Yet again, I check my blog records only to find that I
haven’t actually commented on this writer.
Here goes.
He’s best known for two major works: Brave
New World, and The Doors of
Perception. The latter was used by the
famous L.A. band to name themselves, although little of their material really
has much to do with the subject matter of that book. It’s typically paired with Heaven & Hell (likewise, no content
connection with the Black Sabbath album of 1980), as they both tend to focus on
altering consciousness.
Before I get into his two major works, a brief biography.
Born in England in 1894, he suffered blindness for awhile
which prevented him from pursuing a career in science like his
grandfather. Instead, he became a
prolific writer. In the 1950s he moved to the US. He died on November 22, 1963, along
with C.S. Lewis, and a more famous person, who died under more notable circumstances,
John F. Kennedy. Per his request, his
wife gave him an injection of 100 mikes of LSD on his death bed.
Huxley actually wrote a lot: in addition to many essays, he wrote no less
than 11 novels, most if not all overshadowed by his two major works; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley.
Brave
New World. A dystopian saga,
written in 1931, about a totalitarian society in the future (2540 AD), which
remarkably coexists with a free, anarchic society. Peace is kept by “soma”, a mysterious (fictional)
hallucinogen. A “savage”, John, is brought
to the society, becomes somewhat of a celebrity, but ultimately decides he’s
not a fan of the dictatorship.
The most obvious comparison is with 1984, by Orwell, and Huxley was an admirer of Orwell and even wrote
to him complimenting him on that novel. Between
the two, I find Orwell’s book much better, but Huxley deserves credit for
recognizing that such a society might well rely upon drugs to keep its subjects
docile and obedient. Orwell seemed to
assume that after years of misinformation, people would simply accept the
government’s story and doubt their own experience and judgment.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a comparison between the two, Why
Americans Are Not Taught History. [Perhaps a blog about Hitchens would be appropriate... maybe later.]
The book was made into a movie twice: first in 1980, then
later in 1998. I’ve only seen the 1998
version, which features Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy.
The Doors
of Perception/Heaven & Hell. Non-fiction, and fairly short: Doors
(1954) is about his experience with mescaline.
Most of his observations have to do with flowers and classical music. In that regard it’s considerably less
interesting than the subject matter would imply. I found Albert Hofmann’s book (LSD: My Problem Child) to be far more
intriguing, even though it’s written by a scientist and not a novelist. As noted above, Huxley died in 1963, well
before Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and other psychedelic bands came around; in
1963 the Beatles were still in their pop phase and 5 years before “Revolution
#9”. Add him to Fitzhugh Ludlow, another
“trip-writer” (1860s) denied the privilege of the appropriate music to accompany
his adventures, Ludlow’s being highly concentrated hashish, which was legal in
New York state back then.
Heaven
& Hell (1956) offers the remarkable assertion: medieval peasants were effectively tripping
in their everyday lives. Huxley argues
that their highly substandard diets with vitamin deficiencies, plus the Church’s
omnipresent obsession with death and the afterlife, essentially gave these poor
people a continuous bad trip. I’m not
aware that anyone took up the experiment of flirting with scurvy to emulate psychedelics: Huxley himself apparently didn’t bother, as mescaline,
LSD, etc. made such an attempt pointless.
He also claims that you can trip off breathing a mixture
of seven parts oxygen, three parts carbon dioxide. Never heard that before.
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