It has often been argued that even in his fiction Aldous Leonard Huxley never ceased to be the essayist. To the extent that, from Crome Yellow (1921) onward, he shared Thomas Love Peacock's interest in ideas as well as in manners, this is a just assessment. Huxley would have been the first to recognize its truth; he once said: "I am not a born novelist but some other kind of man of letters possessing enough ingenuity to be able to simulate a novelist's behaviour not too convincingly." It was not merely that, in a long life during which he wrote incessantly, despite times of near blindness and times of spiritual crisis, Huxley published a vast number of essays that appeared in periodicals and later were collected in books. His other nonfiction books-travel narratives such as Jesting Pilate (1926) and Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) and studies in the more curious areas of history, as in Grey Eminence (1941) and The Devils of Loudun (1952)-tended to assume the form of interconnected reflections that resemble his essays.
