Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Back in Sanary in July, Maria wrote to their recent host, Roy Fenton, to say that La Gorguette was to be ‘our permanent address and en plus – I hope it will be our address for a long time’.7 The Husdeys’ health was not good and the occasionally arduous journey – that mule ride, for instance – had worn them out. Huxley was trying the famous Hay diet, the first of many such ventures into areas that some would find faddish but which he would undertake in his usual spirit of wanting to try something new. His publishers were slow at first to show enthusiasm for his travel book – so much so that he abandoned it briefly to work on the new novel – but they warmed to it during the summer and he delivered the manuscript in November. He told Ottoline Morrell that it was ‘a book of travels – which is really a book about everything.’8 A peculiarly apt description of Huxley’s approach to writing. But if he thought that Sanary was a place of escape, he was wrong. The ominous signs of coming cataclysm in Europe were beginning to show themselves. He compared Wordsworth’s account of his visit to France during the Revolution with Europe in 1933 – ‘the awful sense of invisible vermin of hate, envy, anger crawling about looking for blood to suck’.9 Central America had persuaded Huxley that psychological factors such as hate were more powerful factors than economic ones. ‘In CA there were no economics, only evil passions.’ In his sunny retreat, Huxley was harbouring some very dark thoughts. A young Welsh writer, J. Glyn Roberts, asked him to endorse his new book, I Take This City (1933), and Huxley agreed to praise its ‘uncompromisingness and violence’. 10 He told Roberts: ‘About 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid and philistine (tho’ in different ways) as the great masses of the English. The important thing, it seems to me, is not to attack the 99.5% – except for exercise – but to try to see that the 0.5% survive, keeps its quality up to the highest possible level and, if possible, dominates the rest.’ Like a contemporary intellectual berating the Sun or the Daily Mail, Huxley blamed tabloid journalists like Hannen Swaffer and James Douglas for fostering this ‘imbecility’. The word ‘dominate’ here is plainly a hostage to fortune. Yet those who met Huxley at this time – such as Roy Fenton – found him patient and generous. Gerald Heard told Ottoline Morrell: ‘One of the reasons why one is so fond of Aldous is because he is so gentle with cruder people like oneself. No doubt he suffers just as much but his suffering does not make him wild.’11

  One thing that nearly made Huxley wild was the steady influx of incomers throughout the summer. In August, he complained to Eugene Saxton: ‘Sanary swarms with German literary exiles, from Thomas Mann downwards. The place fairly stinks of literature – which is rather distressing.’12 He told Julian that these exiles were ‘Rather a dismal crew, already showing the disastrous effects of exile.’13 Maria was less tolerant of the German Jewish exiles: ‘They are mostly so ugly.’14 Their closest friends now seemed to be William and Marjorie Seabrook who were very friendly ‘when sober’. Huxley, as has been noted above, was both aware of the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, and in the habit of using rather questionable or pejorative terms to describe them. He characterised the German exiles to Julian as ‘a rich selection of Jews’ at about the same time as he was writing in the Chicago Herald and Examiner of 19 August 1933 on ‘Apocalypse’ and pointing out how persistent was the spirit of intolerance: ‘In Hitler’s Germany the Jews are being treated as though they belonged to some species of lower animals.’ Huxley was generally sceptical of the idea of progress – in the arts and in the remaking of humanity – but in this piece, whilst conceding that progress in realising humanist ideals was slow, he concluded: ‘But this does not mean that such hopes are without value. They impel the hopers to do work which, though apparently doomed to failure in the present, may bear good fruit at some future time.’ A more pessimistic summer visitor was Gerald Heard ‘advising us all to clear out to some safe spot in South America or the Pacific islands before it is too late’.15 Edward Sackville-West made his first visit to Sanary this summer.

  The summer sequestration in Sanary was briefly broken by a trip to Paris. Huxley went to take part in a conference of intellectuals discussing the future of the European spirit and was bored beyond belief by ‘the professors’. He told Mary: ‘One has no idea, until one attends a congress of “intellectual co-operation”, how bottomlessly stupid learned men can be. Like dogs.’16 He had not intended to speak but sat up one night to prepare a discours, which he fired off the next day–‘to the horror and dismay of the professors, who were really pained to hear something that actually meant something’. The only consolation in this event was meeting Julian Benda – ‘whom I liked very much’. He complained to Mary that the economic crisis was making the pound fifty per cent less effective in purchasing power with the result that they were having to economise on labour by moving the dining-room next to the kitchen and installing butane gas geysers to heat the water. In November they went off on a tour of Spain where they visited Madrid and Toledo and Barcelona. They looked up the Roy Campbells, who were living in poverty. They had been unable, Roy told Aldous, to buy a book for three years. This was their third Spanish journey and once again they were thrilled by the El Grecos. ‘What a pity painters have ceased to believe in God,’ he wrote to Mary on a postcard from Toledo showing El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin: ‘They’ll never paint this sort of thing again until they become croyant and pratiquant.’17 Huxley was painting furiously again but the results were not always to Maria’s taste. ‘Sometimes I hide them,’18 she confessed to Mary, whom she had asked to go and see the revival of The World of Light at the Playhouse in London where it had opened on 4 December for a three week run. ‘Tell us frankly how that wretch Lion has dealt with it.’ Rehearsals had apparently been scant and Huxley used a cold he had caught in Spain as an excuse not to come to the opening night. It was no more successful this time than on the previous occasion.

  In January 1934, Huxley resumed his tussle with the novel that would become Eyeless in Gaza. But he had not severed his link with journalism. Nash’s Magazine asked him to write a piece on eugenics ‘particularly the sterilization of the unfit‘19 as he explained to C. P. Blacker, General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, when he wrote in December, asking for a briefing on the history of the progress of the bill for the legalisation of sterilisation. Blacker replied that the Bill had in fact been rejected by the Commons in June 1931, mainly because of Labour opposition. ‘The adoption of a drastic eugenic policy by the Nazis had had the effect of still further antagonizing persons of Labour persuasion against eugenics,’20 Blacker told Huxley. The piece appeared in April, headed, ‘What is Happening to Our Population?’ The article claimed that mental deficiency was on the increase, owing in part to the fact that infant mortality was in decline and thus: ‘An environmental change for the better has resulted, among other things, in a hereditary change for the worse.’21 Huxley saw that ‘half-wits’ were on the increase and said the only remedy was in: ‘encouraging the normal and super-normal members of the population to have larger families and in preventing the sub-normal from having any families at all’. He advocated – as the Galton Institute does today – use of the family allowance system to encourage some groups and not others to bear children. But he went further in proposing sterilisation of ‘certified defectives’, pointing out that eugenic sterilisation was already legal in half the states of America. He dismissed the objections of theologians and ‘mystical democrats’. The latter he agreed were on strong ground in suggesting that this was ‘just another attempt on the part of the rich to bully the poor; that it is an excuse invented by the ruling class for evading its responsibilities towards people it has itself condemned to a life of degradation’. He agreed that such an argument was ‘commendable’ but he still insisted that it was unscientific because democracy needed intelligent citizens to make its onward march irresistible: ‘Half-wits fairly ask for dictators.’ He also believed that, on humanitarian grounds, ‘defectives’ made poor parents and were responsible for many acts of cruelty
according to the NSPCC. At this point Huxley swerves aside from the eugenic point and moves on to consider the increase in population generally and whether it has reached an optimum level: it may have done so but the need to control it has to be confronted. The piece ends rather flatly on that note. The argument is put with clarity and logic but those who find the notion of eugenics odious are unlikely to be convinced by it. One might add that Huxley’s ‘scientific’ predictions have not been borne out. There is no evidence, seventy years on, that there are more ‘half-wits’ in the population than in 1933.

  Huxley in his precocious youth enjoying the hospitality at Garsington and making his acquaintance with the leading writers of the day, such as T.S. Eliot, seen here with his first wife, Vivienne.

  Huxley’s Garsington circle around 1916: Maria Nys who would soon become his wife; Dora Carrington (the model for Mary Bracegirdle in Crome Yellow); Katharine Mansfield; Lytton Strachey who described Huxley as “a piece of seaweed”.

  Maria Huxley shortly after her marriage to Aldous in 1919; the Hampstead flat where she and Aldous spent the first months of married life.

  Nancy Cunard, the model for Myra Viveash in Antic Hay, by whom Huxley was dazzled in the twenties and Edith Sitwell who, with her brother Osbert, remained lifelong friends.

  The Huxleys as a young family in the 1920s, Aldous, Maria and their son, Matthew. Firstly on the beach at Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany and secondly in London.

  Cecil Beaton’s image of the brilliant iconoclast of the 1920s tearing aside the veil of bourgeois respectability.

  Huxley and D.H. Lawrence, a complex and surprising relationship of two very different sensibilities.

  Mary Hutchinson, writer, socialite, lover of Clive Bell, intimate of both Aldous and Maria Huxley in the 1920s.

  Huxley houses ar Suresnes in Paris ( 1928–30) and the Villa Huxley at La Gorguette, Sanary-sur-Mer (1930–37) where the legendary red Bugatti was first acquired.

  Huxley in 1936 signing copies of Eyeless in Gaza and with his friend and mentor in the Peace Movement, Gerald Heard, in 1937 at Black Mountain College, North Carolina at the start of a lecture tour which turned into permanent residence in the USA.

  ‘Let us hope we shall not have to scuttle when Mosley gets into power,’ he had written in 1933. Mosley was the model for Webley and his Greenshirts in Point Counter Point.

  The cabin in the woods at Wrightwood, California, where the Huxleys lived in the second half of the 1940s.

  Huxley at around this period.

  Huxley’s small intimate circle of Hollywood friends included Harpo Marx, the Stravinskys, Edwin Hubble the astronomer and the novelist Anita Loos. The circle also included Isherwood, Garbo, Chaplin, Paulette Goddard and others.

  Eileen Garrett, the medium whose parapsychology conference Huxley first attended in 1954 when his reputation as an intellectual explorer without boundaries was established.

  A late picture of Maria not long before her death in 1955.

  Huxley not long after his marriage to Laura Archera Huxley in 1956; Mrs Huxley today at her home in Hollywood.

  Huxley at his typewriter in Hollywood, 1958, the established and well-coutured Englishman at the height of his fame.

  Huxley the intellectual and Californian sage in expressive and attentive moods.

  Huxley at the end of his life already suffering from terminal cancer with his brother, Sir Julian Huxley, at his home in Hampstead.

  And in his prime as a hopeful visionary.

  What is odd in this piece is the contrast between Huxley’s cold logic and his evident humanitarian sympathies, his fundamentally progressive orientation, in addressing other social and political issues. It is true that he was exasperated by the stupidity of the ‘99.5%’ in tabloid-fed public opinion. But nowhere else in his writing up to this point is there anything other than an occasional intellectual arrogance or snobbishly superior remark of a kind that one might expect from one of his background. Very shortly, Huxley was to discover political commitment of a kind that would banish any worries about his democratic credentials. The whole episode demonstrates the limitations of the intellectual’s fondness for an abstraction that has cut loose from its moorings in common humanity and common sense. And as has been copiously demonstrated in recent studies, he was not alone amongst the ‘progressive’ thinkers of his time in playing with this concept. And, finally, he had just published an article for Time and Tide on ‘The Prospects of Fascism in England’ whose argument is both acute (recognising the Poujadist roots of petit bourgeois support for reactionary politics) and exemplary in its rejection of ideas which were by no means being met with antipathy in many parts of English upper-class society at the time.

  Abstraction was also the starting point of his new novel. ‘The theme, fundamentally is liberty,’ he told Julian. ‘What happens to someone who becomes really very free.’22 His description of the embryo novel to Mary Hutchinson makes it sound like a treatise by the Italian sociologist Pareto whose ideas he was buttonholing just about all of his friends and readers with at this time: ‘I dodder along with my book, rather exasperated because I can’t quite get the formal relations between parts that I’m looking for, but advancing little by little. I am looking for a device to present two epochs of life simultaneously so as to show their relations with one another – and also their lack of relationship. For when one considers life one is equally struck by both facts …’23 Mary, too, was treated to Huxley’s passion for Pareto, though while praising its scientific ‘unmetaphysical’ account of human affairs he admitted it was ‘the most depressing book in the world’. He had first read the Sociologica in 1924 and was now going through it again, noting how true to the facts it was: ‘Partly because of the events, which have punctured all the post-war hopes of lands-fit-for-heroes and reconstruction; and partly, doubtless, because one is creeping into middle age and is less easily distracted by one’s appetites, which have grown feebler, and by one’s passions, which seem such a bore – all but the consuming desire for knowledge and understanding. That grows.’ If he did not have to earn his living, and if his eyes could stand it, he would wish to do nothing for the next few years but read ‘and in the intervals travel round, pushing my nose into things’.

  In fact, Huxley was not doing a great deal at all in the lovely, abundant spring of 1934 at Sanary, by his own account: ‘Such flowers and greenery I never saw here. I have been doing little – lying rather fallow, as I don’t seem to be able to get what I want in my projected novel: reading a fair amount.’24 He thought little of one new book, T.S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934). ‘I never knew a writer who spent so much time explaining what he didn’t mean to say and then at last saying so little. The way he makes generalizations and then slips away without giving examples is incredible … And then the serene way he ignores history.’ A lethal exposure of Eliot’s hallowed method that would still be considered controversial today. In April the Huxleys visited Italy, partly to have a last look at Rome before Mussolini destroyed it with his triumphalist fascist architecture. He complained to Eliot that ‘the strutting of the fascists, the cringing hypocritical acceptance of fascism by the masses were most depressing’.25 In June, Huxley slipped across to London where he attended a conference of the Society for Sexual Information and Progress at Welwyn Garden City where sexual reform was being discussed. He visited Virginia Woolf at Rodmell and she found him, at the age of forty, mellower than ever before. ‘A most admirable, cool, antiseptic, distempered, but humane & gentle man: with age just tempering his brow: experience; but admirably mature, as we are not; has gone about the world, completely sceptical, all the more humane; judging everything yet nothing. A little theoretical, about religion & sex; not for that reason a novelist; infinitely elegant and bony: his blurred grey eye; his malice & wit … He uses every instant to the best advantage but has somehow solved the problem of remaining just, gentle, – a very sympathetic mind.’26

  Two other sketches of Huxley belong
to this mid-point of his adult life. The first is by Frank Swinnerton, the man credited with ‘discovering’ him for Chatto: ‘He is the tallest English author I know … Naturally this great height has given some of those who encountered him the impression that he lives remote from the world, wrapped in distant hauteur. That is not the case … the truth is that Huxley converses easily, and is full of gleeful high spirits. He uses long words because he thinks in long words; and not because he is aware they are long words. The words he uses most often in conversation (or at least in narrative) are “fantastic” and “incredible” … He has a happy knack of meeting odd people and seeing odd sights; and while this does not mean that he is himself odd it does mean that he is prepared for every oddity.’27 Swinnerton decided that after Brave New World (he did not yet know what was to come) Huxley had reached a dead end – ‘something has gone wrong, it seems to me, with the Huxley alignment’. He risked a prophecy: ‘there is a single mind, which is Aldous Huxley, busily transforming multiplicity into unity and so into wisdom. He has a greater capacity for wisdom than any encyclopaedia-stuffed man of this era; and may yet lead his generation, and the younger generation, into a state of grace out of which great things will come.’