The Surface Glitter

...The Huxleys is an attempt at a family biography...

...He, too, was an able journalist, and this aspect of his activities is unduly emphasized...

...He was the scientist who dared to force the 19th century to face the question of the descent of man...

...They are concerned—and this applied even to Aldous in his most mystical phase—with the wastage of the world's resources as mankind's numbers and needs increase...

...Huxley's flair for the public gesture certainly helped to focus the double beam of hostility and popularity upon him during and after the Victorian age...

...He is also scientifically knowledgeable, but no literary critic at all...

...It is Clark's failing that he accepts this flamboyant figure as an originator rather than an impresario...

...Thomas Henry is the towering presence in Clark's biography...

...Darwin and others originated the idea, but Huxley appropriated it, and in doing so gained such notoriety that important but more modest evolutionists like Alfred Russell Wallace and Henry Walter Bates were obscured by his shadow...

...The elements that make a Huxley novel a work of literature as well as a tract, however, pass him by...

...His tone is journalistic, and he has the journalist's flair for catching the surface glitter...

...I have known four Huxleys, and at present 1 am preparing to write a book on a fifth...

...Because of the towering presence of Thomas Henry, the great father figure, the other 72 Huxleys must be squeezed into two-thirds of the book's space...

...author, "The Writer and Politics" Thomas Henry Huxley, the great defender of evolution and pioneer in scientific education, was also the founder of a great clan which over the past century has played an extraordinary role in British science and literature...

...Aldous is a harder man to tackle...

...Almost all of these 72 individuals made a mark of some kind on their time, and the British intellectual establishment has been so infiltrated by Huxleys that anyone moving in that literary world is bound to have encountered not one but several...

...1 finished The Huxleys feeling that Clark was more concerned with showing the Huxleys as actors in a spectacle than with seriously assessing their achievements...

...He devotes a chapter to Julian at a certain period, another to Aldous, another to the small fry, and then repeats the process at a later stage...

...It seeks to encompass within less than 400 pages the essential and striking facts about each of these talented and energetic people...

...But these common preoccupations constitute a family tradition, learned in Victorian nurseries and passed on to successive generations...

...Not only did Thomas Henry cast a shadow over second-generation Huxleys...

...The book is an interesting experiment, partly because it invites speculation on the genetic factors that have made Thomas Henry Huxley's descendants such an exceptional group of men and women, and partly because of the sheer technical skill required by the author to give every one of them his appropriate share of the light...

...Clark catches all the energy and excitement that go into a publicly lived life, and he ably condenses the works of popularization that brought Julian his great following...

...There is no really serious discussion of Aldous Huxley's craftsmanship, of the structure of his works, or of their esthetic qualities...

...Inevitably...

...Over a third of the book is devoted to various sides of this complex man: the intellectual revolutionary, the moral prig who forbade his daughter Nettie to bring Oscar Wilde home a second time, the Victorian head of the household...

...The two most brilliant later Huxleys—Aldous and Julian—are also descended from another great Victorian clam their mother was a granddaughter of Arnold of Rugby and a niece of Matthew Arnold...

...Even the Huxley brilliance, however, is not so clearly a gift of Thomas Henry's genes as it may appear at first sight...

...in addition, Clark lists another two dozen children and grandchildren of the Huxley girls...

...Too often the book resembles the chimpanzee tea parties that Julian made such a popular feature at the zoo: One is watching the animals perform, not getting into their minds...

...Sometimes one is tantalized by these brief encounters: I would like, for example, to have been told more of Thomas Henry's Bohemian daughter Nettie, the friend of Wilde, the rebel, and the most originally beautiful of all the Huxley girls...

...Wallace's importance has lately been reestablished, although Clark does nothing to further the process, mentioning him only once in more than a hundred pages devoted to the stirring battles fought for the theory of evolution...

...Nevertheless, a vivid and accurate image of Julian does emerge, along with a less satisfying one of Aldous...

...Although the family stream flows on, no one's life appears as a continuity of development and achievement...

...They are interested in the relationship between science and such fields beyond exact knowledge as religion and art...

...Forty-eight Huxleys, including some women who married into the clan, are cited in the index to Ronald W. Clark's book...

...Without making any special effort...

...The difference reflects Clark's own limitations as a writer...

...so that his son Leonard did not begin to blossom until iong after his father's death, but he stole the limelight in the scientific world from men who were as important as he or even more important in the development of evolutionary theory...

...Clark does establish a number of continuing preoccupations that appear to trouble all Huxleys...

...Julian Huxley is a gift to him—a superb journalist and popularizer of science, an efficient organizer of such various institutions as unesco and the London Zoo, an insightful social thinker enjoying the public limelight of the Brains Trust, a competent field naturalist, but, as an originating scientist, rather minor...

...Bates—from whom Darwin got much of the information he used in The Descent oj Man—is not mentioned at all...

...The lesser among them often appear for slight and pointless confrontations, rather like those minor characters who punctuate a roman fleuve with their occasional and apparently meaningless emergences...

...Aldous and Julian emerge as major figures in the latter part of the book, even if their stature is curiously diminished in comparison with that of their grandfather by Clark's chronological method...

...Clark also finds in the novels the old Huxley preoccupation with science and art, with man and his environment, and discusses quite intelligently the baggage of ideas that Aldous dragged around the world with him...