Our first book club reading will be Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In this thread, contributors will be compiling background and context for the novel. We hope this information will help Lil' Lit League members to engage in a more insightful reading of the text and more lively online discussion. Additional comments to the context posts are welcomed and encouraged.
Reading schedule will follow shortly.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Aldous Huxley Biographical Short
ReplyDeleteAldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and school-master Leonard Huxley and Julia Arnold who founded Prior's Field School. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog") who famously defended Darwinism. His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Huxley had another brother Trevelyan (1891-1914) who committed suicide after a period of clinical depression.
Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside where his mother was his teacher 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 [him] 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, he taught French for a year at Eton. George Orwell (born Eric Blair) was among his pupils but Huxley was remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Orwell and others were impressed by his use of words.
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. Mustapha Mond is a character in the book.
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.
In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, till 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 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.
During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a writer but he was not very successful as his complex writing didn’t fit well into dialogues.
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." In his letter to Orwell, he predicted 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."[7]
After World War II Huxley applied for United States citizenship, but his application was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U.S., so he withdrew it. Nevertheless, he remained in the country. 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 occultist 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 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", 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. 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.
Historical Context
ReplyDeleteAlthough the novel is set in the future, it contains contemporary issues of the early 20th century. The Industrial Revolution was bringing about massive changes to the world. Mass production had made cars, telephones and radios relatively cheap and widely available throughout the developed world. And, the political and economic instability that resulted from the First World War created an environment ripe for authoritarian rule.
The events that occurred during and after the First World War were particularly influential in providing context for Huxley's novel. The combination of modern weaponry (tanks, grenades, flamethrowers, machine guns and poison gas) and antiquated military tactics (trench warfare) resulted in an unprecedented number of casualties and convinced many people that virtue and justice were things of the past. This, along with the technological innovations occurring at the time, marked the beginning of a post-modern period in social, cultural, and political thought.
The First World War also set the stage for the rise of totalitarian and authoritarian rule around the world. The Russian Revolution of 1917 gave birth to a communist dictatorship. While similar political and economic conditions in Italy and Spain led those countries to put their trust in fascist regimes just a few years later.
These events provide the context for Huxley’s Brave New World. He used settings and characters from his science fiction novel to express widely held opinions, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Not only was Huxley outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity, and inward-looking nature of many Americans, he also found a book by Henry Ford on the boat to America. There was a fear of Americanization in Europe, so to see America firsthand, as well as read the ideas and plans of one of its foremost citizens, spurred Huxley to write Brave New World with America in mind.