Aldous Huxley is a figure that has long drawn my attention. It is not only the fact the ‘Brave new world’ is the best work I have read imagining a dystopian future, it is also the tremendous originality with which he lived his life. This mixture of curiosity and admiration has led me to read Dana Sawyer’s biography.
In common with Winston Churchill, whose biography by Andrew Roberts I have also recently read, Huxley descended from a family generously touched by greatness, even if of a different kind. Not only was Aldous the grandson of the brilliant and influential scientist Thomas Huxley, he was also a close relative of Matthew Arnold, the acclaimed poet, this time on his mother’s side.
I cannot quite picture what growing up in an environment like that should feel like. The tremendous pressure that Victorian England’s elite places on their offspring mustn’t have helped, be it in the brutally cruel version that young Winston endured, almost abandoned by his parents, or in the coated-with-love, way more palatable one that Aldous experienced as a much loved child.
I write that thinking of episodes like Huxley’s older brother, Trev, and his mid twenties suicide, immersed, as he apparently was, in a feeling of being an irreparable failure. Falling way short of expectations relative to what being a Huxley meant in his world, both to himself and others, surely weighted a good deal in his deterioration process.
In a very different spirit to today’s dominating one –as an exception, there is a great Tyler Cowen andPatrick Collison interview on the subject–, England’s Victorian society believed that progress was possible and desirable, argues Sawyer, and that in that light each person had a moral obligation do his or her share to the best of their ability. For Aldous Huxley, this translated into a career applying his unrivalled intellect to destroy dogmatic structures, as a good rationalist, whilst trying to preserve the spiritual results that, as he put it, a perennial philosophy could provide to society’s greater benefit.
I find this interesting, inspiring and provocative in equal parts.
