Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Some of the especially favoured boys received extra literary sessions in Huxley’s rooms and he was delighted to report that, ‘a young poet has been discovered in the shape of Ld. David Cecil, a very charming frail boy of fifteen or so with quite remarkable talent’. Decades later, Cecil recalled how different Huxley was from the general conservative run of masters in the matter of dress: ‘I remember seeing him walking out towards Arches, with a prim plain, tweed-clad cleric called Bevan, dressed in delicate dove-grey, a black sombrero hat, & round his neck a flowing scarf of flame-coloured silk which contrasted with his white countenance and wavy dark hair, which he grew much longer than was common in those days.’7 Huxley enjoyed mocking Bevan – ‘a thick square parson’ who liked his regular meals: ‘We always dress for dinner, sitting tête à tête in our black coats, attended by one of our not inconsiderable seraglio of domestics.’8 He mocked, too, with the eye of Gumbril, the rituals of this ‘comical place … a real Nightmare Abbey of incongruous characters’, rituals that were still the same as the ones he had endured as a boy at the school: ‘It is so long since I was there; but it is all just the same, the bored, critical boys going through the appropriate gestures with the mechanical skill of long habit, the parson intoning through his Eustachian tubes … All exactly the same, except for a few prayers couched in the most horrible imitation-seventeenth-century language about the War … It is all so familiar, yet seeing it again, one has such a shock of amazement: can it really be, in this, the so-called twentieth century?’

  Huxley regularly escaped to London, to dine with his young women or to converse at their lodgings with T.S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell. One evening in October he found this gloomy pair philosophising over a dying fire. Russell observed how much good it would do to exterminate the whole human race. ‘I told him he was a little Sunbeam in the House; we all felt much better.’9 Virginia Woolf spotted Huxley at An Exhibition of Works Representative of the New Movement in Art, curated by Roger Fry at the Mansard Gallery at Heal’s: ‘Aldous Huxley was there – infinitely long & lean, with one opaque white eye. A nice youth. We walked up & down a gallery discussing his Aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward.’10 He even managed a visit to Garsington in November, where Woolf saw him again ‘toying with great round disks of ivory & green marble – the draughts of Garsington’ in the company of Brett and Evan Morgan (‘a little red absurdity’).11 Eliot’s influence on Huxley’s poetry – though the former said he disliked it and was later to advise him to concentrate on prose – was considerable. They had similar tastes, and bits and pieces of Eliot’s aesthetic were finding their way into Huxley’s observations about poetry. Later, Huxley would disapprove of Eliot’s criticism, which he found unconvincing in its mode of argument. Reporting to his father the news that Blackwell was to publish a second volume of poems by him, Huxley declared: ‘I find that more and more I am unsatisfied with what is merely personal in poetry.’12 The Defeat of Youth when it appeared, however, would contain much personal matter. Reading the new Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, he concluded that it contained ‘a lot of tosh’.13 Mocking his own efforts in the annual Oxford Poetry just published – a translation of Mallarmé’s L’Aprés midi d’un faune – he observed: ‘I am like the aged Swift looking back on the work of my youth: “What genius I had then!” is all I can exclaim.’14

  Huxley’s last expedition of 1918 was to a poetry reading at the home of the society patroness, Sybil Colefax. Taking part with mixed feelings, Huxley was joined by Eliot, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Nichols, and the Sitwells. The event, in aid of charity, and attended by ‘a large expensive audience of the BEST PEOPLE’,15 was chaired by Edmund Gosse. Robert Ross stage managed the whole affair which Huxley found rather frightful: ‘Eliot and I were the only people who had any dignity.’ The best part of the event was the dinner afterwards at the Sitwells – whom Huxley was still calling the Shufflebottoms. He got tight with Mary Hutchinson, Montague Shearman, and Lalla Vandervelde, wife of the Belgian socialist, Emile Vandervelde. Then out into the cold night and back to the ‘hole’ of Eton by train. Huxley at this time was sleeping very badly, possibly from the strain of the teaching, but very probably because his health was never very good – Virginia Woolf had noted his pallor. ‘I live in state of continual exhaustion,’ he complained in December, ‘and really haven’t felt in any way well or alive during the last two months except on the occasions I have been away from Eton.’16 He had just been rejected for the third time by the army medical authorities and was being tempted by the possibility of a trip, all expenses paid, to chaperone Evan Morgan on a trip abroad for six months, which would have been a salutary change from London’s winter fogs. This came to nothing because, even with his medical discharges, there would have been a problem getting a wartime passport. Lady Tredegar was worried about Evan’s dissolute lifestyle and, thought, as Huxley put it, ‘that my respectable middle-aged temperament would act as a slight brake to Evan’s whirligig habits’.17 Lady Tredegar had reason to be concerned. The next day, Huxley was at the studio of a painter called McEvoy where the artist was ‘spasmodically trying to paint a nude study from a very lovely little model with red hair … Evan and the model became increasingly affectionate.’ He and Evan later lunched with Carrington: ‘We all three went whirling round London in a taxi.’ In spite of this lively social life, he had not forgotten Maria. Just before Christmas, Aldous had ‘a happy letter from Maria’ which hinted at ‘the possibility of seeing her again’.18 Her letters kept on coming throughout the following year, which greatly cheered him (though he was unaware of Maria’s letters to Ottoline describing her and Costanza’s flirtations with Luigino Franchetti at the Villa Fasola in Florence. In one of these, Maria wrote: ‘I have had such longings and desires for you and more so since the other day I came across a lady perfumed so as you were and it brought back such endless thoughts and past things,’19 and in another she enclosed a poem of her own in French where a perfume ‘Me rapportant l’éternelle obsession de Vous’20).

  The new year of 1918 was enlivened at Eton by a new project into which Huxley threw himself with great eagerness. Encouraged by a young aristocratic pupil called De La Warr, who had introduced Huxley in the previous November to the Labour politician George Lansbury, a man he had found ‘extremely interesting, very tolerant, not bitter like so many of these labour men’,21Huxley helped to launch the Eton Political Society, relishing the prospect of causing a little debate in ‘the home of all that is least revolutionary’.22 The piquancy of the young Earl De La Warr – ‘a passionate socialist’23 – being the instrument of this piece of mild ‘eminently respectable’ subversion rather appealed to Huxley. The inaugural meeting of the Society had taken place on 8 December 1917, with William Temple, the Bishop of Oxford, and George Lansbury as speakers, and was reported in the first issue of The Eton Review, which appeared in March 1918, priced one shilling. There were articles by Lord Haldane and by George Bernard Shaw, and two poems by David Cecil (who also reviewed the latest Georgian Poetry anthology, noting ‘the numberless young poets whom this War has caused to spring up in a night, like so many mushrooms’). The anonymous Editorial bore the unmistakeable signs of Huxley’s influence if not his actual pen. It revealed that Repton – where Huxley had taught briefly in 1916 – had provided the inspiration for the Review in its publication The Public School Looks at the World. ‘The War has stimulated precocity. The boy of nineteen is launched into the world as a full-blown soldier,’ it began, justifying the bringing of boys into contact with politics, but its real aim was to ‘persuade people to think’. One can hear Huxley saying: ‘There is nothing more wearisome than thinking, no task which human beings, old and young, will make such efforts to avoid. They will do anything rather than think …’ There was also a report of George Lansbury’s speech at the inaugural meeting in which he said that ‘his only connection with Eton was that he lived within a few minutes walk of the Eton Mission at Hackney Wick … He went on to remind the Society of their advantages in educat
ion and upbringing, and of their great privileges – none of which the vast majority of boys possessed.’ Shaw took the opportunity to mock the Eton school uniform, ‘the Penguin costume, which makes a drive through Windsor so mirthful’. The Review lasted for six issues, until 1920, a year after Huxley had left. On 16 June 1918, one issue reported, a Mr Mansbridge of the Workers’ Educational Association appealed to his audience to ‘take greater interest in all matters connected with the working classes’. He offered ‘illustrations of the passion for education of a great many [working people]’. The ‘policeman who learnt phrases of Greek classics by heart during his perambulations; and above all the porter who waved his wooden leg at the Professor of Economics, provided much food for thought’. Eton’s progressive elite occasionally forgot itself, as when Issue 4 noted that: ‘An ignorant and superstitious age believed in the infallibility of the Pope; now we believe in the infallibility of the people.’

  Whether from the diversion of the Political Society or from some other cause, Huxley’s health and spirits improved in the new year. The work was ‘less beastly’ and he began to enjoy going over essays with individual boys. ‘The time goes whizzing past at such a rate that one is hardly conscious of anything more than the rapid flickering of alternate night and day – which is a grand thing in war-time.’24 The jaunts to London continued. He spent weekends with the Sitwells meeting Arthur Waley and many other literary figures. With Osbert Sitwell he visited the studio of the Vorticist painter Atkinson: ‘Atkinson and I got on wonderfully well, drinking champagne at lunch and talking about the zeitgeist and the great currents of thought of the age – quite meaningless, but extremely impressive.’25 He was at the private view in May of Gaudier-Brzeska’s pictures, ‘which seemed to me too lovely’,26 and at that event he saw ‘almost everybody’ in the avant-garde literary and painterly sets: ‘the glorious company of Sitwells, the noble army of poets, including Graves and Davies and Eliot’ as well as Mary Hutchinson, Mark Gertler, and Atkinson. The following day he was off to the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho (haunt of the Imagist poets including Ezra Pound) where he found Gerald and Trevegond Shove. Pound would also have been at the Gaudier-Brzeska show and Huxley’s failure to mention him points to the limits of Huxley’s appetite for the avant-garde. He was mixing in progressive circles and, through his friendship with Eliot (who, unlike Pound, moved easily between the world of Garsington and that of the Eiffel Tower poets), was aware of the new modernist currents in English poetry and prose. Initially, he admired Joyce’s Ulysses, encountering it as early as November 1918 when he told Julian: ‘Among the quite moderns I sip the brilliant Ulysses of James Joyce; it has, to be sure, a slight flavour of excrements, but is none the worse for that.’27 The two writers would later meet in Paris but mutual admiration did not flower. Huxley was contributing at this time to J. C. Squire’s London Mercury, a paper pugnaciously hostile to the avant-garde and to literary experimentation – which it branded ‘stunts’.28 The paper also lambasted two other periodicals to which Huxley contributed: Wheels, and Chaman Lall’s quarterly Coterie. Huxley was actually a member of the editorial committee of Coterie with Eliot, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis and others and had encountered at first hand some of the leading exponents of Dada in Paris. His open mind led him to explore this work but his natural sympathies were not with the extreme avant-garde. Moreover, his own poetic practice was quite at odds with the principles of the dominant movement in London at the time, Imagism. Its programme, drawn up by Pound in ‘A Few Don‘ts By An Imagiste’, (‘Go in fear of abstractions … Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.etc.’) was certainly not adhered to by the poet of The Defeat of Youth. Huxley would go on to identify himself as a ‘highbrow’. He stood on the creative, risk-taking side of the fault line which opened up in English culture in the early twentieth century and which plagues it a century later. Frank Stuart Flint, the Imagist, rebuked Squire for being ‘provincial’ and ‘illiterate’ and observed at the start of 1917: ‘This is a curious phenomenon that our most liberal papers politically are our most reactionary papers in literature.’29

  After the private views and the literary encounters in Soho, Huxley went on to a party ‘just up the river’ at Frank Schuster’s where Robert Nichols, the poet, was living. Enid Bagnold and many others were at the party, which reminded the schoolmaster that there was another way to live, the way of literary success: ‘the talk was perpetually turning on the size of editions, royalties from publishers, splendid reviews’. Virginia Woolf noticed him at the 17 Club in London: ‘One room was very crowded, & silent; at the end of the other Aldous Huxley & a young woman in grey velvet [Carrington? Naomi Mitchison? Jelly d’Aranyi? Juliette Baillot? Mary Hutchinson? Dorothy Brett? Frances Petersen? Katherine Mansfield?] held what should have been a private conversation. A. has a deliberate & rather dandified way of speaking … They were discussing Evan Morgan & his affairs of the heart I think.’30

  The possible incompatibility of the round of pleasure (quite apart from his professional duties) with the discipline of serious writing seems to have forced itself onto Huxley’s attention during 1918. He told Jelly in May that he was ‘engaged in rapidly becoming a typical schoolmaster … Meanwhile one writes a little – moderately well. And that is almost all.’31 More tellingly, he confessed to Ottoline during the summer break that ‘the hecticness and frivolity of social life tends to get on my nerves – tho ’I love it while it goes on. However, I am, I find, fundamentally too earnest and too bourgeois in outlook to be able to plunge into it wholeheartedly: it seems such an expense of spirit in a waste of pure folly and not worth while for more than a very little time.’32 Such dawnings did not prevent him writing to old friends like Carrington letters intended, as he put it, ‘to provoke reprisals’33 when he was lonely. Maria, too, was concerned about the set he was in. Back in Forte for the summer again, she exchanged letters with Ottoline (who had been receiving constant bulletins from Aldous) in which they expressed their common anxiety that he might be in danger of, as Maria put it, giving himself ‘entirely up to those flighty people’.34 Maria told Aldous – and he replied rather stiffly to her in response to the rebuke – that he should avoid being ‘eaten up and swallowed by the Englishness of England and get too tightly grasped in that clasping … but keep himself fresh for the whole world and new people and longings’. Maria, who reiterated with emphasis that ‘I am devoted to him,’ had never been fond of Bloomsbury and its brittle cynicism but seemed now to think that it was also insular and that Huxley deserved better. She was also acutely aware of the passage of time. She told Ottoline that she had been the age now reached by her younger sister, Suzanne, when she first came to Garsington ‘and now I am twenty – Barbara [Hiles] and Carrington’s age at that time – It’s a nightmare’.35 Aldous himself had told Jelly that – apart from ‘another horrid little book coming out’ his life consisted in: ‘Wasting time for the most part, and wondering what is going to happen in the horrible uncertainty of the future.’36 Aldous and Maria needed each other. But they would not be married for a further twelve months.

  The ‘horrid little book’ was Huxley’s second – he would eventually write over fifty books – and it was another volume of poems. The Defeat of Youth, like his first volume of poems, was published by the Oxford bookseller, Blackwell, in a series called ‘Initiates’, a term designed to distinguish it from ‘Adventurers All: a series of Young Poets Unknown to Fame’ in which the last volume, The Burning Wheel, had appeared. Huxley had now progressed to the status of initiate in ‘A Series of Poetry by Proved Hands’ in boards at three shillings. The title poem consisted of twenty-two sonnets which explore the theme of youth learning the lessons of experience (‘for love is infinite discontent/With the poor lonely life of transient things’) and preparing to face reality (‘Truth is brought to birth/Not in some vacant heaven: its beauty springs/From the dear bosom of material earth’). They are poems haunted by feelings of transience and uncertainty and by d
eep ambivalence towards the object of his love. ‘I give you all; would that I might give more,’ declares the poet at one point. At another he is tortured by lust and the ‘sickening heartbeat of desire’. In spite of ‘his high love for her’, he entertains confused and sometimes hostile feelings: ‘the hatred turns/To a fierce lust for her, more cruel than hate’. In spite of Huxley’s official allegiance to Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality, there is more of him, one feels, in these poems than there is of Eliot in Prufrock. It would have needed clairvoyance, however, to have seen the pointedness of: ‘Naked you bask upon a south-sea shore/ … ’Twill please you awhile to kiss your latest lover’. Formally the poems occasionally waver into an old-fashioned poetic diction but more frequently display the positive influence of the modern French poets in which Huxley was immersed. He had told Juliette of his bicycle rides out into Windsor Forest to sit under the oak trees ‘and peruse the works of the French romantics’.37 There are fine translations of Mallarmé and Rimbaud. The whole is rescued from a certain precious literariness by a self-mocking wryness. In ‘The Life Theoretic’, for instance, with its: ‘But I who think about books and such/I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,/And the women palsy me with fear.’ In another poem, he suggests: ‘I am a harp of twittering strings,/An elegant instrument, but infinitely second-hand.’ Did he fear that his poetry was too derivative and dependent on its literary models? There was perhaps some justice in the view of the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement who observed that he was ‘better equipped with the vocabulary of a poet than with the inspiration of a poet’.38 That reviewer turns out to have been Virginia Woolf.

  The harp of twittering strings and the marking of schoolboy essays did not bring any nearer the prospect of marriage. Huxley’s family seem to have been in two minds about Maria, hinting at some instability of character or excessively romantic temperament. Aldous found himself having to defend her to Julian. He conceded both that she had (‘hideous expression’) – the ‘artistic temperament to the highest degree’39 and that ‘aestheticism is a dangerous thing’. He was trying to encourage her to focus her mind on ‘some fixed intellectual occupation’ and argued that, given her youth (she was nineteen) she had done remarkably well. ‘I only wish I was with her, for I think I could be of help to her in growing up.’ Which is rather the view she had of him. More than this, she would ‘help me out of the curiously unpleasant slough of uncertainty in which one seems to wallow so hopelessly these days’. While waiting to be united with Maria, he continued to write the poems that would form his collection, Leda, and a play. Huxley’s belief that writing a play was the route to fortune has its origin here and the delusion would stay with him for the rest of his life. Plays, he told Julian, ‘are the only literary essays out of which a lot of money can be made, and I am determined to make writing pay’.40 The play seems to have ended up as a short story (‘Happily Ever After’), being ‘wholly undramatic’, but Huxley had some interesting thoughts on how the theatre might find a future, through reducing its dependence on realism and multiplying the number of scenes. Unfortunately he did not act on these insights and was in practice a very conventional playwright, wholly uninterested in the dramatic innovations of his era. He was beginning to write more stories and initiating the move to prose. He would always regret not having been able to sustain his poetic vocation but Eliot was almost certainly right in his view that his talent was for prose.