Huxley at 75

The critical reception of Brave New World was largely chilly. Most reviewers were disgruntled or disgusted with what they saw as unjustified alarmism. H. G. Wells was downright offended. “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book,” Wells said. In fact, Wells felt the bite of this betrayal personally—his own writings, especially his 1923 novel Men Like Gods, had been Huxley’s inspiration. Huxley told a friend in 1931 that he was “writing a novel about the future—on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it.”
Wells is often considered the father of science fiction. His long train of novels predicted, among other things, tanks, aerial warfare, and the atomic bomb; as J. B. S. Haldane said, “the very mention of the future suggests him.” Although his earlier and most memorable work explores the darker possibilities of scientific advancement (in a 1940 preface to his 1908 novel The War in the Air, Wells said he wanted his epigraph to read “I told you so. You damned fools.”), in Huxley’s heyday Wells was writing utopias teeming with technogadgetry and what George Orwell called “enlightened sunbathers.” Rejecting Rousseau’s noble savage and the romantic utopias of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he saw the Industrial Revolution and modern science as enduring and largely positive developments in man’s eternal conflict with pitiless nature, including his own. Men Like Gods is the story of a group of contemporary Englishmen accidentally transported into an alternate dimension of peaceful, passionless Utopians who are uncritically committed to scientific rationalism and the self-negating collectivist state. As the title suggests, this is Wells’s idea of perfectible Man, achieved through communitarian ideals, technological enhancement, and an aggressive program of eugenics. The Utopians share their wisdom with the time-travelers, explaining how they put “the primordial fierce combativeness of the ancestral man-ape” behind them. Just as man’s intrinsic aggression had brought civilization to the brink of collapse, a great prophet saw the light. In “a dawn of new ideas,” an elite group of researchers reordered society until, finally annihilating the sources of strife, they achieved a cooperative state with “no parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no business competition, no police nor prisons, no lunatics, no defectives nor cripples,” whose motto is “Our education is our government.”
Huxley thought this vision preposterous. “Get rid of priests and kings, make Aeschylus and the differential calculus available to all, and the world will become a paradise,” he scoffed. Men Like Gods “annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into Brave New World.”
Prior to Huxley’s book, however, another great dystopia had cast a scorching glare on totalitarian rationalism. Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We depicts a technocratic OneState whose citizens are “Numbers” governed with absolute authority in a system where political and quantitative laws are fused. Zamyatin, the Russian editor of H. G. Wells’s novels, had at first supported the Bolshevik Revolution but came under fire throughout the 1920s for his vocal criticism of the Soviet regime. His works were banned and he was arrested several times, and finally moved permanently to Paris in 1931. First released in English in 1924, We was not officially published in Russian until 1988 under glasnost. Some critics suggested Huxley had borrowed from or been heavily influenced by We. George Orwell—himself not especially impressed with Brave New World, which he called a “brilliant caricature of the present” that “probably casts no light on the future”—even accused Huxley of plagiarism (a particularly strange charge since Orwell’s own 1984 was much more directly influenced by We). Curious about it himself, Zamyatin learned through a mutual friend that Huxley had not read We before he published Brave New World, “which proves,” he said, that “these ideas are in the air we breathe.”
But most critics shared Wells’s, not Zamyatin’s, reaction to the book. “As prophecy it is merely fantastic,” dismissed essayist Gerald Bullett. Wells’s friend and fellow writer Wyndham Lewis called it “an unforgivable offense to Progress.” Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks began his review by asking, “With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about?” and ended it with several personal attacks.
Economist Henry Hazlitt sarcastically remarked that “a little suffering, a little irrationality, a little division and chaos, are perhaps necessary ingredients of an ideal state, but there has probably never been a time when the world has not had an oversupply of them.” J. B. S. Haldane’s then-wife Charlotte penned a snide review for Nature, complaining that Huxley’s great-uncle Matthew Arnold, the conservative literary critic, had taken demonic possession of him, and that in any case, “biology is itself too surprising to be really amusing material for fiction.” Even G. K. Chesterton thought Huxley’s book sadly laughable, observing that, “However grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.”