Friday, May 23rd

LAST WEEK I was asked to write a short tribute for Julian Huxley … a memorial service will be held in New York on June 7th. I finally decided to speak of him as a friend and, effort though it was to summon myself, I am glad I made the effort because it forced me to look back on the first years of our friendship, all his kindness to me, and his very great charm. If one digs down into memory, there is often a surprising reversal of feeling—oublieuse mémoire! How much we forget, how much that was fresh and dear gets overlaid! This is what I said:

“When I went to London as a young woman, just beginning to be published, the Julian Huxleys adopted me and took me into their magic world as a friend. I say “magic” because at that time Julian was Secretary of the Zoological Society and they lived in a large airy apartment over the zoo offices, where it was not unusual to find a lion cub as a fellow guest at tea. Several budgerigars flew about and might light on one’s head, and sometimes Gulliver, the bush baby, moth-soft with huge eyes, sat on the dining room table and sipped dessert from a glass dish no taller than himself.

“The humans who made part of the society of Huxley friends were as diverse and, to my innocent eyes, as magical as the fauna, comprising such poets as T.S. Eliot, such scientists as Solly Zuckerman, painters, the young museum director Kenneth Clark. One never knew whom to expect, nor how the mixture would work, but it was apt to end in gales of laughter and a beautiful sense of intimacy. There was nothing stiff about a party at the Huxleys. Such occasions were both illuminating and fun … how rare!

“As I evoke that time, nearly forty years ago, I am as overwhelmed as I was then by all that they gave me and by the quality of their friendship, that manifested itself also in practical ways … as when they lent me their apartment at Whipsnade Zoo when I was finishing my first novel. Later on, after the war, I stayed with them in Paris, where Julian was engaged in the strenuous adventure of being the first Secretary General of UNESCO. But the Julian Huxley of the official worlds through which he moved with such distinction was not the Julian I knew, and I can speak only of the latter.

“I see him most vividly in the country, almost anywhere, and in all seasons, when he might interrupt almost anything to rush off with his bird glasses in pursuit of a bird whose song he had just recognized; I see him leaning against a haystack reading poems aloud and drinking tea from a thermos; I see him lying on the ground holding a collapsible telescope concentrated on a pair of grebes he had just caught doing their mating dance, his ecstasy of delight almost matching theirs. A walk with Julian was an encyclopedic journey among beetles, butterflies, wild flowers and grasses, trees, birds, of course—his precise knowledge was extraordinary and flowed out in impromptu lectures quite unself-consciously. He was not at all pedantic, simply immensely, insatiably curious, like ‘the elephant’s child.’ But his curiosity as a scientist was matched by the sensitivity of a poet’s response to nature and it was these two in combination that made him unique. I think the winning of the Newdigate prize for poetry when he was at Oxford pleased him as much as any honor he ever received.

“Outdoors he occasionally relaxed; the compulsive energy that drove him, sometimes too fast, in too many directions, seemed to compose itself. Then I caught glimpses of the philosopher who could absorb tons of specific information, sort it out, and synthesize the minute particulars into theory and vision. Perhaps he was driven and drove himself so hard because taking the long view of evolution meant that he was acutely aware of his own time as a time of emergency when man, who had come so far, so bravely, might risk annihilation. The long view, in fact, commanded haste, commanded that constant warnings be uttered, that he himself not rest while such major human problems as population growth remained unsolved.

“Whatever the reason, he did drive himself unmercifully. The immense verve, the childlike humor (he found almost any joke irresistible and had a vast repertoire to draw on), the quick response to a person or a landscape or an idea, were counterpointed by periods of self-doubt and near despair. Without Juliette at his side, her patience and wisdom, would he have survived? With her at his side the phoenix was able to rise again from more than one little death.

“What can one say of such a complex genius in a few minutes? The first word that springs to my mind is ‘generosity.’ When we met, I was twenty-five and Julian was fifty, but he treated me as an equal—what could be more generous than that? And what I knew in my life touched thousands of others in a thousand ways. Let me close with four lines by Julian Huxley, a poem he titled ‘The Old Home’:

Like sudden blossom on the naked trees

Memories shoot; the place is all alive

With questing thoughts that like Spring-quickened bees

Find and bear back remembrance to my hive.”