Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The third moral snapshot is from Alexander Henderson’s book on Huxley (the first full-length study, approved, and published by, Chatto). Henderson pointed out that Huxley had now been writing for nineteen years and had already produced twenty-five books. Librarians were still ready to ban his books in some places and the stock attitude of reviewers was to label Huxley ‘Intellectual – slightly unpleasant’. Henderson felt that Huxley’s post war cynicism and attacks on idealism were ‘over-compensating’ but concluded that: ‘The foundation of Huxley’s materialism is a natural idealism.’28 All three views of Huxley agree that here was a brilliant writer who had made his mark but of whom something more was expected. He was being summoned to act as the moral conscience of his generation but before he could do that he would have to resolve his own inner conflicts, to balance his intellectual powers with his moral and imaginative vision of contemporary life. The next twelve months or so, from the middle of 1934 to the end of 1935 when he embraced the pacifist cause, constituted one of the most difficult passages in his life. But he would emerge stronger, more clear-sighted, less self-conscious and more committed than ever before. Just before leaving Sanary to spend the last three months of 1934 in London he gave Mary a hint of what was going on in his thoughts:

  I am more and more struck by the hopelessly primitive and uneducated state of our minds – utterly ignorant of all rational techniques for encouraging such essential states as concentration on the one hand and ‘decentration’ – relaxed quiescence – on the other … It’s a dismal story of wasted talents and unrealised potentialities; and I come more and more firmly to believe that the most important task before human beings is the perfection of a series of psychological techniques for the proper exploitation of personality. All this famous ‘planning’ in the social and economic sphere will be wasted and useless if we remain barbarously unplanned as individuals – at the mercy of the social forces we have created … we have been content to drivel along with our current educational systems, most of which neglect all the essential things and leave their victims for all intents and purposes quite untrained.29

  This was Huxley’s personal manifesto for the next year or more. He left Sanary for the time being, the memory fresh of meetings with Paul Valéry, who talked of the poets of his youth (Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Huysmans). He also bade farewell to the summer migrants to the coast who were still capable of exciting his satirical and self-mocking impulses: ‘It’s sad that all the things one believes in – such as democracy, economic equality etc – shd turn out in practice to be so repulsively unpleasant – hot, smelly crowds; banana skins; building estates like skin eruptions on the landscape; loud speakers and gramophones every ten yards; roads made nightmarish with rushing traffic.’ But would winter in ‘Pudding Island’ for the next six months be an improvement?

  1 BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 12 March 1933

  2 Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934), p13

  3 L.367

  4 HRC, Postcard to Ottoline Morrell, 10 April 1933

  5 SB1.272–3

  6 L.371

  7 L.371

  8 HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 31 August 1933

  9 L.373

  10 National Library of Wales, Letter to J Glyn Roberts, 19 July 1933

  11 HRC, Letter from Gerald Heard to Ottoline Morrell, 17 December 1932

  12 UCLA, Letter to Eugene Saxton, 4 August 1933

  13 L.375

  14 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 5 August 1933

  15 L.375

  16 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 24 October 1933

  17 HRC, Postcard to Mary Hutchinson, 6 November 1933

  18 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, undated but probably December 1933

  19 Wellcome Trust, Eugenics Society papers, Letter to C.P. Blacker, 1 December 1933

  20 Wellcome Trust, Letter from C.P. Blacker to Huxley, 4 December 1933

  21 Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, April 1934. Hidden Huxley, pp147–58

  22 L.376

  23 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 25 February 1934

  24 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 19 May 1934

  25 L.380

  26 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4 pp222–23. 18 June 1934

  27 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene (1935), p458

  28 Alexander Henderson, Aldous Huxley (1935)

  29 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 18 August 1934

  XXIII

  Albany

  On arrival in London in October 1934 the Huxleys took lodgings at 18 St Alban’s Place, SW1: ‘a studio flat – 2 bedrooms, large studio, kitchen and bath – within 50 yards of Piccadilly Circus, at £5 a week – altogether a miracle. It is very quiet and I manage to do a certain amount of work and even some painting in the afternoons.’1 ‘We propose to be here in London till after Christmas,’2 he told Mencken (another auditor of praise for Pareto who had just been translated – ‘Such a monument of common sense’). Huxley liked above all, Pareto’s realism, and disliked, by contrast, the fashionable poses of the young thirties poets. Virginia Woolf noted down his terms of dismissal of Macspaunday: ‘A. can’t stand Auden. Nothing but a demagogue. Declaims: takes in the young. Something in Day Lewis – hasn’t read Spender.’3 Huxley’s fondness for massive works of sociology coexisted with a growing interest in personal development. He had read Geraldine Coster’s new book on Yoga and Western Psychology and told Julian that yoga might be the way forward because: ‘I’ve always felt that it was vitally necessary for people to have some efficient technique for personal development.’4 Without achieving full mental and spiritual development people couldn’t benefit from improved social and political arrangements. And, preoccupied as he was with Eyeless, Huxley was not blind to other people’s misfortunes. His friend J.W.N. Sullivan had just entered the first stages of an incurable paralysis and was having difficulty in meeting his contract with the Viking Press. Huxley immediately offered cash help and wrote to some other writers, including Wells, asking them each to stump up £200. This was a characteristic gesture by Huxley. Whatever his personal circumstances, he always found himself able to help out a range of people – relatives and friends – who were in difficulty.

  On 12 November, Huxley surprised himself by announcing to Mary: ‘We have taken – for seven years! – a flat in The Albany. Very nice, with central heating, parquet floors, and lots of room. A very decisive step!’5 Huxley’s astonishment was justified. Restless as he was – and what about Sanary, lying empty for the winter? – such a commitment to the future seemed a little inconsistent with his footloose record. They would keep the flat for barely two years. The Albany is a very exclusive residential building off Piccadilly with a literary reputation generated by past tenants, real (Byron) and imaginary (Raffles the gentleman thief). Names like Terence Stamp and Bruce Chatwin have continued its twentieth century allure. The Huxleys furnished it cheaply with second-hand furniture and began to receive a stream of guests, including Ottoline Morrell whose visit was marked by an accident in which she scattered a string of pearls on the floor when the string broke. It was an elegant address, though not entirely convenient, with a kitchen in the basement and a servant room in the attic, which they later enabled Sybille Bedford to live in.

  It was at this address, E2 Albany, that Huxley first began to suffer from the insomnia that would rack him on and off for the next year – a symptom of his inner stress and unease. They moved in to the flat in mid-December. In January, after Christmas in the country, Huxley went back to France to collect material for some articles he had agreed to write for Paris-Soir on the theme of La France au seuil de 1935. He managed to get out of this commitment in the end, telling E.M. Forster, ‘not having sufficient effrontery to pour out my opinions on a subject of which, the more I look into it, the less I find I know’.6 He shared with Forster a gloom about the world as it was on the threshold of 1935: ‘and add to it a considerable gloom about myself: Bertie Russell, whom I’ve just been lunching
with, says one oughtn’t to mind about the superficial things like ideas, manners, politics, even wars – that the really important things, conditioned by scientific technique, go steadily on & up (like the eternal feminine, I suppose) in a straight, un-undulating trajectory. It’s nice to think so; but meanwhile there the superficial undulations are, as one lives superficially, & who knows if that straight trajectory isn’t aiming directly for some fantastic denial of humanity?’ The following month the personal anxiety returned, in spite of the breathing-exercises which Gerald Heard had recommended for him. ‘I’ve been far from well, suffering from sleeplessness which is just about to drive me away from London and the country to another climate,’ he told R.A. Scott James. ‘This has kept me in a state of incapacity to do most of the things I ought to have done.’7 He had just been to see John Gielgud in Hamlet which he thought was ‘the work of art with the greatest amount of substance ever put into words’. In his present impasse, however, this made him ask ‘why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be – and what one’s own writing is not’.8

  Huxley was in touch at this time with Strachey’s friend, Sebastian Sprott, now a lecturer at Nottingham University. He told Sprott that he felt he should really visit the east Midlands again ‘to hear a little about that other England of which we here in London have really no inkling’.9 Huxley was aware that Piccadilly was not the place to know England in the Depression. His insomnia, however, had become so bad that his doctor recommended a drastic change of climate such as the mountains near Grenoble and he put off the trip to see Sprott. In March he put up in the Hotel des Grandes Rousses at Huez in the French alps – a rather ‘god-forsaken little place … However I console myself with the thought that it must be good for me, and take enormous walks on snow-shoes, conscientiously, as one might drink the waters at Vichy’.10 From there he went to Sanary where the Huxleys spent March until October. By early April he was able to report to Harold Raymond at Chatto that he was gradually sleeping better and had started working again ‘under about half steam & progress slowly with the book’.11 At the start of May Maria announced that ‘he is cured, definitely cured … work goes well’.12 He dashed off an article in May for the Daily Express to mark the Silver Jubilee of George V in which he made some predictions for the next twenty-five years. Huxley was generally a good prophet and his prediction of a ‘generation war’ as a result of a rapidly ageing population in the later twentieth century was one of the more interesting. He also expressed the hope that ‘Europe is spared the war which its Governments seem quite determined to make inevitable’.13

  The rise of Hitler and the apparent threat of war was increasingly galvanising Huxley’s thinking. He addressed an International Writer’s Congress in Paris on 21 June to warn about the dangers of propaganda and was disappointed that it appeared to be a Communist front event. Later, during his residence in the United States, the FBI would regularly dredge up his attendance at this event to bolster their thin case against his putatively subversive potential. Earlier in the month he had attended a London rally at Olympia addressed by Sir Oswald Mosley, now the leader of the British Union of Fascists and surrounded by his Blackshirt thugs. Twelve thousand people filled the hall. Sitting with Naomi Mitchison and other friends, Huxley saw the brutal handling of protesters.14 In a pamphlet published to record the event, Huxley was one of many who described what they saw. Mosley’s stewards – many of whom wore knuckle-dusters concealed under bandages or gloves – would pounce on any hecklers and attack them viciously. Mosley would stop speaking and searchlights would theatrically sweep onto the victims. The opposition, however, was equally active. On 16 October 1934, Canon Dick Sheppard had written a letter to the press asking members of the public to pledge their support for peace. Eighty thousand people returned postcards making their pledges in the first year. By the beginning of 1937 numbers in ‘Dick Sheppard’s Army’ had swelled to 130,000. The first sacks of mail in October 1934 contained a postcard from Huxley, then living at 18 St Alban’s Place. A rally at the Albert Hall took place in June 1935 and Huxley would eventually write the Peace Pledge Union’s first official pamphlet. But at Sanary in the early summer of 1935 he was more preoccupied with his own health and sanity. With a mixture of apprehension and amusement, Maria watched as he implemented a new plan, to take violent exercise for the sake of his health: ‘he digs every spare inch of the ground and causes havoc all round him to the despair of the gardener’.15 He was also taking a mixture of calcium and magnesium as a sedative and mild hypnotic for the continuing ‘beastly insomnia’.16 The novel seemed back on course and he was having discussions with the American writer Ted McKnight Kauffer, who had first met him at Sanary in 1931, about writing some short film scripts on the theme of ‘Dreams’ for Alexander Korda. He also hoped that Korda might take an interest in Brave New World.

  Meanwhile Huxley’s charitable instincts had been awakened by the predicament of a young woman friend, a partly-Jewish German whose passport was coming up for renewal and who was naturally fearful of being repatriated. He wrote to Sprott to ask if he knew of any ‘impecunious Englishman’ who would marry her as a purely financial transaction so that she could stay in England. ‘The solution, it seems to me, consists in finding someone combining impecuniosity, honesty and homosexuality.’17 He pointed out that Auden had just married Erika Mann on the same grounds. He wrote to Naomi Mitchison at the same time – with the result that a clutch of potential husbands now presented themselves. ‘It is reassuring to know that husbands are in such good supply and at so reasonable a price,’18 he told Sprott. The wedding took place on 15 November at the Westminster registry office, with Huxley as principal witness. There was a party at the Albany afterwards. ‘Party for the German they’ve married to a postman [actually a doorman at a gentleman’s club in Westminster] – for £50,’19 Virginia Woolf noted in her diary. She had been one of the guests, with Robert Nichols and Naomi Mitchison.

  In November, Huxley lunched for the first time with Dick Sheppard. Afterwards he felt that he been rather garrulous and glib in his talk of organising the peace movement. ‘When one has been endowed with that curious thing, the gift of the gab, one is sadly tempted to make use of it for elegantly expressing ideas which one knows as ideas and not by experience.’20 He told Sheppard that it was ‘frankly comic’ that such an egghead as he should be telling a man like Sheppard how to proceed and that it was only by laughing at himself that he could ‘take the edge off my shame. Thinking, reading, talking & writing has been my opium & alcohol, & I am trying to get off them on to listening & doing.’ Huxley was making the painful transition from closeted thinker to activist. He was a quick learner and became a very important member of the PPU, and one not without an understanding of the tactics of campaigning. His first public appearance as a peace campaigner was at a lunchtime talk at Friend’s House in Euston Road – a stone’s throw from the Bloomsbury salons he knew so well. On 3 December he came to the rostrum to ‘set forth some of the intellectual justifications for pacifism … and … discuss what I may call some of the indispensable philosophical conditions of pacifism. ’ He introduced his familiar argument about ends and means and declared: ‘There is nothing inherently absurd about the idea that the world which we ourselves have so largely constructed can also, if we so desire, be reconstructed on other and better lines.’ This is a marked change from the intellectual pessimism of the 1920s and early 1930s. What is most significant about this talk, however, is that in it Huxley explicitly brings in a spiritual or religious dimension. He urged that ‘the doctrine of the essential spiritual unity of man’ be taken seriously. He claimed that humanism ‘has as its principal end-product the religion of nationalism’, which was part of the problem not the solution. ‘There is left the belief in a spiritual reality to which all men have access and in which they are united. Such a belief is the best metaphysical environment for pacifism.’21

  There was little doubt that for Huxley his adoption of the pacifist cause was not a mere in
tellectual interest. It was a spiritual discovery. He was undergoing a ‘conversion’22 that would end the mental and physical anguish of the past year. The hard line political activists of the Left were contemptuous. After Eyeless in Gaza was published the following summer, Stephen Spender would write to Christopher Isherwood to express anxiety that the religious Auden could be seduced by this approach: ‘He has some ideas now but they are all wrong; a sort of half-religious, mystical pacifism. I do hope that Wystan doesn’t fall for it.’23 In a letter to Robert Nichols, telling him about ‘the novel that won’t get finished’, Huxley expressed his anxieties about the coming conflict: ‘I wish I could see any remedy for the horrors of human beings except religion or could see any religion that we could all believe in.’24 Two months later, after returning to Albany from Belgium where Maria’s youngest sister, Rose, had been married he was telling Victoria Ocampo that he had been talking to Gerald Heard about ways and means of getting an adequate peace movement on its feet. ‘The thing finally resolves itself into a religious problem – an uncomfortable fact which one must be prepared to face and which I have come during the last year to find it easier to face.’25 For a Huxley, the idea of religious belief was a hard one to swallow, but (while the religion of brass eagle and beeswax would for ever be outside his scope) he was beginning his inexorable journey towards the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ whose expositor he would become in the next decade.