Aldous Huxley
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Huxley in 1954
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| Born | Aldous Leonard Huxley 26 July 1894 Godalming, Surrey, England |
| Died | 22 November 1963 (aged 69) Los Angeles County, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Compton, Surrey, England |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Eton College |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Notable works | |
| Spouses |
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| Children | Matthew Huxley |
| Signature |  |
Philosophy career | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Perennialism |
Main interests
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Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism and universalism, addressing these subjects with works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945)—which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism—and The Doors of Perception (1954)—which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
Early life
English Heritage blue plaque at 16 Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead, London, commemorating Aldous, his brother Julian, and father Leonard
Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley, who edited Cornhill Magazine, 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. Humphry 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
Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who took his own life after a period of clinical depression.
As a child, Huxley's nickname was "Ogie", short for "Ogre". He was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently "[contemplated] the strangeness of things". According to his cousin and contemporary, Gervas Huxley, he had an early interest in drawing.
Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming. He was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside he went on to Eton College. His mother died in 1908, when he was 14 (his father later remarried). He contracted the eye disease Keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years." This "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor." In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited Oxford Poetry in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA 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.
Following his years at Balliol, Huxley, being financially indebted to
his father, decided to find employment. He taught French for a year at Eton College, where Eric Blair (who was to take the pen name George Orwell) and Steven Runciman
were among his pupils. He was mainly remembered as being an incompetent
schoolmaster unable to keep order in class. Nevertheless, Blair and
others spoke highly of his excellent command of language.
Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England. According to the introduction to the latest edition of his science fiction novel Brave New World
(1932), the experience he had there of "an ordered universe in a world
of planless incoherence" was an important source for the novel.
Career
Painting of Huxley in 1927 by John Collier
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and
began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a
successful writer and social satirist. His first published novels were
social satires, Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World was his fifth novel and first dystopian work. In the 1920s he was also a contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue magazines.
Contact with the 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 near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. There he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. Jobs were very scarce, but in 1919 John Middleton Murry 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. They lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence's letters (1932).
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, set in a dystopian London, 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.
Beginning in 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.
Life in the United States
In 1937 Huxley moved to Hollywood with his wife Maria, son Matthew Huxley, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, until his death, and also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means (published in 1937). The book contains tracts on war, religion, nationalism and ethics.
Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti,
whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti entered
into an enduring exchange (sometimes edging on debate) over many years,
with Krishnamurti representing the more rarefied, detached, ivory-tower
perspective and Huxley, with his pragmatic concerns, the more socially
and historically informed position. Huxley provided an introduction to
Krishnamurti's quintessential statement, The First and Last Freedom (1954).
Huxley also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long afterward, 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 a British literary award, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period, Huxley earned a substantial income as a Hollywood screenwriter; Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography My Guru and His Disciple, states that Huxley earned more than $3,000 per week (approximately $50,000
in 2020 dollars) as a screenwriter, and that he used much of it to
transport Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's
Germany to the US. In March 1938, Huxley's friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which hired him for Madame Curie which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. (Eventually, the film was 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). He was commissioned by Walt Disney in 1945 to write a script based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the biography of the story's author, Lewis Carroll. The script was not used, however.
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.
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 narcohypnosis 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.
Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed
world might make for itself. From these, he made 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 persuasion; the tendency to
promote modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed
commodities.
In the fall semester of 1960, Huxley was invited by Professor Huston Smith to be the Carnegie Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
As part of the MIT centennial program of events organised by the
Department of Humanities, Huxley presented a series of lectures titled,
"What a Piece of Work is a Man" which concerned history, language, and
art.
Post-World War II life
In 1953, Huxley and Maria applied for United States citizenship
and presented themselves for examination. When Huxley refused to bear
arms for the U.S. and would not state that his objections were based on
religious ideals, the only excuse allowed under the McCarran Act, the judge had to adjourn the proceedings. He withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the U.S. In 1959 Huxley turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government
without putting forward a reason; his brother Julian had been knighted
in 1958, while another brother Andrew would be knighted in 1974.
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.
In 1944, Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God", translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, which was published by the Vedanta Society of Southern California.
From 1941 until 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. Nonetheless, Huxley's agnosticism, together with his
speculative propensity, made it difficult for him to fully embrace any
form of institutionalised religion.
Psychedelic drug use and mystical experiences
In the spring of 1953, Huxley had his first experience with the psychedelic drug mescaline. Huxley had initiated a correspondence with Doctor Humphry Osmond,
a British psychiatrist then employed in a Canadian institution, and
eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline; Osmond obliged and
supervised Huxley's session in southern California. After the
publication of The Doors of Perception,
in which he recounted this experience, Huxley and Swami Prabhavananda
disagreed about the meaning and importance of the psychedelic 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. Huxley later had an experience on mescaline that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception.
Huxley wrote that "The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it
is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of
himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less
self-centered and more creative life."
Eyesight
Huxley in 1947, his right eye affected by Keratitis he contracted in 1911
Differing accounts exist about the details of the quality of Huxley's
eyesight at specific points in his life. In about 1939 Huxley
encountered the Bates method for better eyesight, and a teacher, Margaret Darst Corbett, who was able to teach the method to him. In 1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (16 ha) ranchito in the high desert hamlet of Llano, California, in northern 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 more than 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 (U.S.), 1943 (UK). The book contained some
generally disputed theories, and its publication created a growing
degree of popular controversy about Huxley's eyesight.
It was, and is, widely believed that Huxley was nearly blind since the illness in his teens, despite the partial recovery that had enabled him to study at Oxford. For example, 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".
Brazilian author João Ubaldo Ribeiro,
who as a young journalist spent several evenings in the Huxleys'
company in the late 1950s, wrote that Huxley had said to him, with a wry
smile, "I can hardly see at all. And I don't give a damn, really".
On the other hand, Huxley's second wife, Laura Archera, later emphasised 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 tempered her statement with, "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".
Laura Huxley proceeded to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency
peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, agrees 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.
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 ...".
Personal life
Huxley married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, Oxfordshire, 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. In 1955, Maria Huxley died of cancer.
In 1956, Huxley married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author, as well as a violinist and psychotherapist. She wrote This Timeless Moment, a biography of Huxley. She told the story of their marriage through Mary Ann Braubach's 2010 documentary, Huxley on Huxley.
Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960; in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" both at the UCSF Medical Center and at the Esalen Institute. These lectures were fundamental to the beginning of the Human Potential Movement.
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. Some are also at the Stanford University Libraries.
On 9 April 1962, Huxley was informed he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, the senior literary organisation in Britain, and he accepted the title via letter on 28 April 1962. The correspondence between Huxley and the society is kept at the Cambridge University Library. The society invited Huxley to appear at a banquet and give a lecture at Somerset House,
London in June 1963. Huxley wrote a draft of the speech he intended to
give at the society; however, his deteriorating health meant he was not
able to attend.
Death
On his deathbed, unable to speak owing to advanced laryngeal cancer, Huxley made a written request to his wife Laura for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular." According to her account of his death in This Timeless Moment,
she obliged with an injection at 11:20 a.m. and a second dose an hour
later; Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. (Los Angeles time), on 22
November 1963.
Media coverage of Huxley's death, along with that of fellow British author C. S. Lewis, was overshadowed by the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy on the same day, less than seven hours before Huxley's death. In an article for New York magazine titled "The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club", Christopher Bonanos wrote,
The championship trophy for badly timed death, though, goes to a pair of British writers. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, died the same day as C. S. Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia series. Unfortunately for both of their legacies, that day was November 22, 1963, just as John Kennedy's motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. Huxley, at least, made it interesting: At his request, his wife shot him up with LSD a couple of hours before the end, and he tripped his way out of this world.
This coincidence served as the basis for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley, which imagines a conversation among the three men taking place in Purgatory following their deaths.
Huxley's memorial service took place in London in December 1963; it was led by his elder brother Julian. On 27 October 1971 his ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, Guildford, Surrey, England.
Huxley had been a long-time friend of 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.
Awards
- 1939: James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for After Many a Summer Dies the Swan)
- 1959: American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit (for Brave New World).
- 1962: Companion of Literature (Royal Society of Literature)
Film adaptations of Huxley's work
- 1968: Point Counter Point (BBC miniseries by Simon Raven)
- 1971: The Devils (The Devils of Loudun adapted by Ken Russell)
- 1980: Brave New World (American TV adaptation)
- 1998: Brave New World (American TV adaptation)
