Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  ‘Most of my time is taken up doing fiction,’ he told Mencken. ‘I am contracted to produce a certain wad of it each year. I find it more interesting and more profitable than miscellaneous journalism. It also enables me to live here: which I prefer to London, finding on the whole that the pleasiveness [sic] of the prospect makes up for the vileness of man in these regions.’3 He had earlier made a similar point to his old friend the poet Robert Nichols (who, incidentally, had also fallen under the spell of Nancy Cunard at one time, writing her a clutch of sonnets). Nichols was told that the famous departure ‘in rather a hurry’ was a consequence of Maria’s health and a desire to escape ‘the odious tumult of London’.4 At the start of July they were giving themselves a break at Siena, watching the Palio, and glorying in the escape from drudgery. ‘I am now cutting myself off almost completely from regular journalism,’ he told Nichols, though he said he would still be doing the odd piece for Vanity Fair in the United States. They proposed to settle ‘more or less permanently – as far as any arrangement with us is ever permanent’ in Italy and had already taken a lease on the Castel Montici in Florence with which they were already familiar. ‘There I shall settle down to grind out two yearly books of fiction for Chatto’s [sic] and any other things I can manage. The life, I think, ought to be agreeable, and one’s money goes nearly twice as far as in London. I shall come back to civilisation a few months every year to find out what is going on.’

  One thing that was going on was the publication, in May, of a collection of essays, On the Margin. This was Huxley’s first collection of essays – a genre in which he excelled – and all had first appeared above the pseudonym Autolycus in the Athenaeum, or in The Westminster Gazette, The London Mercury and Vanity Fair (New York). They are sparkling and irreverent. In an essay on the Shelley centenary (which allows him a pen portrait of the Tuscan coast at Forte) he mocks the fusty English approach to honouring the dead and suggests that the dreary establishment take a leaf out of the Italians’ book: ‘In this dim land of ours we are accustomed to pay too much respect to fictitious values; we worship invisibilities and in our enjoyment of the immediate life we are restrained by imaginary inhibitions. We think too much of the past, of metaphysics, of tradition, of the ideal future, of decorum and good form; too little of life and the glittering noisy moment.’ The collection also launches some characteristic Huxley themes which would be elaborated in the years ahead – such as the critique of what we would now call ‘the leisure society’. ‘Like every man of good sense and good feeling, I abominate work,’ he observes in an essay, which, if it appeared today, would send a shiver of horror through the young upwardly mobile professional. He attacked the ‘stale balderdash’ and the ‘tepid bath of nonsense’ coming out of Hollywood and argued that the Press exists merely to provide ‘distraction’ not thought. Even sport had now become a vicarious experience, watched not participated in. This is the frame of reference in which some of the ideas of Brave New World were developed a decade later. ‘Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility.’ Huxley sympathised with the industrial proletariat, forced to perform unrewarding production line tasks, and then provided by the cultural industries in their leisure with ‘distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work’. Huxley wanted the ordinary man and woman to have the opportunities for mental stimulation and imaginative and intellectual freedom which highly cultivated people like himself enjoyed. This is an argument that would once have won him active sympathy on the Left. Today it has resulted in his being branded an ‘elitist’.

  Many of the essays are very light (but occasionally deceptively so) but some begin to point to an incipient dissatisfaction with the frivolity that has been enjoined on him. In a telling essay on Lytton Strachey (who held Huxley, perhaps as a result of a certain competitiveness, in some reserve) he noted: ‘One cannot imagine Mr Strachey coping with Dostoevsky or with any of the other great explorers of the soul.’ For his part, Strachey described Huxley as ‘a piece of seaweed’.5 Yet Huxley also praised Edward Lear, whose nonsense, he argued, was no less than ‘an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom’ and his work that of ‘a profound social philosopher’. The ‘They’ of the limericks embodied ‘that eternal struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow-beings’. In these essays one sees elaborated Huxley’s belief that art for art’s sake was a dead end and that writing must convey something other than its own self-delight in form and must have content, and a moral basis. In his essay on Ben Jonson, he argues: ‘His greatness is a greatness of character.’ And, finally, it is impossible to read these essays without a sense of regret that the essay form is now virtually defunct. A young writer today has only the brief and tightly edited book review, or an ephemeral newspaper column, as an alternative to these freer, more talkative forms.

  The Huxleys’ first stop in Italy was Forte dei Marmi and the Villa Fasola. In a letter to Pinker from Forte, Huxley again claimed that, ‘My wife’s health is making it essential for us to settle for most of the time at any rate, out here in Italy.’6 Though Maria plainly preferred to live in Italy, with which she was in love, and though she was a little thin and ‘too light’,7 at this point, the real story of why they had left London could not be told. ‘Ever since I have been in Italy,’ he told Nichols, ‘I have been so wildly busy tapping on this machine for my living – a book to be finished by the beginning of August and hardly ten words on paper before I started.’ A series of letters to Mary Hutchinson (with Nancy Cunard out of the way, this relationship was free to develop) from an address at 65 Victoria Road, Kensington, seem to indicate that Huxley must have returned to England in the second half of July, no doubt to deal with business consequent on their sudden departure in June. The letters show Huxley still in the mode of anxious and aspiring suitor (‘The misery of dashed anticipation: the cold, unhappy anger of the disappointed against the raiser and the destroyer of charming hopes.’8). Writing to her in red ink – the only kind he had to hand – he quips: ‘Not my heart’s blood, Mary’9 and goes on to regret that he is going away again. She does not reply, so he writes again the next day: ‘I don’t want to suffer at all any more … I want to laugh and exchange delightful sentiments, ideas and kisses. And meanwhile you are always no more than the rustle of a skirt disappearing round the corner: you are a perfume in the corridor and the discreet closing of a door. And one evening conceivably … you might feel that it was time, today, for an answer.’10 He begs her to give him an answer and to follow him to Florence: ‘There are so many pathways in the Italian landscape.’ The Huxleys seem to have made another visit to London in October 1923 because they were among a group involved in another jape orchestrated by Lord Berners. This time they signed – along with the Sitwells, William Walton, Harold and Vita Nicolson, and Evan Morgan – a plaster cast of Psyche owned by Lord Berners which Ronald Firbank had had the temerity to criticise. After being signed it was put in a taxi with Berners’ butler and delivered to Firbank’s home.’11 Huxley’s association with Berners and the Sitwells – who were not really ‘Bloomsbury’ at all – shows how wide his circle was and is reminder that, notwithstanding his close association with Garsington, he was to some degree at a tangent to the mainstream Bloomsbury of the Stracheys and Woolfs. The term ‘Bloomsbury’ used to convey a certain approach to private friendship and sexual ethics and an aesthetic, has nonetheless been used here for convenience. And he used it in this way himself.

  At the beginning of September, Antic Hay was finished – 100,000 words written in two months – and the Huxleys moved to Castel Montici, in the Via di Santa Margherita a Montici in Florence, having visited Belgium in August, then Milan where they bought their first car, a four-seater Citroën. The six-bedroomed house was cold and ugly – they had a genius for choosing ugly houses – ‘but the position is marvellous’.12 There was a fine view, from a south-west facing terrace and from a room in
the tower, of the city below. The argy-bargy with the proprietrix over a defective water pump finds its way into Those Barren Leaves (1925). The Huxleys were not enamoured of the English expatriate community in Florence and saw only Norman Douglas and occasional birds of passage. When the ‘servant problem’ had been sorted out, Matthew and Bella came on from Forte and the boy took great pleasure in playing with the peasant children in the sun, riding on mules, and collecting frogs in a vasca. Life promised to be happy, the only shadow on the horizon being a letter from Constable just before Christmas asking what progress (none) he was making on the Balzac book which should have been delivered no later than December 1920. ‘We should also be glad to know when we may expect the manuscript,’13 the publishers asked firmly.

  In November, Huxley’s second full-length novel, Antic Hay, was published. It was longer and more substantial than its ‘Peacockian’ predecessor but written with the same satirical verve and dash. Too satirical, in fact, for the United States, where his publisher, Doran, found the book being reported by the censor to the New York District Attorney’s office. In his autobiography, George Doran revealed that the DA had personally enjoyed the book, finding it ‘fascinating and artistic’,14 but he feared that ‘some parts of the book might be misconstrued into the pornographic’. A compromise was reached whereby Doran promised, in publicising the book, not to stress ‘the pornographic aspect’, nor to refer to the threatened seizure of the book as a tactic to boost sales. Eighty years on, it is hard to see what could have been considered pornographic in the book. In England, however, trouble would be caused by the Huxley family. Like Lady Ottoline Morrell, they thought they saw resemblances and did not like what they saw. The memorable opening scene in which ‘Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon.’ sits in his oak stall in what is pretty obviously modelled on Eton chapel, is a sprightly mockery of conventional religion as embodied by the Church of England chaplain intoning before the ‘spread brass eagle’, as well as giving some insight into Huxley’s view of his time at Eton. Gumbril’s father, ‘an anti-clerical of the strict old school’, sounds very much like Leonard Huxley, and Gumbril’s mother, who died when he was a boy, is pretty unmistakably modelled on Julia Huxley. Gumbril’s hatred both of what he was currently doing and of work in general is also very familiar and the comic business of his patent device of pneumatic trouser seats echoes his desire for a quick economic rescue from the drudgery of work.

  Like most of the people with whom Huxley consorted, the characters of Antic Hay are aesthetes and literary types who have no knowledge of the commercial or industrial worlds. Gumbril’s visit to a Leninist tailor who denounces the pursuit of political liberty as ‘never a greater swindle ‘atched in the ’ole of ‘istory’ reminds us also that working class characters were never to be Huxley’s forte. This is a very amusing book, the satire frequently very clever, as when the literary journalist Mr Mercaptan denounces the patent small clothes as ‘too Wellsian’. Huxley is trying to forge an appropriate style – rapid, dislocated and impressionistic at certain points – to capture the restlessness of the bright young things, notable amongst whom is Myra Viveash with, like Nancy Cunard, her desperate memory of the lover lost in the war, ‘that deathbed on which her restless spirit for ever and wearily exerted itself’. There is satire on the art world – the aggressive earnestness of Lypiatt, whom some have taken as a portrait of Wyndham Lewis, and the art critic, Mr Mallard, who ‘had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful’. There is also satire on the cult of ‘The Complete Man’ so created by donning a false beard, and on modern advertising, as well as self-directed mockery at the Huxley figure himself: ‘Have I lied to myself. Have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one?’ But at the core of the book are the exposed wounds of Huxley’s passionate entanglement with Nancy Cunard. “‘What have I done to you?’ Mrs Viveash asked, opening wide her pale-blue eyes.” Gumbril replies, “Merely wrecked my existence”. In Chapter 21, Gumbril and Myra take a trip around London seeing ‘all that is most bestial and idiotic in contemporary life’, a trip in which the lights of Piccadilly Circus ‘give one temporarily the illusion of being cheerful … It’s like the Last Ride Together.’

  Gumbril and Mrs Viveash leaned their elbows on the sill and looked out. Like time the river flowed, staunchlessly, as though from a wound in the world’s side. For a long time they were silent. They looked out, without speaking, across the flow of time, at the stars, at the human symbol hanging miraculously in the moonlight …

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Gumbril at last, meditatively.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Mrs Viveash interrupted him, ‘will be as awful as to-day.’

  But it was the scene in which the death of Gumbril’s mother is described that angered Leonard Huxley, who accused his son of ‘botanising on your mother’s grave’. Huxley’s reply to his father is very solemn and firm and cold. He was prepared to make no concessions: ‘I will only point out that it is a book written by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind; and that it is intended to reflect – fantastically, of course, but nonetheless faithfully – the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch.’15 Huxley stressed what he claimed was the book’s ‘artistic novelty’, which consisted in its being ‘a work in which all the ordinarily separated categories – tragic, comic, fantastic, realistic – are combined so to say chemically into a single entity, whose unfamiliar character makes it appear at first sight rather repulsive’. This is an important insight into Huxley’s view of artistic innovation (it anticipates the musical analogy of Point Counter Point or the dislocated time scheme of Eyeless in Gaza). Huxley’s critics sometimes accuse him of ‘inorganic’ structural innovations that are no more than shuffling the elements rather than making it new in more imaginatively revolutionary ways. There is some degree of truth in this (a scissors and paste quality in the flashbacks and fast forwards of Eyeless for example). But at the very least he was confronting the issues and seeking formal solutions to the problem of representing ‘an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch’. Conservative England certainly got the message. It swung into action in the shape of James Douglas in the Sunday Express. His review was headed ‘Ordure and Blasphemy’ and declared: ‘Mr Aldous Huxley is beyond question a diabolically clever young man … It is a witty novel, but its wit compels the reader to hold his nose’ (a more temperate review in the Times Literary Supplement had already concluded that Huxley had in fact ‘faced his disgust’ and was likely to move on from it; the Sunday Express, however, was not about to let him get away with it). ‘The sixteenth chapter,’ spluttered Douglas, ‘is almost Ulyssean in its nauseous horror.’ Fearing that imitators would be spawned, Douglas held up his hand: ‘If Antic Hay escapes uncastigated and unpilloried the effect upon English fiction will be disastrous.’ He called on the great British public to repudiate this filth: ‘The great poets are as clean as the east wind … Mr Huxley is a blowfly.’16

  Huxley – who always claimed never to read reviews of his work – was nonetheless aware of the attack but continued to work away steadily in Florence, preparing his next fictional collection, the stories in Little Mexican, which would be published in 1924. ‘Life proceeds very calmly here and I manage to get a good deal of work done, together with a certain amount of reading,’ he told his father. He added that he envied Balzac’s legendary productivity. ‘I find that eight hours of writing is my extreme limit.’17 Although he was able to talk about Mussolini rather frivolously in a letter to Julian about the concept of leadership in the modern state (‘A little more pure reason and he would be the philosopher king.’18) the growing strength of the fascists in Italy meant that he had less than eighteen months left in what, for now, was still proving a far better way of life than the one he had enjoyed in London.

  1 Ge
orge Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940) in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This 1920–40, P557