X

Italy

For the first few months of 1921, Huxley moved in with his old friends Tommy Earp and Russell Green, who had a flat at 21 Regent Square, Bloomsbury. Another member of this flat share was the South African writer, Roy Campbell, who recalled the experience in his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse (1952). Campbell recorded that ‘the great Mahatma of all misery, Aldous Huxley’ was installed in the flat when he arrived. He poured scorn on his lack of rugged, outdoor machismo, this being Campbell’s pronounced trademark: ‘As a practical zoologist and botanist … I felt ill at ease with this pedant who leeringly gloated over his knowledge of how crayfish copulated (through their third pair of legs) but could never have caught or cooked one, let alone broken in a horse, thrown and branded a steer, flensed a whale, or slaughtered, cut, cured, and cooked anything at all.’¹ It is indeed hard to conceive of Huxley breaking in a wild horse, let alone flensing a whale, but few opportunities would have presented themselves, anyway, in London WC1. For Campbell: ‘Huxley was always as lost and bewildered by the very scientific civilization of which he is one of the main prophets, as a wild African giraffe would be if it were suddenly to be dumped in the middle of Piccadilly or Broadway.’ Campbell also remembered that Green and Huxley were frequently disturbed at their typewriters by the sound of dancing lessons being given at the flat upstairs. This could only have reinforced Huxley in his determination to find a proper ambient for writing.

He was now engaged in polishing up the 1200 word pieces he had been writing weekly for the Athenaeum over the past nine or ten months, under the pseudonym ‘Autolycus,’ in the magazine’s ‘Marginalia’ column. He wrote to Frank Swinnerton at Chatto, the man who had ‘discovered’ Huxley, to ask whether the firm would be interested in publishing a collection in the spring: ‘They are literary & moderately erudite, but not pedantic, as I don’t know enough to do the professor stunt with confidence!’² These were the essays that would eventually form the collection On the Margin (1923). To Mencken, in March just before he went to Italy, he complained that he had been doing no proper writing other than the ‘quotidian journalism’ ³ – reviews, literary articles and ‘the most fantastic hackwork (happily well paid) for an American fungoid growth which has established itself here recently, called House and Garden’. This work was now coming to an end, mercifully, and he was engaged ‘in burning my boats preparatory to starting in a week’s time for Italy, where money looks four times as plentiful as it does here, and where … it is still possible to live fairly cheaply. There I shall spend the next few months writing to amuse myself and seeing if I can make the process pay. If so, good; if not, then back here to journalism.’ Huxley mentioned Lawrence to Mencken, mocking both his alleged psychoanalysis and its effects on his writing, and the recent Women in Love with its cruel representation of ‘an old friend of mine’ Ottoline Morrell. In a few months time, Huxley would be doing the same to that old friend, although he always protested his innocence. ‘What an odd thing it is in a man who has done such exceedingly good things,’ he said of Lawrence’s book. Clearly Huxley’s early enthusiasm for Lawrence had cooled, but as the decade wore on it would be rekindled with the same intensity as before. Trying hard to parody his master, Huxley told Mencken: ‘Mr Clutton Brock is now known to write his sermon-leaders in the Times Literary Supplement by means of automatic writing; he sits still and his pen disgorges the excrements of his brain at the rate of eighteen hundred words an hour. Result: vast salary for Brock and ever increasing popularity and esteem.’ Huxley was worn out by his current style of life and had told Mary Hutchinson: ‘I find myself forced to adopt a misanthropical attitude out of sheer self-defence – because I simply can’t afford to spend time seeing people’. Unlike these fluent hack-writers, ‘it takes me 7 days out of the 7 to do what I have to do’.⁴ Nonetheless, he made a lunchtime assignation with her as ‘a short holiday’ from this work. By the end of March he was so exhausted by overwork and the stress of trying to write in the intervals of paid work that he was seriously ill – so much so, in fact, that the London Life Association refused to insure him in his present condition. ‘It is absurd and rather humiliating to be a Bad Life,’ he told his father.⁵

At the end of March, however, he finally left for Italy. He rejoined Maria and Matthew at the Villa Minucci in the Via di Santa Margherita a Montici in Florence. Costanza’s parents, the Fasolas, lived in the same street, at number 15, in a villa called Castel Montici – still standing today though divided into separate dwellings and with a fine view of the city below, San Miniato on its hill, and the tip of the Duomo glimpsed through a frame of olive trees – ‘a sort of Oxford from Boar’s Hill effect’⁶ as Huxley put it rather unusually to his father (having stood in both places I can just about see his point). The Huxleys would later live at the Castel Montici themselves between 1923 and 1925. For now, they had three rooms at number 4 furnished ‘somewhat hideously’ and at a rent of 150 lire a month. Post war inflation in Italy was high but the Huxleys felt they could live on up to 2000 lire a month. Bread was rationed and there was no electricity at number 4 so they were dependent on oil lamps and candles. It was nonetheless a pleasant spot, just a few metres outside the city boundary, and with a tram which ran from the bottom of the hill to the centre of the city in twenty minutes. Huxley did nothing at first but eat and sleep which did him a lot of good. In addition to all the journalism and professional theatre-going, he had translated Remy de Gourmont’s novel, A Virgin Heart, which was now issued by a New York publisher. It is small wonder that he felt tired. But Florence was not to prove his resting place. Cities always exhausted him, and it was getting very hot, with a long spell of scirocco. The English colony there – ‘a sort of decayed provincial intelligentsia’⁷ – was proving irksome and the art of Florence, to Huxley’s rather exiguous taste, was ‘too tre- and quattrocento. There is too much Gothic in the architecture and too much primitive art in the galleries.’ The result was a decision to go to Forte dei Marmi, no doubt at the suggestion of the Fasolas. He and Maria and Matthew settled there for the whole summer from May to September 1921. Just before leaving Florence he wrote to his new American agent, J. B. Pinker, hoping that the latter would help to place material in the USA. He gave Pinker a list of English editors ‘with whom I am on friendly terms’,⁸ a list which included his father on the Cornhill, J. C. Squire on the Mercury, and Austin Harrison. In America he had already been published by Century and The Smart Set.

Forte – a place already familiar to Maria – is about twenty miles north of Pisa on the Tuscan coast, below Viareggio, ‘the coast where Shelley was washed up, under the mountains of Carrara, where the marble comes from. It was an incredibly beautiful place then.’⁹ Today it is a busy resort, its flat, sandy beach – which Lawrence said reminded him of Skegness – crowded in summer with bathers and decked with bright beach huts. Though less developed when Huxley arrived at the end of May, 1921, contemporary photographs show plentiful families on the beach, sheltering under white canvas sun-umbrellas. The little jetty, now purely used for pleasure purposes, was used then to load blocks of marble, brought down on a railway line, to waiting ships. Huxley was fascinated by the ‘enormous white oxen with long horns and melancholy black eyes,’¹⁰ which were used to drag the slabs of marble. It was here that Huxley wrote that very English novel, Crome Yellow, in the summer months, from June to August. He wrote to Frank Swinnerton at Chatto: ‘This is a good place: Mediterranean bathing at one’s front door & large mountains entirely constructed of Carrara marble at one’s back. The natives support themselves by carving angels for tombstones, which they then export by the thousands to the U.S.A.’¹¹ For those three months, he established a very regular routine – apart from the setback of an attack of ophthalmia in the middle of July – which he described for the benefit of his father:

The day’s programme here is simple and unvarying. Work in the morning till twelve or half past, then a bathe, then lunch, then a rest till four; then tea and a little more work, till about half past five or six, when one goes out for a walk till dinner time; then reading or work till bed … One has all one’s meals out of doors, wears a shirt, flannel trousers and a pair of sandals and remains a long time in the water without getting cold.¹²

In short, it would be ‘perfect if we can solve the servant problem’.

Throughout the summer, at 29 Viale Morin, a shady street set back from the beach, opposite the Villa Fasola, Huxley worked for five or six hours a day on what he was now describing as ‘my Peacockian novel’ – inspired by the short, witty ‘novel of ideas’ of Thomas Love Peacock (1785—1866), whose sparkling prose and light satiric touch were the perfect model for the young Huxley. Good progress was being made by the middle of July when he wrote to Swinnerton in London proposing a title, Crome Yellow, ‘pleasingly meaningless except in so far as the Peacockian house [Peacock’s novels were invariably set in country houses where the characters have been assembled in order to be put through their conversational paces] in which the scene is laid is called Crome … The book, as I hope you realise, will be fairly short: for the Peacockian novel is not a form that can go to great lengths. About 50,000 words, I think it will work out. I can see a smallish book of rather pleasant form – with perhaps a crome yellow binding to carry out the hint of the title [a suggestion that was taken up by Chatto].’¹³ On 28 July, barely two months after starting, Huxley mailed off the first 30,000 words with the promise that another 20,000 would follow in ten days or a fortnight. His typewriter, ‘the sole stay and comfort of my life’,¹⁴ had broken down at the revision stage – the first draft seems to have taken about eight weeks – and Huxley was worried that the rough script with handwritten additions would be illegible.

By the end of August the book was off his hands and the reward was a trip to Rome where he met Ottoline and Philip Morrell. Ottoline claimed that they had come there because Maria wanted to get work as a movie star (the careers of ballerina and novelist having been tried and abandoned in the past).¹⁵ Huxley fell in love with Rome, telling Mencken that it was ‘certainly the place where I shall come to spend my old age and if possible, large portions of the rest of my existence. Architecture, sculpture and painting give me, I find, as much pleasure as music.’¹⁶ To Mencken he confessed that he had written Crome because ‘I lack the courage and the patience to sit down and turn out eighty thousand words of Realismus. Life seems too short for that.’ He inquired whether Mencken knew of any editor in the USA ‘sufficiently ramollite [soft-witted] to offer me large sums for writing articles – word pictures I believe they call them – about Italy and art and all that sort of thing?’ He explained that he would soon have to return to England to deal with the lease of the Hampstead flat and might have to stay: ‘It depends whether I can lay hands on any cash without having to work for it journalising.’ He made the same point to his father: ‘The though of replunging into journalism appals me; I had been living for 2 years in a perpetual state of fatigue and I don’t want to go back to it if I can help it.’¹⁷ He estimated that he could live in Italy on £300 as opposed to £750 or £800 a year in England, and that the money would come from existing royalties, another £100 for Crome, short stories, and sub-letting the Hampstead flat. The only drawback to Italy seemed to be the political situation – they had just witnessed a band of seven hundred Tuscan fascists demonstrating against the Left in the course of which several people had been killed – ‘a horrible and extraordinary episode’. It would be the rise of Fascism that would eventually drive the Huxleys from Italy at the end of the decade.

After the ecstasy of seeing Rome (undiminished by having had his pocket picked), Huxley returned to Forte with the idea of doing ‘a gigantic Peacock’¹⁸ suggested by the experience of the Sitwells’ enormous castle at Montegufoni (‘Here one has the essential Peacockian datum – a houseful of oddities.’). It is rather a pity that this idea wasn’t pursued. ‘I am giving Realismus a little holiday:’ he told Julian. ‘These descriptions of middle class homes are really too unspeakably boring. One must try and be readable.’ One piece of very palpable realismus caught his eye in the newspapers, the case of Harold Greenwood, who had been acquitted at Carmarthen of poisoning his wife. This was the inspiration of a short story that had just appeared, thanks to Pinker, in The English Review, with the title, ‘The Gioconda Smile’. What Huxley really wanted, however, was the chance to live a little, to travel and to explore, instead of this relentless hand-to-mouth existence of the writer striving to establish himself and keep afloat. The child had come too soon, so he had to go on earning, but as he explained to Julian: ‘What I should like now more than anything is a year or two of quiet devoted simply to seeing places and things and people: to living, in fact. When one hasn’t much vitality or physical energy, it is almost impossible to live and work at the same time. At least, I find it so. Life and work are always, for me, alternatives. Circumstances demand that I should work almost continuously, and I can’t squeeze in enough living.’ The next two years, however, would offer no respite of this kind. He was offered £750 a year by Condé Nast which was enough to make him return to London. As he explained to his father: ‘The disadvantages of England are too much work and too little superfluous time or energy. The drawbacks of Italy are the absence of libraries and the lack of informed and intelligent society. ’¹⁹ The job with Condé Nast would last until May 1923 and there was a flat at 155 Westbourne Terrace in Paddington where they would stay until the end of 1922. The wanderer’s life was being put on hold.

The Huxleys were back in London for the publication of Crome Yellow in November 1921. It was a striking debut and confirmed the twenty-seven-year-old’s commanding position in the world of contemporary literary reputations. Several aspects of the book are worth noting. Scogan’s description of the typical young man’s novel, shows Huxley’s awareness both of his own position and of the literary milieu he was entering – not without some misgivings and uncertainties: ‘Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe on his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.’ Scogan’s question: ‘Why will you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists?’ was one that Huxley would have been asking himself. His whole career was an attempt to frustrate the traditional expectations of the English novel, but the only solution he had come up with to date was to be clever and witty. There are hints of future directions, of Brave New World, for example, in Scogan’s envisioning of The Rational State, and there is evidence that Huxley was not without self-knowledge. Jenny’s notebook, which Denis accidentally discovers, contains a description that Huxley might have chosen to apply to himself: ‘He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.’ The novels that would come throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, would contain much merciless vivisection of the life and the classes that Huxley knew.

The reviews of Crome Yellow immediately acknowledged its vivacity – it is certainly the brightest and wittiest of Huxley’s books – and the fact that, as the anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer put it, ‘Mr Huxley’s personages are drawn with an extreme verve of crispness’.²⁰ There were some reservations about its bookishness, and consequent derivativeness (‘he almost invites us to believe that the proper study of mankind is books’) but the view of Lady Williams-Ellis in The Spectator (who described it cleverly as ‘a Cubist Peacock’), that it was ‘delightful’, was the prevailing view. The Nation in New York felt that Huxley ‘lives in a different world from that of D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce’ – in other words that he was working inside a tradition rather than trying to revolutionise it. In The Dial, Raymond Mortimer worried that this ‘desperately clever’ book was too concerned to be iconoclastic and ‘amusing’ to be able to find time to be serious. He also made a far more pertinent criticism that would persist throughout Huxley’s novel-writing career: ‘I doubt if he is a story-writer at all. He does not care to concentrate, to dig.’²¹ F. Scott Fitzgerald said simply: ‘I find Huxley, after Beerbohm, the wittiest man now writing in English.’²²

But those who knew Huxley and his milieu more closely had begun to notice another aspect of the book, its rather too uncomfortable drawing of portraits from life. Quite apart from the bicycling young man of letters ‘enamoured with the beauty of words’ encountered in its opening pages, who could not be anything other than a wry self portrait, wasn’t Jenny rather like Dorothy Brett? Ivor Lombard like Evan Morgan? Mary Bracegirdle like Dorothy Carrington? Gombauld like Mark Gertler? Scogan like Bertrand Russell (with shades of Mencken or Norman Douglas)? And, most worrying of all, was not Priscilla Wimbush, who presided over Crome, rather too obviously like Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington (an identification in no way lessened by the lack of architectural likeness to Garsington)? ‘When I read in it the description of life at Garsington, all distorted, caricatured and mocked at, I was horrified,’ Ottoline declared. ‘Here were scenes from the farm and the sayings of the farm labourers, which in real life were so witty and wise, made flat and artificial and quite denuded of their salty wisdom. Then there were pages and pages taken from a book of sermons by our rector, all mocked at and held up to derision. Long conversations which Aldous had had with Mark Gertler and Bertie Russell were here, but these were transposed and treated with contempt and ridicule, and portraits were put in sadly and cruelly distorted. Poor Asquith was depicted as a ci-devant Prime Minister, an old man feebly toddling across the lawn after any pretty girl. I was filled with dismay.’²³ She felt that Huxley had taken advantage of all the opportunities she had provided him with to meet these people ‘and that not only had he himself behaved dishonourably but that he had involved me in his own dishonour’. She wrote immediately to tell him so. He produced a long and pained reply, claiming to be dumbfounded that anyone could ‘suppose this little marionette performance of mine was the picture of a real milieu … I ought to have laid the scene in China – nobody could have any doubt then that it was a marionette show … A caricature of myself in extreme youth is the only approach to a real person; the others are puppets.’²⁴ He claimed that he had neither the wish to represent real people, nor the capacity to do so, ‘for I am not a realist, and don’t take much interest in the problem of portraying real living people … the personages are just voices … They are puppets, devoid of all emotions, devoid indeed of most of the attributes of living humanity … it is absurd – and at the same time distressing and painful to a degree – that a long-cherished friendship should run the risk of being broken because the scene for a comedy of puppets [and now be begins to concede a little] has been laid in surroundings partly recognizable as real … This incident is to me another proof of something I said in the book: we are all parallel straight lines destined to meet only at infinity. Real understanding is an impossibility.’ Ottoline found the answer ‘strangely disingenuous’ – which it almost certainly was – and a breach opened up between them that was not healed for many years. She was still smarting from it the following summer when Virginia Woolf, who was staying at Garsington, went into ‘her little green book room with the gilt pillars stuffed with pretty yellow books’ to console Ottoline who claimed to be ‘now indifferent to disillusionment’, quoting from Aldous’s letter and its expressed regret that ‘mere marionettes’ should have destroyed their friendship. ‘But mere marionettes have destroyed it,’ Woolf observed.²⁵

Huxley remained on good terms with the other marionettes and, after his return from Italy, quickly re-inserted himself into London good society, as is instanced by an episode which took place just before Christmas 1921. Huxley, in a group which consisted of Lord Berners, the three Sitwells, William Walton, Augustine Rivers, and Alan Porter, the literary editor of The Spectator, and which called itself the representatives of ‘The Poets of England’, presented the soprano Luisa Tetrazzini with a chaplet of bay leaves at the Savoy. The Sitwells, with their gift for publicity, had ensured that press photographers and journalists were present.²⁶ Virginia Woolf’s diaries show that he was dining around this time with Clive Bell, Mary Hutchinson, Maynard Keynes and herself. Huxley was certainly not being shunned as a result of his wicked satire.

1

Roy Campbell, Light on A Dark Horse (1952) p184ff.

2

Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 13 January 1921

3

NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 16 March 1921

4

HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 31 January 1921

5

L.194

6

L.194

7

L.197

8

HRC, Letter to J.B. Pinker, 16 May 1921

9

Paris Review interview, 1961, in Writers at Work, 2nd Series. (ed George Plimpton) (1963)

10

L.196

11

Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 20 June 1921

12

L.197

13

Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 9 July 1921

14

Reading, Letter to Frank Swinnerton, 28 July 1921

15

Ottoline at Garsington, p214

16

NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 8 September 1921

17

L.200

18

L.202

19

L.204

20

Times Literary Supplement, 10 November 1921. Watt, p58

21

Raymond Mortimer, The Dial, June 1922. Watt pp65–8. All other reviews quoted here in Watt, pp58–74

22

F Scott Fitzgerald, St. Paul Daily News, 26 February 1922. Watt, p72

23

Ottoline at Garsington, p215

24

HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 December 1921. An edited version of this letter is in Ottoline at Garsington, p216

25

The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2, p180, 17 July 1922

26

See Mark Amory, Lord Berners, the last eccentric (1998), p74