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lationships of his adult life were with his young son-he knew he was an in–
adequate father, and tried to make amends when Matthew was older-and
with the flamboyant Nancy Cunard , for whom he felt a brief but agonized
love in the early nineteen-twenties. Nancy 's passionately idealistic and self–
consuming career stood as an implicit reproach to Huxley's Olympian de–
tachment, which only this one sexual infatuation could breach. The woman
who had so thorougly humiliated him he commemorated, not without mal–
ice, as Myra Viveash in
Antic
Hay
and Lucy Tantamount in
Point Counter
Point.
Against individual passions Huxley 's standard defenses were with–
drawal, rationalization, and irony. The mass passions of our century he tried
at
fIrst
to ward off with similar attitudes; but, as a person of intellectual in–
tegrity, he eventually had to admit that
his
responses were inadequate in the
face of a radical and destructive transformation of the whole culture that had
shaped
his
youth . For all their surface acerbity, his earlier satires had neither
expressed any deep revulsion against the status quo, nor proposed any way
of amt"nding it . But from 1933 onwards, as the political situation deteri–
orated, Huxley underwent a personal crisis that culminated at the end of
1935 in his declaration of allegiance to the Peace Pledge Union of the Rev–
erend Dick Sheppard. This was surprising enough for the audience that had
taken
him
for the epitome of youthful irreverence; but even more shocking
was the ground on which he based his pacifIsm. He would not go quite so
far as to acknowledge the personal God of Christianity; but he did argue
that the way to world peace was the general recognition of an extrahuman
" spiritual reality ... God . .. regarded, and if possible experienced as a
psychological fact, present at least potentially in every human being. "
Huxley's newfound mysticism remained with him to the end of his life,
though for all his skill as a popularizer he had little success in convening his
readers to this panicular belief. But it is imponant to remember that his
commitment to a higher spiritual reality grew out of the bitter political di–
lemmas of the thinies, and that it would be unfair to accuse him of making
a pusillanimous retreat into otherworldliness. Rather the contrary occurred:
in unison with
his
mysticism he developed an equivalent commitment
to
social action, of a kind that for many years was dismissed as irrelevant or
quixotic but now has been generally admitted as a central concern of poli–
tics. The issues of population control , ecology, chemical alteration of con–
sciousness, psychological and sexual liberation, were all explored by Huxley
long before they became fashionable ; though his contempt for traditional
politics left
him
at a loss to suggest credible means of implementing the
sweeping changes he advocated .
Mter his conversion Huxley was no longer a good novelist by the usual
