Aldous Huxley
Page 41
12 HL, Letter to Grace Hubble, 24 February 1942
13 HL, Isherwood papers, Letter from Maria Huxley to Christopher Isherwood, 17 March 1942
14 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Madame Nys, 17 March 1942. Author’s translation
15 HL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Grace Hubble, 20 April 1942
16 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 14 March 1942
17 L.480
18 W.Y. Tindall, The American Scholar, Autumn 1942, 11 (4), pp452–64
19 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 2 November 1942
20 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Suzanne Nicolas, 9 November 1942. Author’s translation
21 L.483
22 HL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Grace Hubble, 10 April 1943
23 HL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Grace Hubble, 9 August 1943
24 Ibid
25 L.497
26 L.498
27 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 17 January 1944
28 HL, Isherwood papers, Letter from Maria Huxley to Christopher Isherwood, 30 January 1944
29 Isherwood Diaries, p334, 7 February 1944
30 HL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Grace Hubble, 9 January 1944
XXIX
Atman
Back in Los Angeles at the start of 1944, Huxley expressed the hope that the year would see ‘the end of the horror in Europe’.1 He feared that the consequences of masses of dispossessed people in Europe might be a growth of ‘totalitarian centralization’ – for the Jeffersonian democracy of self-sufficient individuals he advocated ‘cannot exist where there is not a wide distribution of private property in land, utilizable goods and means of production’. For himself, his skin condition was still raw but the fact that the weeds at Llano would now have died down for the winter encouraged the Huxleys to think that they could return ‘experimentally’.2 A summer season there, however, was out of the question: ‘It is all a great nuisance and shows how dangerous it is for men of letters to do a little honest work for a change.’ His work in Beverly Hills was now an anthology with comments, along the lines of Texts and Pretexts, ‘devoted to what has been called the Perennial Philosophy – the Highest Common Factor underlying all the great religious and metaphysical systems of the world’.3 Since Huxley’s view of a peaceful world order was predicated on a shared outlook by all world citizens ‘it would seem useful and timely to produce such a book’.
Work on this project began in April or May but first he was seeing what he could do with an original story for the movies in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood. ‘I hope we shall be able to sell it, as it will solve a lot of economic problems and will make it unnecessary to go into temporary slavery at one of the studios,’4 he told Frieda Lawrence. The story was Jacob’s Hands and it concerned a faith healer in the Mojave Desert. It was published for the first time in 1998.5 Although Isherwood as a young man had been a delighted consumer of film in contrast to his friend who began by deploring the movies, he was not really any more successful in the long run as a film-writer – which can be said of most of the famous-name writers employed by the studios in the 1930s and 1940s. Isherwood went out to Llano in early March to talk about the script, which was based on a real character, an old man in the desert who healed animals. Although both writers had high hopes for this script, it cut no ice at the studios who no doubt felt at that time that such a ‘cranky’ subject was unsuitable. Isherwood later recalled: ‘Nobody liked the story – least of all James Geller, who’d been practically prepared to buy it sight unseen: he was the story editor at Warner’s, and one of Aldous’s warmest admirers. Either they thought it was goody-goody, or that it was superstitious, or both. Nevertheless, I still think it really had something.’6 Huxley wrote to Leon Lion that the writing of film scripts could be: ‘Rather interesting for a short time, but after that maddeningly irritating. It is always a great relief to be able to get back to the solitude and laissez-faire of writing for print and paper rather than celluloid.’7
Huxley was spending quite a lot of time in the desert ‘hoping to outwit the weeds’8 and indulging increasingly gloomy (and somewhat over-stated) reflections on the current state and future prospects of England as the war drew to a close. He was dependent for information on a Quaker investigation of conditions in England whose author he had just met in Los Angeles and who seems to have rather over-egged his account. He was now deep in a reading of the mystical tradition and regretted that the educational system seemed to ignore the classics of this tradition such as William Law. He told Isherwood that the anthology would be ‘like the outline of a system … a kind of miniature summa’,9 adding that the methods of science ‘are still those of Descartes, which positively guarantee the scientist against dealing with more than a small part of reality and force him to deal even with that in a very unnatural and unenlightening way’. Huxley’s conviction that the truths of mysticism were profounder than those of science had never before been stated so unambiguously.
The good news as the spring advanced was that the allergic itch was seemingly under control and Huxley could spend more and more time at Llano. Plenty of rain in the desert at the start of the year had produced a fine show of spring flowers and the grazing was good for the cattle. Their caretaker, the ‘blue-eyed Texan handyman, in his big hat and western belt slung low around his hips’10 who had caught Isherwood’s attention, was running his own herd so the ranch was ‘agreeably lively with calves, cows, steers, horses, not to mention the inevitable dogs and cats that inevitably pullulate in the country’.11 Matthew was now fully recovered and working as a reader for Warner Brothers (he would be radicalised during this time and was acting as a press officer for the union) and Maria was well. The only disappointment was what looked like a final rejection from the William Morris Agency of Jacob’s Hands. ‘It appears that the reason for the hitherto universal rejection of it is fear of the doctors,’12 Huxley told Isherwood.
At the end of July Maria wrote to Jeanne that ‘Aldous is more adorable than ever and today his new novel appeared,’13 repeating this a month later: ‘He is the most adorable of all the Aldouses I have ever known and I want you to know it.’14 Better health, a chance to return to the desert, the prospect of the war ending, or dividends from the wisdom of the East, or a combination of all of these, appeared to be creating a more serene fifty-year-old Huxley. Time Must Have A Stop, much like its predecessor, After Many A Summer, was in some measure a reversion to the sprightly wit of the novels of the 1920s. Huxley said it was his favourite amongst his novels and Maria agreed. The satire on ‘sentimental old dodoes’ or unfeeling professed humanitarians, and the occasional spasm of sexual disgust in the earlier chapters are reminiscent of the old concerns. Indeed, the Californian sun, which had brightened the previous novel, is absent entirely from this English and Italian setting. Chapter Four, in particular, is a searing indictment of stuffy bourgeois family life in England. But John Barnack says at one point: ‘Cynical realism – it’s the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.’ When the scene moves to Italy, Eustace Barnack encounters a radical bookseller who holds forth on the reasons why the French Revolution modulated into tyranny: ‘this sort of thing was bound to happen wherever people tried to do good without being good’. This is the new Huxley not the old, no longer content with destructive satire but seeking for the positive way forward. But at the same time the ‘ideas’ in this novel are more well-integrated into the story compared with preachier antecedents. It is also bolder in including hallucinatory sequences and streams of consciousness. At its heart is the character Bruno Rontini, who tells the young poet Sebastian Barnack that writing can be ‘an obstacle in the way of further knowledge. And that, maybe, is one of the reasons why most men of genius take such infinite pains not to become saints – out of self-preservation.’ Huxley was not quite at the point of renunciation, of abandoning writing in order to become a pure contemplative, but he was putting into the mouth of Rontini the notion that if a writer ‘spends
all his energies on writing and doesn’t attempt to modify his inherited and acquired being in the light of what he knows, then he can never get to increase his knowledge’. Brontini and Sebastian later visit the frescoes of San Marco and the Medicean tombs whose exalted art teaches him ‘the unutterable wearisomeness, the silly and degrading horror, of being merely yourself, of being only human’. Once again a book has ended with a perception that mystical knowledge is the only indispensable knowledge and that political amelioration, the doctrine of progress, are ineffective until they have achieved this realisation.
The novel sold well but Maria was complaining towards the end of the year that the cost of living had soared since the outbreak of the war. Nonetheless her health and that of Aldous was good. She was no longer thin, nor was she suffering from migraines. In a letter to Jeanne she said that they had no plans to return to Europe once the war was over and that for now she wanted only to spend more time at Llano: ‘autumn being the most beautiful season there’.15 During the stays in Beverly Hills she pined for the snows of the San Gabriels ‘which are as close as the Apuan mountains were at Forte’. At Christmas, hoping this would be the last time they did so in wartime, they despatched to Mary Hutchinson in rationed England a packet of figs, tinned tongue, cherry jam, gelatine dessert, orange juice, cocoa and onion flakes.16 Another Christmas gift was a story for Olivia called The Crows of Pearblossom, which was published posthumously in 1967. It is a pleasant children’s story full of local colour from Llano and Pearblossom where Olivia lived with her mother, Rose. There are cottonwood trees, alfalfa grass and rattlesnakes and the tale – about a rattlesnake who steals crow’s eggs – could be seen perhaps as a pacifist parable for the snake is defeated by intelligent strategy rather than by being killed. There is possibly a touch of self-mockery in the character of Mr Crow: ‘This is serious,’ he said. ‘This is the sort of thing that somebody will have to do something about.’ Mr Crow consults the owl for advice: ‘Owl’s a thinker. His ideas are always good.’ Mr Huxley at the end of 1944 was at work on his anthology of good ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, knowing that after the war there would be plenty of people wishing to ‘do something’ and in need of the right intellectual basis on which to found their actions.
In January, Maria’s wish was granted and they were back in the desert. She told Sybille Bedford that Aldous was about to embark on a painting bout, not having painted since arrival in the USA. He had also been, in spite of his eyes, learning to drive the car in the desert: ‘He will not take a licence or drive on the main highways and in town but he adores it and still likes speed … Even the cattle stare in wonderment when he drives through them … And he smiles and his cap is always on one side or the other for the setting sun and you know how comic and rakish and adorable he looks then.’17 She said how much they had been enjoying Christopher Isherwood’s new novel, Prater Violet, which Maria had been reading aloud. ‘ … he is a sort of habitue sans habitudes. Part of the family. But no successor to Eddy [Sackville-West] … or Raymond [Mortimer]. Somehow those days are all over and things change … We have long walks in the evenings and after dinner we read. But we dine very late and until then we live in our houses. The nights under the same roof but the days well apart. It suits us.’
Eating their own eggs and bread and cream from neighbours they delighted in their routine of ‘monotony’ for in truth: ‘Everything is wonderful about my life.’ Soon she was telling Jeanne about Aldous painting in a long white smock: ‘You would not recognise Aldous. So serene and above all sweet … He helps in the housework now, drying up while Don Juan plays on the gramophone – a cracked record we can’t afford to replace … All his wonderful qualities that you know so well are developed to the point where even I am surprised.’18 Unaware of this praise, Huxley was busy deprecating himself as usual, telling E.S.P. Haynes, who had liked his last novel, that he was ‘sadly aware that I am not a born novelist, but some other kind of man of letters, possessing enough ingenuity to be able to simulate a novelist’s behaviour not too unconvincingly’.19 Still in the grip of Sheldon’s theory of types about which he had just written for Harper’s, Huxley said he was ‘the wrong shape for a storyteller and sympathetic delineator of character within a broad social canvas. The fertile inventors and narrators and genre painters have all been rather burly genial fellows … So what chance has an emaciated fellow on stilts?’ Sheldon’s analysis of the relationship between shape and mind was, he claimed, ‘the first serious advance in the science of man since the days of Aristotle’. He was also corresponding at this time with the German novelist Hermann Broch, whose trilogy he had greatly admired and whose book The Death of Virgil he was reviewing for the New York Herald Tribune. He told Broch that his book was valuable ‘socially’ because it pointed to the profound dangers of the ‘aesthetic temptation’20 which led intellectuals away from the most valuable kinds of knowledge. He told Henry Miller that his new book would present the doctrine ‘taught by every master of the spiritual life for the last three thousand years – a doctrine of which the modern world has chosen to be ignorant, preferring radios and four-motored bombers and salvation-through-organization, with the catastrophic consequences that we see all about us.’21 His publisher, too, was bombarded with these solutions from the desert: ‘Personally I come more and more to believe in decentralization and small-scale ownership of land and means of production.’22 But Huxley feared that the need to reconstruct would result in at best an outbreak of dirigisme at worst state tyranny.
During the summer the Huxleys decided to buy a chalet in the mountains at Wrightwood, not too far from Llano, but without the risk of allergenic flora. The move was rather an abrupt one, as Maria confessed to Rosalind Rajagopal, the Huxley’s Californian friend: ‘We have actually bought, rather suddenly and vaguely the most hideous little house at Wrightwood.’23 The Huxleys’ genius for acquiring unsuitable houses on the spur of the moment had not deserted them. Wrightwood is nearly six thousand feet above sea level and a very attractive spot in the mountains today – a resort for walkers, and, a little higher up, those using ski and snowboard. As with Llano, the Huxleys did not move in immediately – the cabin needed work to make it properly habitable. They did not take up full-time residence until early 1947. In July they paid a visit and climbed to eight thousand feet, entranced with the view, until they heard the sound of a rattlesnake in the undergrowth. Maria was greatly disappointed because she knew that this meant Aldous could not be allowed to go on his customary walks in case he did not see one of the coiled snakes (a reminder that for all the praise of Dr Bates, Huxley never had perfect vision). On their descent they came across two bears ambling across the road, another hazard (although the ever-informative Huxley pointed out that bears were vegetarian)24 From Maria’s point of view Wrightwood was not as attractive as her desert paradise: ‘The windows do not open on to any horizon. At night I can see neither the moon nor the stars; in the morning there is no huge and golden awakening.’
The following month Maria suddenly announced to Jeanne that they had crazily bought a second house at Wrightwood. ‘To the degree that the other one is gloomy, ugly, stuffy, sombre, cramped, and horrible, the new one is glorious, in the open air and full of light with windows, sky, and views (relative, as all views will be for the rest of my life, in comparison with Llano).’25 Huxley wrote to Krishnamurti at Ojai offering him the chance to use the first cabin as a mountain retreat: ‘Wrightwood itself is at six thousand feet and the temperature is always agreeable, never going above ninety, when there was a heat-wave in the neighbouring desert of over a hundred. Mornings and evenings are cool and the air is stimulating.’26 There was a nearby store and electricity in the cabin. The new house, a former forest ranger’s station on Highway Two, had an adjoining stable for the ranger’s horse, which the Huxleys altered into a studio for Aldous. Wrightwood’s local historian, Pat Krig, who was a child when the Huxleys arrived, told me that she remembered them as being rather ‘sombre’ and ‘remote’ residents who
kept themselves to themselves. She felt that their alterations had detracted from the ‘mountainy’ feel of the cabin but its present owner – like the Huxleys a refugee from city life, on the East Coast – was delighted with the house and its setting of pine trees: ‘It’s good to see the seasons again!’ he told me. The house was situated in ten acres of land and, just a little way down the hill there was a silver-fox farm, which they were assured would not smell. It was certainly small, but conversion of the stable block could solve that problem. Maria struggled to be philosophical about the loss of Llano: ‘It could have been a beautiful dream but in reality it was a nightmare and I couldn’t live that way. I believe the physical work helped to get me through the war, ill-health, Matthew going away … it was there that for the first time in my life I found steady and reliable health.’27 By October 1945 the ranch at Llano was up for sale (though it wasn’t sold until early 1947) and Huxley was at work again at the studios on a new film.
The Perennial Philosophy, which appeared in September 1945, should not have surprised his readers – a respect for the mystical tradition having been present in his work for a decade – but it clearly did so. A typical reviewer was C.E.M. Joad in the New Statesman who lamented that the Huxley of 1929 who could write in an essay in Do What You Will that he was ‘a worshipper of life who accepts all the conflicting facts of existence’ had now become a devotee of the Highest Common Factor. ‘If a choice must be made,’ Joad declared, ‘the unregenerate Huxley of sixteen years ago seems to be infinitely preferable to the sour-faced moralist of today. The trouble with Huxley is and always has been intellectual whole-hoggery. Ideas will go to his head. He should read Aristotle on moderation.’28 To call Huxley a ‘sour-faced moralist’ seems a little excessive but the charge of ‘intellectual whole-hoggery’ has a grain of truth in it. In practice, Huxley’s politics – after the bumpy confusions of the late 1920s – had emerged very clearly. He was a decentralist, a believer in self-governing small communities, and a hater of state socialism and state fascism. Utopian politics of right and left he saw as inescapably totalitarian – because they wished to steamroller opposition to their imposed blueprint – and he was a libertarian and a pluralist in politics.