The Huxleys were back in London for the publication of Crome Yellow in November 1921. It was a striking debut and confirmed the twenty-seven-year-old’s commanding position in the world of contemporary literary reputations. Several aspects of the book are worth noting. Scogan’s description of the typical young man’s novel, shows Huxley’s awareness both of his own position and of the literary milieu he was entering – not without some misgivings and uncertainties: ‘Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe on his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.’ Scogan’s question: ‘Why will you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists?’ was one that Huxley would have been asking himself. His whole career was an attempt to frustrate the traditional expectations of the English novel, but the only solution he had come up with to date was to be clever and witty. There are hints of future directions, of Brave New World, for example, in Scogan’s envisioning of The Rational State, and there is evidence that Huxley was not without self-knowledge. Jenny’s notebook, which Denis accidentally discovers, contains a description that Huxley might have chosen to apply to himself: ‘He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.’ The novels that would come throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, would contain much merciless vivisection of the life and the classes that Huxley knew.
The reviews of Crome Yellow immediately acknowledged its vivacity – it is certainly the brightest and wittiest of Huxley’s books – and the fact that, as the anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer put it, ‘Mr Huxley’s personages are drawn with an extreme verve of crispness’.20 There were some reservations about its bookishness, and consequent derivativeness (‘he almost invites us to believe that the proper study of mankind is books’) but the view of Lady Williams-Ellis in The Spectator (who described it cleverly as ‘a Cubist Peacock’), that it was ‘delightful’, was the prevailing view. The Nation in New York felt that Huxley ‘lives in a different world from that of D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce’ – in other words that he was working inside a tradition rather than trying to revolutionise it. In The Dial, Raymond Mortimer worried that this ‘desperately clever’ book was too concerned to be iconoclastic and ‘amusing’ to be able to find time to be serious. He also made a far more pertinent criticism that would persist throughout Huxley’s novel-writing career: ‘I doubt if he is a story-writer at all. He does not care to concentrate, to dig.’21 F. Scott Fitzgerald said simply: ‘I find Huxley, after Beerbohm, the wittiest man now writing in English.’22
But those who knew Huxley and his milieu more closely had begun to notice another aspect of the book, its rather too uncomfortable drawing of portraits from life. Quite apart from the bicycling young man of letters ‘enamoured with the beauty of words’ encountered in its opening pages, who could not be anything other than a wry self portrait, wasn’t Jenny rather like Dorothy Brett? Ivor Lombard like Evan Morgan? Mary Bracegirdle like Dorothy Carrington? Gombauld like Mark Gertler? Scogan like Bertrand Russell (with shades of Mencken or Norman Douglas)? And, most worrying of all, was not Priscilla Wimbush, who presided over Crome, rather too obviously like Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington (an identification in no way lessened by the lack of architectural likeness to Garsington)? ‘When I read in it the description of life at Garsington, all distorted, caricatured and mocked at, I was horrified,’ Ottoline declared. ‘Here were scenes from the farm and the sayings of the farm labourers, which in real life were so witty and wise, made flat and artificial and quite denuded of their salty wisdom. Then there were pages and pages taken from a book of sermons by our rector, all mocked at and held up to derision. Long conversations which Aldous had had with Mark Gertler and Bertie Russell were here, but these were transposed and treated with contempt and ridicule, and portraits were put in sadly and cruelly distorted. Poor Asquith was depicted as a ci-devant Prime Minister, an old man feebly toddling across the lawn after any pretty girl. I was filled with dismay.’23 She felt that Huxley had taken advantage of all the opportunities she had provided him with to meet these people ‘and that not only had he himself behaved dishonourably but that he had involved me in his own dishonour’. She wrote immediately to tell him so. He produced a long and pained reply, claiming to be dumbfounded that anyone could ‘suppose this little marionette performance of mine was the picture of a real milieu … I ought to have laid the scene in China – nobody could have any doubt then that it was a marionette show … A caricature of myself in extreme youth is the only approach to a real person; the others are puppets.’24 He claimed that he had neither the wish to represent real people, nor the capacity to do so, ‘for I am not a realist, and don’t take much interest in the problem of portraying real living people … the personages are just voices … They are puppets, devoid of all emotions, devoid indeed of most of the attributes of living humanity … it is absurd – and at the same time distressing and painful to a degree – that a long-cherished friendship should run the risk of being broken because the scene for a comedy of puppets [and now be begins to concede a little] has been laid in surroundings partly recognizable as real … This incident is to me another proof of something I said in the book: we are all parallel straight lines destined to meet only at infinity. Real understanding is an impossibility.’ Ottoline found the answer ‘strangely disingenuous’ – which it almost certainly was – and a breach opened up between them that was not healed for many years. She was still smarting from it the following summer when Virginia Woolf, who was staying at Garsington, went into ‘her little green book room with the gilt pillars stuffed with pretty yellow books’ to console Ottoline who claimed to be ‘now indifferent to disillusionment’, quoting from Aldous’s letter and its expressed regret that ‘mere marionettes’ should have destroyed their friendship. ‘But mere marionettes have destroyed it,’ Woolf observed.25
Huxley remained on good terms with the other marionettes and, after his return from Italy, quickly re-inserted himself into London good society, as is instanced by an episode which took place just before Christmas 1921. Huxley, in a group which consisted of Lord Berners, the three Sitwells, William Walton, Augustine Rivers, and Alan Porter, the literary editor of The Spectator, and which called itself the representatives of ‘The Poets of England’, presented the soprano Luisa Tetrazzini with a chaplet of bay leaves at the Savoy. The Sitwells, with their gift for publicity, had ensured that press photographers and journalists were present.26 Virginia Woolf’s diaries show that he was dining around this time with Clive Bell, Mary Hutchinson, Maynard Keynes and herself. Huxley was certainly not being shunned as a result of his wicked satire.
1 Roy Campbell, Light on A Dark Horse (1952) p184ff.
2 Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 13 January 1921
3 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 16 March 1921
4 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 31 January 1921
5 L.194
6 L.194
7 L.197
8 HRC, Letter to J.B. Pinker, 16 May 1921
9 Paris Review interview, 1961, in Writers at Work, 2nd Series. (ed George Plimpton) (1963)
10 L.196
11 Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 20 June 1921
12 L.197
13 Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 9 July 1921
14 Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 28 July 1921
15 Ottoline at Garsington, p214
16 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 8 September 1921
17 L.200
18 L.202
19 L.204
20 Times Literary Supplement, 10 November 1921. Watt, p58
21 Raymond Mortimer, The Dial, June 1922. W
att pp65–8. All other reviews quoted here in Watt, pp58–74
22 F Scott Fitzgerald, St. Paul Daily News, 26 February 1922. Watt, p72
23 Ottoline at Garsington, p215
24 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 December 1921. An edited version of this letter is in Ottoline at Garsington, p216
25 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, p180, 17 July 1922
26 See Mark Amory, Lord Berners, the last eccentric (1998), p74
XI
Entanglements
Huxley began his new office job at Vogue in January 1922 but by May he was writing to Norman Douglas: ‘I moulder along in a pretty chronic state of boredom, and my dislike of work grows steadily towards a fanatical passion.’1 He had already told Mencken that as soon as he could afford to do so he would ‘flit off once more to some cheap Dago state’2 to live cheaply and write. Meanwhile he was settled in the flat at Westbourne Terrace – three large rooms, including a study which the couple painted lemon yellow, and a basement infested with black beetles. In 1922 Maria invited her nineteen year old sister, Suzanne, to come to live with them. In a rather curious arrangement, Suzanne and Aldous shared a bedroom, separated by a screen, through which they would sometimes talk to each other at night. Suzanne accompanied him to musical concerts sometimes when he was required to write a notice, and she found him a fascinating companion, full of conversation on music, art, and literature, and with never a trace of condescension and never making her feel inferior in understanding. She noted that he was fond of ‘les gens les plus simples’ such as the daily, Mrs Jones. Maria tended to go to bed when Aldous and Suzanne were out at a concert – she slept in a separate room and in a third, the nanny, Bella, slept with Matthew (‘Baby’). When Aldous and Suzanne returned, all three would take refuge in Maria’s bed in the large cold room and read to each other. Huxley’s eyesight was still very poor and when he offered, as he invariably did, to accompany guests part of the way home, Maria grew terribly anxious. So short-sighted was he that on more than one occasion he found himself embracing Suzanne who had been sitting in Maria’s room, thinking she was his wife (‘ce qui d’ailleurs ne lui était pas désagréable’). There was a perfect innocence about all this and Suzanne noted, from her vantage point of unique intimacy, that Maria – whom she always called ‘Coccola’, or ‘little berry‘, the nickname she had acquired in Italy and which Aldous always used, lived with Aldous ‘in perfect harmony’. Suzanne later recalled how fond Aldous was of a Siamese cat, which he allowed to climb on to his shoulder while he was writing.3 There would be frequent dinner parties at Westbourne Terrace, for the Sitwells, Naomi Royde-Smith, Jack and Mary Hutchinson, Mark Gertler, and old friends of Aldous such as J. N. Sullivan and Tommy Earp. On evenings alone Maria and Aldous would sometimes wind up the gramophone and dance together, tangos and foxtrots, with Baby hanging on to what Suzanne called ‘one of the long legs of Aldous’. He told Suzanne that the royalties from Crome Yellow were such that he would soon be able to abandon the reviewing and the journalism to concentrate solely on writing.
Aldous had been in discussions with his publishers since the return from Italy in the autumn about a new book (as well as talking of a translation of Flaubert’s Trois Contes, which he declined on the grounds that ‘to do the translation as well as it deserves to be done would be almost as much time as the writing of an original book’4). Mortal Coils was published in May. It contained ‘The Giaconda Smile’, Huxley’s best-known short story about a man who poisons his wife (and who is writing a book entitled The Effect of Diseases on Civilisation). Huxley’s morbid interest in human decay and debility is evident in much of his early work and though this is in part the traditional satirist’s preoccupation, it has also something of the coldness of the vivisectionist. His sister-in-law, Juliette Huxley, was typical of many who found something faintly repugnant in early Huxley: ‘Every time I read a new book of Aldous’s I had a feeling of apprehension, because he peeled personalities to a painful surface sometimes. One had the feeling that he was almost corrosive … There was something vindictive in those early books.’5 As usual, Huxley would have been aware of this charge. As a character says in ‘The Tillotson Banquet’ – actually the best story in the collection – ‘What was the use of his own youth and cleverness? He saw himself suddenly as a boy with a rattle scaring birds – rattling his noisy cleverness …’ Max Beerbohm, one of Huxley’s most famous admirers, wrote to praise the book. An even more surprising one was Marcel Proust who, in the first volume of ‘Sodome et Gomorrhe’ in 1921 in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu referred to; ‘L’illustre Huxley (celui don’t le neveu occupe actuellement une place préponderante dans le monde de la littérature anglaise) …’ Huxley never quite understood how Proust had formed this view (written even before Crome) of an eminence he certainly didn’t consider himself to possess at this time. Huxley thanked Beerbohm for his comments and promised to call in on him at Rapallo if, as he hoped, he was passing that way to Forte by train next year. He hoped that an American success for Crome would enable him ‘to get away to Italy for a fairly long spell to write another on a more grandiose scale and of a slightly solider texture’.6 In July he was complaining again to his father about the inroads of journalism into ‘intelligent writing’ and the ‘necessary quiet thinking one must do in order to write’,7 At the end of May, Maria and Baby set off for Italy and in June Aldous followed via Paris and Salzburg to join them at Venice and Padua before settling for August and September at Forte. Then it was back to London, to sit for a portrait by William Rothenstein and listen to Paul Valéry lecturing at Lady Colefax’s salon ‘to a room full of feathers and white gloves’ according to Virginia Woolf, who sat with Lytton Strachey, the pair taking ‘a great dislike … to Aldous … in spats and grey trousers’.8 The following month she was dining with him and Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson and found Aldous ‘very long, puffy, fat-faced, white, with very thick hair & canary coloured socks’ and playing ‘the raconteur; the young man of letters who sees life’.9
In one of the stories in Mortal Coils, Tillotson remarks in his speech: ‘The life of an artist is a hard one … It demands from him a constant expense of spirit.’ The echo of Shakespeare’s famous sonnet (‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame’), draws attention to another aspect of Huxley’s life at this time. The pressure on him as a writer came not only from the dreary diurnal office work at Condé Nast’s building at Rolls House, EC4, and from the theatre reviews and the music reviews he was starting to write for the Westminster Gazette, but from other claims on his energies. In her biography of Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford was frank about the way in which the Huxleys’ marriage dispensed with conventional notions of fidelity: ‘Maria took what I should call the aristocratic view of sex.’10 She encouraged him in his affairs, helped him to pursue them and, it seems, may have – through her own attraction to beautiful women – been the means of introducing some of them to Aldous. ‘Maria thought that he enjoyed such distractions, needed the change and his mind taken off his work. They amounted to very little, the distractions, and were either short or intermittent over the years. Aldous was never in the least involved.’ Maria seems also to have taken responsibility for what Sybille Bedford calls ‘the logistics’ of these affairs since Aldous was disinclined to waste time on the intricacies of courtship. ‘In a subtle way she prepared the ground, created opportunities, an atmosphere, stood in, as it were, for the courtship.’ The contrast with Julian’s similar pursuit of an ‘open marriage’ is painfully clear. Juliette suffered greatly from Julian’s infidelities. What Sybille Bedford was unable to say so soon after Huxley’s death, but has said equally frankly since, is that: ‘Maria was bisexual and she did have a series of short-term, passionate relationships with other people while she was married to Aldous. But we are talking about one or two relationships … They were sophisticated people who were not afraid to experiment.’11 Only the relationship with Maria and the intense, unhappy and unrequited relationship with Nancy Cunard were serious,
Sybille Bedford maintained.
But there was a third relationship, with Mary Hutchinson, the writer and friend of Virginia Woolf and well-publicised mistress of Clive Bell (who was still alive when Sybille Bedford wrote her biography) which should perhaps be added to that list. Letters describing that relationship – which has never before been described – are now deposited in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Austin, Texas. There are also letters from Maria to Mary Hutchinson, which indicate the complexity of this tripartite relationship which began some time towards the end of 1922, at precisely the same time that previous biographical accounts have emphasised the dominance of Nancy Cunard in Aldous’s life. Disentangling these strands is not easy but in the case of Mary Hutchinson the evidence of the letters from both Maria and Aldous (none from Mary in return exist) is incontrovertible. In the case of Nancy Cunard it is wholly a matter of other people’s recollections. There is not a scrap of documentary evidence. It has been assumed that the sudden departure of the Huxleys for Italy in July 1923 was the result of Maria’s recognising that things had gone too far this time. Yet the relationship with Mary Hutchinson seems to have been, as it were, superimposed on the Nancy Cunard affair – if we assume that the latter began in the early autumn of 1922 and lasted until July 1923. The former certainly lasted well beyond this date. That two affairs could have been simultaneously carried on is of course wholly plausible but, at the very least, the situation was complicated. It can be argued that such inquiries are prurient or intrusive, and perhaps they are. But traces of these affairs are to be found in Huxley’s novels. For that reason alone they are relevant. Huxley’s view of human sexuality was complicated. Although he was unsympathetic to male homosexuality (in spite of having many close friends such as Gerald Heard, Edward Sackville-West or Christopher Isherwood who were homosexual) and therefore not wholly ‘correct’ by current standards, Huxley was certainly, from his youth, quite free from sexual inhibition. ‘The incorrect sexual act,’ he wrote in an essay in Music at Night, ‘corresponds, in certain contemporary societies, to the expression of heretical opinions in Catholic and early Protestant Europe during the ages of faith.’12 In his novel After Many a Summer, Mr Propter asks himself: ‘What sort of sexual behaviour was normal? … there was not one type of human sexuality that could be called normal in the sense in which one could say there was a normality of vision or digestion … The different kinds of sexual behaviour could not be judged by referring them to an absolute natural norm. They could only be judged in reference to ultimate aims of each individual and the results observed in each case.’13 But in a letter to J.B. Priestley in 1937 in which he discussed a book called Sex and Culture by J.D. Unwin, he observed that ‘there does seem to exist a correlation between social energy and a degree of restraint’.14 In other words, he seems to have been moving towards a critique of promiscuity – of the kind that features so markedly in his imagined societies, whether in Brave New World or Island. More than once he refers to the experience of ‘alienation’ in sexual activity – the ‘alienating frenzies’ of the ‘Other World of sensuality’ in Island, for example.15 Quite free from the restraining hand of English Puritanism and Mrs Grundy, and from the notion that fidelity to one partner was a necessary ingredient in marriage, Huxley seems to have had nonetheless some reservations about the desirability of total sexual freedom, particularly when – as in his Utopian novels – sex is wholly divorced from procreation or any other social consequence.
Aldous Huxley Page 16