III

Damage

Aldous arrived at Eton in September 1908 as one of the school’s academic elite, the seventy King’s Scholars, who lived in College, the original core of the ancient school, with its black oak benches carved deeply with the initials of young Etonians across the centuries. In Huxley’s first letters from Eton the same jauntily facetious, precocious-schoolboy tone he had perfected towards the end of his time at Hillside (where he had been head of school that summer) is on display. ‘I notice you say “term” instead of “half” the only and obvious expression,’¹ he primly reprimanded Huxley Major, a mere Rugbeian, who was unaware that at Eton three halves make a whole. Aldous was being initiated into the rituals of fagging, Homer and Virgil, and as a Colleger was installed in the Lower Fifth. Huxley would always be a dandy in dress and he lost no time in telling Gervas: ‘I look so chic in tail coats mouldy collars and white ties.’ He added that he had been whipped only twice ‘(1) in a general working off of the whole of college for hiding a letter and (2) for forgetting to take VI form cheese out of Hall’. Lewis Gielgud, he added, was beginning more and more to resemble a turnip. Aldous’s letters to Julian were bright and clever, with sometimes a sense that he was trying to impress the elder brother, now at Balliol, whose triumph in reading out his prize-winning Newdigate Poem at Oxford, the younger had witnessed during the summer.

Aldous seems to have settled in well and towards the end of November, he was looking forward to Julian and his other elder brother, Trev, coming to Eton to watch the annual wall game on St Andrew’s Day, Monday 30 November. In the event, they did not come because, on the Sunday, with terrible swiftness, Julia Huxley died of an inoperable cancer after a very short illness. She had been diagnosed only four months previously and was forty-five years old. Julian came back from Oxford to her bedside: ‘Never shall I forget how wasted she looked,’ he recalled later, ‘nor the terrible cry she gave: “Why do I have to die, and so young!”’² Her sister, Mrs Humphry Ward, that night brought Margaret and Aldous – ‘poor little fellow’³ – home to her house, Stocks, at Tring in Hertfordshire. The funeral took place the next day at Compton, in the Watts Memorial Chapel designed by the wife of the portrait painter, George Frederic Watts. Surveying the rich art nouveau and Celtic decoration of the tiny chapel, the boys would have read the gilt legend that ran around the walls: ‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, their hope is full of immortality.’ Julia is buried in a grave close to the chapel wall beneath a broad-branched beech tree. Leonard was later buried with her, and Aldous’s ashes, too, would one day, with his wife’s, be laid to rest there in the same grave, sadly neglected now, and giving no clue about the famous author whose remains are buried there. On the day of Julia Huxley’s funeral the girls from the school were in attendance. The previous night they had listened to a poem by Leonard Huxley, written to express his feelings about his late wife, which at least one girl, Enid Bagnold, found not true to her spirit. Aldous, sobbing, was comforted by Joan Collier. Julian described his younger, fourteen-year old brother as standing ‘in stony misery’ at the grave side. Mrs Humphry Ward’s daughter, Dorothy, recalled: ‘The little Eton boy very sensitive and brooding and white, and feels it deeply – and dumbly.’⁴ Margaret, Aldous’s nine-year-old younger sister, recalled the aftershock of this event which seemed to presage the end of the school and residence at Prior’s Field: ‘I lost my mother, my home, my school, living in the country and my governess all at one blow.’⁵ Julia Huxley’s managing partner, Mrs Burton-Brown, emerged to carry on with the school – she would be succeeded in turn as headmistress by her daughter Beatrice – but for pupils like Enid Bagnold its magic was over. The damage inflicted on the sensitive schoolboy – the first of three powerful blows during his time at Eton and immediately afterwards – is self-evident. At such an age and with such a sensibility, an early event of this kind, the discovery that the ground beneath is not always firm and sure, can have a permanent effect. In Grey Eminence (1941) Huxley wrote of another historical character’s loss of a parent at the age of ten: ‘There remained with him, latent at ordinary times but always ready to come to the surface, a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless precariousness of all merely human happiness.’⁶ When Huxley later wrote of the isolation and grief of Anthony Beavis when his mother dies during his schooldays in Eyeless in Gaza (1936) ‘he was drawing on his own bitter experience,’ thought Gervas.⁷ ‘I am sure that this meaningless catastrophe was the main cause of the protective cynical skin in which he clothed himself and his novels in the twenties,’ judged Julian. A later friend, Dennis Gabor, would write: ‘to the last he remained suspicious of the scars left by the emotional ties of the family’.⁸ In both Brave New World and its counterpart, the ‘good Utopia’ of Island, the nature of motherhood and the role of the family is an important theme, and one informed by Huxley’s complicated feelings about the matter reaching back to his childhood experiences. On her deathbed, Julia wrote Aldous a letter which he kept with him for the rest of his life and in which she enjoined: ‘Judge not too much and love more.’⁹ The immediate consequence of Julia Huxley’s death was another expulsion from the Surrey arcadia for Aldous. Leonard moved, in July 1909, to what Julian called ‘a gloomy London house in Westbourne Square, away from our beloved Surrey’. Aldous shared Julian’s dislike of the Bayswater house at 27, Westbourne Square and tended to spend his holidays at Stocks or with Gervas’s parents, Dr Henry and Sophy Huxley, in nearby Porchester Terrace.

But meanwhile, Aldous remained at Eton, fagging for his first year in College, and generally avoiding, as he had done at Hillside, any attempts at bullying by virtue of his distinctive manner. ‘From the word go,’ Lord Justice Harman recalled, ‘he was clearly going to be a superior being. He possessed a kind of effortless aristocratic approach to his work.’¹⁰ The syllabus was mostly Latin and Greek (the subjects Huxley himself would teach when he was briefly a schoolmaster at Eton after Oxford, English literature not forming part of the syllabus at Eton until the 1960s). There was a little modern history and a little French. But the main effort was in classics. Huxley recalled: ‘Actually, the education at Eton was uncommonly good at that time … There were a few very good teachers … We used to spend the whole of every Tuesday from 7 in the summer and 7.30 in winter till 10.30 at night composing Latin verses – we were given a piece of Tennyson or something and were told to turn it into elegaics or hexameters or Alcaics or Sapphics, and if you were a little further advanced Greek iambics – which was a sort of immense jig-saw puzzle game’.¹¹ These mellow reflections from an interview given at the end of his life should be placed against a sharper view from his essay ‘Doodles in the Dictionary’ from Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) where the very same above exercise was described as ‘the exhausting and preposterous task of translating thirty or forty lines of English poetry into Latin, or on great occasions, Greek verses. For those who were most successful in producing pastiches of Ovid or Horace or Euripides, there were handsome prizes. I still have a Matthew Arnold in crimson morocco, a Shelley in half-calf, to testify to my one-time prowess in these odd fields of endeavour. Today I could no more write a copy of Greek iambics, or even Latin hexameters, than I could fly. All I can remember of these once indispensable arts is the intense boredom by which the practice of them was accompanied.’¹² At the same time, however, Huxley believed that ‘the pupil in a progressive school lives in a fool’s paradise’ for the evident reason that: ‘As a preparation for life, not as it ought to be, but as it actually is, the horrors of Greek grammar and the systematic idiocy of Latin Verse were perfectly appropriate.’ Huxley, who was generally on the ‘progressive’ side of such questions, was nonetheless firmly of the view that the right to self-expression had done ‘enormous mischief in the sphere of education’.¹³ At Eton, where a new King’s Scholar or ‘K.S.’ would begin in the original stalls or cubicles of College, Huxley soon graduated to a room of his own where he read voraciously. Here was ‘the brilliant boy two years ahead of his contemporaries in book-learning’ who figures in the unfinished autobiographial novel which Laura Archera Huxley excerpts in her memoir, This Timeless Moment (1969).¹⁴ He also began to paint. This was a lifelong pleasure and recalls the skilled draughtsmanship of his grandfather, though Huxley claimed that he came from an aesthetically constricted family background. ‘I was brought up in the strait and narrow way of Ruskinism,’ he confessed in a passage in Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) – this being the Ruskin who, for the high-minded English bourgeois, ‘persuasively rationalised this ethicoreligious preference [for the Oxford Movement] in terms of aesthetics’ – and ‘so strict was my conditioning that it was not till I was at least twenty and had come under the influence of a newer school that I could perceive the smallest beauty in Saint Paul’s cathedral.’¹⁵ In the company of the Eton aesthetes he read Pater and Wilde but he was also passionately interested in science in general and biology in particular. His biology master M. H. Hill kept a cage of lemurs in his garden and Huxley, whose house tutor and ‘division’ (form) ‘beak’ (master), was A.W. Whitworth, thought Hill one of the best masters in the school. In an essay in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), written when he was an enthusiast for ‘non-verbal education’ and thus prone to criticise his own traditional education, he nonetheless recalled with pleasure how ‘I collected butterflies and kept their young in glass jars on the window sill of my cubicle at school’.¹⁶ Huxley’s ambition at this time was to be a doctor not a writer – though his later friend Gerald Heard claimed that his wish also was to be a painter.¹⁷

Whether or not Huxley would have managed the necessary qualities to be a general practitioner – the bedside manner, the professional demeanour – events were soon to determine the issue. Quite apart from his appetite for highly unorthodox and fringe medicine throughout a life dominated by poor health, his principal interest in medicine was scientific, like his grandfather who admitted that he was drawn to medicine not as a career of healing but for the study of ‘the mechanical engineering of living machines’.¹⁸

One Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1911 (the dates surrounding this episode are frustratingly vague), Dr Henry Huxley was coming back from a visit in the country when he decided to call in to see his precocious sixteen-year-old nephew, Aldous, at Eton during the Easter Half. He found the boy with an enormous compress on a very badly inflamed eye and immediately expressed his dismay to Matron, Gertrude Ward. Matron, in spite of her title, was not medically qualified and acted more in the role of a substitute mother for the boys, looking after their domestic needs. She had assumed that Aldous was suffering from a stye or the condition known as pink-eye. Dr Huxley announced that it was far more serious and said that he was taking him there and then to consult an eye specialist in London.¹⁹ The explanation for the infection that has usually been proffered was that it came from dust – on the playing field or out on an OTC exercise (as a member of the OTC Huxley had stood guard on the route of Edward VII’s funeral procession to Windsor, ‘keeping the rabble back with the butt end of my rifle’²⁰) – aggravated because of illness and being generally run-down. The two years since his mother’s death at the end of 1909 had not been happy ones for Aldous who had frequently been isolated and left to his own devices. The boys were worked very hard at Eton and the diet may well have been unsatisfactory, all contributing to vulnerability to an infection that today would be cleared up quickly by a course of antibiotics. The cause of infection was diagnosed, after attempts by Henry Huxley and others to treat it, by the leading eye surgeon, Ernest Clarke, in December 1911, as staphylococcus aureus. The infection inflamed the cornea very badly – the condition is known as keratitis punctata – and, in spite of weekly injections at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in London, opacities in the cornea left when the inflammation subsided grossly impaired the teenager’s sight. He was effectively blind and would remain so for at least a year, possibly as long as eighteen months – certainly from early 1911 to the middle of 1912. The vagueness is to do with the absence of records but also because the near-blindness on either side of the acute period affected his ability to read and write. A letter to his cousin Joan Collier in July 1911 says, briefly (though always a very concise writer, this is Huxley’s shortest ever letter) and rather poignantly: ‘Scuse bad writing which same I cant see’.²¹ Looking back on this time, in an interview conducted in the United States in 1957, he recalled:

It happened when I was about sixteen and a half, and I got this attack of keratitis which left one eye about nine-tenths blind and affected the other quite badly. I was unable to do any reading for nearly two years. I had to leave school and I had to have private tutors. I learned to read Braille and even Braille music, which is very difficult. And then, I was able, after about two years, to read with a rather powerful magnifying glass and went through university on that basis.²²

A voracious reader, a painter, a delighted explorer of the natural world, Huxley suddenly found that all these pleasures had been ripped away to be replaced by a darkness that must have seemed to him to have a connection to the occluded life of the affections he was living at this time. It was a catastrophe which he always believed was the most important single determining event in his early life. In that same interview, he went on to explain that this dousing of the light at a crucial point in his adolescent development cut him off from sports and ‘a great many ordinary kinds of outlets for social communication with people of my own age; and it did stimulate a tendency which I think I have by temperament, a tendency towards solitude and what may be contemplation, so that in a sense it confirmed things’. It also meant that he missed another powerful experience shared by his contemporaries: participation in the First World War – ‘and so I no doubt may owe my life to it’.

In a short book written in 1943 called The Art of Seeing, in which Huxley tried to popularise the doctrines of Dr William Bates who challenged conventional ophthalmology by proposing exercises for the eye instead of simply prescribing lenses, he gave a very precise account of his condition:

At sixteen, I had a violent attack of keratitis punctata, which left me (after eighteen months of near-blindness, during which I had to depend on Braille for my reading and a guide for my walking) with one eye just capable of light perception, and the other with enough vision to permit of my detecting the two-hundred-foot letter on the Snellen Chart at ten feet. My inability to see was mainly due to the presence of opacities in the cornea; but this condition was complicated by hyperopia and astigmatism.²³

Medical records no longer exist but, in the view of a present-day consultant ophthalmologist, who was shown Huxley’s account, the injections at the Institute for Tropical Medicine would possibly have contained heavy metals, arsenic or other borates, boric acid, or bismuth with presumed antibacterial activity.²⁴ Other injections favoured by ophthalmologists at the time included arsenicals, atropine, eserine, iodine of various kinds, and cocaine topically and in ointments but possibly even injected for pain.²⁵ Keratitis punctata is classified into superficialis and profunda, the former the result of infection and leaving small grey dots in the cornea. One form of keratitis (interstialis) is caused by measles or congenital syphilis and results in complete corneal opacity for months and usually leaves considerable corneal scarring. This seems very close to the condition described by Huxley. It is reported that he had mumps at school, whose effects would have been the same as measles. But in addition to the infection, Huxley almost certainly had pre-existing eye problems to which the illness added. His hyperopia – long-sightedness – would require strong glasses for reading and long-sightedness can predispose to amblyopia or lazy eye. Photographs of Huxley in his youth were taken carefully to avoid showing this, and some may even have been retouched, but at least one shows distinct abnormality in the eye. ‘One eye resembles a blue smear,’ the author Robert Payne noted in 1948.²⁶ And Virginia Woolf recalled: ‘There was a look of sightlessness in his eyes which reminded one of the blind seer.’²⁷ Corneal scarring does tend to become thinner and less opaque as time passes and this may account for the marked visual improvement Huxley claimed after 1939 when he discovered the Bates method – though there remain conflicting accounts of his visual capacity. It is worth noting above how Huxley draws short of saying he was totally blind at sixteen, but the impairment of vision cannot have fallen far short of total blindness. It is a topic to which it will be necessary to return frequently, since visual impairment was a constant in his life. Sometimes, one feels, the problem was overstated. At others, his sight may have been far more impaired than it was claimed at a particular moment. Accounts sometimes clash. In short, the question posed by Christopher Isherwood needs regularly to be put: ‘How much did he actually see?’²⁸

In 1931 Huxley wrote to Clive Bell, after hearing from Jean Cocteau that Bell was having eye problems. He advised him to learn Braille: ‘It takes a very short time – I think I was only three or four weeks before I could read with reasonable facility and speed – and makes an astonishing difference … Everything has its compensations and I remember with pleasure the volupté of reading Braille in bed, in the dark and with one’s book and one’s hands snugly under the bedclothes. ’²⁹ Realising that a medical or scientific career was now out of the question, Huxley turned to the idea of writing which, he told the interviewers mentioned above, was ‘a very important event in my life’. He began by writing ‘bad verses’ and then even ‘wrote an entire novel which I never read because I couldn’t see what I had written’. This 80,000 word novel – written on a typewriter – is now lost, but Huxley described it in an interview in 1961 as ‘a rather bitter novel about a young man and his relationship to two different kinds of women’.³⁰ By means of Braille Huxley read a great deal (including Macaulay) and also taught himself to play the piano by touch. He displayed enormous courage at this time in ways that recall the determination in isolation of his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, persevering in his scientific work throughout the years before his fame. Even when he began to recover some sight during 1912 it was hard. ‘In looking back I am always amazed at the amount of reading I did with a small, powerful magnifying glass,’ he said in 1957. Without a trace of self-pity he threw himself into the task of coping. He rose above the disability but he never minimised the importance of the experience in his life. Until his death he was preoccupied with the relationship of mind and body, with the way in which the body often hampered and constrained the mind – but also how mind needed to discover the right sort of relationship with the body. ‘How senseless psychological and moral judgements really are apart from physiological judgements!’ he exclaimed to his lifelong friend Naomi Mitchison in 1933. ‘And of course I am also to a considerable extent a function of defective eyesight. Keratitis punctata shaped and shapes me; and I in turn made and make use of it.’³¹ In an essay in Music at Night, he wrote: ‘Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.’³² His phenomenally retentive memory, for example, was almost certainly shaped by the need to retain information and to minimise the difficulty of frequent referring-back to books and sources of information. Naomi, years later, recalled his use of Braille music and his playing, even after his sight had begun to return as an undergraduate, at her parents’ home in Oxford: ‘What I remember most is his long hands on the piano and his half-blind face reaching forward into the music. I only listened, but he was immersed.’³³

The immediate consequence for Aldous of the blindness was the end of his schooldays at Eton. For those dark months he was passed around to relatives and friends – Aunt Mary at Stocks, the Selwyns (relatives of Julia) at Hindhead, Naomi’s parents (the Haldanes) at Oxford, Gervas’s parents, and then, as things began to improve, to Marburg in Germany to learn German and to Oxford, with his brother, Trevenen, from April to June 1913. He was taught by private tutors, one of whom was Sir George Clark, the historian. Clark taught him English history while staying with the Huxleys in Bayswater as an undergraduate in September 1911. When Aldous required a book, Clark would lead him round the corner to the Braille lending library at Whiteley’s department store. He also attended some lectures at London University given by W.P. Ker. Towards the end of November, 1911, Leonard Huxley, who had paid a tutor’s fee and £4 to Eton in order to keep Aldous’s place in College open across the summer, accepted that he was now unlikely to return (though he retained an option of applying for a vacancy in May 1912). ‘His eyesight is improving,’ he told the Bursar on 24 November, ‘but I see little prospect of his gaining sufficient advantage from a renewal of his work at school. It is a great disappointment.’³⁴ If Aldous’s eyesight really was ‘improving’ as early as November 1911 it may be that the period of actual blindness was less than a year in duration. Huxley himself was inconsistent, reporting anything from nearly two to three years as the period of blindness. In some very telegraphic, unpublished biographical notes prepared for his German translator, Herbert Herlitschka, in 1929, he wrote: ‘Education interrupted for three years by an infection of the eyes which left me for some time nearly blind … I was much alone & thrown on my own resources.’³⁵ The shorter period is more likely to be accurate if we are referring to total blindness, but it is also true to say that for most of 191, 1912, and 1913, Huxley’s education was indeed ‘interrupted’ until October 1913 when he passed (with the aid of a magnifying glass) the entrance to Balliol College, Oxford.

In February 1912, Leonard Huxley remarried after three years of being alone. His new wife, Rosalind, was thirty years younger – younger even than Julian and Trev – and the difficulties of this arrangement can be imagined. The announcement seems to have been abrupt and, on Rosalind’s side, these young intellectuals must have been a rather intimidating prospect. She was fond of them, however, and took good care of Aldous, allowing him to use the piano which her grandfather had given her as a wedding present. ‘She really did try,’ said Sybille Bedford.³⁶ He was soon off, in May, to Germany where he stayed with a Professor Kayser, a geologist, and continued with his music. On his return he spent part of the summer with Gervas and Lewis Gielgud. At Christmas, in spite of his limited vision, Aldous went skiing in Montana in Switzerland with his uncle, John Collier, and the other two members of the threesome, Gervas and Lewis. In January 1913 he went on a walking tour with Trev on the South Downs and during spring and early summer stayed with Trev at Oxford at his digs in the Banbury Road. In May, the two brothers and Lewis Gielgud were rehearsing a play at the Oxford home of the parents of its author, Naomi Haldane (later Lady Mitchison), brother of the scientist J.B.S. Haldane. Naomi Mitchison describes this summer of 1913 as ‘a strawberry and gooseberry summer … We were always having picnics up the Cherwell, making fires and boiling kettles; we were always laughing and scrapping …’³⁷ Later, staying in their home, Aldous would persuade Mrs Haldane that Naomi’s education demanded that she be allowed to read hitherto banned books such as Tom Jones and Madame Bovary. He also introduced her to music and art: ‘He knew an amazing amount about all the arts and took them seriously in a way that was tremendously encouraging to me in our somewhat anti-art Oxford home.’ The nineteen-year-old on the threshold of Oxford – tall, precocious, learned, contemptuous of the bourgeois codes of his class in relation to ‘shocking’ art, pleasure-seeking but with a firm underlying moral sense, is the Huxley of the twenties emerging from its chrysalis.

It was in the summer of 1913, just before he went to Grenoble, that an incident occurred which is described, with her characteristic sensitivity and tact, by Sybille Bedford, who derived her account from conversations with Gervas – the only possible source.³⁸ That summer, Aldous found himself alone in his father’s house in Westbourne Terrace. He decided to go out for a stroll during which he picked up a girl whom he assumed to be an au pair on her evening off. He took her back to the house and made love to her on the sofa, telling Gervas later that he had been surprised by her boldness of approach and eagerness – young men of that class and epoch assuming that these were prerogatives of the male. This was Huxley’s sexual initiation and what Sybille Bedford calls his being ‘extremely susceptible to pretty women’ ensured that it was the beginning of a very active sexual career.

In July Aldous stayed in Grenoble, learning French – which he would always speak and write effortlessly. He visited, like his great uncle, Matthew Arnold, the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse. From La Tronche he reported to his father on the butterflies ‘shining like new minted coins’³⁹ – his eyesight clearly functioning again and his alert attentiveness to the beauty of nature undimmed. On his return there was a brief stay in Yorkshire in September with his two firm friends. And then Oxford.

Trev, with whom Aldous had spent the earlier part of the summer, was aged twenty-three and in his last term at Balliol. He seems to have been the most likeable and charming of the three Huxley brothers. He is transformed fictionally into Brian Foxe in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), who has the same stammer and the same scrupulous conscience: ‘“But if you d-don’t st-tick to your p-principles …” he hesitated … “well, where are you?” he concluded despairingly.’⁴⁰ To anticipate the narrative slightly, what happened to him in August 1914, when Aldous had completed his first year at Oxford, was the third major blow of Aldous’s youth, following the death of his mother and the loss of his sight, the three events constituting an undoubted impairment. These events injected a greater bitterness into his early writing than might otherwise have been there (though it would be over-determinist to ignore the contribution of his free-ranging intelligence, his immersion in literary precedents, his wider political and social awareness, his sensitivity to the historical moment). Trev was a worrier, which caused him to overwork and tire himself and in consequence he secured that summer only a second in Greats. Huxleys were meant to garner firsts. Trev stayed on at Oxford for a further year of postgraduate study, but his hypersensitive nature, the confusion within him between inherited high ideals and the normal sensual feelings of a young man, came to a head when he fell in love with a young woman who was not, according to the upper middle class codes his family lived by, ‘suitable’. She has never been identified by name but she was said by Julian to be ‘an attractive and intelligent’ young housemaid who worked at the family home. Trev was secretly trying to educate her by taking her out to plays, concerts, and lectures but the affair was, they both realised, doomed. She eventually handed in her notice. Knowing the hoplesseness of the liaison, and tortured by his whole condition – he had also failed to pass the Civil Service examinations – Trev fell into a serious mental breakdown. The ‘black melancholy’ that had cursed his grandfather and which would afflict throughout life his elder brother Julian (though not the more equable Aldous) struck. He was sent, on specialist advice, to a Surrey nursing home, the Hermitage at Reigate, the same that had taken Julian the year before. Though instructions had been given that he was not to be allowed out of anyone’s sight, Trev set out on Saturday morning, 15 August 1914, for a walk on the downs. When he failed to return the police were called. There was a search. Eight days later, on Sunday 23 August, Trev was found in a nearby wood. He had hanged himself from a tree. A letter from the housemaid was in his pocket and it was left to the parlourmaid, Sarah, to explain what it all meant. The family – particularly the younger members like Margaret who had treated Trev as ‘the hub of the family wheel’⁴¹ and Aldous – was devastated by the loss and the awful circumstances of the delay in finding the body. Aldous wrote to Gervas:

There is – apart from the sheer grief of the loss – an added pain in the cynicism of the situation. It is just the highest and best in Trev – his ideals – which have driven him to his death – while there are thousands, who shelter their weakness from the same fate by a cynical, unidealistic outlook on life. Trev was not strong, but he had the courage to face life with ideals – and his ideals were too much for him.⁴²

Julian later wrote: ‘Trev’s suicide was one of the most ghastly things that could have happened. He was brilliant, good-looking, athletic, especially as a mountaineer, wrote good poetry, and was very popular. ’⁴³

This event would cast a shadow across the middle of Aldous’s Oxford career. But when he went up to Balliol in the autumn of 1913, his sight more or less restored, he threw himself into that brief pre-War moment of excitement and intellectual discovery with all the energy and enthusiasm at his disposal.

1

L.29

2

Julian Huxley, Memories 1 (1970) P64

3

Letter from Mrs Humphry Ward’s daughter, Dorothy Ward, to her friend, Miss Jewett, 13 December 1908. Quoted SB1.24

4

Ibid.

5

Margaret Huxley, letter to Sybille Bedford, October 1969. Quoted in SB1.25

6

Grey Eminence (1941), p21

7

Mem. Vol., p59

8

Mem. Vol., p69

9

Quoted by Sybille Bedford addressing P.E.N. meeting ‘In Honour of Aldous Huxley’, 15 November 1978. Tape in National Sound Archive

10

Quoted in SB1.28

11

Recorded interview with John Chandos July 1961. Quoted by SB1.29

12

‘Doodles in the Dictionary’, Adonis and the Alphabet (1956), P240

13

Music at Night (1931), p67

14

Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (1968), p212–38

15

Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934), P124

16

Adonis and the Alphabet, p79

17

Gerald Heard, ‘The Poignant Prophet’, Kenyon Review, p52 ‘As a boy he was determined to become an artist.’

18

R. W. Clark, The Huxleys (1968), p11

19

HL, Oral History Transcripts. Interview between David King Dunaway and Juliette Huxley, 5 July 1985

20

L.36

21

L.39

22

Interview in Hollywood with students of Los Angeles School of Journalism, 18 December 1957. Text in UCLA Huxley Collection

23

The Art of Seeing (1943), pvi

24

I am greatly indebted for this information to Mr John Deutsch FRCS, FRCOphth, Consultant Ophthalmologist, Victoria Eye Hospital, Hereford

25

Mercurial inunctions were used as well as ‘subconjunctival injections of plain water, saline solutions, chloride or cyanide of mercury’ – Aids to Ophthalmology (1919)

26

Robert Payne, ‘Aldous Huxley,’ in Now More Than Ever: Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium, Munster (1995, Frankfurt), p5. From the Payne papers, State University of New York at Stonybrook

27

Mem. Vol., P36

28

Mem. Vol., p156

29

L.344–5

30

Interview with John Chandos, July 1961. Quoted in SB1.35

31

L.372–3

32

Music at Night, p37

33

Mem. Vol., p52

34

Eton College MS, Letter from Leonard Huxley to Bursar, 24 November 1911

35

Reading MS. Unpublished note in Herlitschka file

36

SB in conversation with the author

37

Mem. Vol., P51

38

SB1.57

39

L.52

40

Eyeless in Gaza (1936). Chapter 36

41

Quoted by SB1.47

42

L.61

43

Memories 1, p96