XIX
Sanary
From the gracious Hotel Beau Rivage at Bandol, a week after the death of Lawrence, Maria wrote to Mary to describe the new house they had bought: ‘It is nothing that I wanted except the position – in the country & at two minutes for good bathing. For the rest it is only comic & charming. Aldous wants to call it Villa Pécuchet – so you guess more or less what it is – hideous of course and we should have to fiddle with it – but it has a large vineyard, infinite water & we can come for Easter already as the furniture – the Pécuchet furniture – goes with it.’1 The reference here is to Flaubert’s novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) whose eponymous heroes buy a house in provincial France which they proceed to improve and manage – with comic results. The owner – ‘a short fat man of 55’ from Marseille – and his wife were ‘charming’ and proud of their bourgeois comforts – a bathroom in the cellar and a W.C. on every floor, a conservatory on three sides of the house, and 4000 square metres of land containing olive trees, figs, and a large eucalyptus maimed by last winter’s frost. Maria thought that it would be a pleasant place for walks as well as bathing but presciently realised that the suburbanisation of the coast would proceed apace: ‘The coast is so over built with awful people … that I don’t know how long we really shall be safe.’ Huxley told Sydney Schiff it was ‘a ridiculous little house … but easily transformable’.2 They commissioned builders to make alterations, and an enthusiastic mason is said to have painted on the gateposts, VILLA HULEY [sic], in preparation for the return of his clients.
In those first weeks of settling in and disorder the Huxleys had a visit from Roy Campbell and his wife, who arrived with the daughter of the family with whom they were staying, Sybille von Schoenebeck, who, as Sybille Bedford, would provide a vivid description of the Huxley’s home at Sanary, and her first meeting with Huxley, in her biography.3 The Campbells brought with them ‘a rush of vitality & adventurousness’ in contrast to another couple – Cyril Connolly and his wife – who had lost no time in beating a path to the Huxleys’ door. Maria’s first impressions of the Connollys hint at the strains of this relationship – essentially to do with her fear that the boozy, good-living Connollys would intrude upon Aldous’s vital and to some degree ascetic solitude. Jean Connolly referred to Maria as ‘the watchdog’. Maria told Mary that they had squabbled with the Connollys: ‘I believe they dislike me very much but … they keep seeing us … for the sake of Aldous though he does not like them any better. Connolly was very hurt – because … I called him by his surname & on top of that asked him whether he was Catholic – which gave rise to a litany of his pedigree.’4 Cyril Connolly – a hugely influential critic who had come to Sanary to hero-worship Huxley – would later refer in his novel, The Rock Pool (1936), to ‘the competent intellectual vulgarity of Aldous Huxley’ and in Enemies of Promise (1938) would characterise him as the type of ‘the Oxford boy, the miserable young man on the flying trapeze’ who later became ‘a moralist and a puritan’. In the same book he said of Huxley: ‘He is a defaulting financier of the written word, and nobody since Chesterton has so squandered his gifts.’ But in 1930 Connolly was all admiration.
He had first met Huxley in Paris in the autumn of 1929 at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and moved to Sanary, to a house called Les Lauriers Roses, in 1930. ‘All along the coast from Huxley Point and Castle Wharton [Edith Wharton was at Hyères] to Cape Maugham, little colonies of angry giants had settled themselves,’ he would write in The Rock Pool. Writing much later, in the 1960s, Connolly confessed that he became ‘on terms of profound ambivalence’5 with the Huxleys and the admiration that had brought him to Sanary ‘curdled’. He describes a lunch with the Huxleys at Edith Wharton’s grand chateau at which they felt slighted and at which the conversation is described in terms of a tennis match with game set and match awarded to the Huxleys who next time were invited without the Connollys. The problem seems to have been that Connolly, in a sense, reminded Huxley too much of his former self. He was the dazzlingly clever, urbane, young man of letters, with the social panache and lightly-worn learning of the Eton and Balliol man. Huxley, at thirty-eight, was beginning his long trek away from ‘literature’ towards social and moral concerns. The fluttering brilliance of Connolly – his unabashed hedonism and aestheticism – was something the older man wanted to move on from. As Connolly wrestled with the enemies of promise, Huxley appeared to vault over their heads and to rebuke the younger man with his astonishing productivity. Having once confessed that ‘“Aldous!” that unique Christian name has reverberated throughout my life … I settled in Sanary to be near him and one of my happiest moments was when his red Bugatti first swung into the drive,’ Connolly eventually concluded: ‘The Huxleys have added ten years to my life’6
The Huxleys continued to see the Connollys throughout the spring and summer of 1930 and Huxley did admit to Mary that they were ‘amusing’ – ‘he like a highly-educated, Eton-and-Balliol street arab, she a perfect specimen of the hard-boiled young rich American girl’.7 As late as the end of October Maria was reporting that they were seeing them still ‘fairly often’ even if they were ‘unpleasant people with suddenly spots of niceness – like an unpleasant child has moments which make him touching. With Cyril I quarrelled – often – but now they must have made up their minds that as we are the only neighbours they had better keep in our good graces & as a result are so deferential to me that I must laugh all the time’.8 There is something about the way this is put that inclines one to some sympathy with the Connollys.
In May, Aldous went to London to deal with the editing of Lawrence’s letters, which he had been invited to compile. He left the Sanary house in the hands of the builders. ‘Aldous Huxley is over here, buzzing about his letters,’9 Virginia Woolf told Brett. Frieda Lawrence had originally accepted Huxley’s idea of a memorial volume interspersed with letters but eventually he settled on an edition of the letters for which he refused to accept payment or royalties. He also declined a proposal from T.S. Eliot to write a book on Lawrence the poet. In the ‘whirl of spirit-expending activity’10 which had consumed him in March, Huxley had dashed to England for three days to sign the sheets of a special limited edition of his new book of stories, Brief Candles, which was being issued by the Fountain Press in New York. Back in London in May he could see the book published by Chatto. It consisted of three short stories and a longer one, ‘After the Fireworks’, that approached novella length. The themes of Do What You Will interestingly recur in these stories – there was always cross-fertilisation between Huxley’s fictional imagination and his intellectual preoccupations. ‘The Claxtons’ is an attack on puritanical self-righteousness – ‘how beautifully the Claxtons lived, how spiritually!’ – echoing the warnings about the coercive nature of the idealistic programme in the essays. In ‘After the Fireworks’, Miles Fanning – yet another writer – declares ‘a writer can’t influence people’ and inveighs against the ‘illiterate idealist’ who is no more than ‘A Higher Thinker with nothing to think about but his – or more often, I’m afraid, her – beastly little personal feelings and sensations.’ The social comedy of these stories is moving towards a clearer indictment of thinking in a moral vacuum, of mere aestheticism. In the same month, Huxley wrote a piece for the Evening Standard called ‘Babies—State Property’, which discussed the crisis in the family brought about both by individuals increasingly wanting to assert their rights and freedoms and by the standardisation imposed by modern democracy. He noted how in Soviet Russia the family was under attack as a locus of individual autonomy from the State and therefore: ‘The State-paid professional educator is to take the place of the parents.’11 One thinks, inescapably of course, of Brave New World. There is a curiously clinical tone to this writing. Huxley is observing what he sees as the decline of the family, and analysing its causes, but it appears to the reader that he is not himself greatly engaged.
Although Huxley always claimed never to read any reviews of his work (or even to cast another glance over his own work once it had been published) he did see the reviews of Brief Candles and was disappointed. ‘The mot d’ordre at the moment is that all literature must be eminently public-schooly, with touches of Barrie-esque whimsicality to relieve the gentlemanly tedium. If one’s works don’t resemble those of Mr Priestley, then one’s damned.’12 Although having read ‘nothing lately except historical and philosophical works’ Huxley was greatly impressed by his first reading of Kafka’s The Castle in Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation. ‘One would need to have a very special sort of mind to write it; it’s something one couldn’t do oneself. I think it’s a fascinating book … In a work of art, a truth is always a beauty-truth; and a beauty-truth is a mystical entity, a two-in-one; the truth is quite inseparable from its companion, so that you can only state in the most general terms what its nature is.’ This is a line of aesthetic thinking that one might have wished Huxley to pursue more vigorously but he was set on another path. Reading so little contemporary literature, however, his enthusiasm for Kafka as he prepared to write Brave New World is worth noting.
The brief stay in London hunting down Lawrence letters (in the spaces of which he was trying to finish his play) made him reflect on his ambivalent feelings towards Lawrence’s writing. ‘What a queer devil he was! The queerer, the more I think of him and know about him. So many charming and beautiful things in him, such a lot too that wasn’t sympathetic.’13 Towards the end of the month, Huxley returned to Sanary via Suresnes. From the Rue du Bac, he wrote to Mary about a new ‘spy-glass’ he had acquired to improve his vision and which enabled him to see Calais for the first time: ‘It’s melancholy how much one misses by seeing badly – but perhaps one’s also spared a good many horrors! Only the horrors are probably paid for by the loneliness, with a bit to spare on the credit side, perhaps. With my little spy-glass I felt suddenly like a convalescent rediscovering the world after an illness and finding it unbelievably beautiful. However, the repulsiveness of the man sitting next to me in the restaurant car soon reminded me that it was something else as well.’14 On 26 June Maria finally moved their belongings out of the Rue du Bac, from what she called now ‘this ever detested place’.15 The house at Sanary remained a building site well into the summer. ‘We live in considerable squalor and discomfort among the ruins – a life of refugees,’16 Huxley reported to Prentice in early July. With workmen hammering around them, they were reading Fielding’s Tom Jones aloud: ‘such sense, such a tapping of all the nails on the head – knock, knock, knock’.17
In September, Huxley rather abruptly left for London, having realised that Matthew was going back to school a week earlier than he had realised. He also wanted to go to the North Midlands, in connection with the Lawrence letters, to see the writer’s home at Eastwood, but also to write a piece for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine on social conditions in the depressed working class areas. Juts before he left he corrected an article on him sent by a Mrs Theis who had evidently missed a crucial dimension in his work. He told her: ‘I wonder if you’re right about the absence of ethical bias? I feel myself very much of a moralist.’18 It was the moralist – in a very well-established tradition of the educated liberal intelligence venturing into ‘darkest England’ – who wrote the piece for Nash’s, which was not published until May 1931. In April 1931, another Old Etonian, George Orwell, published his first piece of similar reportage, ‘The Spike’, in The Adelphi. That piece would be reworked into a chapter of Down and Out in Paris and London. Huxley’s piece, ‘Abroad in England’, cleverly alluded in its title to the fact that the working class areas of the Midlands and North were a foreign country to most of middle class Britain. ‘The notes which follow are the casual jottings of a tourist – a tourist whose home is that remote province of the Great Bourgeois Empire inhabited by Literary Men, Professional Thinkers and the Amateurs of General Ideas,’19 he wrote. This article, and a companion piece on ‘Sight-Seeing In Alien Englands’ published the following month, effectively demolish the myth of Huxley the unfeeling toff, indifferent to the fate of what some refer to haughtily as ‘the masses’. He showed himself acutely aware of the class-ridden nature of English society. With Orwellian directness he registered the ‘Chinese wall’ that existed between the Deanery of Durham Cathedral where he was received and the mining village where he had lectured on 10 October on ‘Science and Poetry’. The two working men with whom he had arrived from the mining village of Willington he liked very much but he realised how much his class background made it easier for him to relate socially to the Dean because both had been formed in ‘those curious hotbeds of bourgeois imperialism, the Public Schools’. Huxley’s conclusions from what he saw in Middlesbrough and elsewhere were that, to avoid a sort of permanent post-imperial, post-industrial mass unemployment, some form of national planning was needed. The vested interests of the few would oppose it ‘but if national planning is, by the highest human standards, desirable, then the actual desires of this minority will have to be overridden and the desirable thing imposed by force.’ He even spoke warmly of the Soviet Five Year Plan. Since the only plans currently being discussed were Oswald Mosley’s ‘A National Plan for Great Britain’ or the ideas of the Political and Economic Planning group, Huxley’s critics have seized on passages such as this in order to expose him as a faintly sinister anti-democratic thinker. In fact, the article makes him look like some form of intellectual Fabian compelled by the spectre of social inequality and suffering to the conviction that Something Must Be Done, probably through some form of nationalisation.20 Today the solution, from a Labour or Conservative government, would no doubt be privatisation.
On the same trip to England, Huxley broke off to accompany Sullivan to Berlin and Paris on his tour of the ‘Great Men’ he was profiling. He described this as ‘a most entertaining piece of sightseeing’.21 In Paris he himself was interviewed by Frederic Lefevre who interrogated him for four hours and who was ‘the most crassly vulgar, self-satisfied businessman of letters I ever met’.22 Lefevre nonetheless wrote ‘the most monstrous flatteries’ about him and the two performed a dialogue in French for the national radio. Although Huxley talked to Robert Nichols about ‘projecting a kind of picaresque novel of the intellect and the emotions – a mixture between Gil Blas, Bouvard et Pécuchet and Le Rouge et le Noir’23 (an interesting idea that never materialised) and to Prentice about a new volume of verse incorporating Arabia Infelix (which had been published in May 1929) and other poems, he was concentrating now on his new play. He told Schiff at the end of December that he had had no success with producers so far ‘owing to its last act’24 but he hoped he would be luckier in the new year. As 1930 came to a close, the Huxleys felt settled in at Sanary. In spite of the protracted – and worryingly expensive – works, they had bathed and basked in the sun and were really enjoying it. They were also meeting some of their famous neighbours such as Edith Wharton – ‘rather a formidable lady who lives in a mist of footmen, bibelots, bad good-taste and rich food in a castle overlooking Hyères’.25 He had even been invited to become a Corresponding Member of the local Académie du Var ‘which I think is rather distinguished’.
Huxley’s new year reflections for 1931 were informed by the previous autumn’s immersion in the life of the depressed mining villages of England, whose fate had touched him deeply. ‘What a world we live in,’ he exclaimed to Flora Strousse. ‘The human race fills me with a steadily growing dismay … The sad and humiliating conclusion is forced on one that the only thing to do is to flee and hide. Nothing one can do is any good and the doing is liable to infect one with the disease one is trying to treat.’26 He was, however, still pre-occupied with the relationship of ends and means and his professed desire to escape (written indeed from a rocky point on the Cote d’Azur) was merely rhetorical. He would continue to write his documentary pieces ‘abroad in England’ for Nash’s throughout 1931 with their air of bemused and well-meaning puzzlement at the chaos of the contemporary world, but the growth of a wider political and social awareness that would issue in a more definite public commitment in the middle of the decade was now unstoppable. Meanwhile he was recommending The Castle by Kafka as ‘one of the most important books of this time’27 and his own book, about a utopia that wasn’t, was beginning to take shape at Sanary. But first he had to go to London to see about production of his first play.
1
HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 10 March 1930
2
BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 28 March 1930
3
SB1.230–39. See also: Mem. Vol., pp138–43
4
HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, undated, postmarked 1930
5
Quoted in Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997), p236
6
Ibid., p238; P239
7
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 July 1930
8
HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 28 October 1930
9
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4. Letter to Dorothy Brett, 10 May 1930
10
L.333
11
‘Babies–State Property’, Evening Standard, 21 May 1930. Hidden Huxley, pp47–50
12
BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 19 June 1930
13
L.335
14
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 28 May 1930
15
HRC, Letter from Maria Huxley to Mary Hutchinson, 26 June 1930
16
Reading, Letter to Charles Prentice, 5 July 1930
17
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 July 1930
18
HRC, Letter to Mrs Theis, 9 September 1930
19
‘Abroad in England,’ Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, May 1931. Hidden Huxley pp51–64
20
For a less sympathetic view of Huxley’s democratic credentials at this point see David Bradshaw, ‘Huxley’s Slump’, in The Art of Literary Biography (1995) ed John Batchelor. Bradshaw argues, with his customary meticulous scholarship, that Huxley’s expressed support for national planning was a contradiction of his usual libertarian stance
21
L.343
22
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 23 October 1930
23
L.343
24
BL, Letter to Sydney Schiff, 24 December 1930
25
HRC, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 18 December 1930
26
L.345
27
Ibid