Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Early in December, 1922, Huxley wrote from the offices of Vogue at Holborn to Mary Hutchinson, whom he had been seeing quite regularly at dinner parties with her husband Jack. Mary Hutchinson’s name is to be found scattered throughout the voluminous reminiscences of Bloomsbury – mostly for her affair with Clive Bell – but also for her entanglement with others such as Virginia Woolf who seems to have enjoyed a complicated relationship with her. Woolf wrote in her diary in 1920: ‘She might be one of those impulsive, affectionate, rather unfortunately concocted natures who are to me interesting, perpetually venturing out, rashly importunate, & then snubbed back again; aspiring; fastidious, vain & so on, but impelled by a kind of passion, for Clive, I suppose, which is sincere.’16 Woolf, in other moods, contrived to suggest that Mary was a little predatory and manipulative, ‘she is decorative, and hunts like a beast of prey, whatever it may be – a jewel, a toy … she is a crafty devil, Mary.’17 But D.H. Lawrence told her husband St John Hutchinson in 1929 when he was staying with the Huxleys in Paris: ‘Mary is one of the few women left on earth who really listens to a man – no men do – and it’s quite stimulating. ’18 She was a writer – of one book, the aptly-named Fugitive Pieces (1927) – and had contributed, like Huxley, to the Athenaeum and Vogue – her essays in the latter appearing under the pseudonym of Polly Flinders. It is slight stuff, with a vein of higher coquetry (‘We ladies are said to be frivolous … Certainly we are not useful …’ etc. etc.) and peppered with quotations from French poetry, and (rather too frequently) from Proust. The most vigorous passage in the whole book is her praise of Diaghalev for having breached the defensive wall of English philistinism with the thrilling modernisn of the Russian ballet. A reference by her to the ‘fog of democratic dullness’ sent up by the mass of ordinary people suggests that she was no stranger to the snobbish side of Bloomsbury. In spite of the notorious affair with Clive Bell, Mary had a bisexual side (faced with the intricacies of these Bloomsbury pairings – and this one is about to become more intricate – such labels as ‘bisexual’, ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexual’ seem clumsy and somehow inadequate to the task). She may also have had an affair with Vita Sackville-West. She allowed herself to be courted by Aldous because it was Maria she had in her sights: ‘Of the two Huxleys – Maria and Aldous – Maria was the one I loved. Aldous was gentle, aloof, affectionate and even ardent sometimes, but it was Maria who attracted and charmed me. I always imagined she was “like a Persian”. Her eyes were almond-shaped and very beautiful, her expression languid, her nature innocent, sensual, uncomplicated, her heart warm and loyal. Her hair was dark. She always seemed to be sweetly scented, oiled and voluptuous.’19

  Huxley, as this first letter of 4 December 1922 shows, had been intimidated by this potent Siren: ‘How much I enjoyed last Friday: I always used, in the past, to be so terribly shy and nervous of you. Why I hardly know – unless it was your air of impenetrable serenity that disquieted me. What are you really like?’20 From the end of 1922, letters to Mary flowed steadily, and the two were involved for the rest of the decade at least, as was, gradually, Maria, a menage à trois as it became, that seems to embody the popular idea of Bloomsbury sexual freedom. On the way back from a brief trip to Brussels in mid-December, Huxley scribbled another note to Mary in pencil, heading it ‘In the Train’ and asking: ‘Mary, when shall I see you again? May it be soon? … My head turns a little when I think of you – still as enigmatic as ever, still somehow a little charming in your serenity.’21 That this affair did not proceed entirely smoothly is clear from a telegram sent from Paddington a week later following a meeting at which some gaucherie on Huxley’s part had evidently spoiled the evening: ‘HAVE RISEN EARLY TO BEG YOU FORGIVE A STUPIDITY THAT WAS RATHER OFFENSIVE AND TO REQUEST AN OPPORTUNITY NOT TO REPEAT IT.’22 His next surviving letter to Mary, early in the new year, again seems to indicate that this relationship had a prolonged and bumpy start.

  Meanwhile, Huxley was planning his campaign of liberation from journalism. Frank Swinnerton, of Chatto, later wrote that the journalistic discipline of these years had actually proved salutary in two ways: it had given Huxley a training in the art of communicating directly with a large audience which he would exploit to great effect in his essays and non-fictional works; and it had knocked some of the corners off him by giving a potentially remote intellectual a taste of the real world of work.23 That was almost certainly true, but the pressure – professional and personal – that was driving him towards a new way of life was building up inexorably. Journalism was beginning to disgust him because he was beginning to see how the new organs of mass communication were sacrificing quality to profit. Huxley’s vigour of denunciation of these trends has caused some to see him not as a hater of those who foisted bad art on the public but as a hater of the mass audience which, willy-nilly, became the consumers of it. This is a reprise of the argument sparked by his great-uncle, Matthew Arnold, in the middle of the previous century. To these critics he is guilty of ‘contempt for mass society’. They would adduce as an example his remarks to Mencken at the close of 1922: ‘The Press & now the Wireless Telephone are doing wonders in the way of spreading darkness, vulgarity, fifteenth-rateness, folly, mental idleness, cant and confusion, waste of energy: once can see the results at once. The gulf between the populace & those engaged in any intelligent occupation of whatever kind steadily widens. In twenty years time a man of science or a serious artist will need an interpreter in order to talk to a cinema proprietor or a member of his audience:’24 Huxley’s unusually colourful language here may reflect his own intellectual frustration at this time or his desire to vie with Mencken’s own vigorous mode of expression.

  In January 1923, the Huxleys moved house again from Westbourne Terrace to 44 Princes Gardens SW7, a much more satisfactory address in Kensington. On 8 January, Huxley signed a momentous agreement with his publishers. In exchange for a guaranteed income of £500 a year he would deliver two new works of fiction a year, one of which would be a full-length novel. He would retain his American rights and the prospect of renewal at the end of this three-year contract was strongly hinted at. This looked like the financial security he had sought and which would allow him at last to concentrate his energies on ‘intelligent work’. But, as an internal Chatto memo had put it just before the meeting to agree the contract: ‘How many works can he produce in one year?’ Exactly. Was Huxley, in fact, exchanging one remorseless treadmill for another? No present-day writer would be offered such a contract, though it was not unheard of at that time. There is clear evidence over the next three years that the pressure of churning out two books a year was taking its toll, even for a writer who had already perfected the art of meeting regular deadlines. Moreover, although freed from the pressure of daily journalism – ‘after April I shall be able to write what I want’,25 he told Suzanne – the pressure of his emotionally turbulent private life was rapidly filling the vacuum. The first typescript was due in July. ‘For my sort of fever there is no specific quinine,’ he told Mary three days before the contract was signed, ‘Only, perhaps, work; I want to play – not a game but a new sort of music, a Mozartian relationship … I kiss your hands because I am not allowed to kiss your mouth.’26 The relationship was still at a very early stage and not at all clandestine. He asked her and Jack to come to see a performance at a club called the Cave of Harmony, of his play, ‘Happy Families’, which had been published in Limbo, or, failing that, would she join him at a concert ‘just to indicate how two people might know one another, lightly and profoundly …’27 Mary was told to phone Maria to confirm the arrangements.

  Maria was also aware of another woman in Aldous’s life: Nancy Cunard. As has been indicated above, this is a very difficult relationship to pin down. There is no letter or note. No-one knows when it began or ended (probably late 1922 to May or June 1923, though they would have met earlier at the Eiffel Tower) and the sole sources are oral. One might even be inclined to dismiss it were it not for the powerful evidence of novels such as Antic Hay (
1923) where Nancy Cunard is transformed fictionally into Myra Viveash, the driven socialite, maimed by the death of her young lover in the War, as Nancy Cunard mourned her young lover, Peter Broughton-Adderley – whose name is on the war memorial at Eton. Nancy Cunard – whose image has been unforgettably caught in Cecil Beaton’s photograph of 1930 – was by any measure extraordinary. Daughter of Sir Bache Cunard of the shipping company (that is, if she was not actually the daughter of George Moore by Lady (Emerald) Cunard) she was strong-willed, certain of herself, and, according to Harold Acton she had ‘inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties. They saw her as the Giaconda of the Age … She was slim to the point of evanescence … Her small head so gracefully poised might have been carved in crystal with green jade for eyes, and this crystalline quality made some people think she was cold to the core. But she felt passionately about injustice … [particularly for the African American] .’28 For David Garnett: ‘She was very slim with a skin as white as bleached almonds, the bluest eyes one has ever seen and very fair hair. She was marvellous. The world she inhabited was that of the rich and smart and the gulf between us seemed unbridgeable … She was always certain that what she saw was the truth and there was no room for doubt.’ For Mary Hutchinson: ‘Her character I am sure must be described as deeply disturbed and violent, subject to fierce angers, fierce indignations, fierce enthusiasms.’ Iris Tree recalled ‘the delicate dance of her walk through London streets’. William Carlos Williams, the poet, called her ‘that tall, blond spike of a woman’ and Raymond Mortimer noted ‘the mixture of delicacy and steel in her build … Never in her life, I believe, was she frightened of anything.’ Virginia Woolf saw a ‘little anxious flibbertigibbet with the startled honest eyes, & all the green stones hung about her’.29 In short, she was a striking, powerfully emotional and passionate rebel. In Allanah Harper’s words: ‘There was no middle way for Nancy.’ Was this the sort of woman who would want to attach herself to Aldous Huxley?

  Maria talked about this affair to Sybille Bedford – who describes it, and Nancy, in important detail.30 It was unlike any of Aldous’s other affairs in its intensity, which was hopeless because Nancy had no interest in Aldous, preferring less sensitive, less ‘cerebrotonic’, and more aggressively virile, men. Some of the pain of this rejected address and thwarted desire is revisited in Walter and Lucy in Point Counter Point (1928). Nancy Cunard’s fast life and sexual allure, her ‘image’, were the cause of his infatuation, one which proved too much for Maria, who, tolerant of sexual variety as she was, disliked the values and attitudes of Nancy Cunard’s set and feared for Aldous. They had a brief holiday in Florence in April 1923 (passing back through Paris at the beginning of May), and were spotted on the ferry to Dieppe by Virginia Woolf, who darted out of view, afraid that her dowdy patrician Bohemianism would be shown up by the Huxleys’ customary fashion-plate chic: ‘I can’t think it right to look precisely like an illustration to Vogue; and I daresay they thought the same t’other way round about us,’31 she told Vanessa Bell. Huxley was always a very stylish dresser, fond of handmade suits from fashionable London tailors, and Maria was frequently stunning. Her son Matthew joked to me that he would generally have to walk several yards behind his mother for fear of detracting from the extraordinary elegant figure she cut in whatever she was wearing.32 According to Sybille Bedford, ‘Nancy and Aldous had a brief affair. Nancy gave in, out of affection, exasperation; after a few days discarded him.’ His health suffered. Never a night owl or a drinker, his sojourns in the sorts of smoky night club frequented by Nancy and her set, were ruinous for him. He once spent a whole night pacing up and down outside her window. Things came to a head – and Sybille Bedford’s account of what Maria told her directly is the most important piece of evidence we have (and will ever have) – when Maria confronted Aldous one night when he returned late to Princes Gardens and delivered an ultimatum. They would leave for Italy the next morning. She started to pack, with Aldous hovering around her. By first light she had finished. She tossed out of the window anything else left unpacked and they left for Victoria and the boat train to the Continent. It was the end of their period in England for at least a decade. That summer, at Forte, Aldous would write, furiously, the novel his contract demanded, and which his need dictated: Antic Hay.

  1 L.206

  2 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 5 February 1922

  3 RL, Mémoires de Suzanne Nicolas Nys, p38

  4 Reading, letter to Chatto and Windus, 10 November 1921

  5 HL, Oral History Transcripts, Juliette Huxley interview with David King Dunaway

  6 L.206

  7 L.209

  8 Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 1 November 1922

  9 Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, p216 3 December 1922

  10 SB1.295

  11 Sybille Bedford quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, 7 May 2000. See also Margot Peters, May Sarton: a Biography (1997) in which Sarton is quoted as saying to her biographer: ‘Maria Huxley, you know, tamed women for Aldous. The young tigress, you know, she broke them in. Sybille what’s her name who wrote about Aldous was both Aldous’s and Maria’s lover.’ P394

  12 Music at Night (1931), p108

  13 After Many A Summer (1939), pp 228—9

  14 L.430

  15 Island (1962) P9

  16 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, p63 8 September 1920

  17 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, P20. Letter to Vita Sackville-West 12 February 1929

  18 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, Letter to St John Hutchinson, 25 March 1929

  19 HRC, Mary Hutchinson Profiles typescript. Mary’s interest in Aldous as a means to Maria confirmed by SB in conversation with the author

  20 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 4 December 1922

  21 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 20 December 1922

  22 HRC, Telegram to Mary Hutchinson, 28 December 1922

  23 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, (1935)

  24 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, undated but probably December 1922

  25 RL, Letter to Suzanne Nys, 9 February 1923

  26 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 5 January 1923

  27 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 16 January 1923

  28 Hugh Ford (ed) Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896–65 (1968). All quotations on Nancy Cunard in this chapter from this source unless otherwise indicated

  29 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, P320, 1 November 1924

  30 SB1.132–38

  31 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3, Letter to Vanessa Bell, 1 April 1923

  32 Matthew Huxley in conversation with the author

  XII

  Disgust

  ‘When one looks back at the twenties,’ George Orwell wrote in 1940, ‘nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia.’1 He noted a ‘pessimism of outlook’ in the post-war writers such as Huxley, and concluded, ‘they are able to “see through” most of the things that their predecessors had fought for. All of them are temperamentally hostile to the notion of “progress”; it is felt that progress not only doesn’t happen, but ought not to happen.’ The result was that there was ‘no attention to the urgent problems of the moment’. Frank Swinnerton had made a similar point a few years earlier, on the basis of actually knowing Huxley directly (which Orwell did not). Swinnerton saw the work of these writers as ‘a direct outcome of the mood of dissatisfaction, even despair, by which honest thoughtful young people were seized as they saw the consequences of four years of slaughter … They all feel that the world is a revolting place, and a hopeless place … they are all in a condition of gloom and disapproval regarding the world into which they have been flung. It is a world in a mess … The air is full of criticism and bad words.’ Huxley, in particular, in his early work of the 1920s, ‘seemed without hope, and therefore without philosophy, without anything but horror at the futility of things’.2 Swinnerton (prescie
ntly, as it turned out) believed that Huxley would find a way out of this impasse, but Orwell was largely right in his verdict on the decade. Until his political awakening in the mid-1930s, Huxley was concerned more with private ends than public means – symbolised by the sexual ronde. The story of his 1920s is a story with much of the outer world of English domestic politics (he travelled a great deal of course) removed. The fascisti who bothered him from time to time in Italy tended to be seen rather as comic opera buffoons than as the stormtroopers of a sinister ideology. His main reason for being there was, at last, to write fiction and nothing else.