Judge — February 27, 1932 — page 3: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JUDGING THE BOOKS Y" No Mr, Huxley (Aldous to you), he with the blue ribbon mental pedigree, is no intellectual dullard, filled with dryness and dust, whose » the brains the bellyache. . His is the most democratic > that ever lived. He fills intellectual in with good libidinous action (even the common people enjoy it), and ties gaily colored balloons to his dialectic. Playing the seraphone, he pals to the mind. He is a lecherous He goes great with the un- intelligentsia, Being one of the lead- ing members of the group, we ought to know. Now Mr. Huxley, in his réle of in- tellectual Barnum, has pulled his scholar’s mortarboard a thre: cireus of a book called “Brave New World.” A book designed to turn critics on the car, get them to spread themselves with fine, bmve, clever writing like this (Oh, yeah? Where?) and make everyone sit up and take a lot more notice. “Brave New World” is Mr. Hux- ley’s Utopia. But it’s different from all the Utopias you've ever known, even if it echoes Mr. Shs marathon one of is a satirical Utopia, Model-T Utopia, designed, dedicated, and built by Ford. Utopias, you know, like everything else, keep step with the times. What seemed Utopian to Plato, More, Samuel Butler or Mr. Guinzberg on Houston Street in 190+ is outdated today. Presumably quite possibly, the world has taken no- tice of its past defects and has rem- edied them, problems. Thus, our civilization, from ring w's six-day ars back. It 932. style—a 1932 presents its own having ne distance (thru trem Ford, and Freud) into the honeyed land of material happiness, Mr. Huxley goes on to show, in his most brilliant and fantastic way, the end of such strivings, pre- senting the advantages and disadvan- tages of such a world. In Model-T Utopia (Mr. Huxley will call it T Model—but then, he is an Englishman) we are all born in incubator fashion. ement is completely synthetic and is an improvement over Mr. Shaw's method where x all born full- grown in cnormous knows by what monster. Once the child spends its carly years in erotic play. It gets moral education thru a process known as sleep-teaching. Children, of course. are born unequal: they are conditioned in carly years to different castes. Some to work the machines, some to white collaritis, and some to Alpha-Plus or Phi Beta Kappaism. ‘This condition- ing process is horribly satirical. Of age. the Huxley adult ne ries. All pain is abolished. Comes the faintest touch of the blues, he takes a pill that fills him with happi- ness, without any psychopathic after- effects. ‘There is no marriage (which without. s: born, goes wx). everyone be- longs to everyone else: love being beautifully universal. All travel. is done by helicopter and rocket; they play electro-magnetic golf; listen to synthetic ear-and-eye music; and, for sheer entertainment, take in the Feelies. Into this rose-colored milk-choco- late setting, Huxley introduced a Man of Yesterday, someone like you and us. This fellow’s attempts to prac- tice his old-fashioned ideas on love and other things end disastrously, furnishing the provocative action of the story for such a world in the read- er’s mind. /["- Hextey’s Utopia has its good points and. its bad. Unquestion- ably we all want happiness, freedom | from imnegrims, mental rats, grime in the corners of life Hux- ley shows it as we may yet have it. But it is all so dependent on synthesis; it is all so devoid of natural richness; it is all so sterile; so phony; so self- indulgent; so conercte and unmystical ; so three-dimensional—it wouldn't be worth the salt. It would be the world of Synthetic Man; the world where everyone has what he wants. It would be like that pl took place in Hell. Curiously one had everything he wantec Mohammedan heaven style. When one of the inmates protested one day that such indulgence was beginning to pall, the Devil pointed that’s why it's Hell!” Anyway, it’s a great book, probably the best Huxle 1s yet done, His satire has never been bright His observation on what's what is sharper; his skill at dissecting our world is keener. We think, even with its slight sense of the author revealing some of his own personal weaknesses, it is a brave, new book that will tak: place next to Plato and Butler. —Tep Sua nd the out, “Certainly, its This ar- | laid Lord | er wor- Mt" the 1932 model College Inn {VL Tomato Juice Cocktail —the orig- inal—now, better than ever, thanks to the new exclusive *Hi-Vita process. Better because: * Hi-Vita process preserves the flavor and the vitamins in tomato juice to a degree never before known. 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