Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  As Huxley pressed on with all these projects in seclusion in the mountains at Wrightwood, Maria wrote to Suzanne: ‘I think Aldous is a little down without his mixed harem.’13 As autumn drew on to winter the first snow came at Wrightwood and Aldous was out shovelling in order to get to his studio. He and Maria spent their last Christmas at Llano – where life was a little more spacious – before moving permanently to Wrightwood on 26 February 1947. From here Huxley sent the play to John Van Druten, who collaborated (secretly, he didn’t want his role acknowledged) in rewriting it. According to Beth Wendel, who later collaborated with Huxley on another of his plays, Huxley had no visual imagination whatsoever and the collaborator had to be the one who visualised it on stage and who supplied details of sets, action, entrances and exits. Huxley confessed to Van Druten that he wasn’t ‘artist enough’ to put what he called ‘the whole truth’ into a play. But maybe that couldn’t be done at all: ‘That is why, I think, I have never cared profoundly for the theatre.’14 A disarming admission from someone trying to run two scripts at once and from one who would continue to dream until his death of the possibility of theatrical success. In January 1947 he wrote to Ted McKnight Kauffer that work on both scripts of Gioconda was progressing in the usual jig-saw puzzle way: ‘It is rather maddening work … But having embarked on it, I feel I had better finish the damned thing as well as I can – even though it probably won’t be much good, as I am far from a born playwright.’15 Huxley’s modest view of his abilities both as novelist and playwright – he thought he lacked the necessary innate talents for supreme distinction in both – does not seem to have led him to believe he should lay down his pen. He would be working at Wrightwood (though keeping on the South Doheny Drive flat for the rest of the year) and bidding farewell finally to Llano in February, ‘very sadly, but feeling that it is the sensible thing to do, in view of the difficulties and troubles it involves’.

  On the first night at Wrightwood, Maria wrote to Jeanne that Aldous was delighted with the new house now that his library was installed and the central heating working. It was a more practical house than the one at Llano, with its electricity and hot water: ‘But it is ugly.’16 A few days later Maria wrote again to give Jeanne some names of people in London she could contact. Jeanne had gone to London to train as a teacher of the Bates method of visual education. Maria’s list is a roll-call of the old friends from the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with Mary Hutchinson, who was living in Charlotte Street and whom Maria claimed not to have been in contact with since the outbreak of war. (She started a letter to Mary but abandoned it, saying broken threads are ‘very difficult to re-knot’.17) She told Jeanne that she had no desire to renew the acquaintance and described her former friend cuttingly as a ‘nymphomaniac’.18 Raymond Mortimer was another contact who also occupied an interesting milieu but it was one ‘like all of Bloomsbury very difficult to penetrate, and I always had a horror of it’. Eddy Sackville-West, she said, like Raymond, ‘always had a weakness for me’. Yvonne Franchetti from Forte was now married to Hamish Hamilton, the publisher: ‘All that is so far in the past that it’s like the memory of something read in a novel.’ Naomi Royde-Smith could introduce Jeanne to the world of the theatre. And finally, there was Constance Collier who had been a Hollywood neighbour and close friend: ‘Aldous and I love Constance. She sees life in the same way as we do and loves us also.’

  In her cold chalet in the mountains, Maria was looking back on this world without apparent regret. But there was always a sense of fragility in Maria’s moods. She told Christopher Isherwood that they had been to see Peggy and Bill Kiskadden: ‘One of those wonderful Californian evenings when the sun is just warm enough and the air cool enough and there is the promise of so much happiness if we did not mar it.’19 The Huxleys had read Isherwood’s letter from England, sitting in the sun in one of their favourite spots in Los Angeles, the Farmer’s Market, where they so often lunched and where Huxley first met Stravinsky: ‘and suddenly all was covered by the English greyness which made me suffer so much always because I was not born in it’. A key perhaps to the Huxleys’ life of wandering? Isherwood was also told of another evening with Evelyn Waugh, arranged by Sir Charles Mendl: ‘Waugh was wearing a little black hat on top of his little face and a striped suit over his little body; terrible.’ Maria thought she had put her foot in it by asking Waugh’s wife what was making her so melancholy – ‘they walked off, all three, and we were left – uncomfortable. When I think of our lives I realize that we know only very nice people.’

  These days she passed the ranch at Llano on the way to Wrightwood ‘without a pang … almost … But when I come down from that gloomy shut-in valley (where at night I see only three stars and an electric pole in the narrow sky) into the large desert which is a mass of sun and colour as well as luminous large clouds in spring and where the eye goes further and further and the heart with it endlessly, then I mind more than I should.’ But Aldous, in spite of a brief health scare (when his heart beat suddenly increased) was happy, as was Matthew, in spite of the fact that his mother was slightly scandalised at his living with his partner at the other house in Wrightwood. Maria was tired: ‘Having two houses, and Aldous being the most absent-minded of men, he never realises quite what is going on with me. That has had its advantages (in the past when I was young) as well as disadvantages. A. is so good and so loving that my whole life is filled with it. But the tiredness caused by human beings is unbearable and insurmountable. A mere walk is enough for me. That is one of the reasons why I fear so much a trip to Europe.’20 Aldous himself was happy and full of brightness, ‘and we walk alongside the dark lakes under a menacing sky. He started the new novel the day before yesterday and talks to me about it with passion; I tell myself, however, that it must be very disappointing for him to talk to someone who understands so little about the subject … But Aldous never complains about lack of friends. We have none. None with whom he can exchange “intellectual fireworks” as an American woman put it to us … Aldous has become a very remarkable and significant person.’

  Maria realised that life would be easier in Los Angeles, with easily available domestic hep: ‘But it is our double life and our love of LIBERTY which ensures that I am a slave. I am not seriously complaining. For we have chosen this and it is very sweet and very peaceful to be alone during the whole day and just the two of us together in the evening’. And so she put up with the house, ‘ugly, uncomfortable and far too small’, as it was. Perhaps if Aldous had a secretary … But he did not. Her tiredness was ‘because Aldous, who is worth the whole world to me, is still a physical burden in the sense that he is totally impractical and doesn’t even want to do anything. He has absolutely no wish to concern himself with practical matters. He doesn’t want to talk about them or even think about them’. Maria felt that this exhaustion and lack of inward calm that was being imposed on her was in direct contradiction to the ideas being argued out in his books. But in spite of all this ‘he is the sweetest and most adorable and most intelligent man in the world’. That serene Huxley was the one seen by Cyril Connolly, who arrived to write about him for Horizon. He saw Huxley’s case of ‘intellectual adaptation’ to Hollywood as exceptional: ‘The Californian climate and food creates giants but not genius, but Huxley has filled out into a kind of Apollonian majesty; he radiates both intelligence and serene goodness, and is the best possible testimony to the simple life he leads and the faith he believes in, the only English writer, I think, entirely to have benefited by his transplantation and whom one feels exquisitely refreshed by meeting.’21

  Towards the end of March, Huxley began to signal that a projected historical novel about Catherine di Siena was foundering (he had also abandoned an attempt to do a new version, with Anita Loos, of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer). Loos was told that he was now thinking of a novel about ‘a post-atomic-war society’22 and Harold Raymond was promised something ‘half grotesque and half serious’ along these lines: ‘A strictly contemporary novel seems very
difficult to write, as the present world is so obviously provisional and makeshift, so that individual actions have an air of pointlessness, while anything in the nature of satire falls far short of everyday reality.’23 Against this background he struggled on with the script, replacing his usual jigsaw puzzle metaphor for screenwriting with a new one which compared it to carpentry. The censors were giving problems because of the mention of pre-marital sex and divorce, ‘the principle of the Johnson Office’s morality being that nothing may be said in a decent way but all may be suggested indecently’.24 In the Rank studio where he was working on A Woman’s Vengeance, (that title having been bestowed by ‘the all-powerful Jewish gentlemen in charge of distribution’25) Huxley overheard a remark that would end up in his next novel. The Studio casting manager told his director, Zoltan Korda: ‘In this studio not even Jesus Christ could get a raise in salary.’ The Korda brothers tried to revive the idea of filming Point Counter Point but without any outcome. Jeanne’s husband, the French playwright Georges Neveux, was also working on a version in French of The Gioconda Smile.

  As soon as Huxley could get free from the studio, which was at the end of September, he set off with Maria by car for New York. This was the first time since 1938 that they had left California and, for Maria at least, it was a welcome break. She told Rosalind Rajagopal that she now had ‘an absolute horror of California. I would not mind if I never went back.’26 The New Yorker ran Huxley down during his stay, interviewing him in his Central Park South apartment. ‘His sight is still poor, but he continues to eschew glasses and goes in for the optical exercises he thinks have helped him,’27 the magazine’s diarist noted. Describing the simple life of Wrightwood, it noted how he wrote in the mornings, again in the afternoon for a couple of hours, and then after dinner ‘he and his wife play phonograph records or she reads to him – generally novels like War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, which he likes to re-read or re-listen to, every few years.’ Huxley spoke warmly of Korda’s work on A Woman’s Vengeance. ‘We didn’t suffer from the extraordinary Hollywood assumption that twelve incompetent writers equal one competent one.’ He recalled working on Pride and Prejudice: ‘finding forty or fifty scripts on the story piled up in my office. It gave one the most peculiar feeling – all this wasted energy, this huge pile of pulp that no one looked at.’ He then described the new post-atomic novel and declared: ‘It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a novel today. There’s such a sense of general precariousness … Now the whole social order is running down in the most hopeless way, with no prospect of amelioration in the immediate future … It’s Malthus’s nightmare come true … The touching assumption that man has conquered nature is absolute bosh.’ This was vintage Huxley, telling the world, in exquisitely modulated accents, how awful things were. Like the Buddha, in his favourite quotation from that source, he would tell the media: ‘I will show you sorrow, and the ending of sorrow.’

  With Maria at the wheel of the Ford, they drove back to Los Angeles – finding themselves marooned briefly in the Blue Bird Motel at Little Rock, Arkansas during torrential rains – and to Wrightwood where Maria announced to Matthew: ‘I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have decided we do give up Wrightwood … Now Aldous and I long again for the desert.’ She added: ‘I could leave California in an hour, forever, without one regret! Including all the people it contains, which is very unkind of me.’28 The house was cold, it needed to be kept warm to avoid freezing-up, and it tied up all their capital in a house that they could not spend all their time in – as Aldous saw no prospect of being relieved of movie-work for the time being. Maria had punished herself for Aldous’s sake and wanted to do so no longer. In fact the house would be kept on for more than a year but they would spend most of their time at the flat in Beverly Hills and in travelling: for the next year, 1948, would see their first visit to Europe since the mid-1930s.

  1 National Library of Wales, Letter from Paul E. Evans to George Ewart Evans, 25 September 1945

  2 L.535

  3 HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview between David King Dunaway and Dorris Halsey, 12 August 1985

  4 RL. Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 20 October 1945

  5 L.537

  6 L.539

  7 Reading, Letter from Maria Huxley to Harold Raymond, 21 May 1946

  8 L.545

  9 UCLA, Letter to Reginald Pole, 14 September 1946

  10 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 26 May 1946

  11 RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 29 July 1946

  12 Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 23 July 1946

  13 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Suzanne Nicolas, 23 October 1946. Author’s translation

  14 L.560

  15 L.565

  16 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 26 February 1947. Author’s translation

  17 RL, Cancelled draft of letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson on part of sheet used to write to Jeanne Neveux, 20 March 1947

  18 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 3 March 1947. Author’s translation

  19 HL, Isherwood papers. Letter from Maria Huxley to Christopher Isherwood, 6 March 1947

  20 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 20 March 1947. Author’s translation

  21 Cyril Connolly, Horizon, October 1947, p11

  22 L.569

  23 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 1 April 1947

  24 L.572

  25 L.576

  26 SB2.84 quoting letter from Maria Huxley to Rosalind Rajagopal, October 1947

  27 The New Yorker, 25 October 1947, p27

  28 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley, 21 December 1947

  XXXI

  Europe

  Huxley hoped, at the start of 1948, that the Korda brothers, pleased with the success of A Woman’s Vengeance, would want to film, on location, another of his short stories with an Italian setting, ‘The Rest Cure’. During the war he had not stirred out of California and his comments on Europe, while full of compassion for those suffering in the war and its aftermath, had not evinced any desire to go there. Some in England felt resentful of those who, as they saw it, had sat out the war in the sun and as late as February the following year when Ape and Essence was offered to the Times Book Club its manager, Andrew Shirley, told Chatto that not merely was the book’s futuristic setting unpopular: ‘I am also bound to observe that Huxley’s only solution is the one he adopted himself in World War II, namely escape’,1 When Chatto responded promptly that Huxley had gone to the USA long before the war ‘solely because he would have been stone-blind within a year if he had stayed here’,2 Shirley apologised.

  This was a common criticism of Huxley, that his meditations in the desert were merely escapist. He saw them, by contrast, as direct engagements with the real issues. He told Krishnamurti: ‘How strange that we should be so much more conscious (once we have reached civilisation) of the artificial problems we ourselves have fabricated than of the cosmic problems presented by the nature of things – more conscious of political and social relations than of the relations between man and Nature, material and spiritual. And yet if the relations between man and his spiritual and material environment can be put on a satisfactory basis, all the other, the man-made problems will tend to solve themselves.’3 He objected to schoolchildren being taught ‘civics’ but not the ‘much more fundamental ideas’ he had expounded in The Perennial Philosophy. ‘These last are data over which we have no control, but to which we must adapt ourselves. “Civics” are homemade.’

  On 24 February, Huxley announced that his novel was finished – the title from Measure for Measure alluding to the ‘angry ape’ who ‘plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven’. For the first time ever, Aldous agreed to Maria reading it to him. She did this in one sitting, ending, she told Matthew, at one thirty in the morning – a four and a quarter hour marathon. She was awed by it and looked at her husband: ‘Though he so often looks old now he looked young and a bit shy and pleased: you know his a
ir of a little boy. Honest, innocent, humble and so clever and knowing so much.’4

  In mid-June the Huxleys sailed from New York to Europe, travelling from Cherbourg to Paris on 29 June to see Jeanne and Georges Neveux. On 4 July Aldous was interviewed by Georges for the radio and on 13 July they set off for Italy. Just before leaving France, Maria wrote to Mary Hutchinson at last: ‘I am so radiantly happy … we are so completely part of Europe and at home.’5 They encountered a political disturbance in Siena when Communists fired on the funeral procession of two policemen. Maria was forced to take shelter in a nearby house. The clashes between fascist-sympathising landlords and peasants were seen by Huxley as further confirmation of his current belief that there was a crisis of population and resources worldwide. He told a local writer, Alberto Bonnoli, that world leaders were fiddling while Rome burned: ‘They play power politics and prepare for new wars … while the population of the world increases at the rate of 55,000 a day and while erosion destroys every day an equal or perhaps a greater number of acres of fertile land.’6 He also referred to the findings of Sir Cyril Burt that the average IQ of children was falling which revived the sleeping spectre of Huxley’s eugenicist sympathies: ‘The question arises: can one have a democratic way of life in a population which is, biologically speaking, degenerating?’