A Biography on Orwell & Huxley

Part Three: Huxley as a Character

“Aldous was born into a particular and self-conscious enclave, a class within a class, the governing upper middle – an elite, an intellectual aristocracy made up of a handful of families – Trevelyans, Macaulays, Arnolds, Wedgwoods, Darwins, Huxleys – who had produced a number of extraordinarily and diversely gifted individuals whose influence, although they never confused themselves with the actual nobility, upon nineteenth-century England had been tremendous. Their common denominator was an intense desire to acquire, to advance and to disseminate knowledge – all of them, it goes without saying were highly though not necessarily expensively educated men and women – a wish to improve the lot as well as the administration of mankind, an assumption of responsibility – l’intelligence oblige – and a passion, no tamer word will do, for truth. It was the values, the habits, the glory, and the limitations, of this aristocracy which informed the spiritual and material background of Aldous’s youth..” (Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley – A Biography, 18-19) “Already when he was 13, some of Aldous’ key character traits were well in evidence, A school mate wrote: he was someone whith whom you couldn’t quarrel: he didn’t give way to violent emotions the way most of us did, He met ill-nature or spite with serene integrity and detached unselfishness – there was a shining goodness about Aldous…”

Huxley was 37 at the time of writing Brave New World. “We have a verbal snapshot of him around this time by James Lansdale Hodson: ‘Aldous Huxley is so tall – six feet four inches – and slender that he bends when walking; he has a mop of blackish brown hair, a keen, sensitive face and horn-rims with curved lenses. He preserves at thirty-seven something of the Oxford undergraduate’s appearance – suede leather shoes, negligent collar, protruding soft cuffs . . . He talks well, leaping from topic to topic, changing his chair and his attitudes also at the same time . . . he types everything, tries to do one thousand words a day, and writes poetry only when he must.’” (Nicholas Murray in ‘Aldous Huxley’)

“I should like to go on for ever learning. I lust for knowledge, as well theoretic as empirical. Comparing small things with great, I think I am rather like the incomparable John Donne.” (Aldous Huxley in a letter to Julian Huxley 1916, cited in Sybille Bedford’s ‘Aldous Huxley: A Biography’)

“I still have a vivid pictoral recollection of that elongated, stooping, myopic figure, with a face that was far younger than most of our masters’ [he was twenty-three] and yet seemed somehow ageless, and usually hidden by an infinite variety of spectacles, eyes that were almost sightless and yet almost uncomfortably observant. He stood there looking something of a martyr but at the same time extraordinarily distinguished” (Sir Stephen Runciman, Mem. Vol. And from a letter to S. B)

“If one looks at his face one gets first an impression of immense intelligence, but this is not unusual among artists. What is much more remarkable and almost peculiar to him is the radiance of serenity and loving-kindness on his features; one no longer feels ‘what a clever man’ but ‘what a good man,’ a man at peace with himself and plunged as well – indeed fully engaged – in the eternal conflict between good and evil, awareness and stupidity. (Cyril Connolly, interview with Huxley for Picture Post, 1948)

“His long-term end, his absolute end: discovery. The discovery of what we are. His life was mainly what, for want of a better word, we must call the inner life: a process of gradual self-transformation, the fruits of which are traceable, perhaps, in his books (Aldous left no journal) and were evident to those who met the man he had become.” (Sybille Bedford’s ‘Aldous Huxley: A Biography’)

 “His life was a constant search for light, for understanding, of himself and his fellow men and women in the twentieth century. This intellectual ambition – not unknown but rare in English novelists – sent him far beyond the confines of prose fiction into history, philosophy, science, politics, mysticism, psychic exploration. He offered as his personal motto the legend hung around the neck of a ragged scarecrow of a man in a painting by Goya: aun aprendo. I am still learning. Grandson of the great Victorian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley – ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ – he had a lifelong passion for truth, artistic and scientific. His field of interest, declared Isaiah Berlin after his death, was nothing less than ‘the condition of men in the twentieth century’.” (Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

“It is true that he confessed to ‘a fear of the responsibilities of relationships’. And he admitted: ‘I know how to deal with abstract ideas but not people’. In spite of his exceptional intelligence and his frequent impatience with human stupidity (expressed more at a theoretical than at a personal level) Huxley was a surprisingly modest and self-effacing man.” (Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

Huxley considered himself to have a “cerebrotonic personality”: “The cerebrotonic is the over-alert, over-sensitive introvert, who is more concerned with the inner universe of his own thoughts and feelings and imagination than with the external world . . . In posture and movements, the cerebrotonic person is tense and restrained. His reactions may be unduly rapid and his physiological responses uncomfortably intense . . . Extreme cerebrotonics . . . have a passion for privacy, hate to make themselves conspicuous . . . In company they tend to be shy and unpredictably moody . . . Their normal manner is inhibited and restrained and when it comes to the expression of feelings they are outwardly so inhibited that viscerotonics suspect them of being heartless.” (Huxley, Harper’s Magazine, November 1944)

“All three views of Huxley agree that here was a brilliant writer who had made his mark but of whom something more was expected. He was being summoned to act as the moral conscience of his generation but before he could do that he would have to resolve his own inner conflicts, to balance his intellectual powers with his moral and imaginative vision of contemporary life. The next twelve months or so, from the middle of 1934 to the end of 1935 when he embraced the pacifist cause, constituted one of the most difficult passages in his life.” (Nicholas Murray’s ‘Aldous Huxley’)

From Sybille Bedford’s ‘Aldous Huxley- A Biography’: “Simultaneous existence in a dozen parallel worlds – this is what always exercised Aldous’s mind. What most of us most of the time choose to ignore because it is too complicated, too out of stride with our daily requirements and habitual sense perceptions, too dizzy-making in fact, was for Aldous evident philosophical and literary raw material.”

“The mind must be open, unperturbed, empty of irrelevant things, quiet. There’s no room for thoughts in a half-shut, cluttered mind . . .” (Huxley in Those Barren Leaves)

“One can either go on listening to the news – and of course the news is always bad, even when it sounds good. Or alternatively one can make up one’s mind to listen to something else.” (Sebastian in Time Must Have a Stop by Huxley)