Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  As well as this re-making of himself as a quasi-religious believer in pacifism (his early writings about peace stress the need for a reformation of the individual life as much as they talk about questions of power and military policy), Huxley was also attending to his physical disposition. The torment of the year 1935 (which Maria would refer to later as ‘l’année horrible’) was the result of several difficulties (and of the conviction that they were all related to each other). There was a sense of indistinct purpose – the need for someone who had been so destructively cynical to find a positive commitment. ‘He suddenly felt he must develop. Negative cynicism was not enough.’26 There were profound aesthetic problems, trying to make the new novel work. He had a writer’s block that was starting to raise financial anxieties. What if his writing career was finished? What would he then do? In that gloomy, old-fashioned building, the Albany – where the sound of his typewriter raised anxieties on the part of management that someone might be sullying the dignity of the place by engaging in ‘trade’ – he sank deeper into depression. And, finally, there were physical problems. Huxley was often in bad health throughout his life but this was something different. He had already, under the influence of Gerald Heard, begun to practice breathing-exercises and various kinds of mental discipline, in order to defeat his insomnia.27 It was bad enough not being able to see properly but he felt his whole physical deportment was wrong. He was in the grip of a feeling of utter physical and artistic dysfunction.

  Intellectually and spiritually, however, the peace movement was starting to show him a way out of the impasse. Physically, a saviour appeared in the shape of EM. Alexander, the therapist and inventor of the Alexander technique. Huxley started to have daily sessions with him from November 1935 in which his whole posture, physical movement, performance of simple daily actions, was subject to a process of ‘kinesthetic’ re-education. Huxley later wrote an introduction to a selection of Alexander’s writings, in which he claimed Alexander had discovered empirically ‘that there is a correct or “natural” relationship between the neck and the trunk and that normal functioning of the total organism cannot take place except when the neck and trunk are in the right relationship’.28 What attracted Huxley to this technique – apart from the fact that it seemed, for him, to work – was the way it highlighted the relationship between body and mind, that old combat which had always preoccupied him. By focussing on ‘the data of organic reality’ to the exclusion of ‘the insane life of phantasy’ it made it possible for ‘the physical organism to function as it ought to function, thus improving the general state of physical and mental health’. It had certain affinities with the ‘straight-spine’ position of yoga and so successful did Huxley consider it that Maria also put herself through the process. Alexander in turn put the Huxleys on to Dr J.E.R. McDonagh, whose theory was that intoxication of the intestines was at the root of most disorders. They duly submitted to colonic irrigation, vaccine injections, and special diet. By early 1936 Huxley was able to report victory over insomnia, fatigue (he could now work for eight hours instead of four), normal blood pressure, the vanishing of psychosomatic symptoms and of two patches of eczema that he had had for years, better skin colour, and the disappearance of chronic nasal catarrh.29

  Huxley returned to The Albany – to a work room that Sybille Bedford described as a ‘goldfish bowl’ and one that she thought added to his discomfort30 – and began to write those sections of Eyeless in Gaza that dealt with the moral rebirth of Anthony Beavis. Huxley, particularly during his Californian years, would from time to time acquire the reputation of one who was a little too prone to take seriously the claims of quackery but there is little doubt that this therapy worked for him. Around this time the Huxleys started to introduce to their friends the therapist and author of The Human Hand, Dr Charlotte Wolff, whom they had met in Paris, and who had now established herself across the road at Dalmeny Court. At an evening at the Woolfs, Lotte started to read palms. Leonard Woolf was disgusted by this ‘humbug’ but Clive Bell told him that this was not the proper scientific spirit.31

  Summing up the past year, Maria wrote in a new year letter to her sister Jeanne (she addressed her sometimes as ‘Janin’ or ‘Jokes’, in these letters written in French and now in the Royal Library at Brussels, the latter being a Flemish diminutive) that she hoped sincerely that 1936 would be ‘as different from the last as possible. I don’t think anyone could grasp how dreadful the last year has been for me’.32 She reported that the novel was coming to an end and that somehow she had great hopes for it. Aldous’s health was ‘good but not brilliant’ but he was working hard and was ‘calm and peaceful’. They were leading a quiet life, seeing only the people they wanted to see. The fever was abated.

  1 L.385

  2 NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 16 October 1934

  3 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, 1 November 1934

  4 L.382

  5 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 12 November 1934

  6 King’s College Cambridge, Letter to E. M. Forster 17 January 1935

  7 HRC, Letter to R.A. Scott James, 25 February 1935

  8 L.390

  9 King’s College, Letter to Sebastian Sprott, 5 March 1935

  10 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 March 1935

  11 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 9 April 1935

  12 L.392

  13 Daily Express, 8 May 1935. Hidden Huxley, pp171–175

  14 see Fascists at Olympia (1934) by ‘Vindicator’

  15 L.393

  16 L.395

  17 King’s College, Letter to Sebastian Sprott, 22 August 1935

  18 King’s College, Letter to Sebastian Sprott, 30 September 1935

  19 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, p354 21 November 1935

  20 Lambeth Palace Library, Letter to Dick Sheppard 9 November 1935

  21 ‘Pacifism and Philosophy’, The New Pacifism (1936) edited by Gerald Hibbert

  22 SB in conversation with the author

  23 Stephen Spender, Letters to Christopher (Santa Barbara, 1980) Letter to Isherwood, 27 July 1936

  24 L.398

  25 L.398

  26 SB in conversation with the author

  27 SB1.308

  28 The Resurrection of the Body. The Writings of F. Matthias Alexander (1969) ed Edward Maisel

  29 L.402

  30 SB1.294

  31 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 5, P452, letter to Julian Bell, 17 December 1935

  32 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, January 1936. Author’s translation

  XXIV

  Eyeless

  The Huxleys were in Sanary for the New Year of 1936: ‘Exquisite weather here,’ he told Harold Raymond at the beginning of January, ‘sun and no wind, and the landscape extraordinarily beautiful.’1 But Huxley was now actively engaged in contemporary politics and was constrained to add: ‘It makes it all the more distressing to reflect that such a short way off, in Spain, they are busily engaged in slitting one anothers’ throats.’ Young poets were going off to the Spanish Civil War but Huxley returned to London to continue to work with Dick Sheppard and Gerald Heard in the Peace Pledge Union. The novel was nearly finished and Maria wrote to his American publisher, Eugene Saxton, to let him know. She said that Alexander had made ‘a new and unrecognisable person of Aldous, not physically only but mentally and therefore morally. Or rather, he has brought out, actively, all we, Aldous’s best friends, know never came out either in the novels or with strangers.’2 That is a very significant remark, for the new Huxley who was now being unveiled – to the dismay of those who preferred him in the guise of the brilliant cynic and destructive satirist – was not so new. Contemporaries, like many present-day critics, missed the constructive undertow, the ethical underpinning, of Huxley’s earlier writing. They, but not his close friends, were caught unawares by the emergence of the idealist of peace.

  Huxley increasingly found that he had to defend himself. Early in 1936, Leonard Woolf wrote a pamphlet on Mussoli
ni’s aggression, The League and Abyssinia, accusing pacifists like Huxley of burying their heads in the sand when confronted with Fascist violence, wishing to have ‘nothing to do with evil’. On the contrary, Huxley told Leonard Woolf (and Virginia as they circled Kensington Gardens discussing politics and Huxley’s refusal to sign a manifesto calling for sanctions against Mussolini because it would simply cause the Italians to rally round the Duce). ‘He examines the evil and asks what is the best way of dealing with it. To this question experience gives a clear answer: the worst way of dealing with one evil is to do another evil, or to threaten another evil.’3 For the rest of the decade this would be Huxley’s working philosophy of international affairs. His contributions to Time and Tide, which were continuing, show that he was increasingly sensitive to the democratic deficit of some of the ideas he had been exploring earlier in the decade. His passion for strong government, intelligent co-ordination and planning was yielding to an awareness of what could actually happen if power was given to ‘men with well-thought out plans for improving the world’.4 Continuing the anti-Utopian thinking of Brave New World, he argued: ‘Thinking in terms of first principles has generally entailed acting with swords and rubber truncheons. ’ The hyper-intelligence had engaged with the real world and discovered the brutal consequences of ill-matched ends and means. His flirtation with eugenics was likewise coming to an end. His final gesture was to second a vote of thanks to Julian’s Galton Lecture at the Eugenics Society on 17 February. The next month he was off to the Nottinghamshire coalfields again to go down a pit and visit some unemployed centres.

  Huxley’s host in Nottinghamshire was Sebastian Sprott, a choice of companion which led Maria to joke to Jeanne that Aldous was going to explore ‘the homosexual underworld of Nottingham’.5 Given Huxley’s homophobia this was unlikely. Chatto, no doubt seeing the virtue in encouraging their author’s exposure, published in April a threepenny pamphlet in yellow paper covers, What Are You Going to Do About It? The Case for Constructive Peace. All Huxley’s gifts of logic, clarity, lightness of touch and essayistic fluency came into play in what was his most coherent statement of his pacifist beliefs to date. ‘Feeling, willing, thinking – these are the three modes of ordinary human activity,’6 he argued. ‘To be complete, life must be lived simultaneously on all three planes. In this pamphlet an attempt is made to provide all those who feel that war is an abomination, all who will that it shall cease, with an intellectual justification for their attitude; to show that their feeling and willing are essentially reasonable, that what is called the utopian dream of pacifism is in fact a practical policy – indeed the only practical, the only realistic policy that there is.’ He then proceeds to demolish one by one the familiar arguments against pacifism that would come from a ‘theoretical heckler’.

  The theoretical hecklers were not slow to respond. Cecil Day Lewis spoke for the Communist Party Left in a rejoinder, We’e Not Going to Do Nothing, which mocked Huxley’s ‘big, beautiful idealist bubble’ as singularly useless against ‘a four-engine bomber’. Day Lewis then demanded: ‘Where was Mr Huxley when the lights went out in Italy, in Germany?’ [answer, witnessing the rise of fascism at first hand]. He dismissed Huxley’s ‘spiritual exercises’ and termed him ‘the Prophet of Disgust’.7 Day Lewis said that Huxley’s argument that no change was useful that did not come from within was ‘another form of the doctrine of despair’. The Left Review returned to the attack (conscious of Huxley’s intellectual prestige and therefore keen to shoot him down) in June, with an open letter from Stephen Spender who announced solemnly that he was ‘angry’ at Huxley’s alleged proposal to sacrifice ‘oppressed pacifists and socialists in Italy, Germany, and Austria on the altar of a dogmatic and correct pacifism’. As for Huxley’s doctrine of ends and means, it had ‘muddled you into thinking that one kind of violence is as bad as any other’. Spender announced in conclusion: ‘We had to wait for Aldous Huxley to propose that prayer is an exercise for the soul, like an elastic exerciser or a dose of Eno’s Fruit salts: 8 By now, in June, Eyeless in Gaza had appeared and its ‘mystical’ parts would further discountenance the Left. George Woodcock, in a study of Huxley’s writings, recalled how Huxley’s pacifist conversion ‘seemed to place him within the … tradition of radical political dissent that stemmed in England from Godwin, the Chartists, and the largely pacifist British socialist movement’. But the appearance so soon afterwards of Eyeless seemed to signal for this older Left tradition ‘a retreat into obscurantism on the part of one of the writers we most admired … It seemed another case of the Lost Leader.’9

  A case, however, can be made that Eyeless in Gaza is Huxley’s best novel. More than Point Counter Point it extends the range of the earlier satirical novels and finds new fields of interest, a more affirmative direction, and a deeper understanding of human beings and their relationship to the contemporary world. But at the same time it suffers perhaps from the circumstances of its composition, the ‘mystical’ elements not forming part of the original conception. Huxley seldom talked up his books but his comments while writing this novel imply that he had real doubts about its likely success. ‘All I’m certain of is that I shd have liked another year to work at it,’ he told Victoria Ocampo. ‘But I couldn’t afford to give the time – and perhaps anyhow it wouldn’t have been any good: the book might have gone stale and dead on my hands if I’d gone on.’10 To another correspondent he confessed it was ‘rather a curate’s egg – good in parts perhaps’.11 Its chief formal interest is in the dislocated time scheme it adopts to tell the story of Anthony Beavis – a character very similar to Huxley himself – and the exploration of guilt and remorse centres on certain incidents (a brother’s suicide, a father’s remarriage) which are mirrored in Huxley’s. John Beavis recalls Leonard Huxley, Brian suggests Trevenen, and lesser characters have their echo in originals such as the Reverend Purchas (Dick Sheppard or parts of Gerald Heard) and Dr Miller (F.M. Alexander). Back in 1930, Huxley had told a correspondent that Rampion in Point Counter Point (whom everyone had concluded to be based on D.H. Lawrence) was ‘just some of Lawrence’s notions on legs. The actual character of the man was incomparably queerer and more complex than that.’12 It was a skilful defence against the charge that he had caricatured and over-simplified to say: look, the real people you detect are infinitely more complex and rich than my poor versions of them. One thing Huxley could not do was to deny the echoes and parallels because they were immediately recognised by others. The portrait of his deceased father, Leonard Huxley (a dreadful punster, emotionally repressed) was objected to by his step-mother, Rosalind. Huxley tried to persuade her that John Beavis was rooted in an amalgam of sources – a poem by Coventry Patmore (‘Tired Memory’), or the philologist first husband of Frieda Lawrence – but he was forced to admit that ‘quite unjustifiably, I made use of mannerisms and phrases some of which were recognizably father’s’.13

  As with his protestations of innocence to Ottoline Morrell in 1921 over Crome Yellow, Huxley assumed an ingenuous air: ’I had not thought that they would prove recognizable to others and I am most distressed to find that they should have been.’ The young man who commits suicide, Brian Foxe, he conceded was ’definitely’ based on Trev. But Anthony Beavis in the novel is responsible for Brian Foxe’s death. No-one could blame Huxley for the suicide of Trev. Was there here a kind of moral masochism? Was Huxley punishing himself for some unidentified wrongdoing? What did he need to feel guilty and remorseful about? The title of the novel (from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, ‘Eyeless in Gaza, at the Mill with slaves’) implies a sense of impotence and inadequacy. The strange, unsettling incident when the naked lovers, Anthony Beavis and Helen Amberley, are shattered by the fall of a dog from a plane above them compounds this sense. The dog dies on impact. They are spattered with its blood. It is a quite horrible scene (Huxley was always good at conveying physical disgust) and the context suggests that human relationships, and sexual ones in particular, are haunted by the possibility of abrupt termination,
of disgusted recoil. The Latin tag that Anthony Beavis uses – Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor (I see and approve of the best but follow the worst) also conveys a sense of moral dysfunction. Given that Huxley was self confessedly inept at devising plots and attending to the normal business of the novelist – inventing, in short – it is neither reductive nor crass to discuss these ‘originals’. Defending himself before Rosalind for the creation of Brian Foxe (recognisably Trev but with some disagreeable additions such as a stammer) Huxley argued that ‘all deeply good characters in imaginative literature have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers’. He did not regret the portrait based on Trev ‘since it was reproduced entirely in love and in an attempt to understand a character which I profoundly admired’. That love and admiration were beyond doubt. And if Anthony Beavis is Huxley, the portrait is drawn with a ruthless and unsparing crayon: ‘That which besets me is indifference. I can’t be bothered about people. Or rather, I won’t. For I avoid, carefully, all occasions of being bothered … One clever man and two idiots – that’s what you’ve made yourself. An admirable manipulator of ideas, linked with a person who, so far as self-knowledge is concerned, is just a moron; and the pair of you associated with a half-witted body.’