Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  All Huxley’s sense of himself as a moral and physical mess before Alexander and Dick Sheppard pointed him the way to physical and ethical rebirth is in this portrait. For the rest, it offers much the same picture of the English aesthetes and intellectual upper middle class, the same bold and sometimes shocking frankness about sexual and social mores which his readers had come to expect and to relish. It was his last novel before settling in America where, some readers felt (wrongly I would argue) that his best as a novelist was past. Meanwhile the new life of political commitment had been signalled in the novel and would be followed by Huxley in his personal life. Anthony Beavis, at the end of the novel, discovers the importance of the ‘unity of mankind, unity of all life’ and the sense that life has meaning. If it does not, ‘then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment … If it weren’t nonsense, if there were some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things.’ The last words of the novel are: ‘Dispassionately, and with a serene lucidity, he thought of what was in store for him. Whatever it might be, he knew now that all would be well.’ Huxley was bidding farewell to his former self. Not all his readers were pleased. They preferred the man who had ‘chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be’. They had to adjust to the fact that Huxley was now a writer who rejected ‘the pointlessness, the practical joke’ in favour of a tentative kind of affirmation.

  Around this time, Ottoline Morrell, nominally reconciled to Huxley, wrote in her journal a kind of summing up of the writer in 1936: ‘what I feel most clearly is that he is now singularly lacking in the imagination of the heart, which alone would enable him really to understand and enter into the lives of the human beings that he writes about. The tentacles of his intellect are incessantly at work collecting detached facts, collecting stories, scenes; he studies queer oddities and tricks of behaviour. He listens to conversations but he listens and looks as if he were looking and listening at the behaviour and jabber of apes. His attitude is always that of an onlooker, a sad disapproving onlooker, a scientific student of human behaviour.’14 She went on to accuse him of having ‘a very limited capacity for admiration’ and speculated that his peace campaigning would suffer from ‘his want of warmth and passion and humour’. This is a harsh portrait – which goes on to blame Maria for abusing her position as his eyes and ears to attract to them ‘the rather degenerate cosmopolitans who collect like bluebottles round any successful literary man’. One senses that there is some unresolved personal matter here, particularly when Maria is brought into the argument. And Ottoline has clearly not appreciated the extent to which Huxley was changing – though she does conclude by saying that has ‘a gentle, tender and unself-seeking nature’ that might ‘give him courage to know himself, to cast aside his superiority and revalue his burden of knowledge, and to conquer contempt by compassion’.

  In April the Huxleys had moved back to Sanary, having sublet the Albany flat (Harold Raymond found ‘a gentleman from Bermuda’ interested in taking the lease but Huxley doubted ‘whether the Secretary of the Albany would permit the letting of the flat to a coloured person’15). In Paris on the way to Sanary Huxley had met ‘an intelligent representative of the Left’16 who told him that the French were unlikely to adopt total pacifism. ‘I suppose this is due to the fact that they have had no Quaker tradition preparing the ground for the idea.’ Huxley was not wholly at ease in Sanary and, although the new book was selling well, he was rather short of funds. Not having supplied a novel for four years he was in Chatto’s debt. His publishers, however, were pleased with the sales. The subscription sale of 7000 was bigger than for any previous title of his and by the end of June sales had reached 10,000. Foyle’s bookshop in London had made it their monthly ‘Choice’ but, sending Maria a batch of reviews which she knew Aldous would not read, Harold Raymond observed: ‘Reviews on the whole are displaying English reviewing at its most pitiable.’17

  From Sanary, Huxley continued to be involved in the Peace Pledge Movement. He was chairman and Gerald Heard was vice-chairman of the splendidly appropriate Research and Thinking Committee. But Maria noticed Aldous was restless and dissatisfied: ‘There’s no doubt that he would sell up at the first possible opportunity. Although he is happy and in good spirits I sometimes get the impression that he is bored. He wouldn’t say so at any cost nor would he admit it to himself but I am convinced. He isn’t even interested in his painting any more:’18 He was supplementing his Alexander technique and yoga-based methods of meditation now with an examination of Catholic thinking on prayer. He had read a book by a priest, Father Bede Frost, called The Art of Mental Prayer and recommended it to T.S. Eliot while agreeing with him that meditation needed to have ‘a metaphysical or theological background’.19 He went to Pontigny to meet a group of thinkers who had formed themselves into a group called the Centre Polytechnique des Etudes Economiques who were becoming ‘unofficially the brain trust of the Blum government’.20 Huxley was drawn, for the rest of his life, to men and women of this kind – social psychologists, scientists, engineers, sociologists, biologists, economists – experts in all aspects of human society who seemed more attractive to him than the people to be found in literary circles. They were also practically engaged with social problems: his Olympian intellectualism was over and from now on he would recognise that the contribution of the intellectual to society is in collaboration with existing know-how rather than in a speculation that risks becoming self-indulgent. He was proposing, in collaboration with Gerald Heard, to produce ‘a kind of synthesis, starting from a metaphysical basis and building up through individual and group psychology to politics and economics … a synthesis for human beings, not a synthesis à la mode de Berlin, Rome or Moscow.’21

  But all this purposeful activity didn’t mean that his anxiety about the political situation lessened. The prospects for Europe in 1936 seemed to him ‘worse than ever’.22 France was in ‘a very uneasy, disquieted state … There might so easily, I think, be a bad financial panic resulting in chaos and a violent reaction from the Right.’23 Maria, however, was enchanted by the summer bathing and the peacefulness of Sanary. ‘We are enjoying it all with added intensity, in comparison to those long, London months.’24 And so, throughout the summer they enjoyed Sanary – it was to be their last summer there – while Aldous exchanged letters with the leaders of the PPU. These showed a shrewd understanding of tactics – as when he suggested getting round a boycott of a congress on peace in Brussels (brought about by its insistence on collective armed security) by going as a delegate from a movement called ‘For Intellectual Liberty’ which would enable him to observe what was going on without compromising the PPU. After Brussels, he went to Holland and thence to London where he and Matthew were living in a hotel in Mount Royal, waiting for the Albany tenant to go at the end of September. Maria was left behind at Sanary where she started to sort things out, feeling in her bones that they were about to sell the house. She joined them in London in September, slightly anxious about the cost of the rooms, in part because they had been spending a fortune on doctors.

  One of Huxley’s tasks at Mount Royal was to write the introduction to a selection of his writings for the Everyman Library. As usual he explained his reasons for writing in very plain terms: ‘In the present volume are assembled certain fragments of the books, the all too numerous books, which I have written because I wanted to, because the wolf was at the door and I had to, because the composition of them was a form of self-exploration and self-education, and because I had things to say which I wanted to read. The writing of these books was a pleasant process.’25 In the event the Huxleys never did get back into the Albany and stayed at Mount Royal until the following March. But at Christmas they returned briefly to Sanary. ‘All good wishes for the New Year,’ Huxley saluted Lord Ponsonby from La Gorguette, ‘tho’ the prospects for 1937 look, I must confess, worse than ever
.’26 December also saw the publication of his latest essay collection, The Olive Tree, which gathered up various literary essays – the lecture on his grandfather, the essay on Lawrence – together with more general pieces, several of which display the signs of his new-found commitment. There are frequent excoriations of nationalism and militarism and the dangers of political monomania. He cherishes his status as a freelance intellectual, expressing his horror in ‘Literature and Examinations’ that he might be studied. The teaching of literature, he believed, often falls into ‘grotesque absurdity’ and consists of ‘the repetition of the mantras of fashionable critics’. He lashed out at English snobbery which leads people to ‘listen to the privileged class congratulating itself’.

  Perhaps the most attractive essay is the title essay, ‘The Olive Tree’, for it celebrates that love of the Mediterranean which was felt both by Aldous and Maria and which, poignantly, they were about to leave behind, having spent large parts of the last two decades in Tuscany and Provence. He argues that the tree has always been an object of worship and the olive tree in particular is associated with peace and olive oil with joy. Noting that the English are ‘essentially mongrels’ he judges that: ‘Our Saxon and Celtic flesh requires to be constantly rewedded to the Latin spirit … the olive tree is, so to speak, the complement of the oak.’ English to the core – and never more so than when in the United States – Huxley was ever open to the ‘sun-lit clarity’ of the south. ‘If I could paint and had the necessary time, I should devote myself for a few years to making pictures only of olive trees.’ But that was not to be. Already he was making preparations to leave. In October he had been planning a trip to the USA, envisaging a trip of about nine months. He wanted Matthew to enrol as a pre-medical student at Duke University where J.B. Rhine had his Parapsychology Laboratory, which had aroused the interest of both Huxley and Heard. By February 1937 plans were firming up and Huxley was outlining his itinerary to Eugene Saxton at Harper’s and ‘greatly looking forward’ to exploring America. Should he buy a second hand Ford or ‘some larger and more majestic vehicle’?27

  On 19 February, the Huxleys left the house at Sanary for ever. Maria, in particular, was deeply moved by the idea of leaving. She wrote to Ottoline Morrell: ‘No country will ever be like this or the Tuscan hills; with their terraced olives, the vine and cypress at each house … Which does not mean that I am not looking forward to our future wanderings.28 To Mary, she confessed, on the day that the trunks were shipped off to America from Sanary, that the Mediterranean landscape was ‘irreplaceable in my heartz’.29 Huxley himself was preoccupied both with a projected Enyclopaedia of Pacifism which he was editing and with preparation of a much larger work that would elucidate his current intellectual obsession – the relationship between Ends and Means. He told Dick Sheppard that the latter would be a book ‘on the means for realizing desirable changes – such as peace, social justice etc. Reformers ordinarily oversimplify to such an extent; reducing everything to one cause, they think that one reform, or a series of reforms of one type, will remove the cause and lead to desirable change. Whereas it’s obvious that there is multiple causation and must therefore be a multiplicity of means for making the desirable changes.’30 The Huxleys left Sanary and made their way to London via Paris where Aldous started to have teeth problems, which produced an inflammation of the sinus. This involved a visit to hospital to remove the tooth and a miserable Easter in consequence, the only good news being the lifting of the ban on Brave New World in Australia which meant a great deal of gratuitous publicity.

  On 7 April, after a brief stay in London at the Mount Royal Hotel to tie up loose ends, the Huxleys set sail on the SS Normandie for New York in the company of Gerald Heard and his partner Christopher Wood. Just before leaving, Maria wrote a letter to her sister Jeanne which tried to express her mixed feelings about going. If she were alone, she said, she would not go, but she wasn’t, and it was ‘quite pointless to stay and to risk so much when we are among the few people who have the freedom to be able to escape’.31 An ambiguous comment that might suggest that the Huxleys sensed a coming catastrophe in Europe and were in part fleeing it – but there is no other evidence that this was in their mind. In spite of having burned their boats at Sanary, the Huxleys were convinced that this was just another bout of wandering, to lecture and to explore, from which they would return probably at the end of the year. There is no sense that they knew that their sojourn in the United States would turn out to be for ever.

  1 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 3 January 1936

  2 L.400

  3 L.401

  4 ‘A Horrible Dilemma’, Time and Tide, 14 March 1936. Hidden Huxley, P213

  5 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux. Undated but probably March 1936. Author’s translation of ‘la basse homosexualité de Nottingham’

  6 What Are You Going to Do About It? (1936)

  7 C. Day Lewis, We’re Not Going to Do Nothing (1936) Left Review

  8 Stephen Spender, ‘Open Letter to Aldous Huxley’, Left Review, June 1936

  9 George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley (1972), P16

  10 L.408

  11 HRC, Letter to Mrs Kethevan Roberts, 30 July 1936

  12 L.340

  13 L.409

  14 Ottoline at Garsington, P220

  15 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 3 January 1936

  16 Lambeth Palace, Letter to Dick Sheppard, 6 May 1936

  17 Reading, Letter from Harold Raymond to Maria Huxley, 18 June 1936

  18 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 19 June 1936. Author’s translation

  19 L.405

  20 L.407

  21 L.408

  22 L.407

  23 Lambeth Palace, Letter to Dick Sheppard, 21 June 1936

  24 Reading, Letter from Maria Huxley to Harold Raymond, 30 June 1936

  25 Eton College, Draft of ‘Writers and Readers’, enclosed in letter to John Hadfield, 17 November 1936

  26 Bodleian, Letter to Lord Ponsonby, 30 December 1936

  27 L.413

  28 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Ottoline Morrell, 25 January 1937

  29 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, undated but probably mid-February 1937

  30 Lambeth Palace, Letter to Dick Sheppard, 7 February 1937

  31 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, March 1937. Author’s translation

  XXV

  America

  On the SS Normandie, as it steamed across the Atlantic, the Huxleys received, on 10 April 1937, a visit in tourist class from one of the literary Germans from Sanary, Thomas Mann. He took tea with them in the salon and later joined them in the ship’s cinema, but told his diary later: ‘Handicapped by the language.’1 On arrival, New York struck them with its ‘extraordinary beauty’2 as Maria put it to Jeanne. They stayed briefly at a house in Rhinebeck, NY owned by their old Sanary friend, William Seabrook, the spot to which they would return at the end of the year. ‘You can’t believe how famous Aldous is here,’ Maria reported. He was besieged by radio stations seeking interviews. Maria was still sniffy about the supposed lack of sophistication of the population but bowled over by the beauty of New York State. She admitted to Jeanne that they were pining ‘pour notre Europe’, but welcoming ‘the distance from insoluble political problems’. She urged her sister and her daughter Sophie, as she would do again and again to other family members over the next few years: ‘Risque tout et viens ici.’ As soon as they could they bought their Ford (the famous Bugatti had been given away to the Kislings at Sanary) and set off – Aldous, Maria, Matthew and Gerald Heard – with Maria at the wheel. They were to spend five weeks on the road, driving through Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Texas to arrive at Frieda Lawrence’s ranch at San Cristobal in the mountains of New Mexico in May. Exhausted by the driving, Maria had lost weight, discovering on a Taos drugstore weighing machine that she was down to ninety-eight pounds. On the way they had visited various universi
ties at Charlottesville, Black Mountain College, Duke, Dillard, New Orleans and Knoxville. The last stretch across Texas was a thousand miles of desert ‘with a heat-wave in full blast & wind whirling the dust into the air in huge grey spirals’3 to Taos where Huxley was ‘rather relieved to be sitting still. I am starting to work again on the sociological book & hope to get it done by the end of the summer.’

  They had a log cabin on Frieda Lawrence’s ranch, nearly nine thousand feet above seal level among woods with the desert below: ‘sage-brush green … with the canyon of the Rio Grande running through the midst and the blue mountains beyond. The sky is full of enormous dramas of cloud and sunshine -with periodical thunderstorms of incredible violence. Boiling hot sunshine alternates with cold shade and icy nights.’4 The nearest town to the San Cristobal ranch was Taos, twenty miles away, so in spite of the unwelcome presence of artists – almost as bad as being surrounded by writers – they felt well removed from civilisation. Huxley considered he had never been anywhere before so hostile to man: ‘Humans crawl about this savage, empty vastness like irrelevant ticks.’ Maria was making the best of it, as she explained to Edward Sackville-West who was staying at the house at Sanary: ‘no servants whatsoever’,5 being her main gripe. She made the same complaint to Charles Noailles in Sanary: ‘It started by being so hard that I thought it would have to be given up … I know that I shall be homesick for my Mediterranean shores with the olives, the terraces and the signs of life with every cypress:6 To Ottoline, although still agitated by the absence of servants and the need to do housework, Maria was a little more optimistic: ‘we go for long walks, puffing up the hills, then sitting to puff more and pick some strawberries and Aldous may draw the desert or the clouds’.7