Evolution of a Cynic

ALDOUS HUXLEY by John Atkins. 218 pages. Orion Press. $5.95.

THE HUXLEYS by Ronald W. Clark. 398 pages. McGraw-Hill. $8.95.

THIS TIMELESS MOMENT: A PERSONAL VIEW OF ALDOUS HUXLEY by Laura Ar-chera Huxley. 330 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Few writers leave behind even one legend. It is Aldous Huxley's distinction that he managed to leave two.

To his contemporaries in the 1920s, young Aldous Huxley had been a legend for his "lack of charity." He was seen as "a walking encyclopedia," alive only from the neck up. Aldous, Elizabeth Bowen once said with damning praise, was "the stupid person's idea of the clever person."

To the alienated of a latter-day generation, Huxley was all heart: pacifist, passionate pioneer of mind-blowing drugs, hippie blood brother in Oriental mysticism. But when this Aldous Huxley, shot through with cancer and LSD, died at 69--a few hours after President Kennedy--on Nov. 22, 1963, he could have met no stranger ghost on his final trip than his younger self.

Which legend is nearer to the truth--the bright young cynic or the compassionate old guru? In different ways, these three books grapple with the question. And by the intensity they generate, they suggest that the question concerns what sort of face is not only most appropriate for Huxley but also for the age of transition whose dilemmas he so accurately reflected.

Baby Mine! The obligation to be clever in some way came as a birthright--rather reverently if hastily tracked through three generations by Family Biographer Ronald Clark. Above Aldous' cradle brooded the example of his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, a brilliant biologist and a public defender of Darwin when Origin of Species was shocking fundamentalists. Representing a kind of caretaker generation, Aldous' father Leonard devoted most of his life to a two-volume biography reciting the achievements of T.H. and looking forward with confidence to his own chil dren's outdoing him. No one is quite sure which son--Aldous or Julian--he had in mind when he wrote:

All I was not, thou shall be, Baby mine!

The chances are that he meant this ominous burden for both. Julian obliged by becoming a distinguished biologist and scientific humanist. Aldous came equipped to be clever: his head was so big it kept him from walking until he was two. By the age of nine, he already struck others as "aloof and secretly critical."

Tall (6 ft. 4 in. by the time he was 15) and myopic, Huxley grew up through Eton and Oxford to live in a thin, rarefied world of his own. His notion of conversation, Osbert Sitwell grumbled, was to relay data on the "incestuous mating of melons" or the "curious amorous habits of cuttlefish." In words that Clark applies to all the Huxleys, young Aldous seemed less a human being than "something more nearly approaching a controlled experiment."

As for love, in the early novels (Crome Yellow, Antic Hay and Point Counter Point), it meant sex. And sex to Huxley was disgusting man at his most disgusting--something that he approached, as that prophet of passion D. H. Lawrence put it, with the "desperate courage of repulsion." The poem attributed to one of Huxley's characters in Ape and Essence is unmistakably in the author's voice:

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

The Alchemist. It was his curious friendship-of-opposites with Lawrence --Huxley's first wife, Maria, typed up part of Lady Chatterley's Lover--that appears to have weaned Aldous I from pure intellect and started him on the way to becoming Aldous II. He suddenly stumbled across his intuitions.

Somewhere around the mid-1930s, when most British intellectuals were going political, Huxley began to go mystical--despite the fact that Aldous I had declared scornfully: "The mystic objectifies a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology." The ideal of the saint slowly replaced the ideal of the artist. He came to regard even the best plays or novels as "mere disciplined daydreaming."

The new Huxley was still a walking encyclopedia, but with the sneer wiped off his face, scrambling more and more urgently to rejoin the human race. As cosmic problem-solver, he was a bit of the alchemist, obsessively searching for an all-purpose philosopher's stone that could turn all earthly dross into spiritual gold. What still gives Brave New World a kind of suspense is the reader's hunch that Huxley is half tempted by his own happiness pill even as he satirizes it.

Family Dream. The memoir of Huxley's second wife, Laura, is an embarrassing book in literary-widow prose that inadvertently exposes how Huxley's powers of discrimination declined as his passion for The Answer grew. He experimented with such California hobbies as psychedelic drugs and amateur hypnotism, including magnetic passes of the hands. He may have become a better man; but he clearly did not become a better artist. Island, his last, most heartfelt novel, is a labored, neo-utopian disaster.

Critic Atkins, in his short critical biography, which is perhaps the best of the three books, provides a key thought when he describes Huxley as "a displaced Victorian artist." In the end, this is what connects Aldous I to Aldous II--the civil war that raged within a 19th century man who happened to find himself in the 20th century. Huxley measured with his intellect how the modern world was and found it wanting. But his heart responded to some inherited faith in the laws of progress, and launched an impractical search for what might be. Often superlatively funny in his despair, always gloom-edged in his optimism, he spoke finally for the self-contradictions of his mixed-up times.

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