THE FAMOUS NOVELIST WAS ALSO A JOURNALIST, PERIODICALLY

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was marked by good fortune and marred by
misjudgment. Among the assets were impeccable bloodlines: His paternal
grandfather was the scientist Thomas Huxley, Britain's most eloquent
defender of Charles Darwin. On the maternal side was his great-uncle
Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and critic. The family expected Aldous
and his older brother, Julian, to be equally brilliant, and the siblings
did not disappoint.

Julian became an eminent biologist and eventually received a knighthood.
For his part, Aldous rose to world fame, largely because of his 11 novels.
The most celebrated, "Brave New World," imagined a dystopia built by
behavioral conditioning and genetic engineering. That book remains as
disturbing today as it was upon publication nearly 70 years ago, before the
nightmares of totalitarian eugenics, B.F. Skinner and cloning.

On the debit side was devastating ill health. Julian experienced a number
of nervous breakdowns, and in adolescence Aldous was not only neurasthenic
but was beset by an eye disease that left him blind for months. (Undaunted,
he learned Braille and excelled in his studies at Eton. But nothing was
quite the same after he recovered his sight.) The young writer mistakenly
assumed that journalism, rather than fiction, would establish his name. A
contributor to periodicals, he announced, "is promoted from mere humanity
and has attained the apotheosis of print. Concealing his merely human
physique and personality, he presents himself to the world disguised in the
magic and pontifical robes of pure verbiage."

Clad in those raiments he offered essays as provocative as his fiction.
Unlike the novels, however, these fugitive pieces came and went,
uncollected, trapped in stacks of faded magazines and crumbling newspapers,
where they were available only to scholars. Happily, two professors, Robert
S. Baker and James Sexton, have recently ransacked libraries and organized
the Huxleiana in chronological order from the 1920s to the 1960s. Fully
annotated, "The Complete Essays" (Ivan R. Dee, 445 pages, $35) show a
striking mastery of English prose as well as a profusion of ideas and
insights. They also reveal the flaws that were to make Aldous a victim of
what lyricist Lorenz Hart called "the self-deception that believes the lie."

Because of early visual problems, Huxley depended more on his ears than his
eyes, and his remarks on classical music retain their sparkle. Here he is
praising and damning Beethoven: It was the German composer "who first
devised really effective musical methods for the direct expression of
emotion." In doing so, however, "he made possible the weakest
sentimentalities of Schumann, the baroque grandiosities of Wagner, the
hysterics of Scriabin; he made possible the waltzes of all the Strausses. .
. . And he made possible, at a still further remove, such masterpieces of
popular art as 'You Made Me Love You.' "

Yet the visual arts did not escape Huxley's notice; the Surrealists, he
observed critically, "have presented us not with the finished product of
creative thought, but with the dream-like incoherencies which creative
thought uses as its raw material. It is the statue that lives, not the
stone." Huxley's tone was not always so lofty. He considered Felix the Cat
his favorite dramatic hero and praised the "hilarious and subtle" pranks of
Charlie Chaplin as well as the adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks.
Indeed, Aldous was so besotted with cinema that when he and his wife
emigrated to America in the 1930s they headed straight for Hollywood. There
he wrote the scenarios for "Pride and Prejudice," starring the young
Laurence Olivier, and "Jane Eyre," featuring Orson Welles.

And there he succumbed to the California state of mind, a state that
included a naive belief in psychic phenomena and the transformative powers
of psychedelic drugs. At Duke University, he writes, Prof. J. Rhine's
research "leaves no doubt as to the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance
and very little doubt as to the existence of pre-vision" -- this despite
contemporary exposes of the professor's shoddy research. To this day, of
course, no repeatable laboratory experiment has affirmed the existence of
extra-sensory perception or pre-vision. So much for "no doubt."

Huxley never stopped seeking transcendence -- the ability to rise above
"the phenomena of the external world." When religious experience failed to
take hold he turned to chemicals. Had these hallucinogenic experiments been
a private affair they would have remained a harmless family secret. But he
decided to proselytize, in short pieces and in his book "Doors of
Perception." Like Timothy Leary's screeds, they seem to have exerted the
greatest influence on the credulous young. The Beatles saluted Huxley by
including his image on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper; Jim Morrison named
his rock group The Doors in the author's honor. The guitarist later paid
for his enchantment with narcotics by dying at the age of 27.

Still, assaying Aldous Huxley by these defects is like judging a garden by
its weeds. His onetime collaborator W.H. Auden appraised the poet William
Butler Yeats by writing, "You were silly like us; your gift survived it
all." So it is with Aldous Huxley. His foolishness is largely forgotten;
his lucid apercus still illuminate the page. Samples: "Facts do not cease
to exist because they are ignored"; "An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by
a thrilling lie"; "Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than
malice can be in the intent."

Huxley died on Nov. 22, 1963, and his obituary was lost in reams of prose
about the assassinated president, John F. Kennedy. "The Complete Essays of
Aldous Huxley" redresses the imbalance 38 years later.