Aldous Leonard Huxley Born: July 26, 1894. Godalming, Surrey, England. Died: November 22, 1963. Los Angeles, CA.

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in Surrey, England, on July 26, 1894, into a family that included some of the most distinguished members of that part of the English ruling class made up of the intellectual elite. He was the third son of Dr. Leonard Huxley and Julia Arnold. Aldous' father was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a great biologist who helped develop the theory of evolution. His mother was the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist; the niece of Matthew Arnold, the poet; and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, a famous educator and the real-life headmaster of Rugby School who became a character in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Undoubtedly, Huxley's heritage and upbringing had an effect on his work. Gerald Heard, a longtime friend, said that Huxley's ancestry "brought down on him a weight of intellectual authority and a momentum of moral obligations." Throughout Brave New World you can see evidence of an ambivalent attitude toward such authority assumed by a ruling class.

Like the England of his day, Huxley's Utopia possesses a rigid class structure, one even stronger than England's because it is biologically and chemically engineered and psychologically conditioned. And the members of Brave New World's ruling class certainly believe they possess the right to make everyone happy by denying them love and freedom.

Huxley's own experiences made him stand apart from the class into which he was born. Even as a small child he was considered different, showing an alertness, an intelligence, what his brother called a superiority. He was respected and loved--not hated--for these abilities, but he drew on that feeling of separateness in writing Brave New World. Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, both members of the elite class, have problems because they're different from their peers. Huxley felt that heredity made each individual unique, and the uniqueness of the individual was essential to freedom. Like his family, and like the Alphas of Brave New World, Huxley felt a moral obligation -- but it was the obligation to fight the idea that happiness could be achieved through class-instituted slavery of even the most benevolent kind.

Another event that marked Huxley was his mother's death from cancer when he was 14. This, he said later, gave him a sense of the transience of human happiness. Perhaps you can also see the influence of his loss in Brave New World. The Utopians go to great lengths to deny the unpleasantness of death, and to find perpetual happiness. But the cost is very great. By denying themselves unpleasant emotions they deny themselves deeply joyous ones as well. Their happiness can be continued endlessly by taking the drug soma by making love, or by playing Obstacle Golf, but this happiness is essentially shallow. Standing in contrast to the Utopians are the Savages on the Reservation in New Mexico: poor, dirty, subject to the ills of old age and painful death, but, Huxley seems to believe, blessed with a happiness that while still transient is deeper and more real than that enjoyed by the inhabitants of London and the rest of the World State.

When Huxley was 16 and a student at the prestigious school Eton, an eye illness made him nearly blind. He recovered enough vision to go on to Oxford University and graduate with honors, but not enough to fight in World War I, an important experience for many of his friends, or to do the scientific work he had dreamed of. Scientific ideas remained with him, however, and he used them in many of his books, particularly Brave New World. The idea of vision also remained important to him; his early novels contain scenes that seem ideal for motion pictures, and he later became a screenwriter.

"I was educated," he writes, "at Eton, which I left at seventeen owing to an affliction of the eyes which left me practically blind for two or three years, an event which prevented me from becoming a complete public-school English gentleman. Providence is sometimes kind even when it seems to be harsh. My temporary blindness also preserved me from becoming a doctor, for which I am also grateful. For seeing that I nearly died of overwork as a journalist, I should infallibly have killed myself in the much more strenuous profession of medicine. On the other hand, I very much regret the scientific training which my blindness made me miss. It is ludicrous to live in the twentieth century equipped with an elegant literary training eminently suitable for the seventeenth. As soon as I could see well enough to read through a magnifying glass, I went to Oxford, where I took my degree in English literature. Two years of my time at Oxford were years of the war. During the remainder of the war I cut down trees, worked in a government office -- as long as my sight would stand the strain -- and taught at school."

He entered the literary world while he was at Oxford, meeting writers like Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell and becoming close friends with D. H. Lawrence, with whom you might think he had almost nothing in common. His years of journalism included music and art criticism, articles on architecture and house decoration, and book reviews. In this period he began the writing of poems, essays, and historical pieces which he has continued throughout his literary career, but it was as a satirical novelist that he first caught the public fancy.

Huxley established his reputation before he was thirty and was a prolific writer. Having contributed to poetry magazines, he published his first book, The Burning Wheel, a volume of poems, in 1916. There followed three more volumes of verse before his first prose work, Limbo, was brought out in 1920. Although doing editorial work for the London House and Garden at the time, Huxley wrote in quick succession a number of books which included Crome Yellow, his first novel. Mortal Coils, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Point Counterpoint, Brave New World, Texts and Pretexts, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Olive Tree were among the books which followed.

He married Maria Nys, a Belgian, in 1919. Their only child, Matthew Huxley, was born in 1920. The family divided their time between London and Europe, mostly Italy, in the 1920s, and traveled around the world in 1925 and 1926, seeing India and making a first visit to the United States. Huxley liked the confidence, vitality, and "generous extravagance" he found in life in the United States. But he wasn't so sure he liked the way vitality was expressed "in places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring... Nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation... It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath -- down the waste. Yes, down the waste." Those thoughts of the actual world, from the book Jesting Pilate, were to color his picture of the perpetual happiness attempted in Brave New World.

For a number of years Huxley lived in Italy, where he formed a close relationship with D. H. Lawrence, whose letters he edited in 1933. Most of Mr. Huxley's earlier novels were written in Italy and Southern Prance, the later books in New Mexico and California. His experiences in fascist Italy, where Benito Mussolini led an authoritarian government that fought against birth control in order to produce enough manpower for the next war, also provided materials for Huxley's dystopia, as did his reading of books critical of the Soviet Union.

Huxley wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931. It appeared three years after the publication of his best-seller, the novel Point Counter Point. During those three years, he had produced six books of stories, essays, poems, and plays, but nothing major. His biographer, Sybille Bedford, says, "It was time to produce some full-length fiction--he still felt like holding back from another straight novel--juggling in fiction form with the scientific possibilities of the future might be a new line."

Because Brave New World describes a dystopia, it is often compared with George Orwell's 1984, another novel you may want to read, which also describes a possible horrible world of the future. The world of 1984 is one of tyranny, terror, and perpetual warfare. Orwell wrote it in 1948, shortly after the Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and just as the West was discovering the full dimensions of the evils of Soviet totalitarianism.

It's important to remember that Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and before Joseph Stalin started the purges that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union. He therefore had no immediate real-life reason to make tyranny and terror major elements of his story. In 1958 Huxley himself said, "The future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell."

In 1937, the Huxleys came to the United States. While living in Taos, New Mexico, Mr. Huxley wrote Ends and Means. Focusing on the old question, 'do the ends justify the means?', the book is a collection of essays about human beings and their behavior. This book was published in 1937, when it was clear to many worried people that the world was heading towards another world war. Aldous Huxley was a lifelong pacifist, but it was in the 1930s that he was a particularly active one. He spoke at public meetings and debates, organised events, wrote pamphlets, and joined a campaign to put an end to war. He was already a famous writer; and Ends and Means sold 6,000 copies within days of publication. Huxley says at the beginning of Ends and Means that most people in our civilisation have agreed on what they want: a world of "liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love." But what they haven't been able to agree on is how to get it. The rest of his book is about why that is so and what might be done about it.

In a chapter on the subject of war, Huxley writes that "Every road towards a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war, by preparations for war." Here is a summary of Huxley's main ideas:

• The nature of war. "War is a purely human phenomenon." What's more, "man is unique in organising the mass murder of his own species." Some people still suggest that war is 'nature's way' of culling our species. The fittest will survive, and so therefore will the human race. Nonsense, says Huxley: "war tends to eliminate the young and strong." There's no evidence to show that war-like people are the ones who survive. "War is not a law of nature, nor even a law of human nature. It exists because men wish it to exist. . . . It is enormously difficult for us to change our wishes in this matter; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible." Huxley suggests that the warlike feature of societies began when groups of people gathered round leaders, mostly men, who wanted domination and even a kind of life after death: the hero's 'immortal fame'. But it's interesting, Huxley remarks, to see how differently various civilizations have regarded war. "Europeans have always worshipped the military hero" and have found "justifications for national aggression." Not so the Chinese, who aspired to "an ordered and harmonious society" for many centuries. "It is one of the tragedies of history that the Westernisation of China should have meant the progressive militarisation of a culture which, for nearly 3,000 years, preached the pacifist ideal." In India, however, Buddhists still learn and teach ahimsa: 'doing no harm' to living beings. "Alone of all the great world religions, Buddhism made its way without persecution, censorship or inquisition. Its record is enormously superior to that of Christianity, which made its way among people wedded to militarism."
• Some causes of war. Huxley suggests a number of reasons why people have wanted war to exist. For some, it has provided a purpose their lives lacked. Others, tempted by crime, have found the lawlessness of war attractive. For many it has, quite simply, made life more interesting. But these are the reasons of non-combatant civilians. They belong to the past, when wars were carried out by relatively small professional armies on, mostly, distant battlefields. Armies in the field and non-combatants back home were not yet threatened by the weapon that changed war for good: the bomber aircraft. Nowadays the causes of war affect both soldiers and civilians. Nationalism, for one. People "like to have excuses to feel pride and hatred." Military leaders like to have excuses to use their men and machines. The making and owning of armaments itself leads to war, creating "fear, suspicion, resentment and hatred" between countries. Such feelings are also aroused by people's desire to spread and defend political or religious ideals. Politically powerful minorities, pursuing their own interests, also take their countries into war. They may be looking for new territory on which to build, or for raw materials (precious stones, minerals, oil, trees) to exploit. But the most dangerous minority interest is the arms trade. To make and increase their profits, arms makers and dealers may be tempted to do whatever they can to ensure that wars take place -- and that disarmament never does. "What is needed," says Huxley, "is the complete abolition of the arms industry." And, he says, it is possible: simply, "abolition will come when the majority wish it to come." Which means we, the citizens, have to think about our own attitudes. "The manufacturers of armaments are not the only merchants of death. To some extent we all are." In western democracies, who votes for governments dependent on arms trade taxes? The people do. Who consents to government's "economic, political and military imperialism?" The people do. That's not all. "Even in so far as we behave badly in private life we are all doing our bit to bring the next war nearer." The rich and powerful among us, of course, do more than a bit: "the peace of the world has frequently been endangered in order that they might grow a little richer."
• The experiment that failed. The League of Nations was founded in 1919, after the First World War. Its aim was to preserve international peace and security, and it hoped to do that by preventing disputes, or at any rate settling them peaceably, and promoting disarmament. Huxley wrote that the high hopes placed in the League of Nations had been disappointed. He suggests several reasons why the League failed to achieve world peace. One was that the USA refused to join, and Russia and 'enemy' nations (such as Germany) were at first kept out. But its chief fault, in Huxley's view, was that the only eligible members were communities that had their own armies: it was a league of societies organised for war, and as such a military league. He also criticised the ways in which the League operated, including providing outside military help to a victim of aggression. "No government," says Huxley, "has the right gratuitously to involve its subjects in war." Indeed: "War is so radically wrong that any international agreement which provides for the extension of hostilities from a limited area to the whole world is manifestly based on unsound principles. Modern war destroys with the maximum of efficiency and the maximum of indiscrimination, and therefore entails the commission of injustices far more numerous and far worse than any it is intended to redress." "Those who prepare for war," he says, "in due course get the war they prepare for." (The League of Nations was replaced after the Second World War by the United Nations. It could be said that hopes have been disappointed there, too.)
• An international police force? A misleading term, says Huxley. "The police act with precision; they go out and arrest the guilty person. But nations and groups of nations act through their armed forces, which can only act with the maximum of imprecision, killing, maiming, starving and ruining millions of human beings, of whom the overwhelming majority have committed no crime of any sort." He foresees the time when people refer to "collateral damage" instead of "civilian deaths," or use such contradictions in terms as "peace-keeping troops": "We shall never learn to think correctly unless we call things by their proper names. The international police force would not be a police force. It would be a force for perpetrating indiscriminate massacres." In any case: "How is such a force to be recruited? How organised? How armed? Where located? Who is to decide when it is to be used and against whom? To whom will it owe allegiance and how is its loyalty to be guaranteed? How can nations be persuaded to contribute men and materials to it? Should their contributions be equal? If not, and a few great powers supply the major part, what is to prevent those powers from establishing a military tyranny over the whole world?" The idea of such a force, says Huxley, "combines all the moral and political vices of militarism with all the hopeless impracticability of a Utopian dream." (But despite Huxley's warnings, the world's states have chosen to place their faith in international forces, deployed all over the world and in some places for decades. We have also seen the development of poorly-controlled local militias moving in to carry out policing functions with violence, appalling brutality, and little respect for human rights. And 'military tyranny'? -- for all the talk of good versus evil, and of 'humanitarian' aims, that tyranny is there.)
• Peaceful settlements that last? Huxley has no doubt: "War cannot be stopped by more war. All that more war can do is widen the area of destruction and place new obstacles in the way of reaching a just and humane settlement of international disputes." In Huxley's day, just as in ours, procedures and skills for negotiation, co-operation and reconciliation existed. But, as he says, "a machine may be exquisitely ingenious and of admirable workmanship, but if people refuse to use it, or use it badly, it will be almost or completely useless. This is the case with the machinery of peaceful change and international co-operation. Wherever 'national honour' and 'vital interests' were concerned, governments have preferred to threaten or actually make use of violence. Even in cases where they have consented to employ the machinery of peaceful settlement, they have sometimes displayed such bad will that the machine has been unable to function. . . . Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes."
• Nonviolence. The chapter ends with a description of how nationalism, communism, religion and other 'idolatries' can give people a misleading sensation of meaning and purpose. People have been ready, as a result, mistakenly "to make sacrifices, accept hardships, display courage and fortitude -- and indeed all the virtues except the primary ones: love and awareness." Without these crucial qualities -- genuine humaneness and caring -- we are doomed to stay on the wrong road, the road that leads to violence and war.

In 1937, the Huxleys went to Hollywood, where Aldous became a screenwriter. (Among his films was an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which starred the young Laurence Olivier.) He remained for most of his life in California, and one of his novels caricatures what he saw as the strange life there: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In it the tycoon Jo Stoyte tries to achieve immortality through scientific experimentation, even if it means giving up humanity and returning to the completely animal state -- an echo of Brave New World

Then came Grey Eminence, a biography of Richelieu's coadjutor, Father Joseph. Since then his published works have included The Art of Seeing, Time Must Have A Stop, The Perennial Philosophy, Ape and Essence, Themes and Variations, The Gioconda Smile, The Devils of Loudon, The Doors of Perception, The Genius and the Goddess, Heaven and Hell, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The World of Aldous Huxley, an omnibus work edited by Charles J. Rolo, was published in 1947, followed by Collected Short Stories (1958) and Collected Essays (1959).

In 1946 Huxley wrote a Foreword to Brave New World in which he said he no longer wanted to make social sanity an impossibility, as he had in the novel. Though World War II had caused the deaths of some 20 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union, six million Jews, and millions of others, and the newly developed atomic bomb held the threat of even more extensive destruction, Huxley had become convinced that while still "rather rare," sanity could be achieved and said that he would like to see more of it. In the same year, he published The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology of texts with his own commentaries on mystical and religious approaches to a sane life in a sane society.

He also worried about the dangers that threatened sanity. In 1958, he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas found in the novel -- overpopulation, overorganization, and psychological techniques from salesmanship to hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching. They're all tools that a government can abuse to deprive people of freedom, an abuse that Huxley wanted people to fight.

In the 1950s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently took a dozen times over ten years. Sybille Bedford says he was looking for a drug that would allow an escape from the self and that if taken with caution would be physically and socially harmless.

He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several books. Two, based on his experiences taking mescaline under supervision, were nonfiction: Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). Some readers have read those books as encouragements to experiment freely with drugs, but Huxley warned of the dangers of such experiments in an appendix he wrote to The Devils of Loudun (1952), a psychological study of an episode in French history. A selection of essays, On Art and Artists, appeared in 1960.

Another work centering on drugs and sanity was Island (1962), a novel that required 20 years of thought and five years of writing. Among other things, Island was an antidote to Brave New World, a good Utopia. Huxley deplored the drug he called soma in Brave New World -- half tranquilizer, half intoxicant -- which produces an artificial happiness that makes people content with their lack of freedom. He approved of the perfected version of LSD that the people of Island use in a religious way.

Huxley produced 47 books in his long career as a writer. The English critic Anthony Burgess has said that he equipped the novel with a brain. Other critics objected that he was a better essayist than novelist precisely because he cared more about his ideas than about plot or characters, and his novels' ideas often get in the way of the story.

But Huxley's emphasis on ideas and his skin as an essayist cannot hide one important fact: The books he wrote that are most read and best remembered today are all novels--Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point from the 1920s, Brave New World and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan from the 1930s. In 1959 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize given every five years; earlier recipients had been Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Theodore Dreiser.

The range of Huxley's interests can be seen from his note that his "preliminary research" for Island included "Greek history, Polynesian anthropology, translations from Sanskrit and Chinese of Buddhist texts, scientific papers on pharmacology, neurophysiology, psychology and education, together with novels, poems, critical essays, travel books, political commentaries and conversations with all kinds of people, from philosophers to actresses, from patients in mental hospitals to tycoons in Rolls-Royces...." He used similar, though probably fewer, sources for Brave New World.

This list gives you some perspective on the wide range of ideas that Huxley studied. He also wrote an early essay on ecology that helped inspire today's environmental movement. And he was a pacifist. This belief prevented him from becoming an American citizen because he would not say his pacifism was a matter of his religion, which might have made him an acceptable conscientious objector.

Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. Maria Huxley died in 1955, and Huxley married Laura Archera a year later. He died November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his parents' grave in England.