Island - Aldous Huxley [156]
“The loss of sight was an ‘event,’ Huxley later wrote, ‘which prevented me from becoming a complete public school English-gentleman.’”
Huxley took his undergraduate degree in literature at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916, and spent several years during World War I working in a government office. After teaching briefly at Eton, he launched his career as a professional writer in 1920 by taking a job as a drama critic for the Westminster Gazette, and a staff writer for House and Garden and Vogue. Possessed of seemingly infinite literary energy, he wrote poetry, essays, and fiction in his spare time, publishing his first novel, Crome Yellow, in 1921. This bright, sharp, mildly shocking satire of upper-class artists won Huxley an immediate reputation as a dangerous wit. He swiftly composed several more novels in a similar vein, including Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925).
In Point Counter Point (1928), considered by many critics his strongest novel, Huxley broke new ground, both stylistically and thematically. In a narrative that jumps abruptly from scene to scene and character to character, Huxley confronts modern man’s disillusionment with religion, art, sex, and politics. The character Philip Quarles, a novelist intent on “transform[ing] a detached intellectual skepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living,” is the closest Huxley came to painting his own portrait in fiction. Brave New World (1932), though less experimental in style than Point Counter Point, is more radical in its pessimistic view of human nature. Huxley’s antiutopia, with its eerie combination of totalitarian government and ubiquitous feel-good drugs and sex, disturbed many readers of his day; but it has proven to be his most enduring and influential work.
During the 1930s, Huxley turned increasingly toward an exploration of fundamental questions of philosophy, sociology, politics, and ethics. In his 1936 novel Eyeless in Gaza he wrote of a man’s transformation from cynic to mystic, and as war threatened Europe once again, he allied himself with the pacifist movement and began lecturing widely on peace and internationalism.
“During the 1930s, Huxley turned increasingly toward an exploration of fundamental questions of philosophy, sociology, politics, and ethics.”
For a number of years Huxley lived in Italy, where he formed a close relationship with D. H. Lawrence, whose letters he edited in 1933. In 1937, Huxley and his Belgian-born wife, Maria Nys, and their son, Matthew, left Europe to live in Southern California for the rest of his life. Maria Huxley died of cancer in 1955, and the following year Huxley married the Italian violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Huxley changed direction yet again as he became fascinated by the spiritual life, in particular with the possibility of direct communication between people and the divinity. Huxley read widely in the writings of the mystics and assembled an anthology of mystical writing called The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Around this time he began experimenting with mind-altering drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he came to believe gave users essentially the same experiences that mystics attained through fasting, prayer, and meditation. The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956), Huxley’s books about the effects of what he termed psychedelic drugs, became essential texts for the counterculture during the 1960s. Yet Huxley’s brother Julian cautions against the image of Aldous as a kind of spiritual godfather to hippies: “One of Aldous’s major preoccupations was how to achieve self-transcendence while yet remaining