The Washington Post
Nicholas Murray has written in the shadow of the estimable Sybille Bedford, whose 800-page biography of Huxley came out in 1974. Bedford knew Huxley, and her book is strengthened by that connection. Murray has uncovered evidence that Huxley's first wife was bisexual, and that detail fleshes out his portrait of their marriage. It would be hard to choose between the two books if it weren't that Murray has written at about half the length of Bedford and still managed to salt Huxley's tail. — Dennis Drabelle
Publishers Weekly
A mordant satirist and impresario of uncomfortable ideas, Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) remains best known for Brave New World, an early 1930s look into a grim future. Murray, biographer of (among others) Huxley's great-uncle Matthew Arnold, evokes the writer rather than the writings. Restless in body as well as in mind, Huxley never lived in one place very long, and could not make do with one woman, although his uncomplaining wife, Maria, was totally devoted all her life. Huxley was never easy to live with. His fastidious distaste for people not on his level of high culture was unconcealed. He experimented with extreme diets, psychedelic drugs and an undogmatic mysticism. An eye infection early on cost him much of his sight; still, he read omnivorously, often with a large magnifying glass, and was read to by Maria. Murray is best on the bleakly visionary Huxley who exploited his creative gifts as a quirky public intellectual. Although this biography does not replace Sybille Bedford's more thorough two-volume life, the passage of time has enabled Murray to deal with issues too sensitive for earlier publication, and to access diaries and other documents not available earlier. Readers may find Huxley sufficiently provocative here to look up his caustic Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Point Counter Point and-the biographer's choice-After Many a Summer. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Although Aldous Huxley's Brave New World remains widely read, its author is at risk of slipping into the one-dimensionality of a mere name. This elegantly phrased but ultimately insufficient biography defines Huxley as heir to the Victorian gentleman-intellectual (his scientist grandfather reached fame as "Darwin's bulldog") who partakes of 20th-century inventions such as literary marketing, the Hollywood studio system, and open marriage without ever shedding a deep-seated aloofness. Huxley wafted into writing like so many privileged men of his class but despite great talent never became a writer's writer. After extensive travels, he settled in California in 1937, where he penned scripts for cash, mingled with stars such as Garbo and Chaplin, worked the lecture circuit, and dabbled in spiritualism. But in charting Huxley's life as a "link between the world of high Victorian liberal intellectualism and the twentieth century," Murray forgoes any analysis of Huxley's books and misses the opportunity to lend depth to a life that could indeed exemplify the uneasy transformation of gentlemen thinkers into public intellectuals. For large public libraries only.-Ulrich Baer, NYU Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Capable biography capturing the English writer in his many guises: artist, aesthete, acidhead, even happy and well-loved man. Born in 1894, Huxley died on the day JFK was assassinated; understandably, news of his passing was buried deep inside the papers, and soon he was all but forgotten save as a kind of psychedelic prophet, thanks to his consciousness-expanding experiments with LSD and mescaline in the 1950s. But in his time he had acquired considerable fame for such fiction as Point Counter Point and After Many a Summer Dies a Swan, better liked by general readers than critics. In between his many novels, Huxley wrote travel journalism, essays, and eccentric philosophy that blended his psychotropic voyages with the wisdom of the East by way of southern California ("Like everyone else," he wrote, "I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential"). Only a few of his 50-plus books are now in print, though he is well-known for (and, really, only for) the dystopian Brave New World. Murray makes a good case for Huxley’s value as a writer on a level with at least some of the Bloomsbury crowd; Virginia Woolf, it happens, was an early champion, though she warned in print that "we would admonish Mr. Huxley to leave social satire alone, to delete the word ‘incredibly’ from his pages, and to write about interesting things that he likes." His biographer also finds reason to criticize Huxley’s work (as did the self-aware author himself) for its didacticism and undervaluing of plot and drama in favor of proselytizing on such matters as the generation gap and the dangers of totalitarianism. Nonetheless, Huxley emerges from Murray’s pages as a decent, contented, and pleasant person whose life andwork merit our regard. A useful addition to Sybille Bedford’s two-volume authorized life of Huxley, drawing on letters and memoirs that have surfaced in the 30 years since its publication.
