BRAVE NEW WORLD SOURCES

            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.