Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  2 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene (1935), PP453ff

  3 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 10 August 1923

  4 L.215

  5 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (1994 edition), P455

  6 HRC, Letter to J.B. Pinker, 6 July 1923

  7 L.219

  8 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 18 July 1923

  9 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 26 July 1923

  10 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 27 July 1923

  11 Mark Amory, Lord Berners, the last eccentric (1998) P91

  12 L.218

  13 HRC, Letter from Constable and Co. to Aldous Huxley, 17 December 1923

  14 George H. Doran, Chronicles of Barabbas (1935), P168

  15 L.224

  16 James Douglas, Sunday Express, 25 November 1923. Watt, PP80—3

  17 L.221

  18 L.223

  XIII

  Florence

  The winter of 1923 to 1924 in Italy had been ‘the worst in Italy since Dante’s days’,1 Huxley told Charles Prentice, the new man at Chatto and Windus, the publishers with whom he would evolve a long and creative association that would also include Prentice’s Chatto partner, Harold Raymond, and, later, Ian Parsons. Huxley enjoyed a unique relationship with Chatto, who published all his books (something of a marvel by today’s publishing standards) and they in turn benefited from his name and from his extraordinary co-operativeness. He was the easiest of authors to deal with.2 With the New Year, he resolved to put his literary house in order, telling Prentice that he had abandoned a projected long novel, because it needed more time, and that he was going to offer him in fulfilment of the contract a volume of short stories to be called either Brief Candles or Little Mexican – ‘I leave the choice to you’. (In the event the former title was used for a later collection.) His offer to send some of the manuscript immediately ‘so as to begin setting up’ and the rest within four weeks indicates the sort of ‘Fordist’ production line Huxley had strapped himself to with this contract. To Eric Pinker – who fulfilled for Huxley some of the functions of the modern literary agent but was really only supposed to be helping to place material in US magazines – he asked for guidance on how to get out of the wretched Balzac contract, signed when he was ‘very young, very foolish and poor’.3 Constable’s Michael Sadleir offered a few compromises – another literary biography, a set of dialogues – but in the end, after much discussion, Pinker used his influence to get the agreement cancelled. This was a great relief, for Huxley was ‘desperately busy’,4 and had fallen deeply out of love with Balzac, seeing him as little more than ‘a sort of gigantic film-scenario writer’ (as Huxley himself would eventually become). He finally got the MS of Little Mexican off to Chatto in February. Immediately, the chassis of Those Barren Leaves was trundled out on to the production line. But not before he began to think of a journey to Tunisia, and through North Africa generally, by car, with a book in mind as the outcome. The Huxleys had begun to develop a passion for motoring – with Maria, an expert driver as she became, at the wheel, for it was inconceivable that Aldous, with his eyesight, would drive a car. In March they were up in the Apennines in the snow and motoring across Northern Italy, the first of several motor tours this year. Then Maria went across to Belgium to see her sister Suzanne, married to Joep Nicolas, a Dutch painter. The couple spent a part of their honeymoon with the Huxleys in Florence in April.

  With the new novel, Huxley was still interested in trying to escape the tyranny of Realismus: ‘The mere business of telling a story interests me less and less. I find it very difficult to understand the mentality of a man like Bennett who can sit down and spin out an immense realistic affair about life in Clerkenwell (his latest, Riceyman Steps is that) … The only really and permanently absorbing things are attitudes towards life and the relation of man to the world.’5 It was for this reason that the Byron centenary left him cold. The poet lacked substance, in Huxley’s view: ‘More and more I find that I can only read poets who have something to say, not those who make beauty in the void.’ This is the Huxley aesthetic in nuce. Increasingly, he would become preoccupied with ‘attitudes towards life and the relation of man to the world’ and seek forms – the discursive essay, the historical biography, the critical anthology – that were primarily vehicles for ideas, chosen for their functionality. He was frequently explicit about this. ‘By profession I am an essayist who sometimes writes novels and biographies,’ he told the New York Herald Tribune three decades later, ‘an unsystematic cogitator whose books represent a series of attempts to discover and develop artistic methods for expressing the general in the particular, the abstract through the concrete, the broadly historical and the deeply metaphysical and mystical within the special case, the localized scene, the personal adventure.’6 Possessed by the intellectual’s infatuation with the abstract idea, Huxley seems to be denying, in passages such as this, the capacity, the inventive capability, of the fictional imagination.

  In May the six stories of Little Mexican appeared, ‘very smart, in what the poet would call “England’s bloody red”. I think it ought to amuse.’7 The book was another opportunity to see in Huxley’s practice the intellect at war with the novelist’s imagination. Often in these stories one feels that there is too much authorial commentary and generalising, too little abandonment to the inventive flow of narrative. Not that these reflections are at all uninteresting. In the story ‘Uncle Spencer’ the sceptical and free-thinking Huxleyan narrator is awakened to the limits of ‘the materialistic philosophy, the careless and unreflecting scepticism which were, in those days, the orthodoxy of every young man who thought himself intelligent’ and is brought to the realisation: ‘Now it is possible – it is, indeed, almost necessary – for a man of science to be also a mystic.’ This is the first tentative sign of the emergence of the later Huxley, and the slow eclipse of the angry young sceptic of the immediate post-war period. Noticeable also, is the fact that only one of the stories is set in England. Up to now, Huxley’s brilliant satires on English life had been written wholly in Tuscany. Now Italy itself, Belgium, and France entered into his books in their own right. In ‘Young Archimedes’ there is a lyrical description of what must have been the view from the Castel Montici: ‘And looking across the nearest tributary valley that wound from below our crest down towards the Arno, looking over the low dark shoulder of hill on whose extreme promontory stood the towered church of San Miniato, one saw the huge dome airily hanging on its ribs of masonry, the square campanile, the sharp spire of Santa Croce, and the canopied tower of the Signoria, rising above the intricate maze of houses, distinct and brilliant, like small treasures carved out of precious stones.’

  In June Huxley’s adaptation of Frances Sheridan’s play, The Discovery, was published and was due to be performed in the 300 Club in London, produced by Nigel Playfair. In a crisp and witty introduction, Huxley explained that in adapting it for the modern stage ‘I did my best to identify with Mrs Sheridan, to think in her terms, to catch her turns of phrase. I fear, however, I have not been entirely successful.’8 Given the premise, he probably had been successful. The Introduction was Huxley’s second attempt. In the intervals of everything else in Florence, he had quickly knocked out for Prentice a preface, which, after consultation, he admitted was ‘rather too off-handed’.9 This is an understatement for it is a rather too frank and insouciant statement of the low creed of the freelance writer (we may sometimes think these thoughts but it is unwise to broadcast them). The scrapped introduction confessed that in the course of ‘a strenuous career as a literary journalist’10 Huxley had been required often to write at short notice ‘about subjects concerning which I knew little or nothing at all’. At first he was nervous about being found out in this imposture but eventually: ‘I found that an hour’s reading in the London Library was enough to provide me with just the convincing little facts on any topic which only the erudite would be likely to know; I acquired the art of setting forth these scraps of information casually and
with an air of professional ease, that was wholly convincing.’ Journalism, he concluded, ‘is not the best form of intellectual training for a young man’, a remark reminiscent of one he would make towards the end of his life to a group of journalism students in Los Angeles: ‘It’s an awfully good field to get into, if you make sure that you get out of it.’11 Huxley went on to make another confession, which would be repeated several times subsequently, that he took no interest in the books he had written: ‘The writing of FINIS at the end of a manuscript should be the equivalent of burning it and when a book is published it is for the author as though it has been destroyed.’ This was because he did not want to ‘allow recollections of past states of mind to interfere with present thoughts’ and to move on.

  Chatto were no doubt wise to dissuade a writer from asking the public to take an interest in books in which the author professed to take none. Chatto were also at this time dealing with the continuing consequences of Antic Hay. Woken up by the Sunday Express, the moral guardians were on the march. The Bishop of London, in his capacity as chairman of the London Council of the Promotion of Public Morality, had requested Chatto either to withdraw the book or to expunge certain passages which would, in their present form, be injurious to ‘women and girls … who constitute so large a proportion of the Readers of fiction’. Chatto replied politely that it would do no such thing, pointing out that it was a book ‘of interest exclusively to intellectual people’, as sales were making clear, and therefore was no threat to ‘the large class of women and girls to which you refer’ (who presumably did not form part of the class of ‘intellectual people’.)12 Huxley himself observed: ‘As for these Moralists – they are a little late in the day, aren’t they? The devilish work is done already.’13 Shortly before leaving for Forte, where he would spend July and August finishing Those Barren Leaves, Huxley told Prentice what he planned to follow this novel: ‘a portentous historical novel of which the disjected members of the germ have been weltering in my mind for years. It should be done in about 18 months or two years [his next novel would actually turn out to be Point Counter Point in 1928]’.14 The contractual obligation for 1925 would be met, Huxley promised, by a collection of short stories in the spring and a ‘light novel with mild detective interest’ for the autumn. In fact 1925 and 1926 would see, apart from the novel, two travel books, a collection of essays, and a book of short stories. The novel, he reported from Forte at the Villa Fasola, was not going well: ‘Meanwhile, this damned book of mine is still on my hands … I’ve had a lot of trouble getting the thing into shape, writing and re-writing whole chunks before they took their proper form and proportion. I’d rather like to begin the whole thing over again now, to redigest & polish. But time lacks.’15 Still, there was the consolation of seeing the egregious James Douglas recanting with praise of Little Mexican. ‘What a frothing swill-tub of a man!’

  Those Barren Leaves, was not finished when the Huxleys, leaving Matthew at the Villa Fasola, set off again for the Alps, where he completed it along the road, at a place called Amberieu in Savoie. Then they drove on to Paris, staying a couple of nights with Lewis Gielgud, with Maria having established herself as an excellent chauffeuse: ‘She drives our little Citroën with great vigour and skill and has taken us across the Alps and through France in a most dashing fashion.’16 From Paris they crossed to London, staying at 258 King’s Road in Chelsea, a flat lent to them by an old friend, Rachel Russell. One purpose of coming to London was to enable Huxley to consult some decent libraries – something he was unable to do in Italy. He caught up with friends such as T.S. Eliot and Osbert Sitwell who told him some gossip. Huxley’s cousin, Arnold Ward, Mrs Humphry Ward’s son, had drunkenly announced in the St James’s Club that Huxley had disgraced his ancestors by writing Antic Hay. The Huxleys also met Mary Hutchinson, who had offered to put them up at her house in Upper Mall, Hammersmith, and who complained later to Maria that Aldous had had a depressing effect on her – perhaps through his mooning attentions. He wrote to her to apologise, complaining that he was an unsuccessful lover but still a hopeful one, adding in a postscript: ‘If only you’d come to Italy.’17 Then the Huxley cavalcade – the Citroën was performing well but they had their eyes on a new Lancia ‘which is said to have all the qualities of the Alfa Romeo, which won the Grand Prix this year’18 – moved on to Holland and Belgium, Paris, central and southern France, and finally back to Florence by the start of October. Just as Huxley’s book plans were often torn up as soon as they were announced, so his domicile was always impermanent. Back in Florence he tried to persuade Robert Nichols to live in Italy because it was so cheap: ‘On the same income on which I just kept alive, uncomfortably, in London, I live in a large house, with 2 servants and a nurse, keep a small car, travel quite a lot and save money to boot. I am also far healthier, put on weight.’19 His good health and spirits were reported to several friends. He fully intended to stay in Italy – but not Florence because of the ‘frightful’ English expats – and would come back to England – London or Oxford – only when Matthew needed to be educated (he was now four). Meanwhile he was ‘incessantly busy’ with his writing and pleased enough with Those Barren Leaves. ‘The main theme is the undercutting of everything by a sort of despairing scepticism and then the undercutting of that by mysticism.’ Prentice was pleased too. ‘The book seems to come off alright,’ Huxley told him. ‘The characters are better done, I think, than in Antic Hay; & what was only implied there is made much more explicit in this book.’20 Prentice was also informed that Huxley was at work on a volume of essays: ‘The central theme will be travel: but I mean to make it the excuse for a variety of lucubrations. For a title I thought that Along the Road or At the Road’s Edge or something like that, reminiscent of On the Margin would vaguely indicate the nature of the book.’ The lucubrations, however, were the thing.

  Towards the end of November, Maria wrote from Florence to Mary Hutchinson with whom she had been corresponding regularly. She was rather less enamoured than Aldous of the Castel Montici and letters over the previous year had complained of the ugliness of the house and its furnishings and the flow of visitors (‘I have had little pleasure out of it; turned me into a taxidriver – meet them at the station … take them back with their luggage’21) many of whom she did not care for. There was Lady Colefax and Lord Berners in his gleaming Rolls-Royce, the trio of titled persons completed by Evan Morgan in his beautifully cut and bejewelled clothes – ‘an 18th century figure come to life again’.22 J. W. Sullivan was a much more sympathetic figure to them, full of serious ideas and interesting talk. But, notwithstanding the cold of a second winter, the beauty of the house’s aspect made her talk of wanting to buy it. Maria’s letter of 20 November 1924 reveals that the Huxley-Hutchinson relationship was more intricate than it hitherto might have appeared. A veiled reference to ‘the Oxford beds’ (had they visited Oxford in September when in England?) and ‘the hours wondering when and where we will meet’ is followed by the exclamation: ‘Darling Mary, how often I think of our mysterious escapade and our last evening in your room, sweet memories, few but endless in their details …’ Aldous is mentioned. ‘He knows I am writing and pay you devoted court and wishes to be allowed to kiss your hand hoping you forgave him long ago for discovering his character not to be frivolous and naughty.’ What had begun as a pursuit of Mary by Aldous was now clearly a complicated relationship between three people. Aldous and Maria never ceased to love each other. Maria and Mary loved each other. Aldous loved – or desired – Mary with a force that was not reciprocated.23

  The Huxleys enjoyed a cold Christmas at the Castel Montici – Aldous writing a very brief children’s story called Noa for Gabriella Fasola, Costanza’s daughter, which he illustrated with his own watercolours – there are scenes of animals ascending the ark, and an elephant getting stuck, which are quite charming.24 They had six months left in Florence.

  In January 1925, Huxley finished Along the Road and Those Barren Leaves was published. It sold 8000 copies in t
he first year – which demonstrates that Huxley was becoming a novelist of some reputation, with the discriminating reading public at least. Like the two previous novels it is satirical in intent and if anything the writing is crisper and brighter. The continuing influence of Peacock is there, but also perhaps something of Ronald Firbank and Norman Douglas. Plainly unrepentant about drawing from life, Mrs Lilian Aldwinkle, who makes an early appearance – ‘one of those large, handsome, old-masterish women’ – looks very much like Lady Ottoline Morrell once more. The same unsparing light is cast on all the characters, raising questions about Huxley’s own frame of reference. For all his free-thinking modernity, his mind and morals were formed by a Victorian tradition of ethical high-mindedness. Whatever the sexual freedoms which we can see that he claimed in his personal life, there is, paradoxically, a deeply moral view– in what one might be tempted to call an old-fashioned sense – of the antic hay danced by these characters. And always ideas are as important as plot. Characters are always saying interesting things and mounting interesting arguments. Where a less sophisticated novelist would begin with a simple description of the English abroad, Huxley in this novel immediately focuses our attention on the nature of English Italophilia. Mrs Aldwinkle is cruelly judged to have ‘the thoughts and feelings of a generation that had grown up placidly in sheltered surroundings – or perhaps had not grown up at all’.

  But it was not just the comfortable bourgeois who was being satirised. The complacent ‘progressive’ of the older generation also feels the lash. Mr Cardan is made to observe: ‘I was brought up in the simple faith of nineteenth century materialism.’ His conscience was appeased by a philanthropy which resulted in ‘a quite superfluous number of white-tiled lavatories for our workers’. The younger generation, in the person of Calamy, lives, like Huxley, in a time governed by ‘the sense that everything’s perfectly provisional and temporary … it’s all infinitely exhilarating.’ There is perhaps something of Huxley in the self-assessment of the novelist, Mary Thriplow: ‘They like my books because they’re smart and unexpected and rather paradoxical and cynical and elegantly brutal. They don’t see how serious it all is. They don’t see the tragedy and the tenderness underneath. “You see,” she explained, “I’m trying to do something new – a chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and tragedy and loveliness and wit and fantasy and realism and irony and sentiment all combined.”’ Huxley’s tussle with the rival claims of art and social commitment – seen at this stage in terms merely of the need for art to have some content – was steadily expanding. Francis Chelifer, observes: ‘I have learned the art of writing well, which is the art of saying nothing elaborately.’ He adds that the doctrine of art for art’s sake is ‘the last and silliest of the idols’. In a self-reflexive manner that is almost proto-post-modernist, Huxley is engaged in a running debate with himself about the nature of writing.