They go their separate ways: Julia to study psychoanalysis in Vienna under Freud, Lillian to fame as a dramatist, and partner to Dashiell Hammett (played in the movie by Jason Robards). Their paths cross again in the mid-1930s and the women’s early thirties. Julia has been active in the anti-underground in Germany, specifically the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria. Lillian, at great personal risk, undertakes to bring $50,000 to Julia’s group in transit via Berlin to a writers’ conference in Russia (Hellman was a staunch Stalinist). During their brief meeting, cash and catch-up information are exchanged and Lillian learns that her friend has a daughter. Some time after her return to the US, she discovers that Julia has been murdered – a heroine of the resistance. So, of course, was Lillian Hellman a heroine.
Stephen Spender, the English poet, caught up with the film in America, where he was lecturing. He had actually been in Vienna in 1934–5. It was a dramatic period of his life: he was there with his gay lover, Tony Hyndman (‘Jimmy Younger’ in Spender’s autobiography, World Within World), but while in Austria he had met a dazzling young American psychoanalyst, Muriel Gardiner. She had come to Vienna to study under Freud’s circle, had a failed marriage behind her and a young daughter, Connie. Spender fell in love with Muriel, to Tony’s immense chagrin. She was the first woman he had slept with and the relationship produced love poetry and a letter of apology to his fellow gay, Christopher Isherwood: ‘I find actual sex with women more satisfactory, more terrible, more disgusting,’ he reported, enigmatically.
Muriel was, when Spender met her, active in the Viennese underground. She was engaged in the dangerous business of smuggling at-risk Austrians out of the country to safety. Spender hoped to marry her, but delayed fatally, and in the interval she fell in love and married a fellow resistance member, Joseph Buttinger. The Buttingers escaped to America in 1938 before the outbreak of war. Spender, and his second wife Natasha, became their close friends after the war. It was apparent to Spender that ‘Julia’ must be Muriel (whose underground code-name was ‘Mary’), although Hellman never identified her heroine, other than by first name, nor did she ever – in the later legal hubbub – offer any documentary evidence as to who Julia actually was. The problem was, Hellman had never met Gardiner. ‘Am I Julia?’ Muriel asked in a letter which was never replied to. At the Spenders’ encouragement, after the ‘who is Julia?’ controversy was widely aired (putting a big question mark over the movie), Gardiner wrote her own autobiographical account of her activities in pre-war Vienna, Code-Name Mary: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground, published in 1983. Hellman died a year later. She never factually contradicted Gardiner’s account, although she resolutely denied it in conversation and correspondence until her dying day. But how had she come by it? All was clear when it emerged that the two women had shared a lawyer, Wolf Schwabacher, who had evidently passed on Gardiner’s story. It had lodged, like grit, in Hellman’s sensibility and resulted in ‘Julia’.
One of the great catfights in American literary history was triggered when Mary McCarthy, on the Dick Cavett talk show, alleged that every word Hellman wrote was a ‘lie’ – including ‘the’ and ‘and’. It was the wisecrack which stung. In the legal confrontation which followed, McCarthy offered as clinching evidence ‘the unbelievability of Julia’. She was, of course, no more unbelievable than Anna Karenina or Jane Eyre. Knowingly or unknowingly, Hellman had written not memoir, but a little novel. And, like many novels, a beautiful lie.
FN
Lillian Florence Hellman (later Kober)
MRT
Pentimento
Biog
C. Rollyson, Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988)
157. Aldous Huxley 1894–1963
A fully fledged, fuzzy-brained California mystic. John Carey on Huxley
Aldous Huxley died on the same day as JFK: bad career move, as Gore Vidal might say. Half a century on, he survives better than his fiction or his ‘philosophical writing’ warrant. Two books above all have kept his posthumous reputation buoyant. Brave New World (1932) is, on the face of it, as clever but ephemeral as most of Huxley’s writing. Its targets (Freud, Ford, meritocracy) and its phobias (sex, sex, sex) have dated badly, or else been overtaken by events. But curriculum framers in schools have always liked dystopias (they generate lively classroom discussion) and, along with Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale, Huxley’s vision of life in ‘World State, A.F. 632’ has been grafted, permanently it would seem, into the British education system. The other book of Huxley’s to keep his name fresh is The Doors of Perception (1953), which has won its author a place alongside Timothy Leary in the pantheon of Class-A substance evangelism. As biographers stress, Huxley’s experiments with mescaline, under the influence of which he was vouchsafed a vision of the chairness of chairs, were timid. They resemble nothing so much as nervous Victorian dabblings with Mr Sludge, the Medium. It’s a nice question as to whether Leary or Huxley has destroyed more young brain cells. Huxley has certainly sold more copies.
No writer wrote more clearly from his life wounds than Aldous Huxley. The most grievous of those traumas was the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was twenty. The event resurfaces, symptomatically, everywhere in his fiction and a particularly vivid depiction comes in the last paragraphs of Brave New World. After an orgy of sexual riot followed by self-flagellating disgust, John the Savage, who is too good for the new world, strings himself up in a lighthouse: ‘Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east.’
Trev killed himself in 1914. The background is tangled and obscure. ‘Huxley No. 2,’ as he called himself, was a rock-climber, blond, outgoing, well liked. He, like Aldous and Julian, was brilliant and from his cradle marked for intellectual greatness. But for all his gifts, he was haunted by a sense of dynastic inadequacy: the genetic confluence of the Arnold and Huxley clans, with, on one side, the great liberal Matthew Arnold; and on the other, the great nay-sayer Thomas Huxley (‘Darwin’s Bulldog’). Even Aldous had difficulty living up to it. At Eton, Trev ‘worked beyond his strength’, bringing on that strange Edwardian condition, ‘brain fag’ and developing a stammer. He went up to Balliol in 1907, following in Julian’s footsteps (Julian would be a lecturer at the college by 1910; Aldous would enter as a scholar in 1913). In 1909 he got a First in Maths. Then, as his career track demanded, he switched to Greats, where, to the amazement of his family, he managed only a Second. For a Huxley-Arnold not to excel was to fail utterly. Trev hung on at Oxford as a postgraduate, helping Aldous, who was held back by his bad eyes (he had gone partially blind while at Eton as a result of an untreated eye infection). In 1913, Trev sat the Civil Service exam and did poorly. ‘Huxley No. 2’ was a certified second-rater – a fate worse than death.
In 1914, afflicted by fits of melancholia, a condition to which the Huxleys were congenitally prone, the young man was removed to the Hermitage, a private nursing home in Surrey. ‘Nerves’ were diagnosed – but the main cause of his distress was not divulged until Julian Huxley’s autobiography, Memories, was published in the 1970s. Trev had fallen in love with one of the maids at the family’s country house. She was attractive and intelligent, but indelibly common. In true Arnoldian fashion, the young man resolved to ‘raise’ her, taking her to plays, concerts and lectures. Sarah, the Huxley family’s senior maid, threatened to expose the relationship. As one of the family put it, brutally: ‘The girl was village educated in a mild way. It couldn’t have worked. His friends could never have been hers; nor hers, his … We sent her off into London somewhere.’
It was a finely calibrated thing. The elder brother Julian (later to become the world’s leading zoologist) could marry a Swiss governess, Juliette Baillot, but no Huxley could marry a housemaid. They could, of course, use them sexually; that was one of the conveniences of genteel life. Aldous lost his virginity to an upper servant in 1913, when he was nineteen. He had found hi
mself alone in his father’s London house in Westbourne Terrace, and ‘decided to go out for a stroll during which he picked up a girl who he assumed to be an au pair on her evening off. He took her back to the house and made love to her on the sofa.’ Huxley was, in his biographer Sybille Bedford’s words, ‘extremely susceptible to pretty women’, and this event marked the beginning of an athletically active sexual career. In Time Must Have a Stop (1945), the devirginating initiation is painted more darkly. The nineteen-year-old hero, Sebastian, takes a prostitute back to his father’s empty house, for a ‘shudderingly’ awful experience: loss of virginity amid rubber corsets, ‘bored perfunctory kisses’ and ‘breath that stank of beer and caries and onions’.
Trev, by contrast, wanted desperately to do the right thing by his housemaid, and it is probable that he was sent to the Hermitage – as she was sent ‘into London somewhere’ – to separate them. If so, it failed disastrously. While he was at the Hermitage, he heard that the girl was pregnant, something he seems previously not to have known. On a Saturday morning in August 1914, Trev left the Hermitage for a walk on the Downs. He did not return. Since he had an appointment in London on Monday there was no great alarm. He had perhaps gone up to town early. When no news had been heard of him after a week, a search was mounted. His body was found in a nearby wood. As a mountaineer he knew all about ropes and their breaking strain. He had climbed a tree, tied a rope around a branch fourteen feet up, put the noose around his neck, and jumped. Both the rope and his neck snapped. His broken and soiled body was found on the ground.
Echoes of Trev’s suicide, and what led up to it, hover like a moral stink over all Aldous’s fiction. Had his brother done the ‘right thing’ in the face of having done the ‘wrong thing’ – or merely succumbed to a second-rater’s lack of moral ruthlessness? Servants were there to serve – not least the upper class’s sexual requirements. Huxley never quite worked the problem out. His last novel, Island (1962), is, as Frank Kermode bluntly says, ‘one of the worst novels ever written’. Few have bothered to disagree. Inferior as the book is, the informed reader catches a glimpse of Trev for the last time, in articulo mortis. The narrative opens with the hero, Will Farnaby, having fallen from a tree, ‘lying like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy’. He has thrown himself down from a cliff-face onto the tree (which broke his fall) on being surprised by a snake. Will, however, is not in Surrey but in a South Seas Eden. He survives to endure the barrage of Buddhistic-rationalist preaching that all Huxley’s later heroes have to put up with. Weaker men would throw themselves off the cliff again. Was Trev the weaker, or the stronger, or merely the unluckier of the brilliant Huxley brothers? Aldous could never decide.
FN
Aldous Leonard Huxley
MRT
Brave New World
Biog
N. Murray, Aldous Huxley (2002)
158. J. B. Priestley 1894–1984
Priestley became in the months after Dunkirk a leader second only in importance to Mr Churchill. And he gave us what our other leaders have always failed to give us – an ideology. Graham Greene
J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford, the son of a schoolmaster. His mother, an Irishwoman – ‘probably a clogs-and-shawl mill girl’ – died two years after her son’s birth, leaving him to be brought up by a kindly stepmother. His origins in Bradford (‘Bruddesford’) coloured his subsequent life. Socialism he inherited from his ‘puritanical’ father; puritanism, signally, he did not. Libido and labour intertwined throughout his adult life. On leaving grammar school, Priestley had his first employment in a wool merchant’s office. He read H. G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly in 1910 and lost his virginity in 1913. There was some local journalism – nothing to prophesy great things, although it was clear that his future was not in wool. Priestley volunteered (‘chump that I was’) on the outbreak of war and served in the infantry, rising to the rank of subaltern. He was lucky only to be wounded (multiply but not cripplingly) and gassed. Lieutenant Priestley finished his service for king and country in the Entertainment Unit of the British Army. The experience of Haig’s ‘sausage machine’ sickened and hardened his socialism and class consciousness – and, possibly, his Anglophobia. Orwell, never a friend, suspected him of Soviet sympathies during the Cold War.
On being demobbed in 1919, Priestley took up a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The war’s carnage had left places for northern grammar school boys like him. He read history and graduated with a 2:1. He already had a wife and a child (and, quite soon, a pregnant mistress). On graduation he went to London where he freelanced as a journalist. In 1925 his wife Pat died of cancer and Priestley made a second marriage to Jane Wyndham Lewis in 1926. This relationship was strained by his infidelities – notably a steaming affair with the young actress, Peggy Ashcroft. Although his image was that of a plain man’s ‘Jolly Jack’ – and he was facially as ugly as a ‘potato’ – Priestley’s adult life was sexually athletic.
In his early London years Priestley became friendly with the bestselling novelist, Hugh Walpole. The two of them concocted a ‘correspondence novel’, Farthing Hall, in 1929 – it was a useful apprenticeship. Priestley’s first novel under his own name, The Good Companions (1929) was astonishingly successful, selling thousands of copies every day in its first months of publication. The novel is dedicated to Walpole, ‘for a friendship that has even triumphantly survived a collaboration’ and is a modern picaresque (‘gas-fire Dickens’, his publisher called it), dealing with a travelling troupe of players with the unhappy name, the ‘Dinky Doos’, who specialise in a ‘non-stop programme of Clever Comedy and Exquisite Vocalism’. Plot complications follow. It was sneered at by the literary elite. ‘If I wrote Anna Karenina they’d still say I was turning out twaddle for the mob,’ he complained, bitterly. The hauteur of London critics was something that rather disinclined him towards fiction in later years when he aimed at being a sage.
Angel Pavement (1930) did as well with the ‘mob’, and, unlike its predecessor, made the American bestseller list. The tone is grimmer, reflecting the post 1929 slump. ‘Not a glimmer of sentimentality’, as Priestley put it. The action centres on the firm of Twigg & Dersingham, eminently stuffy dealers in veneer and inlay, based in ‘Angel Pavement’, a sleepy cul-de-sac in the City. The business shenanigans of a ‘piratical’ chancer, James Golspie, drive the plot.
In later life, Priestley referred to these two unashamedly middle-brow works as his ‘golden gushers’. He had struck it rich and could move to a mansion in Highgate – where the Hampstead intellectuals lived. In 1934, he published his Cobbett-inspired English Journey, whose reportage brought home the working-class realities of the slump to middle-class England. In Hollywood, in the mid-1930s, where his services were in demand, Priestley came across the pseudo-scientific theories of Ouspensky, Jung and – most influentially – J. W. Dunne. The result was his ‘time plays’, I Have Been Here Before (1937), Time and the Conways (1937), An Inspector Calls (1946), and a work of science fiction and apocalypse, set in Arizona, The Doomsday Men (1938). ‘Twaddle’, indeed.
Just as successful was the romantic comedy of newly-wed complications in Yorkshire, When We Are Married (1938) – the first play ever to be televised. By the outbreak of war, in 1939, Priestley was finally the English sage he had always wanted to be. He could easily have gone to America, but stayed to face the music – which would have been very hot, had the Gestapo got hold of him. Priestley was outspokenly patriotic during the Second World War, particularly in his BBC Postscripts, after the Sunday 9 o’clock news, in the perilous months after Dunkirk. As Graham Greene said, only Churchill was more efficacious in raising the fighting spirit of the English people. Churchill – or others in authority – did not relish the comparison and, it is alleged, got him off the air. Priestley’s left-wing views – and harping on about ‘new world orders’ after victory – were the given explanation. His attempt, later in the war, to
enter active politics with his idiosyncratically conceived ‘Common Wealth Party’ failed.
Priestley could none the less sting as a political gadfly and was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, during the Cold War. He had public, knockabout, quarrels with highbrow adversaries such as F. R. Leavis and toffs like Evelyn Waugh. His trump card was always his sales, his box office receipts, his national fame, the love of the ‘mob’. He divorced his wife Jane (who had been heroically complaisant) in 1952 to make a third, lasting, marriage, after years of mutual adultery, in 1953 with the writer and archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. The British people liked him the more for his honest, straight-speaking radicalism. He was always the most amiable of dissidents, in his Yorkshire tweed, puffing thoughtfully on the inevitable pipe, speaking ‘sense’ and – as he confessed – constitutionally ‘tactless’, convinced that he had ‘a hell of a talent’, but no genius. Even Mrs Thatcher liked him, although it was in James Callaghan’s premiership (‘Sunny Jim’ was very much a politician in the Priestley mould) that the Queen awarded him his Order of Merit in 1977. He had turned down two peerages on socialist principle.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 58