Two of a kind?

"Too Good To Be True": The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler, by Mark Royden Winchell, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. 368 pp.

Aldous Huxley: A Biography, by Nicholas Murray, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 496 pp.

LOOKING AT THE DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS of Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), one is tempted to conclude that these two men of letters have very little in common. Such a conclusion, however, would be, at best, only half true. Despite sharp differences in background, style of writing, and Huxley's greater inclusiveness of subject matter and literary genres, both Fiedler and Huxley tried to grapple with life's enduring axiological and teleological questions. But whereas Huxley eventually found inner peace, Fiedler's quest to attain an integrated identify remained elusive to the end.

The differences between Huxley and Fiedler seem quite startling when one examines their genetic inheritance, their education, their private lives, and their chief professional labors and commitments. Huxley's ancestors included Thomas H. Huxley (appropriately called "Darwin's bulldog"); Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby fame; Matthew Arnold, that peerless cultural critic; and Mrs. Humphry Ward, the novelist. Both his parents were educators, and his older brother, Julian, become the first Director-General of UNESCO.

Fiedler's genetic inheritance included nobody of any fame. His father was a pharmacist; his mother did not have any profession. Although his younger brother, Eric, did manage to achieve some social status by becoming a CIA agent and, later, a consul in Istanbul, he converted to Lutheranism and completely divorced himself from his family. The absence of famous figures in Fiedler's background does not mean that he was not influenced by his parents or grandparents. Possibly his lifelong ambivalence towards his Jewish faith was caused by his father's alienation from Judaism and by his maternal grandfather's firm identity as a Jew, although in a non-religious sense.

Huxley attended Eton College, the English public school, and (despite an eye infection which rendered him almost totally blind for the rest of his life), he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford University, with a First in English. Fiedler attended public schools in Newark, New Jersey, and New York University, where he earned his B. A. in English. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin. He also took graduate courses at Harvard University.

Huxley was happily married to his first wife for over thirty-five years (they had one son), and his second marriage was a very congenial one. Fiedler's first marriage which lasted over thirty years (they had six children), ended stormily, and his second marriage to a divorcee (with two children by a previous marriage), young enough to be his daughter, was hardly the idyllic second marriage that Huxley enjoyed.

Huxley's profession was essentially that of a writer, although when he became internationally famous, he had short stints as a lecturer at many universities, including M.I.T. and the State University of California at Santa Barbara. Fiedler was a professor of English at the State University of Montana, 1941-1964, and at the New York State University at Buffalo, from 1965 until his death in 2003. It should be noted that his stay at Montana State University was interrupted by his serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve, 1942-1946; his later stays at Montana State University and at the New York State University, Buffalo, were interrupted by teaching fellowships he received at several universities--both in the United States and abroad.

Despite formidable differences, there are many similarities between them. Both were extraordinarily bright--Fiedler having earned a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin and Huxley having won a First in English at Oxford University. Both wrote profusely--Huxley over fifty books, Fiedler over twenty. Their writings included fiction and poetry (and in Huxley's case, even plays and screen scripts) and non-fiction on a variety of topics--the arts, history, popular culture, and religion. Both tended to classify people into types--Huxley, into Sheldonian types--cerebrotonic, viscerotonic, and somatotonic; Fiedler, into archetypes. Huxley experimented with mescalin and LSD; Fiedler allowed his home to be used by some of his students for smoking pot--although he himself abstained. Huxley was best known for one book--Brave New World (1932); Fiedler was best known for Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). Both tried to create bridges--Huxley, between Eastern religion and Western science and technology; Fiedler, between the classical tradition in literature and popular culture, between the various races, and between the various religions. Both became international celebrities and much in demand as lecturers and cultural commentators, not only in academia, but on radio and TV, and in popular journals. Both sustained severe losses of personal and literary items when fire destroyed their homes.

And yet, when one adds the pluses and minuses of each one's contributions to literary studies, to the world of academia, and to the world in general, one can conclude that whereas Huxley's contributions (especially his warnings against the dangers of letting materialism guide our lives and his advocacy of the life of the spirit and the mind) have been beneficent, Fiedler's have been "weighed in the balance and found wanting." His allowing his students to visit his home and to smoke pot, his failure to take a stand on many critical issues of his time, his occasional use of excessively Rabelaisian language--all these traits were the marks of "the Woodstock generation." (I myself wonder whether the "credit" he is given for being the founder of the "New Studies" which inundated our colleges after the 1960s really enhanced Fiedler's value as a "man of letters.")

What has prompted the previous observations are two biographies, Mark Royden Winchell's of Leslie Fiedler and Nicholas Murray's of Aldous Huxley. Although they both deal with the lives of two eminent men of letters of the twentieth century, they are as different in quality of worth as merit is from mediocrity.

At the beginning of his book, Murray writes that since Sybille Bedford's authorized (and magisterial) biography of Huxley came out in 1974, many diaries and letters involving people whom Huxley knew (e.g., D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf) have made it perhaps desirable to publish a new biography. Furthermore, Murray claims, he had many interviews with some of Huxley's family members and friends. Besides, as he maintains, Huxley has still much to say "to our current condition in more interesting and thought-provoking ways than has recently been allowed."

Unfortunately, the new diaries and collections of letters, and the personal interviews with Bedford and others, hardly add any significant revelations to what we already know about Huxley. Most of it consists of the "Peeping Tom" variety, more suited to trashy magazines than serious publication. Does it really add much to our perception of Huxley as a cultural critic and prophet to learn that his first wife was bisexual and that both of them and Mary Hutchinson (a member of the Bloomsbury Group) carried on a menage a trois relationship for some time, and that during his early years and later, Huxley (even with the encouragement of his first wife) had affairs with other women? At times, it also seems that Murray is more interested in showing Huxley as being more eager to take on any writing assignment and with anybody so long as the price was right than in portraying Huxley as a man of letters. Whatever titillations these revelations may give to some readers, they certainly do not enrich one's understanding of what precisely makes Huxley a significant cultural force for the twenty-first century.

Perhaps the basic flaw in Murray's book is that he patterns both his content and style after Sybille Bedford's, but in every instance Bedford's superiority remains untouched. Except for the "Peeping Tom" revelations mentioned earlier, Murray presents nothing new about Huxley's life. Whatever critical perceptions he attempts to make about Huxley's works are clearly overshadowed by Bedford's. When he tries to enrich his observations of Huxley's life by adding some details, he impoverishes it instead by accentuating the trivial and the marginal:

  In March they [Huxley and his first wife] were up in the Apennines in
  the snow and motoring across Northern Italy, the first of several
  motor tours this year. Then Maria went across to Belgium to see her
  sister Suzanne, married to Joep Nicolas, a Dutch painter. The couple
  spent a part of their honeymoon with the Huxleys in Florence in April.

To add to the discomfort of a reader who has already read Bedford's book, Murray at times copies Bedford almost word for word:

  Indeed the influx of these outside listeners was so heavy that they
  jammed traffic all across the Charles River into Boston, and extra
  police were called out to cope on Wednesday nights (Bedford, 649).

  On some of these Wednesday nights the traffic across the Charles River
  was jammed with extra police being called out (Murray, 436).

On the other hand, Mark Royden Winchell, a professor of English and Director of the Great Works of Western Civilization at Clemson University, who previously published a book on Fiedler for Twayne Publishers, has had good reason to enlarge his earlier book since almost twenty years had passed since his earlier version and since, obviously, Fiedler continued to be prolific during the interval.

In his Preface, Winchell states that "I have not sought to write a hagiography. Nevertheless, the opportunity to return to his [Fiedler's] work is a pleasure for all who enjoy the life of the mind." The statement proves to be essentially correct. Since the 1985 publication of his earlier book on Fiedler, Winchell has interviewed not only Fiedler several times but also some members of Fiedler's family and friends. He has read and reacted to all of Fiedler's writings, has consulted secondary sources, and his knowledge of "The Great Works of Western Civilization" has given him an eclectic perspective from which to view Fiedler's literary output.

There are many shrewd and balanced critical judgments that Winchell makes throughout the book. The following excerpt is typical:

  ... because there are pitfalls in every known system of criticism,
  it's best to avoid all systems and rely on one's intuition and tact to
  make literary judgments. The most obvious objection to this position
  is that we are left with no standards by which to criticize the
  critic. The one advantage shared by critical systems, whether
  aesthetic or ideological, is that they give us some basis for judging
  whether or not the critic is a competent practitioner of his own
  craft. Unfortunately, Fiedler's amateur criticism can easily lead to
  relativism and subjectivism. The only way to escape this dilemma is to
  validate one's judgments by appeal to some external source of
  authority, which can range from popular opinion to elitist taste.

Despite a generally balanced appraisal of Fiedler's works, Winchell occasionally strays from his goal of objectivity. I think that the following judgment is hyperbolic: "[Fiedler's] 'Come back to the Raft ag'n Huck, Honey' appeared the following month [1948] and American literary studies have never been the same." His claim that Fiedler has been an overwhelming force in the development of literary criticism in myth, archetypes, and feminist studies is equally hyperbolic.

Also at times, Winchell's professorial background makes a needless intrusion. Like Murray, Winchell tends to deviate from his major concern--e.g., giving a lengthy background on the history of the American novel or the development of science fiction. And, perhaps unwittingly, he tends to reveal a "liberal" bias at times. Is the inclusion of Ken Starr and Bill Clinton really necessary in the following excerpt?

  Even as a pauper, the Good Boy strikes Americans as effete and
  priggish. When such a figure does appear in our culture, it is as an
  object of derision, a comic foil to the true American hero--the Good
  Bad Boy--Sid Sawyer in contrast to his brother Tom (or, one suspects,
  Ken Starr in pursuit of Bill Clinton).

The two biographies under discussion here have at least the following in common: an excellent chronology, superb illustrations, and illuminating and exhaustive indexes--but that is, however, where the similarities end!

MILTON BIRNBAUM is a widely published literary critic. His book Aldous Huxley's Quest for Values (1971) will be reissued this fall by Transaction Publishers with a new introduction.