Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  But meanwhile, Aldous remained at Eton, fagging for his first year in College, and generally avoiding, as he had done at Hillside, any attempts at bullying by virtue of his distinctive manner. ‘From the word go,’ Lord Justice Harman recalled, ‘he was clearly going to be a superior being. He possessed a kind of effortless aristocratic approach to his work.’10 The syllabus was mostly Latin and Greek (the subjects Huxley himself would teach when he was briefly a schoolmaster at Eton after Oxford, English literature not forming part of the syllabus at Eton until the 1960s). There was a little modern history and a little French. But the main effort was in classics. Huxley recalled: ‘Actually, the education at Eton was uncommonly good at that time … There were a few very good teachers … We used to spend the whole of every Tuesday from 7 in the summer and 7.30 in winter till 10.30 at night composing Latin verses – we were given a piece of Tennyson or something and were told to turn it into elegaics or hexameters or Alcaics or Sapphics, and if you were a little further advanced Greek iambics – which was a sort of immense jig-saw puzzle game’.11 These mellow reflections from an interview given at the end of his life should be placed against a sharper view from his essay ‘Doodles in the Dictionary’ from Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) where the very same above exercise was described as ‘the exhausting and preposterous task of translating thirty or forty lines of English poetry into Latin, or on great occasions, Greek verses. For those who were most successful in producing pastiches of Ovid or Horace or Euripides, there were handsome prizes. I still have a Matthew Arnold in crimson morocco, a Shelley in half-calf, to testify to my one-time prowess in these odd fields of endeavour. Today I could no more write a copy of Greek iambics, or even Latin hexameters, than I could fly. All I can remember of these once indispensable arts is the intense boredom by which the practice of them was accompanied.’12 At the same time, however, Huxley believed that ‘the pupil in a progressive school lives in a fool’s paradise’ for the evident reason that: ‘As a preparation for life, not as it ought to be, but as it actually is, the horrors of Greek grammar and the systematic idiocy of Latin Verse were perfectly appropriate.’ Huxley, who was generally on the ‘progressive’ side of such questions, was nonetheless firmly of the view that the right to self-expression had done ‘enormous mischief in the sphere of education’.13 At Eton, where a new King’s Scholar or ‘K.S.’ would begin in the original stalls or cubicles of College, Huxley soon graduated to a room of his own where he read voraciously. Here was ‘the brilliant boy two years ahead of his contemporaries in book-learning’ who figures in the unfinished autobiographial novel which Laura Archera Huxley excerpts in her memoir, This Timeless Moment (1969).14 He also began to paint. This was a lifelong pleasure and recalls the skilled draughtsmanship of his grandfather, though Huxley claimed that he came from an aesthetically constricted family background. ‘I was brought up in the strait and narrow way of Ruskinism,’ he confessed in a passage in Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) – this being the Ruskin who, for the high-minded English bourgeois, ‘persuasively rationalised this ethicoreligious preference [for the Oxford Movement] in terms of aesthetics’ – and ‘so strict was my conditioning that it was not till I was at least twenty and had come under the influence of a newer school that I could perceive the smallest beauty in Saint Paul’s cathedral.’15 In the company of the Eton aesthetes he read Pater and Wilde but he was also passionately interested in science in general and biology in particular. His biology master M. H. Hill kept a cage of lemurs in his garden and Huxley, whose house tutor and ‘division’ (form) ‘beak’ (master), was A.W. Whitworth, thought Hill one of the best masters in the school. In an essay in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), written when he was an enthusiast for ‘non-verbal education’ and thus prone to criticise his own traditional education, he nonetheless recalled with pleasure how ‘I collected butterflies and kept their young in glass jars on the window sill of my cubicle at school’.16 Huxley’s ambition at this time was to be a doctor not a writer – though his later friend Gerald Heard claimed that his wish also was to be a painter.17

  Whether or not Huxley would have managed the necessary qualities to be a general practitioner – the bedside manner, the professional demeanour – events were soon to determine the issue. Quite apart from his appetite for highly unorthodox and fringe medicine throughout a life dominated by poor health, his principal interest in medicine was scientific, like his grandfather who admitted that he was drawn to medicine not as a career of healing but for the study of ‘the mechanical engineering of living machines’.18

  One Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1911 (the dates surrounding this episode are frustratingly vague), Dr Henry Huxley was coming back from a visit in the country when he decided to call in to see his precocious sixteen-year-old nephew, Aldous, at Eton during the Easter Half. He found the boy with an enormous compress on a very badly inflamed eye and immediately expressed his dismay to Matron, Gertrude Ward. Matron, in spite of her title, was not medically qualified and acted more in the role of a substitute mother for the boys, looking after their domestic needs. She had assumed that Aldous was suffering from a stye or the condition known as pink-eye. Dr Huxley announced that it was far more serious and said that he was taking him there and then to consult an eye specialist in London.19 The explanation for the infection that has usually been proffered was that it came from dust – on the playing field or out on an OTC exercise (as a member of the OTC Huxley had stood guard on the route of Edward VII’s funeral procession to Windsor, ‘keeping the rabble back with the butt end of my rifle’20) – aggravated because of illness and being generally run-down. The two years since his mother’s death at the end of 1909 had not been happy ones for Aldous who had frequently been isolated and left to his own devices. The boys were worked very hard at Eton and the diet may well have been unsatisfactory, all contributing to vulnerability to an infection that today would be cleared up quickly by a course of antibiotics. The cause of infection was diagnosed, after attempts by Henry Huxley and others to treat it, by the leading eye surgeon, Ernest Clarke, in December 1911, as staphylococcus aureus. The infection inflamed the cornea very badly – the condition is known as keratitis punctata – and, in spite of weekly injections at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in London, opacities in the cornea left when the inflammation subsided grossly impaired the teenager’s sight. He was effectively blind and would remain so for at least a year, possibly as long as eighteen months – certainly from early 1911 to the middle of 1912. The vagueness is to do with the absence of records but also because the near-blindness on either side of the acute period affected his ability to read and write. A letter to his cousin Joan Collier in July 1911 says, briefly (though always a very concise writer, this is Huxley’s shortest ever letter) and rather poignantly: ‘Scuse bad writing which same I cant see’.21 Looking back on this time, in an interview conducted in the United States in 1957, he recalled:

  It happened when I was about sixteen and a half, and I got this attack of keratitis which left one eye about nine-tenths blind and affected the other quite badly. I was unable to do any reading for nearly two years. I had to leave school and I had to have private tutors. I learned to read Braille and even Braille music, which is very difficult. And then, I was able, after about two years, to read with a rather powerful magnifying glass and went through university on that basis.22

  A voracious reader, a painter, a delighted explorer of the natural world, Huxley suddenly found that all these pleasures had been ripped away to be replaced by a darkness that must have seemed to him to have a connection to the occluded life of the affections he was living at this time. It was a catastrophe which he always believed was the most important single determining event in his early life. In that same interview, he went on to explain that this dousing of the light at a crucial point in his adolescent development cut him off from sports and ‘a great many ordinary kinds of outlets for social communication with people of my own age; and it did stimulate a tendency which I think I have by temperame
nt, a tendency towards solitude and what may be contemplation, so that in a sense it confirmed things’. It also meant that he missed another powerful experience shared by his contemporaries: participation in the First World War – ‘and so I no doubt may owe my life to it’.

  In a short book written in 1943 called The Art of Seeing, in which Huxley tried to popularise the doctrines of Dr William Bates who challenged conventional ophthalmology by proposing exercises for the eye instead of simply prescribing lenses, he gave a very precise account of his condition:

  At sixteen, I had a violent attack of keratitis punctata, which left me (after eighteen months of near-blindness, during which I had to depend on Braille for my reading and a guide for my walking) with one eye just capable of light perception, and the other with enough vision to permit of my detecting the two-hundred-foot letter on the Snellen Chart at ten feet. My inability to see was mainly due to the presence of opacities in the cornea; but this condition was complicated by hyperopia and astigmatism.23

  Medical records no longer exist but, in the view of a present-day consultant ophthalmologist, who was shown Huxley’s account, the injections at the Institute for Tropical Medicine would possibly have contained heavy metals, arsenic or other borates, boric acid, or bismuth with presumed antibacterial activity.24 Other injections favoured by ophthalmologists at the time included arsenicals, atropine, eserine, iodine of various kinds, and cocaine topically and in ointments but possibly even injected for pain.25 Keratitis punctata is classified into superficialis and profunda, the former the result of infection and leaving small grey dots in the cornea. One form of keratitis (interstialis) is caused by measles or congenital syphilis and results in complete corneal opacity for months and usually leaves considerable corneal scarring. This seems very close to the condition described by Huxley. It is reported that he had mumps at school, whose effects would have been the same as measles. But in addition to the infection, Huxley almost certainly had pre-existing eye problems to which the illness added. His hyperopia – long-sightedness – would require strong glasses for reading and long-sightedness can predispose to amblyopia or lazy eye. Photographs of Huxley in his youth were taken carefully to avoid showing this, and some may even have been retouched, but at least one shows distinct abnormality in the eye. ‘One eye resembles a blue smear,’ the author Robert Payne noted in 1948.26 And Virginia Woolf recalled: ‘There was a look of sightlessness in his eyes which reminded one of the blind seer.’27 Corneal scarring does tend to become thinner and less opaque as time passes and this may account for the marked visual improvement Huxley claimed after 1939 when he discovered the Bates method – though there remain conflicting accounts of his visual capacity. It is worth noting above how Huxley draws short of saying he was totally blind at sixteen, but the impairment of vision cannot have fallen far short of total blindness. It is a topic to which it will be necessary to return frequently, since visual impairment was a constant in his life. Sometimes, one feels, the problem was overstated. At others, his sight may have been far more impaired than it was claimed at a particular moment. Accounts sometimes clash. In short, the question posed by Christopher Isherwood needs regularly to be put: ‘How much did he actually see?’28

  In 1931 Huxley wrote to Clive Bell, after hearing from Jean Cocteau that Bell was having eye problems. He advised him to learn Braille: ‘It takes a very short time – I think I was only three or four weeks before I could read with reasonable facility and speed – and makes an astonishing difference … Everything has its compensations and I remember with pleasure the volupté of reading Braille in bed, in the dark and with one’s book and one’s hands snugly under the bedclothes. ’29 Realising that a medical or scientific career was now out of the question, Huxley turned to the idea of writing which, he told the interviewers mentioned above, was ‘a very important event in my life’. He began by writing ‘bad verses’ and then even ‘wrote an entire novel which I never read because I couldn’t see what I had written’. This 80,000 word novel – written on a typewriter – is now lost, but Huxley described it in an interview in 1961 as ‘a rather bitter novel about a young man and his relationship to two different kinds of women’.30 By means of Braille Huxley read a great deal (including Macaulay) and also taught himself to play the piano by touch. He displayed enormous courage at this time in ways that recall the determination in isolation of his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, persevering in his scientific work throughout the years before his fame. Even when he began to recover some sight during 1912 it was hard. ‘In looking back I am always amazed at the amount of reading I did with a small, powerful magnifying glass,’ he said in 1957. Without a trace of self-pity he threw himself into the task of coping. He rose above the disability but he never minimised the importance of the experience in his life. Until his death he was preoccupied with the relationship of mind and body, with the way in which the body often hampered and constrained the mind – but also how mind needed to discover the right sort of relationship with the body. ‘How senseless psychological and moral judgements really are apart from physiological judgements!’ he exclaimed to his lifelong friend Naomi Mitchison in 1933. ‘And of course I am also to a considerable extent a function of defective eyesight. Keratitis punctata shaped and shapes me; and I in turn made and make use of it.’31 In an essay in Music at Night, he wrote: ‘Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.’32 His phenomenally retentive memory, for example, was almost certainly shaped by the need to retain information and to minimise the difficulty of frequent referring-back to books and sources of information. Naomi, years later, recalled his use of Braille music and his playing, even after his sight had begun to return as an undergraduate, at her parents’ home in Oxford: ‘What I remember most is his long hands on the piano and his half-blind face reaching forward into the music. I only listened, but he was immersed.’33

  The immediate consequence for Aldous of the blindness was the end of his schooldays at Eton. For those dark months he was passed around to relatives and friends – Aunt Mary at Stocks, the Selwyns (relatives of Julia) at Hindhead, Naomi’s parents (the Haldanes) at Oxford, Gervas’s parents, and then, as things began to improve, to Marburg in Germany to learn German and to Oxford, with his brother, Trevenen, from April to June 1913. He was taught by private tutors, one of whom was Sir George Clark, the historian. Clark taught him English history while staying with the Huxleys in Bayswater as an undergraduate in September 1911. When Aldous required a book, Clark would lead him round the corner to the Braille lending library at Whiteley’s department store. He also attended some lectures at London University given by W.P. Ker. Towards the end of November, 1911, Leonard Huxley, who had paid a tutor’s fee and £4 to Eton in order to keep Aldous’s place in College open across the summer, accepted that he was now unlikely to return (though he retained an option of applying for a vacancy in May 1912). ‘His eyesight is improving,’ he told the Bursar on 24 November, ‘but I see little prospect of his gaining sufficient advantage from a renewal of his work at school. It is a great disappointment.’34 If Aldous’s eyesight really was ‘improving’ as early as November 1911 it may be that the period of actual blindness was less than a year in duration. Huxley himself was inconsistent, reporting anything from nearly two to three years as the period of blindness. In some very telegraphic, unpublished biographical notes prepared for his German translator, Herbert Herlitschka, in 1929, he wrote: ‘Education interrupted for three years by an infection of the eyes which left me for some time nearly blind … I was much alone & thrown on my own resources.’35 The shorter period is more likely to be accurate if we are referring to total blindness, but it is also true to say that for most of 191, 1912, and 1913, Huxley’s education was indeed ‘interrupted’ until October 1913 when he passed (with the aid of a magnifying glass) the entrance to Balliol College, Oxford.