Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  And why did I who was so horrified by those Garsington men (and women) I who was so squashed by the English and terrified of them, why did I let Aldous approach me …? Why, because, though I was not then in love with Aldous, even though he was in love with me, we could see all the underlying possibilities which are really facts. He could sense, shall we say, instead of see, that in spite of all he had been told, I was a steady one, and I could sense that I would be entirely devoted to his service for the rest of our lives. In fact we were fated to each other.46

  Maria’s feelings about marriage to Aldous will be examined in more detail later. It is, however, worth noting here, not just Maria’s mature reflections on Garsington and her revulsion from it in retrospect, but the revelation that love was more ardent at first on Huxley’s side than on hers. This was the view also of Ottoline. In the last weeks of 1916, when she returned from Harrogate where she had been recuperating from an illness, she had what she called ‘long and anxious talks’47 with Huxley about Maria and her future. ‘I found that he was very much in love with her,’ she wrote, ‘but of course it was impossible for him to think of marrying then. He was not as yet earning anything and she was so absurdly young – but I was doubtful how deep or serious his feelings for her were.’ She claimed that the summer before he had been very much in love with Carrington. ‘Carrington, however, had many admirers, and fluttered from one to another, whereas Maria sat still, silent and receptive, her pale magnolia face and beautiful dark eyes gazing out in pathetic appeal. Of what was she thinking? That was the magnet that attracted Aldous.’ Ottoline was also unsure whether Maria was in love with Aldous ‘and I was doubtful if they were suited to each other’. The fact that Maria was ‘foreign’ seems to have been a problem for Ottoline who felt that she ‘had no understanding of English ways or traditions’. Juliette – herself a victim of this casual patrician racism – would later reproach Ottoline for failing to understand Maria and her sense of displacement.48 Maria confessed to Juliette, many years later, that she had often been ‘deeply unhappy’ at Garsington ‘being teased by Ottoline for being plump, whilst also suffering from a complete lack of money’. Maria once walked all the way back from Richmond to her London digs because she had no money for the train fare.

  Huxley, however, did not share the xenophobia of the English upper middle class. His worry was simply that Maria might not really love him. In the early months of 1917, when she was clearly very happy in Italy and careless about writing to him, these doubts made him very sad and melancholy in his room at Garsington next door to Mark Gertler, who ‘used to tell us how he was kept awake half the night by Aldous, who sat without his clothes on his bed, his long legs drawn up under his chin, wondering and meditating aloud on the vast problems of love’. Ottoline claimed to have spent hours with Aldous trying to comfort him by talking about Maria. Juliette, too, recalled how she found herself one evening, gazing into the log fire, alone with him: ‘Aldous was staring into the fire, and suddenly blurted out his feelings, the awfulness of separation and the misery of uncertainty.’49 At that time, she noted, ‘Aldous mooned about the place, silent and bottled-up.’

  Meanwhile there was consolation in the fact that his slim volume had got him noticed – the editor of the Times Literary Supplement asked him to send some suggestions, on a postcard, of books he wanted to review and the Morning Post in a review of the annual Oxford Poetry for 1916 had singled him out for praise. But the fact remained that Huxley was jobless, having missed a clerical post in Munitions, and having apparently been rejected by Eton and with only a possibility of a post at Charterhouse, the school where his father had taught. He thus ended 1916 in some gloom about his prospects.

  And Maria was gone. He would not see her again for two and a half years.

  1 Sybille Bedford, Introduction to 1999 Penguin Edition of Jigsaw (1989)

  2 Suzanne Nys, Mémoires, unpublished typescript (78pp), Musée de la Littérature, Royal Library, Brussels, in uncatalogued collection of Nys family papers

  3 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 2, edited by George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, PP325–6

  4 Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–18 (1974) edited by Robert Gathorne-Hardy, PP201–4

  5 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 2 December 1914. Author’s translation

  6 Royal Library of Belgium (RL) Letter from Maria Nys to Suzanne Nys, November 1915. Author’s translation

  7 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell from Newnham, no date but probably autumn 1915. Maria almost never dated her letters at this time

  8 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell from Newnham. No date but probably autumn 1915

  9 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, undated, no location but probably 1915

  10 In conversation with me in Brussels, Lauryssens insisted that the argument of his book had been mis-represented by the Sunday Telegraph

  11 Sybille Bedford, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph, 7 May, 2000

  12 Matthew Huxley in conversation with the author, Washington DC, 14 April 2000

  13 Laura Archera Huxley in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, 31 March 2000

  14 SB1.359

  15 HRC, Letter from Maria to Ottoline Morrell, 24 Jan 1917

  16 Juliette Huxley, Mem. Vol., p39. See also Leaves from the Tulip Tree, P32

  17 SB1.136

  18 HRC, Typescript profiles by Mary Hutchinson of Aldous and Maria Huxley.

  19 Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw, p288

  20 John Lehmann, A Nest of Tigers: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell in their Times (1968), pp68–9

  21 Anita Loos, Fate Keeps on Happening (1984) edited by Ray Pierre Corsini

  22 SB2.166

  23 Mem. Vol., P90

  24 The ‘nice Belgian’ is not actually identified but I have made the assumption that Maria was the only Garsington habitué at this time who would match such a description

  25 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi from Oxford, undated but probably June 1916

  26 Ottoline at Garsington, P124

  27 L.109

  28 Lady Ottoline’s Album (1976) edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun reproduces these and many other portraits of Garsington guests

  29 Mem. Vol., p40

  30 L.109

  31 L.112

  32 L.110

  33 L.112

  34 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably late summer 1916

  35 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, from Prior’s Field, undated but probably September 1916

  36 L.116

  37 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, from Prior’s Field, undated but probably September 1916

  38 Ibid.

  39 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell from Tring, undated but probably summer, 1916

  40 L.116

  41 Ottoline at Garsington, p201

  42 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 16 October 1916

  43 Ottoline at Garsington, p202

  44 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell from 27 Westbourne Square, undated but probably October 1916

  45 L.119

  46 Quoted in SB2.135. Whereabouts of MS unknown

  47 Ottoline at Garsington, p203

  48 Leaves from The Tulip Tree, P45

  49 Mem. Vol., p42

  VII

  Whizzing

  After Maria had gone with her family to Florence in October, Aldous continued at Garsington, ‘hewing wood, like Caliban’,1 for the remainder of 1916. During the autumn, he sent regular bulletins to Ottoline who was in Harrogate for her health. These contained reports on his reading (Conrad’s Chance, and War and Peace, which, he thought, ought to be ‘much longer, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so that one could go on reading it for a little every day the whole of one’s life’2) and laments for the fact that all his friends were getting married. ‘For the last three days,’ he protested in October, ‘special couriers seem to have arrived almost hourly to announce to me the engagement of almost
every friend I ever had, of all the women I ever fell in love with … Everything, however, is a little made up for by the dazzling beauty of my new breeches. I feel like the young Rostov, when he arrived in Moscow wearing riding-breeches of a brilliant blue.’ Try as he might, however, to appear flippant and amused, Huxley’s position was becoming untenable. His literary ambition and his desire to earn enough to be able to marry Maria were incompatible with a life of chopping wood and reading Russian novels. He was, it is true, making some effort with his own writing, planning a historical novel with a seventeenth century setting, but he was finding the execution difficult. ‘I have not sufficient skill to conceive a number of characters and their relations at a single birth,’ he confessed. Psychology was equally difficult for the aspiring novelist: ‘the more I try to understand psychology the more mysterious does it become to me … particularly women, who seem to me … most of them … too utterly inexplicable.’

  All this amused Ottoline, as did the poems he sent her, which expressed similar hesitations and bafflements before the presence of the opposite sex. She told Aldous, in another of those zoological similes his friends loved to deploy, that he was ‘like a giraffe looking down on us poor human beings and enjoying the spectacle of our little futile lives’.3 In search of work, Huxley went to Oxford to see Professor Walter Raleigh, Robert Nicholl Smith, and his old tutor, R.J.E. Tiddy – ‘the three most important nobs in the English School’4 – but they offered little comfort. Raleigh told him that a university job was unlikely because of wartime economies, and because the influx of young women into the English School made older men seem more proper as tutors. Raleigh recommended reviewing instead. ‘My father is sufficiently acquainted with the immortal Strachey to exercise a little nepotistic pressure in that direction,’ Huxley told Ottoline. He had scant respect, however, for the trade of book reviewer: ‘The art of reviewing appears to consist in variations of the formula, “This book is on the one hand good and on the other and at the same time bad.”’5 The excursion to Oxford nonetheless had its compensations, in the shape of a meeting with Lewis Gielgud and friends at which ‘we scintillated pleasantly over two bottles of burgundy’. Huxley was doing a good deal of scintillating at this time and trips to London took him to Fitzrovia and the rather elevated Bohemianism of the Eiffel Tower Restaurant. It was here that he met for the first time Evan Morgan (Viscount Tredegar, the prototype of Ivor Lombard in Crome Yellow), Lady Constance Stuart Richardson, Iris Tree, Nancy Cunard, and, in Ottoline’s words, ‘the tall, charming, unselfish dissolute Marie Beerbohm, of whom he was really very fond’.6 Huxley was greatly attracted to such female free spirits. Frances Petersen, an Oxford friend, he once described – in significant terms – as ‘a clever and amusing creature, whose greatest gift is an amazing light-hearted irresponsibility, which entirely cuts her free from the trammels of quotidian life’.7 It was to Frances Petersen that he confessed at the start of 1917: ‘I am becoming a third class tragic-comedian these days.’8 Dorothy Carrington was another attraction. She made ‘a very good drawing of Jonah seated on the whale’s kidney’ for a Christmas card for 1917, which reproduced Huxley’s poem, ‘Jonah’. Fifty copies of the poem were printed, but he lacked the funds to have Carrington’s drawing included.9

  Huxley, therefore, began 1917 facing the choices he had long ago identified as the inescapable ones: hack reviewing or schoolmastering. The war ensured that he could briefly defer the reckoning, for a clerical job came up at the Air Board, starting in April. Maria, meanwhile, was in Florence. She told Ottoline in February: ‘I wish you could pack up Aldous for this part of the world – because there would be somebody to be with and enjoy everything with – I care for A so much … Think what fun it would be if instead of going to America that silly boy invented a reason to come here – it is wonderful and he would love me.’10 Huxley – no doubt influenced by the precedent of Julian – was toying with the idea of work in America in the wake of his disappointing meeting with the Oxford nobs. An American school appears to have offered him a job and he made some efforts to get the necessary visa, but in the end it fell through. Aldous and Maria’s love letters to each other – preserved in a tin trunk that survived all their travels together – were destroyed in the fire that swept Huxley’s Hollywood home in 1961. There must have been many of these letters in this period of separation in the years 1917 and 1918.

  Maria left Florence in June for the Tuscan coast at Forte dei Marmi (a location that will be described in more detail later) with Costanza da Fasola, whose Florentine family owned a villa at Forte. Costanza was twenty-three and engaged to be married to Luigino Franchetti, ‘who does not love her … she knows she will be unhappy … What can I tell her … It is like someone running to an abyss he sees but runs to it all the same.’11 Maria also had time to reflect on the desirability or otherwise of her own marriage. Writing to Ottoline from Forte, in a letter declaring her love for the older woman, Maria reported in detail on her summer idyll with the beautiful Costanza, and also managed – in this amatory whirl – to talk about Aldous too. Madame Nys had tried to block the trip to Forte but ‘now they are used to it at home and we live as if no-one but us two exists’.12 The two young women, with the villa to themselves, went out in a sailing-boat and enjoyed swimming together, pouring scorn on the restrictive bathing-caps worn by the other swimmers. ‘In the daytime when one gets far enough out we bathe without our clothes – it is too lovely.’ Maria enclosed two snapshots of herself and Costanza posing naked on the top of the stone wall of the villa grounds. Poor Aldous, meanwhile, was commuting to a dreary clerical job in the Strand from his father’s house at 16 Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead, made wretched at the fewness of Maria’s letters to him from Italy. ‘I have been hoping each day that there’d be a letter from Maria – but nothing. It makes me so absurdly miserable,’ he complained to Ottoline.13 Maria responded – in the same letter that enclosed the picture of the two water nymphs – that the last letter she had received from Aldous was ‘not at all nice, grumpy and reproachfull [sic]. He is such a queer creature – But he has been sending me wonderful poems – Only he is so – I don’t know what to say – perhaps merely tired.’ Those ‘wonderful poems’ would include the contents of the second volume he was preparing for Blackwell the following summer, The Defeat of Youth (1918). The title sequence of twenty-two sonnets has a troubled youthful persona asking: ‘or is she pedestalled above the touch/Of his desire …?’, ‘And ever more she haunts him, early and late,/As pitilessly as an old remorse’, ‘An island-point, measureless gulfs apart/From other lives, from the old happiness’. In a poem, ‘Winter Dream’ the poet writes: ‘I am all alone, dreaming she would come and kiss me.’ These youthful fears may have been justified – if a slightly coquettish letter to Ottoline is taken at face value. It appears to disclose that Maria had received a letter from another male admirer who was working as a typist in the Board of Agriculture. She was thrilled at the sensation of receiving it. ‘I wonder what Aldous thinks? Because he never seems to me very much to understand. I write long letters to him of course, friendly letters. I suppose he shows them to you – I shall love it when he comes to Italy but he must be a friend. I have not behaved badly to him? Aldous is one of those people who cannot be roused – anyway by me – I must not become vain.’14 All this worried Ottoline, who appeared to warn Maria about playing with Aldous’s affections, provoking immediate remorse and a promise to be ‘more serious … But I am certain about Aldous – I care for him very much – more now – I think I always did really – only sometimes I care for no-one – and can’t bear him – Don’t let me miserable Auntie – because my feelings for him are real and strong.’15 A little later, Maria was more emphatic: ‘He really is wonderful – and so very clever. I sometimes just sit down and wonder why and how he ever managed to care for me because he really does love me. Are you not sure of it? Do say you are. After all I am so stupid and ignorant – and so young – but then I love him – and so much – I think it is being far aw
ay from people that gives me this feeling – though I always knew I was not worth people moving their little finger for me – though they did move it.’16

  Aldous, however, was not wholly miserable in London, and was discovering diversions of his own. His social life was flourishing and his range of acquaintance quickly expanding. He was also writing reviews for the New Statesman and Nation, having been introduced to its literary editor J. C. Squire earlier in the year. He contributed three introductory essays to Thomas Ward’s The English Poets (1918), on John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, and Richard Middleton. None of this, however, amounted to enough to live on and, in desperation, on 31 March, he inserted an advertisement in the personal column of The Times which read: ‘YOUNG MAN, 22 (rejected), Public School and Oxford, First-class Honours, desires LITERARY, SECRETARIAL, or other Work.’ He received many offers but contrived to get himself pushed by friends towards a dreary post in the Naval Law Department of the Admiralty at £2 for a fifty-four hour week. Just in time, a slightly better post turned up at the Air Board, which he held from April to July 1917. After the ‘imbecility’ of the Dardanelles campaign, Huxley had concluded ‘it’s not pleasant to think of lives thrown away by the sheer folly of the politicians,’17 but he still felt the need to do some war work. As early as February he had worked for the Food Office on a trial basis, complaining to Ottoline: ‘Here all is sugar, sugar … sugar everywhere.’18 At last he was ready to bid farewell to Garsington. On ministry-embossed foolscap (evidently he was not overworked), he drew up a most eloquent letter of thanks to the Morrells, describing his stay with them as ‘the happiest time in my life’.19 It had been a period, he went on, ‘when I have been conscious of the best and most fruitful development of myself’. He had learnt so much from both of them, he said, ‘that I feel I shall never be able to compute the full amount of your giving … and I have been able to return you nothing, I fear, unless a very deep devotion counts at all in the balance against all your gifts of inspiration, almost of creation.’ In view of the later rift, when Ottoline saw not ‘deep devotion’ but cruel caricature of herself in Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, the force of feeling behind this outburst of gratitude is the more striking. In drawing up the Garsington account, he did not omit to mention that it was at the Morrells’ that he had met Maria and received from her ‘a great and violent emotional self-discovery’. That depth of feeling for Maria had been attested to on another occasion when he told Ottoline he had had no sleep one night ‘owing to the excitement of a letter from Maria’.20