Oxford
Aldous arrived at Balliol in October 1913 for the beginning of the Michaelmas term. ‘Behold me established in the little alcove of my room, with a fine view of Balliol Chapel in the foreground and some bluer sky than usual,’1 he announced brightly to his father, on Sunday 12 October. Constant confusions between the two Huxleys, Gervas and himself, dogged the first few days. Another inconvenience was having rooms opposite the Chapel, as he confided to his young friend, Jelly D’Aranyi, the concert violinist: ‘one is made unhappy on Sundays by the noise of people singing hymns’.2 Clearly, neither Chapel nor the ‘awful noise’ of the hymn-singers which ‘rather gets on my nerves’ would appeal to the grandson of the man who invented the word ‘agnostic’. Huxley had also to face some examinations on the first day he arrived, which depressed him a little, but his chief anxiety was that he had been ‘very dull and grumpy’ at his last meeting with Jelly, adding ‘perhaps I always am, I don’t know’. Huxley’s early encounters with women – to judge from the apologies and explanations in his youthful correspondence – appear to have been prone to gaucheness and the regretted faux pas. The normal moodiness and self-regard of the adolescent no doubt also played their part. Huxley’s natural reluctance to engage in some of the more boisterous forms of social life, he realised, had to be overcome if the pursuit of women
were to be assured of success. The following month, having attended a dance at the Haldanes, he resolved to improve his dancing technique ‘or otherwise everyone suffers’.3
But it was his intellectual performance, rather than his conduct on the dance floor, which pre-occupied Huxley in the first months at Oxford. In spite of still impaired vision – almost no sight in one eye and limited performance with the other – Huxley threw himself into his reading. He would later tell an interviewer that he marvelled at his ability to read, sometimes for eight hours a day, at Balliol by means of a magnifying glass.4 He loved the Bodleian and the opportunity to plunge into original texts. He was attending the lectures of Walter Raleigh – his tutor was R.J.E. Tiddy of Trinity – and reading Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon literature, and some Greek philosophers. He found Dryden and his contemporaries ‘most exciting’ and the latter’s verse satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681), together with the responses it engendered, wholly absorbed him as he discovered in Bodley ‘the most fascinating volume’ of original satires. ‘It gives one a queer new sensation, seeing all these absurd old books,’ he told his father, ‘as one somehow always pictures past ages as producing about ten classical works by one or two great names and nothing much else, whereas the trash must have been quite as plentiful in comparison, if not more so, than it is now.’5 Huxley, all his life an ardent seeker-out of the best, and of the ‘classical works’, developed a very early disinclination to waste his time and his eyesight on trash. The sense one derives, from a reading of these first letters from Oxford, is of a delighted exploration of the English literary tradition that would form the foundation of the wide and easy allusiveness of the later essays. English Literature was still a relatively new subject at Oxford and Huxley was one of the first wave of beneficiaries of the new discipline. To his fellow undergraduates, Huxley seemed so much farther ahead and to have read so much – modern French poetry, for example – in spite of his handicap. He quickly became the centre of Balliol’s literary intellectual set, as Gervas later explained:
All freshmen had rooms in College and Aldous’s ‘sitter’ soon became the rendezvous of the first-year
contemporaries who formed our set … Instinctively Aldous’s contemporaries must have recognised the originality and distinction of his mind with its catholic tastes and its curiosity about all things and all men. They were drawn to him, too, by his unassuming friendliness, his complete lack of any pretensions and the gaiety that his company always engendered.6 Huxley attended the Balliol Sunday evening concerts as a matter of course but he was also interested in the new jazz music that was arriving from America. ‘He had an old upright piano in his “sitter” and on it he entertained us by strumming the accompaniments to our singing of such popular numbers as “The Wedding Glide”, and “He’d have to get under, get out and get under his little machine”’, Gervas recalled. Politics, however, seem not to have engaged the smart Balliol intellectual set. ‘Most of us embraced a mild and indifferent Toryism and joined the Union, though I only remember Aldous and I attending one debate,’ wrote Gervas. They were all ‘wholly free’ of the urge for political change which a minority at Oxford was working for and which Huxley himself in later decades would put at the centre of his writing:
Looking back it seems extraordinary that we should have shown such a complete lack of concern with the current issues that were so deeply affecting our country and the world, issues such as Irish Home Rule and the Ulster rebellion and constitutional crisis, women’s suffrage, the Balkan Wars and their threat to the peace of Europe or Anglo-German Colonial and Naval rivalry.7 As their first undergraduate year drew to a close in the summer of 1914 such political innocence no doubt quickly vanished. Huxley in fact applied to join the Oxford Socialist Society, and in spite of Gervas’s witness, there is little evidence of any ‘Toryism’ of a mild or strong variety in Huxley, though it is more than likely that he held the usual prejudices of his class. In particular, casually anti-Semitic remarks seem to have been endemic at the time in this layer of English
society. The Secretary of the Socialist Society was R. Palme Dutt, a Balliol contemporary, who enrolled Huxley – some time between 1914 and 1916 – as a full member. This involved making a declaration of socialist faith – or at any rate signing what was known as ‘The Basis’ (originally the old Fabian Basis) affirming acceptance of the principles of socialism:
I recall the picture of him scrutinising most precisely, with the aid of the magnifying glass he used to aid his eyesight, the small print of the Basis, and then declaring his satisfaction and signing, but adding that he did not want to be ‘an economic type of Socialist’, since he hated economics, and supported Socialism for the same reasons as Oscar Wilde had done.8 The allusion is to Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), a significant one since Huxley’s mature preference was for a politics of decentralisation and of small self-governing communities very similar to the classic libertarian anarchist tradition. That tendency is also present in what many have seen as the serious political vision which underpins the playful surface paradoxes of Wilde’s essay. The alternative socialist tradition of statism and democratic centralism was one that was wholly unsympathetic for Huxley and in later years he was to prove equally forthright in his opposition both to communism and to fascism. At this stage, however, he was primarily an aesthete and it was the arts group of the Socialist Society which mostly engaged him. With Tommy Earp (later an art critic for the Daily Telegraph) and Grattan Esmonde (subsequently a Sinn Fein MP) and others, the group, in February 1916, launched a magazine called the Palatine Review, where Huxley’s first writing appeared. Naomi Mitchison remembered: ‘He was of course in Oxford politics, including the University Co-Op Shop, which had been started on highly ideological grounds, with a room above for discussions.’ The socialist writer G.D.H. Cole was one of the members of the Co-Op as was Tommy Earp who had a pair of pyjamas made out of Liberty’s silk by the Co-Operative dressmaker.
Quite soon, during that first year at Oxford, Aldous and Gervas began to visit Cherwell, the home of Professor and Mrs Haldane in the Banbury Road where open house was kept for friends of their son, Jack (‘JBS’) and daughter Naomi. Naomi thought that Lord Edward Tantamount in Point Counter Point might have been suggested by her father. The civilised and lively atmosphere of Cherwell was a welcome relief from undergaduate irritations such as the ‘infernally stupid’9 Pass Moderations which Aldous completed in February 1914 and Holy Scripture (‘Diwers’) which he passed at the second attempt in December of that year. He was still enjoying his reading and was bored only by the lesser poets of the eighteenth century: ‘It is melancholy work ploughing thro’ the “elegancies” and “just thoughts” in which they all abound,’10he complained to his father. Staying briefly in the summer at Hadspen House, home of the Hobhouse family at Castle Cary, in Somerset, he formed the idea of writing a poem for the Newdigate Prize – his great uncle and his brother Julian had both won it – which he had learned was on the theme of Glastonbury. He would eventually write the poem, but its cynical tone and a reference to the Kaiser as ‘Sweet William with his homely cottage smell’, was too much for the examiners.11 During the summer, he and his friends had sought relief from the monasticism of the all-male colleges, which in those days, according to Gervas, did not fraternise with the women’s colleges, in the company of Naomi and her friends. In the Haldanes’ long garden running down to the Cher, in the summer term of 1914, only weeks before war was declared, plays were performed. One was written by Naomi ‘about an imaginary country, Saunes Bairos, in the Andes under a vaguely Mayan cultures’12 Another consisted of excerpts from Gilbert Murray’s translation of Aristophanes’ Frogs. Aldous and Gervas had parts, the former was Charon and the latter his slave. Lewis Gielgud, who was a nephew of Ellen Terry, doubled as Dionysus and stage manager. Naomi later recalled how the end of that summer and the outbreak of war (days before Trev killed himself) ‘was for me and many another the end of the old life and the beginning of the personal evil and loss which we were going to experience’. At the end of term, Aldous visited relatives in Scotland then returned to his father’s house at Westbourne Terrace from where he
sent to Jelly D’Aranyi a book that had belonged to Trev. ‘With all his books here,’ Aldous told her, ‘all the traces of him left in the character of our room, still fresh – it is hard sometimes to believe that he isn’t just away and coming back in a day or two, to live the old life – sitting with his book and pipe in front of the fire in the evenings.’13
In October 1914, Aldous returned to a different Oxford, no longer in college but lodging now with the Haldanes at Cherwell. ‘Oxford in wartime still managed a certain amount of gaiety,’ according to Naomi, ‘but the colleges were emptying.’ Aldous played the piano while she danced and ‘asked me what being in love was like’. He was trying to find the answer to that question with Jelly, whom he had seen briefly in the summer in London and to whom he confessed, ‘I’m not good at expressing my feelings – Still, they are there.’ He said he would try to ‘grub up’ some poems to show her at their next meeting ‘but I warn you that I am not a poet – except perhaps in a certain didactically flippant manner, particularly irritating to the high-minded.’ He added, ‘I am destined to write some long work of satiric and philosophic tendencies – poetry only doubtfully – but quite entertaining.’14 Julian and Aldous had both fallen under the spell of Jelly, whom Julian recalled playing at a Balliol Sunday evening concert: ‘She was then only sixteen, a lovely creature with hair hanging down her back,’15 Julian recalled. Aldous continued to write to her during the new term, starting one letter late one Tuesday night:
You ought to see Balliol now – it’s too curious. There are only about 60 undergraduates up and the whole of the front quad is filled with soldiers: there are 250 of them there, sleeping four or five in a room – a lot in my old room: I’m only hoping they won’t smash my pictures and spoil my books … Most of my time now is spent in reading the most dreadful stuff for my work – Anglo-Saxon, the language of my ancestors a thousand years ago – you have no idea how extremely difficult it is and most of it fearfully dull … The abominable clock on the mantlepiece has ticked away into Wednesday morning and it was Tuesday night when I started. One day older!
How very unpleasant. I do most desperately want to be always young. The only advantage of age, as far as I can see, is that one’s ideas begin to settle down: one’s mind becomes tidy instead of one great changing muddle as it is when one is young. But I don’t think it makes it worth while being old.16 I do most desperately want to be always young. Aldous had suffered so much already. His friends were starting to go off to war. The old, who had manufactured this war, were not estimable. (Though his first reactions to the war were conventionally patriotic.17) He would one day write a book about a man who wanted to be always young and who, like Swift’s Struldbugs in Gulliver’s Travels, discovered what a horror being kept perpetually alive can be. But he was young and ardent, and something of the candour that his friends cherished in him – the obverse of what an outsider might see as bumptious arrogance – is visible in this letter (one of the several hundred that have never been published before). Cherwell was far preferable to an empty Balliol, but as he pointed out to Jelly, ‘One has so few friends left to one these days, when everyone has gone off to the wars, that those who are left, are still more precious than they were before.’18 To Jelly, he unbuttoned himself more than in his brightly facetious letters to his father or to Julian (letters to whom always seemed designed, just a little, to impress the elder brother). He was clearly lonely, and confessed, ‘One always feels so queer in the middle of the night, dreadfully melancholy, and fierce, and sentimental, and bored.’
Literature, like friendship, was one of the necessary consolations and he was discovering Baudelaire: ‘Wonderful stuff French poetry – I once tried to write some myself, without much success, as you might imagine.’ But he was conscious of his isolation and wanted to do something for the war effort, perhaps working in some kind of non-combative capacity. But the same cause – his defective eyesight – seemed at first to rule out both. Gervas thought that 1914 was a worse blow in many ways than having to leave Eton in consequence of his blindness because the friendships from which he was now cut off were profounder ones than those he had made with his schoolboy
chums. ‘I have always felt that this second isolation must have been an even greater blow to Aldous than the first,’19 he wrote. ‘It was a forlorn and deserted Balliol, haunted by the ghosts of his friends, to which Aldous went back that October.’ The two young men had been very close and now, in khaki, Gervas – Huxley Major to Huxley Minor – was not to see his cousin until the end of the war, except for a chance meeting at Paddington Station that Christmas (and a brief glimpse while on sick leave in June 1915 which seems to have slipped Gervas’s memory). Gervas was on his way to Grimsby to join his regiment bound for Flanders. They did some Christmas shopping, then Aldous saw him off at King’s Cross. ‘I well remember how reassuring was his familiar presence in those hours of uncertain expectation, and how deeply comforting it was to know that, whatever the Fates might have in store, his friendship would always be with me.’
By the start of 1915, Aldous was very well settled in to life at Cherwell, in his large room next to the schoolroom where he played the piano and read continuously. He shared French conversation sessions with the Haldanes and a French speaker, Yvette Chapelain, who had been stranded in Oxford since before the war. Aldous was now reading mediaeval writers like Lydgate and Occleve whom he found ‘terrible people’20. His historical imagination was only really kindled by the seventeenth century and after – though he adored Chaucer. He had become secretary of Walter Raleigh’s essay society but the essays were read mostly to American undergraduates for most of his fellows, including Gervas and Jack Haldane, had gone off to what Huxley gloomily predicted would be ‘a Thirty Years War’. It seemed that he and ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, the don, were ‘the only two possible people left alive in Oxford’. He sent his poem on Glastonbury to Julian for his inspection, describing it as ‘an experiment in realism’.21 He added that his motto was now: ‘Realism, in art and letters, in everything, except life.’ Mediaeval miracle plays, Hardy’s ‘turgid’ The Dynasts, had to be got through, not to mention ‘the quiet life of Anglo-Saxon lectures amid a crowd of painful young women’. There is a bumptious, undergraduate tone in these letters from Oxford and plenty of self-confident, callow judgements: ‘with the exception of Shakespeare’s best – all Elizabethan tragedy is melodrama’.22 But there were also
more thoughtful observations where the essential Huxley decency came through. He told Leonard Huxley in April that: ‘This hustling of aliens is rather damnable – mob-law.’23 He felt the Government was taking ‘repressive action’ against foreigners simply to appease popular opinion: ‘soon we shall be reduced to writing Hymns of Hate’. Huxley hated English xenophobia but at such a moment it was clearly flourishing. He turned to French poetry, especially ‘the modern men’ like Mallarmé ‘who never says what he means, whose syntax is extremely peculiar and who prints his works without any punctuation except full-stops’.24 A writer who always said what he meant and who had little passion for literary experimenters in his own tongue, Huxley nonetheless remained a lifelong admirer of Mallarmé. He also read Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu when it first started to appear in 1913. But literary discovery could not obscure the reality of war. Kitchener’s armies were on the move ‘so that I shall have a lot more friends out at the front – which I don’t like – friends matter more than anything, when one is young,’25 he told Jelly.
Throughout the hot summer of 1915, and from holiday at Connel Ferry, Argyll in Scotland, Aldous continued to write to Jelly. From a ‘hot and stuffy’ Oxford in June, and in his best undergraduate manner, he told her: ‘When all my friends are dead I shall become a hermit, and live in a cave – and perhaps you will come occasionally and feed me with buns thro’ the bars of my gate. It would be a charming life!’26 He was walking with a limp just now, having short-sightedly walked into a bowl of nitric acid left outside the laboratory by one of the assistants of Professor Haldane (from whom Aldous was deriving much scientific knowledge). He left Oxford planning to return in September to read for the Stanhope Prize on the theme of ‘The Development of Satire from Restoration to Revolution’. He told his father that the raw material was in Bodley – ‘a huge corpus of ribald anonymity’.27 There is once again a relaxed, flippant tone in these letters to his Edwardian pater which suggests that the relationship may not have been as difficult as some, like Gervas, insisted. He enjoyed the holiday at Connel Ferry. The beauty of the Scottish landscape and its calm, he told Jelly, ‘all helps to mellow the thought, that one’s friends are being killed, into a quiet kind of resigned sadness’.28
Huxley did not leave it there, however, and began to display to Jelly a new dimension of his mind. For the first time, we see the beginnings of that other Huxley, the unitive intelligence that would seek the kinds of large, universal truth he eventually explored in The Perennial Philosophy (1946):
One does feel tremendously, when one is in this beautiful country, that one is part of a larger soul, which embraces everything … It looks as though the amount of good and evil were about the same in the world. I think the good will probably win in the end – though not necessarily, unless the most persistent and tremendous efforts are made … But I’m not a pessimist, and I think it will be all right. I think we shall ultimately work all the disorder into a single principle, which will be an Absolute – but which at present exists only potentially and at the nature of which we can only very dimly guess.29 Those who would chide Huxley, after the mid-1930s, for allowing the cynical satirist to give place to the idealist and the intellectual and moral seeker, ignore the fact that his mind was always disposed in a certain fashion, seeking organic unity, and trying to discover essential meanings in the world of surface phenomena. To Jelly, he quickly declared: ‘This is rather rambling!’ but it was a pointer. He closed the letter with a sonnet in French which he had just written, entitled ‘Sentimalité d’un Soir d’Été’. Back in London, a month later, he had recovered his flippancy in time for his twenty-first birthday and was able to inform Jelly: ‘Well, I’m twenty-one today – grown up – what a good opportunity to be sentimental about the days of my youth!’30
Taking stock of his youth, he might reflect that he had written a few stories, a few poems in English and French and a few translations. His poetry was clearly influenced by the French symbolists he was reading with rapture at the time – Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Baudelaire – and though these poems might strike us now as mannered and clotted with literary effects, they were helping to make his name in
Oxford. The first poem to be published was ‘Home-Sickness – From the Town’ in the annual Oxford Poetry for 1915.31 Its general style and mood can be caught in the opening lines: ‘Frou-Frouery and faint patchouli smells,/And debile virgins talking Keats.’ Huxley’s comment to Julian on Laforgue – ‘he is interesting and amusing and intensely young, which is all that matters’32 – gives some insight into his poetics at this time. But he also claimed to be writing ‘an immense didactic poem’ – a rather un-Laforgueian project. He described, in addition, ‘a little poem on the habits of the MOLE’ (which would be published in the first issue of The Palatine Review in February 1916) and regretted that his Newdigate poem had been dismissed by the Oxford judges – who in fact decided that year not to award the prize to anyone. The Oxford Professor of Poetry, Sir Herbert Warren, observed that ‘there was one Byronic production; amused us very much, but we did not know whether it was meant to be serious’. Huxley protested to Julian, mockingly: ‘as if it wasn’t manifest that the thing was positively EARNEST!’ His terms of praise for John Donne were characteristic: ‘intense intellectuality, intense passion, concealed and restrained, intense sadness’.33 Fulke-Greville also possessed ‘intense intellectuality’ – a Huxley desideratum – and it was he who would later provide the epigraph to Point Counter Point. Already, Huxley the lover of clarity and light was aware that it was that very intellectuality that could render a poet like Fulke-Greville ‘obscure’.
In October 1915, Huxley returned to Oxford for his final year. Naomi had scarlet fever so Cherwell was out of the question. Aldous moved back into Balliol, an experience that was deeply moving as he began to contemplate the casualty lists of his former friends. He tried to explain his feelings to Jelly:
This war impresses on me more than ever the fact that friendship, love, whatever you like to call it is the only reality. When one is young and one’s mind is in a perpetual state of change and chaos it seems to remain as the one stable and reliable thing. It simply is truth in the highest form we can attain to. You never knew my mother – I wish you had because she was a very
wonderful woman: Trev was most like her. I have just been reading what she wrote to me just before she died. The last words of her letter were ‘Don’t be too critical of other people and “love much”’. – and I have come to see more and more how wise that advice was. It’s a warning against a rather conceited and selfish fault of my own and it’s a whole philosophy of life.34 Once again, unbuttoning himself to someone close to him, Huxley reveals a tenderness and a deep moral sense that run counter to the image of him prevalent in the twenties as a ruthless, amoral writer concerned only to shock. A few weeks after writing these words, he was complaining about the suppression of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow – ‘It is always the serious books that get sat on’.35 Such comments are an index of his refusal to compromise on intellectual values, to trim his sails for the benefit of those whose morality was worn on the sleeve.
Within weeks of taking up residence at Balliol, Huxley was to receive an invitation into a world where such attitudes would receive automatic acceptance. An entry in the visitor’s book at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire on 29 November 1915 shows the name of Huxley alongside Philip Heseltine and others. It was his first visit, and the beginning of a new and wider circle of acquaintance that included novelists, poets, painters, philosophers who had made or were in the process of making their mark in the world. For a young man who was now an aspiring writer – albeit with no clear view about whether he wished to be a poet or a novelist but certain only of his ambition – this was a peculiarly exciting milieu. He seized the opportunities it offered with both hands.
2
HRC, Letter to Jelly D’Aranyi, undated
4
James Lansdale Hodson, No Phantoms Here (1932), p257
6
Gervas Huxley, Both Hands, pp68–9
8
Reading, Letter from R. Palme Dutt to Sybille Bedford, 28 May 1968
11
See Julian Huxley, Memories 1, p62
12
Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood (1973), p44
13
HRC, Letter from AH to Jelly D’Aranyi undated but probably September 1914
14
HRC. Letter to Jelly from Cherwell, undated but probably October 1914
16
HRC, Letter to Jelly, written from Cherwell, undated but probably October 1914
17
See, for example, L.62: ‘What news today! It’s splendid.’
25
HRC, Letter to Jelly D’Aranyi from Balliol undated but probably April 1915 (see L.69)
26
HRC, Letter to Jelly D’Aranyi from Cherwell 5 June 1915
31
Never reprinted by Huxley it is quoted in full in SB1.55–6