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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.