11. Oral Histories with Professor David Dunaway

In this episode of *Themes and Variations*, we begin a special two-part installment recorded at the Aldous Huxley Symposium in Florence. Emily and Toby are joined in person by Professor David King Dunaway, oral historian, biographer, broadcaster, and one of the major figures in the study of Aldous Huxley’s American years. Professor Dunaway is also the author of *Huxley in Hollywood* and *Aldous Huxley Recollected*. In a departure from the usual format, Professor Dunaway has kindly allowed us to reproduce his radio documentary *Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worlds*. We were lucky to be able to join Professor Dunaway for a wide-ranging conversation about Huxley’s life, work, eyesight, and afterlives in oral history, at the Eighth International Aldous Huxley Symposium. Our interview centres on one of the most powerful themes in Professor Dunaway’s work: the relationship between eyesight and insight. Huxley’s visual impairment is not simply a biographical detail, but it shaped his education, ended his expected career in science, redirected him towards writing, and became one of the central imaginative patterns of his work. As Professor Dunaway explains, Huxley became almost blind as a teenager at Eton after a severe eye infection. He taught himself Braille, learned to type, and continued his education with tutors before eventually winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. His sight never fully recovered. Indeed, for much of his life, Huxley struggled with damaged vision, eye treatments, thick glasses, pinhole glasses and visual exercises. Linking these struggles to Huxley’s later career, Professor Dunaway argues that Huxley’s lifelong search for vision was not only physical, but spiritual and philosophical. Huxley’s turn to mysticism, meditation, and later mescaline cannot be separated from this desire to move beyond ordinary perception. In *The Doors of Perception*, *Island*, and many of his essays and poems, seeing becomes a way of thinking about consciousness itself. We also discuss Professor Dunaway’s work as an oral historian. Of particular interest to our listeners is Professor Dunaway’s extensive body of interviews with people who knew Huxley directly: family members, friends, literary colleagues, and figures from Huxley’s Californian world. These interviews later fed into *Aldous Huxley Recollected* and into the radio work heard in this episode. Oral history invites us to go beyond what history says, and to instead experience how history sounds. Instead of approaching Huxley only through books, archives, and criticism, Professor Dunaway’s work preserves voices: memories of Huxley’s charm, detachment, gentleness, fragility, humour, and strange prophetic presence. The first part of *Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worlds* then takes us into Huxley’s life through a brilliantly layered radio form: narration, archival recordings, dramatized readings, interviews, sound effects, and literary quotation. We hear Huxley’s *Brave New World* placed against the rise of fascism, Nazism, Freudian psychology, consumerism, technological control, and the twentieth century’s growing capacity to amuse itself into passivity. The documentary also returns to the formative tragedies of Huxley’s youth, namely, the death of his mother, his blindness, and the suicide of his brother Trevenen. These experiences help explain the detachment, irony, and acerbic intelligence of his early fiction, as well as the later need to find a more affirmative spiritual and ethical direction. Huxley emerges here not simply as the author of *Brave New World*, but as a writer formed by loss, impaired vision, intellectual inheritance, pacifism, Hollywood, mysticism, and the desire to see beyond the limits of the self. The result is a moving and vivid portrait of a writer whose imagination was shaped by both darkness and light. About our guest Professor David King Dunaway is an oral historian, biographer, broadcaster, and author of numerous books on literature, history, and American culture. His books include *Huxley in Hollywood* and *Aldous Huxley Recollected*, both major contributions to the study of Aldous Huxley’s American years. He has also produced award-winning radio documentaries for NPR and Public Radio International, including *Writing the Southwest*, *Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worlds*, *Across the Tracks: A Route 66 Story*, and *Pete Seeger: How Can I Keep From Singing?* You can find out more about David and his work here: davidkdunaway.com David’s latest book, *A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See*, explores the history, culture, stigma, and lived experience of glasses and lens-wearing. You can find the book here: afoureyedworld.com and at Bloomsbury. Works Mentioned By David King Dunaway \* A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See \* Huxley in Hollywood \* Aldous Huxley Recollected: An Oral History \* Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worlds \* David King Dunaway’s website Aldous Huxley and related materials \* Aldous Huxley Oral History Papers, The Huntington Library \* Brave New World \* Crome Yellow \* Antic Hay \* Point Counter Point \* Eyeless in Gaza \* The Doors of Perception \* Island \* The Burning Wheel \* Jonah This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themesandvariations.substack.com