DOCSLIB.ORG

As Late As 1929, Aldous Huxley Had No Interest in and Even No Sympathy for Utopian Or Futuristic Fiction

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
As Late As 1929, Aldous Huxley Had No Interest in and Even No Sympathy for Utopian Or Futuristic Fiction 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. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited Ebook
    BRAVE NEW WORLD & BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Aldous Huxley | 340 pages | 01 Jun 2004 | HarperCollins Publishers Inc | 9780060535261 | English | New York, NY, United States Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited PDF Book I Brave New World A difficult book to rate. It will spread, not through government policy but through the choices of individual parents, likely accelerating as the technology becomes cheaper and more efficient. Brave New World A difficult book to rate. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from until his death in Toward the end of the story, can the reader maintain that safe distance? His letter to Orwell after the younger man sent him a copy of seems touchy The non-fiction work Brave New World Revisited , published in , is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World , including the threats to humanity, such as over-population, propaganda, and chemical persuasion. That's the tragedy of Brave New World Amazing thing being, Huxley extrapolated the contents of this entire book just from a single TV interview which he gave being disillusioned about how his fantasy can easily get real soon. He is unusually short for an Alpha; an alleged accident with alcohol in Bernard's blood- surrogate before his decanting has left him slightly stunted. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World'.
    [Show full text]
  • The Neo-Vedanta Philosophy of Swami Vivekananda
    VEDA’S JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (JOELL) Vol.6 Issue 4 An International Peer Reviewed (Refereed) Journal 2019 Impact Factor (SJIF) 4.092 http://www.joell.in RESEARCH ARTICLE THE NEO-VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA Tania Baloria (Ph.D Research Scholar, Jaipur National University, Jagatpura, Jaipur.) doi: https://doi.org/10.33329/joell.64.19.108 ABSTRACT This paper aims to evaluate the interpretation of Swami Vivekananda‘s Neo-Vedanta philosophy.Vedanta is the philosophy of Vedas, those Indian scriptures which are the most ancient religious writings now known to the world. It is the philosophy of the self. And the self is unchangeable. It cannot be called old self and new self because it is changeless and ultimate. So the theory is also changeless. Neo- Vedanta is just like the traditional Vedanta interpreted with the perspective of modern man and applied in practical-life. By the Neo-Vedanta of Swami Vivekananda is meant the New-Vedanta as distinguished from the old traditional Vedanta developed by Sankaracharya (c.788 820AD). Neo-Vedantism is a re- establishment and reinterpretation Of the Advaita Vedanta of Sankara with modern arguments, in modern language, suited to modern man, adjusting it with all the modern challenges. In the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century many masters used Vedanta philosophy for human welfare. Some of them were Rajarammohan Roy, Swami DayanandaSaraswati, Sri CattampiSwamikal, Sri Narayana Guru, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, and Ramana Maharsi. Keywords: Female subjugation, Religious belief, Liberation, Chastity, Self-sacrifice. Author(s) retain the copyright of this article Copyright © 2019 VEDA Publications Author(s) agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License .
    [Show full text]
  • Psychedelics and Entheogens: Implications of Administration in Medical and Non- Medical Contexts
    Psychedelics and Entheogens: Implications of Administration in Medical and Non- Medical Contexts by Hannah Rae Kirk A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Honors Baccalaureate of Science in Biology (Honors Scholar) Presented May 23, 2018 Commencement June 2018 AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Hannah Rae Kirk for the degree of Honors Baccalaureate of Science in Biology presented on May 23, 2018. Title: Psychedelics and Entheogens: Implications of Administration in Medical and Non-Medical Contexts. Abstract approved:_____________________________________________________ Robin Pappas Psychedelics and entheogens began as religious sacraments. They were apotheosized for their mind-expanding powers and were thought to open realms to the world of the Gods. It was not until the first psychedelic compound was discovered in a laboratory setting a mere hundred years ago that they entered into formal scientific study. Although they were initially well-received in academic and professional circles, research into their potential was interrupted when they were made illegal. Only recently have scientists renewed the investigation of psychedelic substances, in the hope of demonstrating their potential in understanding and healing the human mind. This thesis will explore the history of psychedelics and entheogens, consider the causes behind the prohibition of their research, and outline their reintroduction into current scientific research. Psychedelic compounds have proven to be magnifiers of the mind and, under appropriate circumstances, can act as medicaments in both therapeutic and non-medical contexts. By exploring the journey of psychedelic substances from sacraments, to therapeutic aids, to dangerous drugs, and back again, this thesis will highlight what is at stake when politics and misinformation suppresses scientific research.
    [Show full text]
  • Mysticism and Pacifism
    Chapter 4 Mysticism and Pacifism Huxley’s mystical turn in the mid-1930s was intimately associated with paci- fism, and his pacifist convictions were reinforced by the mystical philosophy of Gerald Heard and Jiddu Krishnamurti. As noted in Chapter 1, Huxley’s involve- ment with Ottoline Morrell and the Garsington set during World War i had led him to adopt a pacifist position, and the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and the imperial tensions of the 1930s had done nothing to change his mind. His disparaging article “What Gandhi Fails to See” (1930), would seem to contradict this statement, but Huxley was not objecting to Gandhi as a pacifist but as an “ascetic salvationist” whose spirituality blinded him to inconvenient facts, such as the “distressingly easy passage from non-violence to violence”,1 or the fact that reverting to a pre-industrial civilisation, as Gandhi was advocating, would entail the “death by starvation of millions upon millions of human be- ings” (in other words, the exponential increase in population made possible by industrialisation).2 Huxley’s interest in mysticism had been dampened by his trip to India and south-east Asia in 1925–26. In the article, Gandhi is pilloried as a representative of the kind of Hindu spirituality that Huxley had deplored in Jesting Pilate (1926): “To my mind ‘spirituality’ […] is the primal curse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes. […] A little less spirituality and the Indians would now be free – free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions”.3 But as the 1930s progressed, Huxley was compelled by personal circumstances to re-evaluate his opinion of both Gandhi and mysticism and by 1936 he was publicly advocating satyagraha and practising meditation with Gerald Heard and members of the Peace Pledge Union (ppu).
    [Show full text]
  • The Thought of Aldous Huxley M
    The Thought of Aldous Huxley M. M. Kirkwood University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1937, pp. 189-198 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549974 [ Access provided at 12 Oct 2020 10:12 GMT from USP-Universidade de São Paulo ] THE THOUGHT OF ALDOUS HUXLEY M. M . KIRKWOOD N an article which appeared in the London Mercury of January, 1933, G. K. Chesterton placed Huxley I among the young moderns whom he attacked as "witty, brilliant and fashionable bankrupts." This view of Huxley in particular has been a common one, for brilliance and wit animate whatever he writes, and, having written for a world that wanted to be amused, he has become fashionable. Mr. Chester to ~' understood him merely to mock, as one having no religious belief and seeing no purpose in the world or in the will. Whether this be a real aspe.ct of his work or not, readers have not found it easy to resist a writer who remarks in connection wi th one of his characters that "no chameleon can live with comfort on a tartan," and who concludes his descrip­ tion of his own agonie,s during a first ride on an elephant with the comment, "I returned full of admiration for Hannibal. He crossed the Alps on an elephant." Numerous quips by Huxley include the statement that "Puritans like to wear the fig-leaf over the mouth," while in a serious essay on the evolution of theologies, he uses the astonishing figure, "Men's religious life works on the principle of a hot-water system." Huxley's voca bulary is no less en tertaining than his figures of coml?arison, and we find ourselves stimulated if not always illuminated by "minusculous" and "callipygous," "wamblingly" and "bombinating," "geodesic" and "mixo­ Iydian." It is as if the creator of "brillig" and "slithy toves" had come to life again, challenging us to under­ stand as well as to enjoy him.
    [Show full text]
  • About Pythagoras, Problem Solving, 1981, 071 3 (5/6), 1–11
    Revised version of: The “truth” about Pythagoras, Problem Solving, 1981, 071 3 (5/6), 1–11. How Did Pythagoras Do It? Although geometry had been my favorite subject in high school, and in 1937 I was nearly halfway to a never finished doctorate in mathematics, no one had ever told me that Pythagoras had probably proved his theorem (if, indeed, it was he who proved it) by an intuitively much more convincing method than the algebraic development we had been taught in school. I happened upon that revelation in “Young Archimedes”, a short story by Aldous Huxley, which, unlike algebra, made an indelible impression on me.1 I found it once more in print 40 years later in Ackermann’s Theories of Knowledge.2 Seeing it neatly drawn in black and white helped me formulate a question from my vague feeling of wonder: How could Pythagoras ever have thought of that proof if he didn’t already have an idea of what he wanted to prove? It’s plausible that, in some context or other (or even just doodling) one might draw a square and place two crossed perpendiculars in it, so that the area is divided into two equal rectangles and two unequal squares. It’s also conceivable that one might add diagonals to each of the rectangles, still without the presupposition of any particular plan (Fig.1). Then. however, to draw a second square and to arrange the four triangles in the particular way necessary to prove a theorem one does not yet know (Fig.2)—that is something that seems very unlikely to be purely fortuitous.
    [Show full text]
  • Brave New World Mindless Hedonism ALDOUS HUXLEY and Consumerism Chatto & Windus: 1932
    COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS by eugenics, drugs, Brave New World mindless hedonism ALDOUS HUXLEY and consumerism Chatto & Windus: 1932. seemed to scorn that rosy view. Although it was lauded by some, including the logician and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell, the science boosters felt that Huxley had let the side down. Nature’s reviewer at the time of publication sniffed that “biology is itself too surprising to be really amus- COLLECTION/ALAMY CSU ARCHIVES/EVERETT ing material for fiction”. That reviewer was Charlotte Haldane, whose then husband, the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, was not averse to predicting the future himself — but in a more optimistic vein. Gradually, as the star of science waned in the nuclear shadow of Hiroshima and the cold war, Brave New World came to be seen as prophetic. But although its status as a clas- sic of twentieth-century literature is rightly secure, what it says about technological development is too often misconstrued. FEARS FOR THE FUTURE Huxley’s brave new world leaned heavily on the technologies that Haldane had forecast in his essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), particularly the idea of ectogenesis — the gestation of embryos and fetuses in artificial containers. For Haldane, this was a eugenic technique that could improve the human race — as his friend and Aldous’s brother, the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, also believed. Aldous here, as else- where, sided with Russell, who had warned, “I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy.” In a 1932 article, biochemist and Sinophile Joseph Needham described Brave New World as a note-perfect realization of Russell’s concerns.
    [Show full text]
  • Cambridge Books Online
    Cambridge Books Online http://universitypublishingonline.org/ The Cambridge History of the English Novel Edited by Robert L. Caserio, Clement Hawes Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952 Online ISBN: 9781139013796 Hardback ISBN: 9780521194952 Chapter 38 - Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: t he modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II) pp. 612-628 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.040 Cambridge University Press 38 Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel’s experiments with narrative (ii) jonathan greenberg 1 “So much life with (so to speak) so little living” – thus Henry James disparages the fiction of H. G. Wells during a debate about the nature of the novel that helps to establish the canon of modern fiction. Whereas the canonical modernists – Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence – follow James in devel- oping narrative and linguistic innovations to accommodate a newly scrupu- lous attention to epistemology and psychology, the seven writers surveyed here generally spurn stream of consciousness, often appear indifferent to the exploration of the psyche, and sometimes follow Wells in renouncing Jamesian formal unity. Thus E. M. Forster breaks with modernist practice in relying on a prominent, moralizing narrator, Wyndham Lewis attacks his contemporaries’ obsession with interiority, and Wells and Aldous Huxley embrace a didacticism at odds with reigning protocols. Ronald Firbank, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Henry Green follow James in their attention to style, but they depart from modernist orthodoxy in representing surfaces rather than depths. In voice, structure, style, and characterization, however, a rebellious spirit in all these novelists challenges both inherited and emergent ideas of what a novel is and how a novel’s prose can read.
    [Show full text]
  • Aldous Huxley - Wikipedia
    3/4/2021 Aldous Huxley - Wikipedia Aldous Huxley Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and Aldous Huxley philosopher.[1][2][3][4] He wrote nearly fifty books[5][6]—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.[7] By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time.[8] He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times[9] and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.[10] Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism[11][12] and universalism,[13] 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. Huxley in 1954 Born Aldous Leonard Huxley 26 July 1894 Contents Godalming, Surrey, England Early
    [Show full text]
  • Gregory Rich Aldous Huxley Characterized Time Must Have A
    “Life After Death in Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop ” Gregory Rich Aldous Huxley characterized Time Must Have a Stop as “a piece of the Comedie Humaine that modulates into a version of the Divina Commedia ” (qtd. in Woodcock 229). To be sure, some of the dialogue includes good-natured banter, frivolous wit, and self-deprecating humor. But some of the human comedy goes further and satirizes human imperfections. For instance, the novel portrays a “jaded pasha” ( Time 67), most interested in his own pleasure, a pretentious scholarly man who talks too much ( Time 79), and a beautiful young woman who believes that the essence of life is “pure shamelessness” and lives accordingly ( Time 128). Some of the novel’s comedy is darkly pessimistic. For example, there are references to the cosmic joke of good intentions leading to disaster ( Time 194). And there are sarcastic indictments of religion, science, politics, and education ( Time 163-64). In the middle of the novel, when one of the main characters dies, the scene shifts to an after-life realm, to something like a divine-comedy realm. Both Dante’s Divine Comedy and Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop depict an after-death realm but provide different descriptions of it. In Dante’s book, a living man takes a guided tour of hell and sees the punishments that 2 have been divinely assigned for various serious sins. In contrast, Huxley’s book depicts the experiences of a man after he has died. He seems to be in some kind of dream world, where there is no regular succession of time or fixed sense of place ( Time 222).
    [Show full text]
  • Jerom E Meckier CANCER in UTOPIA: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE ELEMENTS in HUXLEY's ISLAND Fur Years Aldous Huxley Regarded Utopians Wi
    Jerome Meckier CANCER IN UTOPIA: POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ELEMENTS IN HUXLEY'S ISLAND Fur years Aldous Huxley regarded utopians with disfavor. Their countries of the mind were compensatory dreams inspired by acute disappointment with reality. "My own feeling, whenever I see a book about the Future," Huxley wrote in Do What Y vu Will," is one of boredom and exasperation. What on earth is the point of troubling one's head with speculations about what men may, but almost certainly will not, be like in A.D. 20,000?" Despite the disclaimer, Huxley could not resist troubling his head about the future. The struggle between utopian and dyst opian elements in his prophecies about the world to come remained a pervasive counterpoint in his thought and art. When Island appeared in 1962, Huxley's version of the earthly paradise received harsh treatment from readers whom Brave New World and Ape and Essence had taught to be sceptical of perfectibilitarians. Yet Island was not just another pious daydream. I have argued previously1 that the novel embodies a collection of the right responses to problems that the brave new world handled badly. But there is even more to the novel than that. Unlike News f rom Nowhere, Looking Backward, and other positive views of the future, Island can be defended as· a reasonably complex novel in which a would-be utopian's attempt at optimism is challenged by the possibility that his characters inhabit a Manichean universe. If evil exists even in the earthly paradise, then utopia as one customarily imagines it is an impossibility, unless one can redefine one's conception of perfection so as to include the negative factors that appear to compromise it.
    [Show full text]
  • Crome Yellow Online
    cXKt6 [Get free] Crome Yellow Online [cXKt6.ebook] Crome Yellow Pdf Free Aldous Huxley ePub | *DOC | audiobook | ebooks | Download PDF Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook #1168503 in eBooks 2013-12-01 2013-12-01File Name: B00HDXN6XU | File size: 61.Mb Aldous Huxley : Crome Yellow before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised Crome Yellow: 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Aldous Huxley- young adult authorBy Christopher (o.d.c.)Publication date: 1921Huxley's first novel, written in imitation of such books as Headlong Hall and South Wind.A country visit is the occasion for the wine and conversation to flow freely- thus, the fledgling poet Denis, the older intellectual, Scogan, somewhat past his prime, Wimbush, the antiquarian, who has some pretty entertaining accounts of his ancestors (really just short stories- like many a first novel, it has the flavor of a "Collected Works.")I'd even call it a 'young adult' novel, insofar as the protagonist, Denis, is preoccupied with his lack of success with women. Of course, it would be for young adults studying for their SATs- I counted five 'SAT words' in one sentence at one point:"... For the sake of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The *meridian* demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless *post-prandial* melancholy which the *coenobites* of old knew and feared under the name of "accidie."(Note that he solves the problem with something unavailable to the 'coenobites of old,' namely gin.)My favorite 'set piece' in this assemblage of set pieces, one I remember well from twenty years ago, is Denis explaining to Scogan how poetical and marvelous the word 'carminative' seemed until, using it in a poem, he has to look up the meaning."..
    [Show full text]