Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  Huxley left Berkeley to attend a conference on ‘Technology in the Modern World’ at Santa Barbara at the beginning of March as the reviews began to appear. Cyril Connolly in The Sunday Times was the most positive. He claimed that Huxley had ‘succeeded in infusing life into what might otherwise prove a succession of short essays and sermons’. 6 Less sympathetic critics of the novel would argue that this was precisely what he had not succeeded in doing. P.N. Furbank in The Spectator found the Utopian islanders of Pala ‘priggish and arch, sententious, censorious and smug. They are some of the most disagreeable Utopians I have met.’7 It was left to Frank Kermode in Partisan Review, however, to administer the coup de grace: ‘Reviewers ought to watch their superlatives, but Island, it is reasonable to say, must be one of the worst novels ever written.’8 Kermode simply said what Huxley himself had been saying for all these months: that the ideas overwhelmed the fiction, but he did concede that, in spite of the poorly drawn characters, ‘the verbosity, the over-intellectuality’, Island ‘is a stimulating visit.’ Kermode, disappointed in the book as fiction, approved of its attempt to advocate ‘more imaginative, more utopian ideals’. This seems the right judgement on the book. It is full of worthy thoughts and ideas. It is indeed a statement of the mature Huxley’s philosophy. It is sincerely meant. But it lacks the imaginative brio, the vigour – even the occasional rough crudity of humour and bizarre invention – of Brave New World. Readers will differ in the extent to which they can take their Utopianising raw, without the compensations of fictional inventiveness. The last section of the book, which has been praised as a remarkable account of a mescalin trip, some of us may find merely tedious but the book is undoubtedly stimulating. It cost Huxley much pain to write. He was full of doubts about it, rightly so, but it was a book that he could not have ducked out of writing, and it would have been wrong for it to have been consumed in the flames from which he snatched it a year earlier.

  Pala, the island run on vaguely Mahayana Buddhist lines, has certain interesting parallels with Brave New World. Here sex is not an opium of the people, a way of safely channelling potentially challenging or destructive feelings towards the rulers of the World State, it is an instrument of enlightenment (though once again the conventional family and the Awful Mother are indicted, and sex and child-rearing happen outside the family in Mutual Adoption Clubs). Likewise, the drug moksha is a means to that same end rather than a mind-numbing pacifier. Will Farnaby, the shipwrecked Westerner, is a representative of the fallen species, the damaged man from the West with its overpopulation, environmental prodigality, war mentality, and materialistic consumerism. Slowly he is taught, by these endlessly wise and philosophically correct islanders, the goal of ‘Good Being’. The Ambassador remarks at one point: ‘So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society.’ Pala, of course, is not ignored by the rest of the world, which wants its oil. And on the inside there are those who would prefer a dose of consumer capitalism to beatific isolation, like young Murugan who devours the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Spring and Summer Catalog and wants to parley with the oil companies. Huxley attempts to inject a degree of wit here and there to lighten the endless dialogues in which the theories of Enlightenment on the way to the Clear Light of the Void are expounded (sometimes, as in the case of Dr Robert, with insufferable smugness).

  His own experiences as well as his own ideas are deposited in the book. The death of Lakshmi is very close to the descriptions of the death of Maria: ‘Let go now, let go. Leave it here, your old worn-out body, and go on. Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light …’

  In the final chapter, where Will – who as a young man, like Huxley, ‘refused to take yes for an answer’ – achieves enlightenment through moksha, the moment of illumination is seen in a way which underlines the reasons for Huxley’s own search: ‘Like a blind man newly healed and confronted for the first time by the mystery of light and colour, he stared in uncomprehending astonishment.’ It is impossible to disentangle the real and the metaphorical uses of the word vision in Huxley’s lifelong quest. Like Will he found that: ‘The answer was just plain God – the God one couldn’t possibly believe in, but who was self-evidently confronting him.’ He weeps tears of knowledge and, on the last page of Huxley’s last novel: ‘Disregarded in the darkness, the fact of enlightenment remained.’ And the mynah birds of Pala, who repeat endlessly the Buddha’s call to awareness (in contrast to the mind-numbing advertising jingles of Brave New World) have the very last word indeed: ‘Attention.’ This was Huxley’s ‘message’ to the modern world: be aware.

  From February to April 1962 at Berkeley Huxley enjoyed the same capacity audiences though generally the experience was quieter than the months at MIT. ‘I was always amazed at the ease with which he made public appearances,’9 Laura Huxley recalled. In spite of continuing LSD sessions – a long description of one such on 22 January is described by Laura Huxley10 – 1962 had been ‘a troubled and confusing year’. For: ‘Aldous had lost his books, notes, diaries in the fire, lost the home where we had lived for the best period of our life together; he had had a debilitating flu and the future state of his health was uncertain; Island had been little publicized and grossly misunderstood; when we would have the home I was designing was problematical.’ In spite of these setbacks he threw himself into an extraordinary programme of lecturing and conference attending, at Alabama, Philadelphia, Syracuse (a conference on hypnosis), Alamos (where he looked at the Apollo moon-shot capsule and the latest plane-to-ground missiles and shook his head over the millions spent ‘in the service of vast collective paranoias’11 while hunger persisted), Anaheim, New York (a talk at the American Academy of Arts and Letters). He was publicly honoured as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He had also been corresponding with Timothy Leary, who would famously become an advocate of the sort of unrestrained LSD use which Huxley deprecated. Later in the year he told Peggy Lamson: ‘If only Tim cd get into a Summit Meeting and give some mushroom to the two Mr Ks – the result might be world peace through total lucidity and breaking out by both parties, from the prison of their respective cultures and ideologies! Alas, such a consummation wd be too good to be true, and what in fact we shall go on having is a state of things too dismally true to be good.’12 In February, Huxley wrote enthusiastically to Leary about ‘the sacramentalizing of common life … the ultimate yoga – being aware, conscious even of the unconscious – on every level from the physiological to the spiritual’.13

  But in June the cancer returned and in July Huxley had a minor operation followed by cobalt treatment from which he was slow to recover. A gland had been removed and Max Cutler said it was not too serious. He reported to Laura, who was in Italy: ‘perhaps just because death seems to have taken a step nearer – everything seems more and more beautiful, the leaves on the trees, the flowers, the sky, the green unwrinkled sea as we flew over it this afternoon, and my memories of you and all the people I have loved or felt concerned about’.14 One cheering thing appeared to be the revival of the play The Genius and the Goddess put on by Frank Hauser, which toured at Oxford, Manchester, Leeds ending up in the Comedy Theatre in London, in spite of lukewarm appreciation by the critics and using an altered script from the Oxford one. In August, he accepted an invitation from ‘a new World Academy of Arts and Sciences, started by a lot of Nobel Prizemen who would like to see that their science is used in a relatively sane manner.’15 Huxley’s was becoming a mandatory presence at such gatherings. He flew to Brussels at the end of August, caught another dose of ‘flu which obliged him to stay in Amsterdam with Suzanne and Joep Nicolas, and then flew to London where he stayed with Julian and Juliette at Pond Street as usual.

  On his return to Los Angeles, Huxley started work on what would be his last book, a short study of Literature and Science – a topic on which he was probably uniquely qualified to write. He felt that his grandfather Thomas Huxley and
his great uncle Matthew Arnold in the 1880s remained the best thinkers on this topic and that the recent contributions by C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis, which had stirred the intellectual waters in England, were ‘too abstract and generalized’.16 This was fitted in with a paper for a conference at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions and lectures across the Middle West and the East Coast, ending up in New York. He looked out at the new year, 1963, which would be his last, asking: ‘Will the few scores of people who decide the world’s immediate fate permit it to be a tolerably good year?’17 Having completed the essay on literature and science, he told Rosamund Lehmann that he was ‘ruminating a kind of novel’18 and reflecting on the death of Phil Nichols, brother of his old friend Robert: ‘One ages into progressive solitude and a curious state of segregation – as though one belonged to an alien minority group merely tolerated by the younger majority.’ He asked Juliette: ‘Do you find, as I do, that the older one gets, the more unutterably mysterious, unlikely and totally implausible one’s own life and the universe at large steadily become?’19 In March, the imperious conference agenda resumed and he was off to Rome for a UN Food and Agricultural Organisation conference as part of its Campaign Against Hunger in the course of which he had an audience with the ailing Pope John XXIII. On the way back he stopped at New York for the wedding of Matthew and Judith Wallet Bordage, then it was more lecturing at Oregon, Berkeley and Stanford.

  In April 1963 Huxley had another relapse and in May went into hospital. He spent most of June and July recovering from the radium treatments but was well enough to fly in August to yet another conference – the World Academy of Arts and Science at Stockholm. From there he went to London where his old friends found him much changed in outward appearance (while still in California Gerald Heard had found him on the telephone ‘very tired & indeed to have difficulty in talking’20). When Julian and Juliette came to meet him at Heathrow: ‘We knew at once that there was something terribly wrong with him: he was ashy-complexioned, very thin, and his voice had but half his usual volume.’21 Huxley insisted that he had been up half the night drafting a memorandum at Stockholm and had caught a cold. He would recover. When he did not recover, Juliette prevailed upon him to see a consultant at Bart’s Hospital, which he did. He did not tell them the truth about the cancer and they put his weariness down – wrongly, for he had faced up to and conquered it – to the loss of his house and possessions in the fire.

  They took him to see his old friends, the Elmhirsts at Dartington (‘Dartington is one of the few places in this bedevilled world where one can feel almost unequivocally optimistic,’22 he later told Dorothy Elmhirst), Phyllis Nicols, Philip’s widow, and Kenneth and Jane Clark at Saltwood Castle. ‘I shall always remember Aldous, tall and so pale, wandering round the rooms and grounds, and stooping to smell the scented roses,’ wrote Julian in his memoirs. One night he described his next book ‘a revaluation of history which he would hold together by recounting the tale, told by the Florentine of the fifteenth century, Vanzetti, about the priest who was castrated by order of a Sienese potentate (whom he had disobeyed) and who got back his severed balls so he could continue to officiate as priest, wearing them in small bag about his person.’ Juliette, quoting her diary record of this event for 18 August, continues: ‘Aldous loves this story, and I remember his telling it to me last year, in a grave penetrating voice, as we were riding home together in the number 24 bus. The rest of the passengers listened spellbound as the velvet voice pursued the episodes all up Fleet Road.’23

  After this visit they took him back to Heathrow (‘You are getting terribly remote,’ Juliette had told him. ‘I feel remote,’ he had answered.) ‘We left him in the crowded, noisy waiting-room, already gone really, stooping over his brief-case to extract The Times after saying goodbye – so grey, so ghost-like, so truly remote from us all.’ He had dined with Sybille Bedford on this visit, the last time she too would see him, at Rules in The Strand. Afterwards, he had insisted on one of his long evening walks, stopping at a shop window to ask: ‘Why do all the manikins look like Jackie Kennedy?’24 From London he flew to Turin to rejoin Laura – where they went up into the mountains – and they arrived back in Los Angeles at the end of August and the start of what she called a ‘slow but unrelenting diminuendo.’25 There was a flare-up of what Cutler thought was a secondary inflammation in the radiation-weakened tissues which made him feel very low. In addition, his voice was affected, the nerve leading to the right vocal chord having been knocked out. Huxley cancelled his lecture tour in the East and suspended work on a volume of essays on human resources. Then he wrote to Julian and Juliette, who were deeply shocked at the revelation, that he had been suffering since 1960 with cancer of the tongue. At last he gave them the full story.

  During his last weeks he continued to work in so far as he could. ‘He worked in his pyjamas and wrote sitting at a typewriter as long as possible. Then, when he felt too weak to sit up, he would lie in bed and write in large block letters on a yellow folio pad. If he felt too weak for writing he would dictate into a tape-recorder that stood by his bed.’26 This is Max Cutler’s account and he recalls how Huxley was confident that he was going to get well. He did not, and eventually went into hospital under an assumed name to avoid publicity. He returned to Mulholland Highway and told Laura: ‘We can’t impose on Ginny any longer. We must leave here.’ The next day he started to deteriorate rapidly.

  Literature and Science was published in September. It was an honourable termination of a life spent writing, ceaselessly, productively, with unbounded reserves of energy, clarity and determination to seek out what was wise and true. It addressed itself to the ‘two cultures’ debate, pouring scorn equally on C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures with its ‘bland scientism’ and F.R. Leavis’s ‘violent and ill-mannered’ Richmond lecture, which had replied to Snow. This short book displays all the virtues of Huxley’s non-fictional style. It is formidably learned, wide-ranging, utterly without the shrill or peevish tone that can creep into academic writing on these subjects, and elegantly and simply written. It discusses the different ways in which scientists and poets use language and proposes a rapprochement between the two: ‘Man cannot live by contemplative receptivity and artistic creation alone … he needs science and technology.’ Steeped in the English poetic tradition, Huxley had spent the last decade at least in the company of scientists rather than literary men, and it shows. He concentrates principally on the failure of writers to reflect the extraordinary scientific developments of the modern world rather than rebuking scientists for neglecting the insights of art. He looked forward to the arrival of ‘some great artist’ who would achieve the task of incorporating ‘the hypotheses of science into harmonious, moving and persuasive works of art’. He called upon both scientists and artists (recognising that neither’s language could ever be ‘adequate to the givenness of the world’) – the words are the final ones of his final book – to advance together, ‘men of letters and men of science, further and further into the ever expanding regions of the unknown’.

  And, as 1963 drew to a close, Huxley was moving inexorably towards another ‘region of the unknown’, the last human frontier he had to cross. As with Maria’s mortal cancer so with his own, he minimised its threat, not wishing to make himself a burden to others, having hoped for so long that mind would triumph over body. But by the end of October it was obvious to everyone around him that the end was coming. On 5 November Christopher Isherwood went to see Huxley at the Cedars of Lebanon hospital where he was under observation. Isherwood was told by the surgeon that the cancer was spreading rapidly and that there was no hope: ‘Aldous looked like a withered old man, grey-faced, with dull blank eyes. He spoke in a low, hoarse voice which was hard to understand. I had to sit directly facing him because it hurt him to turn his head.’27 Huxley seemed the only person who did not know that he was dying, seeming to accept it only on the day itself. But he spoke obliquely to Isherwood about old age, ‘and I couldn’t help suspecting that th
is was a kind of metaphor, a way of referring to his own death’. Huxley told him he would never write another novel: ‘I feel more and more out of touch with people.’

  Shortly afterwards, Huxley was taken home to the house at Mulholland Highway. Like the true writer he was, he had a commission to the very end and had half completed an essay on ‘Shakespeare, and Religion’ for Show magazine in New York. He went on with it using pencil and paper only, no longer being able to type. He was surrounded by friends – Virginia and Laura, and Peggy Kiskadden who brought roses daily from her garden and Rosalind Rajagopal who brought oranges from the ranch at Ojai. Huxley had spent a lifetime inquiring into every aspect of human life and his own illness and imminent death was not to pass by in any other spirit. His last days and hours have been written about extensively – in Sybille Bedford’s biography, in Laura Huxley’s book, and in her letters to the Huxleys. ‘If I get out of this,’ he told Laura, ‘those few years will be very important, because this experience that I am going through now will be of the greatest significance.’28