Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  5 Reading, Letter from Harold Raymond to Aldous Huxley, 31 August 1953

  6 Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciples, p219

  7 Letters of Thomas Mann, Letter to Ida Herz, 21 March 1954, p464

  8 L.675

  9 SB2.152

  10 L.692

  11 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 21 January 1954

  12 Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (1968), pp205ff

  13 L.701

  14 L.693

  15 L.696

  16 L.705

  17 L.705

  18 Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), ‘Miracle in Lebanon’, pp195–203

  19 L.719

  20 L.709

  21 L.709

  22 This Timeless Moment, p9

  23 Ibid., p17

  24 HL, Oral History Transcripts. Interview between David King Dunaway and Betty Wendel, 2 June 1985

  25 HL, Interview between David King Dunaway and Peggy Kiskadden, 3 June 1985

  26 SB2.172–3

  27 SB, in conversation with the author

  28 SB, in conversation with the author

  29 SB, in conversation with the author

  30 Leaves of the Tulip Tree, p230

  31 L.711

  32 SB2.179, quoting letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley (undated)

  33 This Timeless Moment, p117

  34 L.720

  35 L.725

  36 L.731n. No further source given

  XXXIV

  Sorrow

  On 5 February 1955 Huxley wrote an extraordinary letter to Jeanne Neveux. Extraordinary because this fluent and copious letter writer rarely gave vent to exposed, personal feeling. The letter begins:

  Dear Jeanne, I write to you from the depths of an immense sadness. Maria is very, very ill – ill, if the doctors are to be believed, without hope. What appeared to be a lumbago is in fact the symptom of a cancer of the spine; and, for two weeks the liver has been attacked, also the lungs, and probably the spleen and the intestine.’1

  At last, Huxley had admitted the truth that must have been apparent to everyone else for a long time (Humphry Osmond had broken down in tears when he discovered the truth from Maria during his 1953 visit). He wrote to Matthew on the same day that ‘I try not to cry when I see her, but it is difficult after thirty-six years.’2

  Maria returned home in an ambulance on Monday 7 February to the care of a nurse, Helen Halsberg, who had looked after her in 1952, after her mastectomy operation. Huxley himself treated her by hypnosis, conquering the nausea that had prevented her from eating. She was weak from having received intravenal injections of glucose and vitamins. ‘Think of her with all your love, and of me also,’ Huxley ended his letter to Jeanne. Matthew flew out to be with his mother on the Tuesday but when Suzanne arrived on Wednesday she was only just conscious.3 Suzanne told Jeanne how Aldous had been constantly on the verge of tears but had tried to distract them by offering tea and playing ‘beautiful’ gramophone records.4 Maria could hardly speak or recognise anyone. Aldous sat with her, ‘sometimes saying nothing, sometimes speaking’ and practising hypnotic suggestion and ‘passes’ to ease her pain. He recalled her mystical experiences in the Mojave desert: ‘This was the reason for her passionate love of the desert. For her, it was not merely a geographical region; it was also a state of mind, a metaphysical reality, an unequivocal manifestation of God.’ All her mystical experiences were associated with light. ‘Light had been the element in which her spirit had lived, and it was therefore to light that all my words referred.’ He would ask her to ‘look at these lights of her beloved desert’ which he had conjured up by describing for her the desert scenery.

  A little before three on the Saturday morning the nurse said her pulse was failing. Aldous went and sat with her, leaned across and spoke into her ear ‘that I was with her and would always be with her in that light which was the central reality of our beings’. And then ‘there was peace … How passionately, from the depth of a fatigue which illness and a frail constitution had often intensified to the point of being hardly bearable, she had longed for peace!’ For the last hour he sat or stood with his left hand on her head and the right on the solar plexus to create ‘a kind of vital circuit’. The breathing became quieter ‘and I had the impression that there was some kind of release’. In her ear he continued to whisper, ‘“Let go, let go … Only light …” When the breathing ceased, at about six, it was without any struggle.’ Matthew and Peggy Kiskadden were also present as these words from the Tibetan Book of the Dead were uttered. Matthew later told his wife that these were ‘the most anguishing and moving hours of my life … It was over so quietly and gently with Aldous with tears streaming down his face, with his quiet voice not breaking.’5 Gerald Heard observed: ‘She has been wonderfully and gently brave through it all’6 Everyone said that the end had been swift and painless but Maria’s anxiety not to be a burden to anyone may have led her to minimise her suffering. The Huxleys’ Breton cook, Marie Le Put, one of those devoted family servants who enjoyed such a good relationship with the Huxleys, was interviewed in 1986. She said that, at a lunch party at North King’s Road, Maria had said to her when they were on their own: ‘“Marie, I can’t take it any more. Only you understand what I am going through …” She was in such pain.’7 But at the same time, according to Jeanne, ‘she was not afraid of death’.8

  Maria was buried on 14 February in Rose Dale Memorial Park in Los Angeles. There were only a few mourners in addition to the family: Christopher Isherwood, the Stravinskys, Gerald Heard, Eva Herrmann. For some reason the service was in an Episcopalian church not, as might possibly have been expected, a Catholic one. ‘Aldous ashen and worn-looking and there was uncontrolled crying here and there,’9 reported Eva Herrmann. After the funeral, Aldous stayed on at the house for more than two months. It seemed that he wanted to be alone. Eva Herrmann paid a visit on the night of the funeral: ‘The house was dark when A. opened the door. No one else was at home. He had a strong light in his study and was just correcting proofs. You might have thought Maria was in the next room, everything seemed so peaceful.’ A month later Christopher Isherwood organised a dinner for Aldous, Gerald Heard and friends. Huxley was tired after a visit to Grace Hubble at Pasadena. ‘He yawned and kept closing his eyes, and his face was thin and grey … Aldous refers without hesitation to Maria and the times they were together, but he is utterly lacking in any other kind of intimacy.’10 Another month later, just before he went to New York, he was looking no better: ‘He looked so thin and worn. Almost a death mask.’11 On this occasion, Huxley talked about a new kind of radiation that had produced an entirely new kind of cancer in mice. ‘Aldous no longer has the right to mention cancer at all,’ wrote Isherwood angrily. Another, less obtrusive, visitor during these two months was the Huxleys’ friend, Laura Archera. ‘In the months that followed Maria Huxley’s death in 1955, I dined quite often at Aldous’s home,’ she wrote in This Timeless Moment.12 She said he was going through the most difficult period of his life but he got through it by trying to follow the exhortation he had given Maria: ‘Let go.’ He made a point of accepting all social invitations to keep his mind from brooding and Marie Le Put carried on cooking for him, leaving meals in the fridge. Not knowing about Laura’s visits, she was puzzled at how much he was eating.

  In April, having worked all this time at finishing the play with Betty Wendel, he decided to go to New York to discuss a production and to stay with Matthew and his family. It was decided that he would be driven by Rose – in Maria’s Oldsmobile – to New York, a twelve-day trip that Rose was nervous of taking because, without Maria’s constant facilitating, how would people now learn to approach Aldous directly? He had been lent the playwright George Kaufman’s apartment on Park Avenue in New York where he stayed for eight weeks, working on the play and living ‘in a style to which I am not accustomed – penthouse with terraces overlooking the City, French butler and wife (admirable cook) Siamese cat and an enormous library of plays’.13
In the months before this trip, Matthew had written to Jeanne that he had to respect Aldous’s wish for solitude ‘so left him alone in the house’.14 He had been left, as Huxley put it to Edith Sitwell, with ‘this daily and hourly presence of an absence‘.15 To Mary Hutchinson, he wrote: ‘And now her absence is a kind of insistent presence – I am conscious of it constantly. However, I work a great deal, and the mechanics of life have been well-settled.’16 To Jeanne he talked of his loss as an ‘amputation’,17 a metaphor repeated to several correspondents, insisting to Lady Sandwich that life, nonetheless, must go on ‘a life that seems, after the thirty-five years of being two in one, strangely amputated’.18

  In July, leaving his New York apartment, Huxley went to stay with Matthew and his family in Guilford, Connecticut in ‘a pleasant 18th century house on a tidal river 2 miles from the sea in the midst of woods & green fields’.19 It was there that he finished off the appendices of Heaven and Hell. To Rina Montini, their favourite old member of staff, he wrote in Italian that: ‘I do not know what I will do next,’20 and to Reginald Pole he said bereavement was ‘a kind of physical shock, as after an amputation, and a continuing sense of the absence of something which ought to be there but is not’.21 In response to a poem on Maria written by Maria’s niece, Claire, Huxley told her: ‘She was more capable of love and understanding than almost anyone I have ever known, and in so far as I have learned to be human – and I had a great capacity for not being human – it is thanks to her.’22 The precise extent of the contribution that Maria made – from those first tentative days at Garsington to her death in 1955 – to the growth and humanisation of Aldous Huxley is immeasurable.

  It was during the early summer that Huxley learned from Eileen Garrett that Maria had, as Huxley solemnly reported, ‘appeared to her several times since her death’.23 Perhaps this sort of thing was what he had in mind when he told Julian on the latter’s birthday that: ‘We both, I think, belong to that fortunate minority of human beings, who retain the mental openness and elasticity of youth, while being able to enjoy the fruits of an already long experience.’24 He had a further sitting in New York with a medium called Arthur Ford, who also reported on Maria’s progress into ‘lightness, youth, gaiety, freedom’.25

  In July, Huxley began to write a series of regular articles for Esquire, a magazine which allowed him to combine the sort of fluent lucubrations on the great issues which he did so well, and so effortlessly, with the traditional concerns of a gentleman’s magazine. His efforts to find a producer for the play – there were hopes that Ingrid Bergman would star – continued and The Genius and the Goddess appeared in July after being serialised in Harper’s Magazine. The novel – hardly more than a long short story – is Huxley’s briefest and in its subject matter connects with his earlier novels: the family, lost childhood experiences, the hint of troubled sexuality. It is told in flashbacks (he was once going to call it The Wrong End of the Telescope) and makes much of the unreliability of fiction. ‘The trouble with fiction,’ says John Rivers, ‘is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.’ Early in the novel, Rivers picks up The Life of Henry Maartens the scientist, the ‘genius’ of the title. It is the official biography, or what he calls ‘The official fiction … an unforgettable picture of the Soap Opera scientist – you know the type – the moronic baby with the giant intellect; the sick genius battling indomitably against enormous odds … the absent-minded Professor with his head in the clouds but his heart in the right place …’ Maartens is described as: ‘An idiot where human relations were concerned, a prize ass in all the practical affairs of life.’ Maarten’s wife, Katy, the ‘goddess’ (who may have had something in her of Frieda Lawrence) comes to Rivers while her husband is dying. The sexual relationship which ensues restores her. ‘I was indirectly responsible for a miracle,’ observes Rivers. Maartens is restored ‘to a state of animal grace through satisfied desire’, a rather Lawrentian conclusion. The book seems to have been a success, selling 20,000 copies in England very quickly with a second printing ordered by August.

  Huxley returned to Los Angeles in September, fleeing from the heat of the East Coast in August to an equally hot California with temperatures of over 110 degrees. He had told Grace Hubble that he wanted some time to ‘chew the cud’,26 but the play – and the endless need to rewrite it to please the producers (especially Joseph Anthony whom he liked) – denied him that creative pause. ‘All this jigsaw work entailed in shaping a play for stage production is extremely boring,’27 he complained to Humphry Osmond. After reading about the oddity of the composer Gesualdo, he told Osmond: ‘I always have the feeling, when I read history, or see or listen to or read the greatest works of art, that, if we knew the right way to set about it, we could do things far more strange and lovely than even the strangest and the loveliest of past history.’ This is a characteristic expression of Huxley’s sense of being unsatisfied aesthetically. He was constantly seeking some new sensation that the mere practice of his art would not yield him. He wanted visions, perceptions, mystical experiences that he could not gain unaided by the force of the creative imagination alone. He needed other keys to unlock the doors of perception.

  On his return to Los Angeles he was keen to extend his experiments. At lunch with Isherwood on 5 October he was ‘thin and pale but lively and full of talk. He urged me to get him some mescalin in New York, spoke of his play, and discussed money – practically asking me outright how much I have. I told him at once, of course. He has $80,000.’28 A fortnight later he wrote to Humphry Osmond to tell him about another ‘extraordinary experience with mescalin the other day’.29 After reading about a Canadian engineer who had thrown off some childhood traumas through taking LSD, Huxley decided ‘it might be interesting to find out why so much of my childhood is hidden from me, so that I cannot remember large areas of my early life’. What exactly were these childhood experiences Huxley was denied? He seems to have been preoccupied with the notion – which is of course a commonplace of therapy-that something in childhood was blocked off. In this instance, he took half the contents of a 400mg capsule (the rest forty minutes later) in the company of Laura ‘the first one, as far as I know, alone with an individual, and one which was not a planned scientific experiment,’30 she wrote.

  He reported to Osmond: ‘There was little vision with the eyes closed, as was the case during my experiment under your auspices, but much transfiguration of the outer world.’ The desired recovered memory did not come but instead ‘the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact’. He admitted that this sounded like ‘twaddle’ but ‘the fact remains’. Unlike previous experiences this meant that he did not feel cut off from the human world. The experience convinced him that ‘mescalin does genuinely open the door’. According to Laura Huxley, he had his first LSD experience with her in the same month, October 1955 (though she did not join him in taking it). Huxley, however, told Osmond that the first LSD experiment was in mid-December 1955, with Gerald Heard and two others. At this he took 75mg of LSD and found it more potent than mescalin. The results were very similar to mescalin, with no visions, only ‘external transfiguration’.31 In the experiment described by Laura Huxley they listened to Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto together and she quotes directly from descriptions in Island his last novel, that mirror this experience. When the music stopped, Laura got up to deal with the record player and suddenly felt a sense of Maria in the room and then inside herself. It seemed for a moment that she actually was Maria. Then Huxley spoke, extremely firmly yet gently: ‘Don’t ever be anyone but yourself.’ There were numerous further experiments of this kind which can be found in This Timeless Moment, especially in the chapter, ‘Love and Work’.

  At the end of the year the play was still ‘in a state of suspended animation’,32 and Huxley reported that he saw few friends and that Maria’s death had ‘deprived me of a pair of vicarious eyes’.33 His relationship with the play’s director, Joseph Anthony,
deteriorated in the new year with the director accusing Huxley of being unwilling to co-operate with him. In January Huxley had yet another mescalin trip in which he thought of Maria ‘and was overwhelmed by intense grief … It was something very painful but very necessary.’34 In February, Heaven and Hell – in a sense a sequel or companion piece to The Doors of Perception with which it was subsequently reissued – was published. Its foreword honestly states Huxley’s need to make use of the artificial road to paradise: ‘For a person in whom “the candle of vision” never burns spontaneously, the mescalin experience is doubly illuminating. It throws light on the hitherto unknown regions of his own mind; and at the same time it throws light, indirectly, on other minds, more richly gifted in respect to vision than his own.’ He anatomised the kinds of visionary experience reached in these experiments, which were ‘strange with a certain regularity, strange according to a pattern’. The visions were not ‘our personal property’ but an Other World into which we were admitted, making contact with ‘the animal otherness underlying personal and social identity’ at ‘the mind’s antipodes’. The book is less personal than The Doors of Perception but more informative about the iconography of visions and their artistic correspondences.

  Huxley had sent off to Chatto his latest essay collection, Adonis and the Alphabet, and was continuing to pump out his monthly contributions to Esquire – ‘the only magazine that will print an essay about anything or nothing’35 – at $1000 a time. And then, with astonishment, his friends caught sight of a headline in the Los Angeles Times: ‘NOVELIST HUXLEY WEDS VIOLINIST’. The report was datelined Yuma, Arizona, 20 March and it was the first anyone, including his son Matthew, knew about his proposal to remarry barely a year after Maria had died. Realising his oversight, Huxley sat down on 19 March to explain to a range of correspondents. To Matthew and Ellen he described Laura as ‘a young woman who used to be a concert violinist, then turned movie-cutter and worked for Pascal. I have come to be attached to her in recent months and since it seemed to be reciprocal, we decided to cross the Arizona border and call at the Drive-in Wedding Chapel (actual name). She is twenty years younger than I am [he was sixty-one, she was forty], but doesn’t seem to mind. Coccola was fond of her and we saw her a lot in Rome, that last summer abroad. I had a sense for a time that I was being unfaithful to that memory. But tenderness, I discover, is the best memorial to tenderness. ’36 Matthew was very hurt by the suddenness of this announcement and the fact that he had to learn of it when people quoted a newspaper report to him. It shows a side of Huxley that was either very insensitive or simply unaware, in his cerebrotonic universe, of what was going on down below in the world of normal human relations. The day before the wedding he had lunch with his old friend Gerald Heard and there was no mention of it. He claimed that his desire for privacy had been ambushed by the press and told Anita Loos: ‘I think some day we shd write a farce called ‘“The Drive-in Wedding Chapel’” … with Jimmy Durante starring as the Minister and various lesser lights driving up, and honking, for a quick nuptial.’37