Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The Huxleys continued to see the Connollys throughout the spring and summer of 1930 and Huxley did admit to Mary that they were ‘amusing’ – ‘he like a highly-educated, Eton-and-Balliol street arab, she a perfect specimen of the hard-boiled young rich American girl’.7 As late as the end of October Maria was reporting that they were seeing them still ‘fairly often’ even if they were ‘unpleasant people with suddenly spots of niceness – like an unpleasant child has moments which make him touching. With Cyril I quarrelled – often – but now they must have made up their minds that as we are the only neighbours they had better keep in our good graces & as a result are so deferential to me that I must laugh all the time’.8 There is something about the way this is put that inclines one to some sympathy with the Connollys.

  In May, Aldous went to London to deal with the editing of Lawrence’s letters, which he had been invited to compile. He left the Sanary house in the hands of the builders. ‘Aldous Huxley is over here, buzzing about his letters,’9 Virginia Woolf told Brett. Frieda Lawrence had originally accepted Huxley’s idea of a memorial volume interspersed with letters but eventually he settled on an edition of the letters for which he refused to accept payment or royalties. He also declined a proposal from T.S. Eliot to write a book on Lawrence the poet. In the ‘whirl of spirit-expending activity’10 which had consumed him in March, Huxley had dashed to England for three days to sign the sheets of a special limited edition of his new book of stories, Brief Candles, which was being issued by the Fountain Press in New York. Back in London in May he could see the book published by Chatto. It consisted of three short stories and a longer one, ‘After the Fireworks’, that approached novella length. The themes of Do What You Will interestingly recur in these stories – there was always cross-fertilisation between Huxley’s fictional imagination and his intellectual preoccupations. ‘The Claxtons’ is an attack on puritanical self-righteousness – ‘how beautifully the Claxtons lived, how spiritually!’ – echoing the warnings about the coercive nature of the idealistic programme in the essays. In ‘After the Fireworks’, Miles Fanning – yet another writer – declares ‘a writer can’t influence people’ and inveighs against the ‘illiterate idealist’ who is no more than ‘A Higher Thinker with nothing to think about but his – or more often, I’m afraid, her – beastly little personal feelings and sensations.’ The social comedy of these stories is moving towards a clearer indictment of thinking in a moral vacuum, of mere aestheticism. In the same month, Huxley wrote a piece for the Evening Standard called ‘Babies—State Property’, which discussed the crisis in the family brought about both by individuals increasingly wanting to assert their rights and freedoms and by the standardisation imposed by modern democracy. He noted how in Soviet Russia the family was under attack as a locus of individual autonomy from the State and therefore: ‘The State-paid professional educator is to take the place of the parents.’11 One thinks, inescapably of course, of Brave New World. There is a curiously clinical tone to this writing. Huxley is observing what he sees as the decline of the family, and analysing its causes, but it appears to the reader that he is not himself greatly engaged.

  Although Huxley always claimed never to read any reviews of his work (or even to cast another glance over his own work once it had been published) he did see the reviews of Brief Candles and was disappointed. ‘The mot d’ordre at the moment is that all literature must be eminently public-schooly, with touches of Barrie-esque whimsicality to relieve the gentlemanly tedium. If one’s works don’t resemble those of Mr Priestley, then one’s damned.’12 Although having read ‘nothing lately except historical and philosophical works’ Huxley was greatly impressed by his first reading of Kafka’s The Castle in Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation. ‘One would need to have a very special sort of mind to write it; it’s something one couldn’t do oneself. I think it’s a fascinating book … In a work of art, a truth is always a beauty-truth; and a beauty-truth is a mystical entity, a two-in-one; the truth is quite inseparable from its companion, so that you can only state in the most general terms what its nature is.’ This is a line of aesthetic thinking that one might have wished Huxley to pursue more vigorously but he was set on another path. Reading so little contemporary literature, however, his enthusiasm for Kafka as he prepared to write Brave New World is worth noting.

  The brief stay in London hunting down Lawrence letters (in the spaces of which he was trying to finish his play) made him reflect on his ambivalent feelings towards Lawrence’s writing. ‘What a queer devil he was! The queerer, the more I think of him and know about him. So many charming and beautiful things in him, such a lot too that wasn’t sympathetic.’13 Towards the end of the month, Huxley returned to Sanary via Suresnes. From the Rue du Bac, he wrote to Mary about a new ‘spy-glass’ he had acquired to improve his vision and which enabled him to see Calais for the first time: ‘It’s melancholy how much one misses by seeing badly – but perhaps one’s also spared a good many horrors! Only the horrors are probably paid for by the loneliness, with a bit to spare on the credit side, perhaps. With my little spy-glass I felt suddenly like a convalescent rediscovering the world after an illness and finding it unbelievably beautiful. However, the repulsiveness of the man sitting next to me in the restaurant car soon reminded me that it was something else as well.’14 On 26 June Maria finally moved their belongings out of the Rue du Bac, from what she called now ‘this ever detested place’.15 The house at Sanary remained a building site well into the summer. ‘We live in considerable squalor and discomfort among the ruins – a life of refugees,’16 Huxley reported to Prentice in early July. With workmen hammering around them, they were reading Fielding’s Tom Jones aloud: ‘such sense, such a tapping of all the nails on the head – knock, knock, knock’.17

  In September, Huxley rather abruptly left for London, having realised that Matthew was going back to school a week earlier than he had realised. He also wanted to go to the North Midlands, in connection with the Lawrence letters, to see the writer’s home at Eastwood, but also to write a piece for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine on social conditions in the depressed working class areas. Juts before he left he corrected an article on him sent by a Mrs Theis who had evidently missed a crucial dimension in his work. He told her: ‘I wonder if you’re right about the absence of ethical bias? I feel myself very much of a moralist.’18 It was the moralist – in a very well-established tradition of the educated liberal intelligence venturing into ‘darkest England’ – who wrote the piece for Nash’s, which was not published until May 1931. In April 1931, another Old Etonian, George Orwell, published his first piece of similar reportage, ‘The Spike’, in The Adelphi. That piece would be reworked into a chapter of Down and Out in Paris and London. Huxley’s piece, ‘Abroad in England’, cleverly alluded in its title to the fact that the working class areas of the Midlands and North were a foreign country to most of middle class Britain. ‘The notes which follow are the casual jottings of a tourist – a tourist whose home is that remote province of the Great Bourgeois Empire inhabited by Literary Men, Professional Thinkers and the Amateurs of General Ideas,’19 he wrote. This article, and a companion piece on ‘Sight-Seeing In Alien Englands’ published the following month, effectively demolish the myth of Huxley the unfeeling toff, indifferent to the fate of what some refer to haughtily as ‘the masses’. He showed himself acutely aware of the class-ridden nature of English society. With Orwellian directness he registered the ‘Chinese wall’ that existed between the Deanery of Durham Cathedral where he was received and the mining village where he had lectured on 10 October on ‘Science and Poetry’. The two working men with whom he had arrived from the mining village of Willington he liked very much but he realised how much his class background made it easier for him to relate socially to the Dean because both had been formed in ‘those curious hotbeds of bourgeois imperialism, the Public Schools’. Huxley’s conclusions from what he saw in Middlesbrough and elsewhere were that, to avoid a sort of permanent post-imperial, post-industrial
mass unemployment, some form of national planning was needed. The vested interests of the few would oppose it ‘but if national planning is, by the highest human standards, desirable, then the actual desires of this minority will have to be overridden and the desirable thing imposed by force.’ He even spoke warmly of the Soviet Five Year Plan. Since the only plans currently being discussed were Oswald Mosley’s ‘A National Plan for Great Britain’ or the ideas of the Political and Economic Planning group, Huxley’s critics have seized on passages such as this in order to expose him as a faintly sinister anti-democratic thinker. In fact, the article makes him look like some form of intellectual Fabian compelled by the spectre of social inequality and suffering to the conviction that Something Must Be Done, probably through some form of nationalisation.20 Today the solution, from a Labour or Conservative government, would no doubt be privatisation.

  On the same trip to England, Huxley broke off to accompany Sullivan to Berlin and Paris on his tour of the ‘Great Men’ he was profiling. He described this as ‘a most entertaining piece of sightseeing’.21 In Paris he himself was interviewed by Frederic Lefevre who interrogated him for four hours and who was ‘the most crassly vulgar, self-satisfied businessman of letters I ever met’.22 Lefevre nonetheless wrote ‘the most monstrous flatteries’ about him and the two performed a dialogue in French for the national radio. Although Huxley talked to Robert Nichols about ‘projecting a kind of picaresque novel of the intellect and the emotions – a mixture between Gil Blas, Bouvard et Pécuchet and Le Rouge et le Noir’23 (an interesting idea that never materialised) and to Prentice about a new volume of verse incorporating Arabia Infelix (which had been published in May 1929) and other poems, he was concentrating now on his new play. He told Schiff at the end of December that he had had no success with producers so far ‘owing to its last act’24 but he hoped he would be luckier in the new year. As 1930 came to a close, the Huxleys felt settled in at Sanary. In spite of the protracted – and worryingly expensive – works, they had bathed and basked in the sun and were really enjoying it. They were also meeting some of their famous neighbours such as Edith Wharton – ‘rather a formidable lady who lives in a mist of footmen, bibelots, bad good-taste and rich food in a castle overlooking Hyères’.25 He had even been invited to become a Corresponding Member of the local Académie du Var ‘which I think is rather distinguished’.

  Huxley’s new year reflections for 1931 were informed by the previous autumn’s immersion in the life of the depressed mining villages of England, whose fate had touched him deeply. ‘What a world we live in,’ he exclaimed to Flora Strousse. ‘The human race fills me with a steadily growing dismay … The sad and humiliating conclusion is forced on one that the only thing to do is to flee and hide. Nothing one can do is any good and the doing is liable to infect one with the disease one is trying to treat.’26 He was, however, still pre-occupied with the relationship of ends and means and his professed desire to escape (written indeed from a rocky point on the Cote d’Azur) was merely rhetorical. He would continue to write his documentary pieces ‘abroad in England’ for Nash’s throughout 1931 with their air of bemused and well-meaning puzzlement at the chaos of the contemporary world, but the growth of a wider political and social awareness that would issue in a more definite public commitment in the middle of the decade was now unstoppable. Meanwhile he was recommending The Castle by Kafka as ‘one of the most important books of this time’27 and his own book, about a utopia that wasn’t, was beginning to take shape at Sanary. But first he had to go to London to see about production of his first play.

  1 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 10 March 1930

  2 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 28 March 1930

  3 SB1.230–39. See also: Mem. Vol., pp138–43

  4 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, undated, postmarked 1930

  5 Quoted in Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997), p236

  6 Ibid., p238; P239

  7 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 July 1930

  8 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 28 October 1930

  9 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4. Letter to Dorothy Brett, 10 May 1930

  10 L.333

  11 ‘Babies–State Property’, Evening Standard, 21 May 1930. Hidden Huxley, pp47–50

  12 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 19 June 1930

  13 L.335

  14 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 28 May 1930

  15 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 26 June 1930

  16 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 5 July 1930

  17 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 July 1930

  18 HRC, Letter to Mrs Theis, 9 September 1930

  19 ‘Abroad in England,’ Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, May 1931. Hidden Huxley pp51–64

  20 For a less sympathetic view of Huxley’s democratic credentials at this point see David Bradshaw, ‘Huxley’s Slump’, in The Art of Literary Biography (1995) ed John Batchelor. Bradshaw argues, with his customary meticulous scholarship, that Huxley’s expressed support for national planning was a contradiction of his usual libertarian stance

  21 L.343

  22 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 23 October 1930

  23 L.343

  24 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 24 December 1930

  25 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 18 December 1930

  26 L.345

  27 Ibid

  XX

  Utopia

  In January 1931 Huxley plunged back into London society, basing himself initially at the Regent Palace Hotel, Piccadilly Circus (a hotel that left him ‘fascinated with horror’1) and dining with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Raymond Mortimer, Robert Nichols, and other old friends. Virginia Woolf spotted him at a concert at the end of January: ‘More of a windmill and a scarecrow, more highbrow, purblind and pallid and spavined than ever; but all the same, sympathetic to me.’2 In spite of the attention his play needed, and notwithstanding his renewed attempt to write some verse for the book he had proposed to Prentice (‘what a labour! It absolutely knocks me out.’3), Huxley was continuing, not to escape, but to confront the face of the Depression.

  On 11 February he went into the Stranger’s Gallery of the House of Commons to listen to a debate on the national economy at which Ramsay MacDonald’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, spoke. Huxley was appalled at the occasion, its tedious speeches and waffle – ‘There is a kind of weariness of the spirit, to which I privately give the name of Septic Boredom,’4 he told the readers of Nash’s Magazine. ‘What in heaven’s name,’ he pleaded, ‘in an age of cheap and rapid printing, are we doing with this mediaeval council chamber? ’ He was contemptuous of Parliament and its ‘twaddling’ politicians. ‘In the appropriately Gothic hall of the Mother of Parliaments, the old anachronistic bawling continues to reverberate.’ What annoyed Huxley was the irrelevance of these old buffers’ speeches: ‘What is the use of knowing how things were done in the good old days when the bad new days have come along and made complete nonsense of your knowledge?’ This impatient iconoclasm came out also in an interview (which had originally appeared under the heading ‘The Despair of Aldous Huxley’ in Harper’s Magazine the previous June) published in a new book in May by Sewell Stokes, Hear The Lions Roar. Stokes describes Huxley as ‘a sad, brave lion’ who invites his interviewer to join him in his club, the Athenaeum, where the English male intellectual and clerical establishment had moved about peaceably for a century or more. Huxley made some mocking remarks about the ‘bottoms of the august great’ which had left their impressions on the antique club chairs, and gave a performance of the stereotypical Huxley of the 1920s, just at the point when he was beginning to bid farewell to this pose of languid contempt and aesthetic revulsion at the world’s follies. Huxley confessed his bewilderment at contemporary London: ‘The England that I thought I knew has so completely changed, that, for me, it has become a strange country. I can make nothing of it; the harsh music, the blatant vulgarity, the Tal
kies …’5

  In a large dance hall in the West End, Huxley had watched the listless and graceless dancers and contrasted them with the happy, natural gaiety of a comparable Paris dance hall crowd. The culprit, he told Stokes, was the English class system which made the working class ‘copy a model of gentlemanly behaviour which isn’t natural’ instead of enjoying themselves spontaneously in their own way. Asked by his interviewer if he had read Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which had just appeared, Huxley said he had, ‘and it made me feel quite old. It was about a world I do not know, another generation; so different from my own. It made me aware of the terrible foreignness of time.’ Waugh was to give his opinion of Huxley, much later, in 1955 when he praised the early novels of the 1920s and regretted Huxley’s abandonment of the zestful animation of those works in favour of the pursuit of ideas: ‘It was because he was then so near the essentials of the human condition that he could write a book [Antic Hay] that is frivolous and sentimental and perennially delightful.’6 Huxley also mentioned in the interview Virginia Woolf, praising her language, but regretting that all her characters were ‘observed at a distance, through a mist; she never seems able to touch them with her fingers.’ He seemed to be putting distance between himself and the world both of bright social satire and of Bloomsbury aestheticism. With all the limitations of background and intellectual temper – not to mention the basic fact, so easily overlooked, that he could not see very much – Huxley was beginning to concern himself increasingly with society and politics and the problems of the contemporary world. He followed his visit to the Parliamentary mausoleum by a trip to the East End where he saw a Jewish slaughter house for poultry off the Commercial Road, and noticed ‘a group of male prostitutes, powdered and with scarlet lips, standing round the door of a cheap lodging house’ as he walked back to the Underground. ‘I was proposing to spend the rest of the evening in Bloomsbury – not merely geographically, but also culturally in Bloomsbury,’ he reported. Bloomsbury, when he arrived, was impressed. ‘Lord, how little I’ve seen, done, lived, felt, thought compared with the Huxleys,’7 Virginia Woolf confided to her diary a few days later. ‘Aldous takes life in hand. Whether that damages his writing I don’t know. He is “modern”. He is endlessly athletic & adventurous. He will be able to say he did not waste his youth. Some bitterness is the goad which drives him on. Death comes; nothing matters; at least let me see all that there is to be seen, read all there is to be read. I fancy no one thing gives him the immense satisfaction things give me. That’s all the comfort I find.’ The next thing she knew, the Huxleys were off to explore the London docks, the Black Country, down a mine, to Moscow (a trip that didn’t in the end come off). ‘Aldous astounds me – his energy, his modernity. Is it that he can’t see anything that has to see so much?’8 Huxley at this stage had been given what his friend, Robert Nichols, called a ‘queer pair’9 of glasses which Huxley called ‘my white poppies’. They had ‘a sort of pebbly lens in the centre surrounded by a sort of silver shield’.