![]() But though Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930), it probably casts no light on the future. Here the hedonistic principle is pushed to its utmost the whole world has turned into a Riviera hotel. He didn’t get around to reviewing Brave New World until July 1940, when Britain seemed to have more urgent problems than the supposed nightmare of too much free sex and narcosis: But since he acknowledges that work as an inspiration of his own, the allegation may have been no insult. ![]() ![]() He suggested at one point that Huxley had “plagiarized” from an earlier anti-Utopian novel, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We. Orwell never referred to this personal connection in print, as far as I know, when Brave New World was published in 1931 and when its dystopic metaphors entered the conversational and social bloodstream. Runciman remembers that Blair admired Huxley’s command of French culture and that he detested those boys who took advantage of the schoolmaster’s myopia. Runciman, later to become the grand historian of Byzantium and the Crusades, and Eric Blair, later to metamorphose into George Orwell. Having originally hoped to become a physician, Huxley contracted a serious eye infection as an adolescent, lost a good deal of his sight, and until he could launch himself as a writer was compelled to be a rather diffident and reluctant teacher of French. (This is one of the bonding yet realistic elements in Anthony Powell’s splendid novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.) However, that Aldous Huxley should have taught George Orwell at Eton, which was also Anthony Powell’s old school, seems to strain the natural serendipity of coincidence. Nonetheless, literary immortality often depends on such vague but durable misunderstandings, and the three words “Brave New World” (themselves annexed from Miranda’s speech in Shakespeare’s Tempest) are as well known as “Catch-22” or “Nineteen Eighty-Four” – virtual hieroglyphics which almost automatically summon a universe of images and associations.Įnglish literary society in the twentieth century was a fairly small pond, and the English class system tended to mean in any case that a limited number of people kept running into each other. In America, as Joan Didion once wrote, people who say “No man is an island” think that they are quoting Ernest Hemingway: the fans who still make a shrine of Morrison’s grave in Paris probably don’t appreciate that Huxley was himself borrowing from William Blake. No, what would astonish laconic old Aldous would be the discovery that his photograph is among those on the album cover of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – perhaps the least cacophonous of the signature records of pop and rock – and that Jim Morrison of The Doors named his group after Huxley’s later and proto-psychedelic book The Doors of Perception. So, in a way, was the “one child” policy now followed in Communist China, where to the extent that the program is successful we will not only see a formerly clannish society where everyone is an only child but a formerly Marxist one that has no real cognate word for “brotherhood.” Intercontinental rocket travel has not become the commonplace Huxley anticipated, but its equivalents have become a cliché: jumbo jets do the same work of abolishing distance for the masses even though, in a strange moment of refusal, the developed world has stepped back from the supersonic Concorde and reverted to the days of voyaging comfortably below the speed of sound. A flickering hunger for authenticity pushes many people to explore the peripheral and shrinking worlds of the “indigenous.” This was all prefigured in Brave New World. Public life in the richer societies is routinely compared to the rhythms of spectacle and entertainment. ![]() The study of history is everywhere, but especially in the United States, in steep decline. Sex has been divorced from procreation to a degree hard to imagine even in 1963, and the current great debates in the moral sciences concern the implications of reproductive cloning and of the employment of fetal stem-cells in medicine. Lewis, chronicler of Narnia), so he missed the televisual event which once and for all confirmed the “global village.” But if he were able to return to us, and cast his scornful and lofty gaze on our hedonistic society, he would probably be relatively unsurprised at the way things are going. He chanced to die on the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 (being cheated of a proper obituary notice as a result, and sharing the date of decease with C.S. Aldous Huxley absolutely detested mass culture and popular entertainment, and many of his toughest critical essays, as well as several intense passages in his fiction, consist of sneers and jeers at the cheapness of the cinematic ethic and the vulgarity of commercial music.
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