Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  He later ate a meal, went for a drive, crossed Sunset Boulevard, visited the World’s Largest Drugstore where he pulled down a book on Van Gogh and looked at his picture The Chair but the photographic representation was as nothing to the sense of ‘manifested Muchness.’ It was only an emblem – as art might be for the mystic, something to be gone beyond, a symbol rather than the deeper reality that the symbol signifies. He looked down at his grey flannel trousers seeing ‘a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity’ in the folds of material. (In her biography, Sybille Bedford reported a friend’s assertion that Huxley had been wearing, in fact, blue jeans, but that Maria thought grey flannel sounded more appropriate. Osmond, however, subsequently said he had a photograph of the day of the session which vindicated Huxley.4) The Doors of Perception, with its companion volume, Heaven and Hell, is probably Huxley’s best known book after Brave New World. It was popular in the 1960s with the drug generation that he deplored. It even gave the name to a rock-band, The Doors, and Huxley is in the crowded picture that is the sleeve illustration for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. But in spite of its celebrity, it can be seen, from one point of view, as a rather sad book for it is the story of an attempt to reach by artificial means what Huxley could not find by the route of artistic perception alone. Blake could see what Huxley sought by the light of his own extraordinarily fertile and visionary imagination. The heightened awareness reported in this mescalin trip is no more impressive to the reader, to the non-participant, than a canvas of Bosch seen in ordinary daylight in the Musée des Beaux Arts. Huxley was aware of this: ‘I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision.’

  When Huxley sent the manuscript to Chatto, Harold Raymond replied: ‘You are the most articulate guinea pig that any scientist could hope to engage.’5 The book was a success and went through many impressions but critics were of two kinds. The first, like the Swami Prabhavananda, thought it illegitimate to take a short-cut to enlightenment by popping a pill. ‘To Swami, this was a deadly heresy, and he regarded Aldous and Gerald as its originators,’6 wrote Isherwood. Spiritual discipline was the only proper way. From the other standpoint of non-mystical rationalism, Thomas Mann’s view is representative. He told Ida Herz who had sent him a copy of the book that he could not share her enthusiasm: ‘It represents the last, and I am tempted to say, the rashest development of Huxley’s escapism, which I never liked in him … Now, given the eloquent endorsement of this famous writer, many young Englishmen and especially Americans will try the experiment. For the book is selling like mad. But it is an altogether – I do not want to say immoral, but must say irresponsible book, which can only contribute to the befuddlement of the world and to its incapacity to meet the deadly serious problems of the times with intelligence.’7

  After the experiment Maria and Aldous took a motoring trip for three weeks to the American North West in which they covered five thousand miles ending with ‘a couple of radiant days at Tahoe’8 in June. There is a description in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) of a visit to Salt Lake City on this trip. Once home, Huxley polished off The Doors in a month and started to work on some essays. He celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday in June at a party with the Stravinskys, Hubbies, Gerald Heard and Christopher Wood, and Eva Herrman. At the end of the summer Edwin Hubble died suddenly. He had been a great friend and someone Huxley admired as an all-round scientific humanist.

  On 3 November 1953 the Huxleys presented themselves for examination as part of an application for American citizenship. They had lived in California for fourteen years and, partly because Matthew and his family were doing the same, wanted to become citizens. It seemed to symbolise the impossibility now of any return to Europe. Their two character witnesses, Betty Wendel and Rosalind Rajagopal, drove them to a court in the Rowan Building in Downtown Los Angeles where they answered all the necessary questions on American history and the Constitution. The judge asked Huxley if he would be prepared to bear arms in the US Army and he replied that he would not. By all accounts the judge tried to be accommodating. He offered Huxley the opportunity to say that his objection was religious but he refused to use the get-out – in spite of whispered promptings from Maria. This left the judge no option but to adjourn the proceedings. According to Betty Wendel, who wrote an account for Sybille Bedford: ‘When they left the building Aldous’s face was white. He said with an entirely uncharacteristic show of feeling, “They don’t want us here!”’9 He asked to go home to bed. They subsequently decided not to pursue the application, although worried that continued ‘resident alien’ status might affect their plans to go to Europe in 1954. Huxley actually thought of leaving the United States if he were to be rejected but he did not, in the end, take the matter far enough for his application actually to be refused. More worrying at this time, perhaps, was Maria’s health. He told Eileen Garrett, President of the Parapsychology Foundation and an old friend of both of them, that Maria had been having a series of X-ray treatments, ‘which she finds tiring and nervously trying. Vitamins and hypnosis help; but it is a bit of an ordeal.’10 Huxley was no longer making light of Maria’s illness.

  Early in 1954 Huxley told Chatto that he was at work on a long story and some essays: ‘And in the distance lies the project of a novel, to cover three generations from the mid nineteenth century, to the present. This is still obscure but I seem to see it coming.’11 Probably the most interesting fictional prospectus for a long time, this was another idea that would never reach fruition. The fragment of an unfinished novel published in his second wife, Laura’s, memoir This Timeless Moment, could be a remnant of this ambition.12 For now, The Doors of Perception was published in February and, after noting some hostile reaction, Huxley told Harold Raymond: ‘How odd it is that writers like Belloc and Chesterton may sing the praises of alcohol (which is responsible for about two thirds of car accidents and three quarters of crimes of violence) and be regarded as good Christians and noble fellows, whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be other and less harmful short cuts to self-transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug fiend and wicked perverter of weak-minded humanity.’13 In a letter to his old friend Professor Rhine (their mutual interest in parapsychology alive, for Huxley had just written a piece for Life on ESP and psychokinesis) Huxley said that the topic raised by Doors of ‘the fauna and flora of the deeper subconscious’ continued to fascinate him. He believed that the deep levels reached by mescalin-takers constituted a world ‘which has little or nothing to do with our personal or collective human interests – the world from which poets and prophets have derived their descriptions of hell and heaven and the other, remoter areas of the Other World.’14

  From the Other World, he turned to the Old World. The Huxleys had decided to revisit Europe in April – it would be Maria’s last experience of her beloved continent – and they set sail from New York for Cherbourg on 7 April. They planned to attend Eileen Garrett’s conference on parapsychology and philosophy in the south of France at St Paul de Vence and then to fly to Egypt to visit their old friends Dr and Mme Paul Godel (he was head of the Suez Canal Company’s hospital at Ismalia). Before he left, Huxley had started work on a new novel, The Genius and the Goddess, which would be his penultimate essay in fiction. The Huxleys left with the citizenship question in the air. They were not even sure, in the months preceding departure, whether they would have their papers and passports ready by April. ‘It is all very tiresome, all the more so as we have got into this imbroglio quite gratuitously and of our own volition,’15 he told Matthew. After a brief stay at their usual hotel in New York, the Hotel Warwick, and having seen Matthew and Ellen and the grandchildren who delighted them, and having conferred with Humphry Osmond, the Huxleys set sail on the Queen Elizabeth. They went straight to St Paul de Vence where Huxley read a paper on ‘The Far Continents of the M
ind’. He reported to Osmond after the conference: ‘There were no conclusions, of any kind, of course; but a lot of interesting things were said.’16 He also met ‘some very remarkable people’, mostly French, doctors, philosophers, and psychologists. Then they went to the Godels at Ismailia: ‘a very extraordinary place in company with a very extraordinary man’.17 Each day he went to the hospital with Godel ‘disguised as a visiting doctor in a white gown’ and marvelled at the doctor’s approach, teasing out the psychosomatic symptoms by ‘Socratic questioning’ of the patients. The Huxleys loved the climate and the people of Egypt and were overwhelmed by Cairo. They tried to persuade Matthew – who was now starting a career in public health administration – to come out and study the work of Godel.

  From Cairo the Huxleys went on to Beirut, again delighted by what they saw and playing with the idea of coming to live there. Their visit to an Armenian Church in the northern suburbs of Beirut where a miraculous patch of light was said to appear is described in an essay in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956).18 Huxley saw nothing, he said, because of his poor eyesight and the experience prompted reflections on the difference between spirituality and superstition, and the ways in which the State could use parapsychological knowledge to brainwash citizens. In spite of his researches into parapsychology, Huxley remained ‘appalled by the superstitious passion for marvels displayed even by intelligent and well educated men … What may be called the Baconian-pyramidological-cryptographic-spiritualist-theosophical syndrome afflicts a large part of the human race.’19 He never ceased to think of himself as a scientific investigator of these phenomena, not a credulous faddist. After Lebanon, the Huxleys went to Jerusalem, Cyprus, Greece and, just before going on to Rome, Huxley summed up: ‘It has been a very wonderful journey through space and time – wonderful but depressing; for I have never had such a sense of the tragic nature of the human situation, the horror of a history in which the great works of art, the philosophies and the religions, are no more than islands in an endless stream of war, poverty, frustration, squalor and disease.’20 It was a further illustration of the Buddha’s tenet: ‘I show you sorrow and the ending of sorrow.’

  In Rome (Huxley had nothing to say about his stay in Athens – the great English phil-Hellenic passion never stirred him) the roar of scooters and traffic upset him. ‘Walking in Rome used to be one of the great pleasures of life; it is now one of the pains.’21 They spent a weekend in Florence where Maria saw Costanza for the last time, in a very ill state, dying of lung cancer. They visited the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia and the set of Helen of Troy at the Ciné Città film studios in Rome. Also in Rome they had lunch with a young Italian former violinist, Laura Archera, whom they had first met in 1948 at Wrightwood when she came to see them about making a film on the Palio at Siena (not realising that Huxley had written an essay on the subject, a fact which he was tactful enough not to refer to). She met Huxley again in 1952 at a dinner party given by the movie producer Gabriel Pascal, and discussed psychotherapy with him. That was to be her subsequent career. Maria, a few days later, came to see Laura at her studio for a therapeutic session. This was after her operation and she told Laura she was completely at peace with the idea of dying: ‘To me, dying is no more than going from one room to another.’22 Laura later returned for sessions with Aldous who was desperate to retrieve a childhood memory of a two-year period around the age of eleven. The session actually ended up with his demonstrating on her the hypnotic technique of ‘magnetic passes’. Now in Rome, the acquaintance was renewed. Maria was exhausted by the travelling, ‘pale and thin’.23 They met Sybille Bedford who was also living in Rome at this time in the Via della Fontanella.

  It has been suggested – and the evidence is fragmentary and anecdotal – that Maria, in June 1954 in Rome, knowing that she was soon to die, made arrangements for Aldous to be cared for by, as it were, designating a successor. Various women in Hollywood – Peggy Kiskadden, Beth Wendel, Maria’s sister, Rose, for example – who knew and cared for Aldous have been considered as possible candidates. All three women were interviewed in the 1980s by David King Dunaway and Betty Wendel told him that Maria, shortly before she died, had rung her up to say: ‘Don’t let X get him.’24 Peggy Kiskadden, for her part, said that the idea that she was X was ‘implausible’.25 Sybille Bedford says that, on one of those balmy nights in Rome, Maria took Laura to one side and spoke to her out of earshot.26 She assumed that Laura was being told that Maria was dying. ‘Maria very much wanted him not to be alone … It was a kind of consecration.’27 Maria had devoted her life to Aldous, caring for a man who was not easy, exhausting herself in the process. She did not want the business to halt with her death. Sybille Bedford is convinced that the marriage to Laura was ‘more or less engineered by Maria’.28 It has also been suggested that Aldous was unwilling to deal with what was happening: ‘He couldn’t face certain things. He couldn’t, for example, face Maria’s death. He was a very strange man,’29 says Sybille Bedford. Perhaps this was yet another example of his excessive intellectualism – an incapacity in ordinary things and emotions that could start to look like but was not callousness.

  From Rome, the Huxleys went to Paris and then to the Drôme where the Neveux family had taken a house for the summer at Dieulefit. Here Aldous managed to do a little more work on The Genius and the Goddess. Three weeks later they went to Vaisons-la-Romaine for a theatre festival which was presenting one of Georges’ plays. Then they returned to Dieulefit to celebrate Aldous’s sixtieth birthday on 26 July. But, happy as Aldous was at work in the garden, Maria was visibly tense and suffering. Eventually she went to see a doctor in Paris who advised immediate return. They could not book a return passage straightaway so Aldous left her in Paris with Sophie and crossed to England to see Julian and Juliette and to meet his publisher and old friends. He dined with John Lehmann and V.S. Pritchett and met a new psychotherapist called Eeman in Baker Street. At Julian’s house in Pond Street he made light of Maria’s condition saying, Juliette remembers, that she had had ‘a “small” relapse but was now recovered’.30

  On 21 August they sailed for New York on the Mauretania. On the ship, Huxley wrote to Juliette about how happy he had been with them: ‘Thank you for all your sweetness and goodness.’31 They spent a fortnight in New York and in October Huxley lectured at the Institute for Modern Art in Washington and again at Duke University on the theme of visionary experience and art, the germ of Heaven and Hell. Then he returned to Los Angeles to finish The Genius and the Goddess as well as some new essays. Maria told Matthew that the new novel was ‘his best ever … there is Trev in it … I can’t help feeling that this love for Trev extends and makes the story so good.’32 Almost immediately, during lunch with Betty Wendel at the Town and Country Market, he asked her to collaborate with him in a stage version of the story. Humphry Osmond went back to Canada, and they missed him greatly. Because of Maria’s medical treatment and Aldous’s shingles they had not been able to repeat the mescalin experience before he left. Maria was having a long series of X-ray treatments combined with a recurrent and very painful lumbago.

  On 9 January 1955, Huxley had his second mescalin experience. ‘This experience was no less remarkable than the first – but entirely different; for since I was in a group, with three other people [including Gerald Heard, a man called Captain Hubbard who supplied the drug on this occasion, and possibly Laura because she mentions taking it with him in 195533] the experience had a human content, which the earlier, solitary experience, with its Other Worldly quality and its intensification of aesthetic experience, did not possess.’34 The trip lasted five hours and may have been Huxley’s last experiment with mescalin: ‘I was given a series of luminous illustrations of the Christian saying, “Judge not that ye be not judged”, and the Buddhist saying, “To set up what you like against what you do not like, this is the disease of the mind”.’

  In the real world, the collaboration with Betty Wendel in the American stage production of The Genius and the Goddess – an unc
onscionably tedious story – was beginning to unfold from the start of 1955. And Maria’s lumbago – which, for Huxley, was what he judged her illness to be – continued to give trouble and need constant hospital treatment. He told Osmond on 22 January that he hoped ‘all will be well within a short time’.35 Was he deceiving himself? Or was he being kept in the dark? By the beginning of February he was forced to admit that something else was going on, and asked the doctor if there was some malignancy in the liver. He was apparently told that they were not sure. Maria had told the Kiskaddens several times: ‘Aldous doesn’t know; he doesn’t want to know,’36 even though the truth must have been apparent since the summer of 1952. He kept on talking of trips to be taken when Maria was better until, on 5 February 1955, the emotional dam broke and the truth burst in on him.

  1 Humphry Osmond, Mem. Vol. pp114–22

  2 L.670

  3 Gerald Heard, ‘The Poignant Prophet’, Kenyon Review, 1965, p65

  4 Humphry Osmond, ‘Preface’ to Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience. (1977) edited by Michael Horovitz and Cynthia Palmer, pviii