The man who preferred ideas to people

The conviction that Aldous Huxley is a novelist of great profundity and vision is one of those things, it seems, like the first flush of romantic love, that cannot survive the passage of time. When I was a teenager, like many an overly-intellectual British schoolboy before and after me, I was persuaded that Huxley was an incomparable genius and read with great delight anything by him that I could get my hands on. These days, however, it is very difficult to recapture that enthusiasm; Crome Yellow, which had seemed so witty and brilliant, now looks unbearably superficial, Point Counter Point, which had seemed so innovative and daring, looks like a failed experiment, and The Doors of Perception, which had been so inspirational, is just plain embarrassing.

I do not think I am alone in this, and to anybody who turns to Nicholas Murray's determinedly sympathetic biography of Huxley hoping that it will remind them of what they saw in Huxley all those years ago, let me tell you now: it won't. Murray clearly likes and admires Huxley, both as a man and as a writer, but throughout most of the book it is extremely difficult to see why. Though he repeatedly tells us how clever, well-read and gifted Huxley was, Murray seems no more in the grip of Huxley's charm than any other grown-up, and clearly struggles to find passages in Huxley's work that would illustrate his alleged brilliance. What he finds instead are engagingly honest self-appraisals in Huxley's correspondence in which he freely admits to being "no Dostoyevsky". Murray evidently agrees with this.

The only novel of Huxley's that he manages to describe with any enthusiasm is Brave New World, which, however, he seems to admire not as a great novel but as a prescient series of prophecies.

Until he gets to Brave New World, Murray seems curiously disengaged from and even bored by his subject. He tells us again and again that the young Huxley was happier with ideas than with people, but he can scarcely be bothered to tell us what those ideas were. For example, he says that Huxley was "increasingly interested in what HG Wells had to say about politics", but, as to what Wells did have to say about politics and why Huxley found it interesting, he remarks only that a piece by Wells in the Sunday Express aroused Huxley's interest in proportional representation. One feels, somehow, that that can't be the whole story.

For the first third of the book, the only times Murray comes to life are when he has occasion to quote from the three-way correspondence between Huxley, his wife, Maria, and the writer Mary Hutchinson. Murray is excited by this correspondence for two reasons: 1. It has never been used before, and 2. It reveals that Mary Hutchinson was both Huxley's lover and Maria's. Murray is, one feels, a little too excited by this last fact and reminds us of it at every turn.

The second half of the book is much more enjoyable than the first.

Admittedly, most of the writing that Huxley produced after his move to America in 1937 is utter tosh, but Huxley himself grew happier and much more likeable, and Murray's account of the increasingly loving relationship between Huxley and Maria is both engaging and moving, especially the way he deals with Maria's final illness and death. Here, as elsewhere, though, the book is marred by writing that is often clumsy and sometimes downright sloppy. For example, he mentions that, towards the end of his life, Huxley engaged in LSD sessions, "a long description of one such on 22 January is described by Laura Huxley". Does he mean that Laura Huxley described the description? This seems unlikely.

In fact, the book could have been improved considerably by a scrupulous copy-editor; someone who could have told Murray, for instance, not to anticipate quite so often. We are forever being told of things that Huxley "would write", people he "would meet", and things that "would happen" in the future, leaving the reader to wonder why, if the time has not yet come to mention these things, they are being mentioned.

What finally prevents this from being a satisfying book, however, are not these stylistic tics, but the half-hearted way Murray presents Huxley as "an English intellectual". He may not have been the deepest thinker of the 20th century, but surely when we, as adolescents, got so excited by his work, we were responding to something. Weren't we?