Huxley in L.A. Picture from LATimes.com
While Europe was preparing for the war, writers Aldous Huxley, a pacifist, and Gerald Heard, came to America for a lecture tour; as the war raged, in 1937 Huxley stayed in Southern California, EEUU, where he was amused by the American culture in old Los Angeles. But
¨in a headlong escape from both war and Hollywood, Huxley moved his family to a ranch in the desert near the ruins of the original ¨anti-Los Angeles¨ of Llano del Río. Here, while he searched for the ¨godhead¨ in the silence of the Mojave, his wife María devoured the astrology columns in the Times that Adorno made fun of. Huxley and Heard, embracing mysticism, health-food and hallucinogens, would later in the 1950s become the godfathers of Southern California´s ¨New Age¨ subculture.
It would be amusing to know if Huxley and Brecht ever discussed the weather. None of the anti-fascist exiles seemed more spiritually desolated by Los Angeles than the Berlin playwright and marxist aesthetician. As he put in a famous poem:
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles *
*(Brecht, ¨On thinking about hell¨, 1913-1956)
From left to right Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley and Linus Pauling. Los Angeles, 1960. Picture by Ralph Crane. Google images.
REFERENCE:
Mike Davis. City of Quartz. P. 51, New York, 1992
Read more about Huxley in Los Angeles:
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