310
PARTISAN REVIEW
literary standards; though, if he in part admitted
hs
decline, he felt no guilt.
He had never been a devotee of literary art for its own sake, and now he
came to believe that the Western literary tradition was incompatible with
the basic values of a good society, since, as he wrote in
Island,
it promoted
only "dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration, and unnecessary
guilt." He thus turned his back on the Faustian cult of the self that has been
at the center of modern bourgeois ideology; and he applied his cultural pre–
scription to his personal life by consciously distancing himself from the sor–
rows and ambitions of his youth. This makes him a rather unrewarding sub–
ject for a biography, since he seems progressively to disappear into a system
of pet ideas, or into a persona of disembodied benevolence. Sybille Bedford
seems indeed to have adopted from Huxley himself the calm, amiable, and
detached tone of her study. Potentially destructive episodes are told candid–
ly enough, but they are not presented as if they really mattered
to her,
nor
are they used to built up any critical analysis of Huxley's personality and
career. Bedford's tolerance is most strained by his enthusiasm for mescaline
and LSD , but it does not snap . The biography, then , is a tribute
to
Huxley
the man and a chronicle of
his
achievements rather than a critical interpreta–
tion. As a tribute it is graceful, comprehensive, and honest about its sub–
ject's flaws if not disturbed by them.
Perhaps this is ultimately a fair response
to
Huxley . Apart from the ex–
traordinarily sweet and serene personality he achieved in later life-which
anyone who met him, even briefly as I did , could hardly fail to be impressed
by..:-he was after all one of the most enlightened and sensible of modern
writers, one who never dabbled in the toxic kinds of unreason that seduced
so many of his peers . Whatever the sins of omission in his private life, it was
not finally by that life that he would wish
to
be judged but by the message
of his works; which he once wtyly summed up as no more , and no less, than
"try
to
be a little more kind."
PAUL DELANY
