Hollywood, November 22, 1963: fortified by a final dose of LSD, Aldous Huxley dies
of cancer. He was unaware that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas earlier
that afternoon. The young man delivering a new oxygen tank was about to break the news
when Huxley, woozy from the lysergic acid, addressed his wife: 'Those tanks are heavy. Give
the boy a dollar.' They were his last words.
To worry about a tip on one's deathbed suggests a selfless, rather patrician, charity. Huxley
was proud of his intellectual aristocracy. His grandfather was TH Huxley, a fierce champion
of Darwin; his mother was a niece of the poet and educationist Matthew Arnold. The
Arnoldian strain in Huxley, his calling to edify frail humanity, attracted social reformers and
mystery-mongers alike. Huxley's sweeping history of religious belief, The Perennial
Philosophy (1945), carried the publisher's warning: 'Mr Huxley has made no attempt to
found a new religion.'
Yet Huxley's psychedelic experiments, first reported in The Doors Of Perception (1954),
accidentally set in motion an international drug culture involving millions. On reading that
bewitching book, Brian Aldiss relates how he went straight to the Drug Store in Oxford and
asked for mescalin: to be told that it was not in the British pharmacopoeia. Meanwhile the
Beatles included a photograph of Huxley on the cover of their Sergeant Pepper album.
Exiled in America, Huxley sometimes appeared quite dotty, as though trapped in a chemical
yogi trance. 'Here I am in this Dome of Pleasure,' he addressed the American Psychatrists'
Association in 1955, 'floating midway on the waves.'
Cool. But was this the same Huxley who gave us the satirical brilliance of Point Counter
Point? Evelyn Waugh was not alone in thinking that America had softened the great mind.
'Huxley has done more than change climate and diet,' was his huffy verdict. In the 1920s
Huxley had been a Bright Young Thing, shopping at Fortnum and Mason and dining at Lady
Ottoline Morrell's.
The highbrow superiority was there in all his writing, whether on psycho-chemical drugs or
the Brandenburg concertos. 'A humanist,' E M Forster said of Huxley, 'who disliked
humanity.'
It was in America that Huxley began to experiment with parapsychology, the yogas of
increased awareness, even with L Ron Hubbard's dianetics quackery. Yet there was an
earlier, socially engaged Huxley who was quite different from this truth-and-beauty seeker. A
rare selection of Huxley's journalism from between the wars (The Hidden Huxley, edited by
David Bradshaw) reveals how he would cross the border between Disraeli's 'two nations', to
report on a mining village in County Durham, say, or the decayed warehouses of St
Katharine's Dock.
This was sightseeing in an alien England of manual labour and poverty; no
doubt Huxley rather relished the piquant contrast between his background and London's
dispossessed. 'Golly!' he marvelled after visiting a Jewish slaughter house in the East End.
'Golly! it's a strange world.'
Huxley was no George Orwell. But he was less remote from the drudgery of real life than we
might think. He kept a keen eye on the social and political upheaval provoked by the Wall
Street Crash of October 1929 and the economic muddle of the Slump. 'Even in its palmiest
days,' Huxley wrote on the misery of unemployment, 'Middlesbrough cannot have been a
very exhilarating place.'
This is not the Aldous Huxley of Sybille Bedford's adoring
biography, where he is all tousled hair and sweet myopia. What was he like, the authentic
1930s Huxley? Not very nice. While Huxley was perhaps right to brand H G Wells a 'horrid,
vulgar little man' (Wells was a frightful antisemite), he did share a Wellsian faith in the
organisation of society on a caste basis. The prospect of mob rule was a nightmare; both
Huxley and Wells dreamed of a samurai class of technocrats to apply scientific panaceas.
Hence eugenics. Huxley was in favour of genetic breeding programmes to arrest the
multiplication of the unfit. In a particularly unsavoury article, published in 1930 in the Evening
Standard, he confessed anxiety about the proliferation of mental defectives and called for
compulsory sterilisation. Not that Huxley was ever a crypto-Nazi; genetic engineering was
championed by many a progressive in the early 1930s (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the
half-baked sexologist Havelock Ellis).
Huxley's early distaste for parliamentary democracy
was probably influenced by that American journalist and wildcat expositor of Nietzsche, HL
Mencken. The so-called 'Sage of Baltimore' received scores of doting letters from Huxley;
they betray a withering scorn for, among others, DH Lawrence. 'He is only at home,' sniffs
Huxley, 'when pouring forth little lucubrations about baa lambs and daffodils.'
Aldous Huxley's Menckenian phase closed abruptly in 1934 when he witnessed the thuggery
of Mosley's black shirts at a London rally. Huxley was horrified; a new note of tolerance
entered his writing and he repeatedly warned against the 'crazy blasphemies of dictator
worship'. He also began to muse on our 'need to take holidays from reality', through religious
or narcotic experience. It was an early indication of Huxley's crackpot credo that
hallucinogens might provide us with a necessary benediction, a breathing space. Yet even
here, Huxley's approach to LSD would be essentially oligarchic: it was a dangerous
substance to be sampled only by such fine and visionary minds as his own.
Convinced that German bombs would reduce London to rubble, Aldous Huxley left for the
US with his first wife, Maria Nys, in 1937. He continued to preach pacifism there - but, as
George Orwell contemptuously remarked, from a safe 3,000-mile distance. Yet Brave New
World, Huxley's disturbing vision of a scientifically-engineered utopia, has already proved a
far more prescient guess at the future than Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley
understood the power of hidden persuasion, the techniques of mass suggestion, better than
any advertising executive. Nineteen Ninety-Four sees the centenary of a true seer.