Aldous Huxley: A Study of His Work and Writing Advice

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a famous and classic novel—and as such, you might be surprised to know that it was inspired by another book, Brave New World by the English Aldous Huxley, which was published twenty-one years earlier in 1932. Huxley was a novelist, essayist, and even a screenwriter. He wrote almost fifty books over the course of his life, which was filled with struggle, especially early on. However, despite that, Huxley managed to write and gift the world stories reflecting his own worldview. He is most famous for Brave New World, which was a dystopian novel depicting an awful and terrifying future. It is regarded as one of the best novels of the 20th century.

While Brave New World became one of the greatest novels over time, Huxley grew up surrounded by greatness in his family. His father was a well-known writer and herbalist, his grandfather was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest naturalists, and his aunt was a novelist. Growing up in the presence of such smart and hard-working people practically foreshadowed how Huxley would become great as well—eventually becoming one of the most famous people alive at the time.

The Life of Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born into “one of England’s most famed intellectual families” in 1894 in Godalming, United Kingdom. Although he became famous for his words and ideas, one of the first things he was known for was his striking appearance. At six feet and four and a half inches, he was “so striking that contemporaries sometimes viewed him as a freak of nature.” Christopher Isherwood, who was also a British novelist, stated that Huxley was so towering he felt “an enormous zoological separation from him,” and Virginia Woolf said he was “infinitely long” and even described him as “that gigantic grasshopper.”

Huxley’s voice has been preserved in online recordings, for it was also “part of his charm;” he possessed “exacting British diction and an unerring verbal accuracy” and “talked in silver sentences, treating conversation as a form of theater, or even literature.” Listening to him speak feels like getting invited to a lavish party; his voice is classy, lofty, and thoughtful with rich and glistening undertones.

He was “gentle” in his behavior and speech, described as sensible and down-to-earth in an impressive contrast to the “biting satirist or the vague mystic” one might expect if you were to judge from his written works alone. Pleasantly, however, he was neither of those harsh personalities; his face was “lean, gray, emaciated face: attentive, reflective, and for the most part unsmiling.”  

While Aldous Huxley’s appearance made him notable—indeed, Googling pictures of him as a young man now invites similarities to actor Johnny Depp—other things related to his body impacted his life in far more negative ways. When he was sixteen and attending Eton, a prestigious school, he contracted an eye illness that resulted in him nearly becoming blind. Although he originally wanted to follow a career in medicine, his terrible eye condition prevented that from becoming a reality. It was keratitis, a condition that resulted in scarring of his eye surfaces, and he would “stagger around the halls of Eton” as the disease rendered “one eye just capable of light perception and the other with about 5 percent of normal vision.” It would trouble him for the rest of his life.

The fact he had such trouble with his eyesight would later become a theme in his books and the rest of his life. Although he recovered enough eyesight to be able to attend Oxford University and graduate with honors, his poor vision prevented him from participating in World War I unlike all his friends, and he could no longer follow his scientific ambitions. However, “scientific ideas remained with him,” and “the idea of vision also remained important to him” as he would write scenes in his early novels that were perfect for motion pictures, and later, he even became a screenwriter, with screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Jane Eyre (1944). On a somewhat amusing note, Huxley’s “most notable failure was a treatment for Alice in Wonderland, which Walt Disney rejected as incomprehensible.” Walt Disney was “overawed” by him and complained, “I can only understand every third word he writes.”

Oddness and persistence seemed to be something of a recurring cycle in Huxley’s life. For instance, because of his struggles with his eyesight, he bought a book called Perfect Sight Without Glasses by Dr. W. H. Bates—but both the author and what the book claims is advisable for people with less-than-ideal eyesight are ignorant and ludicrous to the extreme, such as looking directly at the sun, or covering one’s eyes and then quickly lowering the hands so the resulting flashes would supposedly “merge into a continuum of sharp eyesight.” And the hilarious thing is that Huxley tried these ridiculous methods on himself and thought they were fantastic; he was unreservedly enthusiastic about them. Considering his very real trials and obstacles dealing with his eye disease, one would think he’d quickly realize such ideas were disrespectful nonsense, but it was just the opposite. Huxley even wrote his own book detailing his experience with Bates’ experiments called The Art of Seeing, but the esteemed Sir Stewart Duke-Elder wrote a review of the book for the British Medical Journal, and he was filled with “disgust” that someone as intelligent as Huxley would promote ideas about eye health “that were obviously fallacious.”

The Writing and Influence of Huxley

While all of Huxley’s written works are “notable for their wit and pessimistic satire,”—indeed, social satire was one of the “primary focuses” of his writing—the story he’s most famous for is his 1932 novel Brave New World. Huxley distrusted 20th-century technology and politics, so he used them in Brave New World to illustrate what he believed the future would be like if the use of such trends and technology continued. Furthermore, his life was “surrounded by science” so he created the world of Brave New World to be one where what he so distrusted, and which he thought everyone else was weak to rely upon, was “taken to their extremes.”

The novel shows readers “a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms…a caste system that…obliterates the individual.” His book is a depressing and terrifying idea of a future society—and yet, it’s a world that we may be edging closer to without even realizing it, at least in some respects. Do we not shut out ideas and important conversations we’d rather not listen to or know about in favor of infinitely scrolling through lists of videos presented to us by tailored algorithms and think nothing of it? Are we not happy in our modern, technological, gilded cages? Of course, the reflective world-building of the novel goes deeper than that. In today’s modern world, people can selectively weed out those they don’t want in society; it’s a brutal and loveless mirror of Brave New World’s factory-laboratory where predetermined oxygen levels control a baby’s choices, job opportunities and mental fortitude before they get gleefully and unceremoniously dumped into the caste system. The story is horrific in its immediacy. As the Director explains to onlooking students, “the lower the caste, the shorter the oxygen…we predestine and condition…and decant [them into specific jobs]” (Huxley, Brave New World, C.1) and so no one in Huxley’s novel gets chances at a full life as the machine literally deprives them of choices and literal life-giving oxygen. Furthermore, the prose of the story is immediately as harsh as the world it depicts, and watching the Director, well, dictate, the life of so many before they can do so themselves is frankly sickening, and a reminder of why, in our real world, everyone should have the right to live fully.

Critical reception of the book was “chilly, even disgusted” when it was originally released; readers were deeply offended that Huxley viewed their reliance on technology as weak and “naïve” as a useless "futuristic remedy for problems caused by war and disease." The book was seen as “heedless alarmism.”

H.G. Wells was particularly offended by it as Huxley directly insulted his own writing. Wells stated, “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book.” Indeed, simply because it mirrors or has predicted some aspects of modern society does not mean its overall message is automatically good; nowadays it’s been banned in libraries all over and remains on the list of censored books. Simply put, the protagonist realizes how messed up the society he lives in is and then kills himself—and considering Huxley’s own brother committed suicide, you’d imagine he would have been more sensitive.

Obviously, that’s not exactly an encouraging vision of a future society nor a good message to spread. While being aware of the dangers of technology is vital, hopeful stories can inspire more dread than depressing ones; Brave New World inspired Ray Bradbury to write Fahrenheit 451, which ultimately ends with undertones of hope and change. That protagonist fights back against his oppressive society, whereas this one gives up—as such, it’s not hard to see why it’s one of the more memorable books people think of when they think of “dystopian novels.”

Nevertheless, in addition to inspiring Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World has also inspired other literary works such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and 1984 by George Orwell. It has been adapted for the stage, radio, and screen on several occasions, including TV films in 1980 and 1998 and a 2020 TV series; it is a “powerful reflection on the human condition” and “explores the potential consequences of unchecked scientific progress.” It is now widely considered to be one of the Western canon's most important novels, and—depressing ending or not—sometimes even warnings in fictional packages should be heeded.

The Technique and Legacy of Huxley

Although an incredibly dark story, the influence of it and the man who wrote it are impressive, and as such a lot can be gained from studying how Huxley wrote. It’s clear he took tone into consideration; that’s a vital element you can use to set up the world, setting, and mood of your story all in one. The prose of Brave New World is cold, precise, brutal, and economical. When you write, think about the type of mood you want to convey, and then ask yourself how you can achieve that through your writing style—will you make short or long sentences? Have lots of focus on internal thoughts or hardly any? Also consider how you want them to be arranged. For instance, having a sprinkle of internal thoughts before you proceed with plot-related sentences within the same paragraph—such as Huxley does in the opening chapter of Brave New World when the Director is talking about the predestined careers of those he’s cloning—is a great way to get readers inside a character’s head. This connects their thoughts to the central tension, which increases the context of the tension and therefore the drama.

Huxley was excellent at expressing his ideas through his writing “even today, writers tend to imitate his style, considering him a role model for producing novels and non-fiction.” His “thoughtful ideas and unconventional style” gained him immense popularity as he crafted his terrifying dystopian worlds with “a distinct voice” and used a “revolving door of written language that constantly challenges, engages, and teases his readers.” 

Huxley himself once stated, “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.” That becomes startlingly clear when one considers Brave New World and how, even without realizing it, you participate in its tragic plot simply by being horrified by it and wondering how close it got to imagining our society today. Engaging with his brutally precise prose only strengthens that connection and participation. So, when you are writing, ask yourself, “How do I want readers to participate with my work? How do I want to participate with it? What do I want it to make people feel?”

Although Huxley made his participation very dark—memorable by its horror—you can create any kind you want. It’s a relationship between yourself and your soul, for, as Huxley once said, “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one. It comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

So, make your story a good one.