Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  1 See for example David Bradshaw, ‘Open Conspirators: Huxley and H.G. Wells 1927-35’, in The Hidden Huxley (1994)

  2 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 19 May 1927

  3 L.286

  4 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 30 May 1927

  5 Reading, Letter to Prentice, Ibid

  6 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 6, p77. Letter to Kot, 6 June 1927. All subsequent Lawrence quotations in this chapter from Vol 6

  7 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 29 June 1927

  8 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3, p141. 23 June 1927

  9 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, Chatto, 5 August 1927

  10 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 15 August 1927

  11 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 9 September 1927

  12 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 15 August 1927

  13 L.291

  14 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 11 November 1927

  15 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 8 October 1927

  16 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 27 October 1927

  17 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, Chatto, 24 November 1927

  18 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 5 December 1927

  19 Letters of DH Lawrence (1932) edited by Aldous Huxley, p693. Letter to Huxley, December 1927

  20 Introduction, The Olive Tree, p231

  21 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 9 December 1927

  22 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 10 February 1928

  23 Bodleian, Letter to Sybil Colefax, 13 February 1928

  24 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3. Letter to Vanessa Bell, 29 January 1928

  25 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 6 p276. Letters first to Secker then to Brett, 27 January 1928; Letter to Ada Lawrence, 3 February

  26 Lawrence to Max Mohr, 29 February 1928

  27 Julian Huxleys, Memories 1, p153

  28 Juliette Huxleys, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, p117

  29 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 23 February 1928

  30 L.296

  31 L.295

  32 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 26 April 1928

  33 L.287

  34 L.299

  35 L.310

  XVII

  Suresnes

  That long, penultimate summer at Forte was a welcome easing of the stress of composition of Point Counter Point. ‘Here it is vegetative and solar,’ Huxley announced to Mary. ‘The sun does most of the living for one; one abandons oneself to its energy. In the intervals I do a little work.’1 He was busy with the essays – he called them ‘biographies’, the vestige of an idea discussed with Lawrence at Cortina for a book on the world’s great intellectual ‘perverts’ such as Wilde and Baudelaire – that would form Do What You Will the following autumn. ‘The beach is crowded with flashing young Italian aristocrats, like very handsome young chauffeurs, and shapely young women. Pleasant to look at, but rather tedious; the sort of young women who ought only to exist in bed and naked, and with whom there should be no communication except a physical and nocturnal one. They ought to be trained to hibernate in the intervals of lovemaking.’ Lady Chatterley had appeared and people kept writing to Maria indignantly ‘as though she was the author. What a strange hatred for the truth most human beings have! Or rather not for the truth, because it doesn’t exist, but for reality. A loathing and fear.’ A month later, Mary was told the same story of sunny indolence – ‘the grapes hang almost ripe from the pergolas, the figs have begun to burst with sweetness’.2 They had been to see the Palio again at Siena and taken ‘one or two astonishing drives through the local mountains’. H was reading Renan (‘remarkable’) and Boccaccio. On 10 September it was Maria’s thirtieth birthday. She asked Mary: ‘Do you remember yours & that first kiss?’3 Mary was born in 1889 and therefore her thirtieth birthday would have been in 1919. If these words are taken at face value, the sexual relationship between Mary and Maria would have begun at around the same time she and Aldous were beginning their affair.

  On 22 October, Lawrence exclaimed: ‘I’ve begun Aldous’s book, what a fat book!’4 He was right. The orange volume weighed in at one and a half pounds and was 601 pages in length. It was a long way from the elegant brevity of Crome. It was also weighty with expectation. Huxley had invested a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy in the book. He had expounded, to anyone who would listen, his theories of its composition: the attempt to reflect all the aspects of human nature, balancing one view by another (the musical analogy of counterpoint where competing voices forge complex harmony explaining the title), exploring the human specimen from every angle and with every scientific instrument in the laboratory. He had confessed himself not to be a born novelist yet claimed ‘large aspirations’. The only question for the reader would be: does it work? All the evidence was that they believed it did. It was a success in terms of sales and brought in some welcome income. Critics were cautious. Cyril Connolly, in an anonymous review in the New Statesman, thought it ‘if not Mr Huxley’s best book … certainly his most important’. The anonymous TLS reviewer criticised it from the point of view of the craft of fiction: ‘It does not weld story and ideas into one: it cares little about progression, proportion, climax and so forth. In spite of a few masterly scenes and descriptions, the persons always come second to the ideas.’ Arnold Bennett in The Realist, said it contributed nothing to the ‘evolutionary development’ of the novel and he objected to its ‘destructiveness’, its hostility towards its characters, and the fact that, although at least three of the characters were writers, there was ‘not a single passage in which are broadly treated the repercussions of literature upon life or vice versa’.5 Connolly noted the influence of the Gide of the Faux Monnayeurs — a much-discussed influence on Huxley – but Gide himself, his journal later recorded, after three abortive attempts to get beyond the first seventy pages, and finding not ‘a single line somewhat firmly drawn, a single personal thought, emotion, or sensation, the slightest enticement for the heart or mind’, gave up the struggle.6

  The older generation of novelists were finding difficulty with Huxley’s alienation effect and the robustness, indeed ruthlessness, of his satire. The younger generation probably found it more exciting and dangerous. The novel is a portrait of contemporary types (the literary and artistic types in the main whom Huxley knew) set against each other, each illuminating the other by contraries and comparisons, in order to express Huxley’s overall view of society, a fictional equivalent of those big, comprehensive works like Pareto’s sociology he loved to grapple with. Except that it dealt with quite a limited segment of contemporary society. The epigraph from Fulke Greville (1554—1628) – the poet of ‘man’s degeneration’ – is from his verse drama Mustapha, published in 1609, a chorus of priests who sing of the ‘wearisome condition of humanity’, a condition of trying to live the Christian life yet being defeated by Nature. ‘What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?/Passion and Reason self-division cause.’ The chorus ends in lines, not quoted by Huxley, which are the priests’ lament: ‘Yet when each of us in his own heart looks,/He finds the God there far unlike his books.’ Secularised in the context of Huxley’s novel this would mean that reason and the passions are at war and that life is ‘unlike his books’. It is the argument of Huxley the essayist, trying to reconcile the intellectual and the ideal with the practical realities of society. In its sense of the illusory nature of the perfect society in the face of reality it is the argument of a man whose next novel would be Brave New World. In a way which the post-modernist novel has now made routine, the book signals a commentary on its own procedures at certain points. The novelist, Philip Quarles, is talking about the book he wants to write: ‘the essence of the new way of looking at things is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen … there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want t
o do is to look with all those eyes at once.’ So what did Huxley see? The vanity of pleasure-seeking, intellectuals like Walter Bidlake who were ‘frightened of the lower classes’ and couldn’t bridge the gap between art and life, the emotional immaturity of the rich aristocrat Lord Edward Tantamount (‘a kind of child’), the glamorous fascist, Everard Webley, head of the British Freemen, who is brutally killed, the spectacle of dysfunctional marital relationships (due as often as not to the indifference of the male partner), the ranting Lawrence-like figure, Rampion, ‘the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity’ of Philip Quarles, the novelist and the character nearest to embodying Huxley’s pre-occupations, Spandrell’s ‘refinements of vice’, the irrelevance of much modern art to life.

  Even Huxley’s critics conceded that there was powerful writing and striking scenes in the book. It is not hard to see how Huxley became a favourite with liberal intellectuals. He was bringing matter into the literary novel that was generally not found there, his intellectualising was always stimulating and provocative, and there was a sense of modernity and daring about his writing. As always, there were autobiographical connections. Philip and Elinor Quarles have much in common with the Huxleys. Philip, quite early in the novel, travelling as the Huxleys did through India, realises that he had not loved Elinor enough at the beginning of their marriage: ‘For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her. On her side she had offered everything. And he had taken, but without return. His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld.’ Is this a kind of confession? Philip’s game leg, analogous to Huxley’s disability acquired in childhood, is explained to Elinor by his mother as something that should never have happened to someone of his nature. ‘He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more, if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world … Intellectual contacts – those are the only ones he admits … Because he can hold his own there; because he can be certain of superiority.’ And again, Elinor is seen as a go-between, telling the intellectual about the realities of ordinary life, ‘the habits of the natives’, something she does: ‘Not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the novelist he might be, she wished he could break his habit of impersonality and learn to live with the intuitions and feelings and instincts as well as with the intellect. Heroically, she had even encouraged him in the velleities of passion for other women. It might do him good to have a few affairs.’

  On 28 October 1928, a few days after H.G. Wells had sent ‘a very nice note’,7 about the novel, Lawrence wrote with his reactions: ‘I have read Point Counter Point with a heart sinking through my boot-soles and a rising admiration. I do think you’ve shown the truth, about you and your generation, with really fine courage. It seems to me it would take ten times the courage to write P. Counter P. that it took me to write Lady C. and if the public knew what it was reading, it would throw a hundred stones at you, to one at me … All I want to do to your Lucy is smack her across the mouth’. As to the character thought to represent Lawrence, ‘your Rampion is the most boring character in the book – a gas-bag. Your attempt at intellectual sympathy! – It’s all rather disgusting, and I feel like a badger that has its hole on Wimbledon Common and trying not to be caught.‘8 This was a common reaction to the book – that it was brave and put its finger on the contemporary pulse, but was not always wholly attractive. As Koteliansky told Virginia Woolf, ‘it is typical of the age. It is a painful book, a horrid book, but it is that.‘9 Lawrence – whose friendship with the Huxleys, especially with Maria, was at its warmest at this time – didn’t seem to mind Rampion and was pleased at the commercial success of the book. ‘Do hope the book makes real money,’ he told Maria. ‘I’m glad you’ll get money out of your Counterpane – sounds quite a lot – you’ll be able to squirt around.‘10 Lawrence was reacting to erroneous reports that 80,000 copies had been sold in the United States. ‘If that is so,’ he told his friend, the Florentine publisher, Giuseppe Orioli, ‘he will be very lordly and uppish, no answering for him.’11 By December, 10,000 copies had been sold of the English edition. Throughout his life, Huxley’s books sold more copies in Britain than in the United States. Privately, Lawrence had reservations. He demanded of Brett: ‘Did you read Aldous’s book? A bit cheap sensational I thought.’12 Huxley himself was aware of such an objection. To an unsolicited correspondent, who was to keep on writing to him for many years from America, a Mrs Flora Strousse who wrote under the pseudonym of Floyd Starkey, he confessed facetiously: ‘I have at last written rather a good, but also rather a frightful, novel:’13

  The Huxleys were still settling in slowly to the house in the Rue du Bac, sorting out the central heating, painting and papering. Maria ensured that fabric designed by Dufy was used for the sofas and cushions. Armchairs specially made to accommodate Aldous’s proportions were ordered from Maple’s in London, and Maria’s brother-in-law, René Moulaert, the painter offered his skills. He designed a dining-table with a reflective surface that allowed guests to catch the faintly unsettling image of themselves eating. Huxley’s neighbour – a rather more popular French novelist – was so disconcerted by the praise of Huxley that appeared in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, that he took to turning his garden hose on the author of Point Counter Point when he came out into the pocket-handkerchief back garden.14 The Huxleys were starting to enjoy Paris, however, and sampling some of its pleasures, which included a Lesbian bar featuring ‘a wrestling match between two gigantic female athletes’. It occurred to Huxley that: ‘The funniest feature of this town is the people who try to be wicked in supposed haunts of sin.’15 He was not reading anything particularly interesting, he told Lawrence, having struggled with a ‘tiresome’ book by Virginia Woolf called Orlando ‘which is so terribly literary and fantaisiste that nothing is left in it at all.’ By contrast, a re-reading of Our Mutual Friend reminded him how much it was ‘So painfully true to life.‘16 Huxley’s aesthetic philosophy continued to prefer ‘life’ over the ‘literary’, a distinction he seemed confident in being able to make. He was now asked by Lawrence, who was in Bandol on the Côte d’Azur, to find out whether pirated editions of Lady Chatterley were on sale in Paris. They were, and Huxley, always interested in new communications technology, tried to recommend using the new technique of photo-setting to produce an edition to undercut the pirates, having bombarded Chatto with questions about the technical process. He went to see Sylvia Beach of the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris but in the end Lawrence found another Paris publisher, Edward Titus, to bring out an edition in May 1929. The Huxleys spent a ‘nightmare’ Christmas in Belgium with Maria’s family. ‘One can easily have too much of family life!’17 he complained to Ottoline Morrell. Back in Paris at the start of the year, he told her that, whilst finding most French literary men impossibly ‘dreary’, he had been seeing a good deal of the young French poet, Drieu La Rochelle, and had had a meeting with Paul Valéry. Valéry told Huxley that an author shouldn’t frequent other authors after the age of twenty-four– ‘once formed, he can only find them uninteresting – as a class – that is to say: tho’ of course there are always individual exceptions’.

  In the wake of his triumph with Point Counter Point, Huxley was no doubt taking stock at the start of 1929. During a brief visit to London in January, he wrote from the Athenaeum to Flora Strousse, who had evidently asked him to give some account of himself: ‘I have almost no ideas about myself and don’t like having them … For “know thyself” was probably one of the stupidest pieces of advice ever given – that is to say, if it meant turning the self inside out by introspection … for the self only exists in relation to circumstances outside itself and introspection which distracts one from the outside world is a kind of suicide.’18 It was bad enough exposing one’s inner
life to the public by endeavouring to ‘commit hara-kiri every publishing season’ without adding to the exposure by analysing oneself for the benefit of others. He did however produce a brief biographical note for his German translator, Herbert Herlitschka, which referred to his blindness – ‘I was much alone & thrown on my own resources’ – and which described his post war career in the following terms: ‘Took to journalism in the intervals of which, whenever I had enough money to get away, I wrote my first books, mostly in Italy … Have now a house in the neighbourhood of Paris.‘19 In spite of its almost telegraphic brevity, the note importantly confirms that, for Huxley, journalism was the despised necessity and his object was always to ‘get away’ to write. The getting away was a necessary part of his creativity. In many respects a typical Englishman of his class and epoch, Huxley was also the type – more common in the early twentieth century than today when young writers seem to be more stay-at-home – of the willingly self-exiled. Like Lawrence Durrell who mocked his native land as ‘Pudding Island’, Huxley was one of those who functioned better abroad – not just because it was cheap and freer from stuffy convention – but because distance sharpened the pen.