Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  At home the Huxleys lived their usual quiet life – in spite of their small but glittering circle of acquaintances in Hollywood. Maria, for the benefit of Jeanne, described their daily routine at North Laurel Avenue. In the morning they both rose early. Maria made the beds and cleaned the apartment which was brand new with new carpets and waxed parquet flooring. Then she went out shopping in her large Mexican hat. A maid called Hazel arrived at 1.30 to cook lunch. Leaving her to clean, they went out for a walk in the hills between lunch and tea. At 7.30 they took their baths and at 8.30 ate: ‘Then Aldous goes to bed and we read Herodotus for a long time. As you can see, I live the life of a princess.‘3 Aldous was in such good spirits – after weeks of illness when he couldn’t sleep and when she read to him endlessly (skipping what she judged to be the cruder passages in Aretino) – that when she went in with his early morning tea ‘he smiles so lazily in waking up that I cannot believe it possible’. But the sense of impending crisis in Europe haunted them. Gerald Heard told them that what was happening in Austria – the persecution of the Jewish population – was entering into their subconscious and Maria told Jeanne that she felt ‘so French’ that she felt a draw to go over there until the crisis was over: ‘which is crazy’. In another letter she told Jeanne of their ‘anxiety and horror’ about the Austrian persecutions: ‘But here we are so far away.’4 There seems no justification for the view that Huxley had smugly insulated himself from the coming crisis in Europe.

  The Hubbies became regular visitors and Grace watched Huxley asking Edwin questions about astronomy: ‘He had left off his glasses and his eyes had a tragic, blinded look and his face without the glasses was quite beautiful, and youthful looking, very white, the mouth large and sensitive, the mass of dark, thick hair, he and Edwin talking together, would have given a painter a chance … Aldous like a blasted angel, in a place that is somehow wrong … They like America better than they did.’5 But they were still learning to understand it. At one of the first lunches where Huxley met Harpo Marx he was full of ideas for movies and suggested the Marx brothers make a film about Marx with Groucho as Karl Marx, Chico as Bakunin, and Harpo as Engels. Harpo hadn’t realised Huxley was being facetious in the Anglo-Saxon manner and told him seriously that such a movie could not be made in this town.6 Huxley had another idea for a film about astronomy in which the audience would find themselves looking into the 100-inch telescope and seeing Harpo’s face.7 On another evening at Harpo Marx’s the dinner developed a mad surrealist Marx Brothers quality. Someone upset a plate of canapes, then Huxley, not being able to see clearly, put his hand deep into a platter of fish and mayonnaise, and all through the meal the sound of dishes being broken and smashed came from the direction of the kitchen.8

  Another important friend of the Huxleys throughout their American years was Anita Loos, who smoothed Huxley’s way into the film studios and offered to be his protector there. They were frequent visitors to her beautiful house on the sea ‘which reminded me of mine at Sanary,’ Maria told Jeanne, ‘but grander and with Chinese servants, one of whom is the best cook I know. It is a pleasure to go to her house as if we were part of the family.’9 One day they went walking on the beach with Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia. Maria pointed out the litter of white objects on the beach, which turned out to be condoms. The incident would turn up in an essay by Huxley, ‘Hyperion to a Satyr’ in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956). Something of Huxley’s conversational subject matter and his trenchant judgement comes out in Grace Hubble’s reports of these evenings in Los Angeles during the Huxleys’ first year in America. He conceded that James Joyce wrote well – ‘even his unintelligible things read musically’ – but Gertrude Stein ‘had no ear’.10 Ronald Knox was the most brilliantly precocious boy he had known at Eton and Oxford but T.S. Eliot ‘didn’t know nearly as much as he pretended, with his literary allusions and his pompously serious essays’. Ezra Pound was another questionable scholar, ‘an impostor’.11 He talked also of Noel Coward in ‘a high voice that breaks and is colourful – expressing shades of amusement’ and concluded that Coward’s plays were ‘strangely successful’ given that they were whipped up ‘like a souffle in a vacuum’.12

  At one lunch in June 1938 Huxley and Heard started talking about Krishnamurti and the Theosophical Society. Under Heard’s influence Huxley was beginning to take a serious interest in what he had mocked as a young writer, ’the wisdom of the East’. Grace Hubble, the scientist’s wife was not impressed: ‘Aldous and Gerald seem to me, in this pursuit of religion, like two small boys working over a conjuror’s box of parlour tricks. No, that isn’t quite it, they are looking for magic and power, for the secret words, the open sesame that rolls back the door. It is not religion, it is magic. Aldous, like D.H. Lawrence, has no great love for his fellow-man and he has a lot of rancour to get out of his system, also like D.H. Lawrence. He is somehow cold-blooded. He has read too much.’13 At another dinner he talked about the ability of owls to detect infra-red waves in the dark to locate their prey by their heat: ‘I think that is so-o-o [rising] lovely.’14 He was excited too by Edwin Hubble’s telescope. One lunchtime he arrived ‘full of happy interest, smelling flowers and staring into things with his nose against them’. Gazing at the great device, he announced: ‘Look at the pilasters and fluting. It is Roman, it is like the tomb of a great queen.’15

  The oddities and quirks of scientific knowledge, particularly zoological rare knowledge, were the staple of Huxley’s dinner-table conversation. Huxley and Heard – who were now seeing a lot of each other, swapping intellectual ideas, and energising each other – are glimpsed at the Hubbies’ table, ‘singing uninterruptedly like birds in an aviary’ of mystical knowledge and the thinkers of that tradition. Maria, ‘in gray slacks, sandals, red socks and short leopard-skin coat’ and ‘looking like a very thin mouse, but quite sweet’16 watched the chattering pair. And then a new topic of conversation arose. Huxley had managed to secure a contract from MGM to write a screenplay for a biopic of Madame Curie. It would be directed by George Cukor with Garbo in the title role. He had put the idea to Anita Loos in May and the MGM screenwriter Salka Viertel had already suggested it to Garbo who was enthusiastic. According to those who have studied Huxley’s screenplays this was not a bad effort for a beginner. ‘Surprisingly, it was rather good,’ thinks Virginia Clark, author of Huxley and Film (1987). But in spite of being highly remunerative (in the end Huxley pocketed $15,000) his script was thrown away and when the film was eventually made in 1943 (with Greer Garson not Garbo in the lead) Huxley’s name was nowhere on the credits. He told Julian that he wasn’t sure whether this activity was for him, ‘since this telling of the story in purely pictorial terms doesn’t allow of any of the experimentation with words in their relation to things, events and ideas, which is au fond my business’.17

  Huxley was required initially to spend eight weeks at the studios on the script which meant he had to repulse an offer from Dr George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to join a hand-picked group of eminent people (Anthony Eden, Sir Francis Younghusband) for a weekend in Chichester examining ‘the connection between the spiritual view of life and the application of that view to concrete conditions of the present day’. The angry young man of the 1920s was now being courted by bishops for his views on the means whereby the Church of England could ‘be more closely related to life’, which is a measure of how far his spiritual ‘conversion’ had been recognised. He wrote back to Bishop Bell that he could not take part because he was ‘trying to get the life of Mme Curie made into a film with the minimum of distraction and vulgarisation’.18

  In July the Huxleys moved from North Laurel Avenue to a house in North Linden Drive, Beverly Hills for the summer. In August they drove up the coast to see about putting Matthew into Berkeley. Maria told Grace Hubble that she was not very keen on sewing name-tags into her son’s clothing: ‘I always prefer gardening or electric repairing or fiddling with a carburettor to sewing.’19 She made a confession to Jeanne, unjust to herself, that: ‘
things are difficult for Aldous. Left to himself he could very easily live permanently in a world of intellectual abstractions. Thanks to me he is constantly forced to confront the brutal naked reality of life.’20 Though when they went out for a night with Chaplin to Chinatown (where the star was mobbed by the crowds) she was shocked by the stripper in a night club who ‘left nothing to the imagination’.21

  In September they moved again to 1320 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in Hollywood, awaiting news of the script. Huxley was learning how to be cynical, like everyone else, about the studios: ‘After being extremely enthusiastic for a while, they seem now to have forgotten all about it like chimpanzees that concentrate with terrific intensity on something, then drop it and are totally unaware that it ever existed.’22 He turned away and began to write the novel that would draw on his new knowledge of Hollywood and the life of Southern California, After Many A Summer. The political situation, and the absence of any positive political signs of improvement, the ‘progressive deterioration of the remaining islands and oases of decency’23 were depressing him (quite apart from the continual ill-health that dogged him throughout 1938). More and more he was being drawn towards the consolations of religious philosophy: ‘To find a psychology covering the whole range of human potentiality, not merely the range known to the homme moyen sensuel, one must study the religious philosophers.’ Practical steps like joining public protests or writing letters to the press seemed to him inefficacious. Declining one such initiative from Jake Zeitlin, he told him: ‘The persecution of the Jews in Germany is horrible in the extreme; but it is not by proclaiming the fact in a loud voice that this particular persecution will be stopped …’24 It could not be stopped until ‘the habits of thought feeling, action and belief’ which created such evils were changed.

  Changing those habits was increasingly to be Huxley’s mission. Gerald Heard would be his abetter in this but Maria was occasionally frustrated by Heard’s other-worldliness (refusing to own a car but expecting her to drive him around) and his criticising the Huxleys for seeing too many people of the wrong sort. Maria felt certain courtesies were owed but Aldous was not always keen on socialising, and put the burden onto her. On one occasion a distinguished liberal lawyer rang up asking them to supper. Huxley picked up the phone and said: ‘Mrs Huxley is away. I do not know our engagements. She will let me know.’25 Maria was effectively Aldous’s secretary, the excuse she gave to Mary Hutchinson for not writing so frequently – ‘do you remember the days when we exchanged endless letters and constantly … ?’26 She told Mary that the new house on North Crescent Heights Boulevard was ‘the ugliest house probably in Hollywood. Ugly and comfortable … Furnished about twenty years ago by comfortable Jews … But the garden was planted even before that and it is delightful and very private and we love it … It has a terrace and Aldous worked outside until yesterday … Aldous is so much better … he still rests twelve hours a day … a night out is an event and as a result we enjoy it.’ Maria added: ‘We have made no new friends; but we see the old ones quite regularly.’ Anita Loos on Sunday was now ‘an institution’ and they met her once a week for lunch as well. The Chaplins were seen less frequently but they were very fond of the English actress Constance Collier who lived nearby. Maria said she often reminded her of Ottoline Morrell, whose death had been reported in April. Although they saw Ottoline rarely, ‘she was an essential part of England for us; a solidity in England.’ They had paid their first visit to a night club (though Maria had come home early at ten) but generally they went to bed early and read. ‘We are alone nearly always.’ It has often been assumed that the Huxleys enjoyed a glittering Hollywood life-style, seeing and knowing everyone, but the reality was quite different. Early nights with a book were much more the pattern than carousing with famous writers (few of whom in America Huxley met during his twenty five-year residence). It is true that the Huxley circle – Loos, Garbo, Harpo Marx, later Stravinsky, Isherwood – was far from lustreless but it was a small interior company, and the life was modest and fairly austere. Anita Loos wrote a reminiscence of one of the picnics that this small group took ‘with dramatis personae so fantastic that they might have come out of Alice in Wonderland’.27 Krishnamurti, Garbo (in male disguise), Paulette Goddard, Chaplin, and Isherwood were of the party which sat down in the sandy bottom of the Los Angeles river, ignoring a no trespassing sign. Soon, a sheriff armed with a gun turned up and the party, in spite of its celebrity cast, was unceremoniously moved on.

  Huxley’s energies in early 1939 were thrown into the new ‘short phantasy, in the manner, more or less, of Brave New World’.28 It would be finished by July when he would describe it as ‘a kind of fantasy, at once comic and cautionary, farcical, blood-curdling and reflective’.29 He was greatly encouraged, early in 1939, by the apparent improvement in his sight as a result of seeing Margaret Corbett, a disciple of Dr W.H. Bates, whose controversial method of exercising the eye Huxley would later write a short book about. In April the Huxleys moved yet again, to a furnished house at 701 South Amalfi Drive, Pacific Palisades. Garbo lived on the other side of the street. Maria called it ‘a terrestrial Paradise … The house is crazy, ugly, full of frightful German and Chinese knick-knacks, with not many bedrooms, but, that rare thing in America and so important for us, it is spacious … more peaceful for Aldous.’30 Anita Loos described its bizarre furnishings – a life-sized facsimile of King Kong, a stuffed crocodile, a hideous bar. Grace Hubble found it ‘a rambling house, rambling garden above the canyon … We lunched in the garden … Bertrand Russell thin, old and ill-looking with flushed face.’31 A month after moving in, Garbo arrived for dinner. ‘She was ravishing.’ Another regular guest was Salka Viertel, the Polish-born actress who ran a sort of salon at her home in Santa Monica Canyon, which brought together many of the highly talented European exiles. Maria loved her and told Jeanne that she was very ‘us’ because ’above all she is a European. She loves perfume and takes lovers.’32 Her existence proved that ‘Europeans can live in Hollywood while retaining their charm and their personality’. The names of the surrounding drives – Napoli, Corsica, Toulon – awakened Maria’s nostalgia – ‘names that make one melancholy for things we loved and have left’ – but she told Grace Hubble that ‘really California is still calmer and quieter. And it is beautiful and it has been kind and anyway we do like it.’33

  The most important news, however, was that Aldous, on a visit to the oculist, had demonstrated near-normal vision: ‘C’est un miracle, Janin!’ Maria exclaimed to her sister. Huxley had told Harold Raymond, two months earlier, that the Bates exercises had raised his vision from fifteen per cent of normal to fifty per cent and further improvement was expected. ‘I am already doing all my reading (as much as two hours a day or more) without glasses, which is rather remarkable.’34 When he delivered the manuscript of After Many A Summer in August he claimed that: ‘I wrote it and revised the script (always a very trying job) entirely without spectacles – a remarkable tribute to the efficacy of the eye-training I have been taking.’35 He was, however, using a typewriter with a large typeface to make this assertion. In a long account of the details of the improvement sent to Julian, he claimed to be able to read the seventy-foot line on the oculist’s chart at six feet and large nursery print at the near point. He claimed the scar-tissue was clearing up and hoped that the bad eye would get up to the level the good eye used to be at.36 Meanwhile: ‘We live very quietly, see a minimum of people.’ Huxley was becoming very enthusiastic about linguistics and told Julian: ‘There is no hope of thinking and acting rationally about any of the major issues of life until we learn to understand the instrument we use to think about them.’ Huxley was seeking to understand language through the science of linguistics rather than through his own linguistic experiments.

  In spite of Huxley’s protestation that he lived a quiet life, there was a surprise lunch party at South Amalfi Drive on 30 July to celebrate his forty-fifth birthday. The guests included Helen Hayes, Charlie Chaplin and Pau
lette Goddard (who staggered in with a birthday cake from an English confectioner’s weighing eight pounds, Charlie bearing a dozen bottles of Mumm champagne), Christopher Isherwood (‘dark and slight’37 – this was possibly the first time he met Huxley), Charles MacArthur, Gerald Heard, and Matthew. After lunch everyone sat under the eucalyptus tree. Then Orson Welles arrived. Then Lillian Gish. It was seven in the evening before all the lunch guests departed. Huxley clearly enjoyed all this, though that Sunday, coming away from Charlie Chaplin’s where everyone had sat eating lunch in a crescent-shaped arbour by the swimming pool – and where he had confessed he didn’t really like playwriting ‘because he was too discursive and liked to ramble’38 – he paused to look back at Chaplin’s pile as he was leaving: ‘Isn’t it the ugliest house you ever saw?’ he asked Grace Hubble. One of his last social engagements before the official declaration of war on 3 September was a dinner with the Hubbles. ‘Aldous at dinner said, about the poetry of Auden, Spender, Day Lewis et al that he didn’t like it and he thought the contemporary admiration of it was a curious passing phase, just a while ago Stephen Phillips was thought a great poet and dramatist.’39 In the course of the past year, at dinner parties Huxley had rubbished all the leading poets of the day: Eliot, Pound, Auden and others. A week after war broke out a letter arrived from the New Yorker asking if he had any poems to offer the magazine. ‘Alas,’ he replied, ‘I have not written any verse for a long while, as I find it a more-than-whole-time job which can’t be combined with any other activity – and unfortunately I have been much involved in a variety of occupations.’40 It is hard to think of a better summing up of Huxley’s position at the start of the war.