In Wandering into Brave New World (Rodopi, 2013), David Leon Higdon uses traditional
scholarly methods to reveal the genesis of many elements in Aldous Huxley’s
world tour of 1925-1926 that first resulted in Jesting Pilate (1926). Higdon persuasively argues that Huxley
combined his experience of the caste system in India with his reading of
utopian fiction to form the basis of the predetermined mental and physical
divisions of AF 632. Henry Ford’s autobiography, which Huxley read aboard ship,
combined with other sources to form the novel’s critique of industrialism, and
Huxley’s general knowledge of Freud’s theories lay behind the abolition of
monogamy and family structures as well as John Savage’s Oedipus complex, which
extended past his mother to what Higdon calls surrogate parents, Bernard Marx
and Lenina Crowne.
Huxley’s
brief stay in Los Angeles, where he was more impressed by Hollywood’s special
effects than by its banal scripts, is seen as the source for the depiction of media
of the novel, and the desire for pleasurable sensation, embodied in the
Flapper, pervades the novel and is especially important for the characterization
of Lenina.
Huxley did
barely more than pass through New Mexico, never visiting a pueblo, but his
reading, which Higdon examines thoroughly, supplemented by some conjectural
sources, gave him details about the Hopi Snake Dance (absent D. H. Lawrence’s
supposed influence) and Zuni tales, some of which deal with a boy cast out,
like John, from his society.
The final
chapter deals with the novel’s onomastics, especially on names connected to the
Russian, Italian, and Turkish revolutions but also extending to physical and
social scientists, and with the ways in which Huxley avoided libel suits faced
by Graham Greene and others.
The result
is an ingenious and convincing study of materials which went into Huxley’s
best-known novel. Occasionally Higdon dives so deeply into the background, as in
the history of the Santa Fe Railroad’s Indian tours, that the foreground is
blurred. And his argument that Lenina is the real rebel in the novel seems a
little forced, while the condemnation of Huxley’s misogynistic treatment of
her, which “disastrously impeded characterization, theme, and intention” may owe
as much to current standards of political correctness as to evidence from the
novel. But this is one of the few really debatable points in Higdon’s admirable
study of the novel, so old-fashioned that it is original.
