Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen, on Aldous Huxley, ‘Perpetual Clever Nephew’)

“Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.”—Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), “Mr. Huxley’s Essays” (review of Aldous Huxley’s The Olive Tree and Other Essays), in The Spectator, Dec. 11, 1936

Aldous Huxley—born 130 years ago yesterday in Godalming, England—was certainly during his lifetime, as Elizabeth Bowen grudgingly conceded, “steadily read”—enough so that he would be nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Today? Not so much. Few of his 50 books remain in print, and only one remains widely assigned and read: Brave New World, honored less for its style and characterizations than for a dystopian vision that anticipated reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning.

(He also inspired a bit of rock trivia: his book about mescaline, The Doors of Perception, led Jim Morrison to name the group he fronted “The Doors.”)

But this member of a family of famous literary and scientific luminaries (his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his stout public defense of the theory of evolution) deserves to be more widely read.

Or, as Clive James put it in a dry-eyed but also clear-eyed assessment of Huxley’s life and work in a March 2003 essay in The New Yorker:

“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.”

A good place to start—maybe the best—might be with his Complete Essays. I was only able to get my hands on one, covering the 1930s. But these pieces are not only a fascinating glimpse into the history of his time, but also, as James indicated, a prescient warning of what still convulses our world, particularly concerning technology and totalitarianism. (He was one of the few writers of the 1930s who were enamored neither with Fascism nor Communism.)

It is easy to understand why Huxley infuriated Elizabeth Bowen: he was one of those endlessly curious people who want to know about everything, and somehow manage to assimilate a good chunk of it.

I can’t imagine that Ms. Bowen’s attitude towards Huxley softened: Within a year of her scathing takedown, the novelist-essayist had decamped for Southern California, where he became a well-paid screenwriter and center of a group of intellectuals and entertainers that included Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and Igor Stravinsky.

Out on the West Coast, Huxley, an avowed agnostic, also became increasingly fascinated with Eastern spirituality. His death, on November 22, 1963, was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy.

At six feet four inches tall, Huxley couldn’t help but make others feel small in his presence. His own reputation since his death has achieved a similar diminution, albeit one largely unmerited.