Aldous Huxley Essay Research Paper Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Essay, Research Paper

Aldous Huxley, because he was ill most of the time and since the world he live in was corrupt, tried to make a perfect world seem possible in Brave New World and Island.

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Godalming, in the county of Surrey. As a young boy, Aldous was quite docile and usually kept to himself. He had an unusually large head for his size, and his family nicknamed him “Ogie,” as in Ogre. His brother Julian once said, “He sat quiet most of the time, contemplating the strangeness of things. He showed some quality, some innate superiority, which called for respect even in the nursery jungle. This recognition dawned when Aldous was five and I was a prep school boy of twelve”(Bedford 3). Aldous liked to complain frequently and his mother once gave him a milk mug which bore the inscription, Oh isn’t the world flat with nothing whatever to grumble at. (Bedford 10)

He began writing poems at age nine and was labeled as a troubled child because of his odd observations of everyday occurrences. When he was 14, he attended college at Eton and was an outstanding student but never gained more than a casual interest in sports.

During the winter of 1911, Aldous began having trouble with his eyes. One morning they were swollen and extremely red. His vision rapidly decreased and within a few weeks, Aldous was blind. The diagnosis was, ultimately, keratitis punctata, an inflammation of the cornea. He attended sessions once a week for injections into the eyes of penicillin and cortisone. The actual inflammation subsided gradually, which left opacities in the corneas, extremely impairing sight. The damage had been done.

Aldous, now on his own, began to teach himself braille and to type on a portable typewriter. As time progressed, he also taught himself the piano. Aldous quickly became very well read and once explained his passion for reading, “With braille, you can’t just glance over a page and lose interest” (Bedford 127). School was completed at Oxford with the help of tutors in 1914. Within two years, one eye was capable of light perception and the other with enough vision to detect very large objects.

Limbo, a collection of Aldous’ short stories was published in 1920. The book didn’t sell too well, due to its content of the anticipation and predictions of the postwar mood. Leda was also published in 1920, and contained a compilation of poems. Aldous called these two works his “two children.” In 1921, his first cynical novel, Chrome Yellow, was released. The book received mixed reviews but Aldous would only reply by saying, “I’m such a timid person, much too, in fact, to vent it aloud” (Bedford 210).

Point-Counter-Point was written in 1928. This was the most cynical writing anyone had seen yet. It was as if Aldous was trying to shock the public. While on vacation in Tuscany, Aldous met and befriended D.H. Lawrence. Their works were constantly compared to one another’s because of the bizarre topics on which they seemed to focus (Bedford 225).

For reasons unknown, Aldous Huxley became very outspoken in his disgust at the materialistic society in which he lived. The classic and at the time controversial Brave New World was released in August 1932. The book tells of a counter-utopian society in the 25th century, after a nine-year war. The planet is controlled by the World Controllers, who dictate everyday life for the population except for the Savages, who struggle to hold on to the life that free-willed humans once lived. The deity of this world is Henry Ford, inventor of the production line. Productivity is the only concern of the world controllers, as procreation is illegal and only recreational sex is encouraged. The world is populated through the technology of cloning human embryos and altering their genetic structure, casting them into lifelong roles (Huxley, H). Is this how Aldous viewed the future of man?

Brave New World made Aldous Huxley a very wealthy man, which consequently made matters worse. He was thrown head-first into the exact materialistic circle of people that he despised so much. Nobody is quite sure why his anger grew so intense over the next five years, but the events that followed gave some possible insights.

In 1938, Aldous and his wife Maria, moved to Los Angeles, California. Aldous immediately became ill with a mild but stubborn attack of bronchial pneumonia, and had to spend three weeks in the hospital. After a slow recovery, he began painting and making notes for a future novel. The pictures he painted were of visions he saw while blind, and his perceptions of insignificant objects such as the floor on which he stood. Still not able to venture out at night, Aldous spent much of his spare time with his friend Edwin Hubble, the astronomer, and his wife Grace.

Within a short time, bad news arrived from Europe. Maria’s mother had become ill in a Mexican hospital and three days before returning to Belgium she was knocked down by a bus. Aldous’ older brother Trevenen had committed suicide, and Julian had a nervous breakdown. With all of the new stresses Aldous faced, his poor eyesight became very bothersome to him. He withdrew from family and friends and Maria was losing her nerve as well. Aldous tried many new treatments for his eyes, but sustained little improvement.

As the weeks went by, Aldous drank more fr