Aldous Huxley was a polarizing figure who was both hailed as an emancipator of the modern mind and condemned as an irresponsible free-thinker and an erudite showoff. Huxley died on November 22, , hours after the assassination of president John F. Both deaths, unwittingly, heralded the rise of counterculture, where conformity and belief in the government were questioned.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors.
Share Flipboard Email. Angelica Frey. Classics Expert. Angelica Frey holds an M. Disaffected by his meetings with studio executives, he wrote to his brother Julian that they ' have the characteristics of the minds of chimpanzees, agitated and infinitely distractible ' Letters , Huxley , who worked as an active screenwriter for five years, was also derisive of Hollywood film, considering it a soporific, a bone to the poor, the powerless, and the plain who ' are themselves and not somebody else ': ' hence those Don Juans, those melting beauties, those innocent young kittens, those beautifully brutal boys, those luscious adventuresses.
Hence Hollywood ' The Olive Tree , , 38— In the early s the Huxleys settled into Santa Monica canyon, where many European expatriates lived, including Isherwood. The Huxleys were delighted by the oddities of California, such as what Maria called ' its fancy un-dress costume '. The tide of screenwriters from abroad H. Wells , P. Wodehouse , and Anthony Powell , among others washed up in the banquet hall at W. Here Huxley satirized a classic American tycoon, while insisting that the quest for immortality by physical means is as pointless as the quest for fulfilment by possessions.
In Huxley used savings from his screenwriting work to buy a cottage in Llano del Rio in the Mojave desert. He wrote for the screen until America's involvement in the Second World War, at which point the pacifist Huxley could not find and was not asked to write patriotic, win-the-war films. In the midst of petrol and tyre rationing Huxley , in isolation, produced three extraordinary volumes as he approached his fiftieth birthday.
The Art of Seeing is an autobiographical study of the physical rehabilitation methods of D. Bates , which greatly improved his vision. Huxley had practised the Bates method of visual re-education avidly throughout the war years and after, with regular tutorials.
In January he wrote to Julian of a breakthrough: ' Yesterday for the first time [since childhood] I succeeded, for short stretches, in getting a single fixed image from both eyes together ' Letters , But opinions in his circle of friends differed as to the effectiveness of this treatment.
In The Art of Seeing , however, Huxley suggests that there is a parallel in the way physical discipline could perfect vision while spiritual discipline could perfect insight. Meanwhile The Perennial Philosophy was an effort to find common ground among the world's religions in mysticism, and Time Must Have a Stop , Huxley's response to a world at war, took his concerns with spiritual discipline into fiction. The post-war years alternately haunted Huxley with visions of devastated cities and populations and hope that humanity might triumph over its increasingly potent weaponry.
In Science, Liberty, and Peace and Ape and Essence he offered twin visions, light and dark, of humanity's future. The former is a hopeful appeal to scientists to consider humane values in research. Ape and Essence , Huxley's second novel of science fiction, is a darkly comic satire, in the form of a screenplay, of life in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.
His play The Gioconda Smile was adapted for the screen as A Woman's Vengeance , but except for fanciful projects such as Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland and an adaptation of Cervantes for the cartoon character Mr Magoo, his film-writing career was firmly at an end. He was satirized as the ineffectual scriptwriter Boxley in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon In June the Huxleys left America for Europe for the first time since In England they found a warmer reception than earlier headlines in the press, such as ' Gone with the wind up ', might have suggested.
Wodehouse entitled one of his Hollywood novels. In a symposium organized by the London Magazine in , of the work he had published while living in America only After Many a Summer was discussed, and that was roundly attacked. Huxley the Vedantist, the pacifist, the experimenter in education, health, and psychoactive phenomena, was disregarded. The Huxleys returned to the United States in autumn In the following spring Huxley had a recurrence of iritis following a bout of influenza, which may have shaped perhaps the darkest of his writings, The Devils of Loudun , a historical recreation of a story of demonically possessed French nuns and exorcists.
The depression which accompanied his physical illness only increased alongside Maria Huxley's half-acknowledged cancer. Searching in May for personal balance, and for new ways of seeing, Huxley took a tablet of mescaline, the laboratory-synthesized derivative of the peyote cactus used for centuries by native Americans, which produced effects similar to those of LSD. Humphrey Osmond MD guided him through an odyssey which culminated in Huxley briefly retrieving the stereoscopic vision which had eluded him since his teenage years.
Huxley had sought clear sight through pills, operations, visual retraining, and spiritual disciplines; it eluded him. Under the influence of mescaline he ' saw as painters see ', as he wrote in an autobiographical account, The Doors of Perception A similar theme—the universality of transcendence—appears in Heaven and Hell , while the quest for physical sight and vision which characterized his American period , recurs in Themes and Variations , in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow , and Brave New World Revisited , as well as in major essays in American publications such as Esquire , in which he had a monthly column from July to April , and World Review , in which he published the two-part essay 'The double crisis'.
Just over a year after Maria Huxley's death on 12 February , Huxley married Laura Archera — , an Italian violinist, writer, and psychotherapist, on 19 March They moved into the Hollywood hills. Huxley had begun his last novel, Island , an earnest, overlong story of an American cynic plane-wrecked on an island, and his recovery through participating in the island society's unorthodox health and educational practices.
In his last half-dozen years, Aldous Huxley —who twenty-five years before could barely be persuaded to speak in public—earned his living principally as a lecturer, including at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
In a dentist in Kansas removed a pre-cancerous lesion incompletely, failing to stop what developed into cancer of the tongue. By this had metastasized throughout his body. Huxley refused surgery for the cancer because it would have impaired his speech.
His declining health only increased the fervour with which he finished Island —' this is what Brave New World should have been, and wasn't ', his son Matthew said private information —although Huxley found a utopia far more difficult to write than a dystopia.
His valedictory sense was hastened in May by a fire which destroyed his home in the Hollywood hills along with his manuscripts. Huxley was stoically detached about this. His stepdaughter Ellen Hovde described his final mood: ' He is one of the few people who got more open and available as he grew older. I think by the time he died, he was very young ' Hunt. Kennedy's assassination.
Huxley was cremated in Los Angeles on 23 November , and in his ashes were returned to England and interred on 27 October in his parents' grave at Compton cemetery, Surrey. During his lifetime Aldous Huxley had two distinct audiences: first, a largely European and British one, for his potent satires of his social milieu; second, the audience created by the didactic writings of the s, particularly The Doors of Perception , which, with Island , heralded the youth culture of the s.
For the second audience, Huxley's appeal was social and philosophical, rather than literary. Later this audience gave way to a third, that was interested in his social prophecy, distanced from the bitter response to his experiments with psychedelics, which in England was extreme. As late as the Oxford Companion to English Literature disregarded the work of his American years.
In he also made advances in his personal life, marrying Maria Nys. She gave birth to their son, Matthew, the following year. Amidst all of these professional and personal developments, Huxley began work on his novel Crome Yellow , a parody of the intelligentsia and his experiences at Garsington. Although the book's publication in angered many of his Garsington acquaintances, it also established Huxley as an important writer and sold well enough to allow him to pursue his literary destiny.
While traveling about Europe with his family for the next several years, Huxley produced the commercially successful novels Antic Hay , Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point , which, like Crome , were satires of contemporary society and conventional morality.
Ensconced in his recently purchased villa in the South of France, in late Huxley began work on what is now widely considered to be one of the Western canon's most important novels. Brave New World is also an astonishingly prescient novel, foretelling advances in each of these areas that were as much as a half-century away.
Set in London in , the 7th century After Ford, Brave New World presents a future in which genetically engineered babies are produced on assembly lines, the social and economic divide between the haves and the have nots is legally enforced and discontent is quelled by advertising, medication, sex and entertainment.
In the decades that followed, that prestige would enable Huxley to not only indulge his love of travel but to also explore new ways of being.
Huxley followed Brave New World with the novel Eyeless in Gaza , which showed his blossoming interest in Eastern philosophy and mysticism.
The following year, he left Europe for North America, where he completed a work on pacifism titled Ends and Means , and in he settled in Los Angeles, California, where he would spend most of the rest of his life.
During this time, Huxley added screenwriter to his long list of occupations and was paid handsomely by studios for his work. He also worked on countless articles and editorials.
Much of what time he had left he devoted to his interest in Eastern mysticism, beginning a decades-long association with the Vedanta Society, whose journal Huxley contributed numerous pieces to. The work also marked a change in Huxley himself. The setting of Brave New World — a future London rather than the familiar country houses and town houses of his previous fiction — seems to have broken Huxley out of some habits of mind.
In Brave New World , Huxley takes the problem of evil much more seriously than in the past. The satirist had begun to evolve into the social philosopher.
In his new home, Huxley became involved in the study and practice of mysticism. His new philosophical outlook informed his novel Eyeless in Gaza , which promoted pacifism on the eve of World War II.
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan makes the case for the emptiness of materialism. Gradually, Huxley moved toward mystical writings, far from the tone of his early satire. The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception represent Huxley's non-fictional expression of his interests, including even experimentation with psychedelic drugs.
He also continued writing fiction, notably Ape and Essence , a futuristic fiction set in Los Angeles after a nuclear war. With Grey Eminence and The Devils of Loudon , Huxley looked backward to historical events to examine what he believed to be the hypocrisy of organized religion. In addition to his fiction and screenplays, the planning and writing of biographies, essays, and other works of non-fiction occupied him constantly during these years.
Huxley's last novel, Island , returns to the theme of the future he once explored so memorably in Brave New World. The later novel, in which Huxley tried to create a positive vision of the future, failed to come up to readers' expectations.
0コメント