Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  22 L.67

  23 L.69

  24 L.67

  25 HRC, Letter to Jelly D’Aranyi from Balliol undated but probably April 1915 (see L.69)

  26 HRC, Letter to Jelly D’Aranyi from Cherwell 5 June 1915

  27 L.71

  28 L.73

  29 L.73

  30 L.74

  31 Never reprinted by Huxley it is quoted in full in SB1.55–6

  32 L.81

  33 L.81

  34 L.83

  35 L.85

  V

  Garsington

  Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, a legendary site in early twentieth century English literary and artistic life, was the home, from 1915 to 1927, of Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline was the half sister of the sixth Duke of Portland and Philip was Liberal MP for Burnley in Lancashire. They were not excessively rich by the standards of the day but the Bohemianism over which Ottoline presided was very definitely of the salon not the garret. A great deal – perhaps too much – has been written about Garsington. Its posthumous reputation has tended to rise and fall in line with that of Bloomsbury which supplied it with many of its characters and anecdotes. It is nonetheless worth quoting the judgement of David Garnett as being representative of those who came to enjoy Ottoline’s hospitality but without losing their critical faculty. (One has some sympathy in fact for a woman who was repayed so unkindly for the hospitality she lavished; as well as Huxley’s effort in caricature in Crome Yellow, she was Hermione in Lawrence’s Women in Love, Lady Septuagesima Goodley in Osbert Sitwell’s Triple Fugue (1921), and appeared also in Gilbert Cannan’s Pugs and Peacocks (1921).) ‘Though in no way an artist,’ Garnett observed, ‘she was an original character who managed by strength of will to escape from the conventionality of her upbringing, without losing her position in Society … Spiritually her best quality was generosity: her worst, meanness and the love of power. The good and evil in her waged frequent warfare. ’1 Virginia Woolf observed bitchily that: ‘She had a great gift for drawing people under. Even Middleton Murry, it is said, was pulled down by her among the vegetables of Garsington.’2 A more sympathetic observer, Lord David Cecil, observed ‘she seemed built on the Elizabethan scale with Elizabethan grandeur, imagination, and passion’. Moreover, ‘though she had been born into the great world, she had left it early and during the First War had lived in open opposition to it’.3 This hints at the special flavour of Garsington, at its sense of being at once privileged and anti-Establishment in its political and social sympathies. In contrast to other artistic patronesses – such as Sybil Colefax, whose visitors’ book would also soon record Huxley’s name, and who was accused of merely collecting celebrities – Ottoline Morrell exercised shrewd discrimination in her choice of guests and had an eye for originality, including emergent originality. It is not known how she ‘discovered’ Huxley, who at that stage had merely a reputation as a brilliant undergraduate and an incipient poet, but, six months after finally moving in to the Manor in May (there had been delays with a sitting tenant), she invited Huxley to join the party at the end of November. She chose to introduce him at lunch as the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley. Almost immediately, this encounter at Garsington resulted in a meeting with D.H. Lawrence. Both men were impressed with each other and a friendship was formed that lasted until Lawrence’s death in 1930 (he died in the arms of Huxley’s wife). Huxley’s account of that first Sunday at Garsington was up to the standards of acerbity normally adhered to by Ottoline’s guests. He told his father (who was to prove too straight-laced to appreciate the freedom of the Garsington atmosphere):

  I had an amusing day on Sunday – going out to Garsington for luncheon to the Philip Morrells, who have bought the lovely Elizabethan manor there. Lady Ottoline, Philip’s wife, is a quite incredible creature – arty beyond the dreams of avarice and a patroness of literature and the modernities. She is intelligent, but her affectation is overwhelming. Her husband, the MP, is a conceited ass, very amiable, but quite a buffoon.4

  Huxley was sharpening the tools that would be used to create Crome Yellow six years later. He was not alone in his judgement of Philip. David Garnett recalled that Morrell, ‘posing as a farmer, exhibited precisely the kind of humbug which the Victorian novelists, such as Surtees and Thackeray, loved to make the subject of their good-tempered fun … He was addicted to double-breasted waistcoats.’ He was also addicted to cutting the hair of the numerous young women at Garsington in the prevailing page-boy fashion started at the Slade, and trying his chances with them. Everyone was enchanted with the manor house itself. ‘It was noble, even grand, yet it was the very reverse of ostentatious,’ thought Garnett. Ottoline had transformed the rooms, ‘stamping her personality ruthlessly everywhere … The oak panelling had been painted a dark peacock blue-green; the bare and sombre dignity of Elizabethan wood and stone had been overwhelmed with an almost oriental magnificence.’ The triumph was ‘the Red room’ where everyone gathered around the fire in the evenings. In her diary of that first summer of 1915, overshadowed by the war, Ottoline wrote: ‘I should like to make this place into a harbour, a refuge in the storm, where those who haven’t been swept away could come and renew themselves and go forth strengthened.’5 This sounds as if it were Lady Ottoline’s war effort. For the next few years, Huxley would be a regular visitor and would meet here Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Mark Gertler, Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Dorothy Brett, Dorothy Carrington, Mary Hutchinson, Gerald Shove, and countless others – a roll-call of Bloomsbury’s most celebrated names. So frequent were his visits that the staff referred to one particular guest room as ‘Mr Huxley’s room’. He was in no doubt that he had been one of those renewed and strengthened in Ottoline’s sanctuary, and was dismayed at the later rift caused by her (understandable) anger at the way she was portrayed as Mrs Wimbush in Crome Yellow (the house in that novel, of course bore no architectural similarity whatsoever to Garsington).

  She herself recalled her impression of Huxley on that first visit in November 1915:

  A very thin, very tall, delicate young man, with a very beautiful serious face arrived, dressed in a corduroy coat and cut breeches and stockings [he had bicycled over from Oxford]. His eyesight was very bad, which made him stoop in order to view things closely. He was rather silent and aloof, and I felt as he sat during the afternoon that he was rather bored, for we happened to be alone that Sunday.

  Her reaction was characteristic of the way many people responded to Huxley. His silence and reserve – ‘he was very shy’,6 according to Sybille Bedford – could be unsettling, especially when it was suddenly broken by some brilliant observation or unexpected flow of talk. Clever people are often mistrusted and Huxley, seeing other people imperfectly, impossibly tall, impatient of silly small talk, must often have been taken to be ‘aloof’. Lytton Strachey – who might have been thought to have found in Huxley a kindred spirit in the sport of urbane mockery – complained to Ottoline that he was ‘too Oxfordy’ and ‘frivolous’.7 Katherine Mansfield found him too much of an innocent and mocked him behind his back, making fun of his famous conversational tic – ‘incredible’. Years later, in an interview, Huxley would say of Bloomsbury that in spite of the aesthetic education he received at the hands of Roger Fry: ‘It was a rather limited world in a certain sense, but it was a very brilliant one.’8 One of its limitations, in terms of humane sympathy, was its fondness for cruel gossip.

  Another witness at that first lunch was the young and beautiful Swiss governess, Juliette Baillot, who had been appointed – after an interview with the Morrells conducted in the first-class waiting room on Oxford station – to look after their daughter who was christened Julian. In her memoir, Leaves from the Tulip Tree (1986) Juliette recalled the brilliant young man (whose elder brother, Julian, she would eventually marry) dismounting from his bicycle:

  His six-foot-two [actually it was six-foot-four-and-a-half] seemed even taller because of the slend
erness of his body and his slight stoop. Under the thick brown hair his wide face was pale, with full lips and blue eyes which had an inwards look until one realised that he was totally blind in one eye and not seeing fully with the other … On this first occasion he was mostly silent but when he spoke, the mellow quality of his voice and the quality of what he said was surprising. The unusual beauty of his face, unselfconscious, with its elusive gaze (best said in French un regard intérieur), a slightly detached serenity – not shy, but self-contained, and added to this strange name, Aldous, made a memorable impression.9

  Not long after this, Juliette took Julian to tea with the brilliant young man in his rooms at Balliol – where Ottoline herself would be entertained on another occasion, finding Aldous and his aesthetic undergraduate companions ‘so soft and effeminate, elegant with gentle, affected movements and voices’.10 Juliette remembered: ‘He entertained us with delicious lemon tea and crumpets, speaking impeccable French, as well as reciting Lewis Carroll, Struwelpeter, Max und Moritz, all the cherished bits and pieces which had nourished his childhood. Half-teasing, half-serious, he treated us with a special courtesy.’

  The meeting with Lawrence took place on 10 December 1915. At Lady Ottoline’s suggestion, Lawrence had written to Huxley on 7 December asking him to come over to his house at Byron Villas, Vale of Health in Hampstead. ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell wrote to me, that we ought to know each other,’11 Lawrence explained. Lawrence was planning to go to Florida to found a community – ‘a sort of unanimist colony’12 as Huxley put it to Julian. Huxley always recalled vividly that ‘wintry afternoon’13 in Hampstead: ‘Before tea was over he asked me if I would join the colony, and though I was an intellectually cautious young man, not at all inclined to enthusiasms, though Lawrence had startled and embarrassed me with sincerities of a kind to which my upbringing had not accustomed me, I answered yes.’ The terms in which Huxley describes this encounter – the reference to the different expectations raised by his upbringing – hint at the nature of this unusual relationship between the cerebrotonic, the rational man, and the passionate, visceral, anti-scientific, novelist. It ought not to have worked but it did. Lawrence wrote to Ottoline after their first meeting: ‘I liked Huxley very much. He will come to Florida.’14 But the project never materialised – just as well, since Huxley had two more terms at Oxford to complete and would anyway have found it difficult to leave the country in wartime for such a venture. Ottoline had been anxious about the meeting she had engineered. ‘I think he was puzzled and rather overcome, and perhaps scared, at Lawrence’s quick and immediate approach, brushing away all preliminaries – vetting him, in fact, putting him under his X-ray.’15 She also feared that Huxley was not quite the right candidate for such a utopian experiment. ‘I felt how miserable Aldous, with his fastidious reserve, his delicate and perhaps over-intellectual temperament, would be if he went.’ Huxley, however, reassured her. ‘One can’t help being very much impressed by him,’ he told her, again revealing a kind of shame about his inability to respond, because of the nature of his background and education, to this quite exceptional, nakedly exposed spirit:

  There is something almost alarming about his sincerity and seriousness – something that makes one feel oneself to be the most shameful dilettante, persifleur, waster and all the rest. Not but what I think he’s wrong. All that he condemns as mere dilettantism and literary flippancy – and the force of his sincerity carries one temporarily with him – all this is something much more than an excrementitious by-product of real life. It all comes back again to the question we were talking about the other day – the enrichment of emotion by intellect. And so too with Lawrence: I’m inclined to think that he would find a life unenriched by the subtler amenities of intellect rather sterile.16

  Touched by a force of sincerity and passion in Lawrence that was absent from the Bloomsbury ‘persifleurs’ like Strachey who gathered round in the Red room, Huxley wasn’t quite ready to forswear the supremacy of the sceptical intellect. His continuing refusal to do so, throughout his relationship with Lawrence, is what gives it its special piquancy – visible in the twists and turns of his essay on Lawrence which stands as an introduction to the selection of letters he edited. That would come later. For now, he concluded to Ottoline: ‘But I think there’s a lot in his theory of the world being in a destructive, autumnal period.’

  In the new year of 1916, Huxley’s visits to Garsington became more frequent. It was the perfect ambient for him intellectually: civilised, witty, and daring. In addition, exposure to painters and to writers on art like Roger Fry played a formative role in his aesthetic education. Though some of the guests at Garsington were pacifists and conscientious objectors (Philip Morrell, in the House of Commons, had spoken out against the war), Huxley was not at this stage of their number and, early in 1916, he submitted himself – rather hopelessly in view of his curtailed vision – to the army recruiting office. One Thursday morning in January he went before a major to be sworn in or ‘attested’ for service but, having taken one look at the blinking poet, the major refused to go any further, ‘saying it was the most abject folly to go thro’ all the farce with someone so almost certainly unfit’.17 A doctor examined Huxley, pronouncing him ‘totally unfit – class 1 category A’, and he was sent back to Oxford. Instead of the trenches, he spent the first days of the new term in the stuffy, overheated atmosphere of the Bodleian Library, swotting for the Stanhope Prize. Huxley’s special subject for 1916 was Milton, whom he was forced to swallow with ‘a nauseous diet of Anglo-Saxon’.18 Academic work was interspersed with visits to Garsington where Huxley at last made the acquaintance of ‘the strange creature Lytton Strachey … a long-haired and bearded individual very like a Russian in appearance and very entertaining’.19 He told Naomi Haldane about the ‘japes and harmless practical jokes’20 that went on at these weekend parties at Garsington. In February, he attended her wedding to Dick Mitchison at the Oxford Registry Office. ‘Pity it’s not to be ecclesiastical,’ he told her, ‘I would have made such an excellent page.’ She later recalled: ‘In the gaps between slaughters we were being teenagers with our own delights and problems, and embarassments and importances and giggles and glimpses of overwhelming beauty and excitement.’ There was also the cinema, another American import, like jazz, which Huxley was very interested by – though in the next decade he would sound a very different note. Huxley saw the film version of Jane Eyre after which he said he wanted to see Birth of a Nation which was ‘said to mark quite a new epoch in cinematographic art’.21

  Huxley was leading an increasingly social existence at this time, dining at All Souls’, lunching with all the most important and interesting people in Oxford, and beginning to make himself known as a writer. The Socialist Society’s new Palatine Review was just about to be launched and Huxley was touting for subscriptions at three-and-six for six issues. He hoped that Julian, now in an academic post in Texas, would help to recruit subscribers in the USA. H.W. Massingham of The Nation saw the first issue of the Review with Huxley’s poem, ‘Mole’, in it and asked him to submit some poems to him. But it was not all dazzle and self-indulgent enjoyment. One day in February, Huxley went to listen to the Oxford tribunal which dealt with appeals against conscription and was appalled at the callousness and at the injustices done. His report of the experience to his father shows the humane side of Huxley, angered by the ‘petty tyrannies and the wholesale attempts to cheat men into the army’,22 and by the rough treatment of conscientious objectors. Not so ‘disgustingly hectored’ as they were in London, Huxley still felt that ‘the tribunals are far from treating them with the respect to which they are entitled both by the Act and by ordinary good feeling’. He concluded: ‘The whole thing enormously decreases popular sympathy with the war.’ He was also appalled by the xenophobia of the popular media like the Daily Express with their nicknames for foreigners and their whipping up of crude emotions. ‘This sentimental honeymoon of hate has gone on long enough;’ he told his father, ‘it is t
ime we settled down to thinking reasonably about each other.’23 He was also sympathetic to the case of an undergraduate of St John’s College, J.A. Kaufmann, a German Jew who had anglicised his name to Kaye, and who had been harangued by members of the tribunal after he applied for exemption on the grounds of conscientious objection to war and being an international socialist. Huxley’s moral engagement with public issues and his essentially humane stance were growing. He still wanted to do something for the war effort (even as he was repelled by the war’s reverberations in civil life, the erosion of civil liberty and the threat of ‘collapse of English civilisation’24 from militarisation). One possibility was to work for one of the Government departments. He had toyed over the winter with volunteering for work in the Foreign Press department of the War Office but, as he explained to Julian, the twelve to fourteen hour days would have been ‘quite beyond my ocular abilities to stand the strain’.25 The longer the war went on, the more he came to detest it, telling his brother: ‘At the beginning I shd. have liked very much to fight: but now, if I could (having seen all the results), I think I’d be a conscientious objector, or nearly so. But I shudder to think what England will be like afterwards – barely habitable.’

  Meanwhile, of course, there was Garsington as a refuge and a visible incarnation of the civilisation being fought for. ‘The Morrell household is among the most delightful I know: always interesting people there and v. good talk: I go over from Oxford often to see them.’ And not just the Morrells. ‘I saw the amiable Barbara Hiles there the other day – very entertaining, and gipsy-esque with short hair and gold earrings.’ Huxley had not, however, allowed the charms of Barbara Hiles to blot out those of Jelly d’Aranyi. The latter remained a very special confidante, to whom he unburdened himself more intimately than with anyone else at this stage of his life. After a brief visit at Easter to Stocks, followed by a walking holiday with Tommy Earp, business manager of the Palatine Review, in the Cotswolds – to Chipping Campden and Snow’s Hill – Huxley returned to Oxford in May to work for his finals. He worked so hard, he told Jelly, ‘that I feel I could almost shoot myself in the evenings out of sheer boredom’.26 To assuage that boredom he had taken to going for long walks at night on his own ‘miles and miles by the river till I get more cheerful again. Even if one wants to feel depressed one can’t after an hour in the wind and the moonlight. So then I sing like a crow – symphonies and old French songs and things – and think of nice things and come back quite happy – and tonight I’ve done some work: but it’s late and I’m falling to sleep in spite of strong coffee.’ In another letter in the same month, he told Jelly that sometimes ‘one despairs about things with this vampire of a war draining the life and soul out of the world’.27 Already, he was beginning to think about his future beyond Finals. He might go to America to visit Julian – who will of course have changed. ‘But I myself am so different from what I was two years ago. This is the period of one’s life, I think, when one passes most rapidly from stage to stage of one’s development. In many ways Julian is like me: but in certain points very different.’ Jelly, too, was told how wonderful was Ottoline Morrell: ‘I feel in her house most completely “at home” in a more congenial atmosphere than almost anywhere else.’ And certainly more so than in his father’s house at 27 Westbourne Square.