These personal and literary explorations were conducted against the background of war, the aftermath of which Huxley was pessimistic about: ‘I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all … We shall all be colonized; Europe will no longer be Europe.’41 One of the few diversions ‘which brighten the general darkness is the Russian ballet, which is pure beauty, like a glimpse into another world’.42 He was part of a crowd which went to the performance in September – ‘almost everybody in London was there’ – and afterwards he met André Gide: ‘who looks like a baboon with the voice, manners and education of Bloomsbury in French’. Huxley was with the Sitwells at the Coliseum for the opening night of Scheherazade when news of the German surrender came through. They all went to the Eiffel Tower to celebrate. Music and art were rapidly developing interests at this time and after a stay with Roger Fry, who taught him so much about art, he praised him for being: ‘So susceptible to new ideas, so much interested in things, so disliking the old – it is wonderful.’43 The terms of praise are significant. Nonetheless, it was a sense of inadequate knowledge of art (not just a wish for more lucrative employment on which to marry) that led him to decline an offer from Fry to edit the Burlington Magazine. Julian held out the remote possibility of a job on The Manchester Guardian. ‘What I want more than anything really is to get a year with nothing to do except write … I cannot write properly in the midst of the perpetual distraction here, and besides, I am always much too tired.’44 It was writing that possessed him now: ‘I never feel I am performing a really moral action, except when I am writing. Then and only then one is not wasting time.’45 But money, the precondition of marriage, would not go away. ‘It haunts me sometimes, the horror of it.’46
As 1918 drew to a close, the Armistice signed, Aldous could think only of seeing Maria again. There seemed some prospect of catching her in Paris at Christmas: ‘It will be an extraordinary and unbelievable thing to see her again. After two years it seems scarcely credible that she has a real physical existence or that one would ever see her again. I want to get married as soon as may be and start some kind of reasonable life: I only hope these damned material difficulties won’t make it impossible.’47 In the event he was cheated of this opportunity, for the Nys family chose Naples instead. It had also occurred to him that Italy could be a place where one could live cheaply and write. But another three months stood between him and his goal of seeing Maria, and marriage. His days as a schoolmaster were now numbered.
1 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 24 September 1917
2 L.133
3 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi, undated but probably September 1917
4 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 4 October 1917
5 Mem. Vol., p27
6 Ottoline at Garsington, p208 Letter of 24 September 1917
7 Eton College Library, Letter from Lord David Cecil to Tim Russell, 24 January 1980
8 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 24 September 1917
9 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 8 October 1917
10 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 1, pp61–2, 17 October 1917
11 Ibid., p78 19 November 1917
12 L.137
13 L.139
14 L.138
15 L.141
16 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 8 December 1917
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 13 January 1918
20 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 16 January 1918
21 L.136
22 Ibid.
23 L.137
24 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 11 February 1918
25 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 March 1918
26 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 May 1918
27 L.170
28 See Alan Young, Dada and After: Extremist Modernism and English Literature (1981), p39
29 F.S. Flint, letter to J.C. Squire, 29 January 1917. Reprinted in Peter Jones (ed), Imagist Poetry (1972), pp143—4
30 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 1, p125. 9 March 1918
31 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi, 24 May 1918
32 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 31 July 1918
33 HRC, Letter to Dorothy Carrington, 6 October 1918
34 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 28 June 1918
35 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 18 August 1918
36 HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi, 6 June 1918
37 L.151
38 Donald Watt (ed), Aldous Huxley: the critical heritage (1975), p39. Hereafter, Watt
39 L.154
40 L.157
41 L.160
42 L.163
43 L.167
44 L.168
45 L.171
46 L.173
47 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 28 November 1918
IX
Marriage
Huxley returned to Eton for what would be his final ‘half’ at the start of 1919, determined to push forward to a new start in his writing career and to marry. He had spent Christmas at Garsington and Eton was ‘rather a relief, in a way, after the tearing restlessness of London. Quiet and regularity – I find these indispensable to doing work.’1 In the wider world peace was being celebrated noisily by the Northcliffe newspapers and the loud patriotism of The Times. Like many progressive English intellectuals of the time, Huxley was not wholly euphoric, though relieved at the end of the slaughter. At the end of November he had urged Brett to ‘vote Labour, our only hope’,2 but his private agenda dominated. ‘The prospects of the universe seem to me dim and dismal to a degree,’3 he told Julian. He went to Oxford again to see if he could get an academic post but Raleigh was even more discouraging this time than last, offering only the vague possibility of an introduction to a job at a provincial university. America again surfaced as a possibility, its additional attraction being that it would be ‘the only place where revolution will not break out’. Totally preoccupied with creating space to write, Huxley did not want to find himself embroiled in political upheavals or revolution which interfered with ‘the free exercise of the mind – and after all, that freedom is the only thing in the world worth having and the people who can use it properly are the only ones worthy of the least respect’.4 His aim was frankly stated: ‘What I want to do is to marry and settle down to write.’ Juliette – who would marry Julian in March – remembered Aldous just before the start of term, at his father’s house in Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead ‘desperately looking for some suitable job to enable him to marry Maria. He hardly spoke – deep in one of his curious abstractions, seemingly unapproachable.’5 He was reading Stendhal, Flaubert, nothing much contemporary, and writing a long short story, ‘The Farcical History of Richard Greenow’, which would open his first prose work, Limbo in 1920. He was also working on the poem, ‘Leda’. In January he sent Brett a copy of the first part ‘for you to read and select the indecent passages from for illustration’,6 having earlier sent her his own nude sketches – which do show real talent for drawing. The news of Julian’s engagement was shared facetiously with Ottoline: ‘It makes me laugh rather, but I expect it will do very well: What a clean sweep the Huxley family has made of Garsington – all but Brett; and who will sweep her? She will require a 40 horse power vacuum cleaner.’7 Aldous was best man at Julian’s wedding on 29 March and Juliette remembered him, in his best suit, bringing their luggage to Paddington. As the train pulled out ‘the curtain fell on an empty stage with Aldous terribly alone, desperate, numb and lost.’8
In April, however, Huxley’s luck changed. After toying with the idea of a poorly-paid lectureship at the Sorbonne, he was suddenly offered a job on the editorial staff of The Athenaeum, the paper edited by John Middleton Murry. He handed in his notice at Eton. He estimated that he needed £500 a year to marry on, plus a further £100 from miscellaneous reviewing and literary journalism. He asked (rather uncomfortably) his father for some money f
rom the income which Leonard Huxley was receiving from Prior’s Field, adding: ‘I hope I shall do something not unworthy of all you have given me.’9 The path was clear, and as soon as the Easter holidays came he dashed across to Belgium to see Maria for the first time in two years and three months. He reported back to his father from St Trond on this sudden immersion into a stolid, bourgeois element so utterly in contrast to Garsington and the higher Bohemia to which he was accustomed, that it was ‘a rather oddly un-English life. A quiet Balzacian Ville de Province, where nothing happens and where everybody who is anybody is everybody else’s relation.’ He added manfully: ‘I think they are fairly reassured by my appearance.’10 Already, Huxley had an inkling that ‘Mère’ – Maria’s mother, Marguerite Nys – might become demanding, but he would eventually come to show quite a degree of interest in this family so utterly different from his own. Perhaps the most striking observation to his father was the simple declaration: ‘I am very happy.’
Suddenly everything was moving very quickly and the paralysis was broken. Before the marriage on 10 July, however, there were various matters to be resolved, practical and emotional. On Maria’s side, these had been voiced at the beginning of the year in a long, deeply felt letter to Ottoline from her parents’ house at 19 Grand Place, St Trond. Never before cited, this letter reveals the extraordinary delicacy of Maria’s moral sense, and the profoundly complex reasons for her decision to marry Aldous.11 Beginning with the disclosure that her parents were ‘entirely ruined’ after the war and as a consequence of business failure (Aldous had been assuming that she would have at least some money to bring to the marriage) she asked Ottoline, the only person ‘who … can talk objectively to me’, whether ‘if I accept poverty without dread is it fair though and just to burden him with a wife he must keep? For I shall abandon everything rather than tie his hands or be a charge’. She was in love with Aldous. She wanted him. But she could not bear the thought that she might be standing in the way of his talent. Her sister Suzanne, years later, recalled an episode from Maria’s childhood when she was walking with her mother along the Bruges-Ghent canal. Spying a family of bargees on the tow-path, pulling together on the rope, young and old together, Maria, taking her mother’s hand, solemnly promised: ‘Plus tard, je tirerai ton bateau.’12 That childish piety of the convent girl was transformed in maturity into an ethic of dedication, of ‘sacrifice’.13 Maria went on: ‘I would anything rather than force A for my sake to give up some of his own time and travels to earn money.’ Something had to be done – ‘it is killing me to wait … and which is more he cannot go on waiting for me’. She wanted to get a job herself to free him for ‘that work in which I have so much faith and confidence and in which I longed to help him’. Or should she take what appeared to be Julian’s advice and forget him? ‘If it is my whole happiness which depends on it, it is nothing in comparison with Aldous’s because a whole work of creation depends on him and on his life … which so little can alter and I won’t be the cause of that little.’ Maria pleaded with Ottoline to be ‘cruel if it is necessary’. She told her that she had written to Aldous telling him that he must feel free to abandon the marriage. But it is clear that this was not what she truly wanted. ‘I can hardly bear life,’ Maria protested. She wanted to come and see Aldous and Ottoline and talk it over but the family would not spend their scarce funds on allowing her to make the journey. ‘You must know how much my love for A has grown during these two years – how much my life has been only part of his and how all I did was only in view of when we would be together – to be up to him – to be able to help him – and now there is the menace of my being taken from him … Auntie, I quite quite rely on you to help me.’ Those who have argued that the Huxleys’ was a marriage of convenience must explain away this letter. It was followed by another, several months later, when the crisis was over, and with the marriage due to take place in a month. Maria’s doubts were not wholly silenced. Hoping that Ottoline would not feel displaced in her affections now that marriage was imminent (‘You could never know how much you are to me always and very much above anyone else’14), Maria confessed that she was ‘full of fear – and of the responsibility I take in binding his life to mine – and then – you must not find it silly because it makes one miserable I so fear that after a time he cannot help falling in love with another woman clever and beautiful – for he will not know I am absolutely worth nothing – till then. And I believe I will love him always which would be worse for him … Why he should be in love with me I cannot understand but even less why he still is after two years – Do you think he knows me? He certainly always has a very close insight into other people which astonishes me.’
Many years later, in a letter to her son, Matthew, Maria would ask: ‘Why, why in the world did Aldous choose me of the many prettier, wittier, richer etc young girls? Why in the world did he come back to fetch me after two long years of running around with more of those pretty and amusing ones of his own world? Knowing all the time by my letters that he could never teach me to write poetry or remember what I read in a book, or spel [sic] or anything he did set value on.’15 That phrase ‘ones of his own world’ hints at Maria’s sense of being regarded as an outsider, a theme on which she expanded: ‘And why did I who was 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 …?’ The answer she gave was that ‘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.’ And so, in spite of the inevitable ups and downs, ‘we still stuck it out. Nothing is always perfect for anybody. So Aldous had to put up with me and I had to put up with him, or rather we had to put up with the difficulties life with a big L, as it does everyone else, got us into. Why we managed is because, underneath, our psychological sensitiveness knew better.’ Maria told Matthew that perhaps he had never realised ‘the terribly difficult position of an upstart little refugee getting away with the prize of the artistic English world – and keeping her prize – and at the age of twenty and without any schooling except failures. I did not ever come down to their levels of malice or sex, but that does not mean that I ever rose to their heights of intelligence and brilliance.’ The context of this confession is Maria’s sending Matthew a pamphlet on ‘E’ therapy by A. L. Kitselman, something, she believed, that helped her and Aldous endure because it was something ‘stronger and better than ourselves’.
One final element in this exceptional marriage was Maria’s bisexuality – a fact that has taken a long time to be fully declared by her friends. How much did Aldous know of this before he married her? How did it affect him in his decision to marry her? These appear to be unanswerable questions. Those who might know the answers – and who have spoken relatively freely about Aldous’s various affairs with other women – decline absolutely to speak of Maria’s private life. All we have is the evidence of a long and happy marriage – notwithstanding Maria’s hints above that the normal marital stresses and strains existed – that lasted for thirty-five years.
Notwithstanding the gravity of the letter to Ottoline, Maria was able to laugh at the idea of the unpractical Aldous ‘worrying about furniture and such things’ in his letters to her. He had been busy in June furnishing the tiny studio flat at 18 Hampstead Hill Gardens, NW3 where their married life would begin – with a pug and a kitten as a wedding present from Ottoline. Aldous, after staying briefly with his aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward, where he persuaded her to read Proust ‘for the good of her soul’,16 moved in to prepare the flat in the middle of June. He then set off for Belgium for the wedding. ‘I have been leading a very strenuous life, shopping, painting furniture etc’,17 he told his stepmother. It was not all domesticity, however, for he st
ill found time to frequent his literary friends. Katherine Mansfield reported to Virginia Woolf on a discussion she had been having with friends on the topic of the eighteenth century. It was interrupted by the arrival of Huxley who ‘lay upon the sofa, buried his head in a purple pillow and groaned over the “hor-rible qual-ity” of Smollet’s coarseness’.18 But this was an interlude in a furious programme of activity. Brett was recruited to paint the woodwork in the little sitting room ‘a beautiful dove grey’. His cousin Marjorie (daughter of Dr Henry Huxley who had rescued his eyes) came in to hang wallpaper and there were deliveries from Heal’s and a new carpet. He also bought ‘a marvellous instrument for heating water – a little bar which you fasten to the light and dip into your water: it will boil a pint in about 5 minutes – very useful for shaving and the like, also for simple cooking, such as eggs and tea: much quicker than a spirit lamp.’ This little device perfectly encapsulates the simple austerity of the Huxleys’ first months of married domesticity. When they eventually moved into the flat in July after the wedding, Maria was amused by this new incarnation of Aldous the DIY expert, painting and sawing shelves: ‘I never suspected him of being so handy.’19
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