ALDOUS AND HEAVEN TOO

In an otherwise fine review of “Huxley and God” (Nov. 22), Charles Marowitz sold Aldous Huxley short by indicating that high ideas and highbrow friends “prevented him from enjoying junk food, junk ideas and junk people.”

Leaving aside food, Huxley’s amused interest in such things was acute and witty. This was an intellectual who chose to experience much of his first psychedelic “trip” at a junk-filled drugstore, who savored the nuances of California’s cultural-crap spree in his novel “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” and who married his second wife at a drive-in chapel in Las Vegas, partly for the kitschy kick of it.

Though often appalled, Huxley’s lofty mind enjoyed slumming on earth.

DAVID ELLIOTT, SAN DIEGO