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not a place where aberrant behaviour, human error, emotional instability and social disorder have been completely extirpated. Riot police are kept in reserve to deal with outbreaks of unprogrammed disharmony, like the Park Lane punch-up, and it speaks volumes for the irrepressibility of human passion that a high flier like the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning should have come so disastrously and romantically involved with the young Linda, and she so devoted to her Tomakin'. Similarly, the 'popular' and 'pneumatic' Lenina Crowne follows up her exclusive attachment to Henry Foster with an unaccountable fondness for the stunted Bernard Marx, and, as reported in Chapter XIII, it is Lenina's human gaffe which will lead to the premature death of an Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza. Likewise, it is rumoured that Bernard's lack of stature and his disenchantment may be due to someone else's cack-handed fallibility in the past.

In the 1946 Foreword Huxley explains that if he were to rewrite the novel he would offer the Savage a third alternative, the option of living in a community where the economics would be decentralist, the politics anarchist and where science and technology would be harnessed to serve rather than to coerce mankind. 'Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman.' As readers, we must be thankful that Huxley never revised the novel along these lines, because, had he done so, Brave New World would undoubtedly have lost its enduring appeal. Paradoxically, it is the anxieties and uncertainties which beset Britain and Huxley in 1931, and which resulted in the rich ambivalence of his novel, which have guaranteed Brave New World's status as a twentieth-century classic.

David Bradshaw

Worcester College, Oxford

1993

ALDOUS HUXLEY(1894-1963)

ON 26 JULY 1894, near Godalming in Surrey, Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a family which had only recently become synonymous with the intellectual aristocracy. Huxley's grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had earned notoriety as 'Darwin's bulldog' and fame as a populariser of science, just as his own probing and controversial works were destined to outrage and exhilarate readers and non-readers alike in the following century. Aldous Huxley's mother was a niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and he was a nephew of the redoubtable Mrs Humphry Ward, doyenne of late-Victorian novelists. This inheritance, combining the scientific and the literary in a blend which was to become characteristic of his vision as a writer, was both a source of great pride and a burden to Huxley in his formative years. Much was expected of him.

Three traumatic events left their mark on the young Huxley. In 1908 his mother died of cancer, and this led to the effective break-up of the family home. Two years later, while a schoolboy at Eton, Huxley contracted an eye infection which made him almost completely blind for a time and severely impaired his vision for the rest of his life. The suicide of his brother Trevenen in August 1914 robbed Huxley of the person to whom he felt closest. Over twenty years later, in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Huxley's treatment of the death of the main character's mother and his embodiment of Trev' in the novel as the vulnerable Brian Foxe give some indication of the indelible pain which these tragic occurrences left in their wake. To a considerable degree, they account for the darkness, pungency and cynicism which feature so prominently in Huxley's work throughout the inter-war period.

Within months of achieving a First in English Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford in 1916, Huxley published The Burning Wheel. Huxley's first collection of verse, and the three which followed it, Jonah (1917), The Defeat of Youth (1918) and Leda (1920), reveal his indebtedness to French symbolism and fin de siècle aestheticism. Also discernible, however, beneath the poetry's triste and ironic patina, is a concern with the inward world