Remembering Aldous Huxley, died 22/11/63

[aeolium]

As well as that death 50 years ago, there were also the deaths of two well-known writers, C S Lewis and Aldous Huxley. I remember when I was a student being briefly captivated by Huxley's novels which seemed to be full of acute perception, wit and the play of ideas though there was also a coldness and bleak pessimism there (at least in his pre-war work). I think he was much more interested in ideas than in people, and perhaps that is why his novels are now for the most part forgotten but he still seems to me worth reading. I also very much admired the biography of Huxley by the anarchist George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour which brought out the revolution in sensibility which Huxley underwent and which led to his very different later work. There is also a brief extract of a BBC interview with Huxley here. Of the two prophets of future dystopias, Huxley and Orwell, it seems to me that Huxley's vision was the more prescient even though for some decades it appeared as though Orwell's was more likely.

There is another appreciation here.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

thanks aeolium; Huxley was a novelist for me not a spiritual guide - along with Orwell and Lawrence i read all of his stuff i could lay my hands on at the public library ... i do remember the discovery of Beethoven's late quartets i believe in Point Counterpoint [not quite as transfixing of my teenage mind as The Alexandria Quartet, another contrapuntal device]

his psychedelics caught my young mind but later education left me sceptical, he was a most mystical of English writers [certainly compared to Orwell and Lawrence] and i rather left him behind but he is well worth a plaque! more so than the awful C S Lewis whose work i stopped reading aloud to my daughter on moral grounds and sheer tedium ...

it was Marx who wrote of the opium of the people, but Huxley was far more astute in understanding just what that might be

i confess that reading the novels i read then would now be an impossibility ....

[vinteuil]

... I remember much enjoying Crome Yellow (an important influence on Barbara Pym) ; more recently I re-read his travel and art essays in Along the Road - and again enjoyed it a lot. Time to re-read some of his other stuff, I think...

Certainly more interesting than CS Lewis

[Serial_Apologist]

his psychedelics caught my young mind but later education left me sceptical, he was a most mystical of English writers [certainly compared to Orwell and Lawrence] and i rather left him behind but he is well worth a plaque! more so than the awful C S Lewis whose work i stopped reading aloud to my daughter on moral grounds and sheer tedium ...

CS Lewis was just a name until listening to "The Screwtape Letters" being read on R4 this week, so I certainly agree!

it was Marx who wrote of the opium of the people, but Huxley was far more astute in understanding just what that might be

That's right: I was desolate having left "Island" on a train, until getting a replacement; however I don't think we should thank Aldous for implanting in a generational mindset the idea of drugs as any sort of short cut other than to a fried brain. There are other ways: meditation, mantras, music with a lot of the unexpected in it, Cage's "Schweigen im Wald".

[Alain Maréchal]

<<I remember much enjoying Crome Yellow (an important influence on Barbara Pym)>>

Crome Yellow is a favourite of mine (as is BP), but I hadn't made that connection, and am grateful to you for pointing it out. I shall now immediately reread Crome Yellow and Crampton Hodnet - my favourite BP novel.

I wasn't taught English Lit until my teens, being foreign, and I distinctly recall being "warned off" C.S. Lewis, (The Screwtape letters were mentioned as a possible exception) and Tolkien, as they were writers of fantasy and therefore not worth consideration, and advised to concentrate on reality. That possibly explains why I have never, ever, warmed to Sci-Fi of any sort, or anything that doesn't seem grounded in reality. The success of Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who or Harry Potter is quite inexplicable to me. Why do HP fans not read Mervyn Peake, which is all grounded in solid and logical, though horrible, reality, as any civil servant will tell you.

Nothing Sci-Fi about Huxley of course: its all plausible, very little Fictitious Science is involved.

[aeolium]

Nothing Sci-Fi about Huxley of course: its all plausible, very little Fictitious Science is involved.

Well, Brave New World was set over 600 years into the future and does contain reference to scientific developments which though some have now been realised were not considered imminent at the time the novel was written, 1931. We should think of its imaginary feats not in the light of our own day but how they would have appeared at the time of the work's creation.

I never think that science fiction or fantasy is necessarily not grounded in reality simply because it is set in imaginary or distant worlds. Often the writer is simply using that structure as a device for a freer commentary on the world of his own time. The American writer Philip K Dick seems to me a good example of this. If anything, I think it is the writer of historical fiction who is more constrained, unable to write about the world of his own time without jarring anachronism.

[Alain Maréchal]

I confess I only read BNW once, in my late teens, and struggled with it in English. I think I found it eminently plausible (in the sixties). It was the one book of his, of those I read, that I did not like. Perhaps I should try again, but so many books....

[JimD]

...grounded in reality.

While not seeking to be an advocate for any of the fantasists, if so they be, referred to, I'd be grateful for an explication of the term 'grounded in reality'. It has interesting echoes of Thomas Gradgrind.

[Alain Maréchal]

It has interesting echoes of Thomas Gradgrind.

A much maligned character, in my opinion. His flaw was to not follow his principles: he should have thrown his undeserving son to the wolves. It is probably the only Dickens book I enjoy without reservation. Not for nothing did Trollope lampoon him in The Warden as Mr. Sanctimonious Sentiment.

It's difficult to explain about reality, but perhaps if I said that probably the only sci-fi film I ever enjoyed was "Outland" you might understand. It did not require the intervention of aliens, or self-propelled human flying.

[richardfinegold]

As well as that death 50 years ago, there were also the deaths of two well-known writers, C S Lewis and Aldous Huxley. I remember when I was a student being briefly captivated by Huxley's novels which seemed to be full of acute perception, wit and the play of ideas though there was also a coldness and bleak pessimism there (at least in his pre-war work). I think he was much more interested in ideas than in people, and perhaps that is why his novels are now for the most part forgotten but he still seems to me worth reading. I also very much admired the biography of Huxley by the anarchist George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour which brought out the revolution in sensibility which Huxley underwent and which led to his very different later work. There is also a brief extract of a BBC interview with Huxley here. Of the two prophets of future dystopias, Huxley and Orwell, it seems to me that Huxley's vision was the more prescient even though for some decades it appeared as though Orwell's was more likely.

There is another appreciation here.

I agree with your assessments of Orwell and Huxley. I have read Eyeless in Gaza at three different stages of my life and always appreciate different facets of it.

[Stanley Stewart]

Always a surprise when viewing "Pride & Prejudice" (1940) to see the name of Aldous Huxley credited as collaborator on the screenplay but throughout the MGM film version you can hear the crisp crunch of his writing well performed by Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, both graciously catching the genteel fervour of the novel. I've just had a look at Ian Hamilton's Writers in Hollywood, 1915-1951, (1990,Wm Heinemann, pubs).

Huxley was always in need of money and lived in California until his death in 1963. He continued to dabble in screenplays and I recall his impressive adaptation of his own play, "The Gioconda Smile" as "A Woman's Vengeance" in 1948. Jessica Tandy starred but Hollywood always had a repertory of classy players from the British Raj on call!

"Huxley's later adventures in Hollywood do not amount to much - a failed collaboration
with Christopher Isherwood on a script about a faith healer, a rejected adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for Walt Disney, a saga of negotiations about a possible movie of Lady Chatterley's Lover (with Isherwood, Auden and even Samuel Beckett somehow involved as possible co-writers), a drawn out effort to make a film of his own Brave New World (which his crooked British agent had sold off - for a song - to RKO in 1932). The Brave New World discussions took place in 1946. By this time Huxley was once again on the bestseller lists, with Time Must Have a Stop, and the need for film gold was not quite so pressing."

[muzzer]

Off-topic but what sort of work's available these days for writers that doesn't leave you brain-dead by lunchtime?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Huxley was always in need of money and lived in California until his death in 1963.

... and where he became a close friend of Stravinsky, who, fifty years ago, pipped aeolie to the post with this thread title:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oeoV5X1Ha0

[aeolium]

a saga of negotiations about a possible movie of Lady Chatterley's Lover (with Isherwood, Auden and even Samuel Beckett somehow involved as possible co-writers)

That would have been some screenplay, SS

Thanks for those comments - I had forgotten about Huxley's involvement with Hollywood. It's hard to see how he would have tolerated the compromises required by the moguls and like some others, e.g. Wodehouse and Chandler, he must have been mystified by the strange world of the studios. There was a BBC adaptation of Brave New World in 1980 IIRC.

[muzzer]

You can watch that BNW on youtube I think. On the subject of emigres in Hollywood, I bought this as a present a few years ago http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1