Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  At the centenary of Huxley’s birth in 1994, much emphasis was laid on Huxley’s early politics – in particular his supposed democratic lapses during a brief period in the very early 1930s. Two years earlier, a book by John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), had enjoyed considerable acclaim for its thesis that many leading twentieth century intellectuals imagined ‘the masses’ as ‘ripe for extermination’ as part of a ‘cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler’ – to quote from its excited blurb. The immediate success of this book was not hard to understand. It told conservative English opinion what it wanted to hear: that the high-toned progressives were no better than they ought to be. The Daily Mail was delighted. The Carey thesis – from which, in relation to Huxley, I wholly dissent – had an unfortunate influence on the centenary, including an hour-long BBC2 Bookmark programme about the writer which dutifully reflected the new orthodoxy.

  What effect these passing media trends, however, have had on long-term assessments of Huxley is something hard to quantify. His nimble and lucid intelligence always contrives to keep him several paces ahead of the leaden-footed heresy hunters. His books are in print. Brave New World at least figures regularly on lists compiled to indicate the most popularly esteemed books of the twentieth century. His appeal is international – the enfant terrible of contemporary French writing, Michel Houellebecq, though seriously misinformed about some basic facts of Huxley’s biography, makes a dialogue with the writer a feature of his novel, Les Particules élémentaires (1998).29 Huxley scholars are few in number when compared to the Fordist masses at work in the Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce industries. But Huxley is clearly still read, and still popular, and, although I have written a biography not a critical study of his novels, I hope to show in this fresh life that he may be speaking to our current condition in more interesting and thought-provoking ways than has recently been allowed.

  1 New York Herald Tribune, 12 October, 1952

  2 Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume edited by Julian Huxley (1966) [henceforward: Mem. Vol.] p148

  3 Aldous Huxley: A Biography by Sybille Bedford. [henceforward SB] Volume 2 (1974), p280

  4 Letters of Aldous Huxley edited by Grover Smith (1969) [henceforward L.] P357

  5 L.361. See also L.390: ‘my besetting sin … an avoidance of emotion’

  6 Harper’s Magazine, November 1944, p519

  7 Mem. Vol. p35

  8 Mem. Vol. pp33 and 153 respectively

  9 Cyril Connolly, Picture Post, 6 November 1948, p21

  10 SB2, p122

  11 Christopher Isherwood, Interview with David King Dunaway, 2 June 1985. Huntington Library Oral History Transcripts [henceforward HL]

  12 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene (1935), p458

  13 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, (1977–84) ed Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, Vol 1, 17 October 1917, Vol 3, I July 1926, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, (1975–80), Vol 4, 28 January 1931 respectively

  14 SB1, p233

  15 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, Vol 5 (1989), P569, 31 October 1926. Frieda Lawrence to Montague Weekley

  16 Sewell Stokes, Hear The Lions Roar (1931), p206

  17 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Austin, Texas [henceforward HRC], Mary Hutchinson unpublished profiles of Aldous and Maria Huxley (undated)

  18 Anita Loos, Mem. Vol., p89

  19 HRC, Mary Hutchinson Profiles

  20 Sound Portraits (NY), July 1949. Text of sleeve note in University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Huxley archive

  21 Gerald Heard, ‘The Poignant Prophet’, The Kenyon Review (1965), p51

  22 Mem. Vol., p137

  23 Mem. Vol., p86

  24 Francis Huxley, ‘Preface’ to Aldous Huxley Recollected (1995) edited by David King Dunaway, pv

  25 AH lecture at Santa Barbara, quoted in Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (1969), p21

  26 Two or Three Graces (1926), p88

  27 See Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (1996) p301. Arnold wrote to Huxley: ‘I never doubted that the formula included science.’

  28 HRC Letter to Lady Sandwich from AH, 17 April 1955

  29 Michel Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires (1998, Paris). Houellebecq seems to think that Leonard Huxley was a scientist, not a classics master and literary journalist, and that Huxley in California was an associate of Alan Ginsberg. But see the chapter, ‘Julian et Aldous’, pp193–201

  II

  Grandpater

  On 26 July 1894, Aldous Leonard Huxley was ‘born into the rain’ of the Surrey countryside at Godalming. This was the leafy English county where his free man, John, the ‘Savage of Surrey’, in Brave New World claimed his ‘right to be unhappy’ in a hermitage very precisely located ‘between Puttenham and Elstead’. In 1925, in an essay on the appeal of country life, he recalled that: ‘The Surrey I knew as a boy was full of wildernesses. To-day Hindhead is hardly distinguishable from the Elephant and Castle.’1 In his later essay ‘The Olive Tree’ – that marvellous prose hymn to the Mediterranean spirit – he recalled ‘the old elm trees’ that were the backdrop to his Surrey childhood: ‘I spent a good part of my boyhood under their ponderous shade.’2 In his 1923 novel Antic Hay, the hero, Theodore Gumbril, ‘began talking with erudition about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchis and green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine growing, the best location for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where you get wild daffodils. All this odd knowledge came sprouting up into his mind from some underground source of memory.’3 In the same novel, Lypiatt asks Myra to recall ‘the fine grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows. And the flagstaff and the inscription marking the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at the view. And the enormous sloping meadows round Compton [the eventual burial place of Huxley’s ashes] and the thick, dark woods.’ Huxley was to live almost all of his adult life outside England, but the memory of that green Home Counties Arcadia – before the creeping suburbanisation of the twentieth century had changed it for good – never left him.

  Not that his reminiscences were always so fond. In 1930 he told a correspondent: ‘I sometimes wonder … whether it isn’t perhaps rather bad for one to have been born and brought up a bourgeois in tolerably easy circumstances – with baths, fresh air, plenty of space, privacy and the other luxuries of bourgeois existence. The result is that any diminution of that treasure of space and time which money can buy – leisure and room to be alone in – seems an appalling hardship: and the actual physical contact with members of one’s own species fills one with dismay and horror. The Marxian philosophy of life is not exclusively true: but, my word, it goes a good way …’4 Huxley’s acute self-awareness left him in no doubt about the strengths and weaknesses of his relatively privileged background. Travelling through India in 1925, Huxley mused on the traditional English reverence for parliamentary democracy – noting that it was in fact ‘government by oligarchs for the people and with the people’s occasional advice’ – and wondered whether his freedom to indulge in such easy speculation was not due to the fact that, ‘I was born in the upper-middle, governing class of an independent, rich, and exceedingly powerful nation. Born an Indian or brought up in the slums of London, I should hardly be able to achieve so philosophical a suspense of judgement.’5

  Whether Leonard Huxley, then a modestly-paid Classics master at nearby Charterhouse school, would have placed himself so firmly in the company of the rich and powerful when his third son Aldous was delivered on 26 July 1894, is doubtful. Leonard was the son of the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, and would later achieve greater prominence as a literary journalist and deputy editor of the Cornhill. His wife, Julia, was the daughter of Thomas Arnold, who was brother of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, and Julia’s sister was the novelist Mary Augusta (‘Mrs Humphry’) Ward. Julia Arnold was one of the
first women to attend Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1882 with a First in English. She met Leonard in 1880 while he was an undergraduate at Balliol but had to wait some years until they could afford to marry.

  At the time of Aldous’s birth, the Huxleys had lived for a year in a comfortable, neo-Gothic, Victorian house called Laleham (Laleham-on-Thames had been Matthew Arnold’s birthplace) at Godalming with an acre of garden including a tennis lawn, a rose-garden, and a rockery. On the top floor was a nursery with a rocking horse the size of a pony that could take four small boys at once. ‘I remember the nursery with a fine rocking horse and a screen covered with coloured pictures or fragments of pictures cut from magazines and catalogues – a fascinating mosaic of unrelated faces, scenes, objects, co-existing in a surréaliste confusion,’6 he recalled in 1960. Though Aldous’s relationship with his father was to become strained, particularly after Leonard’s second marriage in 1912, his early childhood was a happy one. He adored his mother and his father seems to have had some of the playful facetiousness of the Victorian paterfamilias. But was there anything of Leonard in the portrait of Mr Barnack in Time Must Have A Stop?

  that was one of the most disquieting things about his father: you never knew from his expression what he was feeling or thinking. He would look at you straight and unwaveringly, his grey eyes brightly blank, as though you were a perfect stranger. The first intimation of his state of mind always came verbally, in that loud, authoritative, barrister’s voice of his, in those measured phrases, so carefully chosen, so beautifully articulated. There would be silence, or perhaps talk of matters indifferent; and then suddenly, out of the blue of his impassivity, a pronouncement, as though from Sinai.7

  Aldous as a small child was looked after by a German governess from Konigsberg, Fräulein Ella Salkowski, whom he later employed to look after his own young son, Matthew. There was a seven year gap between Aldous and his eldest brother, Julian, who was himself to have a very distinguished public career as a scientist and as the first Director-General of UNESCO. The next eldest son, five years older than Aldous, was Trevenen (the name shared by Matthew Arnold’s son ‘Budge’, whose boyhood death so devastated the poet; there was Cornish ancestry in the Arnolds). Five years younger than Aldous was his only sister, Margaret, who hardly seems to figure in accounts of his life. It is possible that her unconventional life style – she would live with another woman, Christabel Mumford, on the south coast where they ran a school together – was the source of some disapproval by the Huxleys.

  In his autobiography, published in 1970, Sir Julian Huxley recalled his father as ‘a kindly man, full of almost boyish fun’.8 But there is evidence, as has already been hinted, that Aldous was less enamoured of his father, whom he respected less and less as he grew into maturity. In part this was because of an inability, even as a small boy, to find himself able to pay his father sufficient respect. His cousin Gervas thought Leonard Huxley was ‘silly. He wasn’t the kind of father one looked up to, or went to when one was in trouble … I think it was this lack of respect that troubled Aldous and marred his relationship with his father.’9 It appears that his behaviour towards the young girl pupils at the school his wife would open in 1910 was not always what it should have been,10 and his rapid remarriage to a much younger woman after his first wife’s death did not help the relationship. For Aldous, then, his strongest feelings were reserved for his mother, whom he adored. Julian describes her: ‘She wore pince-nez, had great charm and a tremendous sense of humour – I remember the way she used to throw back her head and explode with laughter when amused – but could pass from gay to grave when the mood took her … Her steady gaze was truth-compelling, but full of love, even when she had to reprimand us.’ Julian also recalled her ‘sense of fun, her gay participation in simple games, her enjoyment of acting, her infectious vitality and love of life’.

  Unfortunately, Aldous left no direct reminiscence of his mother, though traces can be detected in some of his novels – most notably Antic Hay – where, it must be admitted, the contrasting type of the awful ‘greedy, possessive mother’11 also abounds, a type destined to recur again and again throughout his fiction. The family as an institution gets a bad press in Aldous Huxley’s novels but the reasons are not to be sought in his very early experiences at Laleham. When he came to experiment with drugs in the 1950s he reported that he was seeking to retrieve some unspecified childhood memory, which may relate to this time, but it is more likely that it centred on the trauma of his mother’s early death. In a curious 1962 letter to a Californian music teacher whom he had met at Berkeley, which discussed the notion of a ‘psycho-analytic ballet’, Huxley suggested that such a production should deal with ‘memories of traumatic events in childhood – punishments, humiliations, an attempted rape.’12 One critic, noticing a prevalent sado-masochistic theme in Huxley’s fiction, speculated whether ‘it might perhaps originate from some curious experience in his own childhood’.13 There is no evidence to confirm or deny such a hypothesis.

  As a young child, Aldous was very pretty (as a photograph of him, aged five in curls and page boy costume, pensively examining the camera from a cane-seated leather armchair, makes clear). He had an enormous head which earned him the unkind nickname of ‘Ogie’, short for ‘Ogre’, and it was soon apparent to everyone that, as a young second cousin, Jill Greenwood, told Sybille Bedford, ‘everybody knew that Aldous was different’.14 He was fond of drawing and of childhood games, though rather delicate. The future satirist showed himself in a sally recorded by Julian. They both attended a neighbouring governess whose deafness caused Aldous to observe, of governesses in general, ‘Deaf and dumb they may be, but contradict they must.’ Another story told by Julian is of the young boy being asked by his godmother what he was thinking about, as he gazed pensively out of the window. The small boy replied solemnly, and monosyllabically: ‘Skin.’15 He told a friend in 1959: ‘One of my early recollections is being taken to church in Godalming and disgracing myself by vomiting during the sermon – a precocious expression, no doubt, of anti-clericalism.’ He also remembered the Muffin Man, ‘ringing a dinner bell, like the character in The Hunting of the Snark. He had a long white beard and wore a flat topped military cap, on which he carried a large tray, on which, under a white cloth, were the freshly made muffins and crumpets … And once a steam roller came and rolled the road outside our gate – a truly glorious object with a spinning flywheel and a tall chimney. It exhaled a deliciously thrilling smell of hot oil, and on the front end of the boiler was a golden unicorn.’16 Aldous’s education began at a nearby day-school for infants called St Bruno’s in 1899. That Christmas, staying at his Aunt Mary’s (Mrs Humphry Ward) house, Stocks, at Tring, he wrote a letter to his teacher, Miss Noon, informing her that he had received six presents, and thanking her for ‘my cannon’.17 The following year he attended with his brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles the Christmas Pantomime at Drury Lane. The enormous family party, which had arrived by carriage, occupied the dress circle. The show lasted for four hours and Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell were the star comedians. The scene is fictionalised in Antic Hay:

  All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them – every year they filled the best part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank tea. And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage … And there was Dan Leno, inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like anybody’s skull. And his mother, he remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her cheeks. She used to enjoy things thoroughly, with a whole heart.18

  Aldous and his cousin Gervas were delighted and a long-lasting fondness for music hall was cemented.

  By 1900, Julian was already at Eton, and required on that account by his mother to offer his top hat to six-year-old Aldous to be sick in as they stood waiting at the Natural Histor
y Museum for the Prince of Wales to unveil a statue of their grandfather. Even a six-year-old is impressed when a grandfather is cast in stone or bronze, and no Huxley was ever allowed to forget the awesome precedent of the great forebear. In an interview which took place in 1985, Julian’s wife, Juliette Huxley, referred to the ‘burden’ that was imposed on Huxleys to succeed at all costs, to win the prizes and scholarships (which they generally did), to live up to the example of ‘Gran-Pater’. The pressure on Julian was intense: ‘Julian suffered from that. Very much … There is something really devastating about having a grandfather (grand-pater as they called him) who was a god in the family. These children grew up with that atmosphere: “Worthy of Grand-Pater – right! You must be worthy of grand-pater.” ’19