Aldous Huxley
Nolte, William H.
Book Review/William H. Nolte This Book Must Have a Stop • • When I was young and easy under the apple boughs, to borrow a phrase from a boozy poet, no longer, alas, whinnying with us, I believed...
...Knowing that he enjoyed female distraction, and that the brief encounters amounted to no more than that, Maria aided and abetted the liaisons since, as she put it, "You can't leave it to Aldous, he'd make a muddle...
...His intellectual memory was phenomenal, doubtless trained by a tenacious will to surmount the original horror of threatened blindness...
...But happy marriages, as Tolstoy implied when he said that they were all alike, are of little interest to anyAldo us Huxley by Sybille Bedford Knopf $15 one outside the family...
...and Freida Lawrence, an encounter with Thomas Mann and a group of his worshipful admirers, the travels throughout the world, and so on...
...Moreover, it is only natural to assume that I have rejected books for no better reason than that they caught me, or I them, in the wrong frame of mind—or at a time when my liver happened to be in a foul mood, or when remembrance of past sins made me despair of eternal bliss...
...Still, in all his books there is ample evidence of an extremely civilized and brilliant mind at work...
...It could, in effect, only hasten the collapse of the civilization it ostensibly sought to protect...
...Cyril Connolly put his finger on Huxley's greatest weakness when he wrote, some forty years ago, that "Huxley was hampered by his inability to create character or see a character except in an intellectual way...
...I confess further that I begin far more books than I finish, and us, the confession as testament to my good taste...
...No attempt is made to distill, cohere, or judge the life of her subject, and one is often shocked by her carelessness of style and organization of facts —defects that make so much of her work read like notes for a biography...
...George Steiner began his review in the New Yorker by objecting to the plethora of gossip and trivia found in many recent biographies (of Henry James, Lytton Strachey, and Faulkner, for example), and then delivered himself of a number of acerb reservations concerning the Huxley canon before concluding with this harshjudgment: "The literal dimensions of this book further diminish its object...
...normally they are extreme egotists and more than a little careless with the common decencies...
...He was apparently able to take them in at a glance, and what is more, to remember their essential content...
...He immediately set to work learning braille, and during that dark period he taught himself to play the piano...
...Only in his promiscuity, practiced intermittently over the years, did Huxley seem wayward...
...Although I became more and more selective in my choice of books, this madness ran on into my early twenties...
...His brother Julian marveled at this prodigy in his Memories: "How Aldous managed to absorb (and still more to digest) the colossal amount of facts and ideas which furnished his mind remains a mystery...
...Book Review/William H. Nolte This Book Must Have a Stop • • When I was young and easy under the apple boughs, to borrow a phrase from a boozy poet, no longer, alas, whinnying with us, I believed that one was duty-bound to read books from beginning to end, pausing only for food, sleep, and baseball...
...Born into one of England's great intellectual families, Huxley was from the beginning filled with a consuming curiosity about the visible world, and would probably have become a scientist except for the strange (its precise nature is unknown) eye infection which he suffered at the age of 16 and which left him totally blind for several months...
...They are not omnipotent...
...also during that period he wrote his first novel of about eighty thousand words, which was subsequently lost...
...In such matters taste—that is to say, prejudice—plays the lead role...
...Bedford tells us, "just as soon as someone middle-aged and amusing...
...Bedford (and I think we must), he was one of the nicest and most considerate men who ever wrote a book or had an original thought...
...Maria devotedly read to him for hours at a time...
...The general view that he wrote too muchstrikes me as being somewhat vapid since the same thing can be said about nearly all of his peers as well as his superiors...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 25...
...Bedford's biography a chore to get through, and more than once decided it wasn't worth the trouble...
...Quite frankly, I found Mrs...
...and with his one good eye, he managed to skim through learned journals, popular articles and books of every kind...
...He certainly was no Casanova, forever falling in love and thereby confusing physical desire for emotional attachment...
...Then there are those volumes that can be got through only by taking a number of "breathers" along the way, stopping now and again to read some other and more rewarding tome...
...Fascinating to observe—from a safe distance and with one's money and womenfolk locked safely in the cellar—they are too much concerned with Self to be easy companions, and.if not always immoral, they are frequently contemptuous of the prevailing morality in their time and place...
...Such folly is probably harmless in one's youth, but it would be unforgivable in an adult—evidence of arrested development...
...When writing about Huxley, critics are naturally wont to assess his oeuvre, to set it against that of other literary whales of the age—Proust, Gide, Mann, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner, et al...
...Though pessimistic (or, rather, realistic) concerning the future of our civilization, he never ceased exhorting man to become adult...
...He saw, moreover, as only the foresighted few did see, that the Second World War, far from extinguishing evil forces in the world, could only lead to further and greater evils...
...He and his friend Bertrand Russell were similar in their attitude toward sexual matters...
...Not so to Huxley's...
...All this by way of introduction to a few words about my off-again on-again affair with Sybille Bedford's "life" of Aldous Huxley...
...Many of these failed books have doubtless brought pleasure and even knowledge to other readers (or else the reviewers quoted on the dust-jackets are more incompetent and bigger liars than one might ordinarily assume them to be), and some of them may be masterpieces...
...Huxley's final years were devoted in large part to alerting his fellows to the ecological and demographic crisis in which we are now fully immersed...
...Steiner's view...
...I was especially delighted by a story Huxley tells of dining with James Joyce in Paris and listening to the latter's comments on the meaning of the word Odysseus, that is, its derivation...
...To begin with, fully two-thirds of this massive book is direct quotation...
...Although we are told too little about Huxley's attitudes towards his fellow writers, what we are told is unfailingly interesting...
...That may be one reason we are drawn to their biographies...
...Most great writers (or artists of any kind) have an element of the monstrous in their makeup...
...What Aldous offered, apart from the essential thing that he liked making love and made no bones about it, was friendliness, good humour, a measure of affection...
...Ignorance, militarismand breeding, these three—and the greatest of these is breeding...
...Moreover, he never gave us, for whatever reasons, any single great novel —nothing so outstanding, for example, as Maugham's Of Human Bondage...
...It was during the period when he was reading braille that he developed his phenomenal memory...
...I seriously doubt that the greatness of a man is dependent upon his biographers, but I sympathize with Mr...
...Sprinkled throughout this biography are several amusing anecdotes—concerning Huxley's friendship with D.H...
...While respecting one's love for words, Huxley insisted that "one has to realize the limitations of words," and then described 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 Joyce's greatest limitation as an artist, in two sentences that seem to me apodictic: "Joyce—seemed to think that words were omnipotent...
...Although he regained partial vision in one eye, he had to work always under a handicap that makes his encyclopedic accumulation of knowledge seem almost fabulous...
...He would have grudged the time...
...And that fact may be used as partial explanation of the biographer's failure to make this "life" an interesting book...
...What hedid not offer was courtship...
...It might be a fluffy blonde," Mrs...
...The answer is No...
...A smaller biography would have left a greater man...
...Joyce's discourse on the etymology of the word, totally unrelated to anything we might call realistic, struck Huxley as just the sort of thing one might have expected to hear from Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century...
...Is this biography "unquestionably a work of art" and a "superb biography," as the bookman for Atlantic insisted it is...
...Largesse betrays...
...There is a letter from Huxley, written in 1957 (on pages 613-614), on the earthy character of Freida that all Lawrence scholars and/or admirers should know...
...If we can believe Mrs...
...And much of that is from letters and notes of Maria Nys, Huxley's first wife, who was certainly a devoted helpmate, a thoroughly good, kind, and generous woman...
...Thirty years ago he saw that the greatest evils of our time have to do with overconsumption...
...Now when a book begins to pall and makes me fidget and pull my ear, I take revenge by quietly setting it on the shelf for immediate return to the library or for donation to the Salvation Army...
...By the time 1 got through it—and the four or five other books which occupied me along the way—a number of reviews had passed across my reading table...
...If you doubt my word then I refer you to the Harper's critic who informed us, in unblushing understatement, that the book is "not one of the great efforts of literary biography...
...He published in all 47 books, many of them requiring extensive research, a fact that boggles the mind...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
