Aldous Huxley

• 1. Introduction

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  Aldous Huxley died at 5:20 pm Pacific Standard Time on the 22nd of November 1963 - and almost nobody noticed. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened less than seven hours later that same day. The writer C. S. Lewis also died that afternoon. Three towering figures, one catastrophic news cycle, and two literary legacies effectively erased from the front pages of history.

  But Huxley's exit from this world was singular. Unable to speak because cancer had spread through his body, he wrote a note to his wife Laura asking for "LSD, 100 μg, intramuscular." She gave him the injection at 11:20 am, and a second dose an hour later. He died peacefully at home, having tripped his way through his final hours, which was, in its own way, the most Aldous Huxley thing imaginable.

  Here was a man who graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, taught a young Eric Blair - the future George Orwell - at Eton, wrote forty-seven books across five decades, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. He befriended D. H. Lawrence, advised Timothy Leary on psychedelics, and wrote the foreword to the Bhagavad Gita during the Second World War. His most famous novel imagined a society of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning decades before such phrases entered everyday speech.

  What drove a man of such formidable intellect toward mysticism, mescaline, and a deathbed request for LSD? And how did someone who began his career satirising English society end up as one of the foremost philosophical voices of his age?

• 2. The Huxley Inheritance

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  Godalming, Surrey, on the 26th of July 1894, is where Aldous Leonard Huxley arrived into one of the most intellectually weighted families in Britain. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist and controversialist so devoted to Darwin's theories that he earned the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog." It was Thomas Henry who coined the word "agnostic." His brothers Julian and Andrew both became outstanding biologists. His half-brother Andrew would later be knighted in 1974.

  His mother Julia Arnold was the niece of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, and the sister of the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. Julia founded Prior's Field School and named her son Aldous after a character in one of her sister's novels. His father Leonard edited The Cornhill Magazine. The house Aldous grew up in was not a house where intellectual drifting was an option.

  Huxley's childhood nickname was "Ogie," short for "Ogre." His brother Julian described him as someone who frequently contemplated "the strangeness of things." His cousin Gervas noted an early interest in drawing. His formal education began in his father's botanical laboratory, then moved to Hillside School near Godalming, where his own mother taught him for several years before she became terminally ill. She died in 1908, when Huxley was fourteen.

  He went on to Eton and then, in October 1913, to Balliol College, Oxford. But in 1911, an eye disease called keratitis punctata left him practically blind for two to three years. It ended his early dream of becoming a doctor. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916 during the First World War and was rejected on health grounds. His brother Julian later reflected that the blindness was a blessing in disguise, writing that "his uniqueness lay in his universalism" - the inability to pursue medicine had pushed him toward a far broader province of knowledge.

• 3. The Making of a Satirist

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  In June 1916, Huxley graduated from Balliol with a first-class honours degree in English literature. He had already edited Oxford Poetry that year. Financially indebted to his father, he took a job teaching French at Eton, where among his pupils were Eric Blair and Steven Runciman. Blair was the young man who would later write under the name George Orwell. Huxley was remembered by those pupils as an incompetent schoolmaster, unable to keep order, though they spoke warmly of his command of language.

  He completed his first novel at the age of seventeen - unpublished - and began writing seriously in his early twenties. His first published novels were social satires: Crome Yellow in 1921, Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925, and Point Counter Point in 1928. During the 1920s he also contributed to Vanity Fair and British Vogue magazines. He was, by any measure, a success in the literary establishment he was quietly mocking.

  During the First World War, Huxley had spent time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working there as a farm labourer. He met Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell at the Manor, encountering the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. He later caricatured the Garsington lifestyle in Crome Yellow. It was also at Garsington that he met and quickly married a Belgian refugee named Maria Nys in 1919. She was born on the 10th of September 1899.

  In 1919 the writer John Middleton Murry invited Huxley to join the staff of the Athenaeum. During the 1920s, he and Maria lived part of the time in Italy, where he would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. When Lawrence died in 1930, in Provence, Huxley and Maria were present. Huxley edited Lawrence's letters, published in 1932. Very early in 1929, in London, he met Gerald Heard, a philosopher and broadcaster who would become one of the most consequential friendships of his life.

• 4. Brave New World and Beyond

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  Huxley's experience working during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, gave him something he could not have gotten from Oxford. He described it as encountering "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence." That phrase, from his own introduction to Brave New World, points directly at what the novel is doing: not predicting the future so much as diagnosing the present.

  Brave New World, published in 1932, was his fifth novel and his first dystopian work. Set in a future London, it portrays a society built on mass production and Pavlovian conditioning. The novel drew on that Billingham factory encounter in ways Huxley made explicit. It became the work for which he is most widely known.

  The influence of F. Matthias Alexander shaped the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza, in which Alexander appears as a character. Huxley's pacifism was not abstract. He joined the Peace Pledge Union, wrote An Encyclopedia of Pacifism, and co-wrote Ends and Means in 1937. When he moved to the United States that year with Maria, their son Matthew, and Gerald Heard, it was because, as the writer Cyril Connolly observed, "all European avenues had been exhausted in the search for a way forward - politics, art, science."

  In Hollywood, Huxley earned more than three thousand dollars per week as a screenwriter - roughly fifty thousand dollars in 2020 terms, according to Christopher Isherwood's autobiography. He used much of that income to transport Jewish and left-wing writers and artists from Nazi Germany to the United States. In March 1938, his friend Anita Loos put him in touch with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which hired him for Madame Curie, originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor. He received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice in 1940 and was paid for his work on Jane Eyre in 1944. Walt Disney commissioned him in 1945 to write a script based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the biography of Lewis Carroll. The script was never used.

• 5. The Perennial Philosophy

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  On the 21st of October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Orwell - his former pupil - congratulating him on Nineteen Eighty-Four and laying out a prediction of his own: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons."

  The letter illuminates the distance between the two former teacher and student. Orwell imagined totalitarianism through fear. Huxley imagined it through seduction and compliance - the very premise of Brave New World. But by the time Huxley wrote that letter, his thinking had moved far beyond either novel's frame.

  Gerald Heard had introduced Huxley to Vedanta, the Upanishad-centred philosophy, along with meditation and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. Huxley and Heard became Vedantists in the group formed around the Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and subsequently brought Christopher Isherwood into that circle. From 1941 until 1960, Huxley contributed forty-eight articles to Vedanta and the West, the society's publication. He also served on its editorial board from 1951 through 1962, alongside Isherwood, Heard, and the playwright John Van Druten.

  In 1938 Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. Their relationship was an ongoing exchange that edged into debate. Krishnamurti represented what Huxley described as the more detached, ivory-tower perspective; Huxley brought the more socially and historically grounded position. In 1954, Huxley wrote the foreword to Krishnamurti's work The First and Last Freedom.

  Huxley's book The Perennial Philosophy, published in 1945, mapped the commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, arguing that the same metaphysical truths appear across all the major religious traditions of the world. His biographer Dana Sawyer noted that earlier in his career Huxley had rejected mysticism and often mocked it in his novels. The shift was profound, and not everyone was pleased. Isherwood described having to explain to Huxley's widow Laura that one critic believed Huxley had been "corrupted by Hollywood and went astray after spooks."

• 6. Mescaline, LSD, and The Doors

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  In early 1953, Huxley began a correspondence with Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist then working in a Canadian institution, and eventually asked him to supply a dose of mescaline. Osmond obliged and supervised Huxley's first session with the drug in southern California. The resulting book, The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, described the experience in detail.

  The publication caused tension. Swami Prabhavananda disagreed with Huxley about the meaning and importance of psychedelic experience, and the relationship between them cooled. Huxley continued writing for the society's journal and attending lectures, but the friction was real. He would later have a second mescaline experience that he considered more profound than the ones described in the book.

  Huxley wrote that "the mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life." This was not fringe enthusiasm. In the 1950s Huxley tried LSD, and subsequently became an advisor to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in their early-1960s psychedelic research at Harvard University. Personality differences eventually led Huxley to distance himself from Leary, whom he believed had become too keen on indiscriminately promoting the drugs.

  The autonomy Huxley brought to psychedelics was the same autonomy he brought to everything. In 1953 he and Maria applied for United States citizenship, but when Huxley refused to bear arms for the country and declined to claim his objections were religious - the only excuse allowed under the McCarran Act - the judge adjourned the proceedings. Huxley withdrew his application. He stayed in America regardless, having turned down a knighthood in 1959 from the Macmillan government without explanation, while his brother Julian had been knighted in 1958.

• 7. The Final Years

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  In the autumn semester of 1960, Huxley accepted an invitation from Professor Huston Smith to serve as the Carnegie Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His lecture series was titled "What a Piece of Work is a Man" and covered history, language, and art. That same year, he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer.

  As his health deteriorated, he wrote his last novel, Island, published in 1962, which presented a vision of utopia to stand against Brave New World's dystopia. He gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the UCSF Medical Center and at the Esalen Institute. Those lectures are described as fundamental to the beginning of the Human Potential Movement.

  In April 1962, the Royal Society of Literature elected him Companion of Literature - the senior literary body in Britain. He accepted via letter on the 28th of April 1962. The society invited him to give a lecture at Somerset House in London in June 1963. He drafted the speech, but his declining health prevented him from attending. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times.

  Robert S. de Ropp, who had known Huxley in England in the 1930s and reconnected with him in the early 1960s, wrote of "the enormous intellect, the beautifully modulated voice, the gentle objectivity, all unchanged." On the 4th of November 1963, Christopher Isherwood - a friend of twenty-five years - visited Huxley at Cedars Sinai Hospital and wrote that he came away "with the picture of a great noble vessel sinking quietly into the deep; many of its delicate marvelous mechanisms still in perfect order, all its lights still shining."

  Huxley's friend Igor Stravinsky began work on a memorial composition for him in July 1963. Completed in October 1964, Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the 17th of April 1965 - eighteen months after Huxley's death on a day the world was too stunned to mourn him.