In 1946 Huxley wrote a Foreword to Brave New World in which he

said he no longer wanted to make social sanity an impossibility, as he

had in the novel. Though World War II had caused the deaths of some 20

million inhabitants of the Soviet Union, six million Jews, and

millions of others, and the newly developed atomic bomb held the

threat of even more extensive destruction, Huxley had become convinced

that while still "rather rare," sanity could be achieved and said that

he would like to see more of it. In the same year, he published The

Perennial Philosophy, an anthology of texts with his own

commentaries on mystical and religious approaches to a sane life in

a sane society.

He also worried about the dangers that threatened sanity. In 1958,

he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life

problems and ideas you'll find in the novel- overpopulation,

overorganization, and psychological techniques from salesmanship to

hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching. They're all tools that a government

can abuse to deprive people of freedom, an abuse that Huxley wanted

people to fight. If you want to further relate his bad new world to

the real world, read Brave New World Revisited.

In the 1950s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or

mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently

took a dozen times over ten years. Sybille Bedford says he was looking

for a drug that would allow an escape from the self and that if

taken with caution would be physically and socially harmless.

He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several

books. Two, based on his experiences taking mescaline under

supervision, were nonfiction: Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven

and Hell (1956). Some readers have read those books as

encouragements to experiment freely with drugs, but Huxley warned of

the dangers of such experiments in an appendix he wrote to The

Devils of Loudun (1952), a psychological study of an episode in French

history.

Another work centering on drugs and sanity was Island (1962), a

novel that required 20 years of thought and five years of writing.

Among other things, Island was an antidote to Brave New World, a

good Utopia. Huxley deplored the drug he called soma in Brave New

World- half tranquilizer, half intoxicant- which produces an

artificial happiness that makes people content with their lack of

freedom. He approved of the perfected version of LSD that the people

of Island use in a religious way.

Huxley produced 47 books in his long career as a writer. The English

critic Anthony Burgess has said that he equipped the novel with a

brain. Other critics objected that he was a better essayist than

novelist precisely because he cared more about his ideas than about

plot or characters, and his novels' ideas often get in the way of

the story.

But Huxley's emphasis on ideas and his skin as an essayist cannot

hide one important fact: The books he wrote that are most read and

best remembered today are all novels- Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and

Point Counter Point from the 1920s, Brave New World and After Many a

Summer Dies the Swan from the 1930s. In 1959 the American Academy of

Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for the Novel, a prize

given every five years; earlier recipients had been Ernest

Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Theodore Dreiser.

The range of Huxley's interests can be seen from his note that his

"preliminary research" for Island included "Greek history,

Polynesian anthropology, translations from Sanskrit and Chinese of

Buddhist texts, scientific papers on pharmacology, neurophysiology,

psychology and education, together with novels, poems, critical

essays, travel books, political commentaries and conversations with

all kinds of people, from philosophers to actresses, from patients

in mental hospitals to tycoons in Rolls-Royces...." He used similar,

though probably fewer, sources for Brave New World.

This list gives you some perspective on the wide range of ideas that

Huxley studied. He also wrote an early essay on ecology that helped

inspire today's environmental movement. And he was a pacifist. This

belief prevented him from becoming an American citizen because he

would not say his pacifism was a matter of his religion, which might

have made him an acceptable conscientious objector.

Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. Maria Huxley died in

1955, and Huxley married Laura Archera a year later. He died

November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was

assassinated. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his

parents' grave in England.

THE_PLOT

THE NOVEL

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THE PLOT (HBRAPLOT)

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Brave New World is partly a statement of ideas (expressed by

characters with no more depth than cartoon characters) and only partly

a story with a plot.

The first three chapters present most of the important ideas or

themes of the novel. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning

explains that this Utopia breeds people to order, artificially

fertilizing a mother's eggs to create babies that grow in bottles.

They are not born, but decanted. Everyone belongs to one of five

classes, from the Alphas, the most intelligent, to the Epsilons,

morons bred to do the dirty jobs that nobody else wants to do. The

lower classes are multiplied by a budding process that can create up

to 96 identical clones and produce over 15,000 brothers and sisters

from a single ovary.

All the babies are conditioned, physically and chemically in the

bottle, and psychologically after birth, to make them happy citizens

of the society with both a liking and an aptitude for the work they

will do. One psychological conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, or

teaching people while they sleep- not teaching facts or analysis,

but planting suggestions that will make people behave in certain ways.

The Director also makes plain that sex is a source of happiness, a

game people play with anyone who pleases them.

The Controller, one of the ten men who run the world, explains

some of the more profound principles on which the Utopia is based. One

is that "history is bunk"; the society limits people's knowledge of

the past so they will not be able to compare the present with anything

that might make them want to change the present. Another principle

is that people should have no emotions, particularly no painful

emotions; blind happiness is necessary for stability. One of the

things that guarantees happiness is a drug called soma, which calms

you down and gets you high but never gives you a hangover. Another

is the "feelies," movies that reach your sense of touch as well as

your sight and hearing.

After Huxley presents these themes in the first three chapters,

the story begins. Bernard Marx, an Alpha of the top class, is on the

verge of falling in love with Lenina Crowne, a woman who works in

the Embryo Room of the Hatchery. Lenina has been dating Henry

Foster, a Hatchery scientist; her friend Fanny nags her because she

hasn't seen any other man for four months. Lenina likes Bernard but

doesn't fall in love with him. Falling in love is a sin in this

world in which one has sex with everyone else, and she is a happy,

conforming citizen of the Utopia.

Bernard is neither happy nor conforming. He's a bit odd; for one

thing, he's small for an Alpha, in a world where every member of the

same caste is alike. He likes to treasure his differences from his

fellows, but he lacks the courage to fight for his right to be an

individual. In contrast is his friend Helmholtz Watson, successful

in sports, sex, and community activities, but openly dissatisfied

because instead of writing something beautiful and powerful, his job

is to turn out propaganda.

Bernard attends a solidarity service of the Fordian religion, a

parody of Christianity as practiced in England in the 1920s. It

culminates in a sexual orgy, but he doesn't feel the true rapture

experienced by the other 11 members of his group.

Bernard then takes Lenina to visit a Savage Reservation in North

America. While signing his permit to go, the Director tells Bernard

how he visited the same Reservation as a young man, taking a young

woman from London who disappeared and was presumed dead. He then

threatens Bernard with exile to Iceland because Bernard is a

nonconformist: he doesn't gobble up pleasure in his leisure time

like an infant.

At the Reservation, Bernard and Lenina meet John, a handsome young

Savage who, Bernard soon realizes, is the son of the Director.

Clearly, the woman the Director had taken to the Reservation long

ago had become pregnant as the result of an accident that the citizens

of Utopia would consider obscene. John has a fantasy picture of the

Utopia from his mother's tales and a knowledge of Shakespeare that

he mistakes for a guide to reality.

Bernard gets permission from the Controller to bring John and Linda,

his mother, back to London. The Director had called a public meeting

to announce Bernard's exile, but by greeting the Director as lover and

father, respectively, Linda and John turn him into an obscene joke.

Bernard stays and becomes the center of attention of all London

because he is, in effect, John's guardian, and everybody wants to meet

the Savage. Linda goes into a permanent soma trance after her years of

exile on the Reservation. John is taken to see all the attractions

of new world society and doesn't like them. But he enjoys arguing with

Helmholtz about them, and about Shakespeare.

Lenina has become popular because she is thought to be sleeping with

the Savage. Everyone envies her and wants to know what it's like. But,

in fact, while she wants to sleep with John, he refuses because he,

too, has fallen in love with her- and he has taken from Shakespeare

the old-fashioned idea that lovers should be pure. Not understanding

this, she finally comes to his apartment and takes her clothes off. He

throws her out, calling her a prostitute because he thinks she's

immoral, even though he wants her desperately.

John then learns that his mother is dying. The hospital

illustrates the Utopia's approach to death, which includes trying to

completely eliminate grief and pain. When John goes to visit Linda

he is devastated; his display of grief frightens children being taught

that death is a pleasant and natural process. John grows so angry that

he tries to bring the Utopia back to what he considers sanity and

morality by disrupting the daily distribution of soma to lower-caste

Delta workers. That leads to a riot; John, Bernard, and Helmholtz

are arrested.

The three then confront the Controller, who explains more of the

Utopia's principles. Their conversation reveals that the Utopia

achieves its happiness by giving up science, art, religion, and

other things that we prize in the real world. The Controller sends

Bernard to Iceland, after all, and Helmholtz to the Falkland