Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [7]
In June 1931 Huxley informed a correspondent that he was organising a second trip to America, 'just to know the worst, as one must do from time to time, I think'. In May he had told another that he was writing 'a novel about the future – on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it'. On a number of occasions Huxley had scoffed at H.G. Wells's Men Like Gods (1923), with its rosy portrayal of a Utopia peopled exclusively by 'active, sanguine, inventive, receptive and good-tempered' citizens, and his use of the term 'Wellsian' here encompasses all those aspects of the progressive outlook which he found most rebarbative or preposterous. But Huxley was certainly not the 'greatest anti-Wellsian of them all', as Anthony Burgess once tagged him. On the contrary, with the exception of Men Like Gods, Huxley had a great deal in common with Wells in the 1920s and early 1930s, in particular, a robust contempt for parliamentary democracy and a conviction that mass society must be reorganised as a hierarchy of mental quality controlled by an elite caste of experts. Huxley's original purpose in writing Brave New World may well have been to satirise Men Like Gods and the fantastic, 'Californian' world it depicted, but even as he began to write the novel, Huxley's urge to parody a fictional future became embroiled with his horrified engrossment in the urgent non-fictional problems of the present.
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 triggered a global depression which had severe repercussions for those areas of Britain which depended exclusively on the staple industries. Unemployment rose rapidly in these regions during the next two years, and by the early months of 1931, with the country's economic problems growing daily more acute and Parliament increasingly exposed as an ineffectual bystander, Britain appeared to be on the brink of chaos. Many commentators predicted that the whole of Europe was heading for complete economic collapse and bloody unrest. Civilisation itself seemed doomed.
Huxley visited the Durham coalfield and witnessed the misery of mass unemployment for himself. He was also present during a key Commons debate on the economic and political situation and was profoundly unimpressed by the posturing he observed and the 'twaddling' he heard. As the crises deepened during the summer of 1931, so too did Huxley's pessimism. The run on sterling in August, the formation of Britain's first National Government to deal with the emergency, and the abandonment of the gold standard in September, marking 'the watershed of English history between the 'wars' (in A.J.P. Taylor's words), prompted Huxley to postpone his second visit to the United States indefinitely. Shortly afterwards he reached the nadir of his despair with conventional politics and argued, like many of his contemporaries, that the time had come to renounce parliamentary democracy and to submit to rule 'by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands'. He envisaged propaganda being used as a legitimate tool of state control and repeatedly called for the implementation of a national plan, similar to that which had recently been set in motion in the Soviet Union. In 1928, when the first Five Year Plan was inaugurated in Russia, Huxley had written, 'To the Bolshevist idealist, Utopia is indistinguishable from a Ford factory', but the events of 1931 persuaded him to adopt a different perspective. Like Mustapha Mond, Huxley asserted at the time he was writing Brave New World that stability was the 'primal and the ultimate need' if civilisation was to survive the present crisis. Mond is named after Sir Alfred Mond (1868-1930), first Chairman of Imperial