Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Aldous worked in his bedroom which communicated with hers through an arch, or in a little hut outside, and Matthew slept in the sitting-room from which steps descended to a tiny kitchen. They had to build on a bathroom themselves, a task made lighter by Matthew’s skills. Gerald Heard had a little hut on the other side of a stream. There was hot water from butane gas and a wood-burning range to cook on. Aldous, taken with this primitivism, even made some bread, full of cornflour and treacle and spices, which turned out (more or less) eatable. The ranch’s inhabitants included the redoubtable Frieda, her lover Captain Angiolini Ravagli, and Brett (their old friend from Garsington who had not been on speaking terms with Frieda since she tried, with Mabel Luhan, to steal Lawrence’s ashes from the cement chapel built by Ravagli. The plan was to scatter them over the ranch in the belief that this was Lawrence’s true wish). Brett, Huxley reported, was: ‘Deafer and odder than ever, in a Mexican 10-gallon hat, with a turkey’s feather stuck in it, sky-blue breeks, top boots and a strong American accent.’8

  In this setting of striking natural scenery and human eccentricity, Huxley settled down for the summer to write his ‘philosophico-psychologico-sociological’ 9 book, Ends and Means. In July his Encylopaedia of Pacifism was published by Chatto in England as a sixpenny pamphlet. It is not clear how much of this was written by Huxley himself as editor. Certainly it summed up his beliefs about nationalism being an ‘idolatry’ and a ‘religion of war’. It repudiated theories of racial superiority, reminding the British that they were formed from ‘scores of immigrant waves’. And it declared: ‘We are living in critical days. It is not enough to desire peace or to talk peace. We must make a personal decision and live peace.’ For Huxley the personal was the political. The entry on ‘class war’ observes: ‘The pacifist’s sympathy is naturally with the exploited and the downtrodden. The spirit of the class war and particularly any recourse to violence in the furthering of it are, however, anathema to him.’ The Left Review was planning to publish a pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937), and Huxley was one of the writers whose views were solicited. He told them that he was ‘of course’ on the side of the Government and against Franco in the Spanish civil war. Like Orwell he preferred the Anarchists (‘Much more likely to lead to desirable social change’) to the Communists but insisted that violence was no solution. ‘The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.’10 This would be another nail in his coffin as far as Day Lewis, Spender and others were concerned.

  Another body that was taking an interest in the pamphlet was the Federal Bureau of Investigation – although they didn’t catch up with it until February 1938 when a memo to the director of the FBI headed ‘Subversive Activities – General’ mentioned Huxley as the author of the Encyclopaedia. The spooks were not well-informed enough to know about Huxley’s repudiation of Communism but they didn’t like the company he was keeping. They ordered a copy. The FBI file on Huxley – declassified in 1984 under Freedom of Information Laws – was kept up throughout his life but in spite of its bulk it is light on evidence. A few months before he died it was reported that Forest Hills High School in Michigan was using Brave New World for classroom study and a complainant to the FBI said the book was ‘controversial in nature and not a fit subject for high school study’. The Forest Hills Schools Board ordered the book to be banned from the school but when it was discovered that most of them had not read it the decision was reversed. The complainant said that pupils were coming home from school ‘with a softened attitude towards Communism’.11

  It was while he was finishing Ends and Means at San Cristobal that Huxley was approached by a Los Angeles bookseller and dealer in manuscripts, Jake Zeitlin, regarding the handling of his work for the movies. Zeitlin came to the ranch in August to discuss the possibility of turning novels like Antic Hay (‘there is good comic material here’12 Huxley had told him) and ‘The Giaconda Smile’ into film scripts. Huxley admitted that Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza were ‘probably a bit long and complicated’ to be Hollywood material. The rights to Brave New World had been sold off cheap by his incompetent (and, it turned out, crooked) agent, Pinker.

  On the face of it this was extraordinary. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Huxley had fulminated against the new forms of mass entertainment – most memorably in the account of his visit to The Jazz Singer in Paris in 1929. He felt that these were ‘creation-saving’ forms that deprived people of their creativity and made them passive consumers not active participants in art. Yet he was now actively seeking to enter the world of the movies. He told Zeitlin that he might be staying in the USA at the start of the New Year after his lecture tour was completed, and asked him to make some ‘tactful enquiries’ about the possibility of ‘doing work for the films.’13 As the summer wore on, Huxley was softening both to the idea of the cinema and to America itself – a country which, up until now, he had excoriated as vigorously as he had its mass entertainments. In a letter to Clive Bell consoling him for the death of Julian Bell in Spain he wrote: ‘You would find a great deal to astonish, interest, and amuse you in the various parts of the country. I had no idea, till this summer, of the depths of its strangeness.’14 The new book, meanwhile, was being typed up by Maria, who felt that it was possibly the best thing he had ever done ‘spiritually’.15 She saw it as: ‘In essence a practical continuation of Eyeless.’ She was nonetheless approving of the idea of working in the movies: ‘The money would be useful.’ Ends and Means appeared in November (once again the interval between completing a manuscript and publication astonishes). The new book, he told his friend Koteliansky, was ‘rather an important book discussing the sort of things we shall have to do if we want to make the improvements in the world that we all profess to desire. It covers all the ground from politics to philosophy.’16

  Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization, became one of Huxley’s bestselling books. It was just what he said it was: a comprehensive exploration of how to achieve the desirable ends, ‘the ideal goal of human effort … liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love’ that he claimed all ages had identified in the same way. The problem was not the ends but the means, about which there was ‘utter confusion’. And far from progress being made in the modern world there was regress – towards ‘organized lying’ (propaganda) and ‘regression in charity’. In particular: ‘Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.’ In 1937, long before the awakening of green movements on the modern scale, Huxley – in spite of his commitment to science – was prepared to question the belief that applied science could address all human problems without negative consequences. This was not then, as it is now, a commonplace. The book begins with a discussion of the nature of explanation which concludes that ‘causation in human affairs is multiple – in other words, that any given event has many causes’. This was Huxley’s central belief: ‘there can be no single sovereign cure for the diseases of the body politic’. The next section of the book was what he called ‘a kind of practical cookery book of reform’ across a range of issues, and the final section discussed the big questions about: ‘What is the sense and point of the whole affair?’ He dismissed the idea that the practical reformer could do without such thinking because: ‘So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions.’ The book had excellent reviews and was an immediate success with 6000 copies sold in the first three weeks in the UK.

  No sooner had the book been published than Huxley and Gerald Heard set off on a lecture tour of the States, expounding their gospel of peace. ‘Gerald and I are giving a series of duologue lectures this autumn -in a sort of Mutt and Jeff, Harry Tate-cum-Boys manner,’17 he had told Harold Raymond. In September the Huxleys and Heard had driven in the Ford to Los Angeles – a city which Maria compared to ‘a permanent International Exhibition’.18 They found a flat at 1425
½ North Crescent Heights Boulevard in West Hollywood. Matthew was now eighteen and in love with America. It seemed that his parents were beginning to follow his example. Maria had come to terms with ‘the barbarousness’ of having to live without servants and, having met so many interesting and pleasant people in Los Angeles, they were warming to it. ‘We would not mind staying here a while,’ she told Roy Fenton. She claimed now that Europe had become ‘oppressive’ to her just before they left, in spite of her nostalgia for cypress and olive grove. Maria told Jeanne that she could learn to love America but the heat and the endless driving were wearing her out. She was amazed, and rather shocked, when Aldous was offered $750 for a four minute radio interview. Very quickly the Huxleys met some very remarkable people. Edwin Hubble the astronomer and his wife Grace; Gary Cooper (‘il a les plus beaux yeux et le plus charmant regard du monde’19 Maria told Jeanne), Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard (‘Yesterday we had a very intellectual dinner with Charlie Chaplin’, Maria told Roy) and Upton Sinclair. Chaplin was in the habit of performing for his friends little scenes from his work-in-progress and the Huxleys watched in delight as he did ‘a mimic of Mussolini making a speech’, a foretaste of The Great Dictator. They found Chaplin a rather melancholy man, however, at this first meeting. Huxley later gave Mary Hutchinson a description of this first impact of Hollywood on them:

  Hollywood … with its fearful Jewish directors, and the actors, and the film writers, who make more money than any other kind of author and are generally speaking not authors at all. Our chief friends in that world were Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos, both of whom are really very charming. We even had a glimpse of the ordinarily invisible Garbo, whom we met at Anita Loos’s looking infinitely ninetyish and perverse, like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing dressed up, for added perversity, in a very sporty Lesbian tailor-made. Not that she is exclusively a Lesb. Rather omnifutuent – her present boyfriend being Stokowski the conductor.20

  Huxley himself received his first offer to become one of those wealthy writers: for an adaptation of the Forsyte Saga: ‘but tho’ I might have earned vast sums in the process, the prospect of living for several months with the ghost of poor John Galsworthy was too formidable. I simply wouldn’t face it!’ There was, however, the possibility of a film script of his own, which Zeitlin was trying to put around the studios. Huxley’s treatment for Success, for many years thought to have been lost, is now in the collections of Stanford University. Unusually for Huxley it has a clear and straightforward plot – an advertising executive offers a bet that he can make an obscure sausage manufacturer into a world-famous producer of sausages by the power of advertising propaganda alone. It is a script whose themes are very Huxleyan – the iniquity of advertising and propaganda, the hollowness of material success – and even contains a character who is a young playwright dreaming of success and riches like the author himself. There is also some rather unsophisticated social comedy. He had clearly thought about the filmic treatment and there are ‘cinematic’ moments, as when human crowds dissolve into a shot of pigs being herded to slaughter, but the script never excited any interest. The overarching irony of the script – that its author was angling for success of his own – lends the whole thing a certain piquancy. Huxley had not yet met the Marx brothers, who would become, especially Harpo, a part of his circle. They might have been able to inject sufficient madness into this to make it work – or perhaps the Woody Allen of Small Time Crooks could do something with it.

  It is clear from a comment to Mary Hutchinson that Huxley was now changing his view of America. He told her that after the lecturing was finished in early 1938: ‘I expect we shall be setting out for Europe; unless by any miracle the movie people wished to make use of a comic scenario I wrote while at Hollywood.’21 Having intended this as a brief holiday from Europe, the Huxleys were now prepared to consider staying on permanently, especially if Success turned into a success. Meanwhile they went on with their exploration of the new world. They visited the only chinchilla farm in the world and saw a Mickey Mouse film being made and oil being drilled and visited a private collection of modern French art ‘in the house of a nice mad-man’. They were dazzled but also exhausted by all the endless talk and bustle. It was in the summer of 1937 that Grace Hubble started to record in her journal some of these social occasions at which the Huxleys and the Hollywood stars were present. Within their limitations (there are many gaps) her unpublished journals make her into a sort of minor and occasional Californian Boswell, presenting scenes and sayings of Huxley in the early Californian years. The first relevant entry records Huxley and Heard before setting out to lecture, the latter saying ‘Western Europe dying, America must carry the torch. Dubious outlook for the torch.’22 This was presumably the message they took around America.

  ‘When the time came for Aldous and Gerald to go off together it was cool in the early morning and they went in leather coats, small grey hats and an umbrella. So I laughed and felt just a bit lonely at being left by both at the same time,’23 Maria told Mary. Huxley hated lecturing – for which he had no natural gift – and especially hated having to say the same things over and over again. What made matters worse was Heard’s fall in the snow in Iowa at the end of November (he broke his arm just below the left shoulder and went to a doctor friend in Huntington, Indiana to recuperate) which left Huxley to carry on single-handed, well into the New Year. ‘It was more tolerable when we were two and could throw the ball back and forth in a lively discussion, ’24 he told Julian. While Aldous was away lecturing across this winter (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington etc), Maria was installed once more in Rhinebeck, NY in a pastoral-sounding address, Dairy Cottage, Foxhollow Farm on the old Dows estate owned by J.J. Astor at Rhinebeck. She had driven on her own all the way from California. She could be near the Seabrooks at this address, which they kept until February 1938. Huxley adored the wooded beauty and the nearby Hudson River and the bright, cold blue days. Maria was slightly less enamoured of the house: ‘The place is rather like an ugly old English cottage as compared to the exquisite old little houses which fill this country, but it is warm and comfortable and roomy and only 98 miles from New York.’25 It was here one December morning that a telegram arrived from Zeitlin: ‘MGM INTENSELY INTERESTED IN YOUR STORY NOW ENTITLED SUCCESS WILL HAVE DECISION IN FOUR OR FIVE DAYS.’26 This turned out to be a false dawn, however, and Huxley ploughed on with his lecturing. Maria wrote to Ottoline that in spite of there being much about American life that was ‘alien’ to them: ‘the whole past months have been a continual adventure. There is no other word for the amazement with which we discovered this continent and its people’.27 As the year drew to a close there seemed little doubt that the Huxleys would be staying for the time being in America. But it would have been unwise for such footloose people to predict at this stage that they would remain – in Maria’s case until her death in 1955 and in Aldous’s till his in 1963, twenty-five years later.

  1 The Diaries of Thomas Mann, p275, 10 April 1937

  2 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 30 April 1937. Author’s translation

  3 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 21 May 1937

  4 L.421

  5 SB1.345 quoting letter from Maria Huxley to Edward Sackville-West, 23 June 1937

  6 HRC, Copy of letter from Maria Huxley to Charles Noailles, 25 June 1937. Sybille Bedford papers

  7 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Ottoline Morrell, 5 July 1937

  8 L.422

  9 L.417

  10 L.423

  11 Federal Bureau of Investigation. Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts Section. Subject: Aldous Huxley

  12 L.423

  13 L.424

  14 King’s College, Letter to Clive Bell, 7 August 1937

  15 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 20 August 1937. Author’s translation

  16 BL, Letter to Samuel Koteliansky, 27 July 1937

  17 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 26 August 1937

  18 L.426 />
  19 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 11 October or November, 1937

  20 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 8 December 1937

  21 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 8 December 1937

  22 HL, Hubble Diary, 3 August 1937

  23 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 15 December 1937

  24 L.428

  25 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 15 December 1937

  26 UCLA, Telegram from Jake Zeitlin to Huxley, 10 December 1937

  27 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Ottoline Morrell, 18 December 1937

  XXVI

  Hollywood

  Early in 1938 the Huxleys returned to California, the lecture tour having concluded by the end of January. They had bought a new Ford car which they drove back via Colorado, where Matthew was at school, and New Mexico where they called in to visit Frieda Lawrence at the ranch. They arrived at Los Angeles on Friday 11 February and took a house at 1340 North Laurel Avenue. Huxley had taken ill on the journey, at Tucson, experiencing an attack of bronchial pneumonia that troubled him for most of the rest of the year. He had met several doctors and scientists already in the States (including, at Chicago, Dr William Sheldon whose classification of human beings into types so enthralled him) but now he was less the enquiring mind, more the patient. It wasn’t really until April 1938 that Huxley was out of bed and active again. He was at work on a novel ‘which threatens, if I am not careful, to turn into the Comédie Humaine’1 but which was destined never to be finished. He was also ‘collecting whatever information I can pick up in regard to the technique for giving a viable economic and social basis to philosophic anarchism’.2 The film scenario was getting nowhere because ‘the whole picture industry is in a state of neurasthenia and panic, and it’s impossible for anyone to make any decision’. The news from Europe was also depressing for someone who desired peace. Its opposite seemed more and more likely.