Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  In December Huxley gave up the Hampstead flat, sent Maria and Matthew to Belgium for the winter, and went to stay with friends in Regent Square, Bloomsbury. Italy – and what was to some extent a dry run for a lifetime of willing exile (he would be back in October 1921 and would not leave permanently until May 1923) – was now only a few months away.

  1 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 22 January 1919

  2 L.171

  3 L.174

  4 L.173

  5 Leaves from the Tulip Tree, p70–1

  6 HRC, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 17 January 1919

  7 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 22 January 1919

  8 Leaves, p71

  9 L.175

  10 L.175

  11 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 3 January 1919

  12 RL, Mémoires de Suzanne Nicolas Nys, p3

  13 SB, in conversation with the author

  14 HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 9 June,1919

  15 SB2.135. Letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxleys, 1952 (precise date not given)

  16 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 12 June 1919

  17 L.177

  18 The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Vol 2, p315: Letter to Virginia Woolf, 5 May 1919

  19 L.178

  20 HRC, Photocopy of letter from Leonard Huxley to Gidley Robinson, 8 June 1919

  21 L.176

  22 L.590

  23 L.179

  24 L.180

  25 L.180

  26 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 October 1919

  27 L.182

  28 L.182

  29 L.185

  30 Ottoline at Garsington, p213

  31 L.184

  32 Virginia Woolf, Times Literary Supplement, 5 February 1920, p83. Also, Watt, pp41—2

  33 Herbert S. Gorman, The New Republic, 13 October 1920. Watt, p43

  34 Michael Sadleir, ‘Aldous Huxley’, Voices, June 1920, pp235—38

  35 We will probably never know just how much Huxley wrote at this time because his contributions to publications like The Nation, New Statesman, TLS and others were often anonymous. But thanks to the outstanding bibliographical work of the Huxley scholar, David Bradshaw, much more is now known. See David Bradshaw, ‘A New Bibliography of Aldous Huxley’s Work and Its Reception, 1912—1937,’ Bulletin of Bibliography, Vol 51, No 3, September 1994

  36 Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters, Letter to Sydney and Violet Schiff, 4 May 1920

  37 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, p44. 31 May 1920

  38 L.186

  39 L.187

  40 New York Public Library, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 10 January 1920

  41 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 12 April 1920. For a quite different interpretation of Mencken and Huxley’s response to him see David Bradshaw, ‘Chroniclers of Folly: Huxley and H.L. Mencken 1920-26’ in The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses 1920—36. (1994). Bradshaw sees Mencken as ‘a tireless foe of mass democracy’ not, as I do, a tireless foe of the forcing by cultural producers of mediocrity onto a mass public

  42 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 26 May 1920

  43 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 13 November 1920

  44 John Middleton Murry, Athenaeum, 28 May 1920. Watt, p51

  45 Mem. Vol., p30

  46 The Sunday Times, 23 May 1920, Watt, p7

  47 Harold Monro, Some Contemporary Poets (1920), p124—30

  48 L.188

  49 L.191

  50 Louise Morgan, ‘Aldous Huxley Who Wrote His First Novel in Darkness’, Everyman, 25 September 1930, pp263—5

  51 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, ‘Monday’, undated but probably autumn 1920

  52 Mem. Vol., p31

  X

  Italy

  For the first few months of 1921, Huxley moved in with his old friends Tommy Earp and Russell Green, who had a flat at 21 Regent Square, Bloomsbury. Another member of this flat share was the South African writer, Roy Campbell, who recalled the experience in his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse (1952). Campbell recorded that ‘the great Mahatma of all misery, Aldous Huxley’ was installed in the flat when he arrived. He poured scorn on his lack of rugged, outdoor machismo, this being Campbell’s pronounced trademark: ‘As a practical zoologist and botanist … I felt ill at ease with this pedant who leeringly gloated over his knowledge of how crayfish copulated (through their third pair of legs) but could never have caught or cooked one, let alone broken in a horse, thrown and branded a steer, flensed a whale, or slaughtered, cut, cured, and cooked anything at all.’1 It is indeed hard to conceive of Huxley breaking in a wild horse, let alone flensing a whale, but few opportunities would have presented themselves, anyway, in London WC1. For Campbell: ‘Huxley was always as lost and bewildered by the very scientific civilization of which he is one of the main prophets, as a wild African giraffe would be if it were suddenly to be dumped in the middle of Piccadilly or Broadway.’ Campbell also remembered that Green and Huxley were frequently disturbed at their typewriters by the sound of dancing lessons being given at the flat upstairs. This could only have reinforced Huxley in his determination to find a proper ambient for writing.

  He was now engaged in polishing up the 1200 word pieces he had been writing weekly for the Athenaeum over the past nine or ten months, under the pseudonym ‘Autolycus,’ in the magazine’s ‘Marginalia’ column. He wrote to Frank Swinnerton at Chatto, the man who had ‘discovered’ Huxley, to ask whether the firm would be interested in publishing a collection in the spring: ‘They are literary & moderately erudite, but not pedantic, as I don’t know enough to do the professor stunt with confidence!’2 These were the essays that would eventually form the collection On the Margin (1923). To Mencken, in March just before he went to Italy, he complained that he had been doing no proper writing other than the ‘quotidian journalism’ 3 – reviews, literary articles and ‘the most fantastic hackwork (happily well paid) for an American fungoid growth which has established itself here recently, called House and Garden’. This work was now coming to an end, mercifully, and he was engaged ‘in burning my boats preparatory to starting in a week’s time for Italy, where money looks four times as plentiful as it does here, and where … it is still possible to live fairly cheaply. There I shall spend the next few months writing to amuse myself and seeing if I can make the process pay. If so, good; if not, then back here to journalism.’ Huxley mentioned Lawrence to Mencken, mocking both his alleged psychoanalysis and its effects on his writing, and the recent Women in Love with its cruel representation of ‘an old friend of mine’ Ottoline Morrell. In a few months time, Huxley would be doing the same to that old friend, although he always protested his innocence. ‘What an odd thing it is in a man who has done such exceedingly good things,’ he said of Lawrence’s book. Clearly Huxley’s early enthusiasm for Lawrence had cooled, but as the decade wore on it would be rekindled with the same intensity as before. Trying hard to parody his master, Huxley told Mencken: ‘Mr Clutton Brock is now known to write his sermon-leaders in the Times Literary Supplement by means of automatic writing; he sits still and his pen disgorges the excrements of his brain at the rate of eighteen hundred words an hour. Result: vast salary for Brock and ever increasing popularity and esteem.’ Huxley was worn out by his current style of life and had told Mary Hutchinson: ‘I find myself forced to adopt a misanthropical attitude out of sheer self-defence – because I simply can’t afford to spend time seeing people’. Unlike these fluent hack-writers, ‘it takes me 7 days out of the 7 to do what I have to do’.4 Nonetheless, he made a lunchtime assignation with her as ‘a short holiday’ from this work. By the end of March he was so exhausted by overwork and the stress of trying to write in the intervals of paid work that he was seriously ill – so much so, in fact, that the London Life Association refused to insure him in his present condition. ‘It is absurd and rather humiliating to be a Bad Life,’ he told his father.5

  At the end of March, however, he finally left for Italy. He rejoined
Maria and Matthew at the Villa Minucci in the Via di Santa Margherita a Montici in Florence. Costanza’s parents, the Fasolas, lived in the same street, at number 15, in a villa called Castel Montici – still standing today though divided into separate dwellings and with a fine view of the city below, San Miniato on its hill, and the tip of the Duomo glimpsed through a frame of olive trees – ‘a sort of Oxford from Boar’s Hill effect’6 as Huxley put it rather unusually to his father (having stood in both places I can just about see his point). The Huxleys would later live at the Castel Montici themselves between 1923 and 1925. For now, they had three rooms at number 4 furnished ‘somewhat hideously’ and at a rent of 150 lire a month. Post war inflation in Italy was high but the Huxleys felt they could live on up to 2000 lire a month. Bread was rationed and there was no electricity at number 4 so they were dependent on oil lamps and candles. It was nonetheless a pleasant spot, just a few metres outside the city boundary, and with a tram which ran from the bottom of the hill to the centre of the city in twenty minutes. Huxley did nothing at first but eat and sleep which did him a lot of good. In addition to all the journalism and professional theatre-going, he had translated Remy de Gourmont’s novel, A Virgin Heart, which was now issued by a New York publisher. It is small wonder that he felt tired. But Florence was not to prove his resting place. Cities always exhausted him, and it was getting very hot, with a long spell of scirocco. The English colony there – ‘a sort of decayed provincial intelligentsia’7 – was proving irksome and the art of Florence, to Huxley’s rather exiguous taste, was ‘too tre- and quattrocento. There is too much Gothic in the architecture and too much primitive art in the galleries.’ The result was a decision to go to Forte dei Marmi, no doubt at the suggestion of the Fasolas. He and Maria and Matthew settled there for the whole summer from May to September 1921. Just before leaving Florence he wrote to his new American agent, J. B. Pinker, hoping that the latter would help to place material in the USA. He gave Pinker a list of English editors ‘with whom I am on friendly terms’,8 a list which included his father on the Cornhill, J. C. Squire on the Mercury, and Austin Harrison. In America he had already been published by Century and The Smart Set.

  Forte – a place already familiar to Maria – is about twenty miles north of Pisa on the Tuscan coast, below Viareggio, ‘the coast where Shelley was washed up, under the mountains of Carrara, where the marble comes from. It was an incredibly beautiful place then.’9 Today it is a busy resort, its flat, sandy beach – which Lawrence said reminded him of Skegness – crowded in summer with bathers and decked with bright beach huts. Though less developed when Huxley arrived at the end of May, 1921, contemporary photographs show plentiful families on the beach, sheltering under white canvas sun-umbrellas. The little jetty, now purely used for pleasure purposes, was used then to load blocks of marble, brought down on a railway line, to waiting ships. Huxley was fascinated by the ‘enormous white oxen with long horns and melancholy black eyes,’10 which were used to drag the slabs of marble. It was here that Huxley wrote that very English novel, Crome Yellow, in the summer months, from June to August. He wrote to Frank Swinnerton at Chatto: ‘This is a good place: Mediterranean bathing at one’s front door & large mountains entirely constructed of Carrara marble at one’s back. The natives support themselves by carving angels for tombstones, which they then export by the thousands to the U.S.A.’11 For those three months, he established a very regular routine – apart from the setback of an attack of ophthalmia in the middle of July – which he described for the benefit of his father:

  The day’s programme here is simple and unvarying. Work in the morning till twelve or half past, then a bathe, then lunch, then a rest till four; then tea and a little more work, till about half past five or six, when one goes out for a walk till dinner time; then reading or work till bed … One has all one’s meals out of doors, wears a shirt, flannel trousers and a pair of sandals and remains a long time in the water without getting cold.12

  In short, it would be ‘perfect if we can solve the servant problem’.

  Throughout the summer, at 29 Viale Morin, a shady street set back from the beach, opposite the Villa Fasola, Huxley worked for five or six hours a day on what he was now describing as ‘my Peacockian novel’ – inspired by the short, witty ‘novel of ideas’ of Thomas Love Peacock (1785—1866), whose sparkling prose and light satiric touch were the perfect model for the young Huxley. Good progress was being made by the middle of July when he wrote to Swinnerton in London proposing a title, Crome Yellow, ‘pleasingly meaningless except in so far as the Peacockian house [Peacock’s novels were invariably set in country houses where the characters have been assembled in order to be put through their conversational paces] in which the scene is laid is called Crome … The book, as I hope you realise, will be fairly short: for the Peacockian novel is not a form that can go to great lengths. About 50,000 words, I think it will work out. I can see a smallish book of rather pleasant form – with perhaps a crome yellow binding to carry out the hint of the title [a suggestion that was taken up by Chatto].’13 On 28 July, barely two months after starting, Huxley mailed off the first 30,000 words with the promise that another 20,000 would follow in ten days or a fortnight. His typewriter, ‘the sole stay and comfort of my life’,14 had broken down at the revision stage – the first draft seems to have taken about eight weeks – and Huxley was worried that the rough script with handwritten additions would be illegible.

  By the end of August the book was off his hands and the reward was a trip to Rome where he met Ottoline and Philip Morrell. Ottoline claimed that they had come there because Maria wanted to get work as a movie star (the careers of ballerina and novelist having been tried and abandoned in the past).15 Huxley fell in love with Rome, telling Mencken that it was ‘certainly the place where I shall come to spend my old age and if possible, large portions of the rest of my existence. Architecture, sculpture and painting give me, I find, as much pleasure as music.’16 To Mencken he confessed that he had written Crome because ‘I lack the courage and the patience to sit down and turn out eighty thousand words of Realismus. Life seems too short for that.’ He inquired whether Mencken knew of any editor in the USA ‘sufficiently ramollite [soft-witted] to offer me large sums for writing articles – word pictures I believe they call them – about Italy and art and all that sort of thing?’ He explained that he would soon have to return to England to deal with the lease of the Hampstead flat and might have to stay: ‘It depends whether I can lay hands on any cash without having to work for it journalising.’ He made the same point to his father: ‘The though of replunging into journalism appals me; I had been living for 2 years in a perpetual state of fatigue and I don’t want to go back to it if I can help it.’17 He estimated that he could live in Italy on £300 as opposed to £750 or £800 a year in England, and that the money would come from existing royalties, another £100 for Crome, short stories, and sub-letting the Hampstead flat. The only drawback to Italy seemed to be the political situation – they had just witnessed a band of seven hundred Tuscan fascists demonstrating against the Left in the course of which several people had been killed – ‘a horrible and extraordinary episode’. It would be the rise of Fascism that would eventually drive the Huxleys from Italy at the end of the decade.

  After the ecstasy of seeing Rome (undiminished by having had his pocket picked), Huxley returned to Forte with the idea of doing ‘a gigantic Peacock’18 suggested by the experience of the Sitwells’ enormous castle at Montegufoni (‘Here one has the essential Peacockian datum – a houseful of oddities.’). It is rather a pity that this idea wasn’t pursued. ‘I am giving Realismus a little holiday:’ he told Julian. ‘These descriptions of middle class homes are really too unspeakably boring. One must try and be readable.’ One piece of very palpable realismus caught his eye in the newspapers, the case of Harold Greenwood, who had been acquitted at Carmarthen of poisoning his wife. This was the inspiration of a short story that had just appeared, thanks to Pinker, in The English Review,
with the title, ‘The Gioconda Smile’. What Huxley really wanted, however, was the chance to live a little, to travel and to explore, instead of this relentless hand-to-mouth existence of the writer striving to establish himself and keep afloat. The child had come too soon, so he had to go on earning, but as he explained to Julian: ‘What I should like now more than anything is a year or two of quiet devoted simply to seeing places and things and people: to living, in fact. When one hasn’t much vitality or physical energy, it is almost impossible to live and work at the same time. At least, I find it so. Life and work are always, for me, alternatives. Circumstances demand that I should work almost continuously, and I can’t squeeze in enough living.’ The next two years, however, would offer no respite of this kind. He was offered £750 a year by Condé Nast which was enough to make him return to London. As he explained to his father: ‘The disadvantages of England are too much work and too little superfluous time or energy. The drawbacks of Italy are the absence of libraries and the lack of informed and intelligent society. ’19 The job with Condé Nast would last until May 1923 and there was a flat at 155 Westbourne Terrace in Paddington where they would stay until the end of 1922. The wanderer’s life was being put on hold.