Thursday 26th July is the anniversary of the birth of the writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), author of the classic dystopia Brave New World (1932) and much else besides. As well as having the oddest first name (it came from a character in a novel by his aunt Mrs Humphry Ward) Huxley is famous for having died on the same day in 1963 as John F. Kennedy. In addition to his novels Huxley was a brilliant essayist, a social critic, a prophet, and someone who warned against many of the things that have come to characterise modern civilisation. He is well worth attending to.Those of you who live in the catchment area of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire will have the opportunity to hear me (as his biographer) being interviewed about Huxley tomorrow morning around 9.30am.
5 comments:
The odds of my being in the catchment area of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire tomorrow morn are, unfortunately, distinctly long. I wonder if it can be picked up via the internet.
I am sure it can but I'm not sure of the exact steps. Probably best to start with the BBC website.
Well, it happened, and I don't think it's worth anyone's while following it up. These rapid, drive-time, radio interviews are so brief and shallow and the abrupt ending when the presenter suddenly gets bored like a gorilla on impulse scratching a new part of its armpit and a voice breaks in to say thanks very much and the phone goes click and dies, is a weird sensation. Perhaps one should have the courage to refuse!
I managed to catch it anyway, Nicholas. Into the belly of the beast, as it were. You got to feel a little like John Savage at first hand, which is something. Maybe you should have chosen to display Huxley as constantly out of his mind on drugs with brief intervals of bank-robbing & mugging old ladies to fund his habit.
Just to add, I think you were right to stress Huxley's lightness of touch. This very simple elegance perhaps masks the depth of his genius, & perhaps the "difficulty" of much Western philosophy, for example, is simply a poverty of expression. Which isn' to say it's simplicity here at the expense of depth. Philosophical thought, the same as fiction is first of all a work of art, & if the thought is expressed tediously, then maybe it's fair to say, the thought fails.
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