CHAPTER ONE

AROUND THE WORLD IN 264 DAYS

As late as 1929, Aldous Huxley had no interest in and even no sympathy for utopian or futuristic fiction. In “Spinoza’s Worm”, an essay whose images and examples he would repeat a number of times, he dismissed it, commenting:

My own feeling, whenever I see a book about the Future, is one of boredom and exasperation. What on earth is the point of troubling one’s head with speculation about what men may, but almost certainly will not, be like in A. D. 20,000?1

Earlier in Those Barren Leaves (1925), his character Chelifer dismisses Utopia as a state of total boredom:

… in the Utopian state where everybody is well-off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen.2

These words cut ironically across his career, because in 1929 he was but two years away from writing Brave New World, thus creating the best known, most studied, most censored, and most discussed utopian world of the twentieth century. Since the book’s publication in 1932, its British and American publishers have printed over ten million paperback copies. Although Huxley did not recognize it in 1929, he had already gathered most of the materials that would go into the making of Brave New World. From the time he and Maria sailed aboard the S.S. Genova from Naples on September 15, 1925 until they disembarked at Southampton the following year on June 5, 1926, a nine-months’ trip around the world, Huxley experienced four distinctly different worlds, each of which would contribute directly to his utopian novel and each of which would challenge his views on culture in very different ways:

1 Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will, London, 1929, 71. 2 Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves, London, 1950, 317. 2 Wandering into Brave New World first, the subcontinent of greater India across its northern reaches; second, the tropical world we now call Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines; third, the Native American world of the Southwestern United States; and finally, the roaring Twenties urban centers of movietown Los Angeles (where Huxley would eventually come to live from 1937 until his death in 1963), speakeasy gangster land Chicago, and sophisticated New York City. The immediate result of the trip was Jesting Pilate (1926),3 diffident and informal travel book, which Nicholas Murray describes as “full of characteristic and stimulating lucubrations [but] not always very profound in its sounding of other cultures”,4 and which Peter Firchow has even more accurately called “a fascinating travelogue of a man in search of the truth but too pressed to stay for a definite answer”.5 In all, the Huxleys visited forty-seven cities and sites, half of them in India, a handful of them on no tourist maps of the time. Why did Huxley decide to travel around the world in 1925? True, he was always noticeably restless, and during his lifetime visited at least sixty countries on five continents. After settling in the United States in 1937, his letters record a constant crossing and recrossing of the continent by car and plane as well as numerous trips abroad after World War II. It is not clear that Huxley himself fully understood what propelled him on his adventures in 1925. He may have been searching for material for a new novel, because Those Barren Leaves had little of the spark and dazzle of Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), suggesting that the creative vision he brought to the British social and intellectual scene had somewhat faded. He had written both Crome Yellow and Antic Hay in two months each, but Those Barren Leaves had taken four months, and he was not satisfied with it. He wrote to Naomi Mitchison that he considered his three works “jejune and shallow and off the point. All I’ve written so far has been off the point.”6 There were, though, other pressures on his life. He could have been escaping from the pressures of his two-volumes a year contract, or fleeing the chaos Mussolini’s Blackshirts brought into his life by

3 Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: Travels through India, Burma, Malaya, Japan, China and America, New York, 1991. 4 Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York, 2002,173. 5 Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, Minneapolis, MN, 1972, 124. 6 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York, 1974, 152.