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Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.

This chapter tracks film’s role in rewriting the possibilities of novelistic irony. It focuses on the work of Aldous Huxley, the period’s most well-known satirist, who relocated to Hollywood in the 1930s for a disastrous career as a screenwriter. As Huxley reflected in a number of key essays on the medium, the cinema achieves automatically what writers often labor to express. It is a medium, he says, in which “miracles are easily performed”—a medium in which miracles are no longer miracles, beauty no longer beautiful. Yet Huxley was a writer perversely willing to draw upon that unbeautiful energy, writing the majority of his late dystopian novel, Ape and Essence (1948), in the hybrid form of a screenplay. In offering a novelistic burlesque of modernity’s most abject art, Huxley casts doubt on the ability of art in general to comprehend the culture of which it is a part.

The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually read as a satire on eugenics. But it addresses a wide variety of themes so successfully as to remain fascinating to later modern readers. This chapter contextualizes the work, and illustrates the degree to which it should be read as, in part, an anti-Bolshevik novel. The development of Huxley’s ideas after this, up to his utopia, Island (1962), is also assessed in terms of a series of efforts to confront the themes of his greatest work.

In 1956, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic.” This chapter provides an analysis of the events that led up to Huxley’s psychedelic epiphany under the influence of mescaline, including Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD and subsequent psychedelic research. Particular attention is given to Huxley’s interpretation of the psychedelic state. This is important because Huxley was a catalytic figure at an important moment in the postwar Western world and his ideas had a formative influence on the culture of the 1960s. There is also analysis of R. C. Zaehner’s strident critique of Huxley’s thesis.

This chapter examines the only Bildungsroman written by Aldous Huxley, one of foremost modernist advocates of Bildung, and one of its most intimately linked with contemporary biology. Reviewers and critics have long struggled to make sense of the disorienting and seemingly unmotivated use of anachrony in Eyeless in Gaza, which I attribute to Huxley’s careful study of biological studies by his brother Julian (among others) on the embryology, endocrinology, and evolutionary biology of frogs and salamanders. Central to Huxley’s search for full, harmonious development is the phenomenon of neoteny (the retention of juvenile characteristics into sexual maturity); once interpreted as a pathological failure of development, neoteny was by the 1920s heralded as the biological key to human evolutionary and social success.

This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in Brave New World, from a popular women's romance novel to William Shakespeare to race cinema and nature documentaries. It looks at Huxley's vision of futurity, or, as he called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure. Just as D. H. Lawrence's work registers the attraction of the material he claims to reject, the engineered pleasures in Brave New World, including the feelies, exert a frivolous, sleazy magnetism that often contradicts the novel's argument against careless hedonism. The totalitarian culture that is meant to be repellent is secured by a wide variety of vernacular pleasures that are, from a readerly perspective, paradoxically engaging. The chapter explains how this irony is extended in Huxley's subsequent adaptation of Brave New World to a musical comedy.

In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ‘accumulating drops of allusion and quotation’ represent not only a literary style but also ‘the characteristic universe’ of his fictional parties, ‘where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent’. Serial sexual encounters at parties, together with the taking of narcotics, figure ‘paralysis and obsessive return’, while the ‘repetitions and rituals’ of ‘enforced sociability’ occasion psychic damage. Linking these symptoms in Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) to Huxley’s vision of modernity, Shiach explores how Huxley’s textual strategies mimic party behaviours.

In the period shortly after the First World War, the vast majority of films viewed in Britain and its Empire came from America. This worrisome state of affairs led some British politicians, cultural critics, and writers to assert in all seriousness that Hollywood film had the potential to undermine the British Empire. This chapter introduces the concept of the “entertainment empire” in order to explain how some in Britain perceived American entertainment as a new kind of imperialism, one based less on colonial occupation and more on the marketing of mass-reproduced leisure. The chapter further considers how a group of modernist film critics including H.D., Bryher, and Kenneth Macpherson recast the aesthetic philosophy of their pioneering journal, Close Up, in reaction to the new sounds of Hollywood.

The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered in this study, who was the first to take a distance from events and from the particularities of the Revolution and the League to ask what a future, world state might look like.

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood friendship allowed the two writers to explore their common interests in Eastern religion, film writing, and the Southern California landscape. Working on scripts for plays and films was something Isherwood was good at and already had a fair amount of experience doing, not only for a lot less money a few years earlier with Berthold Viertel in London, but even more notably with his close friend W. H. Auden. He undertook several collaborated scripts with Huxley, including Jacob’s Hands—the only one ever to be published. Unfortunately, their collaborations did not lead to financial or artistic success.

This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug use sparked by the publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. In addressing these topics, journalists introduced American audiences to new drugs and to the use of drugs to create mental states considered to have significant scholarly and academic importance. Scholarly interest gave journalists license to describe drug states that previously had been considered inappropriate for public view. Reports in mainstream media outlets were followed quickly by even more sensational coverage in more marginal publications.

This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which the politics of authoritarianism arguably can never fully or finally triumph, but it is hard to see what that music can do, practically speaking, when faced with the violent realities of authoritarianism ‘on the ground’: vitriol, fists, weapons, bombs, and tanks. Huxley managed to bring these emphases into a distinctive dialogue with the idea of Beethovenian conventionality. This chapter considers how his most modernist novel, Point Counter Point (1928), affirms the value of Beethoven’s late music; questions the terms of the inter-war musicological consensus which did so much to put that music on a high-cultural pedestal; and uses the implied background of the Beethoven centenary celebrations to dispute the redemptive power of Beethovenolatry in an age of authoritarian entrenchment.

In 1925, Aldous Huxley in his book Along the Road wrote an essay in the course of which he asserted that the ‘best picture’ in the world was Piero della Francesca's ‘Resurrection’, a mural which was in Piero's birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, and is still there. In 1944, as the Allies advanced northwards and the Germans retreated before them, the ‘Resurrection’ came perilously close to not surviving, within minutes indeed of destruction by British artillery. That it did survive is due to the fact that the commanding officer of the battery which had been ordered to shell the German troops still holding on to Borgo San Sepolcro had read Aldous Huxley's essay and remembered it as the order to open fire came through to him: the ‘best picture’ in the world was to be his target. He hesitated and did not give the order to open fire in the hope that the German troops might at the last moment resume their retreat and evacuate the town. This chapter considers what we are to make of the painting's survival.

Chapter Four examines another exemplary novel, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (“Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair,” 1949), by the journalist, novelist, and critic Peyami Safa. In a narrative and discursive idiom animated by regional colloquialisms, French medical and psychoanalytic terminology, archaic Ottoman Turkish, Arabic prayer words, and Kurdish borrowings, Safa’s novel provides yet another account of the failure of the nationalist phonocentric project to meet its ideal goal. Unlike The Time Regulation Institute, however, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (which is organized by scenes of the translation and rewriting of such texts as Rimbaud’s “L’Éternité” and Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy), can be said to aspire to the transcendence of linguistic difference and the reconstitution of a new order of signification in the nationalization and Islamicization of ethnic and religious difference. My reading of Safa’s novel emphasizes the collapse of this assimilating authorial agenda, but affirms it, at the same time, as a mark of the ineradicable internal heterogeneity of the Turkish language.