Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  After Bombay the Huxleys travelled, in two days and nights, by train to Lahore where they stayed with an old Oxford friend, Chaman Lall, a young barrister and politician with an English wife – ‘very classy Brahmins’10 – then on by train again to Rawalpindi and thence to Srinagar to a cool, elevated bungalow, owned by Lall, looking out over beautiful poplar trees at the blue hills, though Huxley was disappointed by the famous Mogul gardens there. He was reading a history of India and the EDW-EVA volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.11 Before setting off, Huxley had arranged to syndicate some articles and had an offer from The Times to write some pieces. Settled in Srinagar for a month, he started to type, and suffered no mishap greater than being stung on the leg by a giant hornet. Mary wrote to say she had dug up an old Valentine’s Day letter from him dated 1918, before his marriage. He replied with a very clear awareness of the gap between the sort of privileged, libertine life he and she led in England and the life of his Kashmiri neighbours: ‘They make one realise how excessively odd and remote is the society of highbrows and immoralists which we generally frequent … One moves among them like a Martian.’12 By mid-December, he was back in Lahore where it was clear that the open mind about Indian self-government he had boasted of was doing its work. He was revolted by the general run of English imperialist he met – ‘stupid, uncultured, underbred, the complete and perfect cad’13 – and even in the presence of the more decent representatives he was forced to confess to Lewis Gielgud that he understood Indian nationalistic aspirations: ‘We really have no business here. And there is no doubt whatever that we are steadily making the country poorer and poorer.’ In Kashmir he had observed the ‘small and very corrupt despotism’ and ‘still more fascinating is the study of the relations existing between the English and the educated Indians … The cruelties, the humiliations, the pompous make-believes, the snobberies … Proust should have lived here for a few years.’14

  The Huxleys travelled to Agra, Jaipur, Cawnpore, Peshawar, Amritsar, Benares, Lucknow, Delhi, and Calcutta. Amritsar sparked the reflection that the world had changed and that a humanitarian movement had been unleashed that would no longer tolerate human rights abuses: ‘At any other period of the world’s history than this, Dyer and Mussolini would have seemed the normal ones.’ At Jaipur he was given an elephant to ride (which would have been a sight to relish, the tall Englishman in pith helmet, waistcoat and long, trousered legs – as one photograph of the journey shows him). At Cawnpore, he witnessed Gandhi and Nehru at the All India Congress. Gandhi was ‘the little man in the dhoti, with the shawl over his naked shoulders; the emaciated little man with the shaved head, the large ears, the rather foxy features’. In private correspondence, Huxley was even ruder about Gandhi: ‘half-naked, doing the holy man with an adoring young English woman [Miss Slade] in attendance, handing him his spectacles, adjusting his loincloth etc. – a most unsympathetic looking man with a foxy shopkeeper’s face’.15 Huxley was not wholly enamoured of Hindu ‘spirituality’, calling it ‘the primal curse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes’. He went on: ‘A little less spirituality, and the Indians would now be free – free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions. ’ It was wrong likewise to indict the materialism of the West: ‘We are not materialistic enough; that is the trouble. We do not interest ourselves in a sufficiency of this marvellous world of ours … The Other World – the world of metaphysics and religion – can never possibly be as interesting as this world …’ Hard to imagine the writer of these words as the author of The Perennial Philosophy (1945). At Christmas he wrote to Mary from Bombay: ‘Middle age creeps on apace. The only remedy is to live much, strongly and multifariously while the thing lasts.’16 She sent him a present of a diary and he responded: ‘May there be many engagements with you recorded on those blue pages, and after the engagements there will be perhaps, certain little hieroglyphs and mysterious symbols like those which Stendhal recorded in his diaries … the shorthand and indecipherable record of longdrawn pleasures and delicate complicated feelings.’17 The Huxleys sent her a pair of transparent trousers made of flowered black muslin from Delhi, an item of clothing that offered frequent opportunities for saucy remarks in future letters exchanged between all three.

  In the New Year the Huxleys – especially Maria – became worried about Matthew who had been reported as having trouble with his lungs. They started to make arrangements to go to Switzerland on their return or the mountains at Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy. Huxley was giving some thought to what would happen when they returned. An attempt at doing a film script with Gielgud had failed as had another proposal with Robert Nichols. The basic problem was his unwillingness to work collaboratively in a studio: ‘You depend on Jews with money, on “art directors”, on little bitches with curly hair and teeth.’18 But for now, they were anxious to get on and see Burma, and Singapore and the islands of the Malay archipelago – ‘I feel there must be more in them than met the eye of Conrad,’19 he wrote to the Proust translator, Sydney Schiff, from Benares where they had witnessed an eclipse. His final wish for India ‘as a lover of freedom and of change, a hater of fixity and ready-made commandments, a believer in individuals, and an infidel wherever groups, communities and crowds are concerned’ was that the ordinary Hindu would be emancipated from the bonds of community life and ‘develop his own personal resources’, with the British having relinquished their control.

  After the briefest passage through Burma, the Huxleys proceeded along the Iriwaddy, where Aldous reported to Mary on St Valentine’s Day (‘the anniversary of that first letter, dear Mary, I wrote to you – how long ago – and from the banks of a very different river [presumably the Thames at Eton in 1918]’) that the great pagoda at Rangoon had been ‘a sort of Sitwell’s paradise’. He added that ‘our fellow-passengers are dim. A pair of earnest and Lesbian ladies of unequal age are the most intellectual’.20 Mary was given details, this time by Maria, of a new diversion for Aldous. A Romanian aristocrat living in Paris called Henrietta Sava-Goiu, who was on the boat, began to excite Aldous’s interest. ‘I pointed out her attractions & advised him to try his luck … It is odd that A should always be attracted by self-advertising & loud women – this one is not bad really – but stupid. I suppose it is the extreme that appeals to him who is so reserved and sensitif … Her mouth legs & hands are hideous, the rest plump and very pretty – like a fruit hard to bite on though perfectly ripe – age 28 … not my type … but it seems he can manage his own business this time – Poor Aldous – Of course I should be jealous instead of finding him pathetic & loving him more – but he is not like other men – don’t you think he is very different – delicate & sensitive. As I now write to you he is in her room where I left them – sleepy – after dinner – as before dinner they were so entranced … that they heard no gong … or felt any hunger. I do hope he will succeed.’21 This is the only first-hand evidence we have of the habit described by Sybille Bedford of Maria’s encouragement of Huxley’s affairs. Aldous gave Mary his version of the fling with the Princess: ‘She was Tom’s [T.S. Eliot] Princess Volupine in youth – rather bitchy, but with ideals; a philosophising cock-teaser.’22 The charms of the Princess Volupine were not so encompassing that he was unable to make plans for their return: ‘So go to Paris in May and receive us in your secret house – it sounds too romantic … How much I look forward to it, Mary.’ The Princess arranged to rejoin them in Hong Kong, after their Malayan stay, in order to sail with them to California. The San Francisco Chronicle of 5 May had a photograph of the Huxleys and the Princess under the heading: THEY LAND IN CALIFORNIA ON GLOBE-TROTTING TOUR. The two women are swathed in furs and capped in cloche hats. Huxley is dignified with stick and trenchcoat. Maria has scrawled across the cutting: ‘The Princess’.

  At the beginning of March the Huxleys arrived in Penang on the last day of the Chinese New Year celebrations. With another of those European comparisons with which he punctuated his travelogue, he decided: ‘Penang has a
certain Sicilian air.’ After noting at the rice table the indulgence given to gluttony characteristic of the age – ‘all the fury of the moralists is spent on other sins, especially lasciviousness’ – they moved on to Singapore where they stayed in some splendour with the Governor and his wife, the Guillemards. ‘One doesn’t realise what an astonishing affair the British Empire is until one begins to wander about it,’ he told Mary from Singapore. ‘Everywhere Englishmen, playing tennis, eating porridge at 8.30 am, drinking whiskey at 6.0 in comfortable club-houses, dressing for dinner even in the jungle and to entertain the local orang-outangs. ’23 Next, they made a quick trip to Java, the southern Philippines, then Manila, to catch a liner to San Francisco (stopping at Hong Kong where the Princess would rejoin the boat). From Singapore another steamy letter was despatched to Mary: ‘In my memory you live Adamistically, in only your hair … tied up behind like a schoolgirl … Why aren’t you here to lie naked under the mosquito nets … etc. etc.’24 On arrival in Java, he could only ‘gasp with admiration at the fabulous and entirely unbelievable beauty of the landscape’. Within hours of landing he had been interviewed by fourteen reporters which made him conclude: ‘The literary man is invested, it seems to me, with a quite disproportionate aura of importance and significance … Art has filled the vacuum left by the decay of established religion.’ The remark recalls Arnold’s famous prediction that poetry would replace religion. The Huxleys visited Batavia, Garoet, Buitenzorg, Sarawak, Labuan, Kudat, Sandakan, and changed at Zamboanga to a ship for Manila bound via Hong Kong for San Francisco. There was a brief stop in Shanghai where he noted ‘the vitality of Chinese civilisation’ and in Japan which he does not seem to have taken to. On 5 May they arrived at San Francisco. More reporters were waiting on the quay to ask Huxley what he thought of the General Strike, which had been flourishing in his absence. ‘I gave them my prejudices, which are Fabian and mildly labourite,’ he wrote. An Oxford socialist (intimate of the Haldanes and a member of the University Co-Op), a freethinker and debunker, Huxley was unlikely to have taken the right wing side of this question but the reporters went away and twisted his words into an endorsement of the bosses. Huxley was annoyed at this: ‘Such a paean in praise of capitalism and Mr Baldwin!’ He complained: ‘The reporters had made me respectable.’

  In the ship’s library in Malaya, Huxley had found a copy of a book important for the future author of Brave New World, Henry Ford’s My Life and Work. His view of American civilisation in general, and Hollywood in particular, are what might be expected, in one sense, of an upper middle class literary Englishman in 1926. He was sniffy about the roaring materialism of the Jazz Age and about the products of Hollywood (notwithstanding earlier attempts to respond to the ‘golden lures’ of American syndication, and his tries at screenwriting). His tutor in some of these attitudes, H.L. Mencken, was the first to be contacted on Huxley’s arrival. Writing from the SS President Cleveland, in San Francisco, Huxley told Mencken: ‘I am entering the USA by the back door … from the Orient, where I have been spending some months to satisfy myself empirically that all this rigmarole of Light from the East etc is genuinely nonsense.’25 Huxley was anxious to meet his hero at last and suggested to him that he should consider recording his latest volume of Prejudices, the fourth, on gramophone records: ‘The majority of people in our modern world are not educated up to the point of understanding what they read in books. But they can understand a thing when it is spoken viva voce.’ Huxley was later to predict that books would eventually be issued in recorded form, anticipating the phenomenon of the audio book, but his enthusiasm for recording is not difficult to understand. Much of his own reading was ingested orally – by Maria reading to him – and he was thus more ready than most to advocate non-print methods of publishing.

  After San Francisco, the Huxleys moved on to Los Angeles – which gave Aldous an opportunity to inveigh again against the vice of ‘having a Good Time’. He noted that ‘thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown’. The next stage of the trip was Chicago, and from the train taking him there, Huxley wrote to Robert Nichols: ‘Hollywood is altogether too antipodean to be lived in; it gives you no chance to escape.’26 Taken with his earlier rejection of Eastern philosophy, this was the second piece of poor prophecy in a week, given the direction his life would actually take. Generally, however, Huxley was unusually prescient about the course of his own and his century’s life. To Mary, however, he was more upbeat about America. At the end of the first week he declared to her: ‘We have been in America 5 days and have already seen its two most remarkable natural phenomena – the Grand Canyon and Charlie Chaplin. Both very splendid, especially Charlie, who is, in conversation, like Mark Gertler at his best but more so and better. The most ravishing man.’27 They spent the afternoon walking on the beach ‘in the midst of crowds of exquisitely pretty flappers, dressed in bathing costumes so tight that every contour of the Mount of Venus and the Vale of Bliss was plainly visible’. The flappers, it goes without saying, were ‘quite soulless’ and Hollywood was ‘quite unbelievable … Such roaring comedy, oddness, vitality, vulgarity’. Maria was not quite so enamoured. ‘Nothing would induce me to live in this country, not even money,’28 she confided to Mary.

  Maria also announced with triumph: ‘The fall of the Princess is imminent … now that in America we find that all little girls expose so brazenly their charms she loses most of her attraction.’ She had, however, spent half the night in their compartment, reminding Maria at least of her preferred companion in such a situation: ‘How we both longed for you.’ Maria had more positive news of their plans. They would be returning to England in June ‘and I hope you will think me very very sweet for Aldous is coming straight to England though if I had wanted it he would of course have come to Belgium … it will delight me to think of you through days and nights that I will only be able to imagine.’ All three, however, were aware of the need to keep this extraordinary triangulation a secret. Urging Mary and Aldous to be very discreet, Maria counselled: ‘I hope that both your reasons will make you guard a secret so well kept and on which depends the lightheartedness of all our future meetings and voyages.’ Maria’s plan was that Mary would meet them at Plymouth docks, enabling her to see Mary however briefly, before going on to Belgium to be reunited with Matthew. Aldous and Mary would avoid any waiting journalists and travel to London as Mr and Mrs Huxley: ‘You will have him quite fresh and delightful before anyone else has had anything to do with him.’29 But Mary must let no-one know about this plan in case Aldous was met by ‘cumbersome people of his family’.

  The Huxleys were in New York when all these plans were being drawn up and enjoying being tossed into New York literary society. Mencken was the most important to Huxley and they had their one and only meeting over lunch. Mencken (‘very amusing and looks like Belloc or like a travelling salesman or farmer’, in Maria’s view) was a gentleman who preferred blondes and Maria instantly took a dislike to the ‘vulgar and hideous’ flapper he had with him ‘who made worshipping eyes at A. I could see no excuse for her but A suggested that she probably is alright in bed. I suppose that is enough for some people.’30 The Huxleys met several other ‘nondescript celebrities’ as well as ‘a really charming one of the rather-vamp type who is coming to England and you must meet, though I do hope you will not let her make more than eyes at you. She is Elinor Wylie.’ Even before arrival at New York, Huxley had written an unsolicited fan letter to Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). He told her he was ‘enraptured by the book’31 and had just enjoyed the play. One can imagine Huxley being captured by a book which opens with the heroine – having just been told by her gentlemen friend that if she put down all her thoughts it would make a book – saying: ‘This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopaediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time.’ Loos and the Huxleys met in New York at her apartment for tea. ‘On first meeting Aldous,’ she later recall
ed, ‘I was immediately struck by his physical beauty; he was a giant in height, with a figure that was a harmonious column for his magnificent head; the head of an angel drawn by William Blake.’32 Anita Loos found Maria to be ‘a lovely brunette … as unusual in her way as Aldous was in his’. In a later letter to Julian, Aldous described Anita Loos as ‘ravishing. One would like to keep her as a pet. She is the doyenne of Hollywood, having started to write for the movies when she was seven. Now, at the age of, I suppose, about twenty-eight [she was in fact thirty-five, a year older than Huxley], she feels that she can retire with a good conscience …’33 In the space of a few weeks, Huxley had thus met two of the people – Chaplin and Loos – who would form part of the small circle of friends in which he moved from the late 1930S onwards in Hollywood.

  The dizzying life of New York won Maria over at last to America: ‘I have enjoyed every minute of it … Aldous has cramp from autographing books.’34 Journalists asked her whether Aldous was a romantic lover – ‘to which I cannot answer’. Mary also had a report from Aldous: ‘You have no idea how famous one is in America. It’s frightful. I long to be back in my own country. I don’t like being a prophet at all.’35 He was amazed at the audience of forty-three million for a radio talk he gave. He was keen now to make arrangements for seeing Mary. From the Hotel Belmont in New York he issued instructions to her to find a small garconnière in London – ‘one room wd be enough provided it is a bedroom. I look forward to endless delights.’ Maria scribbled a postscript asking Mary to try and find a room: ‘He hopes he will need it constantly and so surely shall I when I come … with kisses and caresses … Maria.’