Aldous Huxley

A famous family, and an eye disease

Huxley was born at Godalming in Surrey on 26 July 1894 into the English intellectual aristocracy: his grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist who argued Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in public on Darwin's behalf and was nicknamed Darwin's bulldog for it, and his great-uncle was the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. He went to Eton, the most prestigious of England's boarding schools, in 1908, the year his mother Julia died. In 1910 and 1911 he was struck by keratitis punctata, an inflammation of the cornea that left him effectively blind for a period and permanently damaged his sight. It ended any thought of medicine, and it is the reason nearly everything he wrote about perception has a personal edge.

He took a First in English at Oxford in 1916 — a first-class degree, the top result — and went back to Eton for the school year 1917–18, this time as a master, teaching English and French. Eton's own record names two of his pupils from that period: Harold Acton, later a writer and connoisseur and one of the models for the aesthetes of Evelyn Waugh's Oxford novels, and Eric Blair, who would publish Nineteen Eighty-Four thirty-one years later under the pen name George Orwell. Huxley married Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee, on 10 July 1919; their son Matthew was born in April 1920. Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923) made him the wittiest English novelist of the decade, and Point Counter Point (1928) the most ambitious — its character Mark Rampion is drawn from Lawrence, who read it and disliked it.

Suresnes, 1928–1930: the Paris months

In October 1928 the Huxleys took a house at 3 rue du Bac in Suresnes, on the Seine immediately west of the Bois de Boulogne. It was twenty minutes from the centre of Paris and a world away from Montparnasse, the quarter on the Left Bank where the foreign writers and painters of the 1920s drank and worked: Suresnes was a working town, with factories along the river and villas up the slope behind them. They kept the house until April 1930, which means it was their address for the whole of the year D. H. Lawrence spent dying.

Lady Chatterley's Lover had been printed privately in Florence in 1928 and was immediately pirated — copied and sold by publishers who paid Lawrence nothing — and he wanted a cheap authorised Paris edition to undercut them. The Huxleys told him where to go. He came in March 1929, spent a week with them at Suresnes in the middle of his month in Paris, found the suburb sleepy and dull, and let them take him to their doctor. That last detail is the one that tells you how far gone he was: Lawrence was in the last stage of tuberculosis, refused to say the word, and did not readily let anyone examine him. He settled the contract on 5 April, left for the Mediterranean two days later, and died at Vence, a hill town above Nice, on 2 March 1930. Maria had typed part of the book; both Huxleys were there at the end; and it was Aldous who edited the first published collection of Lawrence's letters in 1932.

Sanary-sur-Mer, and the writing of Brave New World

In April 1930 the Huxleys gave up the Suresnes house and went south, to La Gorguette at Sanary-sur-Mer in the Var. They stayed nearly seven years, until February 1937. Brave New World was written there in four months, from May to August 1931, and published in January 1932. Whatever Paris gave other English writers of the period — cafés, publishers, an expatriate audience — Huxley took from a Mediterranean village instead, and the record of his French decade is a record of the coast.

From 1933 the village filled up around him. When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in January 1933, German and Austrian writers and artists — many of them Jewish, most of them on the left — fled to France, and between 1933 and 1940 a remarkable number of them settled in Sanary: Thomas Mann, the German novelist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1929, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, the painter Moïse Kisling, and the philosopher Ludwig Marcuse, who called the place the world capital of artistic and literary exile. The town has marked their houses with plaques since 1987. Huxley, an Englishman with a house there since before any of them arrived, watched the totalitarian century assemble itself in his own village a year after publishing a novel about a state that had abolished the family, history and unhappiness.

What Brave New World actually says

Brave New World is set six hundred years in the future, in a single World State where human beings are manufactured in bottles and graded before birth into five castes, from Alpha down to the stunted Epsilons who do the menial work. Children are conditioned in their sleep to want what their caste is for. Families, mothers and lasting attachments have been abolished as sources of pain; unhappiness is treated on the spot with a drug called soma; and everyone is genuinely, permanently content.

The plot brings in a young man raised outside the system, on a reservation in New Mexico, who has read Shakespeare and therefore has words for grief, love and God — none of which the World State can accommodate. His collision with a society that has bought stability by giving up art, religion, science and suffering is the argument of the book. It is the opposite prediction from Orwell's. Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines tyranny as permanent pain — its own image for the future is a boot stamping on a human face for ever — while Brave New World imagines tyranny as pleasure, administered steadily until nobody objects to anything. That both books came out of the same small English literary world, and that Huxley had taught Orwell French at school, is one of the odder facts of the twentieth century.

California, mescaline, and 22 November 1963

In the spring of 1937 Huxley sailed for New York with his friend the writer Gerald Heard, toured the American Southwest, and by January 1938 had settled in California. He wrote for Hollywood — the studios paid well and his eyes were failing — published the novel After Many a Summer in 1939 and, in 1941, the historical study Grey Eminence — a life of Father Joseph, the French friar who served as Cardinal Richelieu's confidant and political fixer, and whose nickname gave English the phrase for a power behind the throne — bought a cottage in the Mojave desert at Llano del Rio in 1942, and in 1945 brought out The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology-with-commentary arguing that the world's mystical traditions describe the same thing.

In May 1953, at fifty-eight, he took mescaline — a hallucinogen derived from the peyote cactus — under the supervision of the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, and wrote up what happened. The Doors of Perception (1954) is that account: careful, unembarrassed, and written by a half-blind man describing the folds of his own trousers as though they were a cathedral. It made him, against his own temperament, the intellectual grandfather of the 1960s counterculture — the generation that took psychedelic drugs as a route to insight and quoted him as its authority. Maria died on 12 February 1955; he married the Italian-born musician and therapist Laura Archera on 19 March 1956, and in 1962 published Island, a last novel that turns Brave New World inside out: an island society that uses everything the World State had banned — attachment, religion, an honest relation to suffering — to make its people good rather than merely content.

On 12 May 1961 the Bel Air fire — a wildfire that burned through a wealthy district of Los Angeles — took their house with most of his manuscripts and his library inside it; what survived went eventually to UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles, where the Aldous and Laura Huxley papers now run to fifty linear feet, the way archives measure a collection by the shelf space its boxes occupy. He died at home in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963 and was cremated the following day. Laura Huxley gave the account of his last hours in her 1968 memoir This Timeless Moment: too ill to speak, he wrote out a request for LSD, the hallucinogenic drug then still legal in California, and she administered it. The death went almost unreported. President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas that morning.