On his way back to Paris, rattling across wintry south-east England in the train towards Dover, Huxley started to write to Mary – the almost feverish sexual passion for her which had been expressed in the letters of the middle of the decade seemingly now all spent: ‘Farewell, sweet Mary; why do we live in this filthy climate? Too depressing. The sight of the landscape outside the train windows is really sickeningly dismal.’20 He also described to her his dalliance with Beaverbrook who wanted him to write on contemporary literature for his newspapers. In a foretaste of the sort of aesthetico-ethical dilemma he would experience again in Hollywood, he told Mary: ‘I so resent the pressure these swine put on one with their beastly money. At the same time it’s almost a duty to milk them of as much of it as one can. So I remain torn between a desire to send him to the devil and a desire to haggle for the highest price.’ Huxley decided in the end to refuse the devil’s shilling, largely because the task would have been to plough through pages of contemporary writing, most of which he despised, telling Julian: ‘99.8% of the literary production of this age – as of all other ages, for that matter – is the purest cat’s piss’.21 The profession of literary journalism rests on the assumption that the opposite is true, however compelling the evidence to the contrary. That January in London Huxley signed his third agreement with Chatto for two novels in three years with three further books if possible. It was more realistic – previous targets never having been met – and, together with the royalties from Point Counter Point, his first big financial success, he was to be able to live comfortably through the first years of the next decade. He also met, at the home of the critic Raymond Mortimer, Gerald Heard – another fabulous talker and explorer of ideas who will be described more fully later, and who was a key intellectual companion of his American years. Heard later recalled how they stayed talking on this occasion until one in the morning, after all transport had ceased. Nonetheless, Huxley accompanied Heard the three miles back to his flat and then set off for another couple of miles to his own lodging. He was always addicted to long night-time walks.
Once back in Paris, the Huxleys learned that Lawrence was not well and resolved to go and see him in the south of France at Bandol where he was staying at the Hotel Beau Rivage. They also wanted to press on to Florence to sell their Italian car. As it turned out, Lawrence seems to have been more concerned about the Huxleys’ state of health. When they finally left on 1 February (having expressed much anger at the seizure by police of Lawrence’s typescript of poems, Pansies, and of published copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover – an act that would be followed in June by the seizure of Lawrence’s paintings from the Warren Gallery in London), Lawrence reported to Juliette: ‘Aldous and Maria left this morning in the car – a lovely morning indeed, still and sunny. But they are neither of them very well – Aldous liverish and run down, Maria very thin and not sound, somehow. They worry me a bit. Aldous was in bed two days with his liver …’22 Lawrence was grateful for Huxley’s sympathy and his promise to get Mary’s husband, Jack Hutchinson, to have a word about the seizure of the typescript of the poems with Oswald Mosley ‘the Socialist with whom he is great friends’. After the Huxleys had gone, Lawrence wrote to Ottoline, repeating his concerns about their health and their general mood: ‘I think the Counter-Point [sic] book sort of got between them – she found it hard to forgive the death of the child – which one can well understand. But as I say, there’s more than one self to everybody, and the Aldous that writes those novels is only one little Aldous among others – probably much nicer – that don’t write novels: I mean it’s only one of his little selves that writes the book and makes the child die, it’s not all himself. – No, I don’t like his books: even if I admire a sort of desperate courage of repulsion and repudiation in them. But again, I feel only half a man writes the books – a sort of precocious adolescent. There is surely much more of a man in the actual Aldous.’23 To Koteliansky, a couple of days later, he concluded: ‘Aldous is really nicer – getting older and a bit more aware of other people’s existence.’24 Lawrence was convinced that the death of the child (which may have been suggested by the death of Naomi Mitchison’s child from meningitis) was the cause of a certain difficulty in the relationship of Aldous and Maria in early 1929. Moreover, the love affair in the novel with Lucy Tantamount ‘was Aldous’s affair with Nancy Cunard – I think Maria hardly forgives it. And perhaps he’s sorry he did it. But it has made them money, and Maria wants money – says so. Yes, she wants to buy a new car in Paris.’25
When the Huxleys reached Florence, via Genoa where the car’s magneto froze, it was six inches deep in snow, fifteen degrees below zero, every water pipe frozen, and the Arno a solid mass of ice, as Huxley reported to Arnold Bennett.26 It was not a good time to sell a car so they left it with a garage to sell and came back again by train via the Riviera where they encountered a seventy-miles-an-hour icy gale. In March, in Paris, they bought the famous red Bugatti (Enrico Bugatti apocryphally astonished that a woman should be driving one of his hand-built cars). It was the new 1929 touring model and came garlanded with praise from the AA engineers. It was the first materialistic fruit of the Point Counter Point success. It was a two-seater with dove-grey leather upholstery and a great box-like trunk at the back. It had been specially adapted for Aldous’s long legs — which was hard luck on Matthew who had to squeeze into a sort of gap behind the two front seats. Seventy years later, in his apartment in Washington DC, Matthew’s eyes lit up when he recalled for me the days at Sanary-sur-Mer (where the Huxleys went after Suresnes) when he would hear the roar of the Bugatti, his mother at the wheel, coming back along the coast road from Bandol to their home at La Gorguette. The car needed running in and the Huxleys gladly took the chance to drive all the way to Madrid (looking at the Prado) and on to London. They were thus spending very little time in the ugly house in Paris and Huxley did a great deal of his work on the move, setting up his typewriter without fuss in various hotel rooms. He was finishing off the essays for Do What You Will. Lawrence managed to stay with them briefly in March, attending a Paris salon with Aldous where they both met Daniel Halévy and Mauriac. At a lunch at Paul Morand’s, Huxley met the American writer Glenway Wescott and found that he liked him very much: ‘It would be pleasant to meet him again. Which is not the case with most of the literary men I meet in Paris!’27 Lawrence later told Ottoline: ‘They were very good to me, tended me so kindly. I am really very much attached to them, humanly. There is that other side of them, the sort of mental and nervous friction and destructiveness which I can’t bear, but they leave that out with me. As I grow older I dread more and more that frictional nervousness which makes people always react against one another, in discord, instead of together in harmony.’28,29 After the motoring trip to Spain they were in London again, meeting Mary again and Clive Bell, at Virginia Woolf’s house at 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. When Huxley returned, he realised how little he desired to live in England. He told Flora Strousse that he felt ‘very gloomy about my native land and very glad I don’t have to spend all my time in it. I have reached a point where I value sunshine more than people, culture, arts, conversation. So I’m off to Italy for the summer.’ Commiserating with Ms Strousse for having to go to Liverpool ‘an odious town’, he declared ‘The Mediterranean is the centre of the world. Everything of which human beings can feel proud has come out of the Mediterranean … All that’s beastly in human life comes from the North or West or the East … So viva il Mediterraneo! And down with Liverpool.’
And so the Huxleys set off for Forte dei Marmi for the last time, where they would be joined by Lawrence, now in his last months of life.
1 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 2 August 1928
2 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 1 September 1928
3 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 10 September 1928
4 Letters of D.H. Lawrence (1932) edited by Aldous Huxley, 22 October 1928
5 For all these reviews see Watt, pp147—76
6 The Journals of André Gide (1949) trans Justin O’Brien, Vol III, pp154—5
7 L.303
8 Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed Huxley, p757. Letter to Aldous Huxley, 28 October 1928
9 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3, p217. 4 January 1929
10 Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed Huxley, pp762 and 764. Letters to Maria Huxley 8 November 1928 and 5 December 1928
11 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p21. Letter to Giuseppe Orioli, 21 November 1928
12 Ibid, p55. Letter to Dorothy Brett. 10 December 1928
13 L.302
14 See SB1. pp195–98 for a full description of the ‘Cottage on the Seine’
15 L.305
16 L.305
17 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 January 1929
18 L.306
19 Reading, Herlitschka correspondence, biographical note by Huxley. No date (1929)
20 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 15 January 1929
21 L.307
22 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p160. Letter to Juliette Huxley, 1 February 1920
23 Ibid., Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 5 February 1929, p164
24 Ibid., Letter to Samuel Koteliansky, 7 February 1929, p167
25 Ibid., pp169–70. Letter to Earl and Achsah Brewster, 7 February 1929
26 Princeton, Letter to Arnold Bennett, 19 February 1929
27 UCLA, Letter to Eugene Saxton, 7 May 1929
28 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p234. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 April 1929
29 L.311
XVIII
Lawrence
Huxley’s relationship with Lawrence fluctuated considerably, from the extraordinary initial impact of their first meeting, through a perceptible cooling off on Huxley’s part in his respect for Lawrence’s writing during the years when they were not in contact, to a renewed admiration during 1929, the last year of Lawrence’s life. During this latter period Huxley’s letters are strewn with references to Lawrence as a wholly exceptional human being, though he always remained a step short of hero-worship. He could never quite silence his doubts about the anti-intellectualism (though one seeks a better term for the cautions and reservations of that profoundly intuitive intelligence) and anti-scientism inherent in the Lawrentian philosophy. On his side, Lawrence had reservations (‘No, I don’t like his books’) and disliked Huxley’s inherited faith in science, and his discursive intellectualising – he would rage against all that ‘talk’. This oscillation between extreme admiration and intellectual reserve on Huxley’s part informs the essay on Lawrence, discussed later, and makes it an especially interesting document.
In June 1929 the Huxleys arrived in Forte dei Marmi where they would stay, off and on, until September, at the Villa II Cannetto, in the Viale Morin. Just before he left, Huxley told Norman Douglas that he had found ‘poor old England’ to be ‘sadly mouldy and dim’ on his recent visit. The Italian sunshine beckoned. They went via Rome and were appalled at what was happening to it: ‘for the Fascists, who have an Empire-complex and see themselves as Cato and Augustus … are busily engaged in pulling down all mediaeval and Renaissance Rome in order to dig up more and yet more antique rubbish heaps … so that in a few years time Rome will be one vast hole with broken pillars and bits of masonry in it, surrounded by hideous garden suburbs and international hotels.’1 An early visitor to Forte was Lawrence – ‘not better but quiet & happy which is one better than he was in Paris’,2 Maria thought. After staying with them in Paris he had gone to Mallorca for three months. After a brief spell in Forte he went to Florence, then Baden-Baden, and then, from October to February 1930, he was in Bandol before moving to Vence, where he died on 2 March. The Huxleys saw a great deal of the sick man during this period. At Forte in June, staying at the Pensione Giuliani in the Viale Morin, Lawrence went to the Huxleys next door at II Cannetto for tea and met them on the beach. They seemed to him to be physically well and glad to have escaped from the Paris house they had come to hate. But Lawrence told his wife Frieda: ‘Maria is still tangled up in a way I dislike extremely with Costanza.’3 Lawrence’s friend, Maria Chambers, was staying in Forte at the time and she asked Lawrence about these afternoon teas chez Huxley. ‘Talk, talk, talk,’ he said to her. ‘Words, words, words! They kill the flow of life.’4 Quoting to her a Spanish saying he had probably just picked up in Spain (Moros en la costa y gatos en la azotea – ‘Moors on the coast and cats on the roof’) Lawrence called the Huxleys ‘The Moros’ because they were always busying themselves around him and intruding too much, he felt. The Huxleys, however, probably thought they were being solicitous. They had to force him to see a doctor when he was with them in Paris. ‘He doesn’t want to know how ill he is,’ Aldous complained to Julian. ‘That is why he won’t go to Doctors and homes … We have given up trying to persuade him to be reasonable.’5
Lawrence’s endless shifting of place was a doomed attempt to find some spot where he might feel better, but his health was deteriorating steadily. ‘How horrible this gradually approaching dissolution is,’ Huxley told Robert Nichols. ‘And in this case specially horrible, because so unnecessary, the result simply of the man’s strange obstinacy against professional medicine.’6 ‘He never does anything from morning till night, except sit about & talk a certain amount &, very occasionally, glance at a book,’7 he told Maria’s sister Jeanne. Meanwhile, though Lawrence might think the coast at Forte as flat as Skegness, the Huxleys were enjoying trips to the Etruscan places at Cerveteri and elsewhere and splashing in the sea in their new acquisition, an inflatable rubber dinghy – ‘A most entertaining toy.’8 The stay was interrupted in July when Huxley, who had experienced a little jaundice in the spring, went for a week to the Italian spa of Montecatini, in the Apuan Alps – ‘the most grotesque vision imaginable — all the obese, the bilious, the gluttonous, the constipated, the red-nosed, the yellow-eyed, standing about in a pump-room that looks like ancient Rome through the eyes of Alma Tadema’.9 Huxley was there with ‘Pino’ Orioli, Lawrence’s bookseller and publisher friend from Florence who later testified to Huxley’s non-stop discoursing at the spa with the laconic observation: ‘Aldous he sit and make remark.’10 When Aldous returned from this cure, Maria was of the opinion that he was ‘limp as a sawdust doll’.11 Huxley, however, was taken with the Apuan mountains so they both went for a week in August to explore the place from which the Carrara marble came. Huxley took his paints with him to try to capture mountain sunsets. Painting was always a love of Huxley’s (though the only example in any public place is a portrait of Gerald Heard which hangs in the lobby of the Library at the University of California at Los Angeles and his family disclaim any knowledge of the whereabouts of the paintings). Maria once complained to Lawrence that she got cold posing for Aldous in the nude at Forte.
In the autumn, the Huxleys returned to Suresnes and immediately started to plan another trip, to Spain. ‘They are always so restless and unsatisfied,‘12 Lawrence thought. There was a chance of Huxley being a delegate to a ‘Congress of Unions for Intellectual Cooperation’ at Barcelona and another of joining his friend, Sullivan, on a tour of ‘the Great Men of Europe’,13 for a series of profiles in The Observer of Einstein, Heisenberg etc. But first he made a quick visit to London on his own at the end of September. He lunched with Clive Bell at the Eiffel Tower and saw Mary Hutchinson. Maria, alone in Paris, because she did not want to go, not having enjoyed her last visit for some reason, found that Aldous was ‘enchanted’14 by London again. When he came back they talked of going to live in Bandol to be near Lawrence who was now installed there. Maria was anxious to get away from the Rue du Bac – ‘this odious place … it is neither town nor country.’15 Lawrence, however, told Elsa Jaffe, Frieda’s sister, when he learned of this plan: ‘I rather hope they won’t.’16
The trip to Spain by car was quite exhausting for Maria as driver but they found it ‘the strangest country in Europe’.17 They began with a week at Barcelona where they attended the conference of intellectuals – �
�indescribably awful!’18 – then drove to Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante, Murcia, Almeria and Granada. They wandered through the byways of Andalucia to Ronda, Jerez, San Fernando, Cadiz and back through Jerez (where they were greatly impressed by the 1847 sherry they drank), Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, Burgos, then back to France. They had left it a little late and the weather towards the end was rather cold. Lawrence was in receipt of postcards along the way. He was intensely anti-car and felt that Maria must be exhausted by all that driving. ‘I don’t think they loved Spain,’ he told Pino Orioli, ‘but Aldous, no doubt, will write articles on it.’19
Aldous Huxley Page 26