Satirist Turned Seer

...Eventually, he was to become one of the 20th century's intellectual avant-gardists in such matters as Sheldonian psychological types, dianetics, cryogenics, paragenics, parapsychology, psychedelic drugs, acupuncture, mesmerism, and the Alexander technique...

...Despite Huxley's early (and prophetic) warnings about the dangers of overpopulation, food shortages, and ecological waste, not to mention his grim portrait of the technological future in his 1932 novel, Brave New World, he still harbored a 19th-century optimist's belief in science and technological progress...

...some remedy for the unpleasant smells and the vulgar manners, for the stupidities of human nature and the inconvenience of its sexual urges...

...Whatever progress he made in overcoming his introverted temperament he was apt to attribute to his first wife, Maria: "Coccola was very patient and in the long run I learned to get through the shell...

...He'd make it a muddle...

...Her unintentionally ironic memoir, This Timeless Moment, published in 1968, offers a sadly comic portrait of the great man in his dotage...

...In the latter case, Maria's solution was to encourage and arrange for her husband's casual infidelities as a kind of therapeutic exercise...

...An attractive 17-year-old Belgian refugee, she was staying with that odd bird-of-paradise, Lady Ottoline Morrell, in her Elizabethan manor-house, Garsington, a sanctuary for artists, intellectuals and conscientious objecters during World War I. (For reasons the author does not make entirely clear, Maria Nys had recently attempted suicide...

...Nearly blinded in his youth because of an unattended eye infection, he gained some remission by way of the Bates method, a system of rigorous eye-training exercises...

...More often, the remedies had to be abandoned, including the vegetarian diet he was forced to give up on medical advice...

...Huxley first met her around 1916...

...The new goddess had somehow gotten things all wrong...

...In 1956, Huxley wed Laura Archera, an ideal, independent woman...

...Both were convinced that there must be some cure for the human condition...

...His son, who was the victim of the technique, contended it was "a rather expensive way to make a boy stand up straight...

...From childhood on he had an insatiable curiosity...

...When his own son was experiencing marital difficulties, the English-satiristturned-California-seer offered this observation: "It is difficult for Hux-leys to remember that often people have as much right to their habits and temperaments as Huxleys have to theirs...

...Huxley seems to have required, or at least acquiesced to, his wife's initiative...

...She habitually picked up dirty coins with a handy tissue, refused to prepare certain foods because the cooking odors were too disagreeable, and was likely to get out the Air Wick if a guest smoked...

...the suggestion is that it was out of some disappointed school-girlish infatuation with her hostess...

...In nearly 36 years of marriage, Maria proved to be the selfless, dedicated wife, efficiently managing the various households, typing Aldous' manuscripts and warding off friends and visitors who might interrupt her husband's work...

...But for every panacea that went down the drain, there was always another to take its place...

...She was not without her own eccentricities, however, as evidenced by her fetish for cleanliness...

...Sybille Bedford's affection and admiration for her subject are everywhere apparent...

...Occasionally, the cures actually worked...

...Writing to thank his brother Julian for the gift of an encyclopedia, he could boast: "I now know everything from who invented dice to the normal temperature of the sea-cucumber...

...After reading Sybille Bedford's prodigiously long and detailed biography of the English writer-whom she describes as "a sensitive, if under-emotional man"-one has the feeling that it was appropriate advice...

...And especially was this true of Maria, one of the more memorable figures in a long chronology of character and incident...

...You can't leave it to Aldous," Maria once commented...

...Both Sybille Bedford and Laura Huxley present Aldous' experiments with mescalin and LSD as the endeavors of an earnest scientific observer, thus exonerating him from any connection with the drug culture they both deplore...

...Throughout his life, Huxley was consumed by different fads-posture exercises, health diet, colonic lavages -and frequently resorted to what he cheerfully called his "quacks," all in the interest of promoting a sound mind and a healthy body...

...Reached by way of a New York seance, she advised her husband to remarry-re-enforcing a decision he had already made...

...Nevertheless, her biography of Aldous Huxley leaves one with the uneasy impression that this unconventional thinker who so effortlessly parodied English society in his early novels (Chrome Yellow, Point Counter Point), settled into an all-too-comfortable retirement in America-the natural home of boosterism and the fad...

...In certain respects, Huxley's career seems like an endless series of remedial actions...

...It is clear from Bedford's narrative that women played an educative role in Huxley's masculine pantheon -the goddess invariably instructing the genius...

...In a strange way, these two enlightened people made a prophylactic pair...

...There is little doubt, for instance, that his enthusiasm for biochemistry was prompted by his hope that the discovery of chemical causes for disorders of the mind and body would inevitably lead to a pharmaceutical cure...

...author, "Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company" Shortly before her death in 1908, Julia Huxley, a loving, intelligent woman and adored headmistress of a fashionable girls' school, wrote to her son Aldous, then 14: "Do not be too critical of others, and love much...

...So do remember this family vice of too much judging...

...Even Aldous himself was painfully conscious of some flaw in his character, some lack of responsiveness to others- that tendency toward self-absorption that often accompanies genius...

...Even after her death, Aldous continued to turn to Maria...