Aldous Huxley Between the Wars: Essays and Letters.

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In Do What You Will, Aldous Huxley maintained that "there is no such thing as historical truth-there are only
more or less probable opinions about the past, opinions which change from generation to generation" ([London:
Chatto & Windus, 1929], 245]. In "Ballyhoo for Nations," one of the essays in David Bradshaw's Aldous
Huxley Between the Wars, Huxley rejects what he calls "the old-fashioned history books" (180) with their
predictable focus on diplomacy, war, and high culture, arguing that "the tools of the anonymous artisan and the
test-tubes of the man of science have probably done more to shape human destiny than all the pens and swords"
celebrated by conventional historians (180). During the interwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s, Huxley
speculated on a surprisingly broad spectrum of conceptual or procedural problems in relation to philosophy of
history. Deeply disturbed by the course of contemporary politics and the "ferocious ideologies" of postwar
Europe and Asia, he rejected the sweeping teleological master narratives of a Hegel, a Marx, or a Herbert
Spencer in favor of a social world conceived in terms of contingency, complexity, and contradiction. For a
novelist, Huxley exhibits an unusually comprehensive interest in the metahistorical problems of analytic
philosophy of history including what constitutes a historical fact, the place of holism in historical theory, the
role of causality in history, the scientific status of historical or law explanation in history, and the relationship of
history to ideology and rhetoric. Always insisting that "each age must think its own thoughts" (The Olive Tree
[London: Chatto & Windus, 1936]. 134), he cross-indexed history with psychology, preferring more
provisionally conceived generalizations although he was suspicious even of those. For Huxley, "history is not a
science" and the search for nomological explanations was an illusion in a field where there could be "no crucial
experiments . . . nor for that matter, any completely accurate observations" (Do What You Will, 29).
Nevertheless, Huxley remained fascinated by historical generalizations, especially what he characterized as
"psychological undulations" or "humanly significant" trends. He created what he called "the novel of social
history" dominated by a central character who functioned as "a social symbol, a paradigm of the whole life of
the community" (Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969], 383). No other
British novelist of the twenties and thirties thought so hard, in such precise and specific ways, about how we
claim to know history, how we constitute it as an object of knowledge, and how we twist and shape it into
teleological narratives for ideological ends. Now James Sexton and David Bradshaw have assembled a number
of essays published in book form for the first time to show how Huxley's Interest in history moved out of the
realm of literature and theory Into a politics of active social engagement. According to Bradshaw, in the early
1930s Huxley "became more Intensely ravelled in the chronic social and political crisis which unfolded in the
wake of the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 than any other British writer of his generation" (viii). The
tension between intellectual reflection and direct political action is central to Huxley's novels and essays of the
1920s and 1930s. His interest in the depiction of broad social tendencies in his novels from Crome Yellow to
Eyeless in Gaga was always accompanied by a keen eye for the provisional and the local, exemplified in what
he called "prevailing habits of thought and feeling" (The Olive Tree, 20). He claimed to comprehend his social
world, but his work was consistently shaped and informed by a deeply skeptical aversion for Ideological
certitude and the premature leap to abstract teleological closure. The ambiguous terrain where, for Huxley, the
theoretical and the active intersected, was what he regarded as the dominant tendency in twentieth-century
European and American culture - "the New Romanticism" (Music at Night [London: Chatto & Windus, 1931],
212) of enlightenment modernity, especially the excessive faith in instrumental reason and applied science.
Aldous Huxley Between the Wars and Aldous Huxley's Hearst Essays reinforce Huxley's status as one of the
most acute and informed observers of the social and ideological trends of the interwar period. The 165 brief
journalistic essays in Sexton's collection appeared between 1931 and 1935 in various Hearst newspapers from
the San Francisco Examiner to The New York American. As Sexton notes, these were the years "when Huxley
made the shift from a predominately cynical satirist to committed activist" (xiii). The essays, subjects range
from Nazi book-burnings, naval armaments, the League of Nations and its tribulations, to recent forms of state
planning in the Soviet Union. As in the essays in Bradshaw's collection, Huxley is torn between a qualified (and
sometimes enthusiastic) endorsement of social engineering and comprehensive long-range planning and a
characteristic mistrust of technology and ambitious forms of governmental intervention. Yet the need for a new
master narrative, a "comprehensible mythology of humanity" ("In Whose Name?" Hearst Essays, 40) that would
embrace more sweeping forms of state rationalization was, for Huxley, clearly a pressing one. The implications
of this somewhat Wellsian interest in massive social planning will necessitate some adjustment of our
comprehension of the politics of Brave New World. Huxley was wary of ideologically informed master
narratives, yet he desired a new "mythology"; similarly, he satirized the utopian politics of the Wellsian social
engineers in Brave New World, yet a significant number of the essays in both of these volumes seem to reveal a
surprisingly technocratic Huxley who does not hesitate to write coolly and impersonally about "compulsory
sterility," "subnormal stocks," and the "eugenic sterilisation" of "certified defectives" (Bradshaw, 152).

Much of the attraction of the essays in Sexton's book is traceable to their vivid period detail the references to the
raucous voices of Nazi broadcasters, speeches by Roosevelt and Stalin, Soviet five year plans, the China
incident, or a speech in the House by the chancellor of the exchequer combine to provide a rich context for
Huxley's increasingly active role in organized pacifism and his intensifying anxiety over the economic crisis of
the 1930s. Although as journalism they are more directly engaged in what Fredric Jameson has called "the
diachronic agitation of the year to year" (The Political Unconscious [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981], 77), Sexton's
incisive introduction rightly emphasizes their political significance. A major thematic thread that unites many of
the Hearst essays involves the role of science, in particular, the relation of scientists to politics, state planning,
and progressive theories of history. Huxley's "New Romanticism" (Music at Night, 212), or the technological
exploitation of an external world to be known and mastered, is a recurrent theme in these troubled essays,
particularly the ethical obligations of scientists in what Huxley regards as a period of crisis. The exigent socio-
economic problems of the early thirties appear to have driven Huxley to adopt some surprisingly
uncharacteristic postures regarding the technocratic ideology of instrumental reason that reduces everything to
mensuration, efficiency, and standardized technique. In Brave New World, Huxley explored and rejected the
positivistic temper of the bureaucratic planner, focusing especially on the link between modern technology and
totalitarian ideology. This characteristic concern about the rationalization of society (inherent in the research
laboratory) surfaces in essays like "Science's Growth," "New Era," "Reason Eclipsed," or "Catastrophes." His
sense of standing on the threshold of a new era, overwhelmed by a flood of technical information and enmired
in potentially oppressive forms of social organization, is vividly dramatized throughout the Hearst essays. In
"Atoms Versus Men," his praise of the work of Chadwick and Rutherford at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory
("a most important advance," 87) swiftly shifts into a meditation on how scientific and technological progress
contributes to the present instability of industrial societies" (88). For Huxley, the need to control scientists was
more important than the need to control nature. And it is at this point that both the Sexton and the Bradshaw
collections converge to raise some new and fascinating questions about Huxley's politics and, in particular, their
role in Point Counter Point and Brave New World.
In his introductory essay, Sexton strikes precisely the right note when he observes that Brave New World is a
"projection of the kind of society advocated by Mosley on the right and, to a lesser degree, by Wells . . . on the
liberal side of the political spectrum" (xix). In contrast, David Bradshaw's Aldous Huxley Between the Wars is,
among other things, an attempt to close the distance between the Wellsian utopia and Huxley's dystopic version
of it. The essays in Bradshaw's collection complement those in Sexton's, spanning about half a decade (1930 to
1936). They appeared in British periodicals like Nash's Pall Mall Magazine, The Evening Standard, and Time
and Tide, or as BBC National Programme broadcasts. Aimed at the British audience, longer, more detailed and
probing than the Hearst essays, they tend to respond in more systematically conceived ways to the political
crisis of the 1930s. Bradshaw, like Sexton, has compiled an important selection of essays and with a similar
intent, that of stressing Huxley's political activism, but he goes further, arguing that Huxley was "more intensely
ravelled" in the social and political crisis of the 1930s "than any other British writer of his generation" (viii).
While many of these essays are vintage Huxley, a significant number exhibit a willingness to adopt surprisingly
extreme positions, much more radical than those of Music at Night or Proper Studies.

Essays like "Abroad in England" "Sight-Seeing in Alien England," or "Greater and Lesser London" reveal a
Huxley closely attuned to the economic plight of workers in dockyards, factories, and coal-mines. But whether
these excursions into working-class suffering justify what Bradshaw calls an "Orwellian" Huxley is less clear.
The picture of Huxley touring Imperial Chemical Industries, Durham mining villages, and Sheffield steelworks
is, nevertheless, an opening onto a new perspective - although one wonders why Huxley never utilized these
experiences in any direct way in his novels of the thirties, and why they seem to play no significant role in
Collected Essays Ends and Means. The crucial evidence for Bradshaw's argument (in his introduction) that the
Huxley of these particular essays is more Wellsian, more aligned with the darker strains of thirties ideologies,
more willing to sacrifice intellectual freedom to the needs of the state, can be found in essays like "What is
happening to Our Population?" where the author of Brave New World openly and clearly advocates eugenic
sterilization of the mentally unfit, or In "Abroad in England," where intelligent national planning, based
somewhat ambiguously on the Soviet model, is proposed. In Sight-Seeing in Alien England," Huxley endorses
"the raptures of engineers and organizers" (70), the artists of industry whom he enlists in this ostensibly
Wellsian dedication to the project of modernity. On the basis of these and other stridently staked out positions of
"intelligent ruthlessness" (83), Bradshaw argues that "the authentic 1930s Huxley has languished misunderstood
and unread for over fifty years" (vii). While this strikes me as exaggerated, many of the essays in both of these
collections complicate our understanding of Huxley's views on the role of the state in the early 1930s. The
essays in Bradshaw's volume provide ample evidence of his assertion that "Huxley was anything but an aloof
and absentee observer of Britain's problems" (vii) between 1930 and 1936. But was he really, as Bradshaw
claims, a "fervid proponent of Soviet-style planning" (viii)? The early 1930s was a period of experimentation in
the concentration of executive and legislative power. Poincare in France, Roosevelt in the United States, and,
more obviously Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, eagerly sought to control events by means of centralized
bureaucratic planning. The "doctor"s mandate" of the British national government also had aspirations in this
area. In the essays in Bradshaw's and Sexton's collections, Huxley's interest in authoritarian methods is always
awkwardly grafted onto his sustained critique of central planning and executive power. His revulsion for
"systematic planners," his belief that five-year plans are inseparable from "the Ogpu" or "the Gestapo" (212), is
a constant refrain. The principal difficulty with Bradshaw's contention that Huxley's advocacy of Soviet central
planning reveals "the genuine voice of a Wellsian fellow-traveller" (37) is that there is a good deal more to
Wells than world state ideology. Huxley's relationship with Wells was more tortuously nuanced than Bradshaw
allows force consequently, it is not a question of "how we wish to read" Brave New World or Point Counter
Point. Huxley's critics did not invent his criticism of Wells in his letters and essays, nor can the textual evidence
of the novels be ruled out of court. Many of Wells's ideas were comically absurd, often violently reductive, and,
too often, politically naive. Bradshaw, however, has produced some compelling evidence that Huxley's views on
eugenics and state planning do not correspond in any easily applicable way to their ostensible parodying in
Brave New World. While Huxley never embraced Wells's progressivist faith in science and technology, he did,
as Bradshaw makes clear, briefly entertain some notions that admittedly raise difficult and salient questions
about his own tentative complicity in some of the darker aspects of social engineering. Yet, by 1935, Huxley
was opposing Bertrand Russell's faith in scientific enlightenment. He informed E. M. Forster that Russell's
notion of the progress of "scientific technique" as a straight unundulating trajectory" was "nice to think" about
but he wondered "if that straight trajectory isn't aiming directly for some denial of humanity" (Letters, 441). The
essays in Bradshaw's collection also reflect Huxley's characteristic skepticism, his deep pessimism regarding
history, progress, and human rationality. Always disdainful of the "simple-minded believers in human progress"
(172), he tended to see the postwar social world as pathological, seventeen years of "more or less acute
neurosis" (215) - hence the absolute relevance of his social novels to any discussion of his views on science,
history, and politics.

"Dispatches from the Riviera" is a case in point. As it modulates from a discussion of the industrial confidence
man, Ivan Kreuger, to propaganda, governmental ministries devoted to the scientific manipulation of voters,
mental slavery as a consequence of propagandistic advertising, to the menace of the "march of progress" (118),
it finally concludes with a brief assessment of the current Soviet Five Year Plan and its possible application to
England. The concluding paragraph is anything but Wellsian. Rather, it is a mixture of dispirited irony in which
Huxley emphases how quickly the masses are "bored" (11) (a characteristic motif) with what he dismissively
refers to as the social projects of "the secular Second Adventists of planning" (122) In brief, we move from
large scale fraud to large scale social engineering invoked in terms of a rhetoric and a tone as far removed from
Wells's Technocratic enthusiasms as one could imagine.

In the early 1930s, Huxley was clearly capable of entertaining some unorthodox ideas concerning state
controlled eugenics and enforced sterilization in ways that complicate our approach to Brave New World. But
Huxley also knew that government planning modeled on the Soviet or National Socialist state was too often
accompanied by oppression and "torture" and that history undulated in uncontrollable ways. The enduring
Huxleyan note is sounded in one of Sexton's Hearst essays: "Men are not satisfied with mere happiness; or
rather, their idea of happiness is a good deal queerer and more complicated than most of our contemporary
prophets care to admit" (296). This abiding sense of the complex contingencies of human values is present in
Bradshaw's collection as well when Huxley observes that socialism, even if realizable would leave men and
women "hopelessly unsatisfied and empty" (195). Huxley's reading of history tends to preempt the Wellsian
faith in a humanized version of time's arrow as a unilinear trajectory immanently meaningful as a consequence
of progressivist ideology. Huxley worried about the bureaucratic aspects of scientific research. He feared the
irresponsibility of scientists and deplored the socially destabilizing results of applied science. The essays in
these two books reinforce my belief that Huxley felt little optimism concerning the abilities of his
contemporaries to administer new forms of comprehensive state planning.

Bradshaw has gathered together a significant and indispensable set of documents and prefaced them with two of
his own articles on Huxley's relationship with H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken. His argument that there exists a
long-standing misconception of the 1930s Huxley contains some truth but not as much as he wants to claim.
American critics have argued at length that Huxley was engaged with history, social issues, and a broad array of
real world problems - but in the novels. Part of the difficulty flows from Bradshaw's somewhat insular focus on
Huxley's essays and political activities. When he does briefly turn to the novels, he simply ignores the existing
critical scholarship, much of which is American and Asian. A wider engagement with past and current work
would seem to be desirable. Nevertheless, the two essays, while they contain much with which I would
disagree, are two of the most interesting articles to appear on Huxley in the past decade. With the introductory
survey that prefaces the book, they raise an impressive number of provocative questions that lead me to
anticipate the publication of Bradshaw's critical biography of Huxley. And with Sexton's collection of the Hearst
essays, they richly supplement the already extensive archive of Huxley's non-fiction.