Swiftian Swami

...Woodcock, who began immersing himself in Huxley's work at the age of 18, also recalls how the young were excitedly drawn to "the mind of one of the great polymaths of our age as it played over an encyclopedic variety of subjects," ranging from the sex life of the cuttlefish to the most arcane fragments of classical Greek poetry...

...Having been dazzled by Huxley's formidable learning, salacious mockery, and decentralist pacifism, the generation that came of age at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War felt bewildered and heinously betrayed by the shocking turn his sensibility began to take with the publication of Eyeless in Gaza in 1936...

...What Woodcock has set out to do, with exemplary critical and biographical skill, is to correct the widely accepted view that the turn to mysticism signaled by Eyeless in Gaza represented a sharp break in temperament and outlook from Huxley's earlier writings...

...During more than two decades' residence in Los Angeles, for example, Huxley was at times reduced to acting out such grotesqueries as writing an outline for a Mr...

...It was an inexplicably freakish shift indeed for the scion of one of 19th-century England's most powerful intellectual clans...

...Besides being artistically inferior to his earlier satires and marred by didactic interpolations of Buddhist symbols and sermons, the two books reveal a strangely unaltered attitude toward this-worldly people and things...

...What is more, especially given all their preachy morality lessons about the one Whole Truth of Eternity, his two postconversion novels, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Time Must Have a Stop, traduced and caricatured the human "phenomena" of the theoretically illusory world with oddly unserene morbidity...

...It is precisely this dilettantish simplicity that makes Huxley's work seem so incredibly dated today...

...Fascinated with the process of religious conversion weakly dramatized in that book, he was already entertaining, if not assenting to, the mystical idea that if the other side of darkness is light, the opposite of cynical sensuality may well be a hungry reach for eternity...

...Accordingly, the elusive spirit of Point Counter Point?its pessimism that cannot abandon hope, its brutality that yearns for tenderness, its share of despairing finality"—led inexorably to the mystical conversion that formed the core of Eyeless in Gaza and gave Huxley the unalterable direction his life and labor would take from that point on...

...Any attempt to see Huxley plain and whole, Woodcock recognizes at the start, must take account of the intense fascination his early novels—from Crome Yellow through Point Counter Point to Brave New World —had for young people of the 1920s and '30s in search of sophisticated liberation (at least while reading...

...Both Woodcock's evidence and the novels themselves force one to the reluctant—and possibly unintended—conclusion that Huxley's passionate embrace of Eastern mysticism, with its airy rejection of the illusory world of actuality, casts suspicion on the authenticity of his conversion and the ferocious despair that preceded it...

...Woodcock in no way tries to fudge the steady degeneration of Huxley's literary output once the proselytizing guru displaced the novelist of manners, and the second half of Dawn and the Darkest Hour is more chilling and less persuasive than he perhaps expected it to be...

...Since the details of Huxley's tortuous history have already been so fully recounted that there is no further need for full-scale reprise, Woodcock devotes himself to the more intricate lifeline of his subject's career as novelist, critic and religious preacher...

...Not only did he remain intransigently pacifist despite the threat of a Fascist victory in Spain, but the taunting nihilist of Point Counter Point suddenly went overboard for the "obscurantism" of mystical religion...

...But at no point in the dispute (Matthew Arnold's poetry, with its foreboding of spiritual chaos, notwithstanding) did these adversaries seriously question the dominance of reason in the affairs of men...

...Honestly conceding that "the views of art and the artist's function which Huxley developed after 1936 were not only false in themselves but also unfortunate in their effect on his work," Woodcock nevertheless demonstrates the underlying unity in Aldous' career that is not generally recognized...

...Writers &\tyHting SWIFTIAN SWAMI BY PEARL K. BELL George Woodcock's study of Aldous Huxley, Dawn and the Darkest Hour (Viking, 299 pp., $7.95), is intellectual biography at its best: intelligent, comprehensive, respectful yet critical, and beautifully written...

...As Woodcock argues in his perceptive reading of the 1925 novel Those Barren Leaves, Huxley was even then, for all his spitefully derisive commitment to "the meaninglessness of the universe," intrigued by the duality of human destiny and character...

...Unlike Evelyn Waugh's black comedies of Mayfair in the '20s and '30s, Huxley's early novels have the fatally transient air of clever exercises in detached virtuosity, and nothing in his oeuvre comes anywhere close to the heart of darkness that Waugh penetrated in the last scene of A Handful of Dust, where the brightly insolent playboy is condemned to a hellish eternity of reading Dickens aloud to his lunatic captor in the African bush...

...His entire career appears motivated not by an arduous spiritual quest, but by a pervasive unwillingness to confront the appalling incongruities of the human world, leading him with such slippery ease to decide that the world simply does not exist...

...The irony and sclerotic disillusion of Huxley's early satirical novels, with their sardonic pose of frivolity, sprang directly from a youth uncommonly assaulted by catastrophe: the death of his young mother from cancer, the suicide of his brother Trevenen, the eye disease that all but blinded him at 16 and was to plague him throughout his life, as well as the personal and social havoc wrought by World War I. Out of this unrelenting barrage of cosmic injustice, Woodcock shows us, came "the dark irony with which he looked out on a world where men's actions were so different from their pretensions, and where even the most consistently virtuous human behavior did not save a man from the caprices of a fate that seemed totally irrational...

...Not long after the novelist settled in Los Angeles, where he completed After Many a Summer Dies the Swan in 1939, Edmund Wilson cruelly predicted he would share the fate of the "Yogis . . . installed in one of those Wizard-of-Oz temples that puff out their bubble-like domes among the snack bars and the lion ranches" of Southern California...

...Though the mood of skepticism and disillusion continued through Point Counter Point and the savagely anti-Utopian fable Brave New World, Woodcock believes that both works are less a plunge into the abyss than the dark night of the soul through which the mystic must pass before he can reach the light...

...Though Woodcock tries nobly and brilliantly to place Aldous Huxley in the same league as Swift, Celine and Dostoevsky, in the end he seems closer to the California swamis than to the savage literary giants of madness and redemption...

...Great-grandson of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, great-nephew of Matthew Arnold, grandson of Darwin's redoubtable champion Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous was bora in 1894 of a marriage that had been hailed as "a joining together of intellectual Montagues and Capulets"—Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley having been on opposing sides of the Victorian debate about the reconcilability of what we now call "the two cultures" of science and the humanities...

...Except for the occasional saint, insufferably smug in his all-knowing arrogance, Huxley's view of man after he had seen the light is no less Swiftian in its distaste and contempt than it had been in Antic Hay and Brave New World...

...Magoo animated cartoon based on Don Quixote...

...As Stephen Spender described his impressions of Huxley in that heady time, "He seemed to represent the kind of freedom which might be termed freedom from: freedom from all sorts of things such as conventional orthodoxies, officious humbug, sexual taboos, respect for establishments...

...strictly biographical material is used only when he finds it relevant, as of course he often does, to his critical exposition and judgment...

...Yet Aldous' Eyeless in Gaza showed him rejecting the priceless family heirloom of reason with capricious irresponsibility and moving toward the "perennial philosophy" of Buddhist mysticism that denies the efficacy of the rational mind altogether as a means of attaining spiritual enlightenment...

...Though his contemporaries and compatriots, Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood, were similarly to find spiritual coziness in the mixture of California and Buddhism, the trajectory that led Huxley from the intellectual detachment of Oxford to gurudom in Hollywood seemed not only beyond comprehension but beyond charity...