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Every article on Aldous Huxley starts by noting his famous family—grandfather T.H. Huxley the scientist and supporter of Darwin's evolution theory, father Leonard the literary editor, and brother Julian the prominent biologist. His main personal claim to fame is always listed as the science fiction novel Brave New World. (The game Trivial Pursuit even has an answer that mistakenly attributes the origin of the phrase "brave new world" to him.) But in the first half of the twentieth century Aldous Huxley was considered one of the great intellects of the era, as he produced a wide range of novels, travel books, histories, poems, plays, and essays on philosophy, arts, religion and psychology. The 1960s saw a resurgence of interest in Huxley's later works on mysticism, drugs, sex and utopianism. Today his early literary novels are still studied, though not read by the intelligent general public as they once were. In some ways this is too bad, as the concerns that his "novels of ideas" raised are still with us. However his characters' statement of those ideas is somewhat dated and their aristocratic and artistic milieus are difficult to identify with today. If you can get past that though, you may find his best novels quite provocative—and viciously funny in places. Huxley came from a well-to-do background himself, was educated at Eton and Oxford. After the First World War (he was kept out of the fighting by near-blindness), he wrote for a literary publication, while publishing poetry and stories. His first novel was Crome Yellow (1921), which wittily satirized the intellectual pretensions of his upper-crust friends—although he denied this, saying the characters in the novel were just stick figures created to present ideas. His next novel was Antic Hay (1923), my personal favourite, which parodied the bohemian community in post-war London—while creating a couple of ridiculously tragic characters who have stayed in my memory for years. Whenever I run across a self-important artist I think of the hopelessly deluded Casimir Lypiatt. Point Counter Point (1928) is held to be Huxley's greatest literary production, and it does present some more wicked parodies of contemporary intellectuals, his friends the novelist D.H. Lawrence and the critic Middleton Murry, as well as create some lost figures in touching situations. But the characters' ideas are played off against against each other at much wordier length than in Crome Yellow and the tone is more cynical. Brave New World (1932) is the novel that has most connected with the public, having been cited with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (with which it is frequently confused), as one of the two great works of the century depicting a future in which science and technology are used to repress the human spirit. In his writing to this point, Huxley had been increasingly concerned
with the loss of spirituality in a scientific age, and his last great
novel,
Brave New World Revisited (1959) was a non-fiction sequel to his most popular novel and brought his dystopia into the nuclear era. Island (1962), on the other hand, was his attempt to put forward a utopian alternative, although he ended by accepting it was impractical. One other thing Aldous Huxley is famous for: asking for and taking LSD as he lay dying. A seeker to the end. And still a provocative read, whether you agree with him or find him misguided. Huxley presents so many ideas. and ideas about ideas, that I imagine almost any reader would both agree with him in parts and find him hopelessly misguided in other parts (I know I do). Which makes him required reading for everyone, in my books. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2002—2008 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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HUXLEY, Aldous 
After this, Huxley's
work drew less attention, although there are numerous fans of his
non-fictional works: