1 L.432
2 L.434
3 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, March 1938. Author’s translation
4 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 15 March 1938. Author’s translation
5 HL, Hubble Diary, 13 March 1938
6 HL, Hubble Diary, 11 June 1938
7 HL, Hubble Diary, 1 April 1938
8 HL, Hubble Diary, 5 June 1938
9 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 4 April 1938. Author’s translation
10 HL, Hubble Diary, 1 April 1938
11 HL, Hubble Diary, 18 April 1938
12 HL, Hubble Diary, 17 May 1938
13 HL, Hubble Diary, 16 June 1938
14 HL, Hubble Diary, 5 July 1938
15 HL, Hubble Diary, 7 July 1938
16 HL, Hubble Diary, 29 November 1938
17 L.437
18 Lambeth Palace, Letter to Bishop Bell, 8 August 1938; Letter from Bishop Bell to Huxley, 26 July 1938
19 HL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Grace Hubble, 4 September 1938
20 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 27 September 1938. Author’s translation
21 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 5 October 1938
22 HRC, Letter to J.B. Priestley, 21 October 1938
23 L.438
24 L.439
25 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 11 December 1938. The quotation is given by Maria in English
26 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 15 December 1938
27 Mem. Vol., pp91–3
28 L.440
29 L.441
30 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 3 April 1939. Author’s translation
31 HL, Hubble Diary, 2 July 1939
32 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 31 July 1939. Author’s translation
33 HL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Grace Hubble, 28 June 1939
34 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 1 June 1939
35 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 1 August 1939
36 L.442
37 HL, Hubble Diary, 30 July 1939
38 HL, Hubble Diary, 4 August 1939
39 HL, Hubble Diary, 23 August 1939
40 NYPL, Letter to C.A. Pearce, 16 September 1939
XXVII
Wartime
As 1939 drew to a close and England prepared for war, Huxley was settling down at MGM to write a script for Pride and Prejudice. ‘I work away at the adaptation … for the moment – an odd crossword puzzle job,’1 he told Eugene Saxton. ‘One tries to do one’s best for Jane Austen; but actually the very fact of transforming the book into a picture must necessarily alter its whole quality in a profound way.’ Specifically, he felt, stressing the ‘story’ at the expense of the ‘dilute irony in which the characters are bathed’ was ‘a major falsification of Miss Austen’. But this is how Hollywood works and Huxley was doing it, not for love of the art of the motion picture but for the cash, as he explained to his English publisher this time, Harold Raymond: ‘The systems of production are such that it is hardly possible for a picture of this kind to be anything but frightful … However, the job pays well & permits one to help a few people involved in the nightmare in Europe.2 That help went mostly to Maria’s family. Jeanne’s daughter Sophie was the first to be helped, arriving from France in November. She lived with the Huxleys until 1944 and during the early part of the war they thought about formally adopting her.
As far as his own writing went, Huxley was offering Raymond either of two ideas for a new novel: ‘a kind of experimental dissection of people & situations, pushed to the limits attainable through analysis of language [how Huxleyan!] or, alternatively, a kind of Brave New World describing a society better than the present, not worse.’ It was to be more than twenty years before this project of a good utopia was finally realised with the publication of Island in 1961, two years before he died. But first, November would see the publication of his first novel since arriving in America, After Many A Summer. American editions would complete the Tennyson quotation by adding ‘dies the swan’ to the title. It has sometimes been suggested that Huxley’s move to America – which is how his presence there should be regarded from late 1939 on, talk of return to Europe having fallen silent – coincided with his decline as a novelist. One doesn’t have to endorse Christopher Isherwood’s view – that Huxley actually wrote his best novels in America – in order to say that this is erroneous. It is true that there is a quality of zest and energy and satirical daring in those early English novels that was never quite recaptured. And even if either Point Counter Point or Eyeless in Gaza remains his most ambitious and successful novel (Brave New World existing in a category of its own) After Many A Summer turned out to be a witty, sunlit novel that was certainly not the work of a writer in decline. ‘In some ways I think it is Aldous’s best work: a superb mixture of excellent fooling and serious thought,’ Harold Raymond wrote from Chatto in London to Eugene Saxton at Harper’s in New York. ‘I know no writer with the same power of mixing his ingredidents.’3 Although the English reviews were lukewarm it sold well and Harper’s Magazine paid $2500 for the serialisation rights. There were worries about the similarities of the novel’s plot to the real life affairs of William Randolph Hearst – his lover Marion Davies was thought to be hinted at in the name Dowlas, which was changed to Maunciple, and the shooting was reminiscent of real events, but no law suits were launched.
The novel opens with the arrival of the English writer, Jeremy Pordage, at the mock-mediaeval castle of the magnate, Mr Stoyte. The out-of-place literariness and old-world manners of Pordage inevitably make us think of Huxley. Pordage’s new habit of ‘deriving a curious wry pleasure from the recognition of his own shortcomings’ may reflect Huxley’s growing ease with himself in southern California. He mocks Pordage’s ‘small, fluty voice, suggestive of evensong in an English cathedral’ and there is a good comedy of manners in the Englishman arriving in America, a vein that Huxley would not be the last English novelist to exploit. Stoyte/Hearst is represented as emotionally infantile and paranoid and his mistress, Virginia Maunciple, as silly and vain as a character from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But the comedy soon starts to make way for the ‘ideas’, which are about the clash of the old world and the new, about the culture of modern mass entertainment, and programmes of social reform. The ‘progressive’ thinker, Mr Propter, who has more than a dash of Gerald Heard about him, sounds off about the need to escape from the bondage of personality, and about the shortcomings of conventional socialism for solving social problems. Propter dismisses conventional schemes of social improvement because they ignore the fact that ‘Good is a matter of moral craftsmanship. It can’t be produced except by individuals.’ However perfect the social machinery nothing can be achieved without reforming the individual: ‘No human society can become conspicuously better than it is now, unless it contains a fair proportion of individuals who know that their humanity isn’t the last word and who consciously attempt to transcend it.’ These are the ideas which Huxley and Heard were starting to explore around this time through various alternative communities in southern California. Pordage’s work on the archives, the Hauberk Papers, which he has come to catalogue in the castle, takes him back to the world of the English eighteenth century and the Fifth Earl’s researches into human longevity. The parody of Augustan prose recalls passages in Crome Yellow. Huxley’s view of the pursuit of eternal life is Swiftian: the dream of living for ever is in fact a nightmare and the final discovery of the 201 year old Earl in the cellar of his English house – a ‘foetal ape’ – is both well told and unambiguous in its moral point of view. The visit to England in the final chapter makes its old-world decadence appear every bit as absurd as the Hollywood-mogul personal and architectural excesses of Stoyte.
Just before the novel was published, Maria told Jeanne: ‘Aldous has no wish ever to go to England. He has almost a horror of it. In these circumstances Sanary no longer has any appeal
for us. The climate here is good; the countryside is admirable. The people are welcoming. I think that we will stay in America and make it our permanent country. ’4 But not necessarily Los Angeles itself. They were toying with the idea of purchasing a twenty acre estate at Chatsworth in the San Gabriel Valley, the setting for Mr Stoyte’s castle in the novel. ‘It’s the most beautiful spot we know.’ But work at the studio and on other projects would keep them in the city for another two years or more. The tension that always existed in Huxley between retreat and social engagement was behind this desire to leave the city. The war was making things worse, making him turn in on himself to some degree. From his desk at MGM’s Culver City studio he wrote a note to Zeitlin declining some unspecified commitment: ‘I am at the studio all day and too much pre-occupied with the war and its implications to want to do anything at night but meditate in solitude.’5 At Christmas, Gervas and Elspeth Huxley paid a brief visit to them at South Amalfi Drive and he approved of their plan to live in Kenya ‘in a world you will be a little freer to remake according to the heart’s desire than obsessed, hallucinated Europe can ever be’.6
Huxley’s initial contract with MGM was for eight weeks but the slowness of the process on what the studios called ‘Pee and Pee’ meant he had to stay on at the studio on half-pay from February 1940 ready for revisions, though he spent as little time actually at the studios as possible, not liking the physical conditions of his office. In the same month he discovered from Harper’s that he actually owed them money and found himself in a temporary financial crisis. The studios indicated that there would always be work for him there (he seemed to be proving competent at this ‘jigsaw puzzle’ craft of adaptation) but he wanted to get back to his other writing. ‘The worst thing would be if he wrote just to make money,’7 Maria told Jeanne. Pride and Prejudice was released by MGM in August 1940 with Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennett and Laurence Olivier as Mr Darcy. The director was Robert Z. Leonard. Huxley’s name was on the credits alongside Jane Murfin and the film was sumptuously produced and successful. MGM was happy with Huxley’s contribution because, Maria told Jeanne, ‘Aldous has learnt to do their kind of thing extremely well, as he does anything he really wants to do.’8
Anita Loos, who had found Huxley the job in the first place, and who continued to be a favourite neighbour at Santa Monica, later recalled that he had at first wanted to refuse the job because it was paying $2500 a week: ‘I simply can’t accept all that money to work in a pleasant studio while my family and friends are starving and being bombed in England.’9 Anita told him this was nonsense because he could use the money to help those very people. Maria, who had been listening in to the conversation on the telephone extension, thanked Anita for her realism. Loos replied: ‘The trouble with Aldous is that he is a genius who just once in a while isn’t very smart.’ The financial problem of early 1940 must have been very quickly resolved because Maria was telling Grace Hubble at the end of February: ‘Aldous is very rich now.’10 The Huxleys sent food parcels to Europe and continued to be anguished by the plight of those suffering. ‘The accounts I get of London now have a strange similarity to those which Homer gives of Hades – a place of diminished life, of vagueness and uncertainty and sub-acute despair.’11 He thought that after the war all the tyrannous forces he had been identifying in large scale organisation, in social and industrial planning, would be released, making impossible his ideal of a decentralised society.
Early in 1940 Huxley had lunch with Christopher Isherwood, whom he had first met the previous summer. Isherwood was also working at MGM and wrote in his diary: ‘How kind, how shy he is – searching painfully through the darkness of this world’s ignorance with his blind, mild, deep-sea eye. He has a pained, bewildered smile of despair at all human activity … He is still very much the prize-winning undergraduate, the nervous, fastidious, superintellectual boy. Stupidity afflicts him like a nasty smell – and how eagerly he sucks at the dry teats of books! I see how utterly he must depend on Maria, how blessed must be the relaxation in her thin Belgian arms – and I like them both, much better than before.’12 The two writers saw a lot of each other during the writing of Pride and Prejudice. Huxley admitted to Isherwood his inability to make up plots and they discussed the possibilities of a mathematical formula for doing so. Huxley, needless to say, had heard of a Russian composer who had invented a machine for writing fugues. Isherwood felt an intellectual barbarian in Huxley’s presence and thought: ‘We get along best when gossiping.’13 Isherwood also heard about the two rival plans for the next book project: a positive utopia and an ambitious ‘philosophical Summa, couched in fictional form’14 as he called it to Julian. Huxley gave a little more detail to Harold Raymond: ‘The fable will be that of a man who offers himself as a corpus vile for a prolonged experiment in the hibernation treatment which they are now using for cancer & heart disease – & who is kept on ice for a couple of centuries when he is woken up, and finds himself in a different and better kind of world. The book will take the form of a record of his experiences in both worlds, the present and the future, and of his reflections on them.’15 In fact neither of these two ideas came to anything.
Huxley was in very poor health throughout the spring, as was Maria. They were anxious about the fate of Maria’s mother and sister, Rose, who had got out of Brussels but whose whereabouts, in early June, were unknown. Sybille Bedford arrived in Southern California in July 1940 and was shocked to see her old friends: ‘I found Aldous and Maria very changed.’16 Although Aldous was not wearing spectacles any longer ‘this was not as impressive as it might have been because of his looking so drawn and strained, with a great burden of unhappiness severely locked away … And poor Maria was so thin, so worn, so nervous – and so resolutely cheerful.’ This was not apparently a personal or domestic unhappiness. Like Shakespeare’s Miranda, who had once supplied the title of his most famous work, Huxley could say: ‘I have suffered with those I saw suffer.’ It was as if the Huxleys, apparently in fortunate exile in the sun, had taken on themselves the anguish of their family and friends in Europe. When he started work again in July, however, he resolved on a completely different project – the idea given to him by Gerald Heard – of writing a biography of Père Joseph, the original eminence grise of seventeenth century France.
The presence of English writers in sunny Southern California in wartime was obviously a provocation to adverse comment at home. The British popular newspapers got up something of a campaign against the exiles in Hollywood, ‘Gone With the Wind Up’, accusing them of shirking their patriotic duty. Huxley – and even the much younger Isherwood – was over draft-age and there was little a forty-five year-old, half-blind, gangling intellectual could be expected to offer any conceivable fighting force. But he did what he could with food parcels, gifts for charity auctions, and small individual acts of help, which were all he believed he could do. Charlie Chaplin said at the Hubbies that he had been a pacifist in the last war but was now a war-monger: ‘I am a little man and I have always got along by being acquiescent, conciliatory, anxious to please, that has been my way of avoiding trouble – but before I’d submit to these bullies I’d be shot and so help me – I’d take as many of them with me as I could.’17 Anita Loos was active in William Allen White’s ‘Help the Allies’ fund-raising activities and there was no question of Huxley burying his head in the sand though events seemed to have depressed him considerably.
One sunny evening in July 1940, Huxley and Maria dined at a new restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called the Player’s Club, with Anita and the Hubbies. Grace wrote afterwards: Aldous silent when war discussed.’18 One must take this not as callous and selfish indifference but as an expression of Huxley’s inability to come to terms with the dashing of all his high ideals for peace and international co-operation expounded from the mid-1930s onwards. As Isherwood had pointed out, he was hypersensitive to such things and – writing in the middle of his illness in May – he warned Suzanne Nicolas, Maria’s sister, not to dwell too muc
h on the bad news in the media. He told her – in his impeccable and fluent French – that to allow oneself to be overcome by anxiety from too much exposure to news bulletins was to allow the war to make yet more inroads, weakening you and your family without actually mitigating any evil. He advised her to limit her exposure to ‘one or two doses a day’.19
When Huxley began work again in August – telling Frieda Lawrence that he couldn’t consider doing an adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the stage because he had lost nine months through prolonged work at the studio and his illness – the film had just been released and he was very pleased with its success. He told the Hubbies that he would have preferred Cukor as director: ‘I barely stopped my director from having Mrs Bennett fight a duel with Wickham!’ He thought the principals ‘so bad’.20 But the atmosphere, the climate of ideas, of seventeenth century France was much more to his taste and he pressed on with research for Grey Eminence. Huxley moved quickly and three months after starting his research in July was writing in October, finishing the book in May 1941. He told Lewis Gielgud that the book was ‘a strangely apposite study of Père Joseph, collaborator of Richelieu, the most astounding case of a power politician who was also a mystic’.21 Blithely informing Harold Raymond that he had abandoned his previous projects, he commended the new one as having ‘an obliquely topical interest; for Joseph was as much responsible as anyone for prolonging the Thirty Years War, which is on the direct line of ancestry to the present disasters. And he brings to focus in the most dramatic way the whole problem of the relations between politics and religious insight.’22 Getting hold of the needful books when wartime France and its libraries were out of the question was a headache. Chatto was asked to get books for him from the British Museum.
Aldous Huxley Page 38