快猫短视频

Aldous Huxleyby Nicholas Murray, Little, Brown, 拢20, ISBN 0316854921

THIS is the first biography of Aldous Huxley for thirty years. It鈥檚 based on much material unavailable until now and it鈥檚 a brilliant job. Nicholas Murray is endlessly fascinating about the writer who became a symbol of intellectualism almost as much as Einstein did of science. Huxley鈥檚 second novel, the satire Antic Hay, utraged the conventional majority, and Brave New World drew attacks bordering on hysteria鈥攆or his account of fetuses incubated in vitro and people kept in subjugation by a drug he called soma.

Huxley鈥檚 output was prodigious. He wrote poetry, short stories, essays, novels, plays and journalism, while he himself鈥攊mmensely tall and heavily bespectacled, with an unusual private life鈥攚as frequently news. Some were astonished at his friendship with D. H. Lawrence, whose ideas were apparently the antithesis of his own. This turned to consternation when the Huxleys moved to the US in 1937. To some it was a kind of betrayal.

Huxley continued to turn out novels, criticism and Hollywood screenplays. He wrote a book on his experiments with mescalin and LSD, another sensation. He died of cancer in 1963. In a final statement, he said: 鈥淲e must continually be on our watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.鈥� It is an epigrammatic remark to summarise an extraordinary life, which this book splendidly and richly elaborates.