Guest blog: my friend Allene Symons on Aldous Huxley, Shakespeare, and her new book

I first met
Allene Symons about ten years ago when I became a member of a neighborhood
association here in Long Beach. Allene grew up here and still owns her
family’s two houses, both of which were built in 1910 and are just six
blocks up the street from where I live. It’s true that we like to go to
the Huntington Library. And she’s very patient with me when I stand at
the cases with the old manuscripts in them and drool all over the glass.
(I haven’t tried to climb into the cases. Yet.)




Allene’s new book,
Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return
of Psychedelic Science, is well worth reading! As you’ll learn from
her blog (below), Allene’s father was a friend of Huxley’s and took photos
of people’s hands as part of an on-going study. (Allene’s book explains
the study.) I bought the book at her first book talk last December, came
home, sat down, and read it. Practically straight through. I read most
of Huxley’s novels when I was in high school and college, so reading about
them was almost a journey into the past. Reading about my friend’s connection
with Huxley was fascinating. I hope you’ll buy and read her book. Here
she goes—




“O brave new world…”




My springboard for this guest blog is the Huntington Library, where Dr.
Barbara Ardinger and I have spent a number of afternoons peering at literary
treasures in the sepia-lit calm of the main exhibition hall.




The Huntington has one of the world’s four largest collections of works
by Shakespeare, including a copy of the famous First Folio edition of his
collected plays. Listening to Barbara toss off casual comments about Shakespeare
and his era is like time traveling with The Bard.




In case you wonder where I am heading with this riff, my plan is to make
a few connections between Shakespeare and my new book about Aldous Huxley,
his friendship with my father, and Huxley’s exploration of extraordinary
perception. Huxley was a lifelong Shakespeare fan. So were countless other
authors, of course, and if all the descendants of Shakespeare’s creative
gene pool, meaning every book he inspired, were placed end-to-end, the
accumulation would probably circle the perimeter of the Huntington’s 207-acre
grounds.




Shakespeare left behind a tool box, a recipe file, filled with ideas and
images for later generations to borrow and apply. He had no idea that,
three centuries after his death, the line “O, brave new world that has
such people in it! “ from his island castaway play
The Tempest would be adopted by a nearly blind writer for the title
of his dystopian novel,
Brave New World.




The Huntington also owns a number of rare works by eighteenth century
poet William Blake. An engraver by trade, Blake illustrated his poems with
such fantastical images that Aldous Huxley considered them examples of
visionary art – as if the poet-artist had found a hidden passageway to
the realm of otherworldly beings, some mythic or pagan, some biblical-angelic,
some as terrifying as if ripped from nightmarish dreams.




Two decades after
Brave New World was published In 1932, and after writing several
books in between, Huxley needed a title for one of his most controversial
nonfiction books: an account of his own visit to an extraordinary realm,
an altered state of consciousness. This took place in 1953 after Huxley
ingested a dose of the psychoactive cactus derivative called mescaline
(one of several substances later called psychedelic).


Searching for a phrase to capture this breaking-through-to-the-other-side
experience, he turned to William Blake and his poem “The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell.” From this work Huxley borrowed his title,
The Doors of Perception.




All this connects, indirectly at least, to my new book,
Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return
of Psychedelic Science (Prometheus Books). Huxley’s determination
to experience extraordinary perception was more far-reaching than most
people realize, much more so than Huxley’s later interest in psychedelics.
Before and after the landmark day in 1953 when he first tried mescaline,
Huxley had an ongoing interest in the secrets etched in human hands, in
dreams and visions and mystical experience, in ESP and séances and clairvoyance,
in nontraditional healing and hypnosis, and the mysterious passage from
life to death.




And, yes, as the legend goes, Aldous did take LSD on the last day of his
life-- November 22, 1963, a date that coincided with the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy. We will never know if taking the substance
at the end gave Huxley a glimpse of heaven or hell or nothing at all.




Biblical images aside, my book about Aldous Huxley’s quest has a non-Christian
spiritual streak, even though my publisher downplays the spiritual theme.
The publisher’s logline for the Penguin Random House catalog reads like
this:




 “Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together
when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers
a hidden side of the celebrated author of
Brave New World and
The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous
Huxley was once a friend of her father’s until the summer of 2001 when
she discovered a box of her dad’s old photographs.”




That last line brings me to Huxley’s friendship with my dad. Tucked away
among one thousand hand photographs was one image showing of the hands
of Aldous Huxley. It turned out that a shared interest in the mystery of
hands led to the friendship between my father and Aldous.




I only learned about this many years later, and that set me off on a journey
to understand the story behind their relationship and Huxley’s interests
in parapsychology and arcane pursuits. To my amazement, my research led
me to a private collection of original letters written by Aldous in which
such interests were apparent. Biographers sometimes talk about the rapture
of research when you come upon original documents and hold them in your
hands, and now I know what this means.




Which brings me back, bookend-style, to the former private estate of railroad
baron Henry Huntington, preserved as a foundation and its library and grounds
open to the public for almost a century. Meandering through the main exhibition
hall and seeing this collection of literary jewels under glass, some seeming
to glow in carmine leather bindings or reflecting soft light on their hand-drawn,
gilt embellishments, one feels almost swept away, time traveling to other
centuries.




And Barbara and I plan to make that trip again next week.