Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > Brave New World

Brave New World says as much about Aldous Huxley as it does about our modern world.

Maybe more.
***

When he wrote it, Huxley was in the process of losing his inner child. Darling of the Jet Set, he was the literary version of their current idol, Cole Porter.

And in the end, the sophisticated public’s jaundiced taste for quick, fun and outré reads made him disposable - to us all.

And worst of all, to his own deep, dreaming subconscious!

Shy, lanky, shortsighted polymath Huxley was born to a family of Eminent Victorians, and was given ample leisure time to read any book he could get his hands on - which was them all.

They would call him a nerd nowadays.

But his reading and shyness disassociated him from the rough-and-tumble world. He had no fixed anchor.

Like so many of us, he had lost his centre of gravity, or had never had one.

But entre-deux-guerres Europe loved him, and adopted him as one of its own. The darling of the Smart Young Things - as the Catholic Waugh tartly put it - he was witty, caustic and irreverent.

He could do no wrong - except in the eyes of social activists, on one side, and believers on the other.

So it was at the midpoint of his career that he took up his pen against the future in Brave New World. If he couldn’t be serious, he could nevertheless shock.

Problem is, he half-loved his own Utopia. And in later life he moved to the U.S.A. and became an early advocate of the Southern California Lifestyle with its casual gurus and myriad conveniences.

When his beloved wife Maria died of cancer, disconsolate and without moorings, he turned to her much younger caregiver for love - a quality conspicuous by the rarity of its occurrence in his hyper-intellectual heart.

They were married at a no-frills marriage boutique in Nevada. They explored Eastern religions through Vedanta, then a current fad. They attended séances and summoned the ghost of his late wife. But all was not well.

His doctor told him some disturbing news: he was going blind. Losing his sight would be losing his most precious pleasure: reading. So his doctor advised him to frequently rest his eyes, by closing them and then applying light pressure from his palms, gently circling them in a counterclockwise motion.

He was very much a faddish man without roots, and much akin in his casual though refined nature to the citizens of the Brave New World. He Needed to read and write. He was a sensual man who needed his pleasures.

But with the approach of the sixties, he received another grim diagnosis. Cancer of the mouth. He started to compare notes with his friend Stravinsky about their planned abstinence from cigarettes:

The weeds that killed him in the end.
***

Carl Jung used to say that our Shadow will visit us in our dreams if we ignore it in our daily lives...

Huxley bought into the mainstream Freudian POV that the asceticism of the great mystics was mere dumb sexual repression (witness his Late anti-Christian rant entitled The Devils of Loudon - now made newly available on Kindle).

And late in life, close to the time of his own death, Huxley dreamt he was floating in a vast orb containing a marvellous city.

But outside the bubble, brutish crowds were howling with derisive laughter at him - yes, him - the untouchable visionary who penned the great Brave New World!

It’s like that late photo of him at his misunderstood California friend Stravinsky’s recording sessions for his own new severely serial and segmented short compositions.

Huxley marvelled at the capacious mind of the composer of the Sacre, but his small-souled trivial brain had no clue of the older man’s unimpeachable moral integrity.

A wannabe mystic, he was a no-show at the starting gate of Heaven because he could never focus his thoughts long enough to shore up enough justifications for a undying Faith.

He awoke from that dream in a panic.

Poor, dear lost soul that he was, there were times when even Soma wouldn't help...

And in his quest for new utopias, he had left the rough and tumble Faith of ordinary poor workaday, believing sods out of his equation.

For his advanced calculations noisily and brusquely precluded the one and only possible healing panacea for his soul - the Simplicity of the Holy Spirit.

For that’s ALL he had ever needed, had he understood Stravinsky and the common folk well.