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Published by Vintage 2005
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Copyright Mrs Laura Huxley 1952
Biographical introduction copyright David Bradshaw 1994
Aldous Huxley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain in 1952 by Chatto & Windus
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About the Author
Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) bright, brilliant satires of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy but in the 1930s he moved to Sanary, near Toulon.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, Huxleys work took on a more sombre tone in response to the confusion of a society which he felt to be spinning dangerously out of control. His great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material progress) and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under such titles as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937).
In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the worlds problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction ( Time Must Have a Stop , 1944 and Island , 1962) and non-fiction ( The Perennial Philosophy , 1945, Grey Eminence , 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, The Doors of Perception , 1954).
Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.
ALSO BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
Novels
Crome Yellow
Antic Hay
Those Barren Leaves
Point Counter Point
Brave New World
Eyeless in Gaza
After Many a Summer
Time Must Have a Stop
Ape and Essence
The Genius and the Goddess
Island
Short Stories
Limbo
Mortal Coils
Little Mexican
Two or Three Graces
Brief Candles
The Gioconda Smile
(Collected Short Stories)
Biography
Grey Eminence
Travel
Along the Road
Jesting Pilate
Beyond the Mexique Bay
Poetry and Drama
The Burning Wheel
Jonah
The Defeat of Youth
Leda
Verses and a Comedy
The Gioconda Smile
Essays and Belles Lettres
On the Margin
Proper Studies
Do What You Will
Music at Night
Texts and Pretexts
The Olive Tree
Ends and Means
The Art of Seeing
The Perennial Philosophy
Science, Liberty and Peace
Themes and Variations
The Doors of Perception
Adonis and the Alphabet
Heaven and Hell
Brave New World Revisited
Literature and Science
The Human Situation
Moksha
For Children
The Crows of Pearblossom
A LDOUS H UXLEY (18941963)
O N 26 J ULY 1894, near Godalming in Surrey, Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a family which had only recently become synonymous with the intellectual aristocracy. Huxleys grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had earned notoriety as Darwins bulldog and fame as a populariser of science, just as his own probing and controversial works were destined to outrage and exhilarate readers and non-readers alike in the following century. Aldous Huxleys mother was a niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and he was a nephew of the redoubtable Mrs Humphry Ward, doyenne of late-Victorian novelists. This inheritance, combining the scientific and the literary in a blend which was to become characteristic of his vision as a writer, was both a source of great pride and a burden to Huxley in his formative years. Much was expected of him.
Three traumatic events left their mark on the young Huxley. In 1908 his mother died of cancer, and this led to the effective break-up of the family home. Two years later, while a schoolboy at Eton, Huxley contracted an eye infection which made him almost completely blind for a time and severely impaired his vision for the rest of his life. The suicide of his brother Trevenen in August 1914 robbed Huxley of the person to whom he felt closest. Over twenty years later, in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Huxleys treatment of the death of the main characters mother and his embodiment of Trev in the novel as the vulnerable Brian Foxe give some indication of the indelible pain which these tragic occurrences left in their wake. To a considerable degree, they account for the darkness, pungency and cynicism which feature so prominently in Huxleys work throughout the inter-war period.
Within months of achieving a First in English Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford in 1916, Huxley published The Burning Wheel . Huxleys first collection of verse, and the three which followed it, Jonah (1917), The Defeat of Youth (1918) and Leda (1920), reveal his indebtedness to French symbolism and fin de sicle aestheticism. Also discernible, however, beneath the poetrys triste and ironic patina, is a concern with the inward world of the spirit which anticipates Huxleys later absorption in mysticism. These volumes of poetry were the first of over fifty separate works of fiction, drama, verse, criticism, biography, travel and speculative writing which Huxley was to produce during the course of his life.
