Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  On 19 February Huxley made his first trip down a coal mine, at Willington in the Durham coalfield, where Charles Wilson, the man who had first invited him to lecture to his working men on ‘Science and Poetry’ on 10 October 1930, had been a miner. The mine visit is referred to in another magazine article, ‘Sight-Seeing in Alien Englands’ in which Huxley explores further his ideas about the dehumanising nature of modern factory work and its robbing of ordinary people of creativity. These would feed into the writing of Brave New World. Although the scientist and the modernist in him was fascinated by the extraordinary phenomenon of a factory like ICI’s chemical plant at Billingham (‘Looked at aesthetically, a well-organised factory is a work of art – a poem of which the technicians and administrators are the joint authors’10) he was also at war with Henry Ford whom he blamed for ‘creation-saving devices’ and mechanistic work. ‘For the work performed by the overwhelming majority of my fellows seems to me so dreary, so utterly boring, that I feel ashamed, in their presence, for my freedom from it.’ He attacked Ford for propounding the idea that mechanisation left the mind free to think of other things. ‘One is left wondering whether, after all, the work which keeps the mind occupied is not better, humanly speaking, than the work which leaves it free.’ In the following issue of the magazine, he returned to the theme of the apparent perfection of modern manufacturing process but its underlying human deficit. A price had been paid, he felt, for Fordist production. His piece was called ‘The Victory of Art Over Humanity’ and it argued that ‘Our leisures are now as highly mechanised as our labours; the notion that men can recover, as consumers, what they have lost as producers, is quite illusory.’11 But he went further than merely identifying the problem. He wanted a solution and the solution was, once again, a plan. ‘The art of co-ordinating the separate arts has got to be first invented, then imposed by some strong and intelligent central authority.’ Such sentiments have incurred disapproval from Huxley’s critics. His call for action by ‘a rejuvenated government, equipped with the necessary institutional weapons, and capable of acting swiftly and with a well-informed and intelligent ruthlessness’ sounds rather like the rhetoric that was flying around this time from the lips of Oswald Mosley. Huxley had met Mosley in Paris in February, and, according to Robert Nichols: ‘Aldous seemed to dislike him and distrust him but said he was very much alive.’12 Huxley’s article goes on to describe a visit to the London docks where he found an example of the intelligent planning he was advocating in the shape of the Port of London Authority. A less sinister form of coercion than the tread of jackboots, one might feel. The upshot of all these social explorations was that when Huxley returned to Sanary to write his utopian novel the sights and sounds and smells of modern industrial society in a depression were fully in his consciousness.

  On 30 March, Huxley’s play, The World of Light opened at the Royalty Theatre, produced by Leon Lion. Once again there were problems with the censor – this time with Enid’s line: ‘Oh, I admit you still quite like going to bed with me.’ Reading the neatly typed playscript today in the British Library and noting the sparing blue pencil marks of the Lord Chamberlain – occurring against phrases such as ‘Oh God!’ and ‘Christ!’ or against a line when a character, wishing to illustrate a point about social hierarchy, says: ‘I mean you wouldn’t mind going to the W.C. with a dog in the room’ – one can only smile at the contrast between 1931 and 2002. In this case Huxley stood firm and the Lord Chamberlain backed off. The author was, however, ‘nearly mad with the infection of Lion’s fantastic nervosity’.13 Huxley was forced to work with the prevailing conventions of the West End stage, which desired a well-made play with a middle-class setting, and this is what he delivered on the surface. It makes use of spiritualism, whose popularity in the working class areas of the Midlands and North Huxley had noted on his recent travels. The dialogue is witty and sharply intelligent and the drama unfolds neatly enough but the public did not take to it and it closed after a very short run. Huxley’s dream of a smash hit would have to be deferred. The critics had been enthusiastic – which led Virginia Woolf to think he had finally made it. ‘He bids fair to be the great man in succession to Arnold Bennett,’14 she told Quentin Bell, but Huxley himself was more realistic: ‘the public remains conspicuous by its absence’.15 He had not been well in February and had gone back to Sanary for three weeks before the opening of the play. The Huxleys were staying at Dalmeny Court, Duke Street, St James. He returned there on 19 March, via Paris, where Maria remained briefly. As soon as they were able, they returned to Sanary where they were soon up to their eyes in distemper from the painters who were now at work.

  On 7 May Huxley wrote to Sydney Schiff, giving the first hint of his new project: ‘I write away at a novel of the future – Wells’ Utopia realized, and the absolute horror of it, a revolt against it. Amusing but difficult, as I want to make a comprehensible picture of a psychology based on quite different first principles from ours.’16 A few days later he told another correspondent that the task was proving, ‘Very difficult. I have hardly enough imagination to deal with such a subject. But it is nonetheless interesting work.’17 Interesting work was coming thick and fast. He accepted an offer to deliver the Thomas Huxley Lecture and was approached by the American publisher, George Doran, to produce a series of weekly articles for syndication by the Hearst newspapers in the USA ‘which would provide … a very comfortable income’18 at $100 a piece. Huxley told his syndication agent, Pinker, that ‘It seems good money for not much work, and of a kind that might be rather interesting.’ The Hearst Essays, which were only recently published in a collection, appeared from around September 1931 to April 1935 and would have been seen in papers such as The Chicago Herald and Examiner, The New York American and The San Francisco Examiner. These were the sorts of pieces that Huxley could throw off in his sleep and they added comfortably to his income. He had just had a royalty statement from Chatto which indicated that his last year’s income just from English sales had been over £2000. The two previous years it had hovered around £1200 to 1300.

  The new book of poems, Cicadas, appeared in May, and was to be Huxley’s last. He always regretted this, but posterity has never thought of him as a poet, in spite of the beauty of much of the writing in this volume (which incorporated much of Arabia Felix from 1929). The closing passage of ‘Lines’ for example are particularly beautiful: ‘Sometimes in winter/Sea-birds follow the plough,/And the bare field is all alive with wings,/With their white wings and unafraid alightings, /Sometimes in winter. And will they come again?’ It seemed, alas, that the unafraid alightings of poetic inspiration would not come again. The push from Brave New World was driving him on. At the end of May he told Julian he had been overwhelmed by ‘a literary catastrophe – the discovery that all I’ve been writing during the last month won’t do and that I must re-write in quite another way. This throws me right back in my work.’19 He was meant to be delivering by the autumn and was anxious, but needlessly so, because from late June when he told Mary ‘It advances slowly – and the future becomes more appalling with every chapter’20 he arrived at the 24 August with the announcement to his father that he had ‘got rid of’ it. He described it as ‘a comic, or at least satirical, novel about the Future, showing the appallingness (at any rate by our standards) of Utopia and admumbrating the effects on thought and feeling of such quite possible biological inventions as the production of children in bottles (with consequent abolition of the family and all the Freudian “complexes” for which family relationships are responsible) the prolongation of youth, the devising of some harmless but effective substitute for alcohol, cocaine, opium etc. and also the effects of such sociological reforms as Pavlovian conditioning of all children from birth and before birth, universal peace, security and stability.’21 Reporting progress to Chatto in the middle of August, he told Prentice: ‘I’ve not yet decided what to call it. But that will come.’22 No sooner had he finished than he was planning some travel essays built on the model of ‘
Abroad in England’ in which the ‘sociological element’ would play a role, and proposing an anthology with commentaries that would become Texts and Pretexts (1932). Chatto were pleased with the novel and Huxley told Prentice: ‘I think it goes with a sufficient swing; at the same time has enough pseudo-scientific detail to make it convincing.’23 Huxley had been told by Bertrand Russell that he was writing a non-fiction book which would make very similar predictions to his. Huxley suggested to Chatto that the appearance of both books together might be reinforcing.

  For relaxation, Huxley had been taking up his oil paints again at Sanary. He had also been reading Maine de Biran’s Journal Intime, abut which he would write an essay. He had been disgusted by John Middleton Murry’s ‘vindictive hagiography’24 of Lawrence but his own comments on his former friend, based on editing the letters and thinking about him again, were increasingly mixed. He found his passionate style claustrophobic after a time and his manner ‘oppressively visceral … One longs for the open air of intellectual abstraction and pure spirituality’.25 The outside world continued to intrude and the fall of sterling with its consequences for cheap living on the Cote d’Azur continued to worry the Huxleys, who abandoned a planned trip to the United States. In October they returned to London where they would spend the rest of the year. The slump made Huxley feel that he should be in London to see the crisis through. He felt that H.G. Wells was perhaps right ‘in supposing that, given a little intelligence now, the world cd really be made quite decent’.26 The twists and turns in Huxley’s intellectual respect for Wells are indeed hard to keep up with.

  His autumn publication was the collection of essays, Music at Night, a collection which contained Vulgarity in Literature published as a pamphlet the previous November. It was another rich collection and its themes reflect Huxley’s intellectual and spiritual journey towards engagement. In an essay on ‘Art and the Obvious’ he regretted the tendency of modernist art to recoil from popular culture, disgusted by its sentimentality and cheapness. But the badness of commercial mass culture was due to its being ‘made for the people, but not – and this is the modern tragedy – by the people’. This meant that the high art was impoverished as a result of cutting itself off from ‘the great obvious truths’ of ordinary existence: ‘By pretending that certain things are not there, which in fact are there, much of the most accomplished modern art is condemning itself to incompleteness, to sterility, to premature decrepitude and death.’ This was Huxley’s farewell to the avant-garde. Though perhaps he should have looked again at Ulysses. In the title essay he argued that ‘The substance of a work of art is inseparable from its form,’ and that ‘The limits of criticism are very quickly reached.’ He did not foresee a time when criticism would so far transcend any sense of those limits as to appear on occasions to rival literature itself and to deprecate its particular claims. In the essay ‘To the Puritan All Things Are Impure’, Huxley introduced for the first time ‘what I may call Fordism, or the philosophy of industrialism’. He had referred to mass production and the writings of Henry Ford several times before but this was the first time he had used it as the name of a philosophy. In his forthcoming novel it would be the new world religion. ‘Rigorously practised for a few generations, this dreadful religion of the machine will end by destroying the human race,’ he predicted. The collection also includes the essay ‘Foreheads Villainous Low’ in which he discusses what today is often called ‘dumbing-down’, the phenomenon of ‘intelligent and cultured people doing their best to feign stupidity’, a process which has only gathered pace since the essay was written. Again anticipating Brave New World, he notes: ‘In the modern industrial state highbrows, being poor consumers, are bad citizens.’ In the final essay, ‘Vulgarity in Literature’, Huxley announces his mature aesthetic credo: ‘Other things being equal, the work of art which in its own way “says” more about the universe will be better than the work of art which says less.’

  Huxley spent the last months of 1931 in London and stayed over into the New Year in order to give two talks on the BBC, one of which was a dialogue with Gerald Heard, whom he first met in 1929. Heard is now a largely forgotten figure – living perhaps only in the autobiographical novels of Christopher Isherwood (who is said to have captured him most successfully in the character of Augustus Par in Down There on a Visit). But in the 1930s Heard enjoyed a high reputation as a prodigiously energetic polymath, writer, broadcaster and man of ideas, a natural companion for Huxley – though the latter’s reputation has wholly eclipsed the former. In his life of E.M. Forster, P.N. Furbank noted: ‘Strangers thought of him, nervously, as a sort of Wellsian supermind or a “man of the future”.’27 Christopher Isherwood describes Heard at this time in Christopher and His Kind (1977): ‘Gerald Heard was then a prominent figure in the British intellectual world. He knew most of the leading scientists and philosophers personally and he gave BBC radio talks explaining the latest findings of science in popular language. He was interested, agnostically, in the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research but wasn’t prepared to say that he had found definite evidence of survival after death. He had written several books on evolution and pre-history and one which was called: Narcissus: an Anatomy of Clothes.’ Heard’s own dress was ‘slyly exotic’ and he was ‘a slim cleanshaven man in his early forties, with a melodious faintly Irish accent … He was witty, playful, flattering, talkative as a magpie, well-informed as an encyclopaedia, and, at the same time, life-weary, meditative, deeply concerned, and in earnest.’28 In an interview in 1985, Isherwood said of Heard: ‘If you couldn’t get hold of Bernard Shaw, perhaps he was the next best thing … the most fascinating person I’ve ever met … He was a very beautiful man to look at … the beauty of his voice.’29 Heard had an enormous amount in common with Huxley, with the exception of his homosexuality. As Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy remarked of Huxley: ‘I certainly don’t think he had a queer bone in his body.’30 Huxley had many homosexual friends but always spoke negatively about male, though not female, homosexuality. He shared the Bloomsbury habit of referring cheerfully (and without intended insult) to homosexual friends as ‘the buggers’.31 Huxley himself said of Heard: ‘Gerald Heard is that rare being – a learned man who makes his mental home in the vacant spaces between the pigeon-holes … At a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to see anything but the trees, he helps us to become aware of the all-embracing wood.’32

  Huxley and Heard were very close in the 1930s and after they both went to America. Unfortunately any correspondence between them has been lost or destroyed. A key relationship in Huxley’s life and intellectual development is thus doomed to be gravely underestimated by biographers. On 9 January 1932 Huxley and Heard took part in a BBC radio programme titled ‘Is Cruelty Out of Date?’ in which Heard took the role more or less of interlocutor. They were discussing the persistence of violence in the modern world and the broadcast is notable for a remark by Huxley about the future for the use of force: ‘It will be out of date the moment our rulers are educated enough to apply the results of modern psychology to their business of governing. The trouble with politicians is that they are always fifty years behind the times.’33 In a solo BBC talk the following week, Huxley expanded on this theme in a talk on ‘Science and Civilisation’. Acknowledging that the world was living through a period of crisis, Huxley blamed the misuse of science but rejected a Tolstoyan or Ghandian back to nature movement: ‘The only cure for science is more science not less.’34 But science, he insisted, must be applied by humanists if it was to be applied wisely. He made reference to the abuses of propaganda by governments and noted the ‘systematic mass suggestion by wireless and poster’ that had just been used by the Empire Marketing Board in its ‘Buy British’ campaign in its attempt to sell the idea of ‘Englishness’ abroad for marketing purposes. He noted the difference between the humanist ideal of the ‘perfect all-round human being’ and that of the ‘economist-ruler’ whose ideal was ‘the perfect mass-producer and mass-consumer�
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  This talk referred to eugenics as ‘an instrument for giving to an ever-widening circle of men and women those heritable qualities of mind and body which are, by his highest standards, the most desirable’. Huxley the previous week had lunched with P. J. Blacker of the Eugenics Society and was to flirt briefly with a scientific notion that his brother Julian would adopt as a lifelong belief. Brave New World – in which all these ideas would feature – was about to be published. The Huxleys left the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street the next day for Sanary. Matthew wrote a thank you letter to Ottoline Morrell in which he announced: ‘Coccola is packing HARD.’35