.[8] 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.[9]

Huxley-Arnold Family Tree (partial)
Thomas Arnold
1795–1842		 Mary Penrose
1791–1873		 George Huxley
Matthew Arnold
1822–1888		 Tom Arnold
1823–1900		 Thomas Henry Huxley
1825–1895		 Ann Heathorn
1825–1915
Mary Augusta Ward
1851–1920		 Julia Arnold
1862–1908		 Leonard Huxley
1860–1933		 Rosalind Bruce
1890–1994		 Jessie Huxley
1856–1927
Trevelyan Huxley
1891–1914		 Julian Huxley
1887–1975		 Maria Nys
1899–1955		 Aldous Huxley
1894–1963		 Laura Archera
1911–2007		 David Bruce Huxley
1915–1992		 Andrew Huxley
1917–2012		 Richenda Pease
1925–2003

Matthew Huxley
1920–2005

Career

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with Crome Yellow (1921).

Bloomsbury set

Left to right: Bloomsbury Group members – Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell.
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. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919 Middleton Murray was reorganising the Athenaeum and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted immediately, and quickly married the Belgian refugee Maria Nys, also at Garsington.[10] They lived with their young son 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).
Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanising 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.
Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including Ends and Means, An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, and Pacifism and Philosophy, and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.[11]

United States

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the US, 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 civilisation 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 (Upanishad-centered philosophy), 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's book affirmed a sensibility that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.
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 neighbourhood 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.[12] 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 completed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and cast.) 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 success in Hollywood was minimal. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word".[13] Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else. For Dick Huemer, during the 1940s, Huxley went to the first of a five meetings' session to elaborate the script of Alice in Wonderland but never came again.[14] For author John Grant, although the movie's character the Caterpillar displays some characteristics familiar from Huxley's discussion of his experiments with hallucinogens, Huxley's contribution to the movie is nonexistent.[15]
Huxley wrote an introduction to the posthumous publication of J.D. Unwin's 1940 book Hopousia or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society.[16]
On 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating him 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.[17]
Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for itself. From these he put forward some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised interview conducted by journalist Mike Wallace, Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the tendency toward distinctly hierarchical social organisation; the crucial importance of evaluating the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to wily persuasion; the tendency to promote modern politicians, to a naive public, as well-marketed commodities.[18]

Post World War II

After the Second World War, Huxley applied for United States citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection, and therefore was not exempt under the McCarran Act.[19] He withdrew his application. 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 English occultist Aleister Crowley had dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.[citation needed] He was introduced to mescaline (the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953, taking it for the first time in the afternoon of 5 May.[20] Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire Alfred Matthew Hubbard, who was by this point introducing creative and influential people to LSD on a wide-ranging basis.[21] 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". According to a letter written by his wife Laura, Huxley requested and received two intramuscular injections of 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying.[22] 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.[23] 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.

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.[3]
In 1944 Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God",[24] 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.

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 (16 ha) 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 agonising moment."[25]
On the other hand, Huxley's second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, would later emphasise in her biographical account, This Timeless Moment: "One of the great achievements of his life: that of having regained his sight." 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 this: "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."[26] 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.[27]
American popular science author Steven Johnson, in his book Mind Wide Open, quotes Huxley about his difficulties with visual encoding: "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon..." (Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, HarperPerennial, 1963, p. 15.)[28]

Personal life

He married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist.[29] In 1955, 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. Laura felt inspired to illuminate the story of their provocative marriage through Mary Ann Braubach's 2010 documentary, "Huxley on Huxley".[30]
In 1960 Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island,[31] and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen Institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement.[32]
Despite his interest in spirituality and mysticism, Huxley called himself an agnostic.[33]
Huxley was a close friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal and was involved in the creation of the Happy Valley School (now Besant Hill School of Happy Valley) in Ojai, California.
The most substantial collection of Huxley's few remaining papers (following the destruction of most in a fire) is at the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles.[34] Some are also at the Stanford University Library.[35]

Death

On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death[36] in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and a second dose a few hours later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 pm on 22 November 1963. Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day (as was the death of the British 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 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.[37] On 26 July 2013 a commemorative bench was unveiled there, donated by the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust and the International Aldous Huxley Society.
Huxley had been a long-time friend of famous Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who later dedicated his last orchestral composition to Huxley. Stravinsky began 'Variations' in Santa Fé, New Mexico in July 1963, and completed the composition in Hollywood on 28 October 1964. It was first performed in Chicago on 17 April 1965, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Craft (Spies 1965, 62; White 1979, 534)(White 1979, 536–37).
Although not composed for the purpose, Stravinsky's music was twice choreographed for the New York City Ballet by George Balanchine, a first version in 1966, and a second version in 1982, both times under the title "Variations" (Barnes 1966; Anderson 1982).
Huxley's literary legacy continues to be represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt.

Awards

Film adaptations of Huxley's work

Selected works

Novels

Short story collections

Poetry collections

  • Oxford Poetry (magazine editor) (1916)
  • The Burning Wheel (1916)
  • Jonah (1917)
  • The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918)
  • Leda (1920)
  • Selected Poems (1925)
  • Arabia Infelix and Other Poems (1929)
  • The Cicadas and Other Poems (1931)
  • Collected Poems (1971, posthumous)

Essay collections

Screenplays

Travel books

Children's fiction

Drama

  • The Discovery (adapted from Francis Sheridan, 1924)
  • The World of Light (1931)
  • Mortal Coils – A Play. (Stage version of The Gioconda Smile, 1948)
  • The Genius and the Goddess (stage version, co-written with Betty Wendel, 1958)
  • The Ambassador of Captripedia (1967)
  • Now More Than Ever (Huxley's lost play discovered in 2000 in the University of Münster, Germany's Department of English Literature)

Articles written for Vedanta and the West

  • Distractions (1941)
  • Distractions II (1941)
  • Action and Contemplation (1941)
  • An Appreciation (1941)
  • The Yellow Mustard (1941)
  • Lines (1941)
  • Some Reflections 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)

Audio Recordings on CD

Other

  • Pacifism and Philosophy (1936)
  • An Encyclopedia of Pacifism (editor, 1937)
  • Grey Eminence (1941)
  • The Devils of Loudun (1953)
  • The Politics of Ecology (1962)
  • Selected Letters (2007)

See also

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