Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The Huxleys had ‘an interesting time’14 in Germany in May, having enjoyed an unusual occasion in Belgium beforehand. They had been invited by the King and Queen of the Belgians (Maria’s uncle, George Baltus, having been the go-between) to lunch at the Royal Palace. Huxley bought himself a pair of white kid gloves and the affair proved pleasant and intimate though King Albert I displayed ‘a very thorough, rather ponderous mind, grinding exceeding small and rather slowly’.15 What is more the Palace was ‘mouldy in its splendour: actually moths flew out of the sofas when one sat down!’ Huxley was delighted by the absurdity of the court etiquette such as talking in the third person ‘which is distinctly cramping to conversation when one isn’t used to it’. The royal couple made it easy for the visually-impaired Aldous (who would normally have been required to walk out of the room backwards as etiquette demanded) by themselves taking their leave first. The Huxleys joined Raymond Mortimer in Belgium and went on with him to Germany. They met Sybille Bedford, who felt that Huxley looked on Germany at this tense time ‘with a kind of aloof voyeurism’.16 On a previous visit to Berlin he had visited, out of curiosity, a sleazy night club and had allowed himself, out of politeness, to be steered briefly around the dance floor by a young man.

  On his return, Huxley started to write his play, Now More Than Ever, which did not receive its first performance until 27 June 1994 during a special Huxley centenary symposium at the University of Munster. The play was published in 2000, edited with an introduction by the leading British Huxley scholar, David Bradshaw, and James Sexton. As the editors demonstrate, this is an important play, that exhibits Huxley’s growing political awareness and ‘ethical gravitas’17 – although, overburdened as it is by too much exposition, it is not a compelling piece of theatre. Ominously, Huxley told Leon Lion: ‘There will be a good deal of talk.’18 The play was sparked by the suicide in Paris in March 1932 of ‘The Match King’, the Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger, who turned out to have been a massive fraud in spite of his ostensible record of philanthropy – a sort of 1930s Robert Maxwell. Kreuger would be the model of Graham Greene’s Erik Krogh in England Made Me (1935) and Huxley saw in the story a way of indicting capitalist greed and chicanery by ‘linking the story up with general economic ideas’19 No London theatre would do the play but the following June Huxley was revising it for a possible New York production and again in 1934 his hopes were revived in London but all came to nothing and he abandoned it for good. The play was finished by the end of the summer of 1932 when Huxley told Ottoline that Maria was ‘indefatigably typing’ it up. ‘I hope it will attract a few more people than the last one, which made less money than any play since the Agamemnon of Aeschylus.’20 He told Mary it was ‘on the theme of Kreuger and Hatry [a British City fraudster imprisoned in January 1930] – a financier who is ambitious to rationalize industry and is led by his excellent intention into gigantic fraud … let’s hope it may make a bit of money.’21

  In between his literary projects, Huxley was rereading – War and Peace, an eternal favourite of his – and painting: ‘It’s so nice to practise an art in which all the problems are internal to the art and where one doesn’t have to bother about what goes on in the world at large [a view with which the painter of Guernica, for example, might want to quibble]. But the more I paint, the more I resent the laziness of modern painters. Why don’t they take the trouble to do those large elaborate compositions that the old men did? … The moderns seem to me to be inexcusably cheating and shirking difficulties.’22 He was also arranging for Matthew to enter Dartington School. He told his father that Matthew had the Nys family’s ‘natural gift for living’ but not his own love of abstract thinking: ‘He is just the opposite of me; for he knows how to deal with people, but not with abstract ideas: whereas I know how to deal with abstract ideas but not with people.’23 The autumn saw the publication of two new books where Huxley’s role was more that of an editor than a writer. He was glad to get both off his hands: ‘We have had a rather crowded summer – always people in the house: which is, au fond, a mistake, even if they’re nice. At last, however, we’re alone.’24 The two books were The Letters of D.H. Lawrence and Texts and Pretexts.

  Huxley’s introduction to this selection of Lawrence’s letters represents his final attempt to establish an objective view of his fellow writer. On the positive side he declared: ‘Lawrence was always inescapably an artist’ who was ‘in a real sense possessed by his creative genius’. He added: ‘It is impossible to write about Lawrence except as an artist.’ When Virginia Woolf read this she protested to her diary: ‘And why does Aldous say he was an “artist”? Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves … whereas L. would only say what proved something.’25 Huxley identified Lawrence’s ‘special and characteristic gift’ as being ‘an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called “unknown modes of being”’. He could never forget ‘the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind’. Huxley told of how he had failed to convince Lawrence of the importance of science, begging him to look at the evidence. Lawrence would reply: ‘“Evidence doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t feel it here.” And he pressed his two hands on his solar plexus.’ Huxley also conceded that Lawrence had ‘an extremely acute intelligence’ as well as being a man of genius. But, unlike Huxley, ‘Lawrence refused to know abstractly. He preferred to live.’ This made him ‘a kind of mystical materialist’. Some of Huxley’s comments seem a shade autobiographical: ‘His travels were a flight and a search … He was at once too English and too intensely an artist to stay at home.’ Huxley, having pointed to those areas where Lawrence and he could not agree, concluded: ‘To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness … For an inhabitant of the safe metropolis of thought and feeling it was a most exciting experience.’ In the end what makes this essay so impressive – and moving in the most dignified way – is both the acute insight into another way of thinking and feeling and the generosity of a tribute being paid by a writer of prodigious talent to a writer of genius.

  In October the Huxleys took a brief motoring trip to Italy and met Alberto Moravia at Forte. Rereading Tolstoy on Napoleon made him realise the truth about Mussolini and ‘all that stupid unreal rhetoric of fascism’.26 On his return to Sanary Huxley began a new novel – the book that would cause him the most anguish and difficulty, Eyeless in Gaza. Writing to his new American publisher, Eugene Saxton of Harper’s, he seemed to have an intuition of its difficulty even before he had begun to write. He even offered to suspend payments until he was in the right mood: ‘for I know by bitter experience that I can’t force myself to write anything that isn’t ripe’.27 He carried on reading – Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, and Henry Green’s Living – ‘A really very good rendering of that for us bourgeois, most mysterious phenomenon, the mind of the factory worker.’28 Texts and Pretexts appeared in November. It was a sort of anthology raisonné, interspersing excerpts with commentaries. His introduction headed off the criticism that to produce such an anthology of mostly poetic texts ‘in mid-slump’ was mere fiddling while Rome burned by saying, characteristically that: ‘Perhaps Rome would not now be burning if the Romans had taken a more intelligent interest in their fiddling … They also serve who only bother their heads about art.’ The texts are well chosen and the commentaries intelligent and worldly-wise. The Introduction sums up Huxley’s belief that this world is the best one that we have and that we had better proceed on the basis of that realisation: ‘Personally, I must confess, I am more interested in what the world is now than in what it will be, or what it might be, if improbable conditions were fulfilled.’ He groups together in fact a series of aphoristic statements about himself: ‘I prefer being sober to even the rosiest and most agreeable intoxication … I like things to be said with precision and as concisely as possible … Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him … Meanwhile, one must be content to
go on piping up for reason and realism and a certain decency.’ This is, if one will, the seventeenth century side of Huxley, the lover of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, reason tinged with wisdom, intelligent and unillusioned, hopeful but sanguine, decent but not expecting too much in the way of revelations about changes in human nature or society. In truth, however, he was heading towards a personal crisis through which this gentle optimism would be tested to the limit.

  1 Michel Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires, (1998), p194. Author’s translation

  2 The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988), ed R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. P546. Letter to Margaret Chanler, 25 March 1932

  3 See Manfred Flugge, Exil en Paradis: artistes et ecrivains sur la Riviera (1933–1945) (1996; French edition, Paris, 1999)

  4 HRC, letter to Ottoline Morrell, 7 May 1931

  5 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 3 February 1932

  6 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 19 March 1932

  7 James Lansdale Hodson, No Phantoms Here (1932), p258

  8 L.357

  9 L.314

  10 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 19 March 1932

  11 Ibid

  12 T. H. Huxley As A Man Of Letters (1932), p1

  13 ‘Notes by the Way’, Time and Tide 7 May 1932. Hidden Huxley, p117

  14 L.360

  15 L.360

  16 SB1.255

  17 David Bradshaw and James Sexton (editors) Now More Than Ever (2000) University of Texas Press, Austin. The editors, unlike the present author, perceive a ‘hard-line elitist ideology’ and a ‘superior contempt for the masses’ in Huxley’s earlier work from which the play, in their judgement, appears to mark a retreat

  18 Ibid. pxvi, citing Letter to Leon Lion, 27 August 1932

  19 HRC, Letter to Ralph Pinker, 24 July 1932

  20 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 13 October 1932

  21 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 14 October 1932

  22 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 September 1932

  23 L.361

  24 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 September 1932

  25 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, 13 October 1932

  26 L.363

  27 L.366

  28 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 3 November 1932

  XXII

  Mexico

  At the start of 1933, the Huxleys set off on a five month trip to the West Indies, Guatemala and Mexico. It was their first long trip since 1925–26 and it would issue, of course, in a book, Beyond The Mexique Bay (1934). For Huxley the travel book, like the novel, was the continuation of the essay by other means. The relaxed, discursive, inclusive form of modern English travel-writing suited him. They left at the end of January on the Britannic, a West Indian cruise liner, but their plan was to leave the ship at Kingston, Jamaica. The sight of middle-aged English people determined to ‘have a good time’ on the ship filled him with amused horror. There was an entertainment ‘commissar’ who organised a ‘Children’s Party for Grown-Ups’ for what Huxley termed ‘as representative a collection of the elderly haute bourgeoisie as you could hope to find’. What these childish elders hoped to find, it seemed, was a sort of‘quaint Peter-Panishness’. From Kingston he wrote to Sydney Schiff: ‘The horror is unimaginable. Hundreds of retired colonels, spinsters and widows with incomes, enriched Lancashire business men (including, on our cruise, several bookmakers, who drank nothing but champagne), interspersed incongruously with very bien people, who keep themselves from the rest.’1 The Duchess of Northumberland and her two daughters kept apart ‘as though they were Brahmins in a crowd of untouchables’ and the infantilism of the elderly people who ‘dress up, bloodcurdlingly, as schoolboys and babies’ made Huxley exclaim: ‘How depressing our compatriots can be!’ But the indigenous population – whom Huxley described, uncomfortably to the modern sensibility, as ‘the blackamoors’ gave him ‘en masse a sense of hopelessness, tho’ individually and in moments of excitement they are sometimes more cheering – e. g. when we heard them singing topical songs of their own composition at Trinidad’. In Beyond the Mexique Bay, Huxley describes a very striking personal epiphany where this clever facetiousness, which was never far from the surface in his travel writing, is eclipsed by a moment of real transformation. He went into a shop in Speightstown, Barbados and passed through to a back room ‘lit by a dim oil lamp’ where ‘a very old negress’ was cleaning flying-fish and beside her ‘an incredibly beautiful, pale brown girl was sitting beside her, sewing’. The door behind them was open to the sea. ‘There was nothing specially curious or remarkable about the scene; but for some reason it held, and in my memory still holds for me a quality of extraordinary alienness and unfamiliarity, of being immeasurably remote … And the girl, so beautiful, with her face shining in the lamplight, as though it were illumined from within, the old negress … seemed, of another universe.’2 Such moments of openness to the rich and strange are all too rare in Huxley’s travel writing. Too seldom is he transformed by ‘alien’ sightings that break in on the composed and ordered landscape of witty and knowing commentary.

  The Huxleys passed on through Trinidad, Caracas, Belize (‘a place that is definitely the end of the world’3), Quirigua, where they stayed with a Scottish doctor called MacPhail (a surname that would be used later in Island ) who ran the United Fruit Company Hospital, and from which base they explored the Maya ruins. The Maya culture set Huxley thinking about cultural and racial differences. He concluded that theories of racial superiority such as those now prevalent in fascist Europe were nonsense and the idea of racial purity a chimera. ‘Considered genetically,’ wrote the author of Brave New World, ‘any given population is a vast roulette table.’ Next they travelled to Guatemala City, which made him think that Central America was a kind of laboratory in which to study politics. He predicted the rise of ‘nationalistic state-socialism’, heralding his growing realisation that militaristic nationalism was the principal political disorder of the times. This ‘philosophy of hate and division’ rooted itself in certain psychological needs, which perhaps a ‘World Psychological Conference’ should be constituted to address. He was not particularly sanguine about the prospects of an intelligent citizenry appearing to challenge these trends: ‘Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.’ These were the people who would swallow the thoughts of the ‘mob-leaders’, Hitler and Mussolini. The journey went on to Antigua, Lake Aitlan, Chichicastenango (where the historical accounts of brutality reminded him of ‘the beating, kicking, shooting, starving of Jews and Communists in Germany’), Oaxaca, and Mexico City. Ottoline Morrell received a very brief postcard from Mexico: ‘Very strange and sinister country, and dark, savage people. Can’t share Lawrence’s enthusiasm.’4

  In Mexico the Huxleys met a coffee planter called Roy Fenton who entertained them and took them on mules between Pochutla and the Oaxaca road in southern Mexico. Sybille Bedford reports an incident told to her by Roy Fenton, but omitted from Huxley’s account, of an occasion at Ejutla where a drunk nearly pulled a revolver on Huxley. It was the sort of incident that one might expect a writer to treat as good ‘material’ but he never explained why he omitted it.5 The coffee plantations disturbed Huxley: ‘Our afternoon tea and our after-dinner coffee depend on the existence of a huge reserve of sweated coloured labour. An unpleasant thought.’ Mexico City also sparked thoughts of Lawrence. Huxley rejected his notion that ‘the advance from primitivism to civilization’ could be in any degree reversed. He confessed that he had once thought ‘that it was possible to make very nearly the best of both worlds. But this, I believe, was a delusion.’ By May, the Huxleys were travelling to New York (unaware that Leonard Huxley had died suddenly on 3 May) where they dined with H.L. Mencken in the second week of May. New York was expensive and they couldn’t stay long, having now learned of Leonard Huxley’s death. On the SS Statendam sailing back to Europe Huxley wrote to Eugene Saxton. He admitted to him that he probably had ‘an entirely erroneous view’ about fiction.
‘For I feel about fiction as Nurse Cavell felt about patriotism: that it is not enough. Whereas the “born story teller” obviously feels that it is enough.’6 Huxley was always disarmingly frank about his shortcomings as a novelist.