Aldous Huxley a Biography Volume 2 - 1939 - 1963 -

London: Chatto & Windus In Association Eith Collins London, 1974. Assumed First Edition . Hard Back. Very Good/Good. 6 1/2" X 8 1/2. 378 Pages Indexed. There are three inked lines on the front endpaper with the date 28-3-75. No other marks. Dust jacket is protected with a vinyl covering. There can't be any serious doubt, wrote C. P. Snow, reviewing the first volume of Sybille Bedford's biography of Aldous Huxley, that the complete work will rank - and rank high - among the classics of its kind. She has, what is most essential of treatment of all for this present enterprise, an instinct for truth. Her treatment of his character is as masterly as anyone alive could have managed. In the second half of his life Aldous Huxley became ever more deeply concerned with the condition of man in the twentieth century, his power to multiply and to destroy himself, his relation to nature, to society, to the planet on which he must live and to the values he must live by. Yet as before Huxley is presented not only as a writer and thinker, but as a private man. We see him in his day-to-day life, in the free and easy world of Hollywood or at his isolated house in the arid beauty of the Nevada desert, his ventures into the world of films and the theatre, in the anxieties of the Second World War and the trials of bereavement as well as in the gaiety and happiness of his family relationships. These were the years of Grey Eminence, a historical biography that offers insight into the mysticism with which he was increasingly preoccupied; of Time Must Have A Stop and The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors if Perception, his controversial book on the use of hallucinogenic drugs; of Island, the 'good' Utopia that complements the satire of Brave New World. However his achievements are rated, Huxley was an exceptional human being. So it isn't altogether surprising that his life should exemplify to an exceptional degree the contradictions of the human condition. How does one reconcile, for instance, Huxley's devotion to his first wife with his seeming blindness to the stresses his dependence imposed upon her, and his renaissance after her death?