By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was an important twentieth-century writer whose work often explored some of the ‘biggest’ and most important ideas of his day. The following pick of his best books include a work documenting his experiences of drug-taking, classic dystopian fiction, radical utopian vision, and social satires of the ‘roaring twenties’.
Indeed, from the early 1920s, when Huxley was a precocious writer still only in his late twenties, until his death in 1963 (he famously died on the same day as C. S. Lewis – and John F. Kennedy), he encouraged his readers to think differently about the rapidly changing world around them.
The sheer range of modes and subjects which Aldous Huxley incorporated into his writing make him a major twentieth-century figure. We haven’t even included his short stories or his poems in the selection of his greatest books offered below, but yes, he wrote those too. Below, we discuss what we consider to be his best novels and works of non-fiction.
Crome Yellow.
Huxley’s debut novel, Crome Yellow (1921) is the first of a series of social satires he wrote during the 1920s, prefiguring the early satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh towards the end of the decade.
The novel focuses on a group of guests staying at the country house of Crome: a painter, a spiritual journalists, an aspiring poet, and three young women.
The novel is very much a satire of the ‘leisure classes’ just after the First World War, but it is much more inventive than this rather conventional label makes it sound: among other things, we are treated to the science fantasies of would-be Wellsian Mr Scogan, and the portentous Augustan poetry written by Sir Hercules Lapith. We also meet the wonderfully named hack-writer, Mr Barbecue-Smith.
Antic Hay.
Huxley followed the success of Crome Yellow with Antic Hay two years later, in 1923. (The novel’s title is taken from a line in Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II.) The book focuses on a teacher named Theodore Gumbril who invents a special pair of trousers (containing an air cushion!) and dons a false beard in his search for love (we’ll say no more …).
Although the book has a satirical edge, it is also a darker and more ambitious work than its predecessor, exploring the aftermath of the First World War on London.
Although it is lighter than more openly modernist works of the period such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it is, like those works, concerned with disunity and fragmentation in the capital after the war.
The Perennial Philosophy.
This 1945 non-fiction book is Huxley’s most important work on a long-standing interest of his: mysticism. Huxley himself defined ‘the perennial philosophy’ as ‘the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.’
In practice, this means fusing Eastern and Western mysticism and philosophy into some sort of coherent whole. Prefiguring Robert Graves’ similar work The White Goddess by three years, Huxley’s book has perhaps been less influential, but it continues to be read as an important work of comparative philosophy, bringing together such disparate belief systems as Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and the writings of Rumi.
Eyeless in Gaza.
This 1936 novel, which takes its title from a phrase in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, has an impressive chronological range, telling of the life and development of a socialite and Oxford graduate named Anthony Beavis from the 1890s until the 1930s.
It’s notable for adopting a more experimental modernist style which Huxley, in his earlier society novels of the 1920s, had resisted (even though he knew modernist writers such as Katherine Mansfield – who gently satirised Huxley as the poet Eddie Warren in her story ‘Bliss’ – and Virginia Woolf).
The novel is also non-linear in its chronology, flitting between four key periods of Beavis’s life. Huxley expertly shows us Beavis’s embracing of revolutionary politics (notably Marxism) as well as his subsequent disillusionment with politics and with the modern world more generally.
The Doors of Perception.
Huxley often alluded to the work of other writers with his own book titles, and this 1954 book takes its title from a line in the prophetic poet William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In May 1953, Huxley took the psychedelic drug mescaline, and this autobiographical book documents his experiences of the drug. When the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond agreed to let Huxley dry some of the mind-altering peyote, Huxley described it as ‘without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the beatific vision.’
The Doors of Perception charts his use of the drug and the hallucinations, thoughts, reveries, and emotions the drug inspired in him. The book inspired the name of the US rock band The Doors.
Point Counter Point.
By the late 1920s, Huxley’s fiction was becoming more ambitious, and this novel is in many ways a bridge between his earlier social satires and mature works like Eyeless in Gaza. Published in 1928, this long novel is an example of the roman a clef or ‘novel with a key’, whereby the fictional characters mirror real-life people.
So, for instance, the wonderfully named Lucy Tantamount (Huxley had a gift for character names) is modelled on the modernist poet and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard and the writer and painter Mark Rampion is based on D. H. Lawrence (the political demagogue Everard Webley is thought to have been inspired by Oswald Mosley, but this is unlikely, since Mosley only rose to prominence, and notoriety, in the early 1930s, several years after the book was published).
Among other things, Point Counter Point is about the clash of ideals versus reality, and how those who lead a purely intellectual life often have precious little understanding of the real world around them.
Island.
This 1962 book, the last Huxley published before his death the following year, is a novel with a difference. It belongs to the genre of utopian fiction, and thus stands in contrast to the earlier and more famous work Brave New World.
Like another British writer with big ideas, H. G. Wells, Huxley became more interested in the ideas than in telling a good story in his later fiction. Island is as much a political blueprint for the author’s vision of a better world as it is a novel in the traditional sense, but there’s plenty to recommend it, as the scholar David Izzo argued in his guest blog for Interesting Literature devoted to Huxley’s final novel.
The novel’s protagonist is a writer named Will Farnaby who is sent by his employer, a large multinational energy corporation, to undertake a kind of reconnaissance of the island of Pala, which is thought to be rich in oil resources. However, Will becomes more and more convinced that Pala offers the chance to create a new kind of society.
Ape and Essence.
Many readers are familiar with Huxley’s best-known dystopian book, Brave New World, but this 1948 novel – also an example of dystopian fiction – is far less famous. In essence it’s an early Cold War novel about the escalation of war in modern society and the deadly potential of the atomic bomb – in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just three years earlier – to wreak further destruction upon the world.
The ‘ape’ of the novel’s title refers to the intelligent baboons who use nuclear arms to bring about World War Three. In a recent event known as ‘the Thing’, most of civilisation was wiped out, and we follow those survivors living in the aftermath. This is a short read – just 170-odd pages – and deserves to be better-known.
Brave New World.
This is undoubtedly Aldous Huxley’s best-known book, and is often paired with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as the high watermark of twentieth-century dystopian fiction. Published in 1932, Huxley’s novel is, in one sense, a departure from his earlier work in that it’s an example of science fiction.
However, it is shot through with his intelligent satirical strain which made his 1920s books so enjoyable. Its title an ironic twist on Miranda’s words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Brave New World is remarkable for its scope, exploring as it does such big scientific subjects as reproductive technology and psychological conditioning, among others.
In Huxley’s joyless future, the population live in one giant World State, human relationships are discouraged, and everyone’s emotions are regulated through a drug, soma. In New London, three rules or tenets are touted above all others: ‘No privacy, no family, no monogamy’.
There’s a Swiftian quality to Huxley’s vision of a technologically and scientifically advanced society, making this a thought-provoking book, but also an enormously fun one (few people could describe reading Orwell’s classic dystopian novel as ‘fun’, despite its remarkable insights).