Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Departure from Garsington, and arrival at his desk at Room 549 at the Air Board in the Strand, where he dealt with ‘all subjects from timber to chemicals, electric lamps to wire ropes’,21 relegating most of them to ‘a sort of dustbin to wait’, marked Huxley’s final entry into the world of serious work. Although he was not yet living wholly by his pen, he would never again be allowed that aristocratic leisure he had enjoyed at Garsington. Small wonder that his expressions of gratitude were so heartfelt. During this period he was living at his father’s house in Bracknell Gardens in ‘a most pleasant room, looking on the garden’ and, in spite of the banalities of clerical work, was throwing himself with decent vigour into the social life of the capital. Katherine (‘Ka’) Cox, who had been romantically entangled with Rupert Brooke, was a theatre companion one night after which he had ‘a very pleasant little tête à tête conversation … about Things in General and the fallacies of Bloomsburyism in particular’.22 He dined with Carrington and friends, including Virginia Woolf, who afterwards reported to Vanessa Bell this first meeting with Huxley in April 1917, describing him as ‘a most singular speckly eyed young man … who owing to Ka, has got put into a government office. I warned him of what might happen to his soul; however, he spends his time translating French poetry.’23 Huxley was immersed in Laforgue at this time and, a few weeks later, dined with T.S. Eliot at his London flat: ‘Eliot in good form all considered, and he showed me his latest verses [this was the year of Prufrock and Other Observations] – very odd indeed: he is experimenting in a new genre, philosophical obscenity rather like Laforgue … very good: some in English, some in the most astonishingly erudite French.’24 After their erudite chat, the two poets moved off to Omega – the Bloomsbury artists’ studios and workshops – where Huxley spent the evening chatting to yet another young woman whom he referred to only as ‘the Flashing Beauty’. In contrast to the mournful, moping presence evoked by Maria’s letters, Huxley was in fact being sucked into an extraordinary social whirl. In June, the same month that Maria spent in Forte with Costanza, he reported breathlessly to Ottoline:

  What a life! I have been ceaselessly whizzing. On Sunday I assist the Head of the Department in sending a lunatic guest to the local asylum. I lunch now frequently with Evan [Morgan] at the Savoy and with [Middleton] Murry at the A.B.C. Evan has become quite a feature in my life now: he is constantly ringing me up, coming to see me, asking me to meals, and so forth. I like him, I think, quite a lot, tho’ he is the most fearfully spoilt child. Then I whizz round to Mr Mills, then fly to Putney to stay the night with an unknown admirer of my works. Then I rush to meet yet another figure – the editrix of Wheels, Miss Edith Sitwell, who is passionately anxious for me to contribute to her horrible production. The Wheelites take themselves seriously: I never believed it possible! I sit in the Isola Bella, naively drinking in the flattery of the ridiculous Sitwell, in dart Carrington and Barbara [Hiles?], borrow half-a-crown from me and whirl out again … What a life! Then an evening with Vernon Lee – each trying to get his or her word in edgeways. Then again at Eliot’s, where I meet Mrs E for the first time and perceive that it is almost entirely a sexual nexus between Eliot and her: one sees it in the way he looks at her – she’s an incarnate provocation – like a character in Anatole France. What a queer thing it is. This whizzing is a mere mania, a sort of intoxicant, exciting and begetting oblivion. I shall be glad when it stops.25

  At least one of the riders on this whirling carousel, Edith Sitwell, saw things a little differently. In her autobiography, Edith Sitwell recalled that lunch at the Isola Bella in Frith Street, Soho, ‘in a dreamlike golden day in June’, and described Huxley as one of her first friends in London. They would meet again many years later in the United States and she would have been shocked by that cruel epithet, ‘ridiculous’. Recalling Huxley in his prime in London during the First World War (the brutal backdrop to all this gaiety) she pictured him as ‘extremely tall … full lips and a rather ripe, full but not at all loud voice. His hair was of the brown, living colour of the earth on garden beds. As a young man, though he was always friendly, his silences seemed to stretch for miles, extinguishing life, when they occurred, as a snuffer extinguishes a candle. On the other hand, he was (when uninterrupted) one of the most accomplished talkers I have ever known, and his monologues on every conceivable subject were astonishingly floriated variations of an amazing brilliance, and, occasionally, of a most deliberate absurdity.’26 Another literary acquaintance of this period was Katherine Mansfield who re-inforced Huxley’s bulletin to Ottoline with another, telling her that he had called with ‘more news in half an hour than I have heard for months. At present he seems to be a great social success and incredible things happen to him at least every evening. He spoke of the Isola Bella as though it were the rendezvous of Love and High Adventure … I felt my mind flutter over Aldous as if he were the London Mail. There was a paragraph about simply everybody.’27 He was also at a party thrown by Mary Hutchinson – who would play a significant role in his private life in the subsequent decade – but confessed to some social failures. He couldn’t get on with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. This puzzled him and he tried to explain himself to Ottoline: ‘the sense of being out of contact and not knowing how to get into it, which is most baffling. I am afraid I’m rather bad at approaching people – the result of a habit, I think, of laziness and arrogance.’28

  At the end of July, the job at the Air Board came to an end and with it his stay in London, the termination marked by ‘the most prodigious orgy with Evan – a birthday party of at least 25 people, all of them ultimately drunk’.29 Marie Beerbohm and Nina Hamnett attracted Aldous’s attention. Evan, he told Juliette, was ‘very salutary in stirring up my contemplative lethargy’ but at the same time, after all this socialising, drinking, and party going: ‘Coming back to books again is a pleasure.’30 Before he left London he had lunch with Carrington at the Isola Bella, apologising to her (as he was so often to do to his young women) for an access of ‘melodramatic melancholy’31 in the small hours at their friend Mills’s party. He told her that he was going to see the Headmaster of Eton about a job and was cheered by the prospect of freedom from clerking. After London he went to stay with the Haldanes at Oxford where another ‘charming and talented creature’, Yvette Chapelain, was on hand to give him Italian lessons – ‘so that I hope to learn Italian quite without tears’.32 Maria, meanwhile, sounded depressed in her letters because her father’s factory had been destroyed in the latest offensive. The family fortunes would never recover after the war.

  During the summer of 1917, between jobs in Oxford, staying at the Haldanes’ and at the Petersens’, Huxley had been doing some writing. He submitted a collection of poems to John Murray but was told ‘to wait, polish and so forth. How trying one’s elders are, to be sure.’33 He planned now to prepare ‘a largish book’ including prose poems, some of which had been accepted by Eliot for The Egoist. He also was contributing to Wheels. He mocked the Sitwells, for the benefit of Julian, calling them ‘Shufflebottom … each of them larger and whiter than the other’. Although he admitted to liking Edith he patronisingly described them as ‘dear solid people who have suddenly discovered intellect and begin to get drunk on it’.

  Meanwhile, the interview with the Headmaster of Eton had been successful. Rather suddenly, he felt, Huxley found himself installed there on 18 September. The distance from London entailed a certain lessening in the frenetic pace of his social life but that could only be to the benefit of his writing. He was conscious, as young writers always are, that the clock was ticking. ‘It’s one’s duty to stay young as long as possible,’34 he told Jelly d’Aranyi. The imperative to get published was growing stronger. But would the life of a schoolmaster be a help or a hindrance?

  1 Ottoline at Garsington, p158. Letter from AH, October 1916

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid., P197

  4 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, from Garsington, undated but probably autumn 1916
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br />   5 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably October 1916

  6 Ottoline at Garsington, p200

  7 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably October 1916

  8 L.120

  9 Stanford, Letter from AH to Jake Zeitlin, 20 June 1942

  10 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 1 February 1917

  11 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 26 January 1917

  12 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 30 June 1917

  13 HRC, Letter from AH to Ottoline Morrell, 28 February 1917

  14 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 11 February 1917

  15 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 7 March 1917

  16 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 10 May 1917

  17 L.122

  18 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated, but probably February 1917

  19 HRC, Letter to Philip and Ottoline Morrell, undated from Air Board, probably April 1917

  20 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 23 April 1917

  21 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, no date but probably April 1917, written on Air Board notepaper

  22 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 10 May 1917

  23 Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, 26 April 1917, p150

  24 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 2 June 1917

  25 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 21 June 1917

  26 Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: an autobiography (1965), p89

  27 The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984) edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Vol 1: 1903—1917. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 July 1917

  28 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably early summer 1917.

  29 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 July 1917

  30 L.128

  31 HRC, note on scrap paper to Carrington undated but from 16 Bracknell Gardens

  32 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 July 1917

  33 L.131

  34 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi, undated but probably September 1917

  VIII

  Eton

  Huxley arrived at Eton on 18 September 1917 to take up residence at lodgings, still in use by the College today, called The Old Christopher, a former inn. A week into his new life he described himself, ‘perched solitary in my high room that looks one way upon the Southern buttresses of the chapel, golden with this autumn sunshine, and on the other side, right over the roofs to the castle [Windsor] gigantic on its hill’.1 He had arrived not without some misgivings towards his new position, which were promptly shared with Lewis Gielgud. Being a teacher had its pleasant side, he wrote to his friend, but also its ‘tediousness’.2 Nonetheless, the pupils were turning out to be ‘very nice fellows’ who treated him ‘all being considered, wonderfully well … though I wish I could see them more penetratingly’. He had rather put his finger on the problem. The schoolboy will always be anxious to try what he can get away with and a master so palpably short-sighted is an unignorable gift. It was said that card games were played at the back of Huxley’s classes and no doubt much escaped his notice, including boys playing truant through the simple expedient of getting their names called by others because the ‘beak’ could not see the identity of the boy who was calling out. The opening pages of Antic Hay (1923) in which ‘Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon.’, sits in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel, thinking satirical thoughts, capture Huxley’s attitude towards the life of the English public school. The new master shared his lodgings with a clergyman called Bevan, who was addicted to substantial meals and was in no sense an adequate intellectual companion for the brilliant young man. ‘Sometimes I feel most intolerably lonely,’ Huxley confessed to Gielgud, because, though nice enough, the teachers were ‘so remote, so alien’. The truth was plain enough: ‘On the whole I am fairly happy, but I have decided that God never intended me to do any regular work.’ This recalls Antic Hay: ‘Work, thought Gumbril, work. Lord, how passionately he disliked work!’ Huxley was bumping slowly down to earth and wondering, perhaps, if he were really as clever as he had been led to believe. To his old confidante, Jelly, he confessed that ‘I am just a mildly clever fool, educated from the earliest age to be “blasé”: for in England one isn’t supposed to be refined, unless one is blase and cynical!’3 At the heart of the English upper middle class’s training ground for its young, Huxley was witnessing the patrician affectation of indifference to things of the mind: ‘And the affectation becomes almost natural after a few years of it at that age. It’s a peculiar national habit.’ It was a national habit against which Huxley would strive for the rest of his life.

  Hearing at last from Maria ‘after a long period of silence’,4 he learned that she was back in Florence and planning to study German at the university. ‘How I wish I could go on with my education instead of imparting what I have got to others, who don’t in the least want it,’ he exclaimed. ‘It is absurd to teach when one wants to learn.’ One of the problems was that Eton did not actually teach English literature – the subject in which Huxley had won a brilliant First – and he was compelled to teach classics. English literature was considered an accomplishment that should be acquired incidentally and, as has already been pointed out, it was not in fact part of the formal curriculum at Eton until the 1960s. Some of Huxley’s former pupils, such as Sir Steven Runciman, have been kind to him in retrospect. ‘I was, I suppose, in my second year in College at Eton when we were told that we were to be taught by this remarkable young writer. We Collegers were little intellectual snobs, and we were much impressed … the name already had a glamour.’5 Runciman remembered that the boys were not as badly-behaved and cruel as they might have been – for the simple reason that Huxley seemed quite unaware of their behaviour. Runciman recalled the physical impression left by the new teacher: ‘that long, thin body, with a face that was far younger than most of our masters’ and yet seemed somehow ageless, and, usually hidden by an infinite variety of spectacles, eyes that were almost sightless, and yet almost uncomfortably observant. He stood there, looking something of a martyr but at the same time extraordinarily distinguished.’ Runciman considered that Huxley was not ‘a good teacher in the narrower sense of the word’ – a verdict with which Huxley would have agreed – but he was ‘an educator in a wider sense. He showed us a glimpse of the fascination to be found in an unhampered intellectual approach to things.’ There was a feeling that his voice was a little affected ‘but soon some of us were trying to copy it’. And the words pronounced by that voice were most striking. The brighter boys seized on the new and recondite vocabulary they were encountering, as well as the example Huxley set of verbal precision and exact definition. Huxley was never a fuzzy or vague writer, even when he chose to deal with imponderable, abstract matter. It is clear that he made some effort to bridge the gap between his high intellectualism and the needs of young adolescent boys, recognising his practical shortcomings for the task in hand. He expressed it well to Ottoline: ‘I find that I am not cut out for a teacher of boys; or rather I find that all my knowledge, such as it is, is quite of the wrong sort; remote, vague, facts inextricably mixed up with appreciations and opinions; I am setting to work to tabulate and compress.’6