Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The trip to Brazil taught Huxley how much of a celebrity he now was. ‘I was simultaneously touched and appalled to discover that I am now, as the result of having been around for so many years, a kind of historical monument, which sightseers will come quite a long way to inspect, and which radio and press reporters find newsworthy,’14 he told Osmond on his return. ‘In Brazil it was as though the Leaning Tower of Pisa had just come to town, wherever I blew in; and even in Italy I found myself in large theatres. It was really very odd and embarrassing.’ Laura Huxley, in her book, describes stopping off in the middle of the Brazilian jungle on the way to Brazilia and meeting members of a primitive tribe. A ‘frail-looking’ white man arrived and, realising it was Huxley: ‘With tears streaming down his cheeks, he approached him saying, “Uxley, Uxley … Contrapunto …” The two men embraced. Aldous too was moved.’15 After Brazil they went to Italy and to Turin. Laura left Aldous at a café table in Corso Vittorio Emanuele while she went shopping. When she returned, he handed her a letter he had written: ‘A letter to tell you that you really must be a strega [sorceress] – otherwise why should I keep falling more and more in love with you? … I love you very much and only wish I could love you more and better – could love you so that you would be well always, and strong and happy; so that there would never be that discrepancy between a tragic suffering face and the serenity of the nymph’s lovely body with its little breasts and the flat belly, the long legs … that I love so tenderly, so violently.’16 Whatever the truth of Huxley’s second marriage – whether it was indeed as ‘open’ as his first on both sides – the genuineness of his love for Laura is beyond doubt from this letter.

  After Italy, Huxley (at first on his own) went on to see Julian and Juliette in London. This visit was ‘very agreeable, and I saw vast numbers of people from Bertie Russell to Rose Macaulay … and … Tom Eliot (who is now curiously dull – as a result, perhaps, of being, at last, happy in his second marriage)’.17 Jeanne’s daughter, Noèle, met Huxley in London: ‘A strange feeling about Aldous, he hasn’t changed, he has only aged. The English climate doesn’t suit him. No cutting of the Nys link. Coccola isn’t forgotten. He speaks of her frequently and tenderly … He is dressed in a grey suit with a red tie.’18 While in London, Huxley was interviewed by John Lehmann on 12 October for the BBC television programme, Monitor. He told Lehmann, disarmingly, that he would be ‘flattered’ to be considered a novelist but perhaps the claim was ‘fraudulent’ and he was no more than an essayist. But he had not lost faith in the novel: ‘You can do whatever you like with it. There are no rules except to do it well.’ On 26 October he made another appearance, with Julian, the philosopher Freddie Ayer, and the neurologist, Grey Walter on another BBC programme, The Brains Trust. The four gentlemen, with their well-bred voices and public school forms of address (‘What do you think, Ayer?’) discoursed on a number of questions that seemed to have been tailored to Huxley’s concerns. He was more precise than Julian and relaxed and fluent in his answers, eminently reasonable in tone. He brought out some of his hobby-horses about over-population and the exhaustion of natural resources, and made several references to eminent American scientists and researchers at the highest levels with whom he was evidently in close contact. He defended his interests in the paranormal (‘The evidence in favour of telepathy seems fairly solid … And clairvoyance’) and in mysticism. The author of Language, Truth and Logic listened politely, only pointing out that mystical knowledge was all right so long as it wasn’t regarded as ‘cognitive’.

  After London Laura joined him in Paris and they went on to Venice. Huxley lectured in Turin, Milan, Rome, and Naples – in spite of an attack of ’flu. He wrote from Turin to Julian and Juliette to say how much he had enjoyed the ‘delightful’ joint television appearances. ‘When shall we three meet again? In these days of jets and international congresses, almost anything may happen … I shall always remember these weeks in London as a specially happy and significant time.’19 He would make three more visits to London in the years that now remained to him and it is clear that California had not erased his love for the pleasures it could still offer him. But when he returned to Deronda Drive in December he admitted he was ‘glad to be back in a quiet place after 5 months of globe-trotting, interviewgiving, TV appearances, lectures and meeting people’.20 He was coming back to a great deal of work – on the novel and on the lectures he was to give at Santa Barbara. He told Chatto he was working ‘like a termite’ at the lectures. ‘I am not attempting to write them out, but am feverishly collecting & organising materials, so that I may be able to deliver them extempore, but with some measure of sense.’21 These lectures at the University of California at Santa Barbara would be published posthumously in 1978 as The Human Situation and they reveal the full breadth of his concerns about ‘this push towards catastrophe’ 22 of the contemporary world. But at the start of 1959 he told Julian: ‘The trouble with all these talks about culture is that they distract one from doing the things that make a culture worth having and eat up the time and energy that should go into one’s work.’23

  In October 1958, while in London, Brave New World Revisited was published. This short book displayed once more Huxley’s gift for concise and clear argument and is powerful evidence for his own case that he was more effective as an essayist than as a novelist, at least by this stage in his writing career. Where his last novel would creak under the weight of its exposition and disappoint in its lack of fictional invention and imagining, his last two prose works, Brave New World Revisited and Literature and Science, were models of pellucid reasoning. The subject of the book was announced as ‘freedom and its enemies’. He pointed out that when Brave New World was being written in 1931, ‘I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically-induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching – these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren … Twenty-seven years later … I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when writing Brave New World … The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning.’ He predicted a ‘nightmare of total organization’ and in so doing revealed himself as essentially a liberal humanist thinker, defending the freedom of the sentient individual, resistant to bullying by the State, propaganda, conditioning by advertising and marketing, and brainwashing. This was a tradition that had its roots among the Victorian intellectuals from whom the Huxleys sprang, and, in spite of the best efforts of late twentieth century academic theorists, it remains a strong and pertinent and remarkably resilient tradition.

  In his chapters on ‘education for freedom’ Huxley sketched a mode of resistance, ‘an education first of all in facts and values – the facts of individual diversity and genetic uniqueness and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity which are the ethical corollaries of these facts’. He called for decentralisation and small self-organising communities (even within the great metropolises where people were increasingly forced to live) to resist ‘the current drift towards totalitarian control of everything’ and turn back the powers of ‘Big Business and Big Government’. He knew that many people were not interested in such a resistance (‘Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty’) but he knew – as we know nearly fifty years later – that without such a resistance movement the enemies of freedom would triumph.

  Huxley spent the whole of 1959 lecturing at Santa Barbara and working on his last novel, Island. In January he invited Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy to lunch. ‘He looked tired and older,’24 thought Isherwood, who was slightly resentful of Huxley and Heard for implying, it seemed to him, that their visionary insights under mescalin and LSD were somehow spiritually superior to his. Huxley may also have been upset by the new
s that Matthew and Ellen were splitting up. In a letter to Matthew, counselling him to show understanding to his ex-wife, he wrote: ‘Huxleys especially have a tendency not to suffer fools gladly – and also to regard as fools people who are merely different from themselves in temperament and habits. It is difficult for Huxleys to remember that other people have as much right to their habits and temperament as Huxleys have to theirs … So do remember this family vice of too much judging.’25

  In May Huxley flew to New York to collect the award of merit for the novel presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters – further evidence of his status as a ‘historical monument’. His eyesight continued to create problems. He was fond of walking and, one night in August, while doing so alone near the house, he stumbled and fell and considered that he had had ‘a providential escape’.26 He hurt his back and was in pain for two or three weeks. But it did not stop him working away at ‘my Utopian novel, wrestling with the problem of getting an enormous amount of diversified material into the book without becoming merely expository or didactic. It may be that the job is one which cannot be accomplished with complete success … I am trying to lighten up the exposition by putting it into dialogue form, which I make as lively as possible. But meanwhile I am always haunted by the feeling that, if only I had enough talent, I could somehow poetise and dramatise all the intellectual material and create a work which would be simultaneously funny, tragic, lyrical and profound. Alas, I don’t possess the necessary talent …’27 Once again Huxley’s searingly honest powers of self-criticism had accomplished what the critics would later merely echo. Chatto must have had some apprehensions when he told them that the book was developing ‘a horrid way of going backwards as new ideas occur to me and have to be incorporated into earlier chapters, so that what lies ahead still remains unexplained.’28 Throughout the summer and autumn he worked away stoically: ‘my subliminal self always tends to work rather sluggishly – creating not in first fine careless raptures, but in a series of second and third thoughts, which compel me to go back and change or add to or cut out from the material provided by my first thoughts.’29 And offers to lecture poured in – from India and from the Menninger Foundation at Topeka. The latter, he told Osmond, was ‘the holy of holies of American psychiatry’.30

  Huxley broke off one morning in the autumn to admit some students from UCLA who interviewed him for West Wind. They found him ‘astonishingly tall and gaunt – like one of Daumier’s spectral studies of Don Quixote. His face is bloodless, lined. The aristocratic, aquiline nose of all the photographs is there. A nervous, long-fingered hand passes and repasses through his receding hair … His manner is at all times patient, polite – and absolutely detached.’31 Huxley confessed: ‘Unfortunately I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I would like. I have to ration my reading due to the fact that I have this visual handicap, and so I don’t read as many contemporary novels as I ought to.’ That ‘ought’ is significant. They asked him about television and he replied in the same tone of mandarin courtesy: ‘I’m not in a position to talk about TV because I don’t own a set … I like seeing Mr Khruschev and things like that on TV … It’s a sort of Moloch which demands incessant human sacrifice … the people who write for it just go quietly mad.’ Huxley may have been reflecting the view of many screenwriters who had not successfully managed the transition to the small screen and who saw cinema under threat from television in the 1950s.

  The interview encapsulated Huxley’s public image at this time: the grave and courtly intellectual speaking in the accents of another time and place, almost preternaturally cerebral. Around this time he received a letter from Rosamund Lehmann who had developed an interest in spiritualism and who seems to have sent him some sort of report of Maria. He felt that the account was uncharacteristic of her. He conceded that she might have said that ‘my excessive intellectuality was a bar to mystical experience’32 but in a different tone. He told her that Maria would sometimes compare him to the eponymous hero of the Chinese story Monkey who was ‘too unmitigatedly cerebral’. He added: ‘Her great desire was that I should be less isolated, more closely in contact with more kinds of people.’ And for good measure he rejected the ‘legend’ that he was in the habit of travelling with all twenty-eight volumes of the Encylopaedia Britannica and using it for information in lieu of a guidebook.

  Throughout the next year it would be ‘Monkey’, the walking cerebellum, that would take centre stage as Huxley lectured far and wide. Progress on the novel would be slow as he moved from one campus to another elaborating his warnings about the planet and the careless custody of it exercised by its human stewards.

  1 UCLA, Letter to Mrs Leon Lazare Roos, 21 January 1957

  2 Isherwood Diaries, p744. 2 April 1957

  3 L.820

  4 L.820

  5 L.823

  6 Reading, letter to Ian Parsons 16 July 1957

  7 RL, Letter from Laura Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 26 September 1957

  8 L.826

  9 L.873

  10 UCLA, Interview with Aldous Huxley by students of LA School of Journalism, December 1957, ‘Library of Living Journalism’

  11 L.845

  12 L.848

  13 RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 29 March 1958

  14 L.858

  15 This Timeless Moment, pi26

  16 Ibid., p128

  17 L.858

  18 RL, Note by Noèle Neveux in Nys family papers. Author’s translation

  19 Eton, Letter to Julian and Juliette Huxley, 21 November 1958

  20 HRC, Letter to Ralph Rose, 6 December 1958

  21 Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 4 January 1959

  22 The Human Situation (1978) edited by Piero Ferrucci, p83

  23 L.859

  24 Isherwood Diaries, P797, 10 January 1959

  25 L.870

  26 L.874

  27 L.875–76

  28 Reading, letter to Ian Parsons, 20 October 1959

  29 L.879

  30 L.881

  31 UCLA, West Wind, Fall, 1959

  32 King’s College Cambridge, Letter to Rosamund Lehmann, 16 November or December, 1959

  XXXVI

  Fire

  In January 1960, in an unusually cold Southern California – snow down to 2500 feet and frost on the oranges – Huxley resumed work on ‘my Utopian fantasy’,1 telling Julian that it ‘presents extraordinary difficulties’. A few days later he was informing Matthew that it ‘already runs to more than 200 pages and shows no sign of coming to an end – indeed, I don’t yet know how the damned thing is going to end’.2 This sounded rather inauspicious. He admitted to Ian Parsons at Chatto that he had been ‘disturbed by the low ratio of story to exposition’,3 and, after discussions with Christopher Isherwood, he had tried to remedy the defect ‘by the introduction of a brand new personage’. Jeanne was told that the book was ‘horriblement difficile à écrire’.4 The now certain dissolution of Matthew’s marriage was another lowering event, and Huxley found himself having to do what he did not do best, advise on the conduct of ordinary life, which he did by quoting Dante at the couple and telling them that they must find a way out of the ‘dark wood’. This same gap between ‘the conceptual and constitutional’ was one he highlighted in John Midddleton Murry, whom he had not seen since the late 1930s, and whose biography had just appeared. He said that Murry was ‘divided against himself (as so many intellectuals are)’,5 a fact that had so provoked Lawrence.

  Huxley spent March and April 1960 as a Visiting Professor at the Menninger Foundation at Topeka, Kansas, which he described as ‘this curious world centre of psychiatric training. There are more lunatics here per square mile and more analysts than anywhere else, I imagine, in the solar system. My stay will, I hope, be educational, at least for me.’6 Never an admirer of Freud, Huxley felt that Freudian ideas held too much sway at Topeka ‘as tho’ a multiple amphibian cd be cured of his troubles by psychology alone, and psychology of only one, not too realistic brand’.7 The Middle West was under eightee
n inches of snow, now melting, so he had to wade about in rubber boots ‘like a salmon fisher’. No sooner had his spell in Kansas finished than Huxley was off to lecture to a capacity audience at Berkeley and to the Idaho State College at Pocatello. Huxley was receiving good financial news from his publishers and was clearly in funds so it is not clear why he accepted so many of these speaking engagements when he had a book to write – unless it was a means of escape from a novel that refused to respond to his touch.