BOOKS:

...and between books they loved to motor through Europe in vintage cars whose habits, they claimed, were "as regular as those of Immanuel Kant...

...In the course of those searching inquiries, conclusions were drawn against a generally Christian background or upon such premises...

...Jeffrey meyers' forthcoming books include Painting and the Novel (Manchester University Press), The Romantic Temperament in Politics (Basic Books) and A Reader's Guide to Orwell...

...I believe there are, in the verve and urgency with which in these essays moral notions are pressed for the truth they may contain...

...not to break one's heart...

...The difficulty facing any renewal of that tradition of ethical reflection in our day, I would observe, is that those even within the church who would continue a flexible search for answers too often do so upon premises other than Christian while those who from reaction and with foreboding would freeze discussion have at least this virtue, namely, that their answers at least were once Christian and the conclusions of a Christian community...

...I find nothing especially remarkable in Curran's organization of the theological system (creation, sin, incarnation, redemption and resurrection destiny) and therefore of our systematic understanding of morality...

...Fortunately, he wrote easily and well...

...Seven essays on a variety of subjects already published as articles or chapters in 1972 and 1973 brought together in a single volume today...

...New Dealer...

...Sybille Bedford calls Huxley's first liaison, with the bohemian-rebel Nancy Cunard, a "flight beyond Maria's serene Latin sensuality," but this phrase is misleading...

...Cyril Connolly praised his "sublimated sexuality, intellectual pity and spiritual grace," for in Huxley, as the novelist L. P. Hartley observed, "Culture had found a mortal envelope worthy of itself...

...When Aldous was 12 his mother, an extremely sympathetic woman who had founded a successful progressive school, died suddenly at the age of 45...

...The chapter on abortion makes clear that throughout the history of a Christian people there has been ongoing discussion about two questions-when does human life begin...

...However, initial disappointment encouraged perhaps by the title or by one's own holistic attitude toward books tends to vanish as one reads, passing from the general to the particular...

...Arnold of Rugby, and the poet Matthew Arnold, and on his father's side from the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, was born into that small but potent intellectual aristocracy which had a profound effect on the cultural life of Victorian England...

...Huxley was more fortunate than her sister's rejected suitor who shot himself in the family drawing room...

...His answer is, generally speaking, Everybody...

...I know no more hard-pressed ethicians today than Roman Catholics who in addition to their tasks at their scholars' desks have also innumerable priests' conferences and lay education laid upon them in a church in turmoil (one can not yet say on pilgrimage, except sola fide-which is of limited help to Curran...

...That includes not only the magisterial un-hierarchy vs the hierarchical magister-ium (the problem of dissent within the church) but much more besides...

...But these tragedies also fortified Huxley by allowing him to draw on his considerable reserves of pride and courage, so that he could overcome his physical disabilities and realize his full potential as a writer...

...But it does seem clear that, whether Furfey was right or not, dissent from the immediate ecclesial past is a pretty sorry test for being a Christian or a radical (whichever is preferred...

...How much nicer-and wiser," Maria explained to her sister, "not to make a fuss, to consent, not hinder...

...My answer was, generally speaking, Nobody, because we do not in the modern period seek together to be the church speaking or resolve to say no more than that warrants...

...I was a steady one, and I could sense that I would be entirely devoted to his service for the rest of our lives...

...During the war years Huxley became part of Lady Ottoline Morrell's brilliant circle of artists and writers at Garsington, near Oxford, which complemented his formidable though rather rigid Huxley-Arnold inheritance by widening his moral, aesthetic and sensual horizons and by introducing him to Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee, who became his devoted wife in 1919...

...They led directly to his subsequent dread of coming close to uncovered emotion, and his inability to cope with profound feelings or to express them in his creative works...

...These horrible experiences both shattered and strengthened Huxley...

...that same question...

...He did a great deal of work on films and on stage adaptations of his own books and, like Henry James, craved yet failed to achieve theatrical success...

...But with a characteristic determination he quickly learned Braille, typing and music, and entered Balliol College right on schedule...

...These deal with "Abortion: Its Legal and Moral Aspects in Catholic Theology," "Sterilization: Exposition, Critique and Refutation of Past Teaching" and "Divorce: Catholic Theory and Practice in the United States," the last named heretofore available only in Recherches de Science Religieuse...

...He was on his way to the kingdom of God and therefore deeper into his church, not on his way to some humanized kingdom and therefore, sooner or later, away from the corpus Christi...

...yet it would appear he was more Catholic than many a liberal in the '30s...

...Social Ethics of Paul Hanly Furfey...

...and, "whether one likes it or not, it will be impossible to change the present directions in Catholic moral theology...

...His latest book of poetry is Busy Being Born: Poems for Survivors of the Sixties (Straight Arrow Books...

...At 16 (when he was already 6' 4") he was stricken by almost total blindness for eighteen months, and though he gradually recovered his vision, it remained (like Joyce's) radically defective for the rest of his life...

...When her astonished father exclaimed, "This is inconceivable," the expiring lover insisted: "Monsieur, it is conceivable...

...and what goods are morally equivalent to a human life in cases of unavoidable conflict?-and not about the first alone...

...In recent Protestant experience, Reinhold Niebuhr's movement to the "right" theologically was a necessary condition of his movement to the "left" as a critic of the social order...

...When I heard him lecture in Ann Arbor in 1959, he was obsessed by chickens with electrodes stuck in their brains and never once mentioned literature...

...The first, "Catholic Moral Theology Today," was Curran's presidential address before the American Society of Christian Ethics...

...This weakness is manifested not only in her description of their Griselda-Lothario marriage, but also in her fragmentary chapters on Huxley's books -potted summaries rather than critical evaluations-and on bis friendships, particularly with Frieda and D. H. Lawrence whose marriage was the antithesis of the Huxleys...

...She provides considerable gossip and an excess of trivial detail, but she is not sufficiently analytical and retains a childlike tendency to worship the idol rather than to reveal the inner man...

...One cannot imagine Lawrence writing Hollywood film scripts or Huxley attempting to found a Utopian colony on the slopes of the Andes...

...quite another in churches where it has never been so, or along the fringes of the Catholic Church where dissolubility is today readily accepted for worldly reasons...

...This was his greatest weakness both in life and in art...

...paul ramsey, one of the few non-professionals elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, is a professor of religion at Princeton...

...Huxley's will to work was intense, and when he was too weak to type his last article on "Shakespeare and Religion," he tried to write it out and finally dictated the conclusion...

...That, I suggest, answers the question as I did: Nobody...

...Though Huxley was deeply affected by three shocking tragedies in his early years, he was nevertheless able to carry on in the distinguished tradition of his family...

...Those theological motifs in their unorganized plurality seem rather designed to foster indefinitely variable stresses in morality...

...The author, who is a diocesan priest and professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America, moves his arguments along with care and with vigor...

...Maria became an expert driver and adequate typist, and learned to create an emotional and domestic atmosphere in which Huxley could do his work in peace...

...If I may conclude with a mischievous remark, perhaps the average reader of Commonweal (if I know the type) would profit most (as I did) from reading this account of the life and thought of Paul Furfey...

...For Bedford, who was a close friend of the Huxleys for thirty years and features as a major character in this biography, is both too close to her subject and yet not close enough...

...Like Lawrence before him, Huxley moved to America in 1938...

...and though Lawrence disliked Huxley's cool rationality he responded to Huxley's kindness and generosity, curiosity and breadth of knowledge...

...Huxley published a few volumes of poetry, did a great deal of book, theater and music criticism, and made his professional breakthrough in 1923 when he signed the first of a series of contracts with Chatto & Windus to write six books in three years against an advance of £500 per annum...

...Again I would observe that it is one thing to make that challenge in a church in which that has long been the accepted teaching...

...She believed artists and writers needed experience, variety and distractions...

...Let us therefore hope that those "directions" are every one "not infallible" teachings at least (in the strong sense that used to be given that expression...

...Moreover there is not here the boldness or the concentration of theological knowledge such as is evident in his consideration of special moral questions...

...In a middle chapter of this volume, entitled 'Theological Reflections on the Social Mission and Teaching of the Church," Curran asks REVIEWERS todd gitlin, whose articles on literature and society have appeared in the NY Times, Village Voice, Ramparts and other periodicals, teaches politics and literature at the New College of California State University, San Jose...

...Or proven good...

...The three final chapters are, in this reviewer's opinion, significant treatises indeed...

...For three decades Furfey was the primary theoretician of American Catholic radicalism, actualized for example in the Catholic Worker movement...

...In the main, however, Curran does not reach or fully discuss those outer limits here...

...Some years ago the present reviewer published a little book that asked Who Speaks for the Church...

...Bedford's attempt to justify Huxley's behavior, rather than to explain what was wrong with their marriage and to clarify his callous indifference and almost inhuman detachment from his wife's feelings, suggests a radical defect in the biography...

...In these chapters, Curran maintains a balanced view, and strives to adhere to his own standard: "to be as accurate as possible in these matters...

...There is a great deal of quotation from Huxley's and Lawrence's letters to and about each other (in 1932 Huxley edited the first and still the best collection of Lawrence's letters), but no real sense of what bound these extraordinary friends, who represented two very distinct modes of experience in their novels...

...Life in California had a peculiar influence on his thought and helped transform Huxley from the rational and witty satirist to the crankish and sometimes boring mystic who dabbled in everything from vegetarianism and Vedanta to mesmerism and mescalin...

...He had been cut off from his mother in adolescence, and blindness cut him off from his friends, his pursuits and his education at Eton...

...From such devotion there really should be some rewards to the moralist as journeyman and scholar...

...One sees the significance of these issues within a line of conceptual reasoning and not simply, pastorally, between the lines or beyond them...

...What is available to the Christian is also available to the non-Christian...

...The volume opens with two chapters most general in nature...

...In the early 1920s the Huxleys and their young son Matthew lived in Italy and France...

...For one gets the impression that Huxley's Flemish wife, who was terribly thin and suffered from migraines and miscarriages, was passive and unresponsive rather than sensual and Latin...

...I do not know the equivalent of this double movement for the Roman Catholic...

...After Oxford, Huxley taught at Eton, where George Orwell was one of his pupils, but they did not, unfortunately, record their early impressions of each other...

...The second, "The Stance [the theological basis or perspectives] of Moral Theology," delivered before a largely Catholic audience at Villanova University, stressed the "divergencies" of Protestant and Catholic motifs...

...He was no "Right Reverend...

...Before a largely non-Catholic audience he stressed "convergences," and it almost seemed that the future, no way the past or present realities, holds the truth we seek...

...But when Huxley was asked if he were worried by her symptoms he replied lightly: "Oh no, it is not at all serious...

...Four years later, while Huxley was an undergraduate at Oxford, his older brother Trevenen hanged himself after a mental breakdown...

...When Maria learned she was dying of cancer in 1955 she insisted: "It would be wrong of me to die before Aldous-I should have failed in my duty to him...

...The chapter on marriage and divorce I found particularly informative and rewarding...

...and she consented to, condoned and even encouraged her husband's numerous though ephemeral love affairs...

...On the subordinate and ever recurring theme, the legitimacy of dissent within the church, I can only say that as a Protestant I got there "fustest" with the "mostest" pluralism...

...With steady pace and unhurried chase, and with sympathy, Curran shows the weaknesses in positions in the recent literature that have not gone to the heart of the matter and challenged the teaching about the indissolubility of marriage...

...So what's so special about that...

...That's about par for the rhetoric...

...The compulsion to produce books at a rapid rate and his distaste for "the mere business of telling a story"-he preferred "a discussion and fictional illustration of different views of life"-help to account for the thinness of plot and character, and the liveliness of ideas, in his early novels...

...During one of his notorious drug experiences he exclaimed: "This is how one ought to see, this is how things really are...

...I came to a reading of this chapter blissfully ignorant of this important movement in American religious history, and found Curran's exposition exciting and his theological evaluations appreciative and sound...

...there is no "specially Christian difference especially in the area of actions and plans for society...

...Chrome Yellow, his Garsington roman a clef, and Antic Hay, were each completed in two months and immediately established his reputation...

...Aldous Huxley: A Biography SYBILLE BEDFORD Knopf-Harper & Row, $15 JEFFREY MEYERS Aldous Huxley, descended on his mother's side from the educator, Dr...

...Huxley said he admired Lawrence's happiness, "the way he perceived the world-so intense, and exciting...

...Aside from the argumentation, I ought also to say that strength and depth and relevance accrue from the fact that Curran is a churchman doing church-ethics in and for the church...

...Curran waxes deterministic about it: "the incipient pluralism," he writes, "will only become more evident in the years to come...

...He died two days later, a few hours after John Kennedy was assassinated, and in the emotional and political chaos his death was scarcely noticed...

...nd a mortal envelope worthy of itself...

...Despite his limitations, Huxley's achievement as a novelist, essayist, travel writer, historian, biographer, philosopher and psychologist was impressive...

...Finally in this middle section there is a chapter on "The Radical Catholic...

...He comforted Maria's last hours by reading from the Tibetan Book of the Dead...

...Instead he offers a sober treatment of the mission and the limits of the church's social teachings...