Book review: Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

Little Brown, 20

Review by Robert Nye

‘A million million sperm- atozoa," sang Aldous Huxley in an early poem, "All of them alive ... "

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne -

But the One was Me.

So the verse goes on, its mixture of cleverness and self-reproach creating an immediately recognisable tone. Arch, disdainful, the voice of a boy weaned on Eng Lit, inspired and oppressed by his famous family name, critical of the cult of High Seriousness while himself so high and so serious as to sound cynical if not camp, the young Aldous wrote the kind of verse you would expect of a great-nephew of the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold who also happened to be the grandson of a great Victorian scientist. As his biographer Nicholas Murray says, he was thus "a kind of conduit or link between the world of high Victorian liberal intellectualism and the world of the 20th century, whose course those ardent, progressively minded meliorists could not have predicted". But then neither could they have predicted the course which Huxley was himself to follow.

He began as an ironic rationalist and ended up as a psychedelic mystic. For the first half of his life, Huxley excelled at satire. For the second, exiled in the Californian sun, he pursued various half-baked varieties of religious experience. It is a career that at first glance bears out Jung’s theory that a man suppresses parts of his personality at such cost that they are liable to take control of him as he grows older. Thus, in 1918, Huxley was writing to an editor saying: "Here is a review of that Buddhist book. How much I disapprove of the Wisdom of the East!" Forty years on, he had become an advocate not only of such "wisdom" but of mescalin and LSD as a sort of instant spiritual coffee in the attainment of Nirvana. It’s a salutary story.

Or is it? This biography tells the tale for the most part without comment, letting the facts speak for themselves, although Murray’s enthusiasm for his subject’s high-minded sincerity is never in doubt. But what emerges from an on-the-whole objective account is an impression of Huxley’s life which suggests that, early and late, its key feature was an absence of real conviction. He was a satirist with a heart of soap, setting out to mock but ending up in a lather of amusement. It is not such a huge step from that to being a mystic denied mystical experience without the aid of drugs.

Murray makes it clear that it was Huxley’s first wife Maria’s faith which impressed him most deeply. A cradle Catholic, she seems mostly to have believed in her husband, typing his books and defending him against all comers. "She was more capable of love and understanding than almost anyone I have ever known," he wrote soon after her death in 1955, "and in so far as I have learned to be human - and I had a great capacity for not being human - it is thanks to her."

That remark about the capacity for not being human is interesting. It has stuck in my mind since I first read it in the edition of Huxley’s Letters, edited more than 30 years ago by Grover Smith. It was something not given sufficient weight in the two volumes of Sybille Bedford’s life of Huxley, published in the 1970s. But then, Bedford had been emotionally involved with both Aldous and Maria and, for all its merit of liveliness, her biography amounted in the end to an affectionate assemblage of the nicer things that could be said about them.

Murray’s book does go some way towards examining Huxley’s capacity for not being human, although it does so without debunking or otherwise insulting a man who was after all a serious writer of a kind now almost extinct.

He was born in 1894, when Victoria was still on the throne, and he died on the day that Kennedy was shot in Dallas. The period spanned by his life is therefore almost unimaginably crowded with cataclysmic changes, and it has to be said that Murray does a good job in relating Huxley’s work and thought to the intellectual and other life of his day. Why, then, in the final analysis is this book unsatisfactory?

I think it is because Murray never quite faces up to the possibility that Huxley is not as important or as original as he thinks he is. There is an unquestioning note to his enthusiasm - he never, to give an obvious example, mentions the name of Yevgeny Zamyatin, the Russian writer whose dystopian novel We (1924) lies behind Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Nor does Murray allow himself to be in the least sceptical concerning the intellectual credentials of Huxley’s second wife Laura, author of a volume called You Are Not the Target: A Practical Manual of How to Cope with a World of Bewildering Change and Uncertainty , as well as an awful book describing her husband’s last days.

This second marriage is almost as bewildering as the first. About that first, Murray is able to be franker than Bedford was - telling us that it was always open-ended and that at one point Aldous and Maria lived in a mnage trois with a minor writer called Mary Hutchinson.

Those who come to the book looking for titillation, however, are going to be disappointed.

No doubt it is apt that poor Huxley should now have another not very satisfactory biography written about him. Neither his mind nor his life has much spark to it. The trouble with An English Intellectual is that it has some of the soapiness of its subject at the heart of it.