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By Root 551 0

Chemical Industries Ltd, whose vast plant at Billingham near Middlesbrough Huxley visited just before he started writing Brave New World. Huxley hailed Billingham as a 'triumphant embodiment' of the principles of planning, an 'ordered universe ... in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence'. It is tempting to speculate that, in his magisterial domination of the Savage, Mustapha Mond personifies that 'strong and intelligent central authority' whom Huxley had summoned in July 1931 to impose reason, order and stability on Britain. Mond's 'deep, resonant voice' is noted by Huxley on three occasions. Moreover, he observes that it vibrates 'thrillingly', and that Mond's face betrays nothing more threatening than 'good-humoured intelligence' during his interviews with the Savage, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson in Chapters XVI and XVII. For all its hideousness, the hierarchical, aseptic, colour-coded world of A.F. 63 2 is not aeons away from the scientific Utopia Huxley was promoting elsewhere before, during and after he wrote Brave New World in 1931.

Two weeks prior to the publication of Brave New World, in a talk broadcast on B.B.C. Radio in January 1932, Huxley discussed the possible use of eugenics as an instrument of political control and expressed his readiness to sanction eugenicist measures to arrest the 'rapid deterioration ... of the whole West European stock'. Huxley's interest in eugenics, or the state manipulation of the biological make-up of society, had first surfaced in Proper Studies (1927) and eugenicist nostrums were advocated by intellectuals of all political hues in the inter-war period. Bokanovsky's Process, Podsnap's Technique, Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning and Hypnopaedia are the whimsical equivalents of the techniques which, over the airwaves, Huxley suggested might soon be applied to Britain's political problems. As he put it, 'It may be that circumstances will compel the humanist to resort to scientific propaganda, just as they may compel the liberal to resort to dictatorship. Any form of order is better than chaos.'

In the same way that H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) was inspired less by a prospect of the distant future than a Victorian fear of the abyss and its pullulating swarms, so Huxley's morbid fascination with the economic muddle, political inertia and social unrest which shaped national life in 1931, and the panaceas put forward to solve the crisis, lies just beneath the surface of Brave New World. For instance, when the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning informs his students that the lower castes are conditioned to want to go into the country 'at every available opportunity', and engage in sports which, by law, 'entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport', and when we learn that it is axiomatic in the World State that 'Ending is better than mending', Huxley is satirising the theory that the problems which confronted Britain were caused by under-consumption, a view he ascribed to the economist J.M. Keynes and with which he strongly disagreed. Keynes also believed that unemployment could be reduced and the economy revived through a systematic programme of public works. The Obstacle Golf course at Stoke Poges, the forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers massed in the western suburbs of London, and the double row of Escalator Fives Courts which 'lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden' are bizarre manifestations of the Keynesian initiatives which were exciting so much debate at the time the novel was written.

An awareness of the precise background to Brave New World in no way invalidates the novel's dystopian credentials. It can be read just as tellingly as a projection of the totalitarian dangers inherent in the corporate state, as it can be taken as a satire on the American bogey. As we have seen, Brave New World can even be interpreted as Huxley's oblique and despairing endorsement of scientific planning. All texts are autonomous; Brave New World itself, the various non-fictional writings which