It was in Paris in 1929 that Huxley had his first encounter with the talkies. In view of his later life as a would-be screenwriter in Hollywood, the experience is amusing and is described in a piece written for Vanity Fair in July (reprinted in Do What You Will, the essay collection published in October). He admitted that it was a little late in the day to be catching up with the talkies: ‘But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty.’ He describes how he entered ‘that fetid hall on the Boulevard des Italiens, where the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement had been installed’. This phrase is immensely revealing and points forward to some of the leading themes of Brave New World. For Huxley was not enamoured of the new popular cultural forms. He believed that the new entertainment industries had harnessed new technology to increase their profits rather than to facilitate individual artistic creativity. The tone is playful, self-mocking – Huxley the young fogey of thirty-five pretending to be unfashionable – and refers to the ‘beneficent providence’ which robbed him of proper eyesight ‘so that at a distance of more than four or five yards I am blissfully unaware of the full horror of the average human countenance. At the cinema, however, there is no escape.’ On the giant screen he saw everything and found it ‘terrifying’. A jazz band was playing on screen and its melodies and sentimental lyrics expressed for him ‘corruption’. The performance sounds like The Jazz Singer, the first talkie. This is all laid on a bit thick and the tone of the essay seems to allow that it is deliberately over-stated. ‘Ours is a spiritual climate in which the immemorial decencies find it hard to flourish,’ is a large conclusion to draw from a short movie in a smoky Paris cinema. Huxley had just told Julian: ‘I’ve been reading little recently except the Great Authors and have come to the conclusion that it’s really rather a waste of time to read anything else.’20 The encounter on the Boulevard des Italiens was a case of the irresistible force of European high culture meeting the immoveable object of modern commercial popular entertainment.
The twelve essays of Do What You Will (the title from Blake’s ‘Do what you will, the world’s a fiction/And is made up of contradiction’) embody – in a lighter, fizzier form than Proper Studies with its professorial gravitas – Huxley’s world view at the start of the thirties. It is a sceptical, humane outlook, rejecting monomaniac creeds of the kind which were just being unleashed on Europe: ‘There can be no crucial experiments in history … History is not a science,’ Huxley asserted. For the first time he launched his big idea about the need for right ends to choose right means – those ends destined to be cancelled out if the wrong means were chosen. The only workable ideal is ‘not of superhumanness, but of perfected humanity’. This is a plea for humane realism not the tyrannous forcing of human beings into some pre-cast idealistic mould: ‘Man is multifarious, inconsistent, self-contradictory’. In the essays on writers in this collection, such ideas are traced out in detail. Swift’s misanthropy is ‘profoundly silly’ because it expresses ‘a childish resentment against reality’. Wordsworth, too, forgetting that nature in the tropics is far from beneficent to man, ‘asks us to make the same falsification of immediate experience’ and puts us in the ‘snug metaphysical villa’ of simplistic philosophies. Huxley confesses that he has changed his view to one that argues: ‘Only by living discretely and inconsistently can we preserve both the man and the citizen, both the intellectual and the spontaneous animal being, alive within us.’ Much of this shows the influence of Lawrence who is referred to explicitly as offering a ‘fruitful’ contribution.
Abreast as usual of new intellectual developments, Huxley noticed the embourgeoisement of the working class and wondered how capitalism would survive the end of the industrialised proletariat and the inequalities which powered the capitalist machine. In the first signs of a pessimism that would come into his political thinking over the next few years, Huxley raised the spectre of ‘a nihilist revolution’, fuelled by frustration at the mechanisation of every aspect of life, the eradication of much that made human existence rich and various and vital. ‘All that we can hope is that it will not come in our time.’ In the final long essay on Pascal, Huxley set out his own preferred philosophy: ‘[My] fundamental assumption is that life on this planet is valuable in itself, without any reference to hypothetical higher worlds, eternities, future existences … that the purpose of living is to live … Without contrast and diversity life is inconceivable … [I] will have nothing to do with a perfection that is annihilation.’ This is Huxley’s finest essay-collection to date (and a good starting-point for anyone seeking to explore further this aspect of his talent). It also raises the issue of how far the essayist was beginning to compete with the novelist.
Returned from Spain, the Huxleys spent Christmas at Suresnes. Lawrence thought he noted some difficulty between Aldous and Maria. She told Lawrence that she might come to see him at Bandol alone in the New Year. ‘Something seems to have gone wrong between him and her, I don’t know what.’21 Sybille Bedford, however, doubts there was any such difficulty,22 and it must be remembered that Lawrence was a dying man at this point. In December, Huxley met James Joyce in Paris. It was not an eventful meeting, for there was an aesthetic chasm between the two men. Huxley was reading Dante at this time and observed: ‘The art of producing infinite effects with the minimum of obviously visible means has never been carried to such a height.’23 The sheer prodigality of Ulysses, its exuberant delight in language for its own sake, its endless formal invention, would not recommend it to Huxley. He nonetheless told Mary that he had seen Joyce ‘whom I found extraordinarily much pleasanter than Ulysses and the Work in Progress would lead one to expect, tho’ I don’t like either of those two books any the better in consequence.’24 A month or two later, Huxley was telling Robert Nichols that he preferred Graham Greene’s The Man Within to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
The big event of the new year was the staging of This Way to Paradise, a stage version of Point Counter Point written by Campbell Dixon. It ran at Daly’s Theatre in London from 30 January to 1 March 1930, directed by Leon Lion, and was the latest in a long-running series of attempts by Huxley to make his fortune with a stage success. He was still trying to do this on his deathbed. Lawrence gossiped that: ‘Aldous seems to be enjoying himself, figuring among the actors and actresses and being It.’25 Maria wrote to Lawrence that the play was awful but might bring them some money. The short run ensured that it would not. Huxley gave Lawrence a full report on the first night at which the actors were so nervous that they forgot their lines ‘and ranted all those they could remember’.26 He boasted: ‘If I could have gone over the last scene, rewriting the whole thing, I could have made it quite prodigious, I believe.’ Huxley learnt a great deal from this experience: ‘learnt in the first place that actors are incredibly stupid and don’t know their business … Lion was a bit of a disaster. So bottomlessly commonplace … Actors being what they are, the producing of a play is like the performing of a quartet on instruments made of packing cases and string.‘27 The licence for the play had been held up temporarily because Huxley refused to allow the doctoring of the text at the request of the Lord Chamberlain. This functionary had found a reference to impotence unacceptable. Lord Cromer was in fact fairly liberal-minded for the time and pointed out wearily that he was due to meet the Bishop of London and his Purity Committee the following day. In the end, he came and enjoyed the opening night.28 The text was published with a preface by Huxley in which he confessed – in terms that would become familiar in his later screenwriting career – that the collaborative procedures of the theatre were hard for a writer used to composing in solitude: ‘To someone who has been accustomed to working in an art where all the responsibilities are personal and in which success or failure depend exclusively on himself, nothing is more curious than his first experience of an art where creation is multiple, an affair of cooperation and interpretation.‘29 Huxley appears to have received an
offer at this time to write for the cinema which tempted him with its largesse but Maria – in spite of having been accused by Lawrence of having too much regard for money – was hesitant, telling Mary, ‘money is not worth certain things. If one has enough to live on comfortably why slave for more!‘30 The offer must have fallen through or been declined because Huxley announced around the same time: ‘I am writing a play of my own now; which is quite fun.’31 This was The World of Light which would be produced the following March.
On return to Paris the Huxleys made active moves to find a house in the vicinity of Bandol where Lawrence was now entering a sanatorium at Vence near Grasse. They saw Lawrence at the end of February and he was still worried about them: ‘Queer – something gone out of them – they’ll have to be left now to the world – finished, in some spiritual way.‘32 This was the last letter Lawrence wrote, for he died on 2 March, ten days after the Huxleys had arrived. ‘We were with poor Lawrence when he died – a very painful thing to see an indomitable spirit finally broken and put out,’ he told the translator, Sydney Schiff. ‘The disease had made terrible ravages since we last saw him in the summer, and our visits to him … were sad affairs.’33 Maria wrote a brief account of the death in a letter in 1943: ‘Lawrence grasped my two wrists with his hands and said, “Maria, Maria, don’t let me die.” But he was more peaceful a little later … He told me he saw himself, his head, just there, next to me, and that he knew he would die.‘34 Maria held him in her arms. He died at 10.15pm. She was utterly devastated by the death for she had been inordinately fond of Lawrence. The Huxleys stayed in the south of France after the funeral because they had partly come to look for a house. From Bandol, where they were staying at the Hotel Beau Rivage, whose proprietor gave them some advice about the local property scene, they found one, at La Gorguette, a rocky promontory above the beach between Bandol and Sanary-sur-Mer. It was to be their home – once again one must add the phrase ‘on and off’, for the restless couple could never stay too long in one place – for most of the next seven years.
1 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 6 August 1929
2 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 26 June 1929
3 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7 p346, Letter to Frieda Lawrence, 24 June 1929
4 Maria Chambers, ‘Afternoons in Italy with D.H. Lawrence’, Texas Quarterly, 1964
5 L.314
6 L.315
7 Royal Library Brussels (RL), Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 16 July 1929
8 L.315
9 L.316
10 Quoted by Richard Aldington, Pinorman (1954), p68
11 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 28 July 1929
12 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, Letter to Ada Lawrence, 17 October 1929
13 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 30 September 1929
14 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 3 October 1929
15 Ibid
16 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p510Letter to Else Jaffe 4 October 1929
17 L.319
18 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 5 November 1929
19 Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, Letter to Pino Orioli, 13 November 1929
20 L.318
21 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p600, Letter to Pino Orioli 18 December 1929
22 SB in conversation with the author
23 L.322
24 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 21 December 1929
25 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p630, Letter to Pino Orioli, 30 January 1930
26 L.328
27 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 28 March 1930
28 See Leon Lion, The Surprise of My Life (1948) p198
29 This Way to Paradise (1930) by Campbell Dixon. ‘Preface’ by Aldous Huxley
30 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 17 February 1930
31 L.329
32 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 7, p653 Letter to Earl Brewster, 27 February
33 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 28 March 1930
34 Quoted in SB1.224; see also Ibid a long letter from Robert Nichols describing the day after the death
XIX
Sanary
From the gracious Hotel Beau Rivage at Bandol, a week after the death of Lawrence, Maria wrote to Mary to describe the new house they had bought: ‘It is nothing that I wanted except the position – in the country & at two minutes for good bathing. For the rest it is only comic & charming. Aldous wants to call it Villa Pécuchet – so you guess more or less what it is – hideous of course and we should have to fiddle with it – but it has a large vineyard, infinite water & we can come for Easter already as the furniture – the Pécuchet furniture – goes with it.’1 The reference here is to Flaubert’s novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) whose eponymous heroes buy a house in provincial France which they proceed to improve and manage – with comic results. The owner – ‘a short fat man of 55’ from Marseille – and his wife were ‘charming’ and proud of their bourgeois comforts – a bathroom in the cellar and a W.C. on every floor, a conservatory on three sides of the house, and 4000 square metres of land containing olive trees, figs, and a large eucalyptus maimed by last winter’s frost. Maria thought that it would be a pleasant place for walks as well as bathing but presciently realised that the suburbanisation of the coast would proceed apace: ‘The coast is so over built with awful people … that I don’t know how long we really shall be safe.’ Huxley told Sydney Schiff it was ‘a ridiculous little house … but easily transformable’.2 They commissioned builders to make alterations, and an enthusiastic mason is said to have painted on the gateposts, VILLA HULEY [sic], in preparation for the return of his clients.
In those first weeks of settling in and disorder the Huxleys had a visit from Roy Campbell and his wife, who arrived with the daughter of the family with whom they were staying, Sybille von Schoenebeck, who, as Sybille Bedford, would provide a vivid description of the Huxley’s home at Sanary, and her first meeting with Huxley, in her biography.3 The Campbells brought with them ‘a rush of vitality & adventurousness’ in contrast to another couple – Cyril Connolly and his wife – who had lost no time in beating a path to the Huxleys’ door. Maria’s first impressions of the Connollys hint at the strains of this relationship – essentially to do with her fear that the boozy, good-living Connollys would intrude upon Aldous’s vital and to some degree ascetic solitude. Jean Connolly referred to Maria as ‘the watchdog’. Maria told Mary that they had squabbled with the Connollys: ‘I believe they dislike me very much but … they keep seeing us … for the sake of Aldous though he does not like them any better. Connolly was very hurt – because … I called him by his surname & on top of that asked him whether he was Catholic – which gave rise to a litany of his pedigree.’4 Cyril Connolly – a hugely influential critic who had come to Sanary to hero-worship Huxley – would later refer in his novel, The Rock Pool (1936), to ‘the competent intellectual vulgarity of Aldous Huxley’ and in Enemies of Promise (1938) would characterise him as the type of ‘the Oxford boy, the miserable young man on the flying trapeze’ who later became ‘a moralist and a puritan’. In the same book he said of Huxley: ‘He is a defaulting financier of the written word, and nobody since Chesterton has so squandered his gifts.’ But in 1930 Connolly was all admiration.
He had first met Huxley in Paris in the autumn of 1929 at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and moved to Sanary, to a house called Les Lauriers Roses, in 1930. ‘All along the coast from Huxley Point and Castle Wharton [Edith Wharton was at Hyères] to Cape Maugham, little colonies of angry giants had settled themselves,’ he would write in The Rock Pool. Writing much later, in the 1960s, Connolly confessed that he became ‘on terms of profound ambivalence’5 with the Huxleys and the admiration that had brought him to Sanary ‘curdled’. He describes a lunch with the Huxleys at Edith Wharton’s grand chateau at which they felt slighted and at which the conversation is described in terms of a tennis match with game set and match awarded to the Huxleys who next t
ime were invited without the Connollys. The problem seems to have been that Connolly, in a sense, reminded Huxley too much of his former self. He was the dazzlingly clever, urbane, young man of letters, with the social panache and lightly-worn learning of the Eton and Balliol man. Huxley, at thirty-eight, was beginning his long trek away from ‘literature’ towards social and moral concerns. The fluttering brilliance of Connolly – his unabashed hedonism and aestheticism – was something the older man wanted to move on from. As Connolly wrestled with the enemies of promise, Huxley appeared to vault over their heads and to rebuke the younger man with his astonishing productivity. Having once confessed that ‘“Aldous!” that unique Christian name has reverberated throughout my life … I settled in Sanary to be near him and one of my happiest moments was when his red Bugatti first swung into the drive,’ Connolly eventually concluded: ‘The Huxleys have added ten years to my life’6
Aldous Huxley Page 27