OUT OF SIGHT.("Aldous Huxley")(Book Review)

When we were young, clueless, and longing to be profound, what a thrill it was to open a novel weirdly entitled "Eyeless in Gaza."The thrill was doubled when the author turned out to be quoting "Samson Agonistes”: "Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves."At one point in the novel, a pair of lovers are sunbathing on the roof when a dog falls out of an airplane and explodes right beside them. A quotation from Milton and a canine kaplooey: sophisticated, or what? That, kids, was the kind of multilevel blast that Aldous Huxley used to give us when he was current. Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books, but still the legend lingers. Godlike in his height, aquiline features, and omnidirectional intelligence, Huxley was a living myth. He was the myth of the man who knew everything. Inevitably, he attracted contrary myths designed to shrivel his looming outline. Among the counter-myths was the one about his holding forth on a string of topics at the dinner table. On every topic, he knew all there was to know. But a fellow-guest noticed that all the topics began with the same letter. Suspicious, the fellow-guest retired to the library and checked up. Huxley had been quoting verbatim from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

That particular counter-myth had an element of possibility. Huxley did indeed know his way around the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From one of his early essays, we find that he owned a half-sized edition on thin paper, and when travelling always had a volume of it with him. But from the same essay we learn that Huxley carried the volume only because he could not concentrate properly while on the move. From all his other writings, we must deduce that when at his desk and undistracted he read everything, and not just in the humanities but in science, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and religion. He made people who were merely quite bright feel worse than stupid: he made them feel narrow. In Britain, his land of origin, critical disparagement became common after his resettlement to America, in 1937. Hadn't those brittle young novels--"Crome Yellow,""Antic Hay,""Those Barren Leaves,""Point Counter Point”--been flashily yearning for a wider world? But any feelings among his countrymen that their star had deserted them were only an adornment to a more basic feeling, expressed in an everyday motto you can still hear in British school playgrounds: "Nobody likes a clever dick.”

When he was living in Britain, Huxley was already a presence in the slick American magazines: he was an adopted figure of fashion, showing up in Vanity Fair like Noel Coward or Gertrude Lawrence. When he was living in America, he was given space in Esquire for his views and photo spreads in Life for his beautiful face, plausibly represented as an icon of higher thought: he was up there with Einstein. Fame in America, as usual, meant fame everywhere. While he was alive, Aldous Huxley was one of the most famous people in the world. After his death, in 1963, his enormous reputation rapidly shrank, until, finally, he was known mainly for having written a single dystopian novel about compulsory promiscuity and babies in bottles, "Brave New World,"and for having been some kind of pioneer hippie who took mescaline to find out what would happen. People of a certain age might still say that So-and-So is like someone out of "Point Counter Point,"but they will probably not have read it recently or at all. Only a specialist in post-Great War literature could quote from "Crome Yellow"or "Antic Hay"the way people quote from "The Great Gatsby"or "Decline and Fall.”

But the time might have arrived for Huxley's return to the discomfort zone, where we have to deal with what he said as a permanently disturbing intellectual position rather than dismissing it as an obsolete set of fads and quirks. How should we live? Can nothing harmonize the turbulence of our existence? How can we stop development from destroying the human race? The questions that racked his brain are still with us. They drove him to mysticism in the end. If we don't want them to do the same to us, we had better find out how so brilliant a man should come to believe in the All, the Good, the Transcendental, and a lot of other loftily capitalized words that look like panic disguised as tranquillity.

Shining a light in his eyes is a good way to start, because his eyesight, or lack of it, ruled his life more than he was willing to let on. He could talk about a wall-size Veronese as if he could see it ...