Complete Essays, Vol. I: 1920-1925

Aldous Huxley Complete Essays #1

by Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker (Editor), James Sexton (Editor)

These first two volumes of a projected five, in preparation for several years, begin a major publishing venture, collecting the complete essays of one of the giants of modern English prose and of social commentary in our time. The first two volumes span the most productive period of Huxley's career. Volume I begins with his essays for Gilbert Murray's Athenaeum and his music essays for the New Westminster Gazette. Volume II continues through the 1920s and includes his controversial essays on India and the empire in "Jesting Pilate." The essays of both volumes range from nuanced assessments of art and architecture to political analyses, history, science, religion, and art, and a newly discovered series on music. Wide-ranging, allusive, and witty, they are informed by the probing skepticism of a highly educated and ironically incisive member of the English upper middle class. Huxley's fascination with the codes and conventions of European culture, his growing apprehensions about the menacing collapse of the European political order, and his awareness of the impact of science and technology on the post-Versailles world of England, France, Germany, and the United States form the basis for his critique. His subjects overlap with the satirical novels he wrote during the period between the wars, culminating in Point Counter Point and Brave New World. At their best, these essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

510 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have begun reading the Complete Essays of Aldous Huxley, an endeavor which I expect will take a number of years. I have always admired Huxley and am now interested in both re-reading his fiction and exploring his essays and non-fiction.

Complete Essays 1, 1920-1925 covers the postwar years, during which Huxley wrote two books of essays -- Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist and On the Margin: Notes and Essays. To these have been added his music criticism from The Weekly Westminster Gazette as well as various pieces he wrote for Vanity Fair and other publications.

So early in his career, Huxley wrote with the measured taste and maturity of a much older man. Even in his music criticism, he makes me want to re-evaluate many composers with whom I am insufficiently familiar. (Granted that he did not appreciate the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, but then no one's perfect.)

There are pieces in this collection that are astounding. In an essay on Holland, I found the following:

Personally, I balance my affections. For I love the inner world as much as the outer. When the outer vexes me, I retire to the rational simplicities of the inner—to the polders of the spirit. And when, in their turn, the polders seem unduly flat, the roads too straight, and the laws of perspective too tyrannous, I emerge again into the pleasing confusion of untempered reality.

I feel the same way, but damn if I could have expressed it one tenth as well.

I would like to have been Aldous Huxley, though I would not relish living out the rest of my life without the sense of sight, as he did.

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intellectual fireworks illuminating Huxley's journey from cynic to mystic.