Aldous' Acquaintance

Aldous' Acquaintance

TEXTS & PRETEXTS--Aldous Huxley-- Harper ($2.50).

Most authors keep notebooks. In them they jot down Ideas for future reference: the ideas are not necessarily their own, and no law says that they have to be. Many a note-jotting author collects phrases, verses and poems that strike his fancy. Usually not until Fame or Death has overtaken them do artists exhibit their sketchbooks or writers their notes. Aldous Huxley, reasonably far from Death, is not so far from Fame. On the strength of his previous work many a Huxley reader will buy this notebook ("an anthology with commentaries"), will find the comment keen, the choice of quotations illuminating. Note-Taker Huxley's apology for publication: "An anthology compiled in mid- slump? Fiddling, you protest indignantly, while Rome burns. But perhaps Rome would not now be burning if the Romans had taken a more intelligent interest in their fiddlers."

Some of Huxley's notes: The Nature of Love, Physical Passion, Old Age, Progress, Money, Comic Poetry, Obscurity in Poetry. God, Death. Authors quoted range from Sappho to Paul Valery, include many passages from U. S. Poet Walt Whitman but only one from a living English poet, William Henry Davies (nothing from Huxley's late great friend. David Herbert Lawrence). Significant of the pendulum-swing of modern taste are the admiring references to Tennyson and Browning, frequent quotations from them. As an example of unconscious literature Huxley gives the farewell note of a suicide: "No wish to die. One of the best of sports, which they all knew. Not in the wrong, the boys will tell you. This b-- at

Palmer's Green has sneaked my wife, one of the best in the world; my wife, the first love in the world." Huxley's conclusions may surprise some by their apparent conservatism: "Every art has its conventions which every artist must accept. The greatest, the most important of the arts is living."

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