Not for the 'easily shocked': Rebecca West's 1932 review of Brave New World

Those who are easily shocked had better leave Mr Aldous Huxley's new fantasy, Brave New World, on one side: noting, as they pass, that since this is a free country they are not compelled to read it.

Those who are not easily shocked can settle down to enjoy what is not only the most accomplished novel Mr Huxley has yet written, but also the most serious religious work written for some years. His tendency in his other novels has been to select subject matter which might fairly be described as a fuss about nothing. Even the characters in Point Counterpoint were carefully docketed as interesting individuals – they were, in relation to the depicted imbroglio, as lacking in allure as sexually maladjusted cockroaches. But the argument in Brave New World is of major importance. One could sanely ask for nothing more than it gives.

One would say that the book was about a Utopia if it were not that a line of dreamers have given that originally noncommittal term a sense of imagined perfection; for the book describes the world as Mr Huxley sees it may become if certain modern tendencies grow dominant and its character is rather of a deduced abomination.

If one has a complaint to make against him it is that he does not explain to the reader in a preface or footnotes how much solid justification he has for his horrid visions. It would ad to the reader's interest if he knew that when Mr Huxley depicts the human race as propagating by means of germ cells surgically removed from the body and fertilised in laboratories (so that the embryo develops in a bottle and is decanted instead of born) he is writing of a possibility that biologists are seeing not more remotely than, let us say, Leonardo da Vinci saw the aeroplane. And it would add to the reader's sympathetic horror if he realised that the society which Mr Huxley represents as being founded on this basis is actually the kind of society that various living people, notably in America and Russia, and in connection with the Bolshevist and Behaviourist movements, have expressed a desire to establish; and that this is true even of the least pleasing details.

There is, for instance, one incident which immensely enhances the impressiveness of the book if one knows its counter-part in reality.

In this new world there are various grades of human beings to do various work, ranging from Alphas, who hold all the positions of power and do all the intellectual work, to the Epsilons, who do all the drudgery and are too stupid to read or write. These are all bred for the purpose from selected germ-cells, exposed to various treatments during their bottled stages, and then educated by various devices depending on the theory of the "conditioned reflex", which holds that any animal or human being can be taught to dislike an object, even if inherently pleasing, if it is always presented to them in association with an object that is inherently unpleasing to them. Mr Huxley gives an example of one of these devices.

The Delta babies, who are being bred to do menial work that demands a certain amount of intelligence, were put down at one end of a nursery at the other end of which were set out bowls of roses and open picture books. They were allowed to crawl to them and lay hands on both the roses and the books: but as soon as they settled down to their play the nurses pressed a lever which let loose a babel of sirens and alarm bells. The babies went off into screaming fits. Then, to rub in the lesson, the strip of floor where they were lying was electrified, and the babies shrieked and writhed with mild electric shock.

This device serves two purposes. Since the Deltas have to perform fairly intricate work they cannot be bred below a certain fairly high level of intelligence, above that which would make it possible for them to read or write: but since the community cannot afford to have them waste their time on what must necessarily be a fourth-rate mental life, it seeks to make books hateful to them. And it has to discourage any native love of flowers, because they are not machine-made: and the appetite of citizens must be directed away from the natural to machine-made goods, so that the nightmare of over-production may be laid for ever.

Now the interesting thing about this experiment is that it is in technique exactly the same as those constantly conducted by Dr John B Watson, the founder of Behaviourism, a philosophy which has probably made more adherents in the last twenty years than Christian Science did in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and finds them in a more influential grade.

"I hope some time to try out the experiment of having a table top electrically wired in such a way that if a child reaches for a glass or a delicate vase, it will be punished, whereas if it reaches for its toys or other things it is allowed to play with, it can get them without being electrically shocked."

He believes in "building in the negative reactions demanded by society"; and the society he belongs to is one that would certainly, if it could, have demanded such reactions as Mr Huxley's new world demanded from the Deltas. Was it not that society in which, just before the Wall Street crash, a conference of automobile manufacturers expressed an intention of "stimulating the two-car sense"!

There is, indeed, nothing at all impossible in Mr Huxley's vision of a world where the infants are conditioned by such experiments, and by the dormitory loud speakers that whisper moral education into their sleeping ears (his pages on hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching, are among the most amusing in the book) into a lack of all characteristics save those which tend to uphold the stability of the State. Much of it is actual in America.

There is this salesmanship, which enjoins them to make a division between that which is valued and that which is preserved: they are taught to acquire an infinity of gimcrack objects, display them, throw them away. They are taught to dissipate their force on silly crowd pleasures. The talkies have become the feelies – they feel the kisses and the tears – but have not changed their fatuous essence. The chemists have found that drug they have been looking for, which intoxicates without deleterious effect on the nervous system. Leisure hours, therefore, become a blandly drunken petting-party; for promiscuity is a social duty, since it discourages far more than puritanism the growth of that disintegrating factor, love.

The religious instinct has been transferred by skilful conditioning to a deity known as Our Ford, whose beautiful and inspired sayings such as "History is bunk" are reverently handed down. Age has disappeared, youth is artificially prolonged till 60, when there comes death, which is not feared. We are privileged to visit now a co-educational establishment under the headship of Miss Keate, a free-martin (for details refer to the first chapter of this book), and see five busloads of her pupils "singing or in silent embracement," rolling home from Slough Crematorium for a stage in the death conditioning which begins at eighteen months.

Every tot spends two mornings a week in a hospital for the dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate creams on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course. Emotional and intellectual life is entirely flattened out, so that the State which supplies the material needs of the citizens shall run with a triumphant smoothness, as it is intended in Bolshevist Russia. If the individual is drowned, at least he is drowned in a bath of communal happiness.

Into this world comes a Savage: a white child who has been born, through certain odd circumstances, in an American Indian reservation which has been kept untouched for psychological research reasons. His mind is governed by the harsh conceptions of Indian religion. He believes in the vileness of man that can be made acceptable to the gods only by fasting and scourging, and again scourging; so that blood must be drawn from the back if the gods are to let rain fall on the pueblo and the corn grow; and the delights of love must be fenced away by restriction upon restriction, and cancelled afterwards by shuddering loathing of them and contempt for the object who afforded them.

Towards those who begot or conceived one (so obscenely, compared with the decent technique of bottling and decanting) one is fixed in a torturing relationship of loving concern which it is almost impossible to destroy.

Far from blood and hatred and anguished passion being eliminated from life, they are ritually preserved; and nothing is done to veil the threat that, at the end of all this agony, there is nothing but a door painfully opening into emptiness. To this harsh existence there are no palliatives save the joy to be found in hunting and dancing, in the craftsmanship of the potter and the weaver: unserviceable aesthetic joys. It happens that the Savage has found in the Indian reservation an old volume containing the works of Shakespeare, an author forbidden in the new world on account of the reprehensibly private nature of the emotions he chiefly describes. They supply him with an almost complete language to express these blood-stained primative beliefs; since the poet, also, for all that the literature teachers have done to disguise it (as one may read in an entertaining essay by Mr Lytton Strachey), held beliefs not very different.

The Savage is, therefore, aware of his own world. It is not merely strangeness that makes him detest the new world and use the more denunciatory passages from Shakespeare to express what he thinks about its arrangement.

He finds contentment everywhere, but no nobility. Relief from the fear of death is no gain. As he sees his mother die in the Hospital for the Dying ("something between a first-class hotel and a feely-palace, if you take my meaning," says the nurse), doped with the new drug, canned music, and perfumes, while Epsilon dwarf twins munch chocolate eclairs round her bed as part of their death-conditioning treatment, he realises that to know the terror of death is better than to be drugged out of that knowledge. As he says when he talks to Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers (a cynic who reads Shakespeare, too, behind locked doors), things are too easy. One pays no price and one gets nothing valuable. He quotes Othello, "If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death."

It is only at the end of the book that one sees precisely what literary task Mr Aldous Huxley has set himself. He has rewritten in terms of our age the chapter called "The Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov. In these days Dostoevsky is out of fashion, partly because he writes with heat and passion of the sort that Mr TS Eliot's sham classicism has taught us to despise, and partly because the simple and elephant-sized neuroses of Tolstoy are easier for the inattentive eye to follow than the subtle spiritual ferments of Dostoevsky. But "The Grand Inquisitor" is a symbolic statement that every generation ought to read afresh. In it Christ revisits earth, works a miracle in the streets of Seville and is immediately, by order of the Cardinal, thrown into the prisons of the Inquisition.

The Cardinal visits the captive in the middle of the night and tells him that he has recognised him as the Christ, but means to burn him at the stake, because he insists on the freedom of man, and man cannot be happy unless he is a slave. "'For now' (he is speaking of the Inquisition, of course) 'for the first time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy?'"

The words are almost the same as Mr Huxley's World Controller's. But instead of the Inquisition, instead of the orthodoxy that in the nineteenth century crushed spiritual endeavour, Mr Huxley is attacking the new spirit which tries to induce man to divert in continual insignificant movements relating to the material framework of life all his force, and to abandon the practice of speculating about his existence and his destiny. Equally a denunciation of Capitalism and Communism so far as they discourage man from thinking freely, it is a declaration that art is a progressive revelation of the universe to man, and that those who interfere with it leave men to die miserably in the night of ignorance.

The book is many other things as well. One could cover many columns with discussion of its implications. It is, indeed, almost certainly one of the half-dozen most important books that have been published since the war. First published in The Daily Telegraph, February 5 1932

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