Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The most obvious career for Huxley would be teaching, preferably at Oxford, but his father recommended trying a temporary post at a public school, an idea which Huxley agreed was sensible, ‘though I would not propose to adopt it permanently’.28 But first the hurdle of Schools had to be surmounted, one which, he told Leonard, was ‘more tiring than any labour I have ever undertaken. Not only is the mental strain great, but the physical strain on the eyes – even using a typewriter – is very considerable: and I stagger out of the papers feeling as if I had been bruised all over after an acute attack of influenza.’29 By the middle of June, however, it was all over. His first good academic news of the summer was winning the Stanhope essay prize which gave him £20 to spend on some of the best modern scholarly editions of his favourite authors – Chaucer, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher (though he told Julian he would have preferred the hard cash). But the pressure to find employment remained insistent. At the end of June he left the ‘malarial dampness’ of Oxford and went to London to investigate possible ‘ways of escaping the work-house’.30 The Oxford Appointments Committee said it would circulate his details to various headmasters but he decided to make his own approaches to Eton. It was to be, as he facetiously set out the options to Julian, either ‘(a) To disseminate mendacity in our great Modern Press. (b) To disseminate mendacity in our Great Modern Public Schools.’31 Of the two he preferred the latter, interspersed with ‘bouts of mild journalismus’. The imminent publication of his first book of poems, though more important than anything else, would have little bearing on the matter of earning a living. Nor, for that matter would the news, which arrived on 2 July, that he had been one of only two people to win a First in English – he shared this honour with a young woman from Somerville, M.D Niven. He was delighted to read in a list in the Sunday papers ‘the most wonderful version of my name, viz ALDORES HUXLEY – which is most gloriously Spanish’.32

  Almost immediately, Huxley was offered a temporary job by the headmaster of Repton School, Geoffrey Fisher – later Archbishop of Canterbury. His predecessor – though this was not actually stated – had been sacked and Huxley found himself teaching Latin to the Lower Fourth and English and History to other forms. Although this was a stop-gap, lasting only to the end of the summer term, it seemed to him a very poor use of his brilliant First. He had just visited Eton, and hoped to get a post there, but the same problem – public schools at that time did not teach English literature so he would have to teach classics – would recur. He also went for interview to Rugby, where he was worried that the school was ‘traditionally ill-behaved and violent’ and thus not suitable for a short-sighted aesthete like himself.33 The school in turn was worried that ‘I should not be able to see well enough to supervise the boys’. He boasted to Ottoline: ‘No less than 6 Headmasters have implored me to consider their claims for next term.’ A university job, however, would be preferable and he wondered if W.P. Ker would know of a place in London University or elsewhere. He was experiencing the familiar rude transition from the intellectual and other pleasures of undergraduate life to the brutal realities of the world of work. ‘It’s a wrench going down from Oxford: the place becomes as personal as an old house,’34 he told his old headmaster, Gidley Robinson (apparently bearing him no grudge now for the prep-school bullying). It was also very lonely in digs, a far cry from the gregarious vitality of Garsington and Oxford which he had last tasted in the week before going to Repton. Then he had taken ‘Oxford’s most charming undergraduate (female)’35 to a theatre, and found himself staying in the same house as her, acting charades in the middle of Bagley Wood with her and their friends ‘like children’ and sleeping on top of a haystack under a tarpaulin.

  At Repton there was a fellow master he had known at Oxford called Victor Gollancz but little other company. He fired off letters to all his friends. Frances Petersen was told that the masters were all ‘Calibans’,36 that the whole experience was ‘bloody’, and asked to send a two ounce packet of tobacco from the University Co-op; the poet Robert Nicholls heard that ‘it is really quite fun simulating the possession of knowledge’;37 and Jelly, in a letter written on a piece of paper torn out of a school exercise book, was informed, ‘I don’t think I shall become a schoolmaster unless I can help it.’38 He begged her to write, because ‘letters are pleasant here as I am rather lonely and gloomy at times, not knowing anyone here’. He struggled to deal with the continuing reports of fatalities and, in his remarks to Jelly, gave some hint of the sort of post-war mood that would develop amongst him and his friends:

  Already quite a number of our friends have been killed in our offensive and I fear many more will go before it’s over. What I feel about it is that the thing one must not do is look back. Certainly one way that people survive after they are dead is in the society to which they belonged and particularly in their friends. To look back is a kind of betrayal of the life entrusted to one: one must go forward. The best way of remembering them is not by dwelling on the past but the future.38

  To Ottoline, whom he had failed to get over to see before leaving for Repton because his bicycle – ‘my poor Rosinante’ – suffered mechanical failure, he offered up the social comedy of Repton: the headmaster, Fisher, (‘a hearty parson’39) with whom he had tea on arrival, in the company of a selection of ‘local ladies – all definitely low-comedy in type – red-nosed spinsters who bridled and mopped and mowed and asked one “whether London was full” … oh these old masters! They speak with pride of having been here forty years: there is one who has a disease of going to sleep on all occasions, and another who is a dipsomaniac, and another who is indubitably possessed by the devil, and another whose sole knowledge of the classics consists in the 15th book of the Iliad, nothing other than which will he teach – is in fact incapable of teaching anything but it: he has been here since the Crimean War.’ This is the world – and the critical view of it – that would reappear in Huxley’s early novels.

  By the summer, he would be back at Garsington. It was there that an event occurred which he reported to Julian on 2 July, just before leaving for Repton: ‘I have at last discovered a nice Belgian: wonders will never cease.’40 He had made one of the most important discoveries of his life.

  1 David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest: Being Volume Two of the Golden Echo (1955), p37

  2 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (1976), p206

  3 Lord David Cecil, ‘Introduction’ to Lady Ottoline’s Album (1976) edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  4 L.86

  5 Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–1918 (1974) edited by Robert Gathorne-Hardy, p35

  6 SB in conversation with the author

  7 Ottoline at Garsington, p199

  8 Interview in West Wind, Fall, 1959. UCLA Huxley Collection

  9 Juliette Huxley, Leaves from the Tulip Tree (1986; 1987 ed., pp54–5)

  10 Ottoline at Garsington, p93

  11 Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol 2, p467

  12 L.88

  13 ‘D.H. Lawrence’, in The Olive Tree, p231 [reprinted from the Introduction to the Letters of Lawrence]

  14 Letters Vol 2, p483

  15 Ottoline at Garsington, p79

  16 HRC, Letter from AH to Ottoline from Westbourne Terrace. Undated but clearly after 10 December 1916

  17 L.89

  18 L.90

  19 L.89

  20 Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk, p115

  21 L.95

  22 L.92

  23 L.93

  24 L.94

  25 L.97

  26 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi, undated but probably May 1916

  27 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi from Balliol, 5 May 1916

  28 L.99

  29 L.100

  30 L.103

  31 L.104

  32 HRC, Letter to Ottoline, August 1916

  33 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell from Repton, undated but probably early July 1916

  34 HRC, Letter to G. Gidley Robinson from Repton, 12 July 1916<
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  35 L.107

  36 L.106

  37 L.107

  38 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi from Repton, 17 July 1916

  39 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell from Repton, undated but probably July 1916

  40 L.105

  VI

  Maria

  The ‘incomparable’1 Maria Nys, to whom Huxley would propose marriage on a rug on the lawn at Garsington some time in the late summer or early autumn of 1916, was born in the Flanders town of Courtrai on 10 September 1898 in a prosperous bourgeois mansion on the Boulevard Van den Peereboom. Her father, Norbert Nys, owned a clothing factory and his wife, Marguerite Baltus, whose brother George Baltus was a painter and Professor of Fine Art at Glasgow University, had four daughters of whom Maria – nicknamed Yaya, her first childish attempt to mouth her name, though later her familiar name would be the Italian Coccola or ‘little berry’ – was the eldest. Shortly after Maria’s birth, the family moved to Bellem, a small village on the canal between Ghent and Bruges, where Norbert – backed by substantial inherited capital – opened another clothing factory which would eventually end in ruin. As a child, Maria had a delicate bone structure – comme un oiseau,2 her sister Suzanne wrote in an unpublished family memoir – and a curvature of the spine which caused her to be sent away to stay with her grandmother at St Trond so that she could receive treatment from a renowned doctor at Liege. Marguerite Nys was a devout Catholic who christened her daughter after the Virgin to honour the fact that she had failed, at her first daughter’s birth, to complete the last of three promised pilgrimages to the shrine at Montaigu. Educated by nuns of the Sacred Heart order in a convent at Liege, Maria’s handwriting remained profoundly illegible – as a result, she claimed, of the example set her by the nun who taught her handwriting and whose hands were crippled and twisted with arthritis. Maria took ballet lessons and lessons in horse-riding, and was a clever and studious girl. The happy, privileged existence which Maria and her three sisters, Jeanne, Suzanne and Rose, enjoyed in Bellem – dans un petit paradis, in Suzanne’s words – was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War. Suzanne’s campagne plate et poétique des Flandres was about to be transformed into a war zone.

  Marguerite and her daughters fled to England, embarking at Ostend on a beautiful sunny day, bound for a pension run by the sister of a Courtrai friend, located in Grosvenor Square in London. Marguerite had letters of recommendation for friends of Uncle George Baltus in London, and one of these, Lady Ottoline Morrell, invited Maria, whom she had met in London, to come to stay. Suzanne Nys, in her memoir, speaks sharply of Ottoline. The strikingly beautiful sixteen-year-old with her enormous blue eyes – passionate, intelligent, a little highly strung, a little disoriented at being cast out of her solid bourgeois home in Belgium – was wholly overcome and smitten by Ottoline – subjugée et follement éprise in Suzanne’s words. Suzanne was not the only one to be concerned at the way Ottoline handled this naive young woman. D.H. Lawrence was outraged at an incident that took place in April 1915 at Garsington. Details are vague, but it seems that Maria, despairing at being left out of some activity, or feeling slighted, or perhaps anxious that she was going to be sent away (according to Suzanne she did in fact spend some time lodging in the home of the painter Roger Fry), swallowed some cleaning fluid. A doctor was called in the night and her life was saved but it is likely that permament damage was done to her internal organs. From being a little plump she was ever afterwards as thin as a rake – though one wonders whether, given the circumstances, a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa – not then an acknowledged illness and never mentioned before in connection with Maria – might be plausible. Lawrence was angry that Ottoline had, in his view, allowed her love of power to dominate in her relationship with Maria. ‘We were shocked about Maria: it really is rather horrible,’ he wrote to Ottoline on 23 April 1915. ‘I’m not sure whether you aren’t really more wicked than I had at first thought you. I think you can’t help torturing a bit.’3 He said it was as if she ‘with a strong, old-developed will had enveloped the girl, in this will, so that she lived under the dominance of your will … So that when she says it was because she couldn’t bear being left, that she took the poison, it is a great deal true. Also she feels quite bewildered and chaotic … Why must you use your will so much, why can’t you let things be, without always grasping and trying to know and to dominate.’ Then, as if conscious that he was on his high horse, Lawrence conceded: ‘I’m too much like this myself.’ He thought that the answer lay partly in class, in the patrician habits of domination Ottoline had acquired through her upbringing: ‘I suppose it is breeding.’ Lawrence and Maria would always be deeply fond of each other.

  Ottoline herself, in her journals, put her side of the story of Maria, although she is silent on the poisoning incident, and on Maria’s love for her, and treats her more as a rather vexing problem, in what is ultimately a partial and misleading account. She wrote that Maria had come to Garsington when she was ‘hardly more than a child, her hair in ringlets and her stout legs in ginger coloured boots and stockings’,4 but soon developed into ‘an attractive young woman’. She claimed: ‘It was very difficult to induce Maria to work at anything, and I was unhappy to feel that she for whose welfare I had become responsible was spending her life in idleness.’ It was for this reason that Ottoline resolved to badger the reluctant authorities at Newnham College, Cambridge to take Maria as an undergraduate, thinking that it would complete her education, force her to associate with other girls (reports from Cambridge suggest that this did happen, with Maria playing early morning hockey with her companions) and make her a little more independent of ‘Auntie’ Ottoline had taken Maria’s education in hand from the start, and the earliest letter from the young girl to her, in December 1914, before Garsington, presumably after a stay with her in London, Maria (still writing in French) thanked her hostess profusely and said that there was a library in the house in which she was writing the letter: ‘I am sure that I will do what you told me: read, read, read’ (beacoup beaucoup lire).5 Maria had also received some ballet lessons (including some from Nijinsky) but her delicate physique did not allow her to pursue this as a career. It was in autumn 1915 that she started at Newnham, residing at Peile Hall. Maria’s first letters to Ottoline from Cambridge, which have never before been published, convey movingly a young girl’s passionate uncertainties and tentative yearnings and confusions. Still grappling with her second language, English, she bravely encountered the Logic of James Mill and reported to Suzanne that the work was ‘terribly difficult, especially the logic’6 but Cambridge was nonetheless ‘very gay and exciting’. The tone of the letters to Ottoline is different. Maria is clearly overwhelmed by the older woman and fearful of doing and saying the wrong thing, anxious to follow her guidance. She addresses her in these early letters as ‘Dearest Auntie’, indicative of the protective element in the relationship. ‘I really know I am a silly person but I don’t think I will be silly always because I will listen to you as much as I can,’7 she blurted out in a letter from Newnham. In another she confessed: ‘I did an awful thing – Mr [Bertrand] Russell told me to remember him to Miss Stephen [Virginia Stephen, later Woolf] and I was quite convinced it was to Miss Fletcher until I did do it … It seems such an awful thing to do and I feel I ought to apologise to somebody.’8 Adolescent gaucherie and self-consciousness, however, were accompanied by other, stronger, feelings: ‘I cannot bear it, do so long to come back to you … Life is miserable here … I am so lonely and I only want to be with you because I love you so much. I love you so much more [than] I thought I did and I must be with you again I do so want you – dearest dearest Ottoline.’9