Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  From Cherbourg the Huxleys went straight to Paris to stay with Jeanne and Georges Neveux at 82 Rue Bonaparte. ‘And here we are again in Europe as if we had never left it,’24 Maria wrote to Mary Hutchinson. Aldous wrote to Harold Raymond that he was thinking of another historical study ‘this time on the famous devils of Loudun … It is a most extraordinary story, illustrating the whole gamut of the religious life from its most infernal depths to its sublimest heights.’25 This would require further researches in France during the trip. They made another visit to Siena in June ‘exploring the incredibly beautiful countryside in a dwarf car’26 then Aldous left Maria in Sanary at the Villa Rustique where Matthew and Ellen were honeymooning and crossed to England to stay with Julian and Juliette at Pond Street in Hampstead. This provided an opportunity to catch up with old English friends and acquaintances such as Stephen Spender, Edith Sitwell, T.S. Eliot, Cyril Connolly and Osbert Sitwell who was in the first stages of Parkinson’s disease. Spender was ‘white-haired and distinguished-looking’ and Sybil Colefax ‘bent double with her broken back, but indomitably receiving guests and going out’.27 Julian gave a party at which twenty-seven Huxley relatives were present, ‘a pleasant and touching experience’. But the sight of all these old society figures from the 1920s and 1930s, ageing, balding, full at the midriff, struck the Californian exile as inescapably ‘Proustian’. Although he found England ‘much more cheerful than it was 2 years ago’28 he was still gloomy about the world outlook. His friends were now used to exclamations such as ‘What a world!’ being used to sign off letters and the endlessly repeated conceit of diabolic possession being the only explanation of the Western world’s rush to destruction. From Pond Street Huxley wrote to thank Isherwood for all the work he had done on Beyond the Equator, which sounded very much as though Huxley’s input was slight. ‘You must have put an enormous amount of work into it – which makes me feel rather guilty.’

  From London, Huxley returned to Sanary where Maria was preparing to sell the house. They both loved the south of France and were struck by its perennial quality: ‘How amazingly tough the French way of life has proved itself!’29 But they did not seem tempted to remain. They next joined the Neveux family at Juillac, then returned to Paris to see Mimi Gielgud before sailing back to the USA on 22 September. At New York they watched the final rehearsals for The Gioconda Smile. ‘I found everything in the most frightful mess – the actors at daggers drawn with the producer-director, the rendering of the play unsatisfactory in the extreme’.30 The play opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre but survived only five weeks. Back in Los Angeles, Huxley told Harold Raymond this was a pity ‘for I think, if it had been well cast, it might have gone. And also it is a bore; for it wd have been nice to make some easy money.’31 Maria had driven them by car from New York stopping to see Frieda Lawrence at Taos and finding her remarkably well and lively – she was now in her seventies. As the year ended the Huxleys were discovering a new fad: dianetics and its language of ‘engrams’ and being ‘clear’ etc. Huxley found that there was ‘a complete shutting off of certain areas of childhood memory, due, no doubt, to what the dianeticians call a “demon circuit”’.32 This is extremely interesting, for Huxley’s later drug-induced explorations of consciousness centred for him on attempts to recover some occluded – and unspecified – childhood memory. ‘Hubbard, the author of the book, is a very queer fellow – very clever, rather immature, far from being a “clear” himself … and in some ways rather pathetic; for he is curiously repellent physically and is probably always conscious of the fact, even in the midst of his successes.’

  After the failure of the play and the lack of news about the script with Isherwood, Huxley looked to the new year to settle down to work on The Devils, an historical example of the diabolic possession he seemed to detect in the geo-political world of the 1950s.

  1 Reading, Letter from Andrew Shirley to Ian Parsons, 11 February 1949

  2 Reading, Letter from Ian Parsons to Andrew Shirley, 14 February 1949

  3 HL, Letter to Krishnamurti, 13 January 1948

  4 SB2.91 Quoting letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley 22 February 1948

  5 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 6 July 1948

  6 L.587

  7 Cyril Connolly, Picture Post, 6 November 1948, 41 (6).pp21–3

  8 Robert Payne ‘Aldous) Huxley’ in Now More Than Ever: proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium, Munster 1994. (1995, Frankfurt), pp1–6

  9 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 23 November 1948

  10 George Orwell, Letter to Sir Richard Rees, 3 March 1949, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4, In Front of Your Nose 1945–50 (1970), P539

  11 HRC, Letter from Juliette Huxley to Dorothy Brett, 10 December 1949

  12 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 20 March 1949

  13 L.600

  14 The Listener, 4 November 1948, pp686–87

  15 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 16 December 1948

  16 L-589

  17 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 1 May 1949. Author’s translation

  18 HL, Letter to Grace Hubble, 30 July 1949

  19 L.597

  20 Robert Craft, ‘With Aldous Huxley’, Encounter, November 1965, p10

  21 L.604

  22 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 12 September 1949

  23 UCLA, Heard Papers, Letter from Christopher Isherwood to Gerald Heard, 6 May 1950

  24 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 19 (?) May 1950

  25 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond 21 May 1950

  26 HL, Isherwood papers, Postcard to Christopher Isherwood, undated but probably mid-June 1950

  27 L.629

  28 L.627

  29 L.630

  30 L.630

  31 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 16 November 1950

  32 RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 30 December 1950

  XXXII

  Devils

  Huxley spent the whole of 1951 researching and writing The Devils of Loudun, his second full-length historical/biographical study in which he sought to explore ideas in the concrete context of a specific life. Conscious of a lack of complete success with the ‘novel of ideas’, this seemed to him a solution to the problem of how to present ideas in a form that would prove more attractive than the abstract thesis: the story was graphic and extraordinary but it also gave an opportunity for ‘trying to formulate a coherent picture of the mind.’1 Meanwhile his own intellectual explorations were continuing. Dianetics, taken up at the end of 1950, was followed by a renewed interest in parapsychology. He suggested to Professor J.B. Rhine, whose Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University had been one of the first places he had visited when arriving in the USA in 1937, that he should publish an anthology of basic parapsychology texts – experimental material and philosophical background material.

  All this was done against a background of continued struggling with eye problems. In March 1951 both Aldous and Maria caught a bad ‘flu virus that was prevalent in Los Angeles and it attacked Huxley’s right eye, the poor one, with the result that he lost all sight in that eye for a period. He was given a treatment that was intended to break down some old scars covering the pupil but it produced some disturbing side-effects and great pain. Huxley was very shaken by the state he was in. ‘He was so rattled. It really was horrible,’2 Maria told Matthew. Although he recovered by May there were further problems throughout the year and generally he was, as Maria put it, ‘in an off mood’, disappointed in part by the failure of the play which would have given him some freedom.

  In June Huxley went to Ojai, where Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal ran the Happy Valley School, to give the Commencement Address on the theme of the school’s motto – which he had probably given them because it was a favourite of his own – aun aprendo, I am still learning. His sister-in-law Rose’s son, Sigfried Wessberg, attended the school and remembered that although it was run generally on what w
ould be called ‘progressive’ lines (if you didn’t want to go to lessons you didn’t have to) there was no rock and roll or junk food and the day began with readings from the Prophet. Huxley gave lectures there, sage-like in the oak grove. Sigfried, as a thoroughly American teenager, was sometimes baffled by his famous relative. He recalled for an interviewer how Huxley watched a young man across the street lovingly waxing and polishing a red Alfa Romeo every Sunday morning. ‘How red can it get?’ Huxley asked, perplexed at the passion for consumer goods, cars, material possessions that gripped 1950s America. ‘That kind of culture, he couldn’t grasp it.’3 It was for similar reasons that he employed Anita Loos as an interpreter of America and its mores. Until she enlightened him he thought an ice-cream sundae was a drink. Sigfried also remembered the house at North King’s Road: ‘They’d have all these seances and all these mushrooms and big pots of seeds and God knows what.’ The house smelt of cloves and other herbs and spices and there was ‘a big dish in the main living room full of all kinds of dried seeds and dried bushes and jars of things’.

  The house became the focus of Tuesday evening sessions, exploring various forms of parapsychological phenomena and hypnotism. The participants started off by dining at the World’s Largest Drugstore (now demolished but familiar to readers of The Doors of Perception, a book whose groundwork was being prepared in these sessions) after which they gathered in the long living room of the house to explore such things as ‘magnetic passes’ and the work of mediums. L. Ron Hubbard himself was a visitor. Around this time Gerald Heard published an article on flying saucers which caused Huxley to say: ‘I have no settled opinion so far, but keep my trap shut and wait.’4 That captures the essence of Huxley’s outlook at the time: his mind was open and he wanted to find out about these unusual phenomena which others would dismiss out of hand or mock. These Los Angeles years, after the desert and the mountains, which were to be Huxley’s last decade, were filled with more ordinary kinds of social life. They had open air lunches twice a week at Yolanda’s in the Town and Country Market (still flourishing and a favourite haunt of elderly Los Angeles residents) with Vera and Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, Peggy Kiskadden (whose husband Bill, a doctor, took an interest in Huxley’s health) and Betty Wendel (screenwriter and collaborator with Huxley on The Genius and the Goddess).

  It has already been noted that Huxley is popularly assumed to have been in Hollywood at the centre of a dazzling web of social contacts. But, notwithstanding the distinction of some of these names, it was a small circle. Huxley’s modest lifestyle and distaste for swanky restaurants and raucous living and endless socialising meant that his range of acquaintance was not large. Moreover, in the twenty-five years that he spent in America, from 1937 to his death in 1963, he seems to have met very few of the writers who dominated the epoch in literary terms. If one were to draw up a list of the key works of mid-century American writing during these years none of the names would figure in Huxley’s published essays or in his published and unpublished private correspondence – though we cannot be certain that he did not read them. He did, by contrast mention frequently works like The Organisation Man or The Hidden Persuaders and enthusiastically recommended them to friends. He seems to have preferred the company of scientists and social thinkers – and, some would say, quacks. A book like Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death excited him more than A Streetcar Named Desire. Pressed on this by interviewers in 1959 he admitted that he had little interest in contemporary fiction. He had read Kingsley Amis but thought he was ‘repeating himself’.5 John Braine’s Room at the Top was ‘quite good, don’t you think?’ It seems he had tried Kerouac’s On the Road but, ‘I got a little bored after a time. I mean, the road seemed to be awfully long.’

  In April, Huxley asked Robert Craft one day if he would read to him because his good eye was overtaxed. The picture Craft paints is not the one of a triumphant disciple of Dr Bates: ‘I find him typing the witchcraft book … in the den at the end of the darkened corridor, and on a table stacked ominously with publications in Braille. He is wearing his ‘Chinese glasses’, black cellulose goggles with perforations in place of lenses: they force the pupils to perform a kind of stroboscopic movement, and consequently prevent staring; Aldous has taped a bandage over the pin-holes on the right side, which means that he no longer has any sight at all from his opaline right eye.’6 Talking to Huxley about his new book, Craft was puzzled, as many have been, by the contrast between the searching, lucid, rational intelligence which was Huxley’s most obvious characteristic and the most striking evidence of his Victorian inheritance, and the credulity with which he greeted (though he did not necessarily swallow whole) each new Southern Californian fad of mind and consciousness. As the year went on he went deeper and deeper into the horrible events and cruelties of the Loudun story – forced to pass over an invitation to go to India with Robert Godel and his wife to visit the holy places of the Himalayas – and pausing only to offer his extreme reflections on a world that seemed, as usual, to be going to the dogs. The Cold War was now raging and on 23 May the House Committee on Un-American Activities heard testimony that Huxley was one of a number of writers involved in an organisation called ‘Friends of Intellectual Freedom’. The purpose of this organisation, according to an FBI briefing note in Huxley’s file, was ‘to raise funds to help former Communist writers rehabilitate themselves’.7 It was not until 15 May 1953, however, that the FBI finally grasped what should have been obvious from the outset. A confidential memorandum from the Los Angeles Field Office (which had been monitoring his activities) to the Washington Bureau noted: ‘Aldous Huxley is well known, highly respected, and far removed from any pro-Russian or Communist Party sympathies.’

  In spite of the hard work on the new book, which was only half-complete by the end of May, Huxley managed to break off in July to revise the dialogue of what he called ‘a very ingenious and effective stage adaptation’ of After Many A Summer by a writer called Ralph Rose, whose radio version had already been broadcast. And then he succumbed to more trouble, an attack of iritis, which incapacitated him for five weeks, keeping him in the house and in darkness because he could not stand any light. The doctors thought that this could have been connected to a long-standing chronic bronchitis, which may have been a focus of infection for the eye trouble. The summer was hell. Back on course in October, he was gladdened by the news that he had become a grandfather (to Mark Trevenen Huxley). There was also talk of a new film project on the life of Gandhi ‘which perhaps I may tackle when the book is done. Interesting – but dreadfully difficult. Still, a challenge.’8 This was another project, planned by the director Gabriel Pascal, that would come to nothing. On 23 January 1952 Huxley announced at last to Chatto: ‘My book is finished.’9

  All should have been well but now it was Maria’s turn to be ill. She had been taken to hospital for treatment of a cyst, which, though Huxley does not seem to have acknowledged or to have been told this, turned out to be a malignant tumour. In fact he told Jeanne: ‘The doctors are confident there will be no recurrence as the trouble was taken in good time and got rid of very thoroughly. No radiation will be necessary.’10 Maria was said to be well and to have become ‘a reformed character in regard to eating and consumes large quantities of meat – the proteins of which have speeded up the healing of the wound in a remarkable way.’ Aldous and Maria went out at the start of the year for a brief holiday in the Arizona desert, glorying in the sight of snow on the higher mountains and the carpets of spring flowers and the remarkable desert lilies: ‘It is an unforgettable spectacle – the good will of life, the tenacity of it in the face of the most adverse circumstances, the patience of it (the lilies will lie dormant for as much as ten or fifteen years, if there is a drought, and then come bursting through the sand at the first moisture), the profusion, the beauty. And the yearly miracle takes place in an enormous, luminous silence.’11 For the first time Huxley wrote explicitly of the desert as a place associa
ted with mystical vision: ‘as a means to purifying insight into the divine otherness, there is nothing to compare with that silence’. On his return he struck Robert Craft as ‘refreshed and in high spirits’12 when he dragged him off for his favourite walk over the summit of Doheny Hill, pouring out abstruse dendrological information and ending with a drive to an ice-cream parlour in Beverly Hills where he ordered a banana split. ‘Cerebrotonics should eat bananas very day,’ he informed Craft.

  As well as banana splits, Huxley was treating himself to a newly invented pressure-breathing treatment which he was taking at home with an oxygen tank and a special attachment. This seemed to have eliminated the chronic bronchitis that had been ‘a source, over many years, of general under-parness and various troubles of an acuter nature’.13 He continued to haggle with Pascal over a contract for the Gandhi film. And in London, Chatto were looking over the manuscript of The Devils of Loudun. They were not completely happy and felt that it was not going to be as successful as Grey Eminence. ‘In places the tangential discussions produce a somewhat excessive interruption to the story’ and the story itself ‘might occasionally prove more than a queasy stomach could assimilate’.14 Harold Raymond asked Huxley to delete some of the more gruesome details in the torture of Urban Grandier such as ‘there was a sound of splintering bone … ooze of marrow’. Huxley agreed happily, as he agreed at the same time to a proposal for a book by Robert Hamilton about his work. He said that he would not be among its readers because he never read criticism which was ‘always unhelpful, since the critic cannot, in the nature of things, know what the writer is working with and against, what his resources are, what his handicaps and special obstacles … That I am not Dostoevsky or Goethe is admittedly deplorable but it is not by deploring that one can add a cubit to one’s stature.’15