A dazzling conjunction of subject and author-the great English novelist Aldous Huxley, the «wholly civilized man,» brought wholly alive in a magnificent full-scale biography by the brilliant English novelist Sybille Bedford, author of A Legacy, and herself an intimate friend of the Huxleys through four decades. With a pointillistic richness of moment, place, talk, she gives us not only the private Huxley and the literary Huxley but the entire intellectual and social era to which he was central.
Great-grandson of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, grandson of the scientific philosopher Thomas Henry Huxley, great-nephew of Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley was born at the very heart of England’s humanist élite in its still golden days-the complicated, brilliant, charming boy who, despite the almost total loss of his sight at sixteen, became a titan and culture hero of the decades after the first world war, on terms with the outstanding writers and artists of his day, from D. H. Lawrence to Stravinsky and Auden.
He had, in a sense, two separate and large careers. First, with the iconoclastic wit of such novels as Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point, he was flagbearer of England’s Bright Young People through the 1920s-encouraged by Lady Ottoline Morrell, in love (briefly) with the glittering Nancy Cunard, suitor and husband of the beautiful Belgian woman Maria Nys. Then, coming to America in the late ’30s, his novels growing increasingly philosophical and utopian, he began the experiments with mescalin and other consciousness-expanding techniques that gave him an entirely new celebrity and importance as a pioneering explorer of the frontiers of the human mind.
To give us the man in the circle of his extraordinary family and his illustrious friends, to make understood the development of the writer and thinker, Sybille Bedford has, through the last six years, immersed herself in the marvelously articulate letters and diaries of Huxley and his intimates-and in their memories.