AldousLeonardHuxley赫胥黎简介

1、Aldous Leonard Huxley 赫胥黎简介Aldous Leonard Huxley1894-1963 Antic Hay 滑稽的环舞;Point Counter Point 旋律和对立;Brave New World新奇的世界;Letters书信集;Ape and Essence猿与本质:Eyeless in Gaza加沙的盲A;After Many a Summer多少个夏天之后;The Doors of Perception感觉之门；Fairy Godmother天使 教母（?Two or ThreeGraces雅事_.三）Introductionin full Aldous

2、 Leonard Huxleyborn July 26, 1894, Godaiming, Surrey, Engdied Nov. 22, 1963, Los Angeles Aldous Huxley, 1959.English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence His works werenotable for their elegance, wit, and pessimistic satireAldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominen

3、t biologist TH Huxley and was the third child ofthe biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley He was educated at Eton, during which time hebecame partially blind owing to keratitis He retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty, andhe graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916 He publis

4、hed his first book in 1916 andworked on the periodical Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921 Thereafter he devoted himself largely tohis own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled inCaliforniaHuxley established himself as a major author in his first two published nov

5、els, Crome Yellow(1921) and Antic Hay (1923); these are witty and malicious satires on the pretensions of theEnglish literary and intellectual coteries of his day. Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point CounterPoint (1928) are works in a similar vein. Huxley, s deep distrust of 20th-century trends in

6、bothpolitics and technology found expression in Brave New World (1932), a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system. The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) continues to shoot barbs at the emptiness

7、and aimlessness experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley, s growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative Many of his subsequent works reflect this preoccupation, notably The Perennial Philosophy (1946) Huxleys most important later works are The Devi

8、ls of Loudun (1952), a brilliantly detailed psychological study of a historical incident in which a group of 17th-century French nuns were allegedly the victims of demonic possession; and The Doors of Perception (1954), a book about Huxleys experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline The auth

9、ors lifelong preoccupation with the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th-century life make him one of the representative writers and intellectuals of that century.Major WorksThe Defeat of Youth (1918); Limbo (1920); Crome Yellow (1921) ; Antic Hay (1923) ; Jesting Pilate (

10、1926) ; Point Counter Point (1928); Brave New World (1932) ; Eyeless in Gaza (1936) ; Grey Eminence (1941) ; The Perennial Philosophy (1946); Ape and Essence (1949); The Doors of Perception (1954); Collected Essays (1958); Literature and Science (1963)Additional ReadingStudies of the authorJ s life

11、include Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (1968); and Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (1974). David Bradshaw (ed)，The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses, 1920 - 36 (1994), is a collection of Huxleys writing that gives afascinating insight into the contradictions in his thou

12、ght V. Clark, Aldous Huxley and Film (1987), provides a useful account of Huxleys attitude toward cinema and of his career in HollywoodEarly yearsFamily treeAldous Huxley was born in Godaiming, Surrey, UK in 1894 He was the third son of the writer and school-master Leonard Huxley and first wife, Jul

13、ia Arnold who founded Priors Field School Julia was the niece of Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs Humphrey Ward Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and controversialist (，/Darwin, s Bulldog) His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became

14、outstanding biologists Huxley had another brother Noel Trevenen (1891 -1914) who committedsuicide after a period of clinical depression.Huxley began his learning in his father1 s well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside His teacher was his mother who supervised h

15、im for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College Huxleys mother died in 1908, when he was fourteen. In 1911, he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which left him. practically blind for two to three years Aldouss near-blindness disqualified h

16、im from service in the First World War Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford He graduated in 1916 with first class honoursI believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medi

17、cine as a careerHis uniqueness lay in his universalism He was able to take all knowledge for his provinceFollowing his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name Georg

18、e Orwell) and Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn t keep discipline Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministr y.Signific

19、antly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of an ordered universe in a world of plan

20、less incoherence was one source for the novel.Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties His earlier work includes important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on

21、pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza) In Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and Pavlovian conditioning Huxley was strongly influenced by F Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in Eyeless in GazaMiddle yearsLeft to right: La

22、dy Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bel1During the First World War, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including Bertrand Russell and Clive Bel1. La

23、ter, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle In 1919 he married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 - 12 February 1955), a Belgian woman he met at Garsington. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 - 10 February 2005), who had a career as an epidemiologist The family lived

24、 in Italy part of the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D H Lawrence Following Lawrence, s death in 1930, Huxley edited Lawrence1 s letters (1933)In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard He lived in the US,mainly in

25、 southern California, until his death, but also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means (published in 1937) In this work he examines the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of ，zliberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love, they hav

26、e not been able to agree on how to achieve it.Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Veda-Centric Hinduism), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa In 1938 Huxley befriended J Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired He also became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami

27、 Prabhavananda, andintroduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the worldHuxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of Occide

28、ntal College He spent much time at the college, which is in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles The college appears as ，?Tarzana College in his satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939) The novel won Huxley that years James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird

29、 into the nove1.During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a writer In March 1938, his friend Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with Metro-Go1dwyn-Mayer who hired Huxley for Madame Curie which was originally to star Greta Garbo and be directed by George Cukor.

30、(The film was eventually filmed by MGM in 1943 with a different director and stars)Huxley received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940)and was paid for his work on a number of other films, including Jane Eyre (1944)However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success When he wrote a synops

31、is of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that he could only understand every third word，z Huxleys leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all elseOn 21 October 1949, Huxley wrote to George Or

32、well, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating Orwell on how fine and how profoundly important the book is In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:Within the next generation I believe that the world5 s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instr

33、uments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obediencePost-warAfter the Second World War Huxley applied for United States citizenship, but his a

34、pplication was continuously deferred on the grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the U S, so he withdrew it. Nevertheless, he remained in the country, and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government During the 1950s Huxleys interest in th

35、e field of psychical researchgrew keener, and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with psychedelic drugsIn October 1930, the MI6 occultist Aleister Crowley dined withHuxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote o

36、n that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline (considered to be the key active ingredient of peyote) by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953 Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met CIA MKULTRA spy millionaire Captain Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale basis On 24 December 1955, Huxley took h

37、isfirst dose of LSD Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use in a search for enlightenment, famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title derivingfrom some lines in theBl

38、ake), and Heaven andfrequent reading amongHuxley was a friend ofbook The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by WilliamHel1. Some of his writings on psychedelics became early hippies While living in Los Angeles,Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller s biography of Bradbury, the latter was dissatisfied with H

39、uxley, especially afterHuxley encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugsIn 1955, Huxley1 s wife, Maria, died of breast cancer In 1936 hemarried Laura Archera (1911 - 2007), also an author She wrote ThisTimeless Moment, a biography of Huxley In 1960Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer, and in

40、the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island, 8j and gave lectures on Human Potentialities at the Esalen institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential MovementOn his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his

41、 wife for LSD, 100 Mg, intramuscular，z According to her account of his death, in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later He died at 5:21 pm on 22 November 1963, aged 69. Huxleys ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery,

42、 home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near Guildford, Surrey, EnglandMedia coverage of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the Irish author C S Lewis This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft

43、J s book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F Kennedy, C S Lewis, & Aldous HuxleyAssociation with VedantaBeginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed b

44、y Swami Prabhavananda Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practicesFrom 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to Vedanta and the West, published by the Society He also served on the ed

45、itorialboard with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John van Druten from 1951 through 1962.Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa Barbara Vedanta templesAfter the publication of The Doors of Perception, Huxley and the Swami disagreed about the meaning and importance of the LSD d

46、rug experience, which may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to write articles for the Society, lecture at the temple, and attend social functionsLiterary themesCrome Yellow (1921) attacks Victorian and Edwardian social principles which led to World War I and its terrible aft

47、ermath Together with Huxley, s second novel, Antic Hay (1923), the book expresses much of the mood of disenchantment of the early 1920s It was intended to reflect, as Huxley stated in a letter to his father, the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the stan

48、dards, conventions and values current in the present epochHuxleys reputation for iconoclasm and emancipation grew. He was condemned for his explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction. Antic Hay, for example, was burned in Cairo and in the years that followed many of Huxley, s books w

49、ere received with disapproval or banned at one time or another The exclusion of Brave New World, Point Counter Point and Island from Time magazine1 s Best 100 novels list in 2006 created an uproarcitation neededHuxley, however, said that a novel should be full of interesting opinions and arresting i

50、deas, describing his aim as a novelist as being to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay; and with Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley wrote his first true novel of ideas, the type of thought-provoking fiction with which he is now associatedOne of his main ideas was pess

51、imism about the cultural future of society, a pessimism which sprang largely from his visit to the United States between September 1925 and June 1926 He recounted his experiences in Jesting Pilate (1926) : The thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration (for

52、 the worse) of established standards, and it was soon after this visit that he conceived the idea of writing a satire of what he had encountered9Brave New World (1932) as well as Island (1962) form the cornerstone of Huxley, s damning indictment of commercialism based upon goods generally manufactur

53、ed from other countries Indeed also, Brave New World (along with OrwelT s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Yevgeni Zamyatin, s We) helped form the anti-utopian or dystopian tradition in literature and has become synonymous with a future world in which the human spirit is subject to conditioning and contro1

54、Island acts as an antonym to Brave New World; it is described as one of the truly great philosophical novels10一He devoted his time at his small house at Llano in the Mojave Desert to a life of contemplation, mysticism, and experimentation withhallucinogenic drugs His suggestions in The Doors of Perc

55、eption (1954) that mescaline and lysergic acid were drugs of unique distinction, which should be exploited for the 1 supernaturally brilliant， visionary experience they offered provoked even more outrage than his passionate defense of the Bates method in The Art of Seeing (1942) However, the book we

56、nt on to become a cult text in the psychedelic 1960s, and inspire the name of the rock band The Doors Huxley also appears on the sleeve of The Beatles landmark 1967 album Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band EyesightWith respect to details about the true quality of Huxley s eyesight at specific point

57、s in his life, there are differing accounts Around1939, Huxley encountered the Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher, Margaret Corbett, who was able to teach him in the method In1940,Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (160, 000 m2) ranchitoin the high desert hamlet of Llano, Cali

58、fornia in northernmost LosAngeles County Huxley then said that his sight improved dramaticallywith the Bates Methodand the extreme and pure natural lighting of thesouthwestern American desert.He reported that for the first time inover 25 years,he was able to read without glasses and without strain.He even tried drivinga car along the dirt road beside the ranch.wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method, The Art ofSeeing which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK). It was from this period, with the publication of