Aldous Huxley

by Nicholas Murray

  The hard work was making him seek distractions. He begged Mary to consider coming for Christmas to renew the sexual pleasures of the summer and ‘invent new ones, perhaps, if there are any that we have still left untried’.19 There would be skiing, a sport which Maria had discovered, having bought some scarlet skis and ‘ravishing calliphygous breeches’. He elaborated on the book to Mary and its aim of showing man in all his aspects: ‘Any human being is a mass of organized molecules, a physiology, a part of the social organism, believes himself to have an immortal soul and to be of cosmical importance, is a patch of colours that can be painted and can look at the world as patches of colour, can feel enormous emotions, can worship goods; every act he performs can be interpreted in terms of physics and chemistry, of psychology, morality, of economics; his life can be described in the style of the natural history textbook or in that of Paradise Lost … It remains to be seen whether I can manage it.’ To some fiction editors such a proposal would start to ring alarm bells but the result, when it came, was not as fearfully abstract as this seemed to promise. Towards the end of October the Huxleys went to Florence to see the dentist and meet Lawrence, who was impressed by their ‘grand new Italian car – 61,000 lire’.20 He thought they were bored by Cortina already and he found Huxley ‘triste: un uomo finito, to be sentimental and Italian’. Over the next few days Lawrence shared his reactions with several correspondents. He told Ada Clarke: ‘They were very nice, very pleasant, but sad, as if life had nothing for them. Really people have no pep, they so easily go blank, and so young.’ They offered him their old car but Lawrence saw no point in rushing around from place to place and declined their offer. Frieda Lawrence told Mabel Dodge Luhan that Aldous was ‘such a weed … and she was one of Lady Ottoline’s protégées and never got over it.’ Lawrence claimed he was unmoved by the suggestion that he was the model for Kingham in the recent book: ‘He never knew me, anyhow.’

  Before leaving Florence again Huxley quickly finished off revising a dramatisation of Antic Hay which an American writer, a Miss Werner, had done and which he hoped would make their fortune. ‘What fun if it comes off,’21 he told Mary. When they got back from Florence to Cortina (having stopped off at Padua to see Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and to dine with the author) Maria was suddenly seized with a sense of the ‘hideousness’ of the Villa Ino Colli – the artificial flowers and imitation bronze pottery. ‘Except our bedroom the place is a nightmare,’22 she told Mary. A parcel arrived from Mary, delivered at a pleasant time around 7pm when Maria and Aldous liked to talk before their baths. Maria teased Aldous for smelling the red gloves she had sent and complaining that she had changed her scent. ‘I like to imagine you here – in my bed under the eiderdown you know – or rather in what would be yours – a very wide one – Aldous would come up later,’ she wrote to Mary in reply.23 Mary now seemed to be looking for a flat for them again, because Aldous planned to visit England to do some research. Maria had received a long and friendly letter from Ottoline which suggested that relations were about to thaw out.

  As the end of the year approached, Huxley worked harder and harder, tapping away ‘furiously’ at his typewriter in what Maria called his ‘tower of ticking’.24 After these sessions ‘we go for delightfully intimate walks under grey woods – & at night when all places are uniformly passionate’. Maria had come up with a ‘brainwave’ for a movie scenario – the first of many – which Aldous had approved and which would enable them to come to London, they hoped. Huxley seems to have been looking for any excuse to stop work on the novel because he was ‘bored to death … he was like a baby who comes down from his lessons on an unstudious day’. He was forced to write to Prentice at Chatto to say that it was unlikely to be done before next summer. ‘This would leave a blank for the spring,’25 he admitted, with the suggestion of a collection of poetry to plug the gap. Jesting Pilate, which had come out in October, was doing very well and had sold 3000 copies in the first two months. Another diversion from the book and from the absence of people at Cortina – Lawrence thought they were lonely – was a Christmas shopping trip to Venice. From there Huxley wrote to Mary recalling the ‘unadulterated phantasy’ of ‘Onslow’26 in the summer. Venice was ‘fabulous’ though marred by a performance in Italian of Shaw’s St Joan, ‘a pretty bad play … so hopelessly without passion or poetry’. Maria was flourishing in the Cortina atmosphere, ‘puts on weight and flesh … She drives the new car with great dash and has so far touched only 105 kilometres in it; but hopes on better roads to duo 120’ – a speed which would feel like fifty in the old Citroën so smooth was the new machine, an Itala six cylinder two-litres.

  Christmas Day was spent ‘perched on an icy solitude, which would be intolerable if it didn’t do us all, especially the little boy and Maria, so much good’.27 For the first two months of 1927 the Huxleys stuck it out at Cortina: ‘Day succeeds day; I work, read, meditate, slide a little on my skis when there is snow,’28 he reported to Mary early in January. So far the relationship of the Huxleys and Mary Hutchinson had been a secret one, but a sense that all was not well with Mary was beginning to take hold of her friends. Early in February, Virginia Woolf had dined with Clive Bell – who knew about Mary’s bisexuality, which he once referred to as her ‘catholicity’. He confessed to Virginia that things were not going well between himself and Mary. It had reached such a pitch that, suddenly, in a theatre box he had blurted out to Mary: ‘I am wretched.’ She told him the truth that she was, in Woolf’s words, ‘slightly, but only slightly, in love with someone else. Thereupon he practically went mad.’29 Whether to resolve this or because she had succumbed to constant pressure from the Huxleys to come and see them, Mary finally came over to Italy in early March. All three paid a visit to Lawrence in Florence where the latter found Maria, whom he grew more and more fond of, nonetheless ‘ambitious’ for monetary success; ‘if you’ve got nothing else in your life, I suppose money and push make a life for you’30 – an uncharacteristically cruel comment on Maria. ‘Mary Hutchinson seems nice and gentle,’ he told Brett, ‘very faded, poor dear – almost a little old woman … They seem to me like people from a dead planet.’ Perhaps Aldous was exhausted by the strain of the book which, 60,000 words on, seemed to be getting nowhere. ‘The fact is,’ he told Prentice, ‘that the book, which seemed in its infancy a kitten is turning out to be a leopard cub … The thing increases, not merely in size, but in complexity and difficulty under my hands.’31 Huxley’s solution was to call a halt for a while, go to England and do some more research for it, and meet his obligation with an essay collection, Proper Studies. He was all too conscious of the success of people like Arnold Bennett, who had come to stay with them at Cortina and who never took less than ‘two bob the word’ for an article. ‘Like a cable to the USA. Magnificent!’ H.G. Wells, too, that ‘horrid, vulgar little man’,32 was odiously successful, though Huxley did agree to dine with him when he got to London to talk politics. He did, however, manage to sell two articles in America ‘for a thousand dollars apiece!’33 Noticing the clarity of Julian’s recent essays, Aldous told him: ‘I find the desire for lucidity grows in me. Not simplification, but clean dissection and clear exposition of as much of the immeasurable complexity of things as one can dig into.’34 That is probably as good a statement of Huxley’s approach to prose style as one could find.

  After a brief stay in Florence the Huxleys started their journey back to London where they would spend the spring. But they had every intention of returning to their beloved Forte in June.

  1 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 6 June 1926

  2 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 20 June 1926

  3 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 24 June 1926

  4 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3, P93. 1 July 1926

  5 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 8 July 1926

  6 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 12 July 1926

  7 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3, p280. L
etter to Vita Sackville-West, 19 July 1926

  8 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 21 July 1926, ‘Cambridge’

  9 The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3 25 July 1926

  10 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 6 August 1926, ‘In the train between Calais and Brussels’

  11 Beverley Nichols, reprinted in Are They the Same at Home? (1927), pp157–158

  12 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 5, p532. Letter to Giuseppe Oroli, 11 September 1926

  13 L.271

  14 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, undated but probably August 1926

  15 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 1 September 1926

  16 L.273

  17 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 30 September 1926

  18 L.275

  19 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, undated in pencil, but probably October or November 1926

  20 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 5 P563. Letter to Martin Secker, 27 October 1926

  21 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 23 October 1926

  22 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 4 November 1926

  23 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 9 November 1926

  24 HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 3 December 1926

  25 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, Chatto, 9 November 1926

  26 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 20 December 1926

  27 L.278

  28 HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 13 January 1927

  29 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 3. Letter to Vanessa Bell. 2 February 1927

  30 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 5, p650–1 Letter to Dorothy Brett, 8 March 1927

  31 Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 15 March 1927

  32 L.281

  33 L.284

  34 L.285

  XVI

  Counterpoint

  The Huxleys had driven across Italy and France to London in the new car, with Aldous recovering from a bout of ‘flu acquired in Florence. Immediately, from the studio in Onslow Mews, and from Aldous’s desk in the Athenaeum where he wrote letters, they rekindled their social life. They met Mark Gertler and Samuel Koteliansky (‘Kot’), the translator and friend of Lawrence, at the Restaurant Bienvenu in Greek Street, with Maria offering to sit for Gertler. Mary was a frequent visitor to the flat. Increasingly interested in what H. G. Wells had to say about politics, Huxley tried to meet him for lunch. An article of Wells’s in the Sunday Express on 20 March entitled: ‘Is Parliament Doomed?’ on ‘new experiments in government’ made Huxley want to quiz him about the viability of proportional representation. Increasingly, progressive intellectuals were questioning the effectiveness of traditional democratic institutions at a time when fascism was on the rise in Europe. As economic conditions worsened in the late 1920s and 1930s, many were persuaded to explore ideas such as ‘world government’ or eugenics and other kinds of scientific social control. As historians such as Mark Mazower in Dark Continent (1998) have shown, the triumph of liberal democracy was far from a foregone conclusion in the middle years of the twentieth century. Quite apart from the assaults from the totalitarians of Left and Right, from fascism and militaristic nationalism, many supposed ‘progressives’ began to question the effectiveness of traditional parliamentary democracy and to give hospitality to some profoundly illiberal ideas. Huxley’s renewed friendship with Wells, and his brief flirtation with eugenics, have been seen by some as evidence of his faltering commitment to democratic principles in the period leading up to his political awakening in the mid-1930s.1 Someone like Huxley, who thought openly and freely about the problems of man and society, respecting no traditional boundaries or professional lines of intellectual demarcation, was bound to throw out from time to time ideas that cause a frisson of alarm to the present day academic sensibility, hedged about as it is with notions of what is or what is not correct utterance. But one would be hard put to pinpoint in Huxley’s published work anything that would place him in the ‘anti-democratic’ camp where some have sought to corral him. On the contrary, as Europe moved towards 1939, his was a voice of sanity. And the message of Brave New World from 1932 still speaks to our present predicament. Looking back on the period, in Brave New World Revisited in 1959, Huxley stressed that the depression years seemed to many ‘a nightmare of too little order’ whereas ‘a nightmare of total organization’ seemed to characterise the post-war world. His political prescriptions reflected these contexts.

  At the beginning of May, Maria’s grandfather, the old patriarch who had cast a shadow over the young couple when they returned from their world trip, died at St Trond. This put paid to a trip to Paris to see Lewis Gielgud and the Huxleys immediately set off for Belgium. Coming from an English upper-middle class household of intellectual agnostics, Huxley was fascinated by the rituals of Flemish bourgeois Catholicism. ‘The days leading up to the funeral, and the funeral itself,’ he reported to Prentice, ‘have been “Uncle Spencer” [the story from Little Mexican] to the nth degree, at once lugubrious and grotesque as these things can only be in a Belgian provincial town complete with family quarrels, black sheep and all the other adjuncts of patriarchal life.’2 He told Lewis Gielgud that it was ‘at once lugubrious and farcical – the real Balzacian comedy of a funeral in a little town … the poor old man’s body in full evening dress; monks and sisters of charity padding about …’3 His report to Mary showed that the death had given him a rather more profound lesson than these mocking comments suggest: ‘The poor old man fading out painfully and finally dying amidst the rather noble and impressive pomp of Catholic ritual – candle in hand with a monk in brown habit praying at his side and pronouncing the general absolution. There is something very admirable about the way in which Catholicism turns what, by itself, is a merely physiological and painfully animal process – dying – into something of cosmic significance, a dignified and tragic act of the greatest importance.’4

  After the funeral, and a period of sharing the mourning with the family, the Huxleys set off to Cortina, with Maria driving even faster than usual, to tie up their affairs there before moving on to Forte dei Marmi where they planned to stay ‘more or less indefinitely’.5 Given the restlessness of the Huxleys that was a rash prediction. They invited Lawrence to stay but he was initially reluctant, especially when Maria turned up at his villa in Florence with the Franchettis, Italian friends of the Huxleys. ‘I loathe rich people,’6 said Lawrence testily. He yielded, however, and commented afterwards: ‘Forte dei Marmi was beastly, as a place: flat, dead sea, jelly fishy, and millions of villas. But the Huxleys were nice to us, and they have such a nice little lad.’ The Huxleys did not find it ‘beastly’. They were staying at the Villa Maietta, with a garden, a pergola draped with a vine, and the sound of Beethoven trios coming from the Lener string quartet who happened to be staying next door. All their old Italian friends came round, especially Costanza, now married and full of gossip. A new Italian servant, Rina Rontini, aged fifteen, arrived and became fond of her new employers, with whom she would stay for many years. The Huxleys were always good with servants. ‘Our little house is comfortable,’ Maria told Mary. ‘At the very end of the village in a pineta and in front of it through the trees the sea. Small rooms. From Aldous’s to mine a terrace, covered and cool, on which he works.’7 Mary, it seemed, was still unhappy and having difficulties with Clive. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘The point of Clive’s affair is that Mary is in love with another … Unless she will bed with him he is distracted. That she will not do; yet, for lack of him, is distracted herself. The love affair rather increases on her side. It is said to be for someone low in the world.’8 This could be taken at face value or it could be Mary’s way of inventing a story to cover the affair with the Huxleys – it would be understood in her milieu that ‘someone low in the world’ would not need to be identified.

  Huxley liked Forte – the ambience, the friends, and as a place to work. Crome Yellow, Antic Hay and now, with difficulty, Point Counter Point, had been written there. Maria was typing
out the draft of Proper Studies, the essay collection on which he had been working as a break from Point Counter Point, which was stalled. It was finally finished in July and despatched to Chatto. To Huxley’s horror the MS went missing. He shared his fears with Harold Raymond at Chatto: ‘What I really fear is that the Fascist Censors (who are always busy) have stopped the package, thinking so much MS suspicious – for they are in a blue funk of accounts unfavourable to the regime coming through.’9 Fascism was a growing menace to this Tuscan seaside idyll. ‘Italy is becoming so bloody as to be practically uninhabitable,’ he complained to Mary. ‘We are seriously thinking of moving to France. The Fascist efforts to civilise Italy result merely in the action of an interfering police which one would call Prussian if it weren’t corrupt and inefficient as well as tyrannous.’10 In the event the MS turned up, having languished for fourteen days in the Post Office at Florence.