26. Orwell and Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell go together like two peas in a pod. Or at least they do in our histories of dystopia, which tend to lump them together—or more specifically to lump together their most famous books, Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—without due consideration of their differences: as men, as novelists, as essayists, and as critics of humanity’s possible futures. All the same, there’s some truth in the matter. Clearly Huxley and Orwell belong to the dystopian category, if our priority is to pigeonhole them in a neat and useful literary-historical ‘box’. There are advantages to doing so: it makes the connections between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four more visible, for one thing, and it also helps us to place both texts in a longer trajectory of what Orwell called ‘pessimistic Utopia books’.[1] Yet one key difference between them comes into view precisely because of Orwell’s phrasing: how we think about these books depends to a large extent on where we think the emphasis falls; on whether we think they depict the utopias of intolerant rulers or the dystopias of the suffering governed.[2] This is much more straightforwardly decipherable in Orwell’s case than it is in Huxley’s. Tipping Huxley and Orwell into the dystopian box also flattens out several disparities in their outlook and tidies up the dissimilarities between their approaches to writing. The goal of this discussion is to give some brief orientating remarks about how these differences can help us to clarify why Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the way he did, based on his reactions to Huxley’s influential precursor text.
Orwell and Huxley weren’t from different generations, not quite, but they were born far enough apart in years to be and to feel mentally and socially distanced: Huxley in 1894 and Orwell in 1903. This is important because it accounts to some degree, possibly, for the fact that they construed the relationship between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World as a kind of literary-historical competition: who, in effect, could write the better vision of the future? When Huxley went up to Oxford in 1913, aged nineteen, Orwell had recently turned ten years old and was still a student at St Cyprian’s school in Eastbourne. Huxley went to Oxford from Eton, which was the school Orwell entered in 1917. Huxley was deemed not fit for military service in the First World War due to the condition of his eyes—they had been permanently damaged by the disease keratitis punctata, which he contracted in 1911. Having graduated from Oxford in 1916, Huxley worked for a time at Eton. It was here that he first met Orwell, who was then known by his actual name of Eric Blair. Huxley taught French at Eton for a year, and was remembered by Orwell’s friend Stephen Runciman as an inspiring teacher who nevertheless had an ineffective classroom presence:
He taught us rare and strange words in a rather reflective way. Orwell and I enjoyed him, although he was an incompetent, a hopeless teacher. He couldn’t keep discipline and was so blind that he couldn’t see what was happening, so was hopelessly ragged. Blair didn’t like that, he found it cruel.[3]
Runciman added that they nevertheless learned a great deal from Huxley:
At first we thought his voice affected, but soon some of us were trying to copy it. Above all it was his use of words that entranced us. Eric Blair … would in particular make us note Aldous’s phraseology. ‘That is a word we must remember,’ we used to say to each other … The taste for words and their accurate and significant use remained. We owe him a great debt for it.[4]
The acknowledgement of a debt points to a broader source of influence. When Orwell came to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was to Huxley, among others, that he looked for inspiration, imitating and circumventing him in more ways than one.
Huxley wrote Brave New World in response to a range of developments. One was the evolution of modern forms of pleasure, which in Huxley’s view had come to mean forms of experience that involved neither intelligence nor personal initiative. Cinema was a particular target here, as were popular music, the press, and certain kinds of sport. As he put it in 1923:
The working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now, in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.[5]
Another pressing issue was the prospect of Americanization. ‘The future of America is the future of the world’, Huxley wrote in 1927, adding: ‘Material circumstances are driving all nations along the path in which America is going.’[6] For Huxley, Americanization meant cultural sameness: fast cars, aeroplanes, mass production, easy dissemination of information through the press, jazz music, and Hollywood, among other things. At the centre of it all was the machine, which had ‘greatly diminished human drudgery and increased prosperity and leisure’ at the cost of human initiative and autonomy.[7]
Huxley was also thinking about the nature and desirability of democracy. He was sceptical about the likely alternatives to democracy in the 1920s and 1930s, including fascism, but he wasn’t unproblematically committed to democratic forms of socio-political authority either. Brave New World, as he put it in its follow-up text Brave New World Revisited (1958), offers ‘a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society’ in which ‘the attempt to recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible.’[8] Because Huxley hoped to protect what he called the ‘high arts’ from the standardizing consequences of machine culture, the hierarchical structures of aristocratic social frameworks, in which the high arts have flourished, deeply appealed to him, though he was never committed to such structures without question.[9] It may be possible that the hierarchical society depicted in Brave New World has a real-world origin in the Indian caste system, as well as a literary one in the global civilization imagined in H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905).[10] The World State’s commitment to genetic engineering came from Huxley’s quizzical attitude to the ‘health’ of human populations, which led him briefly to take an interest in eugenics.[11] Soma, the World State’s approved narcotic, echoes Huxley’s doubts about the mind-altering capacities of mass culture and conveys his fascination with the hallucinogenic effects of the psychedelics used in Vedic rituals.[12] And his concern in Brave New World with effective forms of suggestion and propaganda came to some extent from his close attention to the operations of ‘covert bullying’ in the political sphere.[13]
Brave New World makes these ideas come alive in fictional form. The World State it depicts is a place where the American consumer culture Huxley disliked has reached a triumphant apotheosis. There’s no gap between desire and its fulfilment. Near-unbelievable forms of technology have turned the world into a unified global civilization based on the principles of community, identity, and stability. The irony is that the stability in question has been achieved at the cost of emptying the human soul. Planned down to its nuts and bolts, the World State is a hierarchical society in which human beings are eugenically segregated into genetically engineered castes: at the top, the Alphas, followed by the Betas, Gammas, and Deltas, and, at the bottom, the Epsilons. Democracy is a thing of the past, as is natural human conception and birth. Individuality has ended in a world of human beings grown at will in test tubes. A technology of mass indoctrination, hypnopaedia, keeps everyone happily in their predetermined place, helped along by soma, which ensures that sadness and sorrow never colonize the mind. This is a world of pleasure in which high art has been abandoned, casual sex is encouraged, and emotional attachments are frowned upon, with a new kind of sensuous film technology, the feelies, guaranteeing the victory of arousal over the intellect. As the World Controller Mustapha Mond announces, the world’s population is ‘well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.’[14]
Orwell later described Brave New World as a book describing an imaginary future ‘in which the special problems of capitalism [have] been solved without bringing liberty, equality, or true happiness any nearer.’[15] In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) he referred to it as a satire on the dreams of progress: ‘a memorable assault on the more fat-bellied type of perfectionism’, and a book ‘probably express[ing] what a majority of thinking people feel about machine-civilisation.’[16] These descriptions indicate the esteem with which he regarded Huxley’s book. He saw it as a rejection of the myths of progress from which not only capitalism but also machine culture are inseparable. A further measure of the importance Orwell attached to Brave New World can be seen in how he incorporated it into the plot of his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), in which the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, directly refers to Huxley’s book in a debate about socialism.[17] Brave New World mattered to Orwell: as a work to admire, as a vortex of ideas to assess, and as a literary model to emulate. The road to Nineteen Eighty-Four took many turns. One of the most important was the sustained attention Orwell gave to Brave New World in a sequence of essays and reviews published during and after the Second World War.
Orwell belatedly reviewed Brave New World when it was re-issued in 1940, alongside re-issues of Ernest Bramah’s The Secret of the League (1907), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), and H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910). Orwell described The Sleeper Awakes as a vision of ‘a glittering, sinister world’ in which society has ‘hardened into a caste-system and the workers are permanently enslaved’—a world ‘without purpose, in which the upper castes for whom the workers toil are completely soft, cynical and faithless.’[18] Brave New World, in Orwell’s view, took a similar line, rejecting caste systems, attacking hedonism, and satirizing the totalitarian impulse. Parodying the utopian visions offered by Wells in the aftermath of the First World War, so Orwell claimed, Brave New World offered ‘a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930)’, yet probably cast no ‘light on the future’; this was because as Orwell saw things no society of the kind imagined in Huxley’s novel ‘would last more than a couple of generations, because a ruling class which thought principally in terms of a “good time” would soon lose its vitality.’[19] Looking back, Orwell argued that the World State of Brave New World was unrealistic as an imaginative projection because it didn’t account for the power politics increasingly visible in 1930s Europe. Huxley got it wrong, Orwell claimed, because he didn’t see that history was moving towards ‘something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police.’[20] Huxley got it wrong, that’s to say, because he didn’t see the world imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The comparison with H. G. Wells stuck. In March 1942, Orwell reiterated his claim that in Brave New World Huxley was offering a counter-vision of the world that contrasted starkly with the view of things presented by Wells in such books as A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), and The Dream (1924).[21] Over a year later, in December 1943, Orwell called Brave New World ‘an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create.’[22] Yet in 1946 a different intertext came into view: the dystopian narrative We (1920), written by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. Orwell had the opportunity to review the book in its French translation for the magazine Tribune. The book tells the story of a man, D-503, a mathematician in the One State, who falls in love with a woman, I-330, in a world of glass where falling in love is outlawed and human life is regulated with clockwork precision. Zamyatin’s novel was to prove decisive for the conception of Nineteen Eighty-Four—it has been claimed, for instance, that Orwell’s ‘Golden Country’ owes something to the land beyond the Green Wall in Zamyatin’s story, and there are many other connections of theme, imagery, and plotting.[23] It can sometimes feel like Nineteen Eighty-Four rewrites the earlier text in accordance with the demands of the 1940s. But Zamyatin also gave Orwell a chance to think about Huxley, and in thinking about Huxley to triangulate his account of a possible future, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in relation to the emerging form of the twentieth-century dystopia.
Finding evident similarities between Zamyatin’s and Huxley’s books, Orwell argued that they both ‘deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world’, yet he considered Zamyatin’s text more relevant to the mid-1940s.[24]
In Huxley’s book the problem of ‘human nature’ is in a sense solved, because it assumes that by pre-natal treatment, drugs and hypnotic suggestion the human organism can be specialised in any way that is desired. A first-rate scientific worker is as easily produced as an Epsilon semi-moron, and in either case the vestiges of primitive instincts, such as maternal feeling or the desire for liberty, are easily dealt with. At the same time no clear reason is given why society should be stratified in the elaborate way that is described. The aim is not economic exploitation, but the desire to bully and dominate does not seem to be a motive either. There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.[25]
Orwell suggested that precisely due to this lack of sadism, Huxley’s future was inferior to the world described in Zamyatin’s book because Huxley had no ‘intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes’.[26] Orwell put the same point slightly differently in 1949, arguing that Zamyatin’s We ‘takes account of the diabolism & the tendency to return to an earlier form of civilization which seem to be part of totalitarianism.’[27] This is the vision presented by O’Brien to Winston in the Ministry of Love: ‘A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.’[28]
Huxley immediately took note of Nineteen Eighty-Four when it was published in 1949, corresponding with Orwell shortly after its appearance and addressing the question of the novel’s futurological correctness just under a decade later in Brave New World Revisited. Huxley had started to sense in the 1950s that modern life had erased all traces of the divine and the eternal, ‘the notions of State, Nation, and Party’ expanding ‘into vast and monstrous caricatures of God.’ He continued: ‘In the service of this God-surrogate and of [the] prophet, Efficiency, totalitarian dictators find it right and proper to behave with systematic savagery.’[29] Nineteen Eighty-Four took this savagery as its subject, Huxley acknowledged, but at first he was sceptical about its accuracy as a work of historical anticipation. Writing directly to Orwell in October 1949, four months after its publication, Huxley affirmed its fineness and importance as a work of distinct imaginative power, yet doubted whether the ‘sadism’ of Oceania’s ‘ruling minority’ was realistic:
Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.[30]
What’s telling here is how exactly Huxley’s criticism of Nineteen Eighty-Four mirrors Orwell’s criticism of Brave New World. Where Orwell thought that Brave New World was unrealistic as a prediction because it mis-estimated the extent to which a hedonistic society could endure, Huxley thought that Nineteen Eighty-Four was unrealistic as a prediction because it mis-gauged the extent to which sadism as a motivation for power could be sustained.
Huxley moderated his account of Nineteen Eighty-Four throughout the next decade. As soon as 1950 he was willing to concede that Orwell may have been right in tracing what Huxley called the ‘third revolution’ to the year 1984: the revolution of subverting ‘the individual in the depths of his organic and hyper-organic being’, and that ‘will bring his body, his mind, his whole private life directly under the control of the ruling oligarchy.’[31] In 1954 Huxley asked with typical provocation whether the materialism of the modern world—its habit of thinking about human individuals as ‘merely the by-products of physical and social processes’—would cause a ‘dangerously logical demagogue’ to treat them exactly as this and as nothing more, thereby turning ‘the fiction of George Orwell’s 1984 […] into appalling fact.’[32] By the time Huxley came to write Brave New World Revisited, his view of Nineteen Eighty-Four had shifted once again. He admitted that in the context of the late 1940s, Orwell’s novel seemed ‘dreadfully convincing.’ Yet a decade on, scientific and technological progress had robbed Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘of some of its gruesome verisimilitude.’ The prospect of a global nuclear war remained the unknown factor, but assuming humanity lived past the possibility then it was more likely, Huxley claimed, that the future would resemble the projection of Brave New World. Orwell’s totalitarians ruled ‘almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of punishment’, whereas Huxley’s world controllers achieved near-total control via ‘systematic reinforcement of desirable behaviour, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization.’[33] Diversify and overcome. Totalitarianism, in Huxley’s eyes, was a matter of taking as many routes as possible to complete domination of the self.
Huxley got to have the last word. Orwell died in 1950, and Huxley lived for a further thirteen years, dying in 1963. By this point, the implications of Nineteen Eighty-Four had become clearer and its assessment of power politics easier to assess in light of historical events. Orwell had been inclined, as his biographer D. J. Taylor explains, to criticize Brave New World on the grounds that the World State’s ‘pleasure domes and constant pursuit of sensual gratification’ had no ‘grounding in basic human psychology.’[34] But Huxley thought much the same of Nineteen Eighty-Four—that it was inaccurately attuned to human reality. Huxley’s belief that ‘liberty would be surrendered through conditioning’, to quote his biographer Nicholas Murray, ‘through populations coming to “love their servitude”, rather than “clubs and prisons”, would indeed seem much more in line with what […] actually happened in the West in the second half of the twentieth century.’[35] We’ll never know what Orwell would have made of Huxley’s extended critiques of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But we can be sure he’d have relished the chance for debate, as would Huxley. Their responses to each other encapsulated something neither society in Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four permits: a life of independent, characterful thought.
[1] George Orwell, ‘The True Pattern of H. G. Wells’ (1946), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 20: Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living, 1949-1950, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 560-64, at p. 563.
[2] Note that Orwell conspicuously avoids the term ‘dystopia’, which is a word he seems never to have used in print. The OED traces the first appearance of the term ‘dystopian’ to 1868. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, ‘dystopia’ starts to be used with significant frequency during and after the 1960s.
[3] Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 117.
[4] Ibid., p. 117.
[5] Aldous Huxley, ‘Pleasures’ (1923), in Complete Essays Volume I, 1920-1925, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 354-7, at p. 356.
[6] Aldous Huxley, ‘The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age’ (1927), in Complete Essays Volume III, 1930-1935, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 185-94, at p. 185.
[7] Ibid., p. 189.
[8] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), introd. David Bradshaw (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 32.
[9] See, for instance, Aldous Huxley, ‘Pascal’ (1929), in Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays Volume II, 1926-1929, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 367-406.
[10] For Huxley’s responsiveness to the Indian caste system, see David Leon Higdon, Wandering into Brave New World (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013).
[11] For a fine account of this phase of Huxley’s intellectual development, see Jake Poller, Aldous Huxley (London: Reaktion, 2021), pp. 61-80. See also David Bradshaw, ‘Huxley’s Slump: Planning, Eugenics and the “Ultimate Need” of Stability’, in John Batchelor (ed.), The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 151-71, which draws on Bradshaw’s editorial work for The Hidden Huxley (London: Faber and Faber, 1994).
[12] Higdon, Wandering into Brave New World, p. 41. See also the chapter on ‘Chemical Persuasion’ in Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, pp. 89-98.
[13] Aldous Huxley, Letters, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 780.
[14] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), introd. Margaret Atwood and David Bradshaw (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 194.
[15] George Orwell, ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’ (1946), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 18: Smothered Under Journalism, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 268-84, at p. 270.
[16] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), introd. Richard Hoggart (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 189.
[17] George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 97.
[18] George Orwell, ‘Review of The Iron Heel by Jack London; The Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; The Secret of the League by Ernest Bramah’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 12: A Patriot After All, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 210-13, at p. 211. Note that the title of Wells’s novel appears incorrectly throughout Orwell’s review: the book first appeared as When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and then in 1910, in revised form, as The Sleeper Awakes.
[19] Ibid., p. 211.
[20] George Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’ (1940), in A Patriot After All, pp. 121-7, at p. 126.
[21] George Orwell, ‘The Re-Discovery of Europe’ (1942), radio broadcast, in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 13: All Propaganda is Lies, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 209-21, p. 216.
[22] ‘John Freeman’ [George Orwell], ‘Can Socialists be Happy?’ (1943), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 16: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 37-45, at p. 40.
[23] See Peter Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996), p. 96.
[24] George Orwell, ‘Freedom and Happiness’ (1946), in Smothered Under Journalism, pp. 13-17, at p. 14.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., p. 15.
[27] George Orwell, letter to Fredrick Warburg (30 March 1949), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 20: Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), p. 72.
[28] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), ed. Peter Davison, introd. Julian Symons (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 279.
[29] Aldous Huxley, ‘Variations on a Philosopher’ (1950), in Complete Essays Volume V, 1939-1956, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp. 34-124, at p. 61.
[30] Huxley, Letters, p. 604.
[31] Huxley, ‘Variations on a Philosopher’, p. 109.
[32] Aldous Huxley, ‘A Case for ESP, PK, and Psi’ (1954), in Complete Essays Volume V, pp. 145-57, at p. 156.
[33] Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, pp. 4-5.
[34] D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The New Life (London: Constable, 2023), p. 482.
[35] Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (London: Abacus, 2002), p. 380.