Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  In February 1912, Leonard Huxley remarried after three years of being alone. His new wife, Rosalind, was thirty years younger – younger even than Julian and Trev – and the difficulties of this arrangement can be imagined. The announcement seems to have been abrupt and, on Rosalind’s side, these young intellectuals must have been a rather intimidating prospect. She was fond of them, however, and took good care of Aldous, allowing him to use the piano which her grandfather had given her as a wedding present. ‘She really did try,’ said Sybille Bedford.36 He was soon off, in May, to Germany where he stayed with a Professor Kayser, a geologist, and continued with his music. On his return he spent part of the summer with Gervas and Lewis Gielgud. At Christmas, in spite of his limited vision, Aldous went skiing in Montana in Switzerland with his uncle, John Collier, and the other two members of the threesome, Gervas and Lewis. In January 1913 he went on a walking tour with Trev on the South Downs and during spring and early summer stayed with Trev at Oxford at his digs in the Banbury Road. In May, the two brothers and Lewis Gielgud were rehearsing a play at the Oxford home of the parents of its author, Naomi Haldane (later Lady Mitchison), brother of the scientist J.B.S. Haldane. Naomi Mitchison describes this summer of 1913 as ‘a strawberry and gooseberry summer … We were always having picnics up the Cherwell, making fires and boiling kettles; we were always laughing and scrapping …’37 Later, staying in their home, Aldous would persuade Mrs Haldane that Naomi’s education demanded that she be allowed to read hitherto banned books such as Tom Jones and Madame Bovary. He also introduced her to music and art: ‘He knew an amazing amount about all the arts and took them seriously in a way that was tremendously encouraging to me in our somewhat anti-art Oxford home.’ The nineteen-year-old on the threshold of Oxford – tall, precocious, learned, contemptuous of the bourgeois codes of his class in relation to ‘shocking’ art, pleasure-seeking but with a firm underlying moral sense, is the Huxley of the twenties emerging from its chrysalis.

  It was in the summer of 1913, just before he went to Grenoble, that an incident occurred which is described, with her characteristic sensitivity and tact, by Sybille Bedford, who derived her account from conversations with Gervas – the only possible source.38 That summer, Aldous found himself alone in his father’s house in Westbourne Terrace. He decided to go out for a stroll during which he picked up a girl whom 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, telling Gervas later that he had been surprised by her boldness of approach and eagerness – young men of that class and epoch assuming that these were prerogatives of the male. This was Huxley’s sexual initiation and what Sybille Bedford calls his being ‘extremely susceptible to pretty women’ ensured that it was the beginning of a very active sexual career.

  In July Aldous stayed in Grenoble, learning French – which he would always speak and write effortlessly. He visited, like his great uncle, Matthew Arnold, the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse. From La Tronche he reported to his father on the butterflies ‘shining like new minted coins’39 – his eyesight clearly functioning again and his alert attentiveness to the beauty of nature undimmed. On his return there was a brief stay in Yorkshire in September with his two firm friends. And then Oxford.

  Trev, with whom Aldous had spent the earlier part of the summer, was aged twenty-three and in his last term at Balliol. He seems to have been the most likeable and charming of the three Huxley brothers. He is transformed fictionally into Brian Foxe in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), who has the same stammer and the same scrupulous conscience: ‘“But if you d-don’t st-tick to your p-principles …” he hesitated … “well, where are you?” he concluded despairingly.’40 To anticipate the narrative slightly, what happened to him in August 1914, when Aldous had completed his first year at Oxford, was the third major blow of Aldous’s youth, following the death of his mother and the loss of his sight, the three events constituting an undoubted impairment. These events injected a greater bitterness into his early writing than might otherwise have been there (though it would be over-determinist to ignore the contribution of his free-ranging intelligence, his immersion in literary precedents, his wider political and social awareness, his sensitivity to the historical moment). Trev was a worrier, which caused him to overwork and tire himself and in consequence he secured that summer only a second in Greats. Huxleys were meant to garner firsts. Trev stayed on at Oxford for a further year of postgraduate study, but his hypersensitive nature, the confusion within him between inherited high ideals and the normal sensual feelings of a young man, came to a head when he fell in love with a young woman who was not, according to the upper middle class codes his family lived by, ‘suitable’. She has never been identified by name but she was said by Julian to be ‘an attractive and intelligent’ young housemaid who worked at the family home. Trev was secretly trying to educate her by taking her out to plays, concerts, and lectures but the affair was, they both realised, doomed. She eventually handed in her notice. Knowing the hoplesseness of the liaison, and tortured by his whole condition – he had also failed to pass the Civil Service examinations – Trev fell into a serious mental breakdown. The ‘black melancholy’ that had cursed his grandfather and which would afflict throughout life his elder brother Julian (though not the more equable Aldous) struck. He was sent, on specialist advice, to a Surrey nursing home, the Hermitage at Reigate, the same that had taken Julian the year before. Though instructions had been given that he was not to be allowed out of anyone’s sight, Trev set out on Saturday morning, 15 August 1914, for a walk on the downs. When he failed to return the police were called. There was a search. Eight days later, on Sunday 23 August, Trev was found in a nearby wood. He had hanged himself from a tree. A letter from the housemaid was in his pocket and it was left to the parlourmaid, Sarah, to explain what it all meant. The family – particularly the younger members like Margaret who had treated Trev as ‘the hub of the family wheel’41 and Aldous – was devastated by the loss and the awful circumstances of the delay in finding the body. Aldous wrote to Gervas:

  There is – apart from the sheer grief of the loss – an added pain in the cynicism of the situation. It is just the highest and best in Trev – his ideals – which have driven him to his death – while there are thousands, who shelter their weakness from the same fate by a cynical, unidealistic outlook on life. Trev was not strong, but he had the courage to face life with ideals – and his ideals were too much for him.42

  Julian later wrote: ‘Trev’s suicide was one of the most ghastly things that could have happened. He was brilliant, good-looking, athletic, especially as a mountaineer, wrote good poetry, and was very popular. ’43

  This event would cast a shadow across the middle of Aldous’s Oxford career. But when he went up to Balliol in the autumn of 1913, his sight more or less restored, he threw himself into that brief pre-War moment of excitement and intellectual discovery with all the energy and enthusiasm at his disposal.

  1 L.29

  2 Julian Huxley, Memories 1 (1970) P64

  3 Letter from Mrs Humphry Ward’s daughter, Dorothy Ward, to her friend, Miss Jewett, 13 December 1908. Quoted SB1.24

  4 Ibid.

  5 Margaret Huxley, letter to Sybille Bedford, October 1969. Quoted in SB1.25

  6 Grey Eminence (1941), p21

  7 Mem. Vol., p59

  8 Mem. Vol., p69

  9 Quoted by Sybille Bedford addressing P.E.N. meeting ‘In Honour of Aldous Huxley’, 15 November 1978. Tape in National Sound Archive

  10 Quoted in SB1.28

  11 Recorded interview with John Chandos July 1961. Quoted by SB1.29

  12 ‘Doodles in the Dictionary’, Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), P240

  13 Music at Night (1931), p67

  14 Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (1968), p212–38

  15 Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934), P124

  16 Adonis and the Alphabet, p79

  17 Gerald Heard, ‘The Poignant Prophet’, Kenyon Review, p52 ‘As a bo
y he was determined to become an artist.’

  18 R. W. Clark, The Huxleys (1968), p11

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

  20 L.36

  21 L.39

  22 Interview in Hollywood with students of Los Angeles School of Journalism, 18 December 1957. Text in UCLA Huxley Collection

  23 The Art of Seeing (1943), pvi

  24 I am greatly indebted for this information to Mr John Deutsch FRCS, FRCOphth, Consultant Ophthalmologist, Victoria Eye Hospital, Hereford

  25 Mercurial inunctions were used as well as ‘subconjunctival injections of plain water, saline solutions, chloride or cyanide of mercury’ – Aids to Ophthalmology (1919)

  26 Robert Payne, ‘Aldous Huxley,’ in Now More Than Ever: Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium, Munster (1995, Frankfurt), p5. From the Payne papers, State University of New York at Stonybrook

  27 Mem. Vol., P36

  28 Mem. Vol., p156

  29 L.344–5

  30 Interview with John Chandos, July 1961. Quoted in SB1.35

  31 L.372–3

  32 Music at Night, p37

  33 Mem. Vol., p52

  34 Eton College MS, Letter from Leonard Huxley to Bursar, 24 November 1911

  35 Reading MS. Unpublished note in Herlitschka file

  36 SB in conversation with the author

  37 Mem. Vol., P51

  38 SB1.57

  39 L.52

  40 Eyeless in Gaza (1936). Chapter 36

  41 Quoted by SB1.47

  42 L.61

  43 Memories 1, p96

  IV

  Oxford

  Aldous arrived at Balliol in October 1913 for the beginning of the Michaelmas term. ‘Behold me established in the little alcove of my room, with a fine view of Balliol Chapel in the foreground and some bluer sky than usual,’1 he announced brightly to his father, on Sunday 12 October. Constant confusions between the two Huxleys, Gervas and himself, dogged the first few days. Another inconvenience was having rooms opposite the Chapel, as he confided to his young friend, Jelly D’Aranyi, the concert violinist: ‘one is made unhappy on Sundays by the noise of people singing hymns’.2 Clearly, neither Chapel nor the ‘awful noise’ of the hymn-singers which ‘rather gets on my nerves’ would appeal to the grandson of the man who invented the word ‘agnostic’. Huxley had also to face some examinations on the first day he arrived, which depressed him a little, but his chief anxiety was that he had been ‘very dull and grumpy’ at his last meeting with Jelly, adding ‘perhaps I always am, I don’t know’. Huxley’s early encounters with women – to judge from the apologies and explanations in his youthful correspondence – appear to have been prone to gaucheness and the regretted faux pas. The normal moodiness and self-regard of the adolescent no doubt also played their part. Huxley’s natural reluctance to engage in some of the more boisterous forms of social life, he realised, had to be overcome if the pursuit of women were to be assured of success. The following month, having attended a dance at the Haldanes, he resolved to improve his dancing technique ‘or otherwise everyone suffers’.3

  But it was his intellectual performance, rather than his conduct on the dance floor, which pre-occupied Huxley in the first months at Oxford. In spite of still impaired vision – almost no sight in one eye and limited performance with the other – Huxley threw himself into his reading. He would later tell an interviewer that he marvelled at his ability to read, sometimes for eight hours a day, at Balliol by means of a magnifying glass.4 He loved the Bodleian and the opportunity to plunge into original texts. He was attending the lectures of Walter Raleigh – his tutor was R.J.E. Tiddy of Trinity – and reading Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon literature, and some Greek philosophers. He found Dryden and his contemporaries ‘most exciting’ and the latter’s verse satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681), together with the responses it engendered, wholly absorbed him as he discovered in Bodley ‘the most fascinating volume’ of original satires. ‘It gives one a queer new sensation, seeing all these absurd old books,’ he told his father, ‘as one somehow always pictures past ages as producing about ten classical works by one or two great names and nothing much else, whereas the trash must have been quite as plentiful in comparison, if not more so, than it is now.’5 Huxley, all his life an ardent seeker-out of the best, and of the ‘classical works’, developed a very early disinclination to waste his time and his eyesight on trash. The sense one derives, from a reading of these first letters from Oxford, is of a delighted exploration of the English literary tradition that would form the foundation of the wide and easy allusiveness of the later essays. English Literature was still a relatively new subject at Oxford and Huxley was one of the first wave of beneficiaries of the new discipline. To his fellow undergraduates, Huxley seemed so much farther ahead and to have read so much – modern French poetry, for example – in spite of his handicap. He quickly became the centre of Balliol’s literary intellectual set, as Gervas later explained:

  All freshmen had rooms in College and Aldous’s ‘sitter’ soon became the rendezvous of the first-year contemporaries who formed our set … Instinctively Aldous’s contemporaries must have recognised the originality and distinction of his mind with its catholic tastes and its curiosity about all things and all men. They were drawn to him, too, by his unassuming friendliness, his complete lack of any pretensions and the gaiety that his company always engendered.6

  Huxley attended the Balliol Sunday evening concerts as a matter of course but he was also interested in the new jazz music that was arriving from America. ‘He had an old upright piano in his “sitter” and on it he entertained us by strumming the accompaniments to our singing of such popular numbers as “The Wedding Glide”, and “He’d have to get under, get out and get under his little machine”’, Gervas recalled. Politics, however, seem not to have engaged the smart Balliol intellectual set. ‘Most of us embraced a mild and indifferent Toryism and joined the Union, though I only remember Aldous and I attending one debate,’ wrote Gervas. They were all ‘wholly free’ of the urge for political change which a minority at Oxford was working for and which Huxley himself in later decades would put at the centre of his writing:

  Looking back it seems extraordinary that we should have shown such a complete lack of concern with the current issues that were so deeply affecting our country and the world, issues such as Irish Home Rule and the Ulster rebellion and constitutional crisis, women’s suffrage, the Balkan Wars and their threat to the peace of Europe or Anglo-German Colonial and Naval rivalry.7

  As their first undergraduate year drew to a close in the summer of 1914 such political innocence no doubt quickly vanished. Huxley in fact applied to join the Oxford Socialist Society, and in spite of Gervas’s witness, there is little evidence of any ‘Toryism’ of a mild or strong variety in Huxley, though it is more than likely that he held the usual prejudices of his class. In particular, casually anti-Semitic remarks seem to have been endemic at the time in this layer of English society. The Secretary of the Socialist Society was R. Palme Dutt, a Balliol contemporary, who enrolled Huxley – some time between 1914 and 1916 – as a full member. This involved making a declaration of socialist faith – or at any rate signing what was known as ‘The Basis’ (originally the old Fabian Basis) affirming acceptance of the principles of socialism:

  I recall the picture of him scrutinising most precisely, with the aid of the magnifying glass he used to aid his eyesight, the small print of the Basis, and then declaring his satisfaction and signing, but adding that he did not want to be ‘an economic type of Socialist’, since he hated economics, and supported Socialism for the same reasons as Oscar Wilde had done.8

  The allusion is to Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), a significant one since Huxley’s mature preference was for a politics of decentralisation and of small self-governing communities very similar to the classic libertarian anarchist tradition. That tendency is also present in what many
have seen as the serious political vision which underpins the playful surface paradoxes of Wilde’s essay. The alternative socialist tradition of statism and democratic centralism was one that was wholly unsympathetic for Huxley and in later years he was to prove equally forthright in his opposition both to communism and to fascism. At this stage, however, he was primarily an aesthete and it was the arts group of the Socialist Society which mostly engaged him. With Tommy Earp (later an art critic for the Daily Telegraph) and Grattan Esmonde (subsequently a Sinn Fein MP) and others, the group, in February 1916, launched a magazine called the Palatine Review, where Huxley’s first writing appeared. Naomi Mitchison remembered: ‘He was of course in Oxford politics, including the University Co-Op Shop, which had been started on highly ideological grounds, with a room above for discussions.’ The socialist writer G.D.H. Cole was one of the members of the Co-Op as was Tommy Earp who had a pair of pyjamas made out of Liberty’s silk by the Co-Operative dressmaker.