The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Collected Essays, Volume III: 1930-1935 by Aldous Huxley
David Seed

Aldous Huxley. Collected Essays, Volume III: 1930-1935. Ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. Ivan R. Dee, 2001. 632 pp. $35.00; Volume IV: 1936-1938. Ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. Ivan R. Dee, 2001. 445 pp. $35.00.

These volumes, under the editorship of Robert S. Baker (author of an invaluable monograph on Brave New World) and James Sexton, form part of a projected six-volume set that will collect all of Huxley’s essays. The first two volumes cover the 1920s and show Huxley beginning to work out his views on the collapse of values in the modern world and on such contemporary media as the cinema. By the end of that decade, Huxley had already identified a number of crucial issues he was to develop in the thirties: the impact of technology, the nature of American culture, and the desirable form society should take. Inevitably, many readers will expect from these volumes an elaborate context for Brave New World, and as early as 1929 Huxley had begun to express his unease over the “worship of success and efficiency.” Throughout his career Huxley held ambivalent attitudes toward what he called the “tragedy of the machine,” which produced good and (usually unexpected) bad results. Mass-produced goods were fine; mass-produced ideas were a totally different matter. Huxley never writes about subjects like technology or literature in isolation from other aspects of society and here anticipates later fiction like Fahrenheit 451 in seeing newly created leisure as a problem. Thus mass production might release thousands from menial tasks, but it also necessitates endless distraction to fill the free time produced by the system.

The editors of these volumes rightly stress that Huxley was preoccupied by two concerns, science and modernity, and one of the ways Huxley satirized contemporary regimes was by showing that they were actually not new at all but merely modifications of ancient practices. Again and again in his essays of the thirties Huxley returns to the ease with which the masses can be manipulated. The most pessimistic formulation of the political process comes when Huxley reduces human behavior to “angry apishness” where the electorate seems driven by an irrational desire to destroy civilization, which it finally achieves in Ape and Essence. Another scientific development that catches Huxley’s attention is behaviorism. He speculates that it might be possible to devise a “baby farm” and, through a “systematic conditioning of infant reflexes,” produce a society where force will no longer be necessary to ensure acquiescence. This was to become a major theme in Huxley’s comments on the postwar technology of mind control. During the thirties he was agonizingly conscious of the need for social planning, but steadily resisted the lure of totalitarianism and unrealistic utopian proposals like those of H. G. Wells.

Huxley never separates his discussion of literature from the social institutions and practices that support it. He subscribed, for instance, to the French critic Gaultier’s coinage of bovarysme, in the sense that he saw literature as feeding our capacity to create social selves or personae. Huxley reserved special praise for writers like Zamyatin or Mencken who, like himself, criticized the cultural norms of their societies, although he was well aware how unpredictable the social “processing” of such writers could be. Shaw’s satire was muffled by his humor; Lawrence’s fiction was used by British youth to sanction promiscuity and by the Nazis to support their mythology, neither of which Lawrence would have approved. Lawrence remains a key literary figure for Huxley throughout, and in an extended essay of 1936 he pays tribute to the former’s crusade on behalf of the body, dislike of abstract thought, and general passion for life. It reflects Huxley’s breadth of mind that he could give such a generous and objective account of a contemporary so different from himself. Indeed, this whole series shows Huxley to be a polymath, constantly trying to map out aspects of his culture without sliding into dogma. [David Seed]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Collected Essays, Volume III: 1930-1935 by Aldous Huxley David Seed Aldous Huxley. Collected Essays, Volume III: 1930-1935. Ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. Ivan R. Dee, 2001. 632 pp. $35.00; Volume IV: 1936-1938. Ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. Ivan R. Dee, 2001. 445 pp. $35.00. These volumes, under the editorship of Robert S. Baker (author of an invaluable monograph on Brave New World) and James Sexton, form part of a projected six-volume set that will collect all of Huxley’s essays. The first two volumes cover the 1920s and show Huxley beginning to work out his views on the collapse of values in the modern world and on such contemporary media as the cinema. By the end of that decade, Huxley had already identified a number of crucial issues he was to develop in the thirties: the impact of technology, the nature of American culture, and the desirable form society should take. Inevitably, many readers will expect from these volumes an elaborate context for Brave New World, and as early as 1929 Huxley had begun to express his unease over the “worship of success and efficiency.” Throughout his career Huxley held ambivalent attitudes toward what he called the “tragedy of the machine,” which produced good and (usually unexpected) bad results. Mass-produced goods were fine; mass-produced ideas were a totally different matter. Huxley never writes about subjects like technology or literature in isolation from other aspects of society and here anticipates later fiction like Fahrenheit 451 in seeing newly created leisure as a problem. Thus mass production might release thousands from menial tasks, but it also necessitates endless distraction to fill the free time produced by the system. The editors of these volumes rightly stress that Huxley was preoccupied by two concerns, science and modernity, and one of the ways Huxley satirized contemporary regimes was by showing that they were actually not new at all but merely modifications of ancient practices. Again and again in his essays of the thirties Huxley returns to the ease with which the masses can be manipulated. The most pessimistic formulation of the political process comes when Huxley reduces human behavior to “angry apishness” where the electorate seems driven by an irrational desire to destroy civilization, which it finally achieves in Ape and Essence. Another scientific development that catches Huxley’s attention is behaviorism. He speculates that it might be possible to devise a “baby farm” and, through a “systematic conditioning of infant reflexes,” produce a society where force will no longer be necessary to ensure acquiescence. This was to become a major theme in Huxley’s comments on the postwar technology of mind control. During the thirties he was agonizingly conscious of the need for social planning, but steadily resisted the lure of totalitarianism and unrealistic utopian proposals like those of H. G. Wells. Huxley never separates his discussion of literature from the social institutions and practices that support it. He subscribed, for instance, to the French critic Gaultier’s coinage of bovarysme, in the sense that he saw literature as feeding our capacity to create social selves or personae. Huxley reserved special praise for writers like Zamyatin or Mencken who, like himself, criticized the cultural norms of their societies, although he was well aware how unpredictable the social “processing” of such writers could be. Shaw’s satire was muffled by his humor; Lawrence’s fiction was used by British youth to sanction promiscuity and by the Nazis to support their mythology, neither of which Lawrence would have approved. Lawrence remains a key literary figure for Huxley throughout, and in an extended essay of 1936 he pays tribute to the former’s crusade on behalf of the body, dislike of abstract thought, and general passion for life. It reflects Huxley’s breadth of mind that he could give such a generous and objective account of a contemporary so different from himself. Indeed, this whole series shows Huxley to be a polymath, constantly trying to map out aspects of his culture without sliding into dogma. [David Seed]

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