Blue Genes

By R. Z. Sheppard

ALDOUS HUXLEY

by SYBILLE BEDFORD

769 pages. Knopf and Harper & Row. $15.

In 1953 Aldous Huxley swallowed a small quantity of mescaline and sat back in the California sunshine to contemplate the infinity of wrinkles in his trousers. The following year he described his psychedelic confrontation with gray flannel in The Doors of Perception. ,"How rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous," he wrote. "The nearest approach to this . . . would be a Vermeer."

Very nice for the early '50s, only Huxley was not wearing gray flannel but blue denim. As he explained to a friend, his wife had made him change his pants in the manuscript because "she thought I ought to be better dressed for my readers."

Two Cultures. A decade after his death, the problem of properly dressing Aldous Huxley remains, Sybille Bedford's long, affectionately detailed biography notwithstanding. A man whose 69 years spanned and made the most of a number of literary and intellectual styles, Huxley simply does not fit comfortably into critical readymades. He was born to England's intellectual aristocracy. Thomas Henry Huxley, the great biologist and proselytizer of Darwin's theories of evolution, was his grandfather. Poet Matthew Arnold, the apostle of sweetness and light, was his mother's uncle. On one side, the traditions of scientific humanism; on the other, the melancholy ironist and culture critic who foreshadowed his grandnephew's own tussles with cynicism and faith. Aldous was a natural-born two-culture man at exactly the time when the wedges of agnosticism and technological specialization had just driven those cultures apart. He would probably have been a scientist like his brother Julian had not an eye infection at age 16 permanently and severely impaired his vision. "I am," he wrote, "to a considerable extent a function of defective eyesight." Yet he managed to function with enormous discipline, teaching himself to read Braille--just in case--and slowly poring over books and paintings with a magnifying glass.

He became a versatile writer, joining what he called the "deadly hustle" of journalism. Like Great-Uncle Arnold, Huxley tried to use literature as a social tool. To his own disillusioned generation of post-World War I Englishmen, he was the cynical dandy who wrote such bright and nasty satires as Antic Hay and Point Counter Point. During the '30s he became the Huxley of the depressingly prescient and durable Brave New World (1932) and its vision of a totalitarian future, with eugenics, social engineering and government-dispensed tranquilizers.

There was also Huxley the pacifist and flirtatious mystic who, in 1937, left England and Europe behind. He moved permanently to Southern California, where he joined another deadly, though higher-paying hustle. Between novels and essays he wrote film scripts (among others for Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre). Finally there was Huxley the culture-explosion sage of the '50s and early '60s. Often in mousy tweed and what looked like a snakeskin tie, he toured campuses and symposia, discoursing in silvery tones on coming ecological di sasters, overpopulation, Shakespeare and the way of the Buddha.

Novelist Sybille Bedford (A Legacy), who was a close friend of Aldous and Maria Huxley's, takes a rather protective and insular approach to her subject. As a biographer in an essentially official capacity, she enjoyed access to many private sources of information and the memories of mutual friends. Year by year, house by house, book by book, Bedford lays out "the more ascertainable facts" about a brilliant and talented man who was not quite a major novelist or a leading thinker.

Huxley did fairly well financially, and used his income to live simply but well in beautiful private places: the hills of Italy, southern France, the Mojave Desert and the less populated fringes of Los Angeles. He had a gift for making reticence count. When reporters rushed up to ask him what he did after a 1961 brush fire destroyed his house and belongings, he replied, "I went out and bought a toothbrush."

Drive-in Wedding. In his Belgian-born wife Maria, who died in 1955, Huxley appears to have found the perfect writer's mate. She shared his passion for exercises, diets and unorthodox doctors. She was formidable in her own right, and she efficiently maintained the privacy and quiet he needed. In 1923 she became the first woman in Italy with a driver's license. Her driving, Biographer Bedford recalls, was up to professional racing standards. In respect to her husband's occasional affairs, she rightly believed that if she made the introductions and even sent the small tokens of affection afterward, she could keep things from getting out of hand. Besides, she remarked, "you can't leave it to Aldous. He'd make a muddle." This can hardly be said of his life as a whole. He overcame his extraordinary physical handicap and, though he regarded himself as a spiritual refugee born "between two worlds," kept his ironic sense of humor till the end. When, in 1956, the distinguished British author of The Perennial Philosophy took a second wife, the Italian-born violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera, the ceremony was conducted at the drive-in chapel in Yuma, Ariz.

For all Huxley's erudition, the adventurous and technically brilliant way he played with ideas, the bulk of his work was ephemeral. His mysticism was privately intense but publicly slick. His attempts to popularize scientific knowledge in much the manner of his grandfather Thomas Huxley were diluted by the vastness of America.

He was, however, an exceptional personal journalist with a keen inner eye on the future and a hard sense of priorities. Priorities, in fact, had the last word. Nobody really paid proper attention to Huxley's obituary when he died of cancer on Nov. 22, 1963. Readers and editors were too busy dealing with what had been happening that day in Dallas. sbR. Z. Sheppard

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