Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Meanwhile, the eye-exercises were continuing, providing some morsel of optimism. But this in turn was threatened by a new financial crisis caused by the alarming news that Ralph Pinker’s literary agency was going into liquidation, owing money to many people, including Huxley (£548, a substantial sum in 1940s terms). Pinker had embezzled money and would eventually be jailed in Wormwood Scrubs (like his brother Eric who had earlier used client account money for gambling and ruined the New York operation).23 Since Huxley was not writing any articles or short stories at this time, and could deal with Chatto direct, he made no immediate steps to acquire a new agent. He carried on writing and by February 1941 he was able to tell Raymond that the book was threequarters done: ‘How tame and unfantastic mere fiction is, compared with history! Actual facts and people are inexpressibly strange.’24 But those facts were also ‘very depressing’ because there seemed ‘very little evidence to justify a belief that there can be any merely political and economic solution to the chronic and the periodically recurrent problems of human beings’.

  Huxley was increasingly drawn towards a mystical or religious solution for rebuilding the world after the war. Around this time both Huxley and Heard were becoming involved with the Swami Prabhavananda who ran the Vedanta Society of Southern California at 1946 Ivar Avenue, Hollywood, an ‘intentional community’. In his account of the Swami, My Guru and His Disciple (1980), Christopher Isherwood claims that Huxley was initiated into the Society at the Swami’s temple in 1940 but says that he and Heard drew apart from the Swami because of a dislike of his devotional bias. They preferred the meditational approach of Krishnamurti who had broken away from Hinduism and who objected to the guru-disciple relationship. He was based at Ojai, about a couple of hours’ drive from Los Angeles. Isherwood confesses in the book to some tension between him and Huxley as a result of the latter’s pronounced homophobia (which doesn’t seem to have been a problem, however, in the case of Gerald Heard). He was very fond of Maria, however, and her ‘charmingly outspoken’25 inquiries into his personal life.

  Père Joseph – a practising mystic who was drawn fatally into the compromises of power politics, could not have been a more suitable field of inquiry for Huxley. He now believed that anyone with ‘a gift for the knowledge of ultimate reality’ could do far more good ‘by sticking to his curious activities on the margin of society than by going to the centre and trying to improve matters there’.26 The Huxleys, however, were continuing their love affair with California. They had lunch in April with the novelist May Sarton who reported back to Koteliansky:‘I liked Aldous extremely, his quiet and simplicity, his interest in what people are doing – it was a very pleasant and easy lunch … They have a small butterfly dog and she [Maria] was blowing up balloons for him to play with … They both love California … they live in a very queer house, a Victorian idea of Hollywood with lots of oriental knick-knacks and hideous sofas but big windows opening onto the steep green valleys and a lovely garden. It is on the very crest of a hill. But they are forever and ever wanderers and strangers examining America as if it were an insect, having no part.’27 Like Sybille Bedford, she noticed Maria’s exhausted look – she used the French word, usée. Possibly to refresh their existence, the wanderers continued to eye their estate in the Valley. The owner had rejected their offer but they still had hopes of his entertaining another bid. Because Aldous had now accepted some more film work, the MS of Grey Eminence having been finished, they wouldn’t have been able to live in the desert yet and leaving it empty in the summer would not have been advisable because of the danger of fires (they had seen three on a recent weekend visit) but the beauty of the desert drew them, especially Maria: ‘An intense sky and blue yet not a deep blue; but the same tone as the expanse of sage-brush which being young was very silvery so there was silver in the sky and silver at our feet and the whole effect exhilarating and peaceful at the same time.’28

  The film work was at a new studio – Twentieth Century Fox – only ten minutes drive from their Santa Monica home and with occasional freedom to work from home. Maria was amused by Aldous setting off with his packed lunch concealed in a dispatch case ‘like an English clerk’. At Fox he was working on a treatment of a story by Charles Morgan (‘Morgan, so phoney baloney’29) . Fox had paid $27,000 for the story and Huxley’s job was to rewrite it. Around this time the Huxleys were seeing more of Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal at their community at Ojai and Gerald Heard at Laguna. Huxley was saying relatively little in his letters about his growing interest in Hindu philosophy and the idea of an ‘intentional community’ of a kind Gerald was soon to found at Trabuco. He would not himself ever consider living communally but the ideas interested him. At Ojai Krishnamurti lectured under the trees in the manner of an Indian sage. Another, more western kind of sage, was the medium Eileen Garrett, who met the Huxleys for the first time in the summer of 1941 shortly after her arrival in Hollywood. A neighbour, Mercedes de Acosta, introduced them (Garrett would later taken an interest in Huxley’s mescaline experiments). De Acosta would often accompany the Huxleys on their evening walks at sunset and she used to ask him ‘endless questions’.30 In turn, the Huxleys introduced de Acosta to Eva Hermann, ‘a lovely and sensitive person’, who lived in Santa Monica Canyon.

  The Huxleys’ circle of friends was expanding. De Acosta, though married, was a high profile Hollywood lesbian and a friend of Garbo and a member of what were known as the ‘Sewing Circles’, a sort of underground lesbian network. In his study, Huxley in Hollywood (1989), David King Dunaway asserts that Maria was part of this network. But there is no concrete evidence to support this.31 Sybille Bedford is highly sceptical about the notion of Maria as a frequenter of the lesbian bars of Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Canyon. It hardly fits with the Huxleys’ modest and early-to-bed lifestyle and their close companionship.32 More convincing is the tone of a letter to Suzanne at this time, pining for escape to the desert: ‘Our cabin in the desert is still just a dream.’33 Maria’s bisexuality is a fact, but the evidence for her involvement in any sort of lesbian scene is circumstantial and seems to rest simply on her friendship with Garbo, De Acosta and others. For Huxley’s forty-sixth birthday, Anita Loos invited many of these to her house on the ocean and there was a magnificent birthday cake and candles.

  By the autumn, Grey Eminence had appeared and Huxley was immediately at work on a new novel, Time Must Have A Stop. At the end of October, Maria told Suzanne that she and Aldous would be taking possession of their ‘cabanon au desert’,34 on New Year’s Day. In fact they were in residence by 19th December: ‘My desert, look at the address on the top of this,’35 Maria wrote to Jeanne. The address was Llano del Rio.

  1 L.447

  2 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 8 November 1939

  3 UCLA, Letter from Harold Raymond to Eugene Saxton, 5 October 1939

  4 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 15 October 1939. Author’s translation

  5 UCLA, Letter to Jake Zeitlin, 9 November 1939

  6 L.448

  7 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 12 February 1940. Author’s translation

  8 SB2.8. Quoting letter from Maria to Jeanne Neveux, 1940. Date not given

  9 Mem vol., p95

  10 HL, Hubble Diary, 26 February 1940

  11 L.451

  12 Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Vol 1, 1939–1960, pp77–8, 9 January 1940

  13 Isherwood Diaries, 29 January 1940

  14 L.452

  15 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 14 February 1940

  16 SB2.11

  17 HL, Hubble Diary, 22 December 1940

  18 HL, Hubble Diary, 2 July 1940

  19 RL, Letter to Suzanne Nicolas, 22 May 1940. Author’s translation

  20 HL, Hubble Diary 23 August 1940

  21 L.460

  22 L.461

  23 For a fuller account of the misdeeds of the Pinkers see the memoirs of Huxley’s American publisher, Cass Canfield, Up Down and Around: a publisher recolle
cts the time of his life (1971) p90ff

  24 Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 21 February 1941

  25 Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple (1980), p51

  26 L.464

  27 May Sarton Selected Letters (1997) edited by Susan Sherman. Letter to Samuel Koteliansky, 13 April 1941

  28 HL, Isherwood Papers, Letter from Maria Huxley to Christopher Isherwood, 16 July 1941

  29 HL, Hubble Diary, 26 July 1941

  30 Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart (1960), p304

  31 David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (1989) pp70–1. David King Dunaway’s thoroughly researched account both of the lesbian scene in Hollywood and of Huxley’s time in Southern California, and his valuable interviews with many who knew Huxley (some, unfortunately, currently under embargo at the Huntington Library at the request of Huxley family members) makes one reluctant to seem to dismiss his linkages too casually but I feel some more concrete evidence, other than circumstantial evidence, would be required to connect Maria to the world he describes

  32 SB in conversation with the author

  33 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Suzanne Nicolas, 13 July 1941. Author’s translation

  34 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Suzanne Nicolas, 30 October 1941

  35 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 19 December 1941

  XXVIII

  Llano

  Less than a fortnight after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 – an event which ensured that the United States would enter the war – the Huxleys took possession of their new retreat in the desert. Indeed, they had been picnicking there on the day of the raid itself. This might have looked like a withdrawal, but the ostensible reason was Maria’s health. For the sake of her lungs doctors had recommended the hot dry air of the desert rather than the fume-laden atmosphere of Los Angeles. Aldous, too, was determined to make progress with his eyes and the unsparing light of the Mojave desert, fifty miles north of Los Angeles, where they had bought the forty acre ranch at Llano del Rio, was perfect. And the Huxleys had never really been happy in cities. To read Maria’s many letters from Llano is to register her delight at the beauty of the desert scenery – however much the domestic chores and the complex demands of the simple life weighed on her. They brought with them the continuing worries about Maria’s family – her mother and Rose still wrestling with paperwork in France – and Aldous’s continuing studio commitments made them think of taking also a flat in Beverly Hills. The address at 701 South Amalfi Drive was not in fact abandoned until the middle of February. Llano, therefore, may have been a change of scene. It was not a running away.

  The publication at the end of 1941 of Grey Eminence was a further step on Huxley’s path towards the exploration of religion in general and the mystical tradition in particular. On New Years’s Day Harold Raymond wrote from Chatto to Eugene Saxton in New York to point out that ‘scarcely a year goes by without my being rung up by some idiot in Fleet Street who wants to know if it is true that Aldous has joined the Romish church’.1 There was scant likelihood of Huxley joining any of the established Christian churches – the intellectual agnostic in the twentieth century invariably turns eastwards – but his new field of intellectual exploration worried some of his admirers. A Catholic priest and a trained mystic who assisted Cardinal Richelieu was not the sort of subject they would have expected him to choose. His reasons for doing so have already been mentioned above and the subtitle, ‘A Study in Religion and Politics’, indicates the book’s scope. Huxley wanted to explore the relationship between the new religious ideas he was beginning to investigate and the world of affairs with which, as a peace activist, he had been engaged. The opening chapter of Grey Eminence which finds the barefoot friar Père Joseph walking towards Rome, meditating on such thoughts as the self being ‘An active nothing that had to be annihilated into passive nothingness if God’s will was to be done,’ must have raised some puzzled eyebrows. One cannot, either, escape a sense of self-identification as the forty-six year-old Huxley describes ‘the face of a man in middle life, weathered, gaunt with self-inflicted hardship, lined and worn with the incessant labour of the mind’ and ‘his myopic eyes’. As a boy, the friar ‘loved … to be left alone, so that he could think his own thoughts’.

  Huxley set out to challenge the ‘fashionable’ or Marxist view that economic factors determined political events. For obvious reasons, he wanted to explore the notion that ideas – and in particular mystical ideas, ideas that challenged the world of realpolitik – were as powerful as economics. He describes the religious background, and gives a sample of those ideas which he would explore more systematically in The Perennial Philosophy five years later. These included the notion that mystical theories were based on ‘the empirical facts of mystical experience’ and that ‘selfhood is a heavy, hardly translucent medium, which cuts off most of the light of reality and distorts what little it permits to pass’. This is Huxley’s central notion, that we should ‘stand out of our own light’ in order to see the eternal truths. In a revealing moment, Huxley says that the appeal of the mystical tradition was that it provided the non-Christian with ‘a religion free from unacceptable dogmas, which themselves are contingent upon ill-established and arbitrarily-interpreted facts’. In other words the natural objections of a Huxley to Christian theology could be sidestepped neatly. Some theologians, like Karl Barth, see this mystical tradition as ‘esoteric atheism’. We might also call it religion without tears. Huxley’s English admirers might also add that it was more than a little Southern Californian. But Huxley believed firmly that a world without the light from mysticism would be ‘totally blind and insane’.

  The purely historical sections of the book are told in a fairly conventional textbook fashion and it is the theorising – about religion and politics – that gives it most interest. The conclusion – from Père Joseph’s failure to prevent power politics conquering his religious instincts – was that we must cultivate ‘the art of what may be called “goodness politics”, as opposed to power politics’. Political reforms were useless without the inner reform exemplified by the contemplatives: ‘Society can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members chose to become theocentric saints.’ In the contemporary world, however, the work of the theocentrics – like the work of the peace-campaigner in the circumstances of 1941 – ‘is always marginal’. Reviewing the book in The Spectator, the historian C.V. Wedgwood saw it as ‘the authentic voice of Mr Huxley’ and concluded that it was ‘incontrovertibly the work of a thinker, whose undeviating integrity is one of the few spiritual torches left burning in the black-out’.2

  Just before leaving Santa Monica for Llano, Huxley wrote a letter to two correspondents (known only as ‘Miss Hepworth and Mr Green’) in which he gave a fascinating account of himself in 1942:

  I am an intellectual with a certain gift for literary art, physically delicate, without very strong emotions, not much interested in practical activity and impatient of routine. I am not very sociable and am always glad to return to solitude and the freedom that goes with solitude. This desire for freedom and solitude has led not only to a consistent effort to avoid situations in which I would be under the control of other people, but also to an indifference to the satisfactions of power and position, things which impose a servitude of business and responsibility … As a young man, I cared supremely for knowledge for its own sake, for the play of ideas, for the arts of literature, painting and music. But for some years now I have felt a certain dissatisfaction with these things, have felt that even the greatest masterpieces were somehow inadequate. Recently I have begun to know something about the reality in relation to which such things as art and general knowledge can be appraised. Inadequate in and for themselves, these activities of the mind can be seen in their true perspective when looked at from the vantage point of mysticism … The secret here, as in the fields of morals lies the indirect approach.3

  Not for the first time the biographer rue
fully reflects that this supremely intelligent and self-aware man was invariably his own best critic.

  One bad piece of news from France in early 1942 was that Drieu La Rochelle, the young Frenchman whom Huxley had so much admired, had become, as editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, ‘an ardent advocate of collaboration’.4 Huxley did not try to apologise for him. ‘He is an outstanding example of the strange things that happen when a naturally weak man, whose talents are entirely literary, conceives a romantic desire for action and a romantic ambition for political power and position.’ Huxley’s thoughts were running in the opposite direction from political ambition and he was now busy trying to make the ranch at Llano viable. He slightly strained his heart at the beginning of February doing some unaccustomed heavy work which caused a chronic fatigue, exacerbated, as he told Isherwood, by ‘having reached an impasse in my writing, where I don’t know whether I can achieve what I want to achieve, or how exactly to do it. I would like to do something else altogether for a little; but my physical condition makes it difficult for me to do anything but the usual sedentary work.’5 He must have looked on with amazement at the practical success of Gerald Heard in establishing a ‘monastery, at Trabuco College near Laguna on a 360 acre estate, which he had just visited, where contemplatives could be nurtured. Huxley sometimes thought he was in a kind of limbo between worldliness and pure contemplative spirituality – his irrevocable commitment to ‘analysis’ seeming to him to be inimical to both.’6