The Intellectual Behind Brave New World. - Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual - book review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. Nicholas Murray. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]20.00. ISBN 0-316-85492-1.

Born a Victorian, Aldous Huxley consciously retained the speech and manner of his privileged origins. He was markedly well-connected in a family of unsurpassed intellectual eminence. Much was given to him, and much was expected of him. Yet he faced oppressive personal afflictions, including severe visual impairment. Whereas he might have been the family invalid, Aldous Huxley became one of the most questioning and challenging intellects of the twentieth century. Nicholas Murray rightly names his subject an intellectual rather than a writer. Though Huxley wrote well, and he remains widely read, his contribution is not exclusively literary. Even Brave New World, for all its verve and wit, is usually discussed in terms of ideas, rather than its appeal to the imagination, though this certainly is strong. One could say that Huxley had the exceptional capacity to infuse insight with passion. It went beyond enthusiasm into an impelling need to understand.

The astonishing continuity of relevance has made Huxley difficult to assess. There is no denying the acknowledged influence he has had upon major cultural figures from Isaiah Berlin to Allen Ginsberg. His was a restless intellect in a life which saw some transformations in the search for a unifying principle. Even as a young master at Eton he was discussing the ideas (his pupils included George Orwell) which were to prove so fecund. A complete account of this period would have been welcome. Its absence is one reason why Mr. Murray's study is less than it might be. The book lacks neither intelligence nor sympathy. What is missing is atmosphere. How did it feel to be that person in those places -- from Bloomsbury to Hollywood? We need the power of evocation so that we might feel what we read.

Aldous Huxley developed his life radically, without denying the fundamental reality of his starting-point. Many readers, especially those who concentrate on Huxley's idealism, are unversed in the author's background. His interest in visionary experience, for example, can be traced back to early essays. In later life Huxley did take hallucinogenics under controlled conditions. He advised against indiscriminate use. Heaven and Hell warns of the dangers. Here, as elsewhere, Huxley proved prophetic.

A powerful sense of moral order underwrote Huxley's career. Curiously, one of the strengths of this new biography is the emphasis Nicholas Murray gives to this aspect of Huxley's character, without fully accounting for it. Though Huxley envisioned a world without privilege, he had the rare wisdom to acknowledge the virtue within that privilege. He remained true to himself where he might have gone terminally haywire. Huxley valued the discipline of learning. 'There is no excuse for not knowing what can be known', was the leitmotif of his life. His life's work was to make sense of what he knew.

His fears for what the world might become did not recede, but in Island they were supplemented by a positive vision of personal fulfilment and social harmony. Huxley, being a Huxley, was deeply aware of the ethical problems in science. He was one of the few creative writers of his time successfully to consider these questions in imaginative terms. His lightness of touch, as in After Many a Summer (set in Hollywood), is the distinguishing feature. His graceful prose is charming, his style of argument, courteous. He enriches while he disturbs. It is not yet certain whether Aldous Huxley finally discovered the unifying principle which would reconcile humanity to the relentless momentum of science. In that sense his life must remain unwritten. The transformation he sought was, as he acknowledged, the most difficult. A perfect world must be unpeopled. A better world remains a possibility.