Authors: Aldous Huxley
Authors: Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley; Brave New World
Aldous Huxley is a very intellectual writer. His writings are often accused of being too flowery. Aldous Huxley comes from a family of intellectuals. His grandfather, Julian Huxley was a famous scientist, and his brother Thomas Huxley is also a famous scientist.
Aldous Huxley wrote a few books which I read during a summer vacation in the tropics.
Chrome Yellow is a fictional story about a real house in the English countryside which was a famous artists hangout during the 1920s. All the famous artists of the time like TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, and F Scott Fitzgerald hung out there. The house was called Garsington. Howard Marks mentions that he stayed at that house for awhile in Mr Nice.
Antic Hay, The title is from a line of medieval poetry, "My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns Shall with their goatsfeet dance an Antic Hay." This book is about intellectual Theodore Gumbril who invents the pneumatic pants. Pants which can be inflated and deflated at will to provide a cushion at times when it is needed like when riding on the wooden seats of an old train.
To impress his woman, he puts on a full beard and tuxedo, top hat and inflatable pants which he calls The Complete Man. One time, he forgets his disguise on his way to visting her and wonders if his woman would still like him even though he was not The Complete Man.
After Many A Summer Dies The Swan is like Citizen Kane, obviously a satire of William Randolph Hearst. There is the millionaire along with his girlfriend, who hires an antiquities expert to go through the journals of a person who lived on the estate three hundred years ago. It is rumoured that these journals contain the secret to longevity if not immortality.
There is a crazy doctor who is the secret lover of the millionaire's girlfriend.
After much social drama and contemplating, it is discovered that there is much more than the secret to immortality contained in the books.
The previous person who lived on the estate wrote in a journal during the 1800s that when he was a child, he put a ring through the tail section of a kind of fish that lived in a pond on the estate. For some reason, he was feeding it a special diet of ground up fish. When he was in his fifites, he still saw the fish. He concluded that the secret to longevity was triturated, or ground up fish meat of this kind of fish.
He ate the ground up fish himself.
The big surprise in the story is that this man, now a good four hundred years old, now lived in a cave, also on the estate. After going through the considerable passages of the cave, they find the old man and his wife also similarly aged. They are in an advanced state of dementia, evident as the old man urinates himself while his wife laughs.
Ape And Essence is a story about two modern day studio hands who stumble upon a script, one script of a few many that had fallen off a truck full of scripts that were on their way to an incinerator.
They stumble upon a story that they liked. They tried to track down William Tallis, the writer of these stories who lived on a ranch in the desert about an hour's drive from the film studio in Los Angeles. When they got to the ranch, they found that the scriptwriter had died.
"But man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he is most assured, his glassy essence like an angry ape plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as to make the angels weep."
The story that the dead scriptwriter left behind was set in the future. A science fiction. Similar to planet of the Apes, the play starts off with a apefaced wearing lipstick cooking a meal on the stove. Apes Leading an Einstein clone on a leash were feeding it rum, sugar, and bologna. This Einstein cloned looked sadly at another Einstein clone across the beach being pulled on a leash by other Apes.
Then the future dawns as it is the after era of a major nuclear war. Infants born with more than seven fingers are instantly deemed as radioactive mutants and destroyed. Breeding is done only once a year.
A time traveller named Alfred Poole winds up here, kind of like Shakespeare's the Tempest where the hapless Antonio winds up on an island populated by the insane.
"The Director asked Alfred what he did. Alfred said that he knew much about plants. "War plants?" asked the director as he dug his heels deeper into Alfred's back."
"They had overturned a coffin which contained the body of a rich film producer of the old times. The Director emerged looking grotesque in the producers jacket with the arms being too narrow and the hips being too wide."
Breeding is done only once a year, permitted by the Priests who identify themselves wearing bulls pizzles. When the Priests catch Alfred in the act with his girlfriend, the Priests merely excuse themselves saying, "Don't mind us, Belial Day comes only once a year."
The Priests offer to initiate Alfred into the Priesthood. He does not like this idea and escapes with his girlfriend.
Brave New World is about a story where the family unit is obsolete. Infants are the result of test tube babies in factories.
"The laboratory girl wondered whether she remembered to put oxygen into a certain tray of test tubes. Never mind, I probably did, she thought and put on her clothes to go out for the evening. Seventeen years later about 45 people would suddenly die of a teenage disease that results from not having oxygen pumped into their test tubes when they were an embryo."
The population is subdued with a drug called Soma. There is a section in the vast city where people live the old life, where births are a result of how people are usually born. The hero of the story has his helicopter crash into that forbidden zone of the city. He finds out that he was not a test tube baby but that his mother lived in the forbidden zone and his father is a powerful executive.
He wrote lots of other good stories like Point Counter Point, The Giaconda Smile, Time Must Have A Stop, but I never read them.
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