Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Meanwhile the work on the house at Llano continued. The word means a level field or even ground in Spanish and it was situated in the Antelope valley close up to the San Gabriel Mountains. It was more like an oasis than a ranch, with a small orchard, a pool they could swim in, and a vineyard from whose grapes the couple once tried to make wine, treading the grapes with their bare feet. Huxley may have been unaware at first (though he would later write on the topic) of the socialist community founded at Llano in 1915 by a radical lawyer, Job Harriman. They secured water rights and cleared the area of its characteristic creosote bush, burro bush and Joshua tree but, as Huxley’s later essay showed, the community fell apart as a result of internal quarrels.7 Today this area of desert is, as a recent writer, Mike Davis, put it, ‘prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis’.8 Subtopia is on the march and when I visited it in early 2000 there was a sense – in the windswept homesteads heavily fortified by wire against which packs of dogs hurled themselves at unwelcome visitors – that this territory now partook more of paranoid America than of utopian experiment. I finally retreated at a sign which read NEVER MIND THE DOG WATCH OUT FOR THE OWNER over the picture of the end of a gun barrel.

  The Huxleys lived near to an oasis and they improved the house – which Anita Loos said was ‘just like the shack where Huckleberry Finn’s father died’9 – by adding another storey and constructing a hexagonal unit where Huxley slept and worked. They had to install a new pump after the caretaker managed to destroy the existing one and they buried an electricity generator out in the yard, keeping the trapdoor in position with a terracotta bust of Gerald Heard. This was referred to as ‘Gerald’s Tomb’. Christopher Ishwerwood was once a guest and, forgetting an injunction not to use the lights in the night, he flicked a switch and the engine ‘started up with a clatter like a motor-bike and woke everybody else up’.10 Maria spent the first weeks and months at Llano often alone because Aldous was working on a new film project – Jane Eyre – for Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Robert Stevenson, it would eventually appear in 1944, with Huxley gaining his second screen credit jointly with Stevenson and John Houseman. Orson Welles would play Rochester and Joan Fontaine Jane Eyre. Maria worried about the financial burden they had taken on in buying the property: ‘I hope we won’t come to regret this house … We are almost prisoners here … I am full of worries and anxieties.’11 Huxley cabled Chatto for information about his royalties and was told that 1941 had yielded £843 in English royalties alone. The rebuilding and the endless round of domestic chores such as cleaning windows (not really Maria’s forte) was a bit much for her but she consoled herself that she was at least ‘in my desert now’.12 And as spring came, after the blizzards and hurricanes, the blossom and the signs of green on the trees became ‘so beautiful that it catches one’s breath to look at it’.13

  The studio gave Huxley a week off in the second week of March because he was exhausted and at the end of the week Maria found it ‘melancholy’ to see him going to get the bus at Palmdale in the first sun. Matthew was spending a lot of time with her and was looking well. He helped with the work on the house and she gloried in the quiet time: ‘How awful that life in L.A. was. Spending my time rushing and catering for a crowd; and being in the crowd and talking to the crowd.’ Her dog Loulou and the five kittens played freely in the spring sunshine and both she and Matthew were reading the writings of Vivekananda, the chief disciple of Ramakrishna, founder of the Hindu sect which had established the Vedanta Society of Southern California where Isherwood spent so much time with the Swami Prabhavananda. The work had advanced sufficiently by the spring for Maria to have a ‘bright and cheerful’14 kitchen which doubled up as a dining-room, a small office almost entirely taken up with a desk they had bought cheaply, her own bedroom which, after the bed and dressing-table left no room to move. She slid along the edge of the room to a bow window which gave a view of the snow-covered San Gabriel mountains and her almond trees in blossom and the irrigation ditch. In Huxley’s bedroom his bed was covered with the same blue and red fabric that had been at Sanary. There was a tiny bathroom. The caretaker who lived in the former post-office helped with all the big jobs. There was a worry about water because intensive wartime cultivation was using up all the available supplies.

  But in spite of all these little difficulties the Huxleys were happy at Llano at this period. ‘The desert beyond is always immense and calming, ’ Maria told Grace Hubble. ‘So you see I do feel very happy even if my hands ache with so much unused muscle stretching and squeezing.’15 They were almost self-sufficient and bottled and preserved their own fruit and engaged in permanent warfare with the rabbits and desert hares, squirrels, rats and coyotes who came to feast on their produce. By April, Aldous was there more or less permanently and the film work must have been quite light for he was at work again on a novel, or trying to be at work on one: ‘Writing has been at something of a standstill for some time. Or, to be more accurate, I have been going round and round, and poking my nose into a succession of alleys that turned out, after exploration, to be blind.’16 As a way out of the block he proposed to write a short book of ‘pure utility’ about the Bates method of visual education. His aim was to produce something of practical benefit to millions of people and also to strike a blow for the Bates method in the face of determined opposition from the optometric establishment. The book was written quickly and finished in July, after which Huxley went to spend three weeks with Gerald Heard at the monastery in Trabuco. He now turned his mind towards another ‘biographico-historical subject’.17 He told Chatto: ‘I have in mind one of the most fantastically strange stories in all French history – the story of the demoniac possession of the nuns of Loudun …’ But it was to be another five years before The Devils of Loudun was published (in part because Llano in wartime was hardly the place to find research materials for such a book). The Art of Seeing, meanwhile, came out in October.

  The book’s account of Huxley’s own predicament has already been discussed but this was not meant to be an uplifting confessional self-help manual. It was intended as a scientific – but also practical – attempt to ‘correlate the methods of visual education with the findings of modern psychology and critical philosophy’. He complained that ophthalmologists were ‘obsessively’ preoccupied with ‘only one aspect of the total, complex process of seeing – the physiological’. They had paid exclusive attention to the eyes ‘not at all to the mind which makes use of the eyes to see with’. He said he had been treated by men with the highest eminence in their profession ‘but never once did they so much as faintly hint that there might be a mental side to vision, or that there might be wrong ways of using the eyes and mind as well as right ways, unnatural and abnormal modes of visual functioning as well as natural and normal ones’. The book set out to show how a different approach might be adopted. It is written with all Huxley’s exemplary clarity and, to the lay person, is very persuasive. Chatto was inundated after publication with requests from readers for names of Bates practitioners and the book sold very well. Sixty years on, however, Huxley would seem to have failed in his aim of altering the professional approach of ophthalmology. Bates remains a fringe character for most specialists. What is interesting perhaps, is that Huxley at this time was thoroughly immersing himself in Eastern philosophy and Hindu scripture, involving himself in the Vedanta Society which studied those scriptures, and exploring the transcendental ‘mind over matter’ dimension of this tradition of thought yet, in spite of the central premise of The Art of Seeing that ‘the human mind-body is a single unit’, the book is written in a wholly scientific register. There is no explicit disclosure of Huxley’s private agenda.

  In the autumn of 1942 an article appeared in The American Scholar with the title, ‘The Trouble with Aldous Huxley’. The author, W.Y. Tindall, lamented ‘the decline of the novelist or, better, his ascent from novelist to mystic’. And the article laid the blame on Gerald Heard. Although this article is written in a would-be
urbane tone of dry mockery, it is not without insight. It claims that Huxley’s infatuation with Lawrence was a dry-run for his infatuation with Heard. ‘For all his intelligence, Huxley cannot resist a dominant personality.’18 Moreover, ‘beneath the desperate frivolities of Huxley had lurked the moralist and the disappointed idealist whose complaint against the world was that it had failed to conform to his standards of truth and beauty’. As a professional literary critic Tyndall was appalled at the introduction of moral issues into aesthetics, claiming: ‘the beautiful has been sacrificed to the good and the true’. He went on: ‘master and disciple retired to California where, when they are not walking with Greta Garbo or writing for the cinema, they eat nuts and lettuce perhaps and inoffensively meditate, Huxley in Hollywood and Heard on a convenient mountainside’. This article is interesting as an early example of that marriage of academic conservatism and popular prejudice that has been the making of so many successful second careers in the media for dons right up to the present day.

  Huxley almost certainly didn’t read Tyndall’s piece and was anyway preoccupied with his health. From Llano he informed Julian that his nervous system had thrown up a catalogue of ailments: ‘heart irregularity, intestinal spasm, hives, bronchitis and the continuous falling off of one of my finger nails, which was evidently innervated and so inadequately supplied with blood’. Fortunately, ‘an excellent and rather crazy Viennese doctor’19 had put him on a ‘stringent meatless, [the Huxleys had been vegetarian for some time now] milkless, sugarless and saltless’ diet. The autumn weather was another balm. ‘Here it is the most beautiful season,’ Maria wrote to Suzanne, ‘warm and crisp and golden.’20 Aldous told Mary Hutchinson, ‘Meanwhile one writes and one does what infinitesimally little one can to help in alleviating the misery of the world. Of books I don’t read much outside the field of mystical religion, which is what now interests me beyond anything else and in which, I believe, lies the sole hope of the world.’ Building up arms would not stop conflict only ‘some sort of common belief, the holding of which makes people reluctant to embark on these enormous suicides’. Because the world of global politics affected everyone this common belief could not be Christian or any other dogma ‘but must be based on something that all people can experience and that has a place in all the existing religious traditions. Mysticism is the only thing that meets the requirements.’ He refined this argument in a letter to Julian, saying that: ‘Mysticism also has the enormous merit of being concerned with the eternal present, and not, as humanism is, with the future.’21 By contrast political religions like Nazism and Communism or any kind of Utopianism were ruthless and ready to liquidate ‘the people it happens to find inconvenient now for the sake of the people who are going, hypothetically, to be so much better and happier and more intelligent in the year 2000’.

  Huxley spent most of 1943 based at Llano, working at a new novel, reading further in the mystical tradition. The war meant that royalty funds in England could not be released – which gave some financial anxiety because the Huxleys now had Maria’s youngest sister Rose staying with them with her four year old daughter Olivia and her new baby, Sigfrid. There were also sporadic food shortages and gasoline rationing. Continued good sales of Grey Eminence and The Art of Seeing meant, however, that English royalties for 1943 would be £3,679, considerably more than in recent years, and by April Huxley was actually offering to invest some money in shares in Chatto.

  At Llano the Huxleys were discovering, if not self-sufficiency, then a modicum of husbandry skills. The previous year Maria had bought ten pounds of sunflower seeds, not realising what a vast crop this would yield, and now they were planting radishes. Maria looked out through the kitchen windows (the only ones she bothered to clean because ‘their eyes open on all I love’22) on ‘a queer fellow of an author wearing blue jeans and thinking he can grow radishes. But Aldous waters them from such a height and with such gusto that the head gets buried and the tails stand in the air as if they were doing yogi exercises and so all we get are dry roots and laughs’. Huxley was looking well and enjoying his Tolstoyan labours. Matthew, now back in the US Army medical corps after an appendicitis operation, wrote letters which delighted his parents. ‘He loves us both, that is so obvious in the letters, and the year we spent together here has meant much to him.’ In spite of their bouts of ill-health and the hard work of living in the desert, and the horror of the war, there is a sense that this was a nearly idyllic time for the Huxleys. They ate their own potatoes, red peppers, onions, carrots, aubergines, tomatoes. But then, some time in the early summer, Aldous, ‘who was supremely well and happy’23 in Maria’s words, plucked at some poison ragweed in the orchard and caught a rash which seemed to react badly with the dry air of the desert and so he left for town. Then in July he went to stay yet again with Gerald Heard at Trabuco throughout July and August. Maria stayed behind at Llano, swimming in the oasis pool ‘with the bull-bats drinking in swoops in spite of my presence and the doves timorously looking from the edge and never risking a drink till I am gone … The desert is still beautiful and I still love it more than anything.’24 The only real cloud was Matthew’s health. He had been invalided out of the army with German measles and other complications and came back to Llano to rest. By September his father was writing to him suggesting that it was now time to be a little more directed and giving him a rather long and uncharacteristic talking-to that had about it some of the earnest censoriousness of a Victorian paterfamilias. He was encouraging Matthew to go to Ojai and to make his reading more purposeful and systematic. ‘Promiscuous reading can become a really pernicious addiction, like oversmoking or drinking.’25

  Huxley was directing his own efforts more or less successfully and, by the end of the year, the manuscript of Time Must Have A Stop was almost completed. He told his new American publisher at Harper’s, Cass Canfield (Eugene Saxton had died in the summer) that the new novel ‘may be described as a piece of the Comédie Humaine that modulates into a version of the Divina Commedia’.26 He added that he had deliberately ‘kept light’ the story and that overall it was ‘an odd sort of book’. To Harold Raymond in London he also promised that the end was in sight for a book ‘which has been riding my back, like the Old Man of the Sea, for the past eighteen months’.27 The truth, however, was that Huxley wasn’t wholly satisfied with it and he agreed with Maria when she read the manuscript at the end of January that they should seek a second opinion. Accordingly, Maria wrote to Christopher Isherwood telling him that Aldous had never before sought an opinion in this way. But he had now told Maria: ‘I will ask Christopher to read it. I would like him to. He has very good judgement.’28 And so Isherwood came out to Llano at the beginning of February 1944: ‘It’s the kind of spring day on which you feel that perhaps you will live for ever. Everything seems eternally alive … There is no sign of the war, except the olive-drab army trucks, moving almost invisibly through the landscape, along the road below the house.’29 Before supper Maria was in the kitchen ‘cooking wildly, with everything boiling over’. She was glad to be back at Llano away from ‘that horrid town’ though the rash problem had made them reluctantly move back to Los Angeles, to a ‘large comfortable and gay’30 flat at 145½ South Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills. ‘How blissfully happy we are again in a curiously and hitherto unsuspected, dove-grey or wrath grey or even English-grey desert,’ she told Isherwood.

  The Huxleys would keep Llano on until February 1947. It was clear, however, that it was not just the allergy that had sent them away. Maria suddenly realised during the summer that the size and remoteness and sheer difficulty of managing the ranch ‘would always make me remain a hustled slavy. Aldous made it quite clear on one of our talks that never could he take an interest in material things; that if he did it intruded on his work and disturbed him.’ The decision was inevitable but still hard for Maria: ‘It is a pang! Nobody loved the place as much as I do. No-one knows it as I got to know it through so many silent and peaceful days.’ And so their dream ended, a dream o
f escape and tranquillity. Aldous was about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.

  1 UCLA, Letter from Harold Raymond to Eugene Saxton, 1 January 1942

  2 C.V Wedgwood, The Spectator, 5 December 1941, p538. Watt, pp335–36

  3 L.473–4

  4 L.472

  5 L.474

  6 L.476

  7 See Robert Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (1983) and Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)

  8 Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990) p3

  9 HL, Hubble Diary, 4 January 1942

  10 Mem. Vol., p157

  11 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Suzanne Nicolas, 29 January 1942. Author’s translation