Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The Huxleys’ psychic explorations continued. Maria had a few years earlier been helped by hypnosis after an intestinal infection and Aldous claimed to have become ‘a rather good hypnotic operator’ 16 who was able to help Maria again after the tumour was removed in January. He thought he was not, as regards himself, ‘a particularly good hypnotic subject’ but when he was suffering from iritis the previous year he had received hypnotic treatment from the UCLA Psychology Department and from Leslie LeCron, a psychotherapist. The ego, under hypnotherapy, was able to ‘let go, to get out of the way, to stop interfering with the beneficent action of the “entelechy”, which is at once the physiological sub-conscious that sees to the proper functioning of the body, and the higher, non-personal subconscious …’ Huxley had discovered ‘E’ therapy and immediately began to proselytise amongst his friends, sending them copies of a pamphlet by A.L. Kitselman describing the technique. He was also using various kinds of auto-hypnosis on himself to cure insomnia. Maria was every bit as enthusiastic and she wrote to tell Jeanne that all this therapy was transforming him: ‘You know how all these years we have loved Aldous, and known his kindness, sweetness and honesty … but you also know how, in spite of all that, he was exhausting to live with, and sad to live with. Well, now he is transformed, transfigured … Aldous no longer looks the same, or has the same moral and intellectual attitude towards animals, people, the clouds, or even the sound of the telephone (which is remarkable).’17 He was helping out in the house, proposing ways of acting practically to help others, in short coming out of his protective shell, all of which she put down to his exposure to these various therapies. Maria wrote to Matthew at this time a letter which tried to explain all these changes and to reassure him that they had not become ‘Faddists’.18 In a spirit of great frankness – did she know the real truth of her illness by now? – she talked about her first meeting with Aldous at Garsington in terms that have already been described in an earlier chapter. From now on both Maria, in the brief time left to her, and Aldous would strike others as having gained a greater serenity.

  The Devils was about to be published in October and Huxley was planning a book of reflective essays on the American West as well as negotiating for a trio of short stories for cinema and television to be played by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. He was toying as well with the script of ‘a popular science movie on the sun’.19 When The Devils appeared it was considered ‘horrible’20 by Basil Blackwell. The Odhams Press Book Club also turned it down as the subject ‘would cause much raising of eyebrows among the members’. But Huxley was convinced that it had worked and that his notion of embodying general ideas in a particular case was the reason it had done so: ‘Because they ignore the particular case, the facts of individual life in a body, science, philosophy and philosophical history are always inadequate to reality as we know it by direct experience,’21 he told Mary Hutchinson. The book, set in seventeenth century France, tells the story of Urban Grandier, the priest who is accused of witchcraft, and the possession by devils of the nuns of Loudun. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible of the same year, the persecution of Grandier has an obvious contemporary resonance. Huxley was named in November 1952 by an hysterical anti-Communist newsletter Counterattack as one of a number of authors who had signed an Authors’ World Peace Appeal and by doing so had ‘fallen for one of Moscow’s biggest lies’.22

  The violence of the torture scenes is excessive and the overall picture of human affairs is profoundly pessimistic, notwithstanding the mellowing of Huxley the man at this time. Successfully transferred to stage and to film (by Ken Russell after Huxley’s death) the story is gripping in outline but it is the scaffolding onto which Huxley loads reflections on the seventeenth century mind, excursions around his mystical preoccupations, and dissertations on his view of the world. He was at pains to stress, in the philosophical passages, that mystical experience is above all real. ‘The heavenly kingdom can be made to come on earth; it cannot be made to come in our imagination or in our discursive reasonings. And it cannot come even on earth, so long as we persist in living, not on the earth as it is actually given, but as it appears to an ego obsessed by the idea of separateness, by cravings and abhorrences, by compensatory phantasies and by ready-made propositions about the nature of things. Our kingdom must go before God’s can come.’ In these and many other passages we hear the voice of Huxley the essayist and the moralist, as it were grafted on to the story, transparently using the story as a device to enable him to do so, where one might wish the artistic creation itself might accomplish the task implicitly. Only those who can accept that strategy will find it a wholly successful book.

  After publication of The Devils, Huxley spent the first half of 1953 engaged on miscellaneous film and journalistic projects – such as his one hour documentary on the Sun which taught him that ‘one must read 100% in order to be able to leave out 99%, as has to be done in this medium’.23 Increasingly, his contacts were with scientists, doctors, social scientists, academic specialists in a range of disciplines. His reading, likewise, was in the works of such men and women. Having spent much of his career as a freelance writer tilting at ‘the professors’, he was now increasingly in their company, trying in some cases to persuade them – ironically, in the case of a proposal to Alan Watts of Stanford for a ‘post-graduate school for the study of synthesis and all its methods of practical application to the education process on all its levels,’24 intending to bankroll the plan with funds from ‘Our Ford’. These would all be designed to launch programmes of study designed to further Huxleyan grand notions. Huxley was becoming aware of the power of institutions and the big foundations to co-ordinate work on a large scale. One of the last things he would do in the weeks before he died was to try to draft a programme for the World Academy in Stockholm on ‘Human Possibilities’. The imbalance of elements, the artistic failure, of his last great attempt at a fictional synthesis of his ideas for a better world, the novel Island, has its roots in this omnivorous intellectualism, this pursuit of good ends that ran too eagerly ahead of the necessary artistic delight in means.

  Early in January 1953, Huxley’s old friends Sir Osbert and Edith Sitwell arrived for tea. Edith was in Hollywood, working with the screenwriter Walter Reisch and George Cukor on a screenplay for her Fanfare for Elizabeth. ‘It’s so nice seeing dear Aldous and Maria Huxley – two of my oldest friends,’ she told Geoffrey Gorer. ‘Aldous hasn’t changed at all since he was 23 (when I knew him first). He drove me to tea with Dr Hubble, the astronomer, the other day, and on the way kept up a long grumble – the drive took 40 minutes – on the subject of Coleridge and Wordsworth. “Really, Edith, that any man reputed to be sane should have written, quite deliberately, ‘I need not say, Louisa dear,/How glad we are to have you here,/A lovely convalescent.” ’25 Grace Hubble was present at two of these tea parties, the first of which disclosed Edith Sitwell in her full splendour: ‘Today she wore a black turban with a border that reached her shoulders, so that only her face, framed in its borders was to be seen. Fresh, fair, transparent complexion, slanting blue eyes with pale gold lashed, aquiline nose, with thin-lipped curling mouth. Her dress was of masses of black drapery to the floor, concealing her figure completely. She wore one ring, of two aquamarine stones set one above the other, as big as walnuts.’26 This astonishing phenomenon rose again ten days later to demolish what Aldous described as ‘the monstrous Victorians, who became increasingly alien and unnatural. More and more they seem like characters in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.’27 Eavesdropping on this tea-party today, as Huxley and the Sitwells – relics of upper-middle class intellectual England in the Californian sun – proceeded to demolish, not only Carlyle and Elizabeth Barrett Browning among the Victorians but Christopher Fry, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Ford Madox Ford (‘and his dreary wife’), a certain narrowness in this patrician taste is revealed. Poor old Sir George Colefax, husband of Sybil, was dismissed as ‘a bore’28 at the next tea party, having
tried to elucidate the Swiss banking system to Aldous. ‘He told me the entire story of Joyce’s Ulysses!’ complained the apparition in black drapery.

  Huxley was approaching the age of sixty and told Julian: ‘Age, I find, has its compensations – but also a great deal which has to be compensated for.’29 He quoted ‘Uncle Matt’ – Matthew Arnold’s – poem ‘Growing Old’ and noted that Maria was well ‘so long as she doesn’t overdo it. Her margin of reserve strength is small, since last year’s operation.’ In February he learned of the death of a very old friend, Lewis Gielgud, which was ‘a great shock’.30 He told Juliette: ‘We had been friends for half a century, and he was part of the order of things.’ They had first met as prep-school boys in 1903. His own powers were being tested for a series of lectures on art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington which he had been invited to give the following spring. The necessary reading was putting a strain on his eyes. He had resumed his siege of the Ford Foundation, hoping to persuade it to fund research into the role of language in international relations, ‘intemperate and improperly used’31 language being the cause of many problems on the world stage. It was for this reason that he withdrew from the Author’s World Peace Appeal, membership of which had been noted by the FBI. He felt that the duty of writers was to the language and he was not a joiner and had not realised the Appeal was an ongoing organisation rather than a one-off gesture.

  The same month Huxley received a letter from an English doctor in Canada called Dr Humphry Osmond. He wrote back, telling Osmond that: ‘Under the current dispensation the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the “real” world.’32 It may be, Huxley reflected, that the drug mescalin might have a role to play in opening minds. Osmond was due to visit Los Angeles for a conference. Huxley offered to put him up.

  1 L.633

  2 SB2.120–21. Citing letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley, March 1951

  3 HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview between David King Dunaway and Sigfried Wessberg, 3 February 1988

  4 SB2.122. quoting letter to Matthew Huxley. Undated

  5 UCLA, West Wind, Fall 1959 Interview

  6 Robert Craft, ‘With Aldous Huxley’, Encounter, November 1965, p12

  7 FBI file on Huxley

  8 Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 10 December 1951

  9 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 21 January 1952

  10 RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 26 January 1952

  11 L.642

  12 Robert Craft, ‘With Aldous Huxley’, Encounter, November 1965, p14

  13 L.644

  14 Reading, letter from Harold Raymond to Aldous Huxley, 6 March 1952

  15 Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 24 March 1952

  16 L.646

  17 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 16 April 1952

  18 SB2.135–37. Quoting letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley, 1952

  19 Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 26 December 1952

  20 Reading, Letter from Basil Blackwell to Harold Raymond, 19 September 1952

  21 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 2 November 1952

  22 Counterattack, 7 November 1952, Vol 6, No 4

  23 L.663

  24 L.657

  25 Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell (1998) edited by Richard Greene, Letter to Geoffrey Gorer, 21 February 1953, P353

  26 HL, Hubble Diary, 20 January 1953

  27 HL, Hubble Diary, 30 January 1953

  28 HL, Hubble Diary, 5 March 1953

  29 L.663

  30 L.665

  31 L.667

  32 L.669

  XXXIII

  Doors

  Humphry Osmond was working in 1953 in a mental hospital on the Canadian prairies, the Saskatchewan Hospital at Weyburn, specialising in schizophrenia. With his colleague, Dr John Smythies, he had contributed an article to the Hibbert Journal on the present state of psychological medicine. Huxley had read it and it was this that caused him to write to Osmond. The idea of taking up Huxley’s offer to stay seemed rather remote until Osmond suddenly found himself invited to attend a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association at Los Angeles. Maria later told Osmond that her first response to Aldous’s proposal to invite this ‘Canadian psychiatrist who works with mescalin’1 was to announce: ‘But he may have a beard and we may not like him.’ Aldous thought for a moment then replied: ‘If we don’t like him we can always be out.’ As it turned out a deep and lasting friendship was quickly cemented. Osmond had known Huxley’s work – taking Texts and Pretexts with him on Atlantic convoys during the war and reading it in the London Blitz – but was slightly apprehensive on arrival at North King’s Road. Maria put him at his ease by saying: ‘I knew that you and Aldous, being Englishmen, would get along well.’ Osmond later commented: ‘To Maria, Englishmen were largely incomprehensible except to each other.’ Out of the inner darkness of the house Huxley materialised to offer a handshake ‘sketchy and uncertain, as if he did not enjoy the custom’, the cerebrotonic not relishing physical contact. Osmond was astounded by ‘the range, boldness, flexibility and sheer playfulness of his splendid mind. When he was at ease he would toss ideas about with the grace, elegance and sense of fun that a trained dolphin has playing with a ball.’

  When Huxley had written offering to collect Osmond from the airline bus-stop at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel he had anxiously inquired whether he would be bringing any mescalin with him ‘for I am eager to make the experiment and would feel particularly happy to do so under the supervision of an experienced investigator like yourself’. 2 Mescalin – the mind-altering drug derived from the Mexican root, peyote – had been available since 1918 and had been used in psychiatric medicine to try to understand patients’ mental processes. Huxley seemed positively eager to be a guinea pig and his doctor declared that he saw no objection. He had already spoken on the telephone to Gerald Heard asking him to join the experiment. Heard was unavailable but joined him in November for a second session.3 Heard, who later referred to Huxley’s ‘successive passionate convictions that some particular therapy, some specific exercise, could prove a panacea’ seemed nonetheless to be taking the latest enthusiasm seriously. Huxley always stressed the seriousness of the experiment and was keen to dissociate himself from those who came in his wake in the 1960s determined to ‘turn on and tune in’. Before broaching the topic with Osmond, Huxley went with him to a session of the APA conference and sat there crossing himself mockingly every time Freud was mentioned.

  And so it was that at eleven o‘clock one morning, 4 May 1953, the most famous English literary drug taking since De Quincey took place in Huxley’s Hollywood home. A Dictaphone was switched on. Osmond swirled the silvery white mescalin crystals in a glass. ‘It was a delicious May morning in Hollywood, no hint of smog to make the eyes smart, not too hot,’ Osmond recalled. The bitter chemical was slow to take effect but within two and a half hours Osmond saw that it was working, and after three hours he saw that all was well. The session lasted for eight hours. In the short book, The Doors of Perception, published in February 1954, Huxley takes up the story: ‘I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to await the results.’ The book, for the first time ever, had a dedication to ‘M’. Why did he choose, at this point, to dedicate a book to Maria? It is not certain how much he knew of her prognosis or how much he was simply refusing to face – or to discuss – facts. ‘We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves … The mind is its own place,’ he wrote before describing what he hoped to see.

  Huxley was convinced in advance that the drug would admit him ‘into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE’, but this did not happen. He did no
t see ‘visions of many-coloured geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation’. He had not reckoned with the simple fact that: ‘I have always been a poor visualizer.’ But then, half an hour after swallowing the drug, he became aware of ‘a slow dance of golden lights’ then similar colours and patterns but no visions. ‘The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.’ By 12.30 he was looking at a small glass vase containing three flowers. He had noticed them earlier in the day but now he saw with different eyes. ‘I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.’ This was the ‘Isness,’ the Istigkeit of Meister Eckhart’s mystical philosophy. His mind was perceiving the world ‘in terms of other than spatial categories’, it was concerned ‘not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning’. And all this was happening because the massively functional Huxley brain was being outwitted and bypassed. The ‘cerebral reducing-valve’ (mescalin reduces the supply of blood sugar to the brain) was being prevented from denying access to ‘Mind at large’.