Word: huxleyism
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...inspiration for the character of Hermione Roddice in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the eccentric baronness whose passion for the hero, Birkin, is more a contest of will than a deep emotion. She knew them all: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Henry Lamb, William Butler Yeats, Henry James...
Died. Sir Julian Huxley, 87, British biologist, older brother of the late novelist Aldous Huxley and grandson of Victorian Scientist-Sage Thomas Huxley; in London. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Sir Julian was an atheist and self-styled "humanist" and an astonishingly prolific writer; his 48 major books range from candid autobiography (Memories) to probing studies of evolution. As UNESCO's first director-general (1946-48), he gained widespread attention as a doomsday prophet, warning against such dangers as the population explosion and man's neglect of his environment...
...Cultures. A decade after his death, the problem of properly dressing Aldous Huxley remains, Sybille Bedford's long, affectionately detailed biography notwithstanding. A man whose 69 years spanned and made the most of a number of literary and intellectual styles, Huxley simply does not fit comfortably into critical readymades. He was born to England's intellectual aristocracy. Thomas Henry Huxley, the great biologist and proselytizer of Darwin's theories of evolution, was his grandfather. Poet Matthew Arnold, the apostle of sweetness and light, was his mother's uncle. On one side, the traditions of scientific humanism; on the other...
...became a versatile writer, joining what he called the "deadly hustle" of journalism. Like Great-Uncle Arnold, Huxley tried to use literature as a social tool. To his own disillusioned generation of post-World War I Englishmen, he was the cynical dandy who wrote such bright and nasty satires as Antic Hay and Point Counter Point. During the '30s he became the Huxley of the depressingly prescient and durable Brave New World (1932) and its vision of a totalitarian future, with eugenics, social engineering and government-dispensed tranquilizers...
There was also Huxley the pacifist and flirtatious mystic who, in 1937, left England and Europe behind. He moved permanently to Southern California, where he joined another deadly, though higher-paying hustle. Between novels and essays he wrote film scripts (among others for Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre). Finally there was Huxley the culture-explosion sage of the '50s and early '60s. Often in mousy tweed and what looked like a snakeskin tie, he toured campuses and symposia, discoursing in silvery tones on coming ecological di sasters, overpopulation, Shakespeare and the way of the Buddha...