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Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was an
English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family.
He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles
from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging
output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film
stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner
and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but
was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as
parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. 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.
 Early
years
Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was
the third son of the writer and professional herbalist Leonard Huxley by his
first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior's Field School, the niece of
Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. He was grandson of Thomas
Henry Huxley, one of the most prominent English naturalists of the 19th
century, a man known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His brother Julian Huxley was also
a noted biologist.
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. Three years
later he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left practically blind for
two to three years". Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in World
War I. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English
literature at Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 1916 with First Class
Honours.
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) was among his pupils, but was
remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep
discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. For
a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry.
But never desiring a career in administration (or in business), Huxley's lack of
inherited means propelled him into applied literary work.
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 World War I, 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 D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome
Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria
Nijs, a Belgian woman he had met at Garsington. They had one child, Matthew Huxley
(1920–2005), who had a career as an epidemiologist.
The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920's, where Huxley would visit
his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, he edited his
letters (1933).
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew,
and friend Gerald Heard. At this time Huxley wrote Ends and Means, while living in
Taos, New Mexico; in this work he explores 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, 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 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.
Aldous Huxley was close friends with Occidental College president Remsen Bird
during Huxley's time living in Southern California. He spent much time at the
college, which is located in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the
college is portrayed under the name of Tarzana College in his 1939 satircal novel
After Many a Summer, for which he collected that year's James Tait Black Memorial
Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period he was also able to tap into some Hollywood income using his
writing skills, thanks to an introduction into the business by his friend Anita
Loos, the prolific novelist and screenwriter. He received screen credit for Pride
and Prejudice, 1940, and was paid for his work on a number of other films. 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.
For most of his life since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind,
his eyesight was poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study
at Oxford). Around 1939 Huxley encountered the Bates Method for Natural Vision
Improvement and a teacher (Margaret Corbett) who was able to teach him in the
method. In 1940, relocating from Hollywood to a forty-acre ranchito in the high
desert hamlet of Llano, in northernmost Los Angeles County, Huxley claimed his
sight improved dramatically as a result of using the Bates Method, particularly
utilizing 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 spectacles 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).
However, while Huxley undoubtedly believed his vision had improved, other evidence
suggests that Huxley may have been fooling himself. 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 truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his
address—he had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought it closer and
closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch 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." (p. 241: quotes Bennett Cerf re Huxley's vision in
1952)
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". His
letter to Orwell contained the prediction that: "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".(p. 605:quotes Aldous Huxley re Huxley's opinions in 1949 about the
technologies to be employed by governments)
Later
years
After World War II Huxley applied for United States citizenship, but was denied
because he would not say he would take up arms to defend America. Nevertheless he
remained in the United States 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 the psychedelic drugs. In October of 1930, the Mystic 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 by the
psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953; on December 24, 1955, Huxley took his first
dosage 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. The title of the former became the
inspiration for the naming of the rock band, The Doors. 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 and in 1956 he remarried, to
Laura Archera, who was herself an author and who wrote a biography of Huxley.
In 1959 Aldous Huxley received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of
Merit for the Novel.
In 1960, Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer and, in the years that followed,
with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island, and gave lectures
on "Banana Potentialities" at the Esalen institute which were foundational 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, i.m.". According to her
account of his death (in her book This Timeless Moment), she obliged with an
injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died peacefully at
5:21 pm that afternoon, November 22, 1963. Media coverage of his death was
overshadowed by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which
occurred on the same day, as did the death of the British author C. S. Lewis.
Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, Compton,
Guildford, Surrey, England.
Descendants
Huxley's only child, son Matthew Huxley (d. Feb 10 2005) was also an author, as
well as an educator, anthropologist and prominent epidemiologist. His work ranged
from promoting universal health care to establishing standards of care for nursing
home patients and the mentally ill to investigating the question of what is a
socially sanctionable drug.
Matthew's first marriage, to documentary filmmaker Ellen Hovde, ended in divorce.
His second wife died in 1983. Survivors include his third wife, Franziska Reed
Huxley, a garden expert of Washington and Morgantown, WV.; two children from his
first marriage, Trevenen Huxley and Tessa Huxley, both of New York City; and two
grandchildren.
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. Following the exclusion
of Brave New World, Point Counter Point and even Island from Time magazine's list
of 'All-Time 100 Novels' there was uproar. One critic became particularly incensed,
proclaiming such a decision to be "blasphemous".
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 revaluation 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.".
A widespread fear of Americanization had already existed in Europe since the
mid-nineteenth century and Brave New World (1932) as well as Island (1962) form the
cornerstone of Huxley's damning indictment of American commercialism. Brave New
World (as well as 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".
He devoted his time at his small house at Llano in the Mojave Desert, Southern
California to a life of contemplation, mysticism and experimentation with
hallucinogenic drugs. His suggestions in The Doors of Perception (1954) that
mescalin 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 defence 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 Huxley appears on the sleeve of the Beatles' landmark 1967
album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The book also influenced rock musician
Jim Morrison to name his band The Doors.
His last novel, Island, was published in 1962, the year after his Los Angeles home
and most of his personal effects had been destroyed in a fire which Huxley said
left him 'a man without possessions and without a past'.
Films
Notable works include the original screenplay for Disney's animated Alice in
Wonderland (which was rejected because it was too literary), two productions of
Brave New World, one of Point Counter Point, one of Eyeless in Gaza, and one of Ape
and Essence. He was one of the screenwriters for the 1940 version of Pride and
Prejudice and co-authored the screenplay for the 1944 version of Jane Eyre with
John Houseman. Director Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, starring Vanessa
Redgrave, is adapted from Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, and a 1990
made-for-television film adaptation of Brave New World was directed by Burt
Brinckeroffer.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Aldous
Huxley - Manifestor - Biography
