Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Huxley’s verdict on America was delivered from Chicago: ‘The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards … This falsification of the standard of values is a product, in our modern world, of democracy, and has gone furthest in America.’ Hollywood, he had already noted in Java, had ‘scattered broadcast over the brown and black and yellow world a grotesquely garbled account of our civilization’. He had little enthusiasm for the American belief that: ‘The democratic hypothesis in its extreme and most popular form is that all men are equal and that I am just as good as you are.’ Finding one of his novels available in Boston only under the counter ‘as though it were whiskey’, he noted the strange co-existence of Puritanism and wild hedonism in America. He had caught something of the raw energy of the United States in the 1920s and Jesting Pilate concludes with a moving statement of his liberal faith in tolerance and the admission that he returns ‘richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions’.

  Before his ship docked in Plymouth there was to be one final shipboard adventure on board the SS Belgenland. One night, Aldous and Maria were woken by the discovery of someone in their cabin. Maria leapt out of bed ‘naked as a worm’ and screaming at the intruder. The steward was called and it later transpired that it was all a mistake and that Lady Dorothy Mills, the writer and explorer, had mistaken their cabin for her own. Maria was badly shaken and felt that the incident – which seems to have been traumatic far beyond its essentially comic properties – had exposed some realisation of fear in both of them. She tried to explain to Mary that Aldous had not made light of their joint alarm because he knew ‘that he shakes with terror is sick with terror – & could go mad with terror.’36

  On 5 June, the Belgenland docked at Plymouth where Mary was meant to be waiting to embrace them both and whisk Aldous off to their secret pied à terre. In the event she was unable to be there and sent telegrams instead with instructions about how to locate the studio. After eleven months of separation from Matthew – in India she had been so anxious about his health she had wanted to return – Maria went straight to Belgium. Although all Aldous’s comments at this time show love and solicitude for his six-year-old son, he nonetheless felt it more urgent to return immediately to London (where Mary would be waiting) and postpone the reunion until August.

  1 L.250

  2 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 10 February 1926

  3 L.253

  4 L.253

  5 HRC, Postcard to Mary Hutchinson, 16 September 1925

  6 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 7 September 1925

  7 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 15 September 1925

  8 HRC, Postscript by Aldous Huxley in letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 1 October 1925

  9 L.253

  10 L.256

  11 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 25 October 1925

  12 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 2 November 1925

  13 L.261

  14 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 9 November 1925

  15 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 6 January 1926

  16 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 22 December 1925

  17 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson 21 January 1926

  18 L.266

  19 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 14 January 1926

  20 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 14 February 1926

  21 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 8 March 1926

  22 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 22 February 1926

  23 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 10 March 1926. It is, of course, conceivable that the ‘orang-outangs’ are not meant literally and that the remark, instead of being a facetious comment on the fact that wild life is the only form of life likely to be impressed by dressing for dinner in the jungle, is intended to be a jocosely racist reference to the native population of Java

  24 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 19 March 1926

  25 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 5 May 1926

  26 L.269

  27 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, undated but possibly 1 May 1926

  28 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 13 May 1926

  29 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 16 May 1926

  30 HRC, Ibid

  31 L.269

  32 Mem. Vol., p89–90

  33 L.272

  34 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 21 May 1926

  35 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 26 May 1926

  36 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, undated, late May 1926

  XV

  Cortina

  Aldous spent June in London, where Maria was intending to rejoin him in July. She sent Mary a note from Paris on 6 June on the way to her grandparents at St Trond congratulating her on having found a flat: ‘How clever you are … Where is it? Is it nice? Will you write to me from there? I gave Aldous a little note for you – urging you to be careful. But I think you will be …’1 A fortnight later, in St Trond, Maria recalled her meeting with Mary last August, just before she set sail: ‘Never have I seen you more lovely, Mary & I remember with poignant tenderness your new beauty with closed eyes during last night … I could come to London … should I come? … Goodbye my precious Mary be happy and wild and gay and don’t forget how I kissed you … Why don’t you write to me? Does Aldous take up all your thoughts?’2 There is no evidence that Maria did come and she may well have stayed in St Trond. Aldous was busy catching up with literary friends, making arrangements from his club, and dining, at the end of June, for example, with St John and Mary Hutchinson and Virginia Woolf. In July he went to Garsington, which displeased Maria, ‘seeing that Philip has such unpleasant things to say about me’.3 Robert Bridges was there, with the manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which he had made arrangements to publish in 1918, and which would appear in a second edition in 1930 after Bridges’s death. Virginia Woolf sat on the lawn examining the MS ‘with that gigantic grasshopper Aldous folded up in a chair close by’.4

  A few days later Huxley wrote to Mary from an address at 4 Onslow Mews East. He was officially staying with his Aunt Ethel Collier – whose husband, John, painted Aldous’s portrait at this time, exhibiting it in the 1927 Royal Academy Exhibition – at North House, 69 Eaton Avenue in Hampstead, after a brief stay with Julian, so this may have been the address of the studio. He said he would be waiting for her after her dinner with Osbert [Sitwell?]. ‘The place is haunted, Mary, by your invisible but perfumed ghost. I embrace it, unsatisfyingly. May I hope tomorrow to caress something more than a disembodied memory?’5 Several days later he was inviting her to lunch: ‘a picnic in disorder and perhaps also in bed’.6 Elinor Wylie, the writer he had met in New York, arrived in London and Aldous arranged for her to have supper with the Woolfs at their house in Tavistock Square. Virginia Woolf was unimpressed by Wylie, ‘that arid desert’, and wondered how it was that she had ‘Francis Birrell, Aldous Huxley, at her feet, and she no better than a stark staring naked maypole? ’7 He was also trying to arrange a meeting in either London or Paris with Anita Loos and her husband. It was during this summer of 1926 that the first signs of uncertainty in the relationship with Mary began to emerge. He appears to have been in Cambridge at the end of the third week in July and arranged to meet her there ‘but not for the last time, Mary … I can’t bear the sound of the words … Let it be uncertain; let there be the possibility of repetitions. But in any case we will dine together.’8 Perhaps the re-emergence of Huxley on the scene had reminded her of the difficulty of the relationship (mindful of Maria’s cautions) and the consequences for her relationship with Clive Bell – which had been a constant throughout the period. It seems that she was trying to tell him of the need to call a halt.

  Huxley’s arrival in New York the previous month had coincided with the publication, on both sides of the Atlantic, of his latest collection of short stories, Two or Three Graces. His three-year contract with Chatto had expired in Jan
uary. He had more or less fulfilled the contract – except that two rather than three novels had emerged, books of essays and travel having made up the shortfall. Chatto proposed a new three-year agreement which Huxley signed on 7 June, the day after he returned from America (this was perhaps his real reason for making haste to London). It stressed that at least one of the books each year should be a full-length novel but in the event only Point Counter Point in 1928 appeared between Those Barren Leaves in 1925 and Brave New World in 1932, though Huxley the essayist and travel writer was very active. The yearly advance, which formed the bedrock of his income and on which the superstructure of freelance income was raised, was increased from £500 to £650 – equivalent to a five-figure salary today.

  Two or Three Graces, which immediately went into a second impression in its second month, contained four stories, with the title story – which may have been a novel that did not quite make its length – occupying the bulk of the volume. Once again the story is long on authorial commentary and short on plot, essayistic rather than dramatic, its themes being the generation gap, the endless round of human vanity, and the struggle of the young to find the right way of living. Very early on a rather Lawrentian character, Kingham (‘a close-cut beard, redder than his hair’) inveighs against the frivolity of modern life and the refusal of the young to look beyond pleasure-seeking: ‘It’s the war that did it … It’s time to stop, it’s time to do something. Can’t you see that you can’t go on like this? Can’t you see?’ The narrator is phlegmatic in contrast to Kingham, who ‘loved to flounder in emotion – his own and other people’s’. In his self-accusation – ‘I have always been too tender-hearted, insufficiently ruthless’ – is there something of Huxley the intellectual faced with the impassioned ranters like Lawrence? Grace’s discovery of the ‘fashionable Olympus’ of contemporary art and music and her enthusiastic pursuit of ‘all that was smartest and latest in the world of the spirit’ shows Huxley’s contempt for the fashionable aesthetes with whom he generally mixed. He exposes the same tendency in morals. Entering a party in an artist’s studio, the narrator overhears a young man saying: ‘We’re absolutely modern, we are. Anybody can have my wife, so far as I’m concerned. I don’t care. She’s free. And I’m free. That’s what I call modern.’ Huxley’s readers – who would have of course no idea about his private life – would take it that he was condemning such attitudes and securely possessing the high ground of more or less conventional morality.

  One reader of the new book was the ageing Thomas Hardy at Max Gate whom Virginia Woolf called on in July. Mrs Hardy asked her whether she knew Aldous Huxley. She and her husband had been reading the new book and found him ‘very clever’ though they immediately forgot what each story was about (recalling Huxley’s plots is indeed a challenge). ‘They’ve changed everything now,’ Hardy said. ‘We used to think there was a beginning a middle and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory. Now, one of those stories [presumably ‘Half-Holiday’] came to an end with a woman going out of the room.’9 Hardy chuckled. ‘But he no longer reads novels,’ Woolf concluded.

  On Friday 6 August, Huxley set off for St Trond to collect Matthew from his grandparents. It had been decided, for the child’s health, that they would go to live in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites. Huxley took with him ‘about two hundredweights of gramophone records’10 and, somewhere between Calais and Brussels on the train, began a letter to Mary recalling their snatched amours of recent weeks: ‘A few brief hours, during which, however, we abolished duration and space, made one another free of paradise and eternity, unchained ecstasies and, touching bodies, moved through one another’s minds like divine presences, apocalyptic gods. Epic and supernatural moments.’ And in between these ecstasies (whose language, appearing in Two or Three Graces, would surely have been satirised) there were quieter moments together: ‘One lives on so many planes, and fully delightfully on each; every human being has as many storeys as the Woolworth Building and shoots effortlessly and imperceptibly in spiritual elevators from floor to floor.’ As the train rattled on through the Low Countries he sent her ‘impalpable kisses of melancholy and loving remembrance’. Not merely was he saying farewell to Mary (the relationship now had probably peaked) but he was exchanging the buzz and excitement of artistic London for a cold chalet in the mountains. His last week had been hectic, starting with a lunch with T.S. Eliot ‘who looked terribly grey-green, drank no less than five gins with his meal, told me he was going to join Vivien in her Paris nursing home to break himself of his addictions to tobacco and alcohol, and was eloquent about Parisian luncheons with resoundingly titled duchesses’. Then on Tuesday he lunched with Beverley Nichols ‘that plump and rosy-bottomed ex-friend of Tommy’s [Earp’s]’. Nichols wanted to write a profile of him for the Daily Sketch and Huxley predicted it would be ‘awful, no doubt; I adopt ostrich tactics towards these things and don’t read them.’

  Had Huxley done so he would have read, under the heading ‘Aldous Huxley or A Very Cold Young Man’, how: ‘Quantities of Mr Aldous Huxley reclined on my sofa, spreading over the cushions, and stretching long tentacles on to the floor. I had never before realized the curious fluidity of his frame.’11 Nichols wrote that Huxley’s mind was like his body, ‘cold, exceptionally fluid, wandering with equal facility into any channel of learning or experience’ but he said that Huxley threw cold water over people, institutions, emotions, and affairs, not because he was disdainful ‘but because he has an exceptionally high standard by which to judge them’. Huxley reportedly said to Nichols: ‘As I grow older I become more and more highbrow.’ He said it wasn’t a pose but the result of these last two months in London where he had evidently been to many of those parties that are described so savagely in his fiction: ‘One goes to a party, and, apart from receiving extravagant and nauseating compliments oneself, one hears the word ‘divine’ applied indiscriminately to ballets, operas, actresses, novelists, free verse – to anything that can possibly be labelled artistic.’ Perhaps that chalet in the mountains beckoned after all. He told Nichols: ‘The whole thing revolts me because it’s soft, and softness is the end of everything.’ Nichols’s summing-up was that Huxley had no sentimentality and wrote with a pen ‘filled with ink that has first been clarified and then frozen’.

  This is an important sketch for it is the first draft of a view of Huxley whose outlines would slowly solidify. This is Huxley the cold-eyed, unsentimental highbrow, looking down on a world which disgusts him, and from which he expects – and offers back – a certain hostility: ‘He gives one a sense, in his writings, of a little group of intelligentsia clinging unhappily together in a grossly hostile world. Not merely unsympathetic, or lacking in understanding, but grossly, actively hostile.’ This is caricature – though persistent enough to inform certain commentaries to the present day – and, like all caricature, to do its work it must contain at least a grain of truth. That was that, from Garsington onwards, Huxley had mixed in high cultural elites that saw themselves from time to time as hated and misunderstood by the public. It is not surprising that the public would occasionally repay the compliment.

  Having frozen Nichols to the marrow, Huxley the same evening went to see D.H. Lawrence, who was over in England briefly, and whom he had not seen since that meeting in Hampstead in 1915. Huxley found him ‘charming. So much quieter than he was – it’s the approach of middle age, with success and the removal of the horrors of the war’. Lawrence was about to re-enter the lives of the Huxleys after a long absence. They would meet him shortly again in Florence and find him a neighbour in Cortina. On his side he found Huxley on this first encounter again ‘no brisker than ever’.12 The final event in this crowded week’s social calendar was dinner at the Eiffel Tower with Anita Loos and her husband. Huxley was still enchanted by her: ‘She is tiny, pretty in a charmingly ugly way, with enormous eyes, and has a drawling little voice in which she brings out very good and fruity comments on the universe.’

  Arriving in Belgium Huxley
found his young son ‘very well and in uproarious spirits. He eats copiously and makes himself a great nuisance – healthy signs.’13 He tried to do some work at 19 Grand Place but was soon thinking of Mary and anxiously making plans to meet in Paris, at the Hotel Bergère, on the way to Cortina. ‘The atmosphere here is impregnated with the misery and horror of old age,’ he wrote from Maria’s grandparents’ house ‘at the heart of the patriarchal system’.14 By contrast he was bursting with intellectual energy and desire for new knowledge: ‘All knowledge, desperately, while it’s possible to acquire it – while there are still internal secretions.’ They were soon off to Florence to do battle with the Italian bureaucrats and retrieve their car, discovering that new rules meant Maria must return to take a second driving test. Huxley read Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs for the first time, finding it ‘the oddest book. You feel that it must have been such a relief to the man to confess, at last, openly, that he preferred boys to girls.’15

  By the start of September they were finally at Cortina d’Ampezzo installed in the Villa Ino Colli. It was a nice house with ‘a perfect aspect, teems with terraces and balconies on which it is possible to get every ray of sunlight that falls on Cortina between dawn and evening, has baths, a garage and central heating, is simply but very comfortably and sensibly furnished and costs something less than nine pounds a month’.16 More to the point: ‘Cortina seems already to have done Matthew a great deal of good. He is perceptibly more robust than he was, has a fine colour, and eats well.’ Cortina was a wide saucer-shaped valley surrounded by enormous limestone crags, was sunny, and the air was ‘extraordinarily keen and stimulating’. They would remain here until February 1927. Within a month, however, having started writing Point Counter Point, Huxley was complaining that it was a ‘hideous’ place – ‘there is a finality about it that is hardly bearable’.17 He described the novel to his father as ‘ambitious, the aim of which will be to show a piece of life, not only from a good many individual points of view, but also under its various aspects such as scientific, emotional, economic, political, aesthetic etc … It will be difficult but interesting.’18 Huxley’s description of the novel’s method makes it sound like a scientific anatomy of life rather than an imaginative portrait.