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Aldous Huxley

Page 9

by Nicholas Murray


  Maria’s passion for Ottoline continued throughout 1915 and 1916, after the meeting with Aldous, whom they would occasionally discuss in the later letters. Maria’s bisexuality had never been acknowledged by the Huxley family and friends (though her sisters were fully aware of it) until very recently when, in response to the rumour that a book was being written by a Belgian author, Stan Lauryssens,10 which would apparently allege that the Huxley marriage was a marriage of convenience (if a true report, a preposterous reading of the facts), Sybille Bedford told a London newspaper: ‘Maria was bisexual and she did have a series of short-term passionate relationships with other people while she was married to Aldous … They were sophisticated people who were not afraid to experiment.’11 Huxley’s son, Matthew, in conversation with me,12 expressed bafflement at the suggestion about his mother’s sexuality, which had been discussed in David King Dunaway’s Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Huxley’s second wife, Laura Huxley, told me13 that she simply didn’t know whether or not Maria was bisexual. The love for Ottoline was described by Maria herself in a letter to Edward Sackville-West published thirty years ago14: ‘In spite of the agonies of those young loves it was my greatest … I loved her dearly and am haunted by many thoughts,’ she wrote after learning of Ottoline’s death in 1938. Perhaps the following letter – written by the eighteen-year-old Maria on 24 January 1917, after she had fallen in love with Aldous, though separated from him now in Florence – can, in its naked feeling and passionate declaration, stand as the last word on this intense love affair and its co-existence with the equally devoted love for Aldous that was starting to flower at the same time:

  My loved, it is not life without you it is not possible without you – just nothing, nothing and I long to be with you and love you for ever and ever – for you know I love you – so much more and more I want to be over all to you – because I am not without you – my love for you is so great – it is everything … I am dark and full of all longings that are you – nothing but you matters … now all is black and grimm [sic] because you are not here to give all light to my sight … I want you and these nights are eternal and dark – and the days are haunted dreams with people trying to take you away from me … You and always you. I want to kiss you forever … I want to feel you … My loved, loved – all to you. Maria.15

  The first recorded glimpse of Maria at Garsington, more than a year before she met Aldous, is provided by Juliette Baillot, the governess and future wife of Julian. To Juliette, Maria was more worldly and, in spite of her conventional Flemish Catholic upbringing, far more ready to embrace the Garsington/Bloomsbury ethic of personal freedom than Juliette herself, whose Swiss Calvinism had not wholly deserted her. In May 1915, arriving for the first time at the Manor, Juliette was ushered through to the Red room where she found Ottoline in a painter’s overall. A younger girl was on the top of a ladder, painting the grooves of the panelling with a thin, gold line. This was Maria: ‘She was small, rather plump, but lovely beyond words, with large blue-green eyes matching an Egyptian scarab ring on her long finger, a delicate slightly aquiline profile and a small pointed chin under a full mouth. Her hair, cut short by Philip Morrell (the fashion was just beginning with Slade students), hung like a dark helmet. She had the vulnerable and defenceless look of a child with a mature body.’16 Descriptions of Maria abound, all stressing the fullness and sensuousness of her beauty, her ‘serene Latin sensuality’17 in Sybille Bedford’s phrase. For Mary Hutchinson, there was a ‘Persian’ quality to her allure: ‘Her eyes were almond-shaped and very beautiful, her expression languid, her nature innocent, sensual, uncomplicated, her heart warm and loyal. Her hair was dark. She always seemed to be sweetly scented, oiled and voluptuous.’18 Sybille Bedford, in her autobiographical novel, Jigsaw (1989), describes ‘her face of a young El Greco saint’19 and Edith Sitwell noted her ‘beautiful eyes like those of a Siamese cat’.20 Anita Loos, meeting her much later, saw her as ‘a lovely brunette no taller than five feet, with wavy hair, pointed oval face, and big blue-green eyes’.21

  But what made Maria extraordinary – and justifies her prominence in biographies of her husband – is the role she played throughout Huxley’s life, a role which will be highlighted again and again in the following pages. She devoted herself wholly to him – even declaring once: ‘It would be wrong of me to die before Aldous.’22 Because of his poor eyesight, she read to him, endlessly, even if the material bored her beyond belief. She drove him thousands of miles around Europe and the United States – putting her profession as ‘chauffeur’ in hotel registers. She typed his books and was his secretary and housekeeper. She held off visitors who might interrupt his writing. She supplied him with plots and insights into the human beings he did not always understand. ‘She was his eyes and ears for what was going on in the human world,’ wrote Sybille Bedford in Jigsaw, ‘for his books, she would explain, any odds and ends came in useful.’ She was intelligent and literate but had also a taste for the wilder shores. According to Anita Loos, ‘she lived a life of pure fantasy. She studied palmistry, believed in the stars, and even in the crystal-gazers of Hollywood Boulevard.’23 And all the time, Anita Loos recalled, ‘her unconventional reactions amused Aldous as well as amazed him’.

  This was the ‘nice Belgian’24 whom Huxley met on 2 July 1916 (though he had reported to Jelly at the end of the summer term that he had been prevented from speaking to Ottoline at a recent meeting because ‘there were some horrid Belgians at tea, who talked incessantly about themselves’25 – possibly Maria’s mother and her daughters). His visits to Garsington increased with such frequency in 1916 that it seemed as though he was becoming a permanent part of the household. In August, finally rid of his temporary post at Repton, that is exactly what happened. He asked Philip Morrell if he might come and work on the farm and thus, from August until April 1917, he lived permanently at Garsington, working on the land alongside formal conscientious objectors like Gerald Shove whom Huxley nicknamed ‘Chabbelow’. Ottoline recalled: ‘We both liked him very much and were very pleased to have him and gave him a charming, quiet room.’26 Huxley himself found it a welcome diversion from ‘the hollowness of existence … a hollowness, which I find peculiarly reverberant when I come to regard my future prospects’.27 Two photographs from Ottoline’s album28 show the two sides of Huxley at this Garsington period. In the first he is deep in a winged armchair, his nose in a book held close to his eyes. In the second he is dressed as a haymaker – the most impossibly chic haymaker Garsington Manor had probably ever seen. Huxley was always a smart and stylish dresser. ‘Wearing straw-coloured jodhpurs and pale stockings, with a dark-brown corduroy jacket, he looked absent-mindedly but absurdly romantic and beautiful,29’ Juliette remembered. Woodcutting, in a house that depended exclusively on logs for fuel, was a useful activity and he threw himself into sawing fallen trees and splitting them with wedges. His work on the farm was light, but he enjoyed it – chasing escaped pigs, or rescuing the large black boar from the pond – but, above all, he enjoyed, after the intellectual desert of Repton, the stimulating company.

  Within days of arriving at Garsington in August he was telling Frances Petersen how he had spent most of the night ‘talking with intelligent people’30 and sleeping out on the roof in the company of ‘an artistic young woman in short hair and purple pyjamas’ – this was Dorothy Carrington – and being woken at dawn by screaming peacocks on the roof. He had found what he was to go on finding throughout his life – a small but exquisite circle of intelligent friends who stimulated him and who in turn were stimulated by him. ‘I keep a little cache of friends there,’ he told Julian, ‘and, after all, friendship is the one thing that makes life supremely worth living.’31 Friends were essential: ‘I am utterly stranded and wretched without them.’ He was reluctant to tear himself away for a few weeks at Prior’s Field, staying with his father and stepmother who were spending the summer there and whom he had not seen for four months – they offered a ‘boring’ prospect. But this short break from Gars
ington – he would be back around the end of September – enabled him to make a few acquaintances in London such as E. S. P. Haynes, ‘England’s most strenuous struggler for freedom of divorce’,32 with whom he lunched for three hours on lobsters, ‘washing them down with huge quantities of Chablis and talking of liberty and sex and the decadence of the Huns in loud resonant voices’. But all the time the need to face up to his future nagged at him. ‘I don’t know what I am going to do for a profession,’ he complained to Frances, ‘I cannot even play the clarionette outside public houses.’ Writing was what he wanted to do most and his first book of poems, The Burning Wheel, was almost due – though the excitement of the arrival of proofs was offset by the idiocy of The Nation which had just published three of his poems under the name of his father. He told Julian that the volume, ‘a tomelet of fifty pages’, made him ‘heartily sick’ as he read the proofs now – perhaps only four of the poems were any good. He had larger ambitions than a slim volume of soon-to-be-forgotten verse. ‘But what we want is men who can write prose … No young men write anything but journalism and verse. A sad fact.’

  Huxley was conscious that he was at a crucial juncture in his life. The academic world was quickly receding. He had been told by his Oxford tutor that there was no chance of an Oxford post. No obvious career beckoned. He couldn’t make a living from verse and he hadn’t yet made a name for himself with fiction. The only temporary prospect was helping the elderly Irish widow of a French nobleman – he referred to this unidentified woman as ‘the baronne’ – with compiling her memoirs. With a deliberate swagger and exaggeration – the tone he often adopted with his elder brother – Huxley summed up the case at the start of September 1916:

  Well, Oxford is over. Crowned with the artificial roses of academic distinction, I stagger, magnificently drunk with youthful conceit, into the symposium, not of philosophers, but of apes and wolves and swine … No more of the sheltered, the academic life … the life, which, I believe, when led by a man of high and independent spirit, is the fullest and best of lives, though one of the most bedraggled and wretched as led by the ordinary crew of bovine intellectuals. I should like to go on for ever learning. I lust for knowledge, as well theoretic as empirical. Comparing small things to great, I think I am rather like the incomparable John Donne.33

  To Ottoline he wrote from Prior’s Field: ‘I have never felt less master of my fate.’34 Much as he was to enjoy the next seven or eight months at Garsington (he playfully offered to write Ottoline a mock-Augustan poem called The Pleasures of Garsington, quoting a sample couplet35), he knew that it was only an interlude and that schoolmastering was the most likely outcome for an indigent poet. Meanwhile, he was reading, with a magnifying glass maybe, but voraciously: War and Peace (‘the greatest book’36), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (‘superb’37), Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, Dante’s Inferno (‘with difficulty and a literal translation’38) the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme which Ottoline had lent him. He told her, in terms that give some insight into his aesthetic principles at this time, that the latter book was wonderfully restrained in its manner: ‘There is no romantic devilling of the incidents, no highlights, no cooking of the evidence by the author. The facts just move with their own impetus and weight: mixing metaphors. They are self-luminous, shining from within, not lit by the writer.’39

  In September, Huxley’s first book was published. ‘I was amused by the Times review of me – pleasantly offensive,’40 he told his father when the first review of The Burning Wheel appeared. The slim, fifty-one page book had been published by Basil Blackwell in the series ‘Adventurers All’, which the jacket described as ‘A Series of Young Poets Unknown to Fame’. Huxley’s fellow poets in the series, Frank Betts, Sherard Vines and S. Reid-Hayman, were destined to continue to enjoy that status, perhaps because Blackwell’s sales pitch was rather unimpassioned. ‘The object of this Series is to remove from the work of young poets the reproach of insolvency,’ the common preface began. A publisher’s advertisement in the book quoted The Observer to the effect that: ‘The get up of this series is very attractive. Type, paper, and the shape of the pages are all good, and the poems are printed with a nice regard for margins.’ The Observer was silent on the actual merits of the poems that positioned themselves so prettily between those margins.

  Huxley’s poem, ‘Mole’, which had already appeared in The Nation, began the volume. Like most of these poems the diction is a little old-fashioned and ‘poetic’ and the impression is more of immense literary sophistication than of striking poetic originality. Metrically they are very regular, rhyme abounds. Huxley, though he shared his friend Eliot’s fondness for the French Symbolist poets and, in ‘The Walk’, offers his own miniature Waste Land, was not a devotee of vers libre. Yet they are serious poems about perception, moments of vision. The vocabulary is rich and recondite – ‘nympholept’, ‘amphisbaena’ – and there are gestures of impatience towards the ‘sordid strife of the arena’ which sound a little precious, as does the title of that poem, ‘The Ideal Found Wanting’. Occasionally, an image arrests: the poet sees, through ‘a tunnelled arch’, in one poem, ‘the chestnut gleam/Of horses in a lamplit steam’. And there are several love poems, including ‘Sonnet’, which has the lines: ‘Souls have been drowned between heart’s beat and beat,/And trapped and tangled in a woman’s hair’, and ‘Sentimental Summer’ in which: ‘Your voice sounds near across my memories,/And answering fingers brush against my own.’

  It was during this summer, 1916, on a rug on the lawn at Garsington, that Aldous proposed to Maria, giving her a scarab ring, but the event must have been kept secret because it does not surface in any of his letters to family and friends (the first mention of her in the published letters is not until December when she is merely a name in a list of charades players). Ottoline, who probably knew about everything in her domain, was aware of the relationship, which was slow to develop on Maria’s side (she took advice from the painter Dorothy Brett, who encouraged her to pursue it). It was a courtship which suffered from a long interruption from the end of 1916 to April 1919 when neither saw the other because Maria had gone abroad. Maria completed a year at Newnham then suddenly, in October 1916, Ottoline received a letter from the head of Newnham telling her that Maria had ‘absconded and had gone to London to an unknown address’.41 Ottoline blamed Brett for this and her fondness for inciting people to revolt against authority – in this case the authority of Ottoline. But Ottoline in her memoirs does not mention a letter she had received from Maria at Newnham on 16 October telling her that she was being sent down for academic failure: ‘I never expected it – that is – to be sent down … instead of preparing myself to life I should have to begin life at once and go abroad … Brett and I have had a talk about it … I am certain I could find a job that would bring me enough money to get a room in London … And I must seriously begin my writing. Don’t you think this is the only thing to do – and the best. You are not cross are you. You know I did my best.’42 Ottoline clearly resented Brett’s involvement (was there also some part of sexual jealousy here?) and saw her as leading Maria off the straight path. The letter is also interesting for its reference to Maria’s ambition to write, an ambition which never surfaced again.

  Worried that living alone in London was not a good idea for Maria, Ottoline tried to persuade Brett to take her in to the Ark, a house in Gower Street where Brett, Carrington and others were living. Instead, Brett arranged for Maria to get some work at the India Office, with the aid of a friend called Boris Anrep, the Military Secretary of the Russian Government in England, and a painter and sculptor in his own right. Ottoline realised that Aldous also was getting rather concerned about Maria: ‘My anxiety I found was shared by Aldous, who was already more or less in love with her. In October he had written to me about himself as having developed a kind of doggy devotion for that rather absurd and very charming figure Maria’ [this sounds like Aldous’s phrasing but the letter is lost].’43 Huxley
arranged to have lunch with Maria ‘in a small bun-house off Holborn filled with earnest-looking women – all I am sure readers at the Museum’.44 Boris Anrep was clearly considered a rather unsuitable person to have charge of an innocent young woman. In the crowded coffee-house Huxley and Maria rather startled the earnest bluestockings when they ‘began (in that clear bell-like voice of the enfant terrible that one somehow always adopts when discussing in public the tetchier, more scabrous subjects of life) to examine the probability of Maria being seduced by Anrep.’ The probability, however, was not great because by now Maria was seen to have acquired ‘a great deal of sense’. She was also ‘very happy’ but that happiness, if it depended on being with Aldous, was threatened now by her mother’s decision to move the family to Florence, and to summon Maria to rejoin them.

  Throughout the autumn of 1916, Aldous had journeyed from Garsington to London as often as he could to see Maria, who was surviving by giving French lessons. Their love blossomed in these last months of 1916 but it was to face a severe test because he would not see Maria again from December 1916 to April 1919. His social life during that period was an often dizzying whirl. Maria herself discovered new friends and experiences in Italy. They were both young and fond of pleasure. They could easily have drifted apart but their love survived the separation. At the time, Huxley did not know how long he would be cut off from Maria. He told Lewis Gielgud the bad news on New Year’s Day 1917: ‘The worst, my dear Lewis, has not lost the opportunity of happening. It rarely does. Poor Maria is being hustled out remorselessly to her ghoulish mother in Florence … It is altogether painful … I find the imminence of separation briny enough and the thing itself will doubtless be worse. And then for how long? It’s the indefiniteness that is so distressing.’45 Huxley had a premonition – based no doubt in part on the fact of the war – that he would have to wait a long time before seeing Maria again. The letter shows how deeply he felt for her but to one of his closest male friends, Lewis Gielgud, who knew as much as anyone about his private life, he hinted at continuing confusions. Playfully he invited Gielgud to reflect on a number of propositions about life, the first two of which were: ‘The incomprehensibility of women and their unlikeness to anything one had expected. The question whether passion is necessary to love, or whether it gambols like a faun around the shrine, unconnected and irresponsible.’ Years later, in a letter to her son, Matthew, Maria disclosed some of her feelings both about Garsington and about Aldous:

 

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