In her book, Laura wrote that Huxleys, early in 1956, had asked her: ‘Have you ever been tempted by marriage?’38 and she was frank about not wanting to surrender her liberty as a young woman who had already had several careers. The choice of venue seems to have been a combination of frivolity and cocking a snook at convention. A ladies room attendant was pressed into service as one of the witnesses but by the time they emerged some quick-witted local newspaper reporters recognising a good story were on the case. Because Laura was not Maria and could never be, and because she had a career of her own (Maria’s being the full time one of supporting, protecting, managing Aldous) she was always going to risk a certain amount of coolness from friends of Aldous and Maria. The Nys family in particular have tended to make disparaging comments in interviews and letters. But significantly, close friends of Maria and Aldous such as Christopher Isherwood and Anita Loos did not share this view. ‘It is such a pleasure to have a happy event in one’s life like Aldous’s marriage,’ Anita Loos told Betty Wendel. ‘I have seen Laura twice and find her absolutely enchanting. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know the origin of the romance, but how lucky for all of us that she is so divine. When I think of the women who were after him it makes me shudder. ’39 Far from being repentant, Huxley enjoyed recounting the tale of the ‘broken-down cowboy’ who accompanied the ladies room attendant as a witness – for the benefit of Isherwood who found him ‘deeply happy and in a most benign state of mind’.40
The couple soon thought about moving and found a house at 3276 Deronda Drive in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the house of Virginia Pfeiffer, with whom Laura had been living, ‘with virtually no smog and an incredible view over the city to the south and over completely savage hills in every other direction, hills which remind me of Greece by their barrenness, their steep-sided valleys and the unsullied sky overhead’.41 There were raccoons, coyotes and snakes in the vicinity and there were good walks in the firebreaks, a sign that this countryside was at risk of fire. Huxley was telling everyone that Laura was getting on with his friends and that as he put it to Mary Hutchinson: ‘The pain and sadness of those last months have lost their intensity and my memories of Maria are now predominantly happy memories.’42 He was still convinced, however, that Maria’s spirit was in touch. He told Victoria Ocampo that he was sure ‘she survives and develops’43 and that several people who, unlike himself, were not opaque to voices from beyond, on the basis of ‘contacts’ with her, concluded that ‘she has achieved an extraordinary degree of liberation – that she gives an overwhelming impression of youthfulness and happiness’. The Huxley of the chapel at Beirut who frowned on superstition was not the Huxley of this letter.
He was now at work on his new ‘phantasy’, the revived project of a ‘good Utopian’ novel which would be his last, Island. Revisions to the play still kept breaking in on this task and there was even talk of reviving a musical comedy version of Brave New World. And there were the endless letters to and from Humphry Osmond – the two men having now invented the word ‘psychedelic’ to describe the visionary consequences of the drugs they were exploring. Julian and Juliette came over to visit, and in October he flew to New York to give a speech on ‘The History of Tension’ to the New York Academy of Sciences. The Academy’s publicist was so effective that he had lined up no less than seven television and radio appearances for him. Huxley was beginning to emerge as an adornment of the sort of serious television interview that went out in the 1950s on the networks – less frequently today – and his brand of elegant and lucid commentary was perfectly adjusted to the format. At the same time he was disinclined to preach, telling a member of the Vedanta Society who asked him to do so, ‘I am not a religious man – in the sense that I am not a believer in metaphysical propositions, not a worshipper or performer of rituals, and not a joiner of churches –and therefore I don’t feel qualified or inclined to tell people in general what to think or do.’44
In October, Huxley’s new essay collection, Adonis and the Alphabet (in the US it would be titled Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) appeared. It was a summing-up of Huxley’s intellectual concerns since the last essay collection in 1950, Themes and variations. The opening essay advocating ‘non-verbal education’ wanted educators to recognise the ‘world of the unconscious intelligences immanent in the mind-body’ as well as the ‘world of self-conscious verbalized intelligence’. It was called ‘The Education of an Amphibian’ and based on the assumption that, ‘every human being is an amphibian … we inhabit many different and even incommensurable universes’. Of no-one was this more true than Huxley. The scientific investigator was also a believer in the spirit world, the non-Christian talked about God, the logical analyst wrote fiction, the unremitting highbrow wrote scripts for Walt Disney, the indicter of ‘the fantastic over-valuation of words’, was a consummate literary artist. And in spite of his obsession with encyclopaedias and factual knowledge, his second essay argued for the vital distinction between ‘Knowledge and Understanding’. Denouncing ‘the learned foolery of scholars’ he praised the dictum of St John of the Cross: know yourself, empty the memory. But there was one word which he was anxious to retrieve for proper use: ‘Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word.’
Huxley the pessimist is again present in these essays. While casting, however, a gloomy eye over the arms race, the ecological ruin of the planet, the rapid growth of world population in relation to food resources, he also exhibited faith in the ability of human beings to transfigure themselves. ‘I am still optimist enough to credit life with invincibility, I am still ready to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man’s being will ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides.’ Yet, in the essay on the early twentieth century socialist experiment at Llano of Job Harriman and his followers, ‘Ozymandias’, which foundered as human selfishness arose to destroy the co-operative idea, one perhaps has a right to expect more from Huxley. His wryly amused account (‘Except in a purely negative way, the history of Llano is sadly uninstructive’) is all very well but he was an advocate of Utopia who perhaps should have had some answers to the all too common phenomenon of failed idealism. Huxley the futurologist is present in these essays, too. In the essay on ‘Censorship and Spoken Literature’ he seems to anticipate both Internet publishing and the talking book. In the best of these essays, Huxley combines attention to the contemporary world with a sense of wider possibilities. Looking, in the World’s Largest Drugstore, at the appalling Mother’s Day card verses he asks: ‘How is it that we have permitted ourselves to become so unrealistic, so flippantly superficial in all our everyday thinking and feeling about man and the world he lives in?’
At the end of December another newspaper headline was set up in type, this time in the British tabloid, The People. It read: ‘HE HOAXED THE WORLD WITH AN EYESIGHT CURE.’ The story beneath was based on a book called The Truth about Eye Exercises by Dr Philip Pollack, a leading American eye specialist who set out to demolish the claims of Dr Bates and in particular to describe ‘the great Aldous Huxley tragedy’. Pollack described a lecture given by Huxley in the middle of which he faltered and began to bring his eyes closer and closer to the manuscript. ‘At last he took a magnifying glass out of his pocket to decipher the words. Huxley was not cured. But he had tried to convince himself that he was. He had memorised the script, but had forgotten one passage.’ The moral drawn by The People was that one should not throw away one’s glasses if one did not wish to fall victim to ‘a great American hoax’. Chatto told Huxley that the article and the book might well be actionable but he told them that it was best to do nothing about it, either because he felt the issue too trivial or because he feared that there might well have been a grain of truth in what was descri
bed. Although this was clearly part of an anti-Bates backlash, he admitted that he had ‘never claimed to be able to read except under very good conditions’.45 This was not necessarily what was claimed on Huxley’s behalf. This incident was probably the address given by Huxley in April 1952 to the Screen Writers’ Guild of America, without glasses. The diarist of The Saturday Review who described it, said it was: ‘An agonizing moment, not improved by scattered titters from embarrassed onlookers.’46 Such accounts raise the puzzling question of why Huxley put himself in this position and what he hoped to achieve – if the reports are true – by attempting to create a false impression. It remains doubtful whether he had anything other than the briefest of intermissions in his struggle to see adequately.
1 RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 5 February 1955. Author’s translation
2 L.731n
3 Huxley’s own account of the death is given in This Timeless Moment, pp20–25
4 RL, Letter from Suzanne Nicolas to Jeanne Neveux, 3 March 1955
5 SB2.187. Letter from Matthew Huxley to Ellen Huxley. Undated
6 UCLA, Letter from Gerald Heard to Lucille Kahn, 10 November 1955
7 HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview between David King Dunaway and Marie Leput, 10 July 1986
8 Reading, Letter from Jeanne Neveux to Harold Raymond, 5 September 1955
9 UCLA, Letter from Sybille Bedford to Allanah Harper, 25 February 1955 quoting Eva Herrmann’s words
10 Isherwood Diaries, p482,18 March 1955
11 Ibid. P490, 8 April 1955
12 This Timeless Moment, p27
13 L.742
14 RL, Letter from Matthew Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 26 February 1955
15 HRC, Letter to Edith Sitwell, 6 March 1955
16 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 7 March 1955
17 RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 27 March 1955
18 HRC, Letter to Amiya Corbin, Lady Sandwich, 17 April 1955
19 Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 18 April 1955
20 RL, Letter to Rina Montini, 27 May 1955. Author’s translation from Italian
21 NYPL, Letter to Reginald Pole, 17 June 1955
22 L.740
23 L.746
24 L.749
25 L.756
26 HL, Letter to Grace Hubble, 26 July 1955
27 L.766
28 Isherwood Diaries, p535, 5 October 1955
29 L.769
30 This Timeless Moment, p138
31 L.779
32 L.778
33 L.781
34 L.788
35 Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 3 January 1956
36 L.794
37 L.795
38 This Timeless Moment, p35
39 HRC, Letter from Anita Loos to Betty Wendel 23 April 1956
40 Isherwood Diaries, p598, 25 March 1956
41 L.800
42 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 10 July 1956
43 L.801
44 L.811
45 L.815
46 The Saturday Review, 12 April 1952
XXXV
Celebrity
Huxley’s unquenchable belief in the possibility of theatrical success ensured that he would persist throughout 1957 in the struggle to get The Genius and the Goddess staged on Broadway. This would finally happen on 10 December but the play survived for only five nights. ‘Why does anyone write for the theatre? It’s just asking for trouble,’1 he declared in January. Two years of his writing life had been wasted – it seems the appropriate word – on this project (not to mention work on rewriting Ralph Rose’s stage version of After Many A Summer and attempts to buy back the rights of Brave New World from RKO, which also involved approaching Stravinsky about writing a few numbers for the musical, then Leonard Bernstein). Two years that might have been put to more interesting creative use. It was also exhausting. At a dinner party in April, Christopher Isherwood found him ‘tired and sleepy’2 though one of his other guests, the young English poet Thom Gunn, was thrilled to meet the legendary older writer. Early in 1957 changes at Esquire meant his services were no longer required but the loss of $1000 a month (‘this convenient and well-paid pulpit’3) would not have troubled him for royalties continued to be high – English earnings alone being in excess of £4000 a year. In the spring he got together with a group of friends – Julian, Harrison Brown, Kingsley Davis, Fred Zinneman, Bill Kiskadden – in order to make a documentary film on population, concentrating on the illustrative example of Egypt.
Huxley was also beginning to accept offers to lecture. In his youth this had been a painful duty and he had hated it but in his last years in California he took to it and offers increased steadily. In April he spent three days at Stanford talking to students ‘of Creative Writing, whatever that is’4 and was then at the University of New Hampshire and in New York. Stanford went well and he became involved with the comparative religion and post-graduate English classes. He told Osmond that ‘the young people were nice and some of their elders were very interesting’.5 He was now the senior man of letters, the itinerant intellectual and visiting campus guru, always a commodity in demand.
On 18 July Huxley left for New York to supervise the play (earlier Peter Brook had read the script but declined it) and spent the rest of the summer there, also making ‘slow progress’6 on a book of essays, Brave New World Revisited. Laura, who was in her native Turin seeing her father, wrote to Jeanne that there was ‘a shadow of tiredness’7 in Huxley’s letters from New York where he was staying at the Shoreham Hotel. He managed to see the Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – ‘what a lot of slapdash shoddy stuff surrounding the twenty or thirty masterpieces!’8 In November, however, things started to go badly wrong with the play. The producer Courtney Burr made changes that were unacceptable and Huxley and Betty Wendel threatened to withdraw. What one commentator described as ‘a weak, conventional domestic comedy’ created by Burr and his collaborator Alec Coppel out of their play opened in New Haven on 13 November and the following week at Philadelphia – where it turned out Burr had inserted lines secretly rehearsed. Betty Wendel and Laura Huxley attended a performance on 23 November and Huxley threatened to terminate rights. On the eve of the short, disastrous New York run Huxley declared at last: ‘I have wasted more than four months, which might have been profitably employed in doing my own work. The experience has been unpleasant and … boring. It has also been highly educational. We live and learn.’ But Huxley was unwilling to learn from the new practitioners. He could not comprehend the ‘consistent mindlessness’9 of the characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays and was stuck in a more conventional playwriting mould. He flew back to Los Angeles with Laura, suitably chastened.
A few days later, a group of students from the Los Angeles School of Journalism arrived at Deronda Drive to interview the celebrity author. He told them about his blindness and how he had conquered it and how it cut off the medical career he had aspired to: ‘I happen to like writing very much … I feel quite sure that if I had been a doctor I should have been a pretty bad doctor and got out of it pretty quickly.’10 They asked him whether the old, satirical Huxley had been lost to the new thinker: ‘I don’t think I’ve sacrificed the old one. I hope I still write fairly funny things from time to time. I hope I’ve added another dimension; this is what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve maybe failed. I think in a certain sense the satirical side is the necessary complement to the other.’ Before the students left he warned them of the pitfalls of journalism: ‘It’s an awfully good field to get into, if you make very sure that you get out of it.’
In the spring of 1958 Huxley finished Brave New World Revisited, many of whose chapters had already appeared in the press during 1956 and 1957, and planned a trip to South America at the invitation of the Brazilian government. He was complaining to Julian about being too busy: ‘Why does one have to be? It seems absurd and unnecessary; but there it is.’11 A little later he told Matthew’s wife, Ellen, ‘I am sick and tired of this kind of writing; but at the same time
find it frustratingly difficult to find the right story line for my projected Utopian novel.’12 This was to be Huxley’s last major fictional work, Island, the novel he had promised for so long, the story that would show the mirror image of Brave New World, the picture of the good and right society – or, as he put it to Jeanne: ‘Le Meilleur des Mondes à rebours, créatif, positif.’13 Just before the Huxleys left for Brazil in July Huxley was interviewed on television – the first of several television interviews over the ensuing months – by Mike Wallace. It was essentially an opportunity to publicise some of the ideas about ‘over-organisation’ in modern societies that he would develop in Brave New World Revisited. ‘Huxley Fears New Persuasion Methods Could Subvert Democratic Procedures’ was the headline in The New York Times on 19 May. The FBI tuned in and took notes, an internal memo dredging up yet again Huxley’s attendance in 1935 at the International Authors Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris, which according to a French publication turned up by the spooks had been exposed as ‘a Communist plot to take over France’ – a singularly ineffective one it would seem. Since the ideas expounded in the Mike Wallace interview were about the defence of freedom of the individual against the state one can’t help feeling that the FBI was wasting its time monitoring the broadcast.
Aldous Huxley Page 49