With the book off his hands, Huxley was free to return to the novel – provided that he could find time from playing host to his summer visitors. Sullivan and Lewis Gielgud passed through, but the most striking of these guests were the Morrells – the wound now having healed. Maria – who was very wary of Philip in particular, reported to Mary that the Morrells had arrived ‘in great style, with the car full of only unnecessary things and fantastically dressed’.11 Aldous was ‘tall and all in white, barefooted in sandals’. Maria put herself out to do everything the way it had been done at Garsington, only to receive the breezy comment from the duo that they did so enjoy the simple life. Aldous improved the tale in his account to Mary. Their two seater tourer was ‘hung all over with strange luggage, like the White Knight’s charger … Philip seems to be less mad, as age creeps on, but more imbecile – the mouth gapes continuously, the eyes and attention wander, there is a kind of involuntary detachment from reality … my hermitage has been disagreeably violated.’12 Huxley seems to have been accepting that perhaps the affair with Mary was in decline: ‘I live here the life of a meditative tree and all past activity seems a dream which has no probable prospect of being renewed. But perhaps it will renew itself? I hope so, Mary.’
As well as struggling to write the intractable novel, Huxley was reading with his usual voraciousness, Don Quixote – ‘What a book! It couldn’t be better’ – and Cardinal Newman – ‘very fine as a psychologist … And how well he wrote!’. But he confessed to Mary that Meredith did nothing for him ‘so much literature to express so little substance’. For Huxley ‘literature’ was developing into a term of abuse. He had also been reading Pascal, Baudelaire, Bossuet’s Variations of the Protestant Religion and, again, Burt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. ‘I wish I could afford, like Flaubert, to spend four or five years over a book,’ he told Julian. ‘There might be a chance then of making it rather good.’13 Instead he worked away, seven or eight hours a day, running out of time, with no question of meeting the January 1928 deadline. In spite of the pressure of work he still found time to write, for the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, an essay on ‘The Outlook for American Culture: Some reflections in a machine age’. It argued that ‘The future of America is the future of the world.’ And that everyone would follow the path America was blazing. Whilst he conceded that machinery had enabled a ‘fuller life’ in the material sense he doubted if culture had been promoted by it. Ever the uncompromising highbrow, he asked whether in spite of ‘all our humanitarian and democratic prejudices’ (which he shared) it was not true that many people did not want to be cultured. And the mass forms of entertainment being devised by Western consumer capitalism would not promote it either: ‘All the resources of science are applied in order that imbecility may flourish and vulgarity cover the whole earth.’ Machinery of this kind would standardise ideas globally and make people passive consumers – ‘It removes man’s incentive to amuse himself.’
Much of this can be seen, seventy-five years on, as good prophecy. Much of this went into Brave New World. But there is one disturbing passage about the ‘revolt against political democracy’ which Huxley sees as inevitable (though not in the form of a return to autocracy) as part of a process of giving power to ‘intelligent and active oligarchies’. He goes on: ‘The ideal state is one in which there is a material democracy controlled by a an aristocracy of the intellect … where those with the greatest talent rule.’ These were dangerous ideas to be playing with at a time when totalitarianism was on the rise and do not represent Huxley’s mature political position. Some will see them as sinister, others as a genuine attempt to deal with an issue that remains unresolved today: how does one reconcile the formidable power of global media and entertainment conglomerates, and the governments who appear to fawn upon them, with the need to nurture an intelligent culture that allows the individual citizen to possess the intellectual and imaginative space, the cultural space, in which to make its own choices and assert its own sense of value?
As the summer ended, Maria found it gloomy: ‘Aldous goes on working with a regularity and a tap-tapping which seems increased by the waves. If the light goes out, which it does every five minutes, he taps in the dark and does not even stop to see if he wrote correctly … Aldous’s writing is rather like Casanova’s (pleasant and unpleasant things are revealed) enough to make it amusing.’14 What did Maria think of his writing? Lawrence – with whom they were now very much involved, supporting him after a lung-trouble which they feared was caused by the salt water swallowed when he was bathing with them at Forte – later said that the death of the child in the book Aldous was writing on the terrace now was something she never forgave. But her loyalty was absolute. When he was not writing there were diversions. They went to Lucca to see the procession of the Volto Santo — ‘very fine and impressive with a magnificent procession at dusk marching straight out of the fourteenth century’15 – and to Florence to retrieve their winter possessions from Costanza’s villa. The autumn weather could still be magnificent – ‘the air like crystal, the colours wonderfully rich & bright’16 – but the book was insistent. His first idea for a title was Counterpoint, but another recent book had been titled God’s Counterpoint so he was trying to think of another but by the end of November he settled for the eventual title ‘making it more specific – note against note’.17 His real worry was that it would be too long: ‘The thing has an unpleasant way of growing and developing in my hands – a habit which has necessitated frequent scrappings, rewritings and re-scrappings of earlier sections. I hope it won’t do anything disturbingly new between now and January.’ He told Mary: ‘I wish I had another year to work at it. More time so matures and ripens every idea – not in the consciousness entirely, tho’ to some extent even there; but mainly when one isn’t specifically thinking of it – by entwining new experiences with old, by relating memories and knowledge to the idea so that it can grow and diversify itself.’18
Proper Studies was published in November. The book marked a step forward from the sort of essay collection he had previously put together. It evidenced a greater seriousness and some methodological ambition. It was a step towards the kind of book that Ends and Means (1937) would be. ‘These essays,’ he explained, ‘represent an attempt on my part to methodize the confused notions, which I have derived from observation and reading, about a few of the more important aspects of social and individual life.’ He also stated: ‘The most important part of man can be studied without a special technique, and described in the language of common speech.’ Today, with the growth of academic specialisation, that assertion would be harder to make. Huxley emerges in these essays a critic of the facile eighteenth century view of human nature as essentially rational, humane and good. He believed in reason, virtue and humanity but acknowledged that social institutions had to be fashioned with difficulty from Kant’s ‘crooked timber of humanity’ not from a perfect blueprint. He also set out the names of his mentors such as the Italian sociologist Vilfred Pareto, whose massive and intimidating Sociologica generale had become something of a social theory bible to Huxley in the 1920s. He admitted that he preferred Jung to Freud and Adler who were merely ‘monomaniacal’.
The essays are interesting in the light they shed on Huxley’s emerging thought, its attempt to reconcile an inherited liberal humanism with the more recalcitrant facts of human nature. ‘The greater part of the world’s philosophy and theology is merely an intellectual justification for the wishes and day-dreams of philosophers and theologians,’ he opined in one essay, adding: ‘the doctrine of Original Sin is, scientifically, much truer than the doctrine of natural reasonableness and virtue’. The limitations of the essay, ‘The Idea of Equality’, are that in spite of its witty, fluent, sceptical, sensible manner, it is not actually advocating anything. In view of the political instability and growing sense of crisis of the times perhaps some more positive thinking was required. Like most concerned thinkers in the 1920s Huxley was groping for an answer
to the problem identified by Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when she tells her rich philanthropist admirer Mr Spoffard: ‘civilisation is not what it ought to be and we really ought to have something else to take its place’. He returned to the argument of his Harper’s Magazine piece in an essay on ‘Political Democracy’ and, referring to the fact that at the Brixton by-election on 27 June 1927 only fifty-three per cent voted (it would be fewer today!) he asked again whether people were actually much interested in democracy and repeated the desirability of a state ‘ruled by the best of its citizens’.
This was in part a desire to see the best ideas prevail, but in part, one senses, it was a frankly admitted desire not to have to do the job himself and to be allowed to get on with his own life: ‘I myself lack all capacity and ambition to govern.’ In an essay on religion he praised Catholicism, no doubt influenced by what he had seen in Belgium and in Italy: ‘Catholicism is probably the most realistic of all Western religions. Its practice is based on a profound knowledge of human nature in all its varieties and gradations.’ Elsewhere he attacks Proust (whom he read with admiration when he was first published but whom he later came to devalue) for being ‘a scientific voluptuary of the emotions’ who had no ambition to do more than know himself: ‘the idea of using his knowledge in order to make himself better never seems to have occurred to him. There is a strange moral poverty about his book.’ For the person, like Huxley, who wished to engage usefully with the world and find some sort of unifying principle to inform right action, Proust’s revelling in the discontinuity of his own personality was impossible. An essay on ‘Eugenics’ is his first foray into the subject and concludes (after noting that ‘It is quite possible … that they will learn to breed babies in bottles’) that a world run by the perfect specimens might be a little unbearable: ‘If the eugenists are in too much of an enthusiastic hurry to improve the race, they will only succeed in destroying it.’
One of the first readers of the book was Lawrence: ‘I have read 70 pages, with a little astonishment that you are so serious and professorial. You are not your grandfather’s Enkel [grandson] for nothing – that funny dry-mindedness and underneath social morality.’19 The Huxleys went to Florence at Christmas to spend it with Lawrence and Frieda and, in what is perhaps the only extract from a ‘spasmodically kept’ diary by Huxley (presumably destroyed in the 1961 fire but the extract is printed in his introduction to his selection of Lawrence’s letters) he described this event: ‘Lunched and spent the p.m. with the Lawrences. DHL in admirable form, talking wonderfully. He is one of the few people I feel real respect and admiration for. Of most other eminent people I have met I feel that at any rate I belong in the same species as they do. But this man has something different and superior in kind, not degree.’20
Just before Christmas, the Huxleys had been thinking about their future. They had formed the plan of going to live in the English countryside. But this quickly gave way to another project, which Maria outlined to Mary: ‘We are instead going to build an enchanting house here in the middle of a pine wood onto the sea. The house will be ready by next June … The house will be small but it will have room for you in the tower or on the ground floor facing the sea.’21 The construction of the novel, however, was not so promising (though the house was never built) and by late January 1928, Huxley was offering Prentice the chance to reduce his advance for non-delivery. He was writing from a new address, not Cortina again as they had planned, but Les Diablerets in the Vaud in Switzerland. Julian and Juliette Huxley had taken the Chalet des Arolles, above Aigle, for the winter, where Aldous and Maria joined them. Juliette later recalled the long leisurely breakfasts, after which Maria sent Aldous off to grapple with the novel. There were visitors, such as Juliette’s pretty cousin, a professional dancer, who attracted interest both from Maria and Aldous, who described her to Mary as ‘a tremendous cock-teaser, who yet doesn’t realise what she’s doing’.22
But the main attraction was Lawrence whom they had invited to stay nearby. ‘What an astonishing man! He does take the shine out of most other people. Such insight, such wit, such prodigious vitality and in spite of his sickness such humour.’ Sybil Colefax was told that Lawrence made most other people seem ‘half-dead by comparison’.23 Mary’s troubled love life, meanwhile, had been dissected by Lytton Strachey who advised Clive to play hard to get in order to drive Mary back to him. Virginia Woolf thought that Mary was ‘very lonely and anxious to come back’.24 Huxley told Mary he was reading E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, based on Forster’s 1927 Clark Lectures at Cambridge and just published. He found the book ‘amusing but thin and rather tiresome, I thought, so spinsterishly giggly and sniggery and so terribly without guts and testicles – the untesticled quality showing up specially strongly in just those passages in which he expresses himself most decidedly on the side of the gutty books against the gutless, like H. James’. Lawrence was not initially enthused by Les Diablerets: ‘Aldous, like a long, stalky bird, all stalk and claw, goes mildly skiing in the afternoon … Aldous and Maria mildly ski without much joy, and we trudge a while, then go home. There are very few people – practically all the chalets shut and snowed over … Aldous looks a rare shoot, as he’s 6ft 4 and thin and half blind, and his skis are over seven feet long.’25 Lawrence was frustrated by the long intellectual conversations: ‘I must say I get tired of so much talk. What is the good of it! It is really much better to possess one’s soul in patience.’26 He was particularly enraged by the scientific talk of the two Huxley brothers, and their belief in the theories of evolution and what Julian called ‘the possibility of mankind’s genetic improvement’. 27 Lawrence believed that the solution to mankind’s problems lay, not in science, but in greater freedom for the instinctive and intuitive life. But he was interested in one idea he had thrashed out with Aldous, that a group of authors should join together to publish their own books, calling themselves ‘the authors publishing company’. His difficulties with publishers (Huxley had none) were no doubt behind this for it was the period of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he was just about to deliver to the publisher – the manuscript typed by Maria, who did not always appreciate the obscene quality of the more robust English sexual terms, introducing them blithely into the general conversation.
These first three months of 1928, up in the snows, were idyllic. The winter sun was brilliant, though entering shadow a little prematurely because of the mountains. In the evenings Julian and Aldous took it in turns to read. The Pickwick Papers were got through in their entirety. During the day they skied and played with the children – Aldous and Julian built an igloo for them. Juliette, as a recreation from typing Julian’s The Science of Life, embroidered an Adam and Eve, whose genitalia were finished off by Lawrence himself, who was very accomplished at all the domestic tasks.28 The Huxleys were falling under the spell of Lawrence again and began to talk of going for six months to live on his ranch in New Mexico. In the event, the need to attend to Matthew’s schooling took them back to London in March. Maria had written to Mary at the end of February about her ‘violent desire for a kiss’, but in the same breath mentioning Aldous: ‘Do you remember how he can make your whole body quiver?’29 Back in London they all made contact again at Onslow Mews. The novel was nearly done but Huxley was still wanting to tinker with the title, which he now decided ‘doesn’t really get all I want to express’.30 He wanted to change it to Diverse Laws, a phrase from the Fulke Greville poem which would form the book’s epigraph, but the American publishers insisted on the original title. He had complained to Lewis Gielgud that fiction was full of difficulties ‘especially to one who, like myself, isn’t really a born novelist but has large aspirations’,31 an unimprovable summing-up.
By the middle of May, the typescript finally off his hands, Huxley was free to continue catching up with friends and new acquaintances. He had already lunched with Noel Coward ‘who seems much nicer and more intelligent when he’s by himself than when he’s being the brilliant young actor-dram
atist in front of a crowd of people’.32 He was reading Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister which reminded him how much he detested Goethe: ‘What an odious character! And as for saying he’s a great writer – no, it won’t do.’ Matthew Arnold would have turned in his grave. He was grudgingly enjoying Yeats, whose magnificent volume The Tower (containing poems like ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, and ‘Among School Children’) had just appeared: ‘They have a strange power about them – underneath their superficial literariness and preciosity.’ Apart from a contribution to The Best Poems of 1926 (‘Arabia Infelix’) Huxley’s life as a poet seemed over: ‘Verse I find almost unwritable these days,’33 he had confessed a year earlier.
In June the Huxleys crossed to Paris to stay with Lewis Gielgud and his wife in the Rue Decamps and to make arrangements to take their latest house, at Suresnes, north of the Bois de Boulogne at 3 Rue du Bac. They would keep this house, though typically not in continuous residence, until March 1930 when they moved to the South of France. Today the roar of traffic along the north bank of the Seine a few yards from the house – in a small complex of rather suburban-looking villas with tall pointed roofs known as Le Village Anglais and subject to a preservation order by the local mairie – makes it a less attractive spot than it would have been in 1928. The present owner – by her brass plate a psychotherapist – seemed mildly interested to learn in the Spring of 2000 that her home had once been lived in by the author of Le Meilleur des Mondes. One of Huxley’s favourite novels was Flaubert’s comprehensive indictment of bourgeois stupidity, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Suresnes was one of the destinations that marked the outer limits of the eponymous characters’ Sunday walks in the early days of their friendship. At first, they seemed to like the house: ‘The surroundings are really delightful – a tiny provincial town, enlivened by Sunday boating, with the river at the door and the Bois – where one can walk on weekdays for an hour and hardly see a soul – 3 minutes away.’34 The Huxleys hardly had time to complete the arrangements before they were off to Forte for the summer. They would not return to Paris until October. The drove from Paris to Forte, taking in three days with Lawrence at Chexbres above Vervey. They were fined thirty francs for speeding in Switzerland, passed through the Simplon pass, and drove down to Milan along the new autostrada. They boasted of maintaining an average speed of fifty miles per hour all the way. At Forte, in temperatures of ninety-four degrees, which persuaded them to buy an electric fan, they settled in to ‘a very tiny but charming little house back from the road and the sea in the pine woods’35 – the Villa Il Cannetto. Huxley was reading Pascal – ‘really one of the strangest and most interesting of men, and certainly, I think, the subtlest and profoundest intellect France ever produced’ and awaiting the reaction to the new novel, which would be published in the autumn. It was his most substantial and ambitious novel so far and had cost him much pain and effort. But would he be seen to have succeeded?
Aldous Huxley Page 24