Grandpater
On 26 July 1894, Aldous Leonard Huxley was ‘born into the rain’ of the Surrey countryside at Godalming. This was the leafy English county where his free man, John, the ‘Savage of Surrey’, in Brave New World claimed his ‘right to be unhappy’ in a hermitage very precisely located ‘between Puttenham and Elstead’. In 1925, in an essay on the appeal of country life, he recalled that: ‘The Surrey I knew as a boy was full of wildernesses. To-day Hindhead is hardly distinguishable from the Elephant and Castle.’1 In his later essay ‘The Olive Tree’ – that marvellous prose hymn to the Mediterranean spirit – he recalled ‘the old elm trees’ that were the backdrop to his Surrey childhood: ‘I spent a good part of my boyhood under their ponderous shade.’2 In his 1923 novel Antic Hay, the hero, Theodore Gumbril, ‘began talking with erudition about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchis and green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine growing, the best location for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where you get wild daffodils. All this odd knowledge came sprouting up into his mind from some underground source of memory.’3 In the same novel, Lypiatt asks Myra to recall ‘the fine grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows. And the flagstaff and the inscription marking the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at
the view. And the enormous sloping meadows round Compton [the eventual burial place of Huxley’s ashes] and the thick, dark woods.’ Huxley was to live almost all of his adult life outside England, but the memory of that green Home Counties Arcadia – before the creeping suburbanisation of the twentieth century had changed it for good – never left him.
Not that his reminiscences were always so fond. In 1930 he told a correspondent: ‘I sometimes wonder … whether it isn’t perhaps rather bad for one to have been born and brought up a bourgeois in tolerably easy circumstances – with baths, fresh air, plenty of space, privacy and the other luxuries of bourgeois existence. The result is that any diminution of that treasure of space and time which money can buy – leisure and room to be alone in – seems an appalling hardship: and the actual physical contact with members of one’s own species fills one with dismay and horror. The Marxian philosophy of life is not exclusively true: but, my word, it goes a good way …’4 Huxley’s acute self-awareness left him in no doubt about the strengths and weaknesses of his relatively privileged background. Travelling through India in 1925, Huxley mused on the traditional English reverence for parliamentary democracy – noting that it was in fact ‘government by oligarchs for the people and with the people’s occasional advice’ – and wondered whether his freedom to indulge in such easy speculation was not due to the fact that, ‘I was born in the upper-middle, governing class of an independent, rich, and exceedingly powerful nation. Born an Indian or brought up in the slums of London, I should hardly be able to achieve so philosophical a suspense of judgement.’5
Whether Leonard Huxley, then a modestly-paid Classics master at nearby Charterhouse school, would have placed himself so firmly in the company of the rich and powerful when his third son Aldous was delivered on 26 July 1894, is doubtful. Leonard was the son of the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, and would later achieve greater prominence as a literary journalist and deputy editor of the Cornhill. His wife, Julia, was the daughter of Thomas Arnold, who was brother of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, and Julia’s sister was the novelist Mary Augusta (‘Mrs Humphry’) Ward. Julia Arnold was one of
the first women to attend Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1882 with a First in English. She met Leonard in 1880 while he was an undergraduate at Balliol but had to wait some years until they could afford to marry.
At the time of Aldous’s birth, the Huxleys had lived for a year in a comfortable, neo-Gothic, Victorian house called Laleham (Laleham-on-Thames had been Matthew Arnold’s birthplace) at Godalming with an acre of garden including a tennis lawn, a rose-garden, and a rockery. On the top floor was a nursery with a rocking horse the size of a pony that could take four small boys at once. ‘I remember the nursery with a fine rocking horse and a screen covered with coloured pictures or fragments of pictures cut from magazines and catalogues – a fascinating mosaic of unrelated faces, scenes, objects, co-existing in a surréaliste confusion,’6 he recalled in 1960. Though Aldous’s relationship with his father was to become strained, particularly after Leonard’s second marriage in 1912, his early childhood was a happy one. He adored his mother and his father seems to have had some of the playful facetiousness of the Victorian paterfamilias. But was there anything of Leonard in the portrait of Mr Barnack in Time Must Have A Stop?
that was one of the most disquieting things about his father: you never knew from his expression what he was feeling or thinking. He would look at you straight and unwaveringly, his grey eyes brightly blank, as though you were a perfect stranger. The first intimation of his state of mind always came verbally, in that loud, authoritative, barrister’s voice of his, in those measured phrases, so carefully chosen, so beautifully articulated. There would be silence, or perhaps talk of matters indifferent; and then suddenly, out of the blue of his impassivity, a pronouncement, as though from Sinai.7 Aldous as a small child was looked after by a German governess from Konigsberg, Fräulein Ella Salkowski, whom he later employed to look after his own young son, Matthew. There was a seven year gap
between Aldous and his eldest brother, Julian, who was himself to have a very distinguished public career as a scientist and as the first Director-General of UNESCO. The next eldest son, five years older than Aldous, was Trevenen (the name shared by Matthew Arnold’s son ‘Budge’, whose boyhood death so devastated the poet; there was Cornish ancestry in the Arnolds). Five years younger than Aldous was his only sister, Margaret, who hardly seems to figure in accounts of his life. It is possible that her unconventional life style – she would live with another woman, Christabel Mumford, on the south coast where they ran a school together – was the source of some disapproval by the Huxleys.
In his autobiography, published in 1970, Sir Julian Huxley recalled his father as ‘a kindly man, full of almost boyish fun’.8 But there is evidence, as has already been hinted, that Aldous was less enamoured of his father, whom he respected less and less as he grew into maturity. In part this was because of an inability, even as a small boy, to find himself able to pay his father sufficient respect. His cousin Gervas thought Leonard Huxley was ‘silly. He wasn’t the kind of father one looked up to, or went to when one was in trouble … I think it was this lack of respect that troubled Aldous and marred his relationship with his father.’9 It appears that his behaviour towards the young girl pupils at the school his wife would open in 1910 was not always what it should have been,10 and his rapid remarriage to a much younger woman after his first wife’s death did not help the relationship. For Aldous, then, his strongest feelings were reserved for his mother, whom he adored. Julian describes her: ‘She wore pince-nez, had great charm and a tremendous sense of humour – I remember the way she used to throw back her head and explode with laughter when amused – but could pass from gay to grave when the mood took her … Her steady gaze was truth-compelling, but full of love, even when she had to reprimand us.’ Julian also recalled her ‘sense of fun, her gay participation in simple games, her enjoyment of acting, her infectious vitality and love of life’.
Unfortunately, Aldous left no direct reminiscence of his mother, though traces can be detected in some of his novels – most notably Antic Hay – where, it must be admitted, the contrasting type of the awful ‘greedy, possessive mother’11 also abounds, a type destined to
recur again and again throughout his fiction. The family as an institution gets a bad press in Aldous Huxley’s novels but the reasons are not to be sought in his very early experiences at Laleham. When he came to experiment with drugs in the 1950s he reported that he was seeking to retrieve some unspecified childhood memory, which may relate to this time, but it is more likely that it centred on the trauma of his mother’s early death. In a curious 1962 letter to a Californian music teacher whom he had met at Berkeley, which discussed the notion of a ‘psycho-analytic ballet’, Huxley suggested that such a production should deal with ‘memories of traumatic events in childhood – punishments, humiliations, an attempted rape.’12 One critic, noticing a prevalent sado-masochistic theme in Huxley’s fiction, speculated whether ‘it might perhaps originate from some curious experience in his own childhood’.13 There is no evidence to confirm or deny such a hypothesis.
As a young child, Aldous was very pretty (as a photograph of him, aged five in curls and page boy costume, pensively examining the camera from a cane-seated leather armchair, makes clear). He had an enormous head which earned him the unkind nickname of ‘Ogie’, short for ‘Ogre’, and it was soon apparent to everyone that, as a young second cousin, Jill Greenwood, told Sybille Bedford, ‘everybody knew that Aldous was different’.14 He was fond of drawing and of childhood games, though rather delicate. The future satirist showed himself in a sally recorded by Julian. They both attended a neighbouring governess whose deafness caused Aldous to observe, of governesses in general, ‘Deaf and dumb they may be, but contradict they must.’ Another story told by Julian is of the young boy being asked by his godmother what he was thinking about, as he gazed pensively out of the window. The small boy replied solemnly, and monosyllabically: ‘Skin.’15 He told a friend in 1959: ‘One of my early recollections is being taken to church in Godalming and disgracing myself by vomiting during the sermon – a precocious expression, no doubt, of anti-clericalism.’ He also remembered the Muffin Man, ‘ringing a dinner bell, like the character in The Hunting of the Snark. He had a long white beard and wore a flat topped military cap, on which he carried a large tray, on which, under a white cloth, were the freshly made
muffins and crumpets … And once a steam roller came and rolled the road outside our gate – a truly glorious object with a spinning flywheel and a tall chimney. It exhaled a deliciously thrilling smell of hot oil, and on the front end of the boiler was a golden unicorn.’16 Aldous’s education began at a nearby day-school for infants called St Bruno’s in 1899. That Christmas, staying at his Aunt Mary’s (Mrs Humphry Ward) house, Stocks, at Tring, he wrote a letter to his teacher, Miss Noon, informing her that he had received six presents, and thanking her for ‘my cannon’.17 The following year he attended with his brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles the Christmas Pantomime at Drury Lane. The enormous family party, which had arrived by carriage, occupied the dress circle. The show lasted for four hours and Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell were the star comedians. The scene is fictionalised in Antic Hay:
All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them – every year they filled the best part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank tea. And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage … And there was Dan Leno, inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like anybody’s skull. And his mother, he remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her cheeks. She used to enjoy things thoroughly, with a whole heart.18 Aldous and his cousin Gervas were delighted and a long-lasting fondness for music hall was cemented.
By 1900, Julian was already at Eton, and required on that account by his mother to offer his top hat to six-year-old Aldous to be sick in as they stood waiting at the Natural History Museum for the Prince of Wales to unveil a statue of their grandfather. Even a six-year-old is impressed when a grandfather is cast in stone or bronze, and no Huxley was ever allowed to forget the awesome precedent of the
great forebear. In an interview which took place in 1985, Julian’s wife, Juliette Huxley, referred to the ‘burden’ that was imposed on Huxleys to succeed at all costs, to win the prizes and scholarships (which they generally did), to live up to the example of ‘Gran-Pater’. The pressure on Julian was intense: ‘Julian suffered from that. Very much … There is something really devastating about having a grandfather (grand-pater as they called him) who was a god in the family. These children grew up with that atmosphere: “Worthy of Grand-Pater – right! You must be worthy of grand-pater.” ’19
The old man died in June 1895, less than a year after Aldous’s birth but his influence never went away. Because of the high intellectual achievements of the Huxleys they are sometimes represented as a formidably long-standing intellectual aristocracy. In fact, the dynasty was founded by Thomas Henry Huxley, son of a provincial savings bank manager, who had only two years of formal education. He was the type of the formidable Victorian autodidact, never more so than in the descriptions we read of him shipping aboard the HMS Rattlesnake in the 1820s as an assistant surgeon, and producing in his cramped, waterlogged cabin, the carefully drawn and noted biological observations that, after many setbacks, would be published and lead to his eventual triumph as one of the leading scientists, controversialists, and communicators of the nineteenth century. As he worked away, with only hope to sustain him, cockroaches feasted on the edition of Dante he was teaching himself to read with the help of an Italian dictionary. That example of courage, tenacity, and undeflectable intellectual ambition was a powerful legacy to his descendants.20 Aldous paid tribute to him in the Huxley Memorial Lecture, which he delivered in 1932, in significant terms, praising his ‘astonishingly lucid’ style. Huxley – who had little sympathy with linguistic experiment of the kind practised by literary artists such as James Joyce – always preferred that touchstone of clarity, however deeply erudite and wide his range of allusion might be. ‘Truth was more important to him,’ he said of his grandfather, ‘than personal triumph, and he relied more on forceful clarity to convince his readers than the brilliant and exciting ambiguities of propagandist eloquence.’ Underlining the point, Huxley added: ‘one of the major defects of nineteenth century literature …
was its inordinate literariness, its habit of verbal dressing-up and playing stylistic charades’. Thomas Henry countered this tendency by a ‘passion for veracity’.21
If one of the central questions about Aldous Huxley is whether he was primarily a literary artist or primarily a thinker, a propagator of ideas, the polarities he sets up here are extremely interesting, and continued to exercise him throughout his career, surfacing in late works like Literature and Science, published in the year of his death. Whether there was something, as it is popularly expressed, ‘in the Huxley genes’, that helped to crystallise this glittering concentration of talent – a matter perhaps for the socio-biologists – or whether, as I am inclined to think, it was more a combination of naturally occurring gifts nurtured by precedent and example, a certain prevailing expectation that one would enhance the performance, not detract from it, the Huxley inheritance was an ever-present reality – though rarely spoken of by Huxley himself in his published work or unpublished correspondence. Yet, at the same time, in his youth Huxley was iconoclastic towards the nineteenth century worthies. He once admitted to Julian that he had avoided reading them at Oxford: ‘I somehow escaped that normal course in youth, that plowing through the Victorian Great and being reminded all the time that they are great.’22 Even in his late fifties, he refused to be pious about them. His Californian friend, Grace Hubble, recorded in her diary an evening party in 1953 attended by Osbert and Edith Sitwell and Huxley where Aldous was pouring scorn on ‘the Monstrous Victorians, who become increasingly alien and unnatural. More and more they seem like the characters in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.’23 The McPhail dynasty in Island, or the Poulshots in Time Must Have A Stop (‘An absolutely sterling goodness, but limited by an impenetrable ignorance of the end and purpose of existence’24), stand for a certain kind of heavy English bourgeois rectitude and dull propriety, with its roots in the Victorian and Edwardian drawing-room, that the gadfly satirist of the 1920s – who was never wholly submerged in the later gravitas – had no difficulty in holding up to ridicule.
In 1901, Julia Huxley, drawing on her own and her husband’s slender capital and loans from the bank, founded a girls’ school near
Godalming called Prior’s Field. The family abandoned Laleham and went to live at Prior’s Field, two miles away, set in twenty-five acres of land. The previous year, Leonard Huxley had published a biography of his father, Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, whose success enabled him to end his fifteen year career as a schoolmaster and enter the literary world as reader and literary adviser for the publishing firm Smith, Elder and assistant editor of the Cornhill Magazine. The school opened on 23 January 1902 with seven pupils: one girl boarder, five day girls, and seven-year-old Aldous. Julia Huxley, a Miss English, and a Mademoiselle Bonnet were the staff. The school grew quickly and just as quickly it became clear that it was a very different sort of school from the prevailing norm. It was freer, more civilised, less regimented and attracted the daughters of some very eminent intellectuals and writers such as Gilbert Murray, Maurice Hewlett, and Conan Doyle – the Huxley and Arnold names no doubt being persuasive. One pupil, the writer Enid Bagnold, described it in her autobiography, however, as ‘above all a literary school, they didn’t lay stress on mathematics,’ which is a little surprising. She recalled her first interview with the headmistress: ‘A chintzy room, modern with William Morris – a slender lady with a beautifully-shaped small head. Kind, yes, but away and above my understanding. Each time before she spoke she seemed to reflect.’25 By the time Enid Bagnold arrived in 1903, Aldous had moved to a nearby prep school, Hillside, but he had Sunday lunch with the girls. Enid had been told that she was supposed to make an effort and talk, so she breezily asked the boy who sat ‘silent, rather green, inscrutable, antagonistic’ next to her what he had done today. There was no answer. Growing embarrassed, she asked again, a little louder: ‘What did you do today, Aldous?’ The terse reply came back: ‘I heard you the first time.’ Forty years later, Enid Bagnold met Huxley at a tea party in Chelsea given by Ethel Sands. ‘You were very frightening, Aldous,’ she reminded him. ‘He gave me a very sweet smile. “I’m frightening still”.’
Julia Huxley read aloud to the girls in the evening in her ‘silvery, even voice’ and did the same, Julian recalls, for her own children, ‘first nursery rhymes and fairy stories, then a little history and poetry’. She was ‘the pivot of our family life’ and used to organise picnic
lunches in the Surrey countryside, and charades and round games. As far as the pupils of Prior’s Field were concerned, Enid Bagnold wrote, Julia Huxley was also the essential pivot: ‘the wonder went out of the school with Mrs Huxley’.26
In the autumn of 1903 Aldous was sent away from this happy Eden to the unpleasant rigours of an English preparatory boarding school. Hillside School, run by Gidley Robinson, was not far away but it was, certainly for the first couple of years, quite awful. The only consolation was the presence of his cousin Gervas Huxley (who would later marry the writer, Elspeth Grant). Another friend was Lewis Gielgud, brother of the actor, Sir John Gielgud. Gervas was older than Aldous by three months and has left a very detailed picture of their schoolboy horrors, which lasted five years. ‘All I can remember of my arrival at Hillside,’ Gervas wrote nearly seventy years later, ‘is entering a large classroom full of boys and sitting on a wooden bench beside my cousin Aldous – also a new boy – who was weeping copiously at leaving home.’27 The school had around fifty pupils aged between eight and fourteen years and the headmaster was ‘old and definitely past his best’. The science master, Mr Jacques (‘Jacko’) was unmercifully ragged by the boys, the music teacher, Mr Macintosh was ‘a bespectacled old buffoon’, while the two Miss Noons from Godalming ‘supposedly taught drawing’. Matron, ‘Ma’ James, was ‘an irascible, ill-educated old woman, whose favourite phrase was “stop your imperence [sic] or I’ll report you”.’ Bullying was rife and allowed to go on unchecked. Aldous and Gervas and the other newcomers would be lined up at one end of the large classroom and peppered with hard little paper pellets fired from catapults. They were then asked if they were ‘mushrooms’ or ‘pears’ (circumcised or uncircumcised) and made to fight each other on that basis for the amusement of the seniors. They were also made to run the gauntlet of flicked wet towels, were beaten with slippers or hair-brushes, or had cold water poured into their beds. In addition there was no privacy to read a book. Fortunately, Huxley Major and Huxley Minor (Aldous), were big for their age and stuck together. At the end of each week, after being marched down the hill, in stiff Eton collars and little black Eton jackets, to Farncombe Church, and after another execrable lunch, they
were allowed to walk over to Prior’s Field. ‘The home-like atmosphere of Prior’s Field was a glorious change from Hillside, as was the excellent tea we enjoyed,’ Gervas recalls. Then it was back to the dormitories of twelve beds each, the cold bath every morning and the once a week hot bath. The teaching was uninspired and consisted of learning dates by rote and memorising third-rate poems. There was no encouragement of the boys to read or to learn for themselves. The school had no library and no place or designated time for reading. Gervas thought that the school, Bulstrode, in Eyeless in Gaza was a thinly-disguised Hillside and that the schoolboy characters were versions of his and Aldous’s schoolfellows. Quite how an inspired educator such as Julia Huxley could have subjected her young son to this brutally philistine routine is a mystery. After two years, however, things began to change. In the autumn of 1905, a new headmaster, Jimmy Douglas, arrived and, for the first time, a proper teacher called Hugh Parr ‘who really enjoyed encouraging the adolescent mind, particularly in anything relating to literature and art’. He refused to bully or mock his charges and: ‘the whole atmosphere of the school changed’. There were concerts and Shakespeare plays were performed. Aldous was said to have moved the old ladies in the audience to tears in his role as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. Even the food improved. Encouraged by Hugh Parr – who in little over a decade was to die in the First World War trenches – to read books and poetry, Aldous and Lewis Gielgud became joint editors of a literary magazine called the Doddite and Aldous contributed a poem called Sea Horses and a short story he illustrated himself. Aldous and Gervas now shared a double cubicle and one of their pastimes was sailing little boats with matchstick masts and paper sails along a gutter which ran outside the top of the windows. Huxley later fictionalised this pastime in Eyeless in Gaza.
Aldous was frequently ill as a child and missed some of his lessons but he seems to have developed a way of remaining immune to the worst experiences of the school. In an earlier, and much less bleak, account of their schooldays Gervas said that Aldous ‘possessed the key to an inviolable inner fortress of his own, into which he could and did withdraw from the trials and miseries of school existence’.28 He was
witty and joined in the schoolboy jokes, even if ‘we somehow felt that Aldous moved on a different plane from the rest of us’. And there were also holidays in the Lakes, and the Swiss mountains, during these years where Aldous developed still further his love of natural scenery and wild flowers.
Many years later, writing about the problems of education, and the shortcomings he perceived – not just in the Edwardian upper-middle class English fee-paying schools he had known, but in all school education – Huxley wrote:
Looking back over my own years of schooling, I can see the enormous deficiencies of a system which could do nothing better for my body than Swedish drill and compulsory football, nothing better for my character than prizes, punishments, sermons and pep-talks, and nothing better for my soul than a hymn before bed-time, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. Like everyone else, I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential.29 In his book on defective vision, The Art of Seeing (1943), Huxley (who incidentally remained firmly opposed to the more permissive kinds of education where children are encouraged to do as they please and learn what they want) complained that children were often ‘bored and sometimes frightened, because they dislike sitting cooped up for long hours, reading and listening to stuff which seems to them largely nonsensical, and compelled to perform tasks which they find, not only difficult, but pointless. Further, the spirit of competition and the dread of blame or ridicule foster, in many childish minds, a chronic anxiety, which adversely affects every part of the organism, not excluding the eyes and the mental functions associated with seeing.’30
Aldous remained at Hillside until June, 1908. Clever and already a remarkable presence, he was destined for a very bright academic career, following in Julian’s footsteps at Eton. But tragedy would very soon strike the family.
1
Along the Road (1925), ‘The Country’, p57
2
The Olive Tree (1936), ‘The Olive Tree’, p294
3
Antic Hay (1923), p184; p273
5
Jesting Pilate (1926), p137
7
Time Must Have A Stop (1944), pp32–3
8
Sir Julian Huxley, Memories 1 (1970) Chapter 1
10
Sybille Bedford in conversation with the author
11
Time Must Have A Stop (1944), p192
13
Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley (1973), p111
15
Julian Huxley, Mem. Vol., p21
19
HL, Oral History Transcripts. Interview between Juliette Huxley and David King Dunaway, 5 July 1985
20
See The Huxleys (1968), Ronald W. Clark and Adrian Desmond’s two-volume life: Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple (1994); Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest (1997)
21
Thomas Henry Huxley As A Man Of Letters (1932). Reprinted in The Olive Tree (1936)
23
HL, Hubble Diary, 30 January 1953
24
Time Must Have A Stop, p273
25
Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography (1969) p25ff
26
See SB1 5–11 for many comments by former pupils on Julia Huxley’s special qualities
27
Gervas Huxley, Both Hands: An Autobiography (1970), p32
29
‘The Education of an Amphibian’, Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), p37
30
The Art of Seeing (1943), p106