Aldous Huxley

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. 

Overall I found his nonfiction writing to be somewhere in between Orwell (crystal clear) and Hitchens (oppressively pedantic and obtuse) with the fiction being unobjectionable.  I’ll have to read Brave New World Revisited, his nonfiction analysis of his story, in 1958, after several decades, the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and Orwell’s 1984 (1949).   

Orwell Rocks!

Well, really this is a review of Road to Wigan Pier, but since that title is supremely lame for the book itself, I couldn’t use it as the blog title either.

Wigan is a city in England, northwest of Manchester.  It is not on the coast, so the “pier” was just a riverfront with no access to the Atlantic Ocean, much less any beaches.   The title really says almost nothing about what the whole thing was about.  [All I knew about Wigan before this is that they have a soccer team.]

For those of you familiar with only 1984 and Animal Farm, let me clue you in.  Orwell had a substantial volume of nonfiction as well, and remarkably, his non-fiction is at least as entertaining as his fiction.  Mainly it’s because he had such a phenomenal way of describing things, a perpetual WTF attitude, that he could describe paint drying and it would be interesting. 

Up until this point I considered Homage to Catalonia, his “WTF” account of his brief experience in the POUM (non-Stalinist, socialist militia) in the Spanish Civil War, to be his best nonfiction.  He was in Barcelona in May 1937 when the various Republican factions – Fascists miles away – took shots at each other.  If you want to know about the Spanish Civil War, read this one.

Anyhow.  In Road, he goes up to northern England and visits different cities, notably Wigan, but also Sheffield (home of Def Leppard, not mentioned herein).  In particular he went into the coal mines to see what that was like.  As a tall guy, he had a hard time.  He came away with a much better understanding, tactically, of what coal miners do.  But he also came away with a better understanding of the bigger picture of working class relations in that part of the country.  There’s really no substitute for actually going somewhere to see with your own eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your own nose, taste with your own tongue, and feel with your own appropriate body part, what is actually going on. 

In the second half of the book, he takes issue with the contemporary socialist movement.  At that time – 1937 – Hitler and Mussolini were well in power, but so was Stalin in the USSR.  Capitalist democracies appeared helpless to fight the two extremes (what he would say once the US entered the war, might be something else).  One thing he noticed was that very few socialists were actually FROM the working class.  Most were bourgeois.  Another thing he noticed is that very few of these bourgeois socialists had ever even met, much less associated with, any members of the working class they professed to champion.  To the contrary, they could not bring themselves to shed their existing unease and contempt for these folk.  Moreover, on the few occasions in which they did, they could not resist acting as snobs, intellectual and otherwise, and using Marxist jargon, and going on about how great Stalin was and what a wonderful place the Soviet Union was.  The perverse result was that too many workers, whose interests were served by the socialists and opposed by the fascists - and were often even able to recognize that for themselves - were driven into the enemy's arms by the spectacularly poor job the socialists did of selling their cause.  Socialist Facepalm.  

I recall a Nation article ages ago written by Michael Moore.  Yeah, the fat “Roger & Me” guy.  He bitched about ivory tower socialist intellectuals who never come near a factory worker, wrapped up in Marxist ideology and jargon – “proletariat”, “bourgeois”, “class consciousness”, etc. – none of which means anything to the GM, Ford, and Chrysler workers who the socialists are trying to reach.   His advice (copying Orwell’s): “Hang out with them, go to a hockey game, go hunting with them.  Talk about how the company is screwing them over.  Whatever you do, don’t go on about Marxism.”  I assume Moore had read Road, as Orwell said the same thing to his colleagues in England in 1937. 

Orwell also reviews much of the contemporary socialist literature, plus H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).  Again, I found his analysis of the contemporary situation and his fellow socialists to be riveting.  What I find especially refreshing is his ability to concede points and play devil’s advocate. 

I’m not now, nor have I ever been a socialist, and I doubt I ever will be.  However, by far the most persuasive case that can be made, is made by Orwell.   His closest contemporary equivalents are Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and Michael Moore.  Neither are very persuasive; both are too arrogant, too stuck up, too self-satisfied.  I’m not aware they were coordinating on the same team, though Hitchens seemed to fight the more intellectual capitalists while Moore focused on the trenches, as it were.  I don’t consider either to be particularly effective.  Judging by the outcome last November, Moore did a poor job getting the American proletariat to oppose Donald Trump.  What’s even more remarkable, and what Orwell was noting in his own time, is that most of Trump’s opposition, and Hillary’s support, came from people we’d describe as bourgeois:  upper class white people.  In fact, much of what Orwell describes in 1937 could also apply to 2017 – a surprising amount.  I have to wonder how recently Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein have consulted Orwell.  Not recently, it seems…if at all.  Then again, I doubt Trump is even aware of Orwell’s existence, much less having read any of his books.

As for my own readers, I would advise everyone, socialist or not, to read this book if they haven’t already.  Orwell’s analysis is superb.  It’s witty.  It’s funny (far more so than 1984 or Animal Farm).  Non-socialists will probably enjoy reading Orwell take the piss out of his fellow socialists.  And the socialists among you may well enjoy Orwell’s wit and honesty. 

Or maybe not.