Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Maria’s father was ill so the only relatives present at the wedding at the Hotel de Ville at Bellem were Maria’s mother, Marguerite Nys, and her sister Jeanne. No Huxleys came over, and indeed, Leonard Huxley had never set eyes on his son’s bride except in a photographic snap which showed him that she was ‘strikingly handsome … very clever and with the changeful variety of the artistic temperament’.20 When Ottoline last met Leonard Huxley at Juliette’s wedding she had remarked: ‘You will think I keep a matrimonial agency at Garsington.’ Maria had written to him in June, punctiliously declaring: ‘I am so ready to love you and hope you will find in me a good wife to Aldous and a good daughter to you.’21 The couple lost no time in getting back to London and establishing themselves. Book reviews and articles started to flow from Huxley’s pen. Since November 1919 he had been writing reviews for J.C. Squire’s new journal the London Mercury but this ceased when he joined the Athenaeum in April. Years later, when lecturing his son on the need to accept that the world of work was necessarily tedious, Huxley recalled ‘the burdensomeness of the asininity of doing “shorter notices” of bad books on The Athenaeum.’22 Also in April he became the drama critic of the Westminster Gazette, in which capacity he saw rather too many plays. He signed a £50 contract with Constable to do a book on Balzac by the end of 1920 for a series called ‘Makers of the Nineteenth Century’ – a commission that would turn into a millstone around his neck and never be completed. ‘I am rather appalled at the prospect of having to read all Balzac!’23 He was busy but it was a literary and a congenial business: ‘It is a crowded sort of life, but I enjoy the work, and the whole atmosphere of the Athenaeum is so delightfully remote, in its purely literary preoccupations, from the horrors of the present that it is in a way restful work.’24 The frequent loneliness and frustration of the last two years were now being banished by the excitements of the new life but, in a letter to Julian, Maria hinted that ‘delightful and comfortable’ as the flat was, and in spite of wondering if one more room could be acquired ‘so as to enable us to remain here all our life’ the future pattern of wandering was beginning to display its tentative outlines: ‘I of course long to go to Italy – and Spain and all those wonderful places.’25 The memory of those two years of Italy, and the easy civilised life she had enjoyed with the Fasolas, was competing with gas fires and egg-boilers and drizzling North London rain.

  Huxley was still trying to find ways of escape from the pressing literary hack-work that was giving him a living but which was hardly conducive to the writing of his first book. In October 1919 he had told Ottoline Morrell that he was planning to take the examination for a fellowship of All Soul’s on 22 October but nothing more is heard of this ‘offest of off chances’.26 Early in 1920 he had a brief holiday in Paris where he stayed with the young writer and poet, Drieu la Rochelle, whom he had met in Belgium, who became a good friend of both the Huxleys, and who would later, to Huxley’s dismay, collaborate with the Nazis during the Second World War. He also saw ‘a certain number of amusing people’,27 and had ‘an entertaining time among the cubists of literature’, telling his former pupil at Eton, Edward Sackville-West, that the Cirque Medrano he had seen at Paris was ‘by far the finest circus in the world’.28 The Dadaists, however, soon palled: ‘Personally I don’t like their theories or their practice. Their satire is healthy, but I see no point in destroying literature.’29 Exciting as artistic London and Paris were, however, two inescapable facts presented themselves. The first was the need to write seriously – ‘if you know of a cottage or small house in the country, anywhere, in charity tell me: for I must find one’ he pleaded with Edward Sackville-West – and the second was Maria’s pregnancy. She went into a nursing home in the middle of April. ‘It was indeed strange to see her looking still such an immature child with a baby on its way,’30 Ottoline Morrell noted in her journal. Matthew was born on 19 April with Maria having ‘weathered the tempest safely and auspiciously’. Huxley told Arnold Bennett: ‘These works of nature really do put works of art in the shade.’31

  In January, Huxley’s first fictional book, Limbo, had been published by Chatto and Windus. Chatto’s reader, Frank Swinnerton, had immediately recognised the quality of Huxley’s work and the firm would remain Huxley’s English publisher for the rest of his life. The book consisted of six short stories and a short play. The stories were immediately striking in their elegance, satirical edge and boldness – readers had already encountered effeminacy, syphilis, homosexuality and auto-flagellation by page 12. There is plenty of sexual disgust in these stories – and they reflected Huxley’s own jaundiced view of the literary life. The eponymous hero of the Farcical History of Richard Greenow is a serious intellectual who impersonates a lady novelist to make his living. Success at the latter means that ‘the fear of poverty need haunt him no more; no need to become a wage-slave, to sacrifice his intelligence to the needs of his belly’ – an aspiration shared with Aldous Huxley. More unsettlingly, there is a fastidious distaste for ordinary humanity. Greenow has a glimpse of Glasgow: ‘Was it possible that there should be human beings so numerous and so uniformly hideous? Small, deformed, sallow, they seemed malignantly ugly as if on purpose. The words they spoke were incomprehensible.’ There is also a reference to ‘a family of Jews, who were anxious to live down a deplorable name by a display of patriotism’. The portrait of Richard Greenow has much of Huxley in it: his intellectualism, his emotional reticence, his perception of the family as dysfunctional and frequently absurd. ‘From childhood upwards, Dick had suffered from the intensity of his visceral reactions to emotion. Fear and shyness were apt to make him feel very sick …’ Politically, ‘Reason compelled him to believe in democracy, in internationalism, in revolution; morality demanded justice for the oppressed. But neither morality nor reason would ever bring him to take pleasure in the company of democrats or revolutionaries, or make him find the oppressed, individually, any less antipathetic.’ When Dick does manual labour on a farm, like Huxley woodcutting at Garsington, he has a problem with his fellow-workers: ‘Dick longed to become friendly with them. His chief trouble was that he did not know what to say.’ In another story, ‘Happily Ever After’, a foreigner in Oxford observes his fellow-students ‘with their comic public-school traditions and fabulous ignorance of the world’. The lineaments of Huxley the satirist are beginning to emerge: the undeceived anatomist of English upper middle class life (as the above quotations indicate, the working classes were not Huxley’s field). The older generation, the clergy, the representatives of the establishment, are held up to ridicule. Guy Lambourne, a Huxleyan figure, is groping for some positive perspective: ‘What the devil is right? I had meant to spend my life writing and thinking, trying to create something beautiful or discover something true. But oughtn’t one, after all, if one survives, to give up everything else and try to make this hideous den of a world a little more habitable?’ Underlying this story is a critique of the cerebral life: in the end it is the ordinary sensual man who gets the girl. In another story, ‘The Bookshop’, a character observes: ‘This journalism … or call it rather this piddling quotidianism, is the curse of our age.’ In another, ‘The Death of Lully’, someone else declares: ‘Man has made a hell of this world.’ In another anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf, under the heading ‘Cleverness and Youth’, conceded that the stories were ‘all clever, amusing, and well-written’ but asked for something more: that he be a little more positive and refrain from tilting at easy targets: ‘we would admonish Mr Huxley to leave social satire alone, to delete the word “incredibly” from his pages, and to write about interesting things that he likes.’32 Thanks to the New York publisher George Doran taking up Frank Swinnerton’s recommendation to acquire the American rights, Limbo had a very enthusiastic reception in the United States. Herbert Gorman in the New Republic compared Huxley to Max Beerbohm and concluded that ‘he is one of the finest writers of prose in England today’.33 Huxley had very quickly progressed from a minor poet an
d miscellaneous reviewer to a writer attracting quite remarkable praise.

  He was being widely noticed and, in June 1920, Michael Sadleir summed up the marvel: ‘Here is a youth, reviewed seriously while still an undergraduate and now, a year or two later, enjoying the undeniable thrill of a first edition value, while booksellers compete for his large paper copies … Huxley has so far achieved little beyond a series of negations, but the little that is positive is of a kind to promise that in thirty years he will rank deservedly as an important and genuine artist. Already he is the most readable of his generation.’ Sadleir concluded that there were at present ‘several Huxleys – the artificer in words, the amateur of garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in rag-time, the fastidious sensualist. For my part I believe only in the last, taking that to be the real Huxley and the rest prank, virtuosity, and, most of all, self-consciousness.’34 What more could a young writer want than such enthusiastic, intelligent and perceptive praise? The answer is, of course, the opportunity to fulfil the welcomed promise through finding more time to write and Huxley’s income was still too small to allow him, with a wife and a new baby, to cut free from literary journalism and concentrate solely on fiction.35 With this praise ringing in his ears, he took a third job in addition to the editorial post on the Athenaeum and his role as a dramatic critic for the Westminster Gazette. For a few hours a day he worked at the Chelsea Book Club in Cheyne Walk run by Arundel del Ré.

  There are brief glimpses of Huxley the literary journalist in May 1920, in a letter from Katherine Mansfield. She glimpses him at the offices of the Athenaeum ‘wavering like a candle who expected to go out with the next open door’.36 Virginia Woolf’s diaries record another visit to the office. She noted that he had brought out a new volume of poems also, Leda, and asked sharply of the young literary lion: ‘Will the public canonise him too?’37 The volume of poems contained a much-quoted poem, ‘Fifth Philosopher’s Song’, which was probably considered rather ‘shocking’ at the time: ‘A million million spermatozoa, /All of them alive:/Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah/Dare hope to survive./And among that million minus one/Might have chanced to be/Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne -/But the One was Me.’ Huxley bought a bicycle in order to cope with his constant voyagings around literary London which confirmed him ‘as physically restless as continually and changingly active in mind’.38 It was a ten mile round trip from Hampstead to Chelsea through two parks. ‘We are well settled in now,’ he told his father. In spite of the small space and the exiguous finances, there was a maid to look after the child, Matthew, ‘who waxes and grows fat’.39 Clinging to the notion that a stage hit would free him from this hectic schedule, he told Leonard: ‘There is nothing but a commercial success that can free one from this deadly hustle. I shall go on producing plays till I can get one staged and successful. It is the only thing to do.’

  The lively reception of Limbo in the United States may have encouraged Huxley to pursue a new contact there, the writer and critic H.L. Mencken. In January, he had written to Mencken expressing praise for the first series of Prejudices and declaring: ‘I only wish we had a few more people in this country capable of producing anything as good &, at need, as destructive in the way of criticism.’40 Mencken’s fearless trenchancy of style and his refusal to tolerate the populist agenda appealed to Huxley and the critic in turn responded warmly to the gift of Limbo. Huxley began to bombard him with submissions for his journal The Smart Set, including work which had already appeared in England in Coterie and Art and Letters. He told Mencken in one letter: ‘I have some more stories simmering on the hob which I shd like to send you when they are thoroughly cooked & finished.’41 After Mencken had voiced some objection to Huxley’s vocabulary in one of his stories, he responded: ‘But you know the mentality of the smuthounds – I bless you for the gift of that enchanting word.’42 Huxley’s early work is characterised by a frank disregard of the taboos of those smuthounds. In his turn, Huxley tried to help Mencken by offering to persuade his boss at the Athenaeum, Middleton Murry, to take a piece by him on the American literary situation, adding: ‘Things are pretty bad here, but I fancy they have not come to quite such a pass as with you.’43 Huxley expressed the hope that Mencken would allow him, when he visited England, to ‘arrange for the local menagerie to show its paces’. In these letters there is something of the tone of Huxley’s letters to his elder brother Julian – an anxiety to impress – which in this case sometimes took the form of near-parody of Mencken’s vigorous style. Huxley was more convincing when he was being his more unforced self.

  In May 1920, Huxley’s third book of poems, Leda, appeared. The title poem is written in fluent rhyming couplets and once again with a rather old-fashioned diction and syntax: ‘Leda, the fairest of our mortal race.’ It aims for an epic manner yet does not wholly escape the feeling of literary pastiche. Middleton Murry himself called it ‘a conjuring trick played with the incidentals of poetry’.44 His friend Eliot was at this time at work on The Waste Land and his indifference to Huxley’s poetry (‘I was unable to show any enthusiasm for his verse’45) is not really surprising. The themes of these poems are similar to the earlier volumes: ‘the imbecile earnestness of lust’, ‘the pain and foolishness of love’ etc etc. In ‘The Ninth Philosopher’s Song’, the poet writes: ‘But I, too rational by half,’ as if he were aware that this was a verse that needed to alter the ratio of its cerebration to its imagining. The Sunday Times was repelled by its pose of sensuous disgust (derived perhaps from French models like Laforgue or Huysmans): ‘Most of the lyrics are violently ugly, with a determination to shock and astonish, which is highly unpleasing.’46 An important contrary view came from Harold Monro, founder of Poetry Review and the Poetry Bookshop. Huxley had been in correspondence with him, offering poems for publication, and Monro saw more in Huxley the poet than anyone else. ‘Aldous Huxley is among the most promising of the youngest generation of contemporary poets,’ he wrote in a new book, Some Contemporary Poets (1920). ‘He has a brilliant intellect, rare force of imagination, command of language, subtle penetration, irony and style; and the progress of his style has been rapid from the beginning.’47

  Huxley was now being noticed and conservative English opinion was beginning to wheel around its big guns. On 20 July, the Daily Express published an attack on ‘The Asylum School’ ridiculing the poetry of the Sitwells and ‘the clever gibberish of Aldous Huxley’. Huxley told his father he was ‘slightly irritated’ by the attack and was ‘preparing counterblasts’48 but he must have thought better of it for the controversy was allowed to fizzle out. His energies were really needed for writing, and, after a brief visit with the family (he had reassured his atheist father that there was ‘no question’ of baptising the child) to Garsington where he met Eliot, Mark Gertler and others, he decided to sever his connection with the Chelsea Book Club (now under new ownership). While at Garsington he spoke to Philip Morrell about building a wooden house in the grounds where he could live and write in peace, but the idea was not taken further. In October, he resigned from the Athenaeum to take up a slightly more remunerative post on House and Garden. Published by ‘the Vogue people’49 (Condé Nast) the magazine was an instant success, in terms both of advertising and circulation, and Huxley took advantage of the publishers’ buoyant mood to propose that he edit a paper of his own called The Patrician. ‘I now see that the only possible papers are those with pictures: nothing else can hope to pay.’ The first issue of The Patrician, the English version of Vogue, appeared in December 1919 and Huxley contributed to this and many other of the Condé Nast publications, although much of it was anonymous. He was good at advertising copy and learned some of the techniques he would parody in the hortatory jingles of Brave New World. He later recalled writing about interior decoration, fashion and beauty. He told an interviewer in 1930: ‘I used to do brilliant articles in House and Garden, all about incinerators and how to put plaster on ceilings!’50 From his offices in EC4, Huxley wrote to his friend, Mary Hutchinson:
‘Would you allow us to send a man to take your Dufy-covered chair and sofa? At the same time, if you permit it, he might take a few views of the rooms for later use as specimens of “Good Interiors”’.51 Huxley would have plenty of such introductions to London’s fashionable interiors but he had other ambitions and the job lasted less than six months. Amongst his non-journalistic activities was a speaking engagement at the Lyceum with T.S. Eliot in December at, in Eliot’s words, ‘a dinner of the Poetry Circle of a ladies’ club’.52 The speakers had all been assigned topics in advance and Eliot discovered in horror that his topic had been appropriated by someone else. Huxley seemed embarked on a long speech that might give him a chance to improvise something in advance but just at that point Aldous slumped forward on to the table: ‘the room was close and airless, and Aldous had unwisely started to smoke a large cigar’. Three men carried him out of the room and Eliot – making his first ever after-dinner speech – was required to plug the gap, ‘a baptism of fire’.