Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  But the main sense of revulsion in this novel is at ‘the horrors and squalors of civilised life’, in Chelifer’s words, which arise from ‘men’s lack of reason – from their failure to be completely and sapiently human’. Chelifer’s job on the Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette is a fairly obvious analogy with Huxley’s stint on House and Garden. In a series of questions and answers Chelifer draws up to settle the matter of why on earth he is working in an office is included: ‘In order that Jewish stockbrokers may exchange their Rovers for Armstrong-Siddeleys’. In each of the novels so far (and in private correspondence), there are similar references to Jews which, taken together, may not be as noxious as the much more pronounced anti-Semitism of his friend T.S. Eliot, but are nonetheless unsettling. The usual explanation is that this was an unthinking feature of the English upper middle class milieu in which Huxley grew up. But he was not supposed to be unthinking, rather he was ‘sapiently human’. Another theme in the novel – which is essentially a series of satirical tableaux – is the state of contemporary culture. The word ‘highbrow’ was in vogue and Huxley was certainly entitled to that label. Like Francis Chelifer, he was aware of ‘living in an age where the Daily Mail sells two million copies every morning’ – and one where people were increasingly being manipulated by media and politicians. ‘Personally, I have always the greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias,’ says Mr Cardan at one point, a view echoed by Chelifer ‘in the Utopian state where everybody is well-off educated and leisured, everybody will be bored’. This was the line of argument that would run towards Brave New World. In this book, Huxley is clear what he is against, but less sure about what he is for. He is searching for an answer to the perennial question: how then must we live? In the closing section of the book, he appears to be taking the first tentative steps towards an acknowledgement of the mystical element in human experience. Calamy speculates: ‘Perhaps if you spend long enough and your mind is the right sort of mind, perhaps you really do get, in some queer sort of way, beyond the limitations of ordinary existence. And you see that everything that seems real is in fact entirely illusory – maya in fact, the cosmic illusion. Behind it you catch a glimpse of reality.’ Those who would later complain when Huxley the brilliant iconoclast became Huxley the sensitive humanist were perhaps not reading him carefully enough. His very freedom of thought and emancipation from convention meant that he was always searching. Calamy again: ‘It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.’

  Critical reception of the novel seemed to suggest that, having branded Huxley the spokesman of his generation, critics were rather relying on him to lead that generation out of its post-war disillusion. It was still not clear, however, where the road would lead but in private he was sharing his thoughts. To Naomi Mitchison, who liked Those Barren Leaves, he confessed that he did not read much ethics ‘if only because it is perfectly obvious to me that ethics are transcendental and that any attempts to rationalize them are hopeless’.25 His mood after the book, he told her, was to feel ‘jejune and shallow and off the point. And I’ve taken such enormous pains to get off it; that’s the stupidity. All this fuss in the intellectual void … I wish I could afford to stop writing for a bit.’ Robert Nichols had some criticisms and suggested that he read Goethe, which Huxley hadn’t to date. ‘But for me,’ he told Nichols, ‘the most vital problem is not the mental so much as the ethical and emotional. The fundamental problem is love and humility, which are the same thing … men are more solitary now than they were; all authority is gone; the tribe has disappeared and every at all conscious man stands alone … Some day I may find some sort of an answer. And then I might write a good book, or at any rate a mature book, not a queer sophisticatedly jejune book, like this last affair, like all the blooming lot, in fact.’26 Was Huxley reaching the limits of satire and feeling that a more nourishing, more positive creative energy needed to be released instead of these scintillating patterns traced in the ‘intellectual void’? A break from writing to allow a new direction to develop was hardly a possibility because of that inexorable contract. He had ruled out the American lecture circuit in spite of having had offers but had applied to Oxford for the Kahn travelling fellowship – which he considered he stood no chance of getting, and which would have resulted in visiting the Jesuit missions in Mexico and Goa to look at architecture. His reading was beginning to extend to books on paranormal states and faculties. He asked Julian if he thought there was anything in telepathy or ‘eyeless sight’.27 He was also reading Lawrence’s Kangaroo and still in two minds about a writer he hadn’t seen since Garsington: ‘What an extraordinary man— such prodigious talent, with such hiatuses where judgement, sense of proportion, self-criticism should be!’28 His descriptions of nature saved him: ‘there has never been anything so vividly beautiful and true, so artistic in its unfailing grasp of the essential and significant things’.

  In March and April the Huxleys went off on a trip to Tunisia which is described in Along the Road. They returned to a Florence ‘colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged Lesbians’29 and realised that they wanted to do a little more substantial travelling which would involve leaving Matthew with his grandmother at St Trond in Belgium. Most of Huxley’s writing now was done with a typewriter but he told Mary Hutchinson that it ‘isn’t really suitable for intimate letters’.30 He confessed to her: ‘I am not imaginative … Personally I have lived so long and so exclusively in a private literary-intellectual world, that I am case-hardened and find the greatest difficulty in getting out, into contact with other forms of existence – forms of existence in many respects much more satisfactory than my own.’ For a writer sometimes represented as arrogant, Huxley at this point in his life seemed extraordinarily self-aware and self-critical. Shortly before leaving for London via Belgium, a group of fascisti burst into the Castel Montici, ostensibly looking for someone, Professor Gaetano Salvemini of the University of Florence, a critic of the government but in fact wholly unknown to the Huxleys who harangued the policemen and threatened them with the British Ambassador. It was a disturbing incident, ‘comic if it weren’t tragic’.31

  In London, amongst other business, Huxley made contact again with Mary Hutchinson. He tried to do some work in his club, the Athenaeum, but: ‘Some of your scent, Mary, still clings about me; and when I move I suddenly catch little whiffs of it – and there’s an end for the moment of any pursuit of the mot juste.’32 He was distracted by the thought of Clive Bell enjoying her favours, admitting to feelings of jealousy ‘that perhaps he is profiting by tendernesses and fires and meltings which he evoked and which by right are mine … Good night but not too good, Mary.’ A month later, from Belgium, just before leaving for their long trip, Maria wrote to Mary: ‘Aldous has just come into my bed & he smelt so strongly of you still that it made one giddy.’33 They had not enjoyed the brief stay in St Trond. Maria’s grandfather was grumpy and presided over ‘gloomy breakfasts in silence’ and her grandmother was a ‘tyrant’ bullying everyone and being ‘beastly’ to Maria’s mother.34 It was a relief to go. The Huxleys eventually set sail from Genoa on 15 September, leaving Matthew behind for their eleven month trip to India, South East Asia and the United States. ‘Seeing that one practises a profession that does not tie one down, I feel that one ought to see as much of this planet as one can,’35 he announced to his father.

  1 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice of Chatto and Windus, 11 January 1924

  2 Ian Parsons, speaking at P.E.N. meeting in honour of Huxley, 15 November 1998. Tape in National Sound Archive (the tape of this event is a most useful biographical source)

  3 L.225

  4 L.226

  5 L.228

  6 New York Herald Tribune, 12 October 1952

  7 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 22 May 1924

  8 Introduction to The Discovery by Frances Sheridan (1924), pvi

  9 Reading, Letter to Charle
s Prentice, 1 April 1924

  10 Reading, typescript of unpublished draft introduction to The Discovery

  11 UCLA, Copy of interview by students of LA School of Journalism, 18 December 1957, in ‘Library of Living Journalism’

  12 Reading, Letters between both parties, April 1924

  13 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 9 May 1924

  14 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 22 May 1924

  15 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 9 August 1924

  16 L.232

  17 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 23 September 1924

  18 L.239

  19 L.234

  20 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 26 October 1924

  21 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 5 October 1923

  22 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 7 January 1924

  23 See unpublished thesis by Margaret Clare Ratcliff: The Correspondence of Mary Hutchinson: A New Look at Bloomsbury, Eliot and Huxley (May, 1991). PhD Dissertation, University of Austin. Copy in HRC

  24 UCLA, Incomplete copy of Noa in the hand of Aldous Huxley

  25 L.242

  26 L.245

  27 L.241

  28 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 18 February 1925

  29 L.246

  30 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 9 May 1925

  31 L.249

  32 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 22 July 1925

  33 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 28 August 1925

  34 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 1 August 1925

  35 L.251

  XIV

  Sailing

  The Huxleys set sail just as a new book was being published. Along the Road, subtitled Notes and Essays of a Tourist, began with an essay: ‘Why Not Stay At Home?’ which had appeared in January in Vanity Fair. It is a typical example of the sort of piece that Huxley could now turn out to order: lightly serious, witty, irreverent, able to make a worthwhile point without straining the capacities of the reader of the magazines in which most of the pieces in the book appeared. After noting that ‘tourists are, in the main, a gloomy-looking tribe. I have seen much brighter faces at a funeral than in the Piazza of St Mark‘s’ he goes on to suggest that people travel out of snobbery ‘because the best people do it’. He admits that ‘With me, travelling is frankly a vice,’ and notes that both reading and travelling are popular ‘because they are the most delightful of all the many substitutes for thought’. An unsympathetic reader of Huxley’s travel writing might be inclined to endorse this judgement for the book of the travels on which he was about to embark, Jesting Pilate, although full of characteristic and stimulating lucubrations, was not always very profound in its sounding of other cultures. Earlier in the summer he had told Norman Douglas that he had been queasy at the sight of the Tunisian Arabs picking and packing dates: ‘How tremendously European one feels when one has seen these devils in their native muck … In fifty years time, it seems to me, Europe can’t fail to be wiped out by these monsters.’1 He would later let slip an ambiguous remark that could be taken as describing the native Javanese as ‘the local orang-outangs’2 (though on the same occasion his remarks about the British colonial society in Malaya were equally unsparing). On the other hand, he announced before setting out that his intention was to test his very English assumption that the Indians were not able to govern themselves. He declared carefully: ‘I shall be interested to see what conclusions a closer acquaintance will bring one to.’3

  In Along the Road, he reveals a little about himself – ‘my dislike of large dinner parties, soirees … I do not shine in large assemblies … I never move without a plentiful supply of optical glass … I like the country, enjoy solitude … I love the inner world as much as the outer … If I could be born again … I should desire to be a man of science etc.’ The persona is relaxed, engaging, well-informed but wearing its considerable learning lightly, playfully paradoxical in the essayistic manner, sceptical about progress in art and the claims of the avant-garde, and unimpressed by trends in contemporary popular culture. In the essay, ‘Views of Holland’, he mocks the complacent rationalism of the Enlightenment, its ‘noble and touching dreams, commendable inebriations!’ which are no longer available to the modern mind: ‘We have learnt that nothing is simple and rational except what we ourselves have invented; that God thinks neither in terms of Euclid nor of Riemann; that science has “explained” nothing; that the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness … and that even in the twentieth century men behave as they did in the caves of Altimira and in the lake dwellings of Glastonbury.’ In another pleasantly witty piece on what books one should take on a journey, Huxley talks about one of his most curious obsessions – with the Encylopaedia Britannica. ‘I never pass a day away from home without taking a volume with me,’ he confesses. ‘It is the book of books. Turning over its pages, rummaging among the stores of fantastically varied facts which the hazards of alphabetical arrangement bring together, I wallow in my mental vice.’ Bertrand Russell joked that one could predict Huxley’s subjects of conversation provided that one knew which alphabetical section of the Encylopaedia he happened to be reading at the time. Huxley even constructed a special carrying-case for it on his journeys. It shows a particular side of Huxley – the fascinated accumulator of facts rather than opinions, the scientific inquirer in the Huxley family tradition. Later, when living in the United States, he would ask his publisher to arrange a subscription to Nature. No corresponding request was made for the Times Literary Supplement. He would show little interest in literary small talk and gossip, and was just as likely to be found reading a book about science or politics or society as a contemporary novel or book of verse. He became less and less ‘literary’ with the years. Just before he left he had been reading Burtt’s Foundations of Modern Science noting that science, with its ‘arbitrary assumptions’ had ‘Quite gratuitously … gone on to assume that all aspects of the world that can’t be treated mathematically are illusory.’4 Passionate as his belief in science was, Huxley never let it become an idol or a fetish and was always acutely aware of its limits.

  The Huxleys shipped from Naples on the SS Genova, sending a facetious farewell postcard to Mary Hutchinson of a naked Venus from the Museo Nazionale in Naples, whose marble buttocks gave ‘a Lytton-eye view … our last glimpse of Europe’.5 Only days before, Maria had written to Mary: ‘I so tremendously wish you were here that I almost expect you to come and so violently think of your lips and eyes that I feel my mouth searching for yours.’6 On the day of departure, Huxley wrote to Mary: ‘I have thought of you Mary, with each of your delicious organs … that you are beautiful and voluptuous … your body is round and slender like a white serpent’s and that your hair is tied in a little pig tail it is a détournement de mineure [seduction of a minor, a phrase Huxley would use again in a later letter to Mary, as well as playing with the concepts of androgyny and hermaphroditism] – of how deliciously perverse a minor!’ He noted that there were three beds in the cabin and that she should be occupying one of them – ‘nature abhors a vacuum’.7 Both the Huxleys seem to have existed in a permanent state of sexual desire for Mary throughout their ten month voyage, and the correspondence between all three is frank, open and passionate. The narrative of the voyage is woven here from these and other letters and the published diary of the journey, Jesting Pilate (1926).

  Huxley’s tone in the book is of the languidly amused rational man in the East – his later involvement with Californian gurus nowhere prefigured in his mid-1920s attitudes. He is dismissive of the ‘wisdom of the East’ but also curious, wishing to make an intellectual analysis of everything he sees. He also distances himself from his frivolous European shipmates, bent on merely ‘having a Good Time’ – a twenties obsession that he would continue to mock throughout the decade. ‘We make contact with the Orient tomorrow morning,’ he told Mary on 1 October. ‘I think it might be amusing.’8
Their first view of India was Bombay, whose architecture is judged ’appalling’, and in the bookstall of the principal hotel, the Taj Mahal, Huxley noted one of his own novels. He was greatly impressed by the intellectual power and charm of Mrs Sarojini Naidu, the newly-elected President of the All-India Congress, to whom the Huxleys, as famous guests, were introduced. They also met the local intelligentsia ‘the majority of them are frail little men, very gentle and underfed-looking … No wonder the British rule, if these are typical.’9 No wonder if Indians took offence if this observation was typical.