VII

Whizzing

After Maria had gone with her family to Florence in October, Aldous continued at Garsington, ‘hewing wood, like Caliban’,¹ for the remainder of 1916. During the autumn, he sent regular bulletins to Ottoline who was in Harrogate for her health. These contained reports on his reading (Conrad’s Chance, and War and Peace, which, he thought, ought to be ‘much longer, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so that one could go on reading it for a little every day the whole of one’s life’²) and laments for the fact that all his friends were getting married. ‘For the last three days,’ he protested in October, ‘special couriers seem to have arrived almost hourly to announce to me the engagement of almost every friend I ever had, of all the women I ever fell in love with … Everything, however, is a little made up for by the dazzling beauty of my new breeches. I feel like the young Rostov, when he arrived in Moscow wearing riding-breeches of a brilliant blue.’ Try as he might, however, to appear flippant and amused, Huxley’s position was becoming untenable. His literary ambition and his desire to earn enough to be able to marry Maria were incompatible with a life of chopping wood and reading Russian novels. He was, it is true, making some effort with his own writing, planning a historical novel with a seventeenth century setting, but he was finding the execution difficult. ‘I have not sufficient skill to conceive a number of characters and their relations at a single birth,’ he confessed. Psychology was equally difficult for the aspiring novelist: ‘the more I try to understand psychology the more mysterious does it become to me … particularly women, who seem to me … most of them … too utterly inexplicable.’

All this amused Ottoline, as did the poems he sent her, which expressed similar hesitations and bafflements before the presence of the opposite sex. She told Aldous, in another of those zoological similes his friends loved to deploy, that he was ‘like a giraffe looking down on us poor human beings and enjoying the spectacle of our little futile lives’.³ In search of work, Huxley went to Oxford to see Professor Walter Raleigh, Robert Nicholl Smith, and his old tutor, R.J.E. Tiddy – ‘the three most important nobs in the English School’⁴ – but they offered little comfort. Raleigh told him that a university job was unlikely because of wartime economies, and because the influx of young women into the English School made older men seem more proper as tutors. Raleigh recommended reviewing instead. ‘My father is sufficiently acquainted with the immortal Strachey to exercise a little nepotistic pressure in that direction,’ Huxley told Ottoline. He had scant respect, however, for the trade of book reviewer: ‘The art of reviewing appears to consist in variations of the formula, “This book is on the one hand good and on the other and at the same time bad.”’⁵ The excursion to Oxford nonetheless had its compensations, in the shape of a meeting with Lewis Gielgud and friends at which ‘we scintillated pleasantly over two bottles of burgundy’. Huxley was doing a good deal of scintillating at this time and trips to London took him to Fitzrovia and the rather elevated Bohemianism of the Eiffel Tower Restaurant. It was here that he met for the first time Evan Morgan (Viscount Tredegar, the prototype of Ivor Lombard in Crome Yellow), Lady Constance Stuart Richardson, Iris Tree, Nancy Cunard, and, in Ottoline’s words, ‘the tall, charming, unselfish dissolute Marie Beerbohm, of whom he was really very fond’.⁶ Huxley was greatly attracted to such female free spirits. Frances Petersen, an Oxford friend, he once described – in significant terms – as ‘a clever and amusing creature, whose greatest gift is an amazing light-hearted irresponsibility, which entirely cuts her free from the trammels of quotidian life’.⁷ It was to Frances Petersen that he confessed at the start of 1917: ‘I am becoming a third class tragic-comedian these days.’⁸ Dorothy Carrington was another attraction. She made ‘a very good drawing of Jonah seated on the whale’s kidney’ for a Christmas card for 1917, which reproduced Huxley’s poem, ‘Jonah’. Fifty copies of the poem were printed, but he lacked the funds to have Carrington’s drawing included.⁹

Huxley, therefore, began 1917 facing the choices he had long ago identified as the inescapable ones: hack reviewing or schoolmastering. The war ensured that he could briefly defer the reckoning, for a clerical job came up at the Air Board, starting in April. Maria, meanwhile, was in Florence. She told Ottoline in February: ‘I wish you could pack up Aldous for this part of the world – because there would be somebody to be with and enjoy everything with – I care for A so much … Think what fun it would be if instead of going to America that silly boy invented a reason to come here – it is wonderful and he would love me.’¹⁰ Huxley – no doubt influenced by the precedent of Julian – was toying with the idea of work in America in the wake of his disappointing meeting with the Oxford nobs. An American school appears to have offered him a job and he made some efforts to get the necessary visa, but in the end it fell through. Aldous and Maria’s love letters to each other – preserved in a tin trunk that survived all their travels together – were destroyed in the fire that swept Huxley’s Hollywood home in 1961. There must have been many of these letters in this period of separation in the years 1917 and 1918.

Maria left Florence in June for the Tuscan coast at Forte dei Marmi (a location that will be described in more detail later) with Costanza da Fasola, whose Florentine family owned a villa at Forte. Costanza was twenty-three and engaged to be married to Luigino Franchetti, ‘who does not love her … she knows she will be unhappy … What can I tell her … It is like someone running to an abyss he sees but runs to it all the same.’¹¹ Maria also had time to reflect on the desirability or otherwise of her own marriage. Writing to Ottoline from Forte, in a letter declaring her love for the older woman, Maria reported in detail on her summer idyll with the beautiful Costanza, and also managed – in this amatory whirl – to talk about Aldous too. Madame Nys had tried to block the trip to Forte but ‘now they are used to it at home and we live as if no-one but us two exists’.¹² The two young women, with the villa to themselves, went out in a sailing-boat and enjoyed swimming together, pouring scorn on the restrictive bathing-caps worn by the other swimmers. ‘In the daytime when one gets far enough out we bathe without our clothes – it is too lovely.’ Maria enclosed two snapshots of herself and Costanza posing naked on the top of the stone wall of the villa grounds. Poor Aldous, meanwhile, was commuting to a dreary clerical job in the Strand from his father’s house at 16 Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead, made wretched at the fewness of Maria’s letters to him from Italy. ‘I have been hoping each day that there’d be a letter from Maria – but nothing. It makes me so absurdly miserable,’ he complained to Ottoline.¹³ Maria responded – in the same letter that enclosed the picture of the two water nymphs – that the last letter she had received from Aldous was ‘not at all nice, grumpy and reproachfull [sic]. He is such a queer creature – But he has been sending me wonderful poems – Only he is so – I don’t know what to say – perhaps merely tired.’ Those ‘wonderful poems’ would include the contents of the second volume he was preparing for Blackwell the following summer, The Defeat of Youth (1918). The title sequence of twenty-two sonnets has a troubled youthful persona asking: ‘or is she pedestalled above the touch/Of his desire …?’, ‘And ever more she haunts him, early and late,/As pitilessly as an old remorse’, ‘An island-point, measureless gulfs apart/From other lives, from the old happiness’. In a poem, ‘Winter Dream’ the poet writes: ‘I am all alone, dreaming she would come and kiss me.’ These youthful fears may have been justified – if a slightly coquettish letter to Ottoline is taken at face value. It appears to disclose that Maria had received a letter from another male admirer who was working as a typist in the Board of Agriculture. She was thrilled at the sensation of receiving it. ‘I wonder what Aldous thinks? Because he never seems to me very much to understand. I write long letters to him of course, friendly letters. I suppose he shows them to you – I shall love it when he comes to Italy but he must be a friend. I have not behaved badly to him? Aldous is one of those people who cannot be roused – anyway by me – I must not become vain.’¹⁴ All this worried Ottoline, who appeared to warn Maria about playing with Aldous’s affections, provoking immediate remorse and a promise to be ‘more serious … But I am certain about Aldous – I care for him very much – more now – I think I always did really – only sometimes I care for no-one – and can’t bear him – Don’t let me miserable Auntie – because my feelings for him are real and strong.’¹⁵ A little later, Maria was more emphatic: ‘He really is wonderful – and so very clever. I sometimes just sit down and wonder why and how he ever managed to care for me because he really does love me. Are you not sure of it? Do say you are. After all I am so stupid and ignorant – and so young – but then I love him – and so much – I think it is being far away from people that gives me this feeling – though I always knew I was not worth people moving their little finger for me – though they did move it.’¹⁶

Aldous, however, was not wholly miserable in London, and was discovering diversions of his own. His social life was flourishing and his range of acquaintance quickly expanding. He was also writing reviews for the New Statesman and Nation, having been introduced to its literary editor J. C. Squire earlier in the year. He contributed three introductory essays to Thomas Ward’s The English Poets (1918), on John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, and Richard Middleton. None of this, however, amounted to enough to live on and, in desperation, on 31 March, he inserted an advertisement in the personal column of The Times which read: ‘YOUNG MAN, 22 (rejected), Public School and Oxford, First-class Honours, desires LITERARY, SECRETARIAL, or other Work.’ He received many offers but contrived to get himself pushed by friends towards a dreary post in the Naval Law Department of the Admiralty at £2 for a fifty-four hour week. Just in time, a slightly better post turned up at the Air Board, which he held from April to July 1917. After the ‘imbecility’ of the Dardanelles campaign, Huxley had concluded ‘it’s not pleasant to think of lives thrown away by the sheer folly of the politicians,’¹⁷ but he still felt the need to do some war work. As early as February he had worked for the Food Office on a trial basis, complaining to Ottoline: ‘Here all is sugar, sugar … sugar everywhere.’¹⁸ At last he was ready to bid farewell to Garsington. On ministry-embossed foolscap (evidently he was not overworked), he drew up a most eloquent letter of thanks to the Morrells, describing his stay with them as ‘the happiest time in my life’.¹⁹ It had been a period, he went on, ‘when I have been conscious of the best and most fruitful development of myself’. He had learnt so much from both of them, he said, ‘that I feel I shall never be able to compute the full amount of your giving … and I have been able to return you nothing, I fear, unless a very deep devotion counts at all in the balance against all your gifts of inspiration, almost of creation.’ In view of the later rift, when Ottoline saw not ‘deep devotion’ but cruel caricature of herself in Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, the force of feeling behind this outburst of gratitude is the more striking. In drawing up the Garsington account, he did not omit to mention that it was at the Morrells’ that he had met Maria and received from her ‘a great and violent emotional self-discovery’. That depth of feeling for Maria had been attested to on another occasion when he told Ottoline he had had no sleep one night ‘owing to the excitement of a letter from Maria’.²⁰

Departure from Garsington, and arrival at his desk at Room 549 at the Air Board in the Strand, where he dealt with ‘all subjects from timber to chemicals, electric lamps to wire ropes’,²¹ relegating most of them to ‘a sort of dustbin to wait’, marked Huxley’s final entry into the world of serious work. Although he was not yet living wholly by his pen, he would never again be allowed that aristocratic leisure he had enjoyed at Garsington. Small wonder that his expressions of gratitude were so heartfelt. During this period he was living at his father’s house in Bracknell Gardens in ‘a most pleasant room, looking on the garden’ and, in spite of the banalities of clerical work, was throwing himself with decent vigour into the social life of the capital. Katherine (‘Ka’) Cox, who had been romantically entangled with Rupert Brooke, was a theatre companion one night after which he had ‘a very pleasant little tête à tête conversation … about Things in General and the fallacies of Bloomsburyism in particular’.²² He dined with Carrington and friends, including Virginia Woolf, who afterwards reported to Vanessa Bell this first meeting with Huxley in April 1917, describing him as ‘a most singular speckly eyed young man … who owing to Ka, has got put into a government office. I warned him of what might happen to his soul; however, he spends his time translating French poetry.’²³ Huxley was immersed in Laforgue at this time and, a few weeks later, dined with T.S. Eliot at his London flat: ‘Eliot in good form all considered, and he showed me his latest verses [this was the year of Prufrock and Other Observations] – very odd indeed: he is experimenting in a new genre, philosophical obscenity rather like Laforgue … very good: some in English, some in the most astonishingly erudite French.’²⁴ After their erudite chat, the two poets moved off to Omega – the Bloomsbury artists’ studios and workshops – where Huxley spent the evening chatting to yet another young woman whom he referred to only as ‘the Flashing Beauty’. In contrast to the mournful, moping presence evoked by Maria’s letters, Huxley was in fact being sucked into an extraordinary social whirl. In June, the same month that Maria spent in Forte with Costanza, he reported breathlessly to Ottoline:

What a life! I have been ceaselessly whizzing. On Sunday I assist the Head of the Department in sending a lunatic guest to the local asylum. I lunch now frequently with Evan [Morgan] at the Savoy and with [Middleton] Murry at the A.B.C. Evan has become quite a feature in my life now: he is constantly ringing me up, coming to see me, asking me to meals, and so forth. I like him, I think, quite a lot, tho’ he is the most fearfully spoilt child. Then I whizz round to Mr Mills, then fly to Putney to stay the night with an unknown admirer of my works. Then I rush to meet yet another figure – the editrix of Wheels, Miss Edith Sitwell, who is passionately anxious for me to contribute to her horrible production. The Wheelites take themselves seriously: I never believed it possible! I sit in the Isola Bella, naively drinking in the flattery of the ridiculous Sitwell, in dart Carrington and Barbara [Hiles?], borrow half-a-crown from me and whirl out again … What a life! Then an evening with Vernon Lee – each trying to get his or her word in edgeways. Then again at Eliot’s, where I meet Mrs E for the first time and perceive that it is almost entirely a sexual nexus between Eliot and her: one sees it in the way he looks at her – she’s an incarnate provocation – like a character in Anatole France. What a queer thing it is. This whizzing is a mere mania, a sort of intoxicant, exciting and begetting oblivion. I shall be glad when it stops.²⁵

At least one of the riders on this whirling carousel, Edith Sitwell, saw things a little differently. In her autobiography, Edith Sitwell recalled that lunch at the Isola Bella in Frith Street, Soho, ‘in a dreamlike golden day in June’, and described Huxley as one of her first friends in London. They would meet again many years later in the United States and she would have been shocked by that cruel epithet, ‘ridiculous’. Recalling Huxley in his prime in London during the First World War (the brutal backdrop to all this gaiety) she pictured him as ‘extremely tall … full lips and a rather ripe, full but not at all loud voice. His hair was of the brown, living colour of the earth on garden beds. As a young man, though he was always friendly, his silences seemed to stretch for miles, extinguishing life, when they occurred, as a snuffer extinguishes a candle. On the other hand, he was (when uninterrupted) one of the most accomplished talkers I have ever known, and his monologues on every conceivable subject were astonishingly floriated variations of an amazing brilliance, and, occasionally, of a most deliberate absurdity.’²⁶ Another literary acquaintance of this period was Katherine Mansfield who re-inforced Huxley’s bulletin to Ottoline with another, telling her that he had called with ‘more news in half an hour than I have heard for months. At present he seems to be a great social success and incredible things happen to him at least every evening. He spoke of the Isola Bella as though it were the rendezvous of Love and High Adventure … I felt my mind flutter over Aldous as if he were the London Mail. There was a paragraph about simply everybody.’²⁷ He was also at a party thrown by Mary Hutchinson – who would play a significant role in his private life in the subsequent decade – but confessed to some social failures. He couldn’t get on with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. This puzzled him and he tried to explain himself to Ottoline: ‘the sense of being out of contact and not knowing how to get into it, which is most baffling. I am afraid I’m rather bad at approaching people – the result of a habit, I think, of laziness and arrogance.’²⁸

At the end of July, the job at the Air Board came to an end and with it his stay in London, the termination marked by ‘the most prodigious orgy with Evan – a birthday party of at least 25 people, all of them ultimately drunk’.²⁹ Marie Beerbohm and Nina Hamnett attracted Aldous’s attention. Evan, he told Juliette, was ‘very salutary in stirring up my contemplative lethargy’ but at the same time, after all this socialising, drinking, and party going: ‘Coming back to books again is a pleasure.’³⁰ Before he left London he had lunch with Carrington at the Isola Bella, apologising to her (as he was so often to do to his young women) for an access of ‘melodramatic melancholy’³¹ in the small hours at their friend Mills’s party. He told her that he was going to see the Headmaster of Eton about a job and was cheered by the prospect of freedom from clerking. After London he went to stay with the Haldanes at Oxford where another ‘charming and talented creature’, Yvette Chapelain, was on hand to give him Italian lessons – ‘so that I hope to learn Italian quite without tears’.³² Maria, meanwhile, sounded depressed in her letters because her father’s factory had been destroyed in the latest offensive. The family fortunes would never recover after the war.

During the summer of 1917, between jobs in Oxford, staying at the Haldanes’ and at the Petersens’, Huxley had been doing some writing. He submitted a collection of poems to John Murray but was told ‘to wait, polish and so forth. How trying one’s elders are, to be sure.’³³ He planned now to prepare ‘a largish book’ including prose poems, some of which had been accepted by Eliot for The Egoist. He also was contributing to Wheels. He mocked the Sitwells, for the benefit of Julian, calling them ‘Shufflebottom … each of them larger and whiter than the other’. Although he admitted to liking Edith he patronisingly described them as ‘dear solid people who have suddenly discovered intellect and begin to get drunk on it’.

Meanwhile, the interview with the Headmaster of Eton had been successful. Rather suddenly, he felt, Huxley found himself installed there on 18 September. The distance from London entailed a certain lessening in the frenetic pace of his social life but that could only be to the benefit of his writing. He was conscious, as young writers always are, that the clock was ticking. ‘It’s one’s duty to stay young as long as possible,’³⁴ he told Jelly d’Aranyi. The imperative to get published was growing stronger. But would the life of a schoolmaster be a help or a hindrance?

1

Ottoline at Garsington, p158. Letter from AH, October 1916

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid., P197

4

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, from Garsington, undated but probably autumn 1916

5

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably October 1916

6

Ottoline at Garsington, p200

7

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably October 1916

8

L.120

9

Stanford, Letter from AH to Jake Zeitlin, 20 June 1942

10

HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 1 February 1917

11

HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 26 January 1917

12

HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 30 June 1917

13

HRC, Letter from AH to Ottoline Morrell, 28 February 1917

14

HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 11 February 1917

15

HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 7 March 1917

16

HRC, Letter from Maria Nys to Ottoline Morrell, 10 May 1917

17

L.122

18

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated, but probably February 1917

19

HRC, Letter to Philip and Ottoline Morrell, undated from Air Board, probably April 1917

20

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 23 April 1917

21

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, no date but probably April 1917, written on Air Board notepaper

22

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 10 May 1917

23

Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, 26 April 1917, p150

24

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 2 June 1917

25

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 21 June 1917

26

Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: an autobiography (1965), p89

27

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984) edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Vol 1: 1903—1917. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 July 1917

28

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, undated but probably early summer 1917.

29

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 July 1917

30

L.128

31

HRC, note on scrap paper to Carrington undated but from 16 Bracknell Gardens

32

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 July 1917

33

L.131

34

HRC, Letter to Jelly d’Aranyi, undated but probably September 1917