Tag: Aldous Huxley

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“The Present Fad of Self Confession” (1926): Aldous Huxley and the Paper “monster of spiritual impudicity”

Cover of the May 1926 issue of Vanity Fair
in which Aldous Huxley’s essay
“The Present Fad of Self Confession” was first published

I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure.  They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time.  The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular culture of yore, traces of which I sample in a twenty-first century context and, more narrowly, from the perspective of my own experience.

For quite some time now I have been browsing vintage US American periodicals ranging from Radio Broadcast to Vanity Fair in search of materials ripe for centenary processing.  Seriously dated though my selections inevitably are, I am more intrigued by resonance than I am concerned with variance, let alone obsolescence.

That is to say, even at the risk of presentism, I am drawn to the relatable—and am committed to relating—instead of concentrating on what makes the past so unalike from the present as to appear entirely and solely of its time.  Context need not be confinement, just as difference does not have to spell distance. 

Declaring something “past” assists in creating an air of critical detachment.  It fosters an attitude of authorial but nonetheless assumptive command over a given subject, a superciliousness that, like an eyebrow hovering prominently above the inspecting eye draws—or should draw—attention to the viewpoint of the writer whose imperiousness gainsays any claims to objectivity.

In my own catchings-up with the presumably out-of-date, I resist assuming an authoritative posture or persona.  All the while, I am aware of—and aim to foreground—my queer biases and spectatorial limitations as an absent witness or indirect observer.  

Far from clinical, the choosing of a subject matter and the manner in which we approach it reveal personality, whether the self at work is acknowledged or not.  Whenever we put our name to them, our published words proclaim “I wrote this”—unless, as is increasingly the case in a grim reality inconceivable to those living in 1926—they hush up, however vainly, that “AI wrote this.”

Despite obvious differences, both technological and social, in the ways in which we communicate and consume—how we take in and dole out prose for public consumption—the question of the “I” in journalistic writing, be it as a peek-a-boo tease between the lines or as a treatise writ large, continues to raise itself, to this day, even—or especially—as distinctions between fact and fiction, news and commentary, intelligence and artificiality have become all but erased.  Brave New World, indeed, this domain of public discourse.  

For that reason alone, Aldous Huxley’s “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” published in Vanity Fair in May 1926—coincidental with the author’s first visit to Hollywood—struck me as worth revisiting one hundred years later, at a moment in time when I question my own willingness to give so freely of myself in projects such as Retroactive Selfies, currently all but shelved on Instagram, and the visual narrative Envelope that I have proposed for display in a local gallery.

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“ . . . only a generation older than radio”; or, Thinking Comfort

Are we resting comfortably?
My visit to Woodlawn Cemetery, 2008

“Comfort,” Aldous Huxley once remarked, “is a thing of recent growth, younger than steam, a child when telegraphy was born, [and] only a generation older than radio.” With a few million listeners guaranteed to sit down for it, the aforementioned Columbia Workshop embroidered on that reference and, on this day, 4 August, in 1946, presented radio critic and historian Robert J. Landry’s digest of Huxley’s essay in a broadcast proposing “Happy Thoughts for a Hot Afternoon” (the second thought being given to “Laughter”).

“Exactly. Comfort is new,” the narrator concurs; and while not an “American invention,” it was an “American enthusiasm.” That much is irrefutable; but is “comfort” truly an invention peculiar—and in its origins traceable—to any particular age?

After all, was it not a state responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire? Perhaps, it is merely a new term for an age-old desire the fulfilment of which came within the no-need-for-stretching-much reach of a New World catering to it, at a price?

Surely, the Neanderthals knew better than to rest their aching heads on a pillow of granite; but they might not have had the nerve or need to sell the idea to anyone inclined to recline and ready to cave in upon being hit over the noggin with the padded yet relentless hammer of persuasion so adroitly wielded in consumer cultures.

Apparently, “comfort” is not even a new term, considering that “kunfort” (from the Latin “confortare”) has been part of the English language for centuries preceding the ostensibly New World, even though it might have been applied only to those rare, restful moments in the lives of the few who could make the Old World believe they had a divine right to experiencing it.

In the Middle Ages, Huxley suggests, comfort was a neglected ideal; and it was not until the dawn of the twentieth century that the “padded chair, the well-sprung bed, the sofa, central heating, and the regular hot bath—these and a host of other comforts enter into the daily lives of even the most moderately prosperous of the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie.”

Lolling about on a none too hot afternoon, more comfortably than a 1940s radio listener deficient in conditioned air, I tuned in belatedly and ever so relaxedly to hear what the Workshop made of Huxley’s “Comfort” and how, a decade before handing the microphone to its author, CBS went about comforting its listeners with what it insisted on turning into “Happy Thoughts.”

Landry, it appears, was sold on the idea that “comfort” is modern, at least in the technological sense:

Announcer.  Now, sir, without straining a muscle, I think you can reach one of those mother-of-pearl buttons.

[Biz: Switch.]

Fine.  That’s remote control for the twelve-tubed radio receiver hidden in the mirrored refreshment bar across the room. Now we should get some soft music.

[Soft Music.]

Dependable, easy, effortless bedside radio music.  Lullabies for grown-ups.

Listener (drowsily).  Does the . . . radio shut off automatically if you fall asleep?

What the narrator-announcer promised is just what broadcasters were often accused of proffering: inoffensive and largely forgettable fare. Outspoken in his critique of radio elsewhere, Landry is rather coy here, suggesting only that programmers would be wise to keep their audience by keeping it awake. Giving listeners what they want might well translate into a general want of same.

“Happy Thoughts” dwells on “comfort” as a feature and enabler of democracy, a political system that begot radio as the voice of—or at least for—the common folk. It refers to fascist Germany as a dictatorship that had no use for—and reason to be wary of—comfort, just as the rulers of the past depended on a populace that was never quite at ease. So much for the German notion of comfort, or “Gemütlichkeit.”

That exposure to the medium may have effects more noxious than inducing somnolence, that the Third Reich had made great use of it in herding the masses, are perhaps thoughts too uncomfortable for Landry to ponder on this “Happy” postwar occasion.

“Yes,” the audio essay concludes, “I guess we’ve got a lot of comforts to be grateful for nowadays. Happy thought, comfort!” In its gentle mockery of our insistence on contentment, the Workshop lecture takes a shortcut to the easy chair. The rest is … rest.

In “Comfort,” Mr. Huxley did not rest his case quite so readily after allowing comfort to be a worthy “means to an end” in that it “facilitates mental life”—just as “[d]iscomfort handicaps thought” when a “cold and aching” body inhibits the use of the mind. He went on to caution that the “modern world” seemed to “regard it as an end in itself, an absolute good.  One day, perhaps, the earth will have been turned into one vast feather-bed, with man’s body dozing on top of it and his mind underneath, like Desdemona, smothered.”

Now, I am not sure whether Desdemona would have been better off being stoned to death by a solid idea than being choked by a foolish notion; but I wonder whether I should not opt for a boulder in lieu of a comforter sometime.

May not a restless night produce thoughts capable of pushing us forward instead of returning us to the site of comfort for more of the same? Should we continue to pad our cells so as not to crack our brains on disquieting thoughts brought on by deprivation?

It might be a thought that strikes many of us as barbaric as the prehistoric, but, as those spineless and far from fortified creatures aboard that Brave New World of a space cruiser in WALL-E reminded me recently, “comfort” can have the discomfiting side-effect of effecting … nothing.

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On This Day in 1956: Aldous Huxley Opens a Radio Workshop and Talks About Our Brave New World

Rummaging through old photographs and notes, I came across a list of favorite books, a personal and highly incongruous assortment of titles I jotted down when I was twenty-one. Put together before I moved to New York City and went to college, that paper-thin time capsule is filled with thrillers like Maurice Leblanc’s The Double Life of Arsene Lupin and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. There is Truffaut’s wonderful book on Hitchcock, as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I eventually got to teach in a college course on friendship in American literature. Also on that chart are the author and work I am featuring today—because they happened to be featured on the previously discussed CBS Radio Workshop.

Architecture for a brave new world: Selfridges, Birmingham

There was little room for the Workshop in my doctoral study, whose subject is the rise and fall of American radio drama between 1929 and 1954—the quarter century during which audio drama (as a form, rather than radio as a medium) made the most significant advances and had its greatest cultural and socio-political influence in the US. This is not to say that there weren’t any notable radio plays either before or after the period defined by me as the form and the medium’s golden age, even though music and talk once again dominated the dial in the mid-50s as they had prior to the 1930s. The CBS Radio Workshop, however belated it may have seemed to a nation obsessed with television, was certainly first-rate.

On this day, 27 January, in 1956, the Workshop opened with a provocative piece of 20th-century fiction, introduced and narrated by its author, Aldous Huxley and scored by radio drama alumnus-turned-movie composer Bernard Herrmann. Addressing the audience, Huxley sounded very British indeed, avuncular, educated, opinionated, and somewhat frail; rather like E. M. Forster, who read several of his works for the record and was heard on US radio as a commentator on the NBC University Theater. What Huxley has to say, however, is anything but mellow or dated. It is still shocking today, mainly because his dark vision has already become reality.

As a teenager—I was sixteen or so when I first read Brave New World—I thought of Brave New Work as a work of science fiction. It was altogether more inviting than George Orwell’s dreary Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I was forced to read at school. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, none of the characters or situations were agreeable to me; everything described seemed too nasty and bleak to be endured even by the meek or uninspired.

In Brave New World, I was confronted with a seemingly uncomplicated future, a life not devoid of pleasures and comforts, a world not entirely unrecognizable—if cleaner and less hostile—in which I could imagine myself existing happily as long as I didn’t question myself or the system for whose workings I was being conditioned. Gradually, this rendered the novel all the more disconcerting to me: I realized that I was complaisant and complicit, willing to denounce my freedoms for relief and security.

Introducing William Froug’s two-part dramatization of his story, Huxley insisted on its relevance:

Brave New World is a fantastic parable about the dehumanization of human beings. In the negative utopia described in my story, man has been subordinated to his own inventions. Science, technology, social organization—these things have ceased to serve man; they have become his masters. A quarter of a century has passed since the book was published. In that time, our world has taken so many steps in the wrong direction that if I were writing today, I would date my story not six hundred years in the future, but at the most two hundred. The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.

It seems that sixty years would have been more accurate. Perhaps, Huxley’s dystopia has already become our present. As in the novel, we are being nursed and kept alive to keep business going; we are programmed to consume, hate, be shallow, satisfy those of our desires that are economically advantageous, and to go about our life without questioning how much we really are in control of it.

Established democracies are becoming more fascist in their curtailing of personal choice, freedoms whose realization may be harmful to our bodies and those of others and thus detrimental to long-term consumerism, a world of designer-labelled clothes and legalized designer drugs in which anyone who openly contradicts or loudly confronts is argued to be someone who sides with whose who have designs on our supposed liberties.

I’m still not sure what a tolerable alternative would be to such a Brave New World, one to be braved each day anew without the benefit of Soma.