Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The old man died in June 1895, less than a year after Aldous’s birth but his influence never went away. Because of the high intellectual achievements of the Huxleys they are sometimes represented as a formidably long-standing intellectual aristocracy. In fact, the dynasty was founded by Thomas Henry Huxley, son of a provincial savings bank manager, who had only two years of formal education. He was the type of the formidable Victorian autodidact, never more so than in the descriptions we read of him shipping aboard the HMS Rattlesnake in the 1820s as an assistant surgeon, and producing in his cramped, waterlogged cabin, the carefully drawn and noted biological observations that, after many setbacks, would be published and lead to his eventual triumph as one of the leading scientists, controversialists, and communicators of the nineteenth century. As he worked away, with only hope to sustain him, cockroaches feasted on the edition of Dante he was teaching himself to read with the help of an Italian dictionary. That example of courage, tenacity, and undeflectable intellectual ambition was a powerful legacy to his descendants.20 Aldous paid tribute to him in the Huxley Memorial Lecture, which he delivered in 1932, in significant terms, praising his ‘astonishingly lucid’ style. Huxley – who had little sympathy with linguistic experiment of the kind practised by literary artists such as James Joyce – always preferred that touchstone of clarity, however deeply erudite and wide his range of allusion might be. ‘Truth was more important to him,’ he said of his grandfather, ‘than personal triumph, and he relied more on forceful clarity to convince his readers than the brilliant and exciting ambiguities of propagandist eloquence.’ Underlining the point, Huxley added: ‘one of the major defects of nineteenth century literature … was its inordinate literariness, its habit of verbal dressing-up and playing stylistic charades’. Thomas Henry countered this tendency by a ‘passion for veracity’.21

  If one of the central questions about Aldous Huxley is whether he was primarily a literary artist or primarily a thinker, a propagator of ideas, the polarities he sets up here are extremely interesting, and continued to exercise him throughout his career, surfacing in late works like Literature and Science, published in the year of his death. Whether there was something, as it is popularly expressed, ‘in the Huxley genes’, that helped to crystallise this glittering concentration of talent – a matter perhaps for the socio-biologists – or whether, as I am inclined to think, it was more a combination of naturally occurring gifts nurtured by precedent and example, a certain prevailing expectation that one would enhance the performance, not detract from it, the Huxley inheritance was an ever-present reality – though rarely spoken of by Huxley himself in his published work or unpublished correspondence. Yet, at the same time, in his youth Huxley was iconoclastic towards the nineteenth century worthies. He once admitted to Julian that he had avoided reading them at Oxford: ‘I somehow escaped that normal course in youth, that plowing through the Victorian Great and being reminded all the time that they are great.’22 Even in his late fifties, he refused to be pious about them. His Californian friend, Grace Hubble, recorded in her diary an evening party in 1953 attended by Osbert and Edith Sitwell and Huxley where Aldous was pouring scorn on ‘the Monstrous Victorians, who become increasingly alien and unnatural. More and more they seem like the characters in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.’23 The McPhail dynasty in Island, or the Poulshots in Time Must Have A Stop (‘An absolutely sterling goodness, but limited by an impenetrable ignorance of the end and purpose of existence’24), stand for a certain kind of heavy English bourgeois rectitude and dull propriety, with its roots in the Victorian and Edwardian drawing-room, that the gadfly satirist of the 1920s – who was never wholly submerged in the later gravitas – had no difficulty in holding up to ridicule.

  In 1901, Julia Huxley, drawing on her own and her husband’s slender capital and loans from the bank, founded a girls’ school near Godalming called Prior’s Field. The family abandoned Laleham and went to live at Prior’s Field, two miles away, set in twenty-five acres of land. The previous year, Leonard Huxley had published a biography of his father, Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, whose success enabled him to end his fifteen year career as a schoolmaster and enter the literary world as reader and literary adviser for the publishing firm Smith, Elder and assistant editor of the Cornhill Magazine. The school opened on 23 January 1902 with seven pupils: one girl boarder, five day girls, and seven-year-old Aldous. Julia Huxley, a Miss English, and a Mademoiselle Bonnet were the staff. The school grew quickly and just as quickly it became clear that it was a very different sort of school from the prevailing norm. It was freer, more civilised, less regimented and attracted the daughters of some very eminent intellectuals and writers such as Gilbert Murray, Maurice Hewlett, and Conan Doyle – the Huxley and Arnold names no doubt being persuasive. One pupil, the writer Enid Bagnold, described it in her autobiography, however, as ‘above all a literary school, they didn’t lay stress on mathematics,’ which is a little surprising. She recalled her first interview with the headmistress: ‘A chintzy room, modern with William Morris – a slender lady with a beautifully-shaped small head. Kind, yes, but away and above my understanding. Each time before she spoke she seemed to reflect.’25 By the time Enid Bagnold arrived in 1903, Aldous had moved to a nearby prep school, Hillside, but he had Sunday lunch with the girls. Enid had been told that she was supposed to make an effort and talk, so she breezily asked the boy who sat ‘silent, rather green, inscrutable, antagonistic’ next to her what he had done today. There was no answer. Growing embarrassed, she asked again, a little louder: ‘What did you do today, Aldous?’ The terse reply came back: ‘I heard you the first time.’ Forty years later, Enid Bagnold met Huxley at a tea party in Chelsea given by Ethel Sands. ‘You were very frightening, Aldous,’ she reminded him. ‘He gave me a very sweet smile. “I’m frightening still”.’

  Julia Huxley read aloud to the girls in the evening in her ‘silvery, even voice’ and did the same, Julian recalls, for her own children, ‘first nursery rhymes and fairy stories, then a little history and poetry’. She was ‘the pivot of our family life’ and used to organise picnic lunches in the Surrey countryside, and charades and round games. As far as the pupils of Prior’s Field were concerned, Enid Bagnold wrote, Julia Huxley was also the essential pivot: ‘the wonder went out of the school with Mrs Huxley’.26

  In the autumn of 1903 Aldous was sent away from this happy Eden to the unpleasant rigours of an English preparatory boarding school. Hillside School, run by Gidley Robinson, was not far away but it was, certainly for the first couple of years, quite awful. The only consolation was the presence of his cousin Gervas Huxley (who would later marry the writer, Elspeth Grant). Another friend was Lewis Gielgud, brother of the actor, Sir John Gielgud. Gervas was older than Aldous by three months and has left a very detailed picture of their schoolboy horrors, which lasted five years. ‘All I can remember of my arrival at Hillside,’ Gervas wrote nearly seventy years later, ‘is entering a large classroom full of boys and sitting on a wooden bench beside my cousin Aldous – also a new boy – who was weeping copiously at leaving home.’27 The school had around fifty pupils aged between eight and fourteen years and the headmaster was ‘old and definitely past his best’. The science master, Mr Jacques (‘Jacko’) was unmercifully ragged by the boys, the music teacher, Mr Macintosh was ‘a bespectacled old buffoon’, while the two Miss Noons from Godalming ‘supposedly taught drawing’. Matron, ‘Ma’ James, was ‘an irascible, ill-educated old woman, whose favourite phrase was “stop your imperence [sic] or I’ll report you”.’ Bullying was rife and allowed to go on unchecked. Aldous and Gervas and the other newcomers would be lined up at one end of the large classroom and peppered with hard little paper pellets fired from catapults. They were then asked if they were ‘mushrooms’ or ‘pears’ (circumcised or uncircumcised) and made to fight each other on that basis for the amusement of the seniors. They were also made to run the gauntlet of flicked wet towels, were beaten with slippers or hair-brushes, or had
cold water poured into their beds. In addition there was no privacy to read a book. Fortunately, Huxley Major and Huxley Minor (Aldous), were big for their age and stuck together. At the end of each week, after being marched down the hill, in stiff Eton collars and little black Eton jackets, to Farncombe Church, and after another execrable lunch, they were allowed to walk over to Prior’s Field. ‘The home-like atmosphere of Prior’s Field was a glorious change from Hillside, as was the excellent tea we enjoyed,’ Gervas recalls. Then it was back to the dormitories of twelve beds each, the cold bath every morning and the once a week hot bath. The teaching was uninspired and consisted of learning dates by rote and memorising third-rate poems. There was no encouragement of the boys to read or to learn for themselves. The school had no library and no place or designated time for reading. Gervas thought that the school, Bulstrode, in Eyeless in Gaza was a thinly-disguised Hillside and that the schoolboy characters were versions of his and Aldous’s schoolfellows. Quite how an inspired educator such as Julia Huxley could have subjected her young son to this brutally philistine routine is a mystery. After two years, however, things began to change. In the autumn of 1905, a new headmaster, Jimmy Douglas, arrived and, for the first time, a proper teacher called Hugh Parr ‘who really enjoyed encouraging the adolescent mind, particularly in anything relating to literature and art’. He refused to bully or mock his charges and: ‘the whole atmosphere of the school changed’. There were concerts and Shakespeare plays were performed. Aldous was said to have moved the old ladies in the audience to tears in his role as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. Even the food improved. Encouraged by Hugh Parr – who in little over a decade was to die in the First World War trenches – to read books and poetry, Aldous and Lewis Gielgud became joint editors of a literary magazine called the Doddite and Aldous contributed a poem called Sea Horses and a short story he illustrated himself. Aldous and Gervas now shared a double cubicle and one of their pastimes was sailing little boats with matchstick masts and paper sails along a gutter which ran outside the top of the windows. Huxley later fictionalised this pastime in Eyeless in Gaza.

  Aldous was frequently ill as a child and missed some of his lessons but he seems to have developed a way of remaining immune to the worst experiences of the school. In an earlier, and much less bleak, account of their schooldays Gervas said that Aldous ‘possessed the key to an inviolable inner fortress of his own, into which he could and did withdraw from the trials and miseries of school existence’.28 He was witty and joined in the schoolboy jokes, even if ‘we somehow felt that Aldous moved on a different plane from the rest of us’. And there were also holidays in the Lakes, and the Swiss mountains, during these years where Aldous developed still further his love of natural scenery and wild flowers.

  Many years later, writing about the problems of education, and the shortcomings he perceived – not just in the Edwardian upper-middle class English fee-paying schools he had known, but in all school education – Huxley wrote:

  Looking back over my own years of schooling, I can see the enormous deficiencies of a system which could do nothing better for my body than Swedish drill and compulsory football, nothing better for my character than prizes, punishments, sermons and pep-talks, and nothing better for my soul than a hymn before bed-time, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. Like everyone else, I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential.29

  In his book on defective vision, The Art of Seeing (1943), Huxley (who incidentally remained firmly opposed to the more permissive kinds of education where children are encouraged to do as they please and learn what they want) complained that children were often ‘bored and sometimes frightened, because they dislike sitting cooped up for long hours, reading and listening to stuff which seems to them largely nonsensical, and compelled to perform tasks which they find, not only difficult, but pointless. Further, the spirit of competition and the dread of blame or ridicule foster, in many childish minds, a chronic anxiety, which adversely affects every part of the organism, not excluding the eyes and the mental functions associated with seeing.’30

  Aldous remained at Hillside until June, 1908. Clever and already a remarkable presence, he was destined for a very bright academic career, following in Julian’s footsteps at Eton. But tragedy would very soon strike the family.

  1 Along the Road (1925), ‘The Country’, p57

  2 The Olive Tree (1936), ‘The Olive Tree’, p294

  3 Antic Hay (1923), p184; p273

  4 L.334 28 November 1930

  5 Jesting Pilate (1926), p137

  6 L.883

  7 Time Must Have A Stop (1944), pp32–3

  8 Sir Julian Huxley, Memories 1 (1970) Chapter 1

  9 SB1 p14.

  10 Sybille Bedford in conversation with the author

  11 Time Must Have A Stop (1944), p192

  12 L.935

  13 Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley (1973), p111

  14 SB1 p3

  15 Julian Huxley, Mem. Vol., p21

  16 L.872

  17 L.23

  18 Antic Hay, p221

  19 HL, Oral History Transcripts. Interview between Juliette Huxley and David King Dunaway, 5 July 1985

  20 See The Huxleys (1968), Ronald W. Clark and Adrian Desmond’s two-volume life: Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple (1994); Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest (1997)

  21 Thomas Henry Huxley As A Man Of Letters (1932). Reprinted in The Olive Tree (1936)

  22 L.146

  23 HL, Hubble Diary, 30 January 1953

  24 Time Must Have A Stop, p273

  25 Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography (1969) p25ff

  26 See SB1 5–11 for many comments by former pupils on Julia Huxley’s special qualities

  27 Gervas Huxley, Both Hands: An Autobiography (1970), p32

  28 Mem. Vol., p57

  29 ‘The Education of an Amphibian’, Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), p37

  30 The Art of Seeing (1943), p106

  III

  Damage

  Aldous arrived at Eton in September 1908 as one of the school’s academic elite, the seventy King’s Scholars, who lived in College, the original core of the ancient school, with its black oak benches carved deeply with the initials of young Etonians across the centuries. In Huxley’s first letters from Eton the same jauntily facetious, precocious-schoolboy tone he had perfected towards the end of his time at Hillside (where he had been head of school that summer) is on display. ‘I notice you say “term” instead of “half” the only and obvious expression,’1 he primly reprimanded Huxley Major, a mere Rugbeian, who was unaware that at Eton three halves make a whole. Aldous was being initiated into the rituals of fagging, Homer and Virgil, and as a Colleger was installed in the Lower Fifth. Huxley would always be a dandy in dress and he lost no time in telling Gervas: ‘I look so chic in tail coats mouldy collars and white ties.’ He added that he had been whipped only twice ‘(1) in a general working off of the whole of college for hiding a letter and (2) for forgetting to take VI form cheese out of Hall’. Lewis Gielgud, he added, was beginning more and more to resemble a turnip. Aldous’s letters to Julian were bright and clever, with sometimes a sense that he was trying to impress the elder brother, now at Balliol, whose triumph in reading out his prize-winning Newdigate Poem at Oxford, the younger had witnessed during the summer.

  Aldous seems to have settled in well and towards the end of November, he was looking forward to Julian and his other elder brother, Trev, coming to Eton to watch the annual wall game on St Andrew’s Day, Monday 30 November. In the event, they did not come because, on the Sunday, with terrible swiftness, Julia Huxley died of an inoperable cancer after a very short illness. She had been diagnosed only four months previously and was forty-five years old. Julian came back from Oxford to her bedside: ‘Never shall I forget how wasted she looked,’ he recalled later, ‘nor the terrible cry she gave: “Why do I have to die, and so young!”’2 Her sister, Mrs Humphry Ward, that night brought Margaret and Aldous – ‘poor little fellow’3 – home to her house, S
tocks, at Tring in Hertfordshire. The funeral took place the next day at Compton, in the Watts Memorial Chapel designed by the wife of the portrait painter, George Frederic Watts. Surveying the rich art nouveau and Celtic decoration of the tiny chapel, the boys would have read the gilt legend that ran around the walls: ‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, their hope is full of immortality.’ Julia is buried in a grave close to the chapel wall beneath a broad-branched beech tree. Leonard was later buried with her, and Aldous’s ashes, too, would one day, with his wife’s, be laid to rest there in the same grave, sadly neglected now, and giving no clue about the famous author whose remains are buried there. On the day of Julia Huxley’s funeral the girls from the school were in attendance. The previous night they had listened to a poem by Leonard Huxley, written to express his feelings about his late wife, which at least one girl, Enid Bagnold, found not true to her spirit. Aldous, sobbing, was comforted by Joan Collier. Julian described his younger, fourteen-year old brother as standing ‘in stony misery’ at the grave side. Mrs Humphry Ward’s daughter, Dorothy, recalled: ‘The little Eton boy very sensitive and brooding and white, and feels it deeply – and dumbly.’4 Margaret, Aldous’s nine-year-old younger sister, recalled the aftershock of this event which seemed to presage the end of the school and residence at Prior’s Field: ‘I lost my mother, my home, my school, living in the country and my governess all at one blow.’5 Julia Huxley’s managing partner, Mrs Burton-Brown, emerged to carry on with the school – she would be succeeded in turn as headmistress by her daughter Beatrice – but for pupils like Enid Bagnold its magic was over. The damage inflicted on the sensitive schoolboy – the first of three powerful blows during his time at Eton and immediately afterwards – is self-evident. At such an age and with such a sensibility, an early event of this kind, the discovery that the ground beneath is not always firm and sure, can have a permanent effect. In Grey Eminence (1941) Huxley wrote of another historical character’s loss of a parent at the age of ten: ‘There remained with him, latent at ordinary times but always ready to come to the surface, a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless precariousness of all merely human happiness.’6 When Huxley later wrote of the isolation and grief of Anthony Beavis when his mother dies during his schooldays in Eyeless in Gaza (1936) ‘he was drawing on his own bitter experience,’ thought Gervas.7 ‘I am sure that this meaningless catastrophe was the main cause of the protective cynical skin in which he clothed himself and his novels in the twenties,’ judged Julian. A later friend, Dennis Gabor, would write: ‘to the last he remained suspicious of the scars left by the emotional ties of the family’.8 In both Brave New World and its counterpart, the ‘good Utopia’ of Island, the nature of motherhood and the role of the family is an important theme, and one informed by Huxley’s complicated feelings about the matter reaching back to his childhood experiences. On her deathbed, Julia wrote Aldous a letter which he kept with him for the rest of his life and in which she enjoined: ‘Judge not too much and love more.’9 The immediate consequence of Julia Huxley’s death was another expulsion from the Surrey arcadia for Aldous. Leonard moved, in July 1909, to what Julian called ‘a gloomy London house in Westbourne Square, away from our beloved Surrey’. Aldous shared Julian’s dislike of the Bayswater house at 27, Westbourne Square and tended to spend his holidays at Stocks or with Gervas’s parents, Dr Henry and Sophy Huxley, in nearby Porchester Terrace.