English intellectual, Californian mystic

The sheer versatility of Aldous Huxley has made him a difficult writer to classify. A new biography provides an opportunity to reassess the prophetic author of Brave New World, writes Suzanne Lynch.

Aldous Huxley's chilling portrait of a futuristic society, Brave New World, makes fascinating reading today, 70 years after its publication. A new biography of Huxley is an opportunity to reassess the author of a work which increasingly seems prophetic. Nicholas Murray analyses the man behind the novel, charting his unlikely development from precocious English man of letters to mystic, drug-sampling resident of California, where he died a few hours after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The most recent biography of Huxley, by a long-term friend, Sybille Bedford, appeared in 1973. Interestingly, Murray claims the full support of Bedford, as well as of Huxley's second wife and son, for his new biography, although, perhaps unavoidably, the book is disappointingly silent on the novelist's relationship with his son. Through a detailed reading of unpublished letters and contemporary sources, it attempts to reassign Huxley, whose reputation has suffered a decline since his death, to his rightful place in literary history.

Born in 1894, Huxley was the grandson of the scientist, T.H. Huxley, and the great- nephew of the poet and critic, Matthew Arnold. The influence of these eminent Victorians on him can be traced in the struggle between arts and science that shaped his intellectual pursuits. Murray charts Huxley's development as a brilliant young student at Eton and Oxford, and the effect of the childhood disease that left him partially blind for the rest of his life. Murray makes much of this visual handicap (Huxley was to describe it in his 1942 book on defective vision, The Art of Seeing) and argues that it had a lifelong effect on Huxley. The impairment exempted him from wartime service in 1914 and, despite his initial disappointment, Huxley passed the war years writing poetry at the estate of literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, where he mixed with intellectuals of the Bloomsbury group and met his Belgian wife, Maria. The social milieu of these formative years was used as material for his cuttingly satirical early novels.

Murray's biography brings fresh insights into Huxley's first marriage, bringing to light for the first time the ménage à trois that existed between the couple and Bloomsbury socialite Mary Hutchinson.

The figure of Maria Huxley looms large. As well as being Huxley's long-term companion, she also filled the role of dedicated secretary and chauffeur. It seems that she actively encouraged her husband's love affairs, but their marriage, although unconventional, was a strong and lasting one. The Huxleys moved to Italy in 1921, the first stop in the nomadic life they were to pursue together. It was in Italy that Huxley forged a friendship with D.H. Lawrence despite the obvious intellectual incompatibility between the scientific, rational Huxley and the visceral, anti-scientific Lawrence. Murray informs us that Maria actually typed the manuscript of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover - just one of the numerous illuminating facts that make this book such an enjoyable read.

During the inter-war years Huxley steadily carved out a reputation as a bold satirical novelist and prolific essay writer. After the success of Point Counter Point in 1928, the reception of Brave New World four years later secured his eminence. But his cool detachment and lucid prose style also attracted criticism: the claim that his novels were no more than vehicles for ideas was to recur throughout his life.

The Huxleys emigrated to America in 1937. Although their trip was initially expected to last just a few months, they quickly settled into Californian life, alternating between their LA home and their ranch in the desert. The idea of Huxley withdrawing to his desert idyll while Europe was at war tarnished his reputation in England. But "the horror in Europe", as Huxley described the war, brought about a new positive strain in his thinking. He embraced pacifism as the only solution to the crisis of civilisation.

A Huxleyan politics was beginning to emerge, as his writings preached the ideal of a decentralised society, and warned of the dangers that scientific advancement could have on humanity and ecology.

It was at this time that he became involved in screenwriting, his most successful film venture being Pride and Prejudice in 1940, starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. The list of Huxley's Hollywood acquaintances was impressive, including such stars as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Stravinsky and Christopher Isherwood.

Although he disliked the materialism of the US in the 1950s, Huxley was fascinated by the experiences his new home opened up for him. Murray traces Huxley's growing interest in psychic experimentation, the Alexander technique, hypnotism and Hinduism, all of which permeated his writing. Commentators in England were bemused by this new Huxley: the pessimistic iconoclast of the previous decades had been replaced by a man preaching mysticism as a positive solution to the world's problems.

Huxley also became notorious for his experimentation with drugs, such as mescalin and LSD, which he hoped would stimulate visual possibilities that his disability prevented. He invented the term "psychedelic", and his 1954 book describing his experiences, The Doors of Perception (the inspiration behind the name of the band The Doors), was adopted as an iconic work by the beat generation. Despite his age, Huxley maintained a zest for new ideas and experiences. In the years after Maria's death in 1955, he continued his work on the US lecture circuit and completed his last novel, Island (1962), a picture of a Utopian society imagined as an alternative to that of Brave New World. The book's positive vision shows how far Huxley had travelled as a thinker, and is the final word of a man who had finally found serenity.

The subtitle of Murray's biography is "an English intellectual". He sees Huxley as the last in a long line of a particular type of intellectual all-rounder, as comfortable mixing with scientists and social thinkers as literary figures. In an age of specialisation, the broad range of his knowledge and interests can unsettle literary critics, who are uncertain where to place his work. But perhaps its resistance to classification is part of its strength.

When George Orwell completed 1984 (in 1948), he wrote to Huxley asking his opinion on his futuristic novel. Huxley courteously replied that he believed his own prophecy to be the more accurate. While Orwell predicted that people would surrender their liberty through force, Brave New World prophesied that, through conditioning, people would actually come to love their servitude. It seems now that the Huxleyan vision has emerged as both the more accurate and the more worrying.

The developments predicted by Huxley in 1932 - the divorce of reproduction from the family, the mechanisation of society and the power of advertising - show an uncanny understanding of the future direction of civilisation.

Aldous Huxley by Nicholas Murray is published by Little, Brown, priced €32.25.