Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  1 L.346

  2 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, p283. Letter to Clive Bell, 28 January 1931

  3 L.346

  4 ‘Greater and Lesser London’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, October 1931. Hidden Huxley, pp87–95

  5 Sewell Stokes, Hear The Lions Roar (1931) pp203–14

  6 Evelyn Waugh, ‘Youth at the Helm and Pleasure at the Prow: Antic Hay’ in The London Magazine 2 (8), 1955: ‘A Critical Symposium on Aldous Huxley’

  7 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, pp11–12. 17 February 1931

  8 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, p293. 21 February 1931

  9 SB1.249 citing a letter from Robert Nicholls to SB

  10 ‘Sight Seeing in Alien England’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, June 1931. Hidden Huxley, pp65–76

  11 ‘The Victory of Art Over Humanity’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, July 1931. Hidden Huxley, pp77–86

  12 Quoted by David Bradshaw in ‘Huxley’s Slump’, The Art of Literary Biography, p154. Letter from Robert Nichols to Henry Head, 8 February 1931

  13 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 20 March 1931

  14 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, p309. Letter to Quentin Bell 11 April 1931

  15 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 7 May 1931

  16 Ibid

  17 L.348

  18 HRC, Letter from George Doran, 1 June 1931. See Aldous Huxley’s Hearst Essays (1994) edited by James Sexton

  19 L.349

  20 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 21 June 1931

  21 L.351

  22 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 4 August 1931

  23 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 7 September 1931

  24 L.352

  25 L.353

  26 L.356

  27 P. N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life (1978), vol 2, p136

  28 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1977), pp81–2

  29 HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview with David King Dunaway, 2 June 1985

  30 HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview with David King Dunaway, 18 September 1989

  31 SB, in conversation with the author

  32 UCLA, Heard Collection, Box 36

  33 ‘Is Cruelty Out of Date?’ published in The Listener 20 January 1932 and reprinted in Hidden Huxley pp96–104

  34 ‘Science and Civilisation’, BBC, 13 January 1932, Listener 20 January 1932, Hidden Huxley, pp105–114

  35 HRC, Letter from Matthew Huxley to Ottoline Morrell, 13 January 1932

  XXI

  Fordism

  Brave New World is Huxley’s most famous book and the one with which his name is always coupled. When college syllabi and newspaper lists of the best or most highly regarded books of the twentieth century are drawn up, it will always find a place. Such fame can be double-edged. A classic has its downside: it deflects attention from other works and makes a writer seem like a one-book name – preposterous in Huxley’s case given his fifty or so books, eleven of them novels. The title – Miranda’s words in Shakespeare’s Tempest on first seeing human specimens of the outside world – was inspired and has become the stuff of journalistic cliché. Yet classics are often doomed to be misunderstood. The extraordinary prescience of Huxley’s satire – he forecast not only human embryo research but a range of things, great and small (Virtual Reality, the turning of country walks into a branch of ‘the leisure industry’, the television running perpetually in the corner of the geriatric ward). Yet this was much more than a ‘nightmare vision’ of babies in bottles. It was the product of all those ideas examined above about science and human freedom, culture and democracy, the manipulation of the citizen by mass media and modern consumer capitalism. We have become accustomed now to the central imaginative concept of its opening pages – the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre of the World State. As I write, geneticists are predicting that parents could soon be able to choose the genetic features of their babies as one might mix up a bespoke shade of paint from a Dulux machine in a decorating shop.

  The book, however, is less often acknowledged to be a critique of modern consumerism, of the way that human freedom evaporates in the world of ‘Fordism’. In a foreword to a reprint of the novel in 1946, Huxley was at pains to point out that – in contrast to the usual Utopian novel’s visions of a violent repressive state the tyranny of the future would come from the existence of ‘a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude’. The compliant consumers of 2001, loyally obeying brand diktats, against a background in which the politics of radical protest are increasingly neutered or abandoned, would strike a contemporary Huxley as a grim vindication. When Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 he sent a copy to Huxley who replied that he had enjoyed it but believed his book was better prophecy: the making docile of the population by advertising and brainwashing – ensuring that people ‘loved their servitude’ – rather than the boot smashing down on the face (which was Orwell’s image of violent state repression) being more plausible as a picture of the future, at least in late twentieth century Europe.

  Huxley’s novel was written deliberately to warn against contemporary trends but also against the whole notion of Utopia itself, the idea that one could design a perfect blueprint and then impose it. The book was a bad Utopia, a dystopia, or cacotopia. Needless to say it was not always taken in that spirit. It was said to have been popular with American college students in the 1950s because of its picture of apparently unlimited and guiltless sexual freedom – secured by the ‘Malthusian belt’, a forerunner of the Pill. Even today, there are readers who take it in this way. The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, in his 1998 novel, Les Particules élémentaires, says that the world of the novel ‘is in fact the precise world which we are trying to attain’.1 One of the book’s first readers, Edith Wharton, however, immediately understood what its author was saying: ‘It is a masterpiece of tragic indictment of our ghastly age of Fordian culture … He wrote to me that I had “put the case” already in Twilight Sleep and I own that I was much set up by his recognition of the fact!’2 Huxley himself, revisiting the book in 1946, his own political outlook having changed, regretted that it was the product of an ‘amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete’ who struck a pose of not caring whether the Savage – who like the modern intellectual dissenter carries the germ of hope for a better way – could choose only between two alternatives: ‘an insane life in Utopia or the life of a primitive in an Indian village’. The later Huxley was not content with such a negative insouciance and was now a believer in finding solutions. His later vision was of a world organised around the principles of classic anarchism – small decentralised communities living in harmony around the beliefs of Kropotkinian mutual aid. Perhaps it is to the benefit of this novel that it was not so ‘positive’ – as his last ‘good Utopian’ novel, Island (1961), would be. If one is to write a convincingly repellent picture of what to avoid a little bleakness and despair and angry cynicism goes further than warm affirmation. The 1946 Huxley, who believed in ‘sanity’ predicted that the essential task for modern rulers – making us love our servitude – would be done through ‘a greatly improved technique of suggestion’ (infant conditioning and drugs); ‘a fully developed science of human differences’ (ensuring rigid hierarchies that pre-empted the frictions of dissent); ‘a substitute for alcohol and other narcotics’; and a ‘foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product’. That system, in the novel, had been ‘pushed to fantastic, though not perhaps impossible extremes’. Huxley’s conclusion was that in 1932 he had projected his nightmare six hundred years into the future but: ‘Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century.’

  The Utopian or ‘science fiction’ novel (Brave New World has elements of both) does not need to be convincing in the manner of the realistic novel but its internal logic needs to convince. Huxley manages to create and sustain a scientifically credible scenario (reviewing the book in the Daily Telegraph Rebecca West wanted
him to go further and supply footnotes explaining his scientific sources) as well as injecting his own personal vision. The artificial manufacture of babies, outside the context of family life, enables easier state control of the breeding process, including the ‘hypnopaedia’ or brainwashing of the young. Like Orwell’s ‘proles’, there are ‘Deltas’ here who are too insignificant to be worth manipulating and who therefore attain a degree of animal freedom. Consumer capitalism – which makes itself into a religion that reverences ‘Our Ford’ and ‘the sign of the T’ – is wittily portrayed, as is the idea that the business world has no patience with private pursuits that bring it no profit: ‘we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus’. This is not even any longer a joke: it is present day reality. The propagandist rhymes that the citizens sing are reminiscent of mindless advertising jingles and, freed from the terrible curse of the ‘pre-moderns’ – feeling strongly – they live an anodyne life underpinned by the dulling drug soma. There is a great deal of humour in the book, as in the reference to ‘the great British Museum massacre’ and the ‘college of Emotional Engineering’ in Fleet Street, given as examples of the mindlessness of the culture that has been created. It is perhaps significant that the Savage – the most interesting character because he embodies the spirit of defiance, pointing to a way out – chooses a volume of Shakespeare with which to answer this cultural emptiness and its devaluation of solitude and reflection. The comment of the Controller Mond (the name incidentally of a prominent industrialist, Sir Alfred Mond of ICI) that ‘you’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art’, taken with John the Savage’s addiction to Shakespeare, has been taken by some critics as evidence of Huxley’s cultural arrogance. The assumption appears to be that in allowing that ‘ordinary people’ might appreciate the benefits of intellectual freedom and the free play of the imagination as opposed to narcotic forgetfulness and mindless obedience, Huxley was being an insufferable ‘elitist’. It is a most peculiar argument but one frequently advanced in all seriousness. The book ends with John claiming ‘the right to be unhappy’ rather than to enjoy a drug induced love of servitude. In his hermitage he practises a kind of orgy of atonement, Christ-like in the wilderness, mortifying his flesh, and then, in the closing pages of the book, he hangs himself in despair.

  In so far as Huxley himself is present in this book, his sense, perhaps, of impotence in the face of the suffering and economic deprivation he had witnessed at first hand throughout 1930 and 1931 when writing the book, comes through in the fate of John. Later, he would be a man with answers, solutions. That intriguing feature of the World State – its apparent readiness to allow islands of dissent rather than subjecting everyone to thought control – the latter generally considered to be an essential feature of all authoritarian systems – could also be an expression of Huxley’s own sense at this time that the life of the intellectual was otiose in a world that seemed to have no use for the thinker or the life of the mind.

  When Brave New World was published in February 1932, Huxley was in Sanary, painting, reading, and working on a new play, Now More Than Ever, (never performed in his lifetime and for many years after his death thought to be lost), the anthology, Texts and Pretexts, the introduction to the letters of Lawrence, and, as if this wasn’t enough, rereading his grandfather’s works in preparation for giving the T.H. Huxley lecture. The coast at this time was filling up with German-Jewish exiles. The Provençal coast at Sanary had long been attractive to writers and artists but the migration from Germany with the rise of Nazism greatly augmented the process. In his book on the subject, Exile in Paradise (1996), Manfred Flügge lists some of the literary and artistic visitors to the Huxleys’ villa: the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, the painter Moshe Kisling and his wife Renée, the American writer William Seabrook, whose Villa des Roseaux was almost opposite the Huxleys, Sybille von Schoenebeck, the American writer and artist Eva Herrmann, the psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff, and the French writers Drieu La Rochelle and Paul Valéry. The Huxleys had preceded the rise of the German colony (though the first Anglo-Saxon arrivals had been Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry as early as 1915, then Lawrence and Frieda in 1928, and Roy Campbell in the same year). From around 1933 the coast became ‘Montparnasse-sur-Mer’ as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other leading German writers arrived.3 Huxley was in two minds about this emigration. It would provide him with the stimulating company he needed but at the same time he disliked an exclusively literary milieu. The previous spring, when the migration was only just starting and he was trying to write Brave New World, he had complained to Ottoline Morrell: ‘Swarms of literary Germans infest the countryside like locusts.’4

  In February Huxley learned of the death of Lytton Strachey and wrote to console Mary Hutchinson: ‘How sad, sad, sad it all is; and with such a peculiar pointlessness and meaninglessness, when looked at from without.’5 Little over a month later he was writing to her again about the ensuing suicide of Carrington, of whom Huxley had been much fonder than of Strachey, and whose death he found very ‘distressing’. Old memories of Garsington stirred: ‘Her death seems to close such a lot of chapters: she was in some queer way, as one now realizes, a symbolical figure, the paradigm of a whole epoch in the life of a whole generation. I hardly ever saw her during these last ten years – but she was none the less representative for me, and her death is none the less the destruction of something important. It was a touchingly heroic act of devotion.’6 Huxley was now thirty-seven, that epoch of sleeping out on the Garsington roofs in the summer nights, talking about poetry and art into the small hours, well behind him. He was an acknowledged and successful man of letters, sought out in his French retreat by other successful practitioners. We have a verbal snapshot of him around this time by James Lansdale Hodson: ‘Aldous Huxley is so tall – six feet four inches – and slender that he bends when walking; he has a mop of blackish brown hair, a keen, sensitive face and horn-rims with curved lenses. He preserves at thirty-seven something of the Oxford undergraduate’s appearance – suede leather shoes, negligent collar, protruding soft cuffs … He talks well, leaping from topic to topic, changing his chair and his attitudes also at the same time … he types everything, tries to do one thousand words a day, and writes poetry only when he must.’7 To Flora Strousse – that odd correspondent whom he never met but to whom he was often so disarmingly frank about himself – he wrote: ‘I share with you a fear of the responsibilities of relationships – have only one that really counts at all, with my wife – nothing else that commits me in any serious way. It’s awful to be committed – but at the same time, if one isn’t one gets very little in return: and if one is, and the other party doesn’t feel committed … The endless possibilities of misery and the few of happiness!’8 But new social relationships were being formed at Sanary all the time. Charles, the Vicomte de Noailles, a neighbour, and Edith Wharton were frequently seen and Bronislaw Malinowski (whose Sexual Life of Savages, Huxleys thought, should be mirrored by a Sexual Life of Gentlemen and Ladies9) turned up nearby.

  Tired out by his literary labours, Huxley took a brief holiday at Cannes (taking in on this trip a visit to an amateur performance in French of his play The World of Light). At Cannes he met H.G. Wells, of whose dislike of Brave New World he was already aware. His respect for Wells was in a downward cycle again, not least because the latter started to disparage Lawrence. It was back to the Bloomsbury view of Wells as a vulgar little man of the lower orders: ‘Wells, if he is a great man, is great in so far as he is a perfect specimen of the canaille magnified ten thousand times: so bottomlessly vulgar and insensitive, without the smallest power of discrimination either in the moral or the aesthetic sphere: an âme mal née and therefore, in spite of his immense ability, profoundly uninteresting … He is as incapable of feeling and appreciating the unique quality of Lawrence as a dog of appreciating music.’10

  Notwithstanding this devastating – and snobbish – put-do
wn, Huxley was having his own difficulties with Lawrence. All the old misgivings were bubbling up to the surface as he wrestled with the Introduction to the letters. He was having a little more success with his lecture on his grandfather, which was delivered in May.

  In spite of his distaste for the English gerontocratic rulers he had observed in Parliament, Huxley was beginning to rediscover an admiration for the eminent Victorians. He told Mary that his grandfather was ‘a very remarkable man’ who had impressed him more and more on rereading. ‘And he had that heroic larger-than-life quality which belonged to the really eminent Victorians and which seems to have disappeared completely in the present age.’11 The lecture, ‘T.H. Huxley As A Man of Letters’, defended his grandfather against the view put by G.K. Chesterton that he was more interesting as a writer than as a scientist. Huxley insisted: ‘He was a man of science first of all … who also had … a literary gift.’12 He argued that Huxley was still a living force and had ‘that persistent contemporaneity that is the quality of all good art’. He analysed his prose rhythms and praised his ‘astonishingly lucid’ way of writing but conceded that one of the major defects of nineteenth century literature was ‘its inordinate literariness, its habit of verbal dressing-up and playing stylistic charades’. It was Huxley Senior’s ‘passion for veracity’ that saved him from the excess of this vice. Huxley was finding time to contribute to Time and Tide magazine, in a series called ‘Notes by the Way’ which reflected themes in the fiction. In May he discussed the major theme of Brave New World – the way in which modern rulers kept power by thought manipulation: ‘The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century will be an advertising man; his Prince, a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time.’13 They showed that – although he professed to read no newspapers at Sanary (except, it seems, the French socialist daily L’Oeuvre) – he was fully aware of current developments such as the progress of the Slump and the splitting of the atom in Cambridge. The trip to London to deliver the Huxley Lecture had also enabled a trip to Belgium and one to Germany with Raymond Mortimer. But first he had to sort out his literary affairs. Brave New World was doing well in England – selling 13,000 copies in the first year – but not so well in the USA where its jaundiced view of the materialist Utopia would be less welcome. Huxley’s Doubleday contract was running out and, after a flurry of contractual letters and bids, he agreed to move to Harper’s with a three-year contract involving payment of $7000 a year. He was influenced in his desire to move to Harper’s by the presence there of an old friend from the mid-1920s at Doran’s, Eugene Saxton. Back in England his next three-year contract with Chatto was renewed more or less automatically, with the annual payment rising from £1000 to £1250. He was now earning a good living (over £2000 in UK royalties alone in the year ending 31 March 1932).