Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  In August the Huxleys stayed at the Hotel de la Ville in Rome and, towards the end of the month they travelled to Sanary, staying for a couple of weeks at the Villa Rustique. Then it was back to Paris – where they stayed with Mimi Gielgud – and London, Huxley’s first visit to England since 1937. He was interviewed in his suite at Claridges by Cyril Connolly for Picture Post. Connolly remarked that someone of his background might have been expected to have become a traditional pillar of the establishment: ‘Instead, we find a religious reformer, a secular mystic, beautifully-dressed, installed at Claridges with a play running in the West End and a lucrative job writing film scripts in Hollywood, to which he is on the way back.’7 Connolly’s comments on the serenity and wisdom of Huxley at this interview have already been cited. He went on to trace the history of his relationship with Huxley, and his meeting him in Hollywood where he was ‘at once struck by the strange new quality of sublimated sensuality, intellectual pity, spiritual grace. There was nothing of America about him … He dressed like an Argentine dandy who moves between Oxford and Rome.’ Huxley told his interviewer: ‘I am not a Christian but if I were, the sect which would appeal to me most would be the Quakers.’ The English audience must have been as perplexed as Connolly by this new manifestation of Huxley the elegant sage, pouring tea from a silver Claridges pot and talking about Zen and Tao.

  The writer Robert Payne, in a description written around the same time, also noted Huxley’s aura of well-bred sanctity: ‘He has the air of a young archbishop, and nothing is so surprising as to see him sitting decoratively in a film studio, a film script on his knee, his blue suit flowing like full canonicals, and the man himself, with his rare elegance and that nonchalance which is the fruit of a practised art, and even of a kind of vision, somehow gives the impression of continually blessing the place …’8 Payne discovered there in the Universal studios ‘an Englishman who gave all the appearance of being a saint, a real saint … and with this extraordinary air of calm and sanctity there went a voice so grave, so gentle, so delicately and impenitently modulated that it came like a shock on exposed nerves.’ This observation was all the more striking given Payne’s admission that he had loathed Huxley’s writing, finding it at first superficial and callow. Huxley told Payne that Zoltan Korda was the only thing that kept him in Hollywood: ‘that, and the knowledge of all the good that could come out of here if only men would set their minds to it.’ Payne noted that Huxley, for all the profundity of his reflections – his belief that only ‘mercy’ could now save us – was utterly without sententiousness and the old wit repeatedly broke through. He went back to Huxley’s flat and took tea then left him ‘groping a little at the edges of the pavement, the grey hair like a wave and the half-blinded eyes gazing through the darkness’. And it occurred to Payne that he was seeing Oedipus at Colonus.

  The Huxleys sailed back from England in October to New York, where Huxley remained alone until the end of November. Maria went on to Wrightwood, leaving him to take treatment in New York from a German doctor, Gustav Erlanger, who introduced certain drugs by means of ‘a very mild galvanic current’ which had some slight effect in clearing up the opacities.9

  Ape and Essence was as far from the historical novel of fourteenth century Italy centring on the life of St Catherine of Siena as one could conceive. It is a nightmare projection of a post-atomic Los Angeles, a strange, disturbing novel with none of the occasional humour of Brave New World. Unusually for Huxley it begins with a first person narrative and in the milieu of the Hollywood studio, in 1947, where the screenwriter-narrator is told by the studio boss, Lou Lublin, that ‘in this Studio at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself could get a raise’. He then speculates about how such a scenario, ‘Christ before Lublin’, would get made if the commission were given to a great artist like Rembrandt or Piero. Then he notices a two-ton truck loaded with scripts for incineration and in particular a treatment titled ‘Ape and Essence’ by a William Tallis who lives in the Mojave desert. The narrator and a colleague go out to the desert – described in such a way that Llano comes immediately to mind – but the man is dead. The second part of this very short novel prints the script. One wonders whether, if the Studio bosses had given Huxley his head and Hollywood was not Hollywood, this is the script Huxley would have wanted to write.

  The audience for this movie of the future consists of baboons and what appears in it is a vision of a society after the Third World War, a nightmare projection of the ideas expressed in Science, Liberty and Peace, about irresponsible science serving militarism and nationalism (‘A choking scream announces the death, by suicide, of twentieth century science’). The atomic explosion is referred to as ‘The Thing’ and the new society practises brutal human sacrifice on ‘Belial Day’ where deformed babies are murdered (Huxley’s last word on eugenics?). The society is misogynistic – women are unclean vessels who produce these deformed babies – and both sex and procreation, as in Brave New World, are divorced from parenthood and family life. Culture is equally valueless: fuel for the communal ovens is supplied by books from the Los Angeles Public Library. The ritual of Belial Day, presided over by His Eminence the Arch Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood, is a parody of institutional religion. It takes place in the Los Angeles Coliseum and exhibits ‘the groundless faith, the subhuman excitement, the collective imbecility which are the products of ceremonial religion’. The script inveighs against war and the plundering of the planet’s resources (Huxley believed that if nuclear war did not destroy the human race it could accomplish the task itself by allowing population to overtake a dwindling stock of natural resources) and the notion of Progress – ‘the theory that you can get something for nothing’. The Arch Vicar, who in a twisted and cynical form gives voice to some leading Huxleyan notions, argues that after the First World War traditional values disappeared ‘and the resulting vacuum was filled by the lunatic dreams of Progress and Nationalism’ and scientists ‘ceased to become human beings and became specialists’. Normality in this hideous society is provided by the visiting New Zealander, Dr Poole, who falls in love with an indigenous woman, Loola, and the two eventually escape to the Mojave desert as ‘Hots’, the tiny minority which does not obey the rules of seasonal mating and which is free (which, of course, is always what happens in the movies).

  In a letter to Sir Richard Rees in March 1949 George Orwell, who found the book ‘awful’, asked: ‘And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex. He cannot get off the subject of flagellating women. Possibly, if he had the courage to come out & say so, that is the solution to the problem of war. If we took it out in a little private sadism, which after all doesn’t do much harm, perhaps we wouldn’t want to drop bombs etc.’10 There are traces of sado-masochism to be found in other parts of the Huxley oeuvre but no evidence to suggest that this was a personal disposition rather than that rather cruelly bleak way he had of reporting on human oddity. Other reviewers wondered whether Huxley’s bleak vision was anything more than that and whether, simply by piling on the horrors, he was actually displaying a lack of human compassion. The disgust was powerful but were the prescriptions being adumbrated potent enough to escape the charge of practising a sort of pornography of repulsion?

  Juliette Huxley wrote to Brett that she had found the book: ‘Too crude and juvenile. The still undigested libidos torment him yet.’11 Reviews generally were lukewarm and Huxley expressed his sorrow at this to Chatto: ‘Perhaps the book is bad? Who knows? I know it cd be better & see now how I could have made it so; but I still think it’s a reasonably decent piece of work & that it says some important things. But perhaps one is mistake.’12 No one could accuse Huxley of being an arrogant author or a prima donna. In a letter to the writer Philip Wylie he admitted the difficulty inherent in the novel of ideas for those who had neither the elevated genius of Dostoevsky nor the contentment with the small-scale of a Peacock: ‘We fall between two stool
s and find it horribly difficult to make a satisfactory marriage between ideas and a middle-sized, non geniusish novel.’13 In an interview in The Listener at the end of 1948 he had told John Davenport: ‘I don’t feel I am really a novelist; it seems to be all a slight fraud, the whole thing, that I am saying something in fictional terms. I think, frankly, a good novelist has to be in some sense rather larger than life … the big novelist has to have this gargantuan capacity for experience and enjoyment; and unfortunately I don’t feel I have that.’14

  In November 1948 Huxley had a severe attack of bronchitis and on doctor’s orders spent the winter months in the Palm Desert at an address called the ‘Sage and Sun Apartments’. He was working on a stage version of Ape and Essence and preparing a volume of essays. ‘After that, I hope, will come the historical novel.’15 He described the Palm Desert location to Victoria Ocampo: ‘We are … surrounded by sand and date palms, very glad to be out of the rains, snows, frosts and tempests which have prevailed in the rest of California … It is quiet and one works well.’16 He found it ‘most surprising and gratifying’ that The Gioconda Smile had done very well in London and was still playing after nine months. It was also to do tolerably well in Paris in a version by Georges Neveux in early 1949. One of the pieces in the planned volume of essays was to be on the French writer Maine de Biran whose Journal Intime he had discovered again at Sanary in the summer, covered in his own annotations of fifteen years previously. Memories of Sanary, however, did not awaken any desire to return to France. Maria discussed it with Jeanne and concluded: ‘I don’t think we will ever come to live in France or Europe … Aldous and I envisage ourselves here in our later years.’17 She added: ‘Suddenly, yesterday, Aldous and I were both tempted by a house in a street with a garden and designed to our taste. Everything about it persuades us and it is in our price range.’ The Huxleys were always impulsive about choosing houses (even if they repented at leisure) and 740 North King’s Road, Los Angeles thus became their latest address, although as usual they did not move into it permanently at first, spending May to September, their last summer, at Wrightwood. The house in the mountains had to go but it was still beautiful – in spite of diesel lorries carrying ‘mangled redwoods’ and filling the air with carbon monoxide ‘so that the road for miles at a stretch, is worse than Wilshire Boulevard. But one can still get off the highway and walk – and then it is paradise.’18 It is one of the inconveniences of paradises, however, that they invariably prove unsustainable. The move back to Los Angeles had become inevitable. The new house would be ‘large, commodious’ the garden ‘with big trees and plenty of privacy’ and the location ‘in that curious country lane between Santa Monica and Melrose, full of huge estates and enormous trees’.19 It was considered not too expensive – $10,000 down with $13,000 to pay in ten years at $135 a month.

  The Huxleys moved in to the new house in the summer. In July they had dinner with the Stravinskys, an event minutely recorded by the music critic and conductor, Robert Craft. Craft noticed Huxley’s ‘silver-point features’ and his eyes: ‘The right cornea is covered by a milky film, like a clouded glass, and it is the unflawed but rapidly nictitating left eye which he turns to us, though its powers of sight are hardly greater. His skin has a desiccated appearance – from the desert sun during his anchorite period, one would suppose, except that it is deathly white. Everything else about the man except the big weedy brows suggests not the out-of-doors, however, but the tightly-sealed edifices of intellectual respectability.’20 Craft noted how poor was Huxley’s sight (‘he feels for his knife, fork and plate, with the palpitations of the blind’). Maria helped him to find his food and quietly directed him throughout (‘Un tout petit peu à gauche, chérie’). The Huxleys spoke French to each other at home but also on this occasion, because Stravinsky was not really used to the ‘lambent, culture-saturated purr’ of Huxley’s version of the English mandarin dialect. Stravinsky still saw Huxley as a man of science and a rationalist rather than as a mystic and was worried that he would be unable to keep up with a scientific discourse. Huxley’s after dinner conversation was extraordinarily learned and multifarious. His hands gesticulated hugely. ‘But he is the gentlest human being I have ever seen, and the most delightfully giggly.’ The Stravinskys returned to the Huxleys for tea on 19 August, rather intimidated by the austerity and gloom of the surroundings at North King’s Road (‘the sepulchral lighting and raftered baronial hall’) where they were offered ‘parsley tea with crystal sugar, and a tray of molasses cookies, wheat germ, raw carrots, small wedges of non-fattening fruit cake’. Craft felt that Huxley was better to listen to than to read because one was absolved of the Tolstoyan sermons and treated to wonderful digressions of a kind that a writer would feel the need to rein in or edit out. Craft thought that Huxley saw in Stravinsky what he also saw in Lawrence – evidence of a great creative genius that he did not himself possess.

  Almost the last letter Huxley wrote before quitting Wrightwood was to George Orwell – whose essays and letters are full of rather condescending references to Huxley (as if the world had room for only one Old Etonian dystopian novelist and contemporary commentator). Huxley was thanking Orwell for the gift of 1984. He agreed how ‘fine and how profoundly important the book is’21 but doubted that future authoritarian rulers would adopt the brutal repression of those in Orwell’s book. ‘My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.’ Huxley’s belief that liberty would be surrendered through conditioning, through populations coming to ‘love their servitude’, rather than ‘clubs and prisons’, would indeed seem much more in line with what has actually happened in the West in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Finally established in North King’s Road, Huxley reviewed his current projects. The essays were virtually complete, the one on de Biran having run to 40,000 words. ‘If the thing comes off as I hope, it will be an example of what I think is a new literary form,’ he told Harold Raymond, ‘in which philosophical discussion is enlivened and given reality by the fact of its being particularised within a biography.’22 This was to be Huxley’s aspiration for the future – to find forms which provided adequate vehicles for the things he wanted to say. He had long ago abandoned any purely aesthetic speculations or experiments. The de Biran essay appeared as part of Themes and Variations in May 1950. It was the longest essay in the book, almost book-length (and might profitably have been reissued as such). It was based on Maine de Biran’s Journal Intime and was written very much in the style of Grey Eminence, with the attempt at historical portraiture soon giving way to intellectual exposition. De Biran (1766–1824) was obviously a very sympathetic spirit to Huxley, a cerebrotonic and a realist or ‘empiricist of the spirit’. Like the visually-impaired Huxley, de Biran’s constant illness made him what he was: ‘Health impels us towards the outside world, sickness brings us home to ourselves.’ He was also a thinker who saw the coming of the modern threats to liberty in the culture of the machine and in the ideologies of nationalism and progress. Every reasonable person, Huxley concluded, should try to ‘escape from history’. De Biran was ‘concerned to establish the irreducible and primordial faculty of the inner world’ and set it against the outer world of history. Huxley predicted what he called a ‘third revolution’ following on from the political and economic revolutions: ‘The third revolution is that which will subvert the individual in the depths of his organic and hyper-organic being, is that which will bring his body, his mind, his whole private life under the control of the ruling oligarchy.’ This was the prediction of Brave New World, written sixteen years previously, and assuming it would not happen for ‘five or six centuries’. Writing in 1949: ‘Today that estimate seems to me excessive.’ Apart from the de Biran essay, ‘Variations on a Philosopher’, the book has essays on art and religion, on the inability of Western art in the main to handle adequately the the
me of death, on El Greco (in truth a much more successful combination of aesthetic analysis and philosophising in a biographical context than the de Biran essay), on Piranesi’s ‘Prisons’ (‘Today every efficient office, every up-to-date factory is a panoptical prison in which the worker suffers … from the consciousness of being inside a machine’), on Goya, and on ‘The Double Crisis’ (‘The human race is passing through a time of crisis, and that crisis exists, so to speak, on two levels – an upper level of political and economic crisis and a lower level of demographic and ecological crisis’).

  In spite of these high intellectual preoccupations, Huxley was thinking of the studios again. He was working with Christopher Isherwood and a screenwriter called Lesser Samuel on an idea for a script. Long thought to have been lost, this treatment recently turned up in the Isherwood papers acquired in late 2000 by the Huntington Library in California. Below the Equator was described succinctly by Isherwood (whose hand is the main one in this script) in a letter that May to Gerald Heard: ‘Am still working on the S. American movie story I devised with Aldous. It is about a meeting between Peggy Kiskadden, Mr Norris, Julian Huxley and Eileen Garrett, in a tinmine at 17,000 feet. No-one gets seriously injured, but a bridge is blown up.’23 Huxley’s contribution seems to have been to propose the title ‘Armed with Pity’ for the script. The script got nowhere. Meanwhile, Huxley pressed on with the never-to-be-written historical novel on St Catherine of Siena. It persuaded him to return to Italy to gather more material and in May 1950, after the marriage of Matthew to Ellen Howde in New York, the Huxleys set off on the Queen Mary to France. One person Huxley hoped to meet in France was Hubert Benoit, a French thinker with whom he had been corresponding extensively. Aldous and Maria attended the wedding in New York, he in a suit tailor made in Rome (in London he would order another of his immaculate suits from Studd and Millington in Piccadilly) and Maria in a quilted black dress. They entertained the Hubbies in the Raleigh Room of the Warwick Hotel in New York where a waiter tripped and spilt a tray of green salad and boats of French dressing down Aldous’s back. He was cleaned up in time for the party to move on to the Ziegfeld Theatre to see the musical of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.