XXIII
Albany
On arrival in London in October 1934 the Huxleys took lodgings at 18 St Alban’s Place, SW1: ‘a studio flat – 2 bedrooms, large studio, kitchen and bath – within 50 yards of Piccadilly Circus, at £5 a week – altogether a miracle. It is very quiet and I manage to do a certain amount of work and even some painting in the afternoons.’1 ‘We propose to be here in London till after Christmas,’2 he told Mencken (another auditor of praise for Pareto who had just been translated – ‘Such a monument of common sense’). Huxley liked above all, Pareto’s realism, and disliked, by contrast, the fashionable poses of the young thirties poets. Virginia Woolf noted down his terms of dismissal of Macspaunday: ‘A. can’t stand Auden. Nothing but a demagogue. Declaims: takes in the young. Something in Day Lewis – hasn’t read Spender.’3 Huxley’s fondness for massive works of sociology coexisted with a growing interest in personal development. He had read Geraldine Coster’s new book on Yoga and Western Psychology and told Julian that yoga might be the way forward because: ‘I’ve always felt that it was vitally necessary for people to have some efficient technique for personal development.’4 Without achieving full mental and spiritual development people couldn’t benefit from improved social and political arrangements. And, preoccupied as he was with Eyeless, Huxley was not blind to other people’s misfortunes. His friend J.W.N. Sullivan had just entered the first stages of an incurable paralysis and was having difficulty in meeting his contract with the Viking Press. Huxley immediately offered cash help and wrote to some other writers, including Wells, asking them each to stump up £200. This was a characteristic gesture by Huxley. Whatever his personal circumstances, he always found himself able to help out a range of people – relatives and friends – who were in difficulty.
On 12 November, Huxley surprised himself by announcing to Mary: ‘We have taken – for seven years! – a flat in The Albany. Very nice, with central heating, parquet floors, and lots of room. A very decisive step!’5 Huxley’s astonishment was justified. Restless as he was – and what about Sanary, lying empty for the winter? – such a commitment to the future seemed a little inconsistent with his footloose record. They would keep the flat for barely two years. The Albany is a very exclusive residential building off Piccadilly with a literary reputation generated by past tenants, real (Byron) and imaginary (Raffles the gentleman thief). Names like Terence Stamp and Bruce Chatwin have continued its twentieth century allure. The Huxleys furnished it cheaply with second-hand furniture and began to receive a stream of guests, including Ottoline Morrell whose visit was marked by an accident in which she scattered a string of pearls on the floor when the string broke. It was an elegant address, though not entirely convenient, with a kitchen in the basement and a servant room in the attic, which they later enabled Sybille Bedford to live in.
It was at this address, E2 Albany, that Huxley first began to suffer from the insomnia that would rack him on and off for the next year – a symptom of his inner stress and unease. They moved in to the flat in mid-December. In January, after Christmas in the country, Huxley went back to France to collect material for some articles he had agreed to write for Paris-Soir on the theme of La France au seuil de 1935. He managed to get out of this commitment in the end, telling E.M. Forster, ‘not having sufficient effrontery to pour out my opinions on a subject of which, the more I look into it, the less I find I know’.6 He shared with Forster a gloom about the world as it was on the threshold of 1935: ‘and add to it a considerable gloom about myself: Bertie Russell, whom I’ve just been lunching with, says one oughtn’t to mind about the superficial things like ideas, manners, politics, even wars – that the really important things, conditioned by scientific technique, go steadily on & up (like the eternal feminine, I suppose) in a straight, un-undulating trajectory. It’s nice to think so; but meanwhile there the superficial undulations are, as one lives superficially, & who knows if that straight trajectory isn’t aiming directly for some fantastic denial of humanity?’ The following month the personal anxiety returned, in spite of the breathing-exercises which Gerald Heard had recommended for him. ‘I’ve been far from well, suffering from sleeplessness which is just about to drive me away from London and the country to another climate,’ he told R.A. Scott James. ‘This has kept me in a state of incapacity to do most of the things I ought to have done.’7 He had just been to see John Gielgud in Hamlet which he thought was ‘the work of art with the greatest amount of substance ever put into words’. In his present impasse, however, this made him ask ‘why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be – and what one’s own writing is not’.8
Huxley was in touch at this time with Strachey’s friend, Sebastian Sprott, now a lecturer at Nottingham University. He told Sprott that he felt he should really visit the east Midlands again ‘to hear a little about that other England of which we here in London have really no inkling’.9 Huxley was aware that Piccadilly was not the place to know England in the Depression. His insomnia, however, had become so bad that his doctor recommended a drastic change of climate such as the mountains near Grenoble and he put off the trip to see Sprott. In March he put up in the Hotel des Grandes Rousses at Huez in the French alps – a rather ‘god-forsaken little place … However I console myself with the thought that it must be good for me, and take enormous walks on snow-shoes, conscientiously, as one might drink the waters at Vichy’.10 From there he went to Sanary where the Huxleys spent March until October. By early April he was able to report to Harold Raymond at Chatto that he was gradually sleeping better and had started working again ‘under about half steam & progress slowly with the book’.11 At the start of May Maria announced that ‘he is cured, definitely cured … work goes well’.12 He dashed off an article in May for the Daily Express to mark the Silver Jubilee of George V in which he made some predictions for the next twenty-five years. Huxley was generally a good prophet and his prediction of a ‘generation war’ as a result of a rapidly ageing population in the later twentieth century was one of the more interesting. He also expressed the hope that ‘Europe is spared the war which its Governments seem quite determined to make inevitable’.13
The rise of Hitler and the apparent threat of war was increasingly galvanising Huxley’s thinking. He addressed an International Writer’s Congress in Paris on 21 June to warn about the dangers of propaganda and was disappointed that it appeared to be a Communist front event. Later, during his residence in the United States, the FBI would regularly dredge up his attendance at this event to bolster their thin case against his putatively subversive potential. Earlier in the month he had attended a London rally at Olympia addressed by Sir Oswald Mosley, now the leader of the British Union of Fascists and surrounded by his Blackshirt thugs. Twelve thousand people filled the hall. Sitting with Naomi Mitchison and other friends, Huxley saw the brutal handling of protesters.14 In a pamphlet published to record the event, Huxley was one of many who described what they saw. Mosley’s stewards – many of whom wore knuckle-dusters concealed under bandages or gloves – would pounce on any hecklers and attack them viciously. Mosley would stop speaking and searchlights would theatrically sweep onto the victims. The opposition, however, was equally active. On 16 October 1934, Canon Dick Sheppard had written a letter to the press asking members of the public to pledge their support for peace. Eighty thousand people returned postcards making their pledges in the first year. By the beginning of 1937 numbers in ‘Dick Sheppard’s Army’ had swelled to 130,000. The first sacks of mail in October 1934 contained a postcard from Huxley, then living at 18 St Alban’s Place. A rally at the Albert Hall took place in June 1935 and Huxley would eventually write the Peace Pledge Union’s first official pamphlet. But at Sanary in the early summer of 1935 he was more preoccupied with his own health and sanity. With a mixture of apprehension and amusement, Maria watched as he implemented a new plan, to take violent exercise for the sake of his health: ‘he digs every spare inch of the ground and causes havoc all round him to the despair of the gardener’.15 He was also taking a mixture of calcium and magnesium as a sedative and mild hypnotic for the continuing ‘beastly insomnia’.16 The novel seemed back on course and he was having discussions with the American writer Ted McKnight Kauffer, who had first met him at Sanary in 1931, about writing some short film scripts on the theme of ‘Dreams’ for Alexander Korda. He also hoped that Korda might take an interest in Brave New World.
Meanwhile Huxley’s charitable instincts had been awakened by the predicament of a young woman friend, a partly-Jewish German whose passport was coming up for renewal and who was naturally fearful of being repatriated. He wrote to Sprott to ask if he knew of any ‘impecunious Englishman’ who would marry her as a purely financial transaction so that she could stay in England. ‘The solution, it seems to me, consists in finding someone combining impecuniosity, honesty and homosexuality.’17 He pointed out that Auden had just married Erika Mann on the same grounds. He wrote to Naomi Mitchison at the same time – with the result that a clutch of potential husbands now presented themselves. ‘It is reassuring to know that husbands are in such good supply and at so reasonable a price,’18 he told Sprott. The wedding took place on 15 November at the Westminster registry office, with Huxley as principal witness. There was a party at the Albany afterwards. ‘Party for the German they’ve married to a postman [actually a doorman at a gentleman’s club in Westminster] – for £50,’19 Virginia Woolf noted in her diary. She had been one of the guests, with Robert Nichols and Naomi Mitchison.
In November, Huxley lunched for the first time with Dick Sheppard. Afterwards he felt that he been rather garrulous and glib in his talk of organising the peace movement. ‘When one has been endowed with that curious thing, the gift of the gab, one is sadly tempted to make use of it for elegantly expressing ideas which one knows as ideas and not by experience.’20 He told Sheppard that it was ‘frankly comic’ that such an egghead as he should be telling a man like Sheppard how to proceed and that it was only by laughing at himself that he could ‘take the edge off my shame. Thinking, reading, talking & writing has been my opium & alcohol, & I am trying to get off them on to listening & doing.’ Huxley was making the painful transition from closeted thinker to activist. He was a quick learner and became a very important member of the PPU, and one not without an understanding of the tactics of campaigning. His first public appearance as a peace campaigner was at a lunchtime talk at Friend’s House in Euston Road – a stone’s throw from the Bloomsbury salons he knew so well. On 3 December he came to the rostrum to ‘set forth some of the intellectual justifications for pacifism … and … discuss what I may call some of the indispensable philosophical conditions of pacifism. ’ He introduced his familiar argument about ends and means and declared: ‘There is nothing inherently absurd about the idea that the world which we ourselves have so largely constructed can also, if we so desire, be reconstructed on other and better lines.’ This is a marked change from the intellectual pessimism of the 1920s and early 1930s. What is most significant about this talk, however, is that in it Huxley explicitly brings in a spiritual or religious dimension. He urged that ‘the doctrine of the essential spiritual unity of man’ be taken seriously. He claimed that humanism ‘has as its principal end-product the religion of nationalism’, which was part of the problem not the solution. ‘There is left the belief in a spiritual reality to which all men have access and in which they are united. Such a belief is the best metaphysical environment for pacifism.’21
There was little doubt that for Huxley his adoption of the pacifist cause was not a mere intellectual interest. It was a spiritual discovery. He was undergoing a ‘conversion’22 that would end the mental and physical anguish of the past year. The hard line political activists of the Left were contemptuous. After Eyeless in Gaza was published the following summer, Stephen Spender would write to Christopher Isherwood to express anxiety that the religious Auden could be seduced by this approach: ‘He has some ideas now but they are all wrong; a sort of half-religious, mystical pacifism. I do hope that Wystan doesn’t fall for it.’23 In a letter to Robert Nichols, telling him about ‘the novel that won’t get finished’, Huxley expressed his anxieties about the coming conflict: ‘I wish I could see any remedy for the horrors of human beings except religion or could see any religion that we could all believe in.’24 Two months later, after returning to Albany from Belgium where Maria’s youngest sister, Rose, had been married he was telling Victoria Ocampo that he had been talking to Gerald Heard about ways and means of getting an adequate peace movement on its feet. ‘The thing finally resolves itself into a religious problem – an uncomfortable fact which one must be prepared to face and which I have come during the last year to find it easier to face.’25 For a Huxley, the idea of religious belief was a hard one to swallow, but (while the religion of brass eagle and beeswax would for ever be outside his scope) he was beginning his inexorable journey towards the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ whose expositor he would become in the next decade.
As well as this re-making of himself as a quasi-religious believer in pacifism (his early writings about peace stress the need for a reformation of the individual life as much as they talk about questions of power and military policy), Huxley was also attending to his physical disposition. The torment of the year 1935 (which Maria would refer to later as ‘l’année horrible’) was the result of several difficulties (and of the conviction that they were all related to each other). There was a sense of indistinct purpose – the need for someone who had been so destructively cynical to find a positive commitment. ‘He suddenly felt he must develop. Negative cynicism was not enough.’26 There were profound aesthetic problems, trying to make the new novel work. He had a writer’s block that was starting to raise financial anxieties. What if his writing career was finished? What would he then do? In that gloomy, old-fashioned building, the Albany – where the sound of his typewriter raised anxieties on the part of management that someone might be sullying the dignity of the place by engaging in ‘trade’ – he sank deeper into depression. And, finally, there were physical problems. Huxley was often in bad health throughout his life but this was something different. He had already, under the influence of Gerald Heard, begun to practice breathing-exercises and various kinds of mental discipline, in order to defeat his insomnia.27 It was bad enough not being able to see properly but he felt his whole physical deportment was wrong. He was in the grip of a feeling of utter physical and artistic dysfunction.
Intellectually and spiritually, however, the peace movement was starting to show him a way out of the impasse. Physically, a saviour appeared in the shape of EM. Alexander, the therapist and inventor of the Alexander technique. Huxley started to have daily sessions with him from November 1935 in which his whole posture, physical movement, performance of simple daily actions, was subject to a process of ‘kinesthetic’ re-education. Huxley later wrote an introduction to a selection of Alexander’s writings, in which he claimed Alexander had discovered empirically ‘that there is a correct or “natural” relationship between the neck and the trunk and that normal functioning of the total organism cannot take place except when the neck and trunk are in the right relationship’.28 What attracted Huxley to this technique – apart from the fact that it seemed, for him, to work – was the way it highlighted the relationship between body and mind, that old combat which had always preoccupied him. By focussing on ‘the data of organic reality’ to the exclusion of ‘the insane life of phantasy’ it made it possible for ‘the physical organism to function as it ought to function, thus improving the general state of physical and mental health’. It had certain affinities with the ‘straight-spine’ position of yoga and so successful did Huxley consider it that Maria also put herself through the process. Alexander in turn put the Huxleys on to Dr J.E.R. McDonagh, whose theory was that intoxication of the intestines was at the root of most disorders. They duly submitted to colonic irrigation, vaccine injections, and special diet. By early 1936 Huxley was able to report victory over insomnia, fatigue (he could now work for eight hours instead of four), normal blood pressure, the vanishing of psychosomatic symptoms and of two patches of eczema that he had had for years, better skin colour, and the disappearance of chronic nasal catarrh.29
Huxley returned to The Albany – to a work room that Sybille Bedford described as a ‘goldfish bowl’ and one that she thought added to his discomfort30 – and began to write those sections of Eyeless in Gaza that dealt with the moral rebirth of Anthony Beavis. Huxley, particularly during his Californian years, would from time to time acquire the reputation of one who was a little too prone to take seriously the claims of quackery but there is little doubt that this therapy worked for him. Around this time the Huxleys started to introduce to their friends the therapist and author of The Human Hand, Dr Charlotte Wolff, whom they had met in Paris, and who had now established herself across the road at Dalmeny Court. At an evening at the Woolfs, Lotte started to read palms. Leonard Woolf was disgusted by this ‘humbug’ but Clive Bell told him that this was not the proper scientific spirit.31
Summing up the past year, Maria wrote in a new year letter to her sister Jeanne (she addressed her sometimes as ‘Janin’ or ‘Jokes’, in these letters written in French and now in the Royal Library at Brussels, the latter being a Flemish diminutive) that she hoped sincerely that 1936 would be ‘as different from the last as possible. I don’t think anyone could grasp how dreadful the last year has been for me’.32 She reported that the novel was coming to an end and that somehow she had great hopes for it. Aldous’s health was ‘good but not brilliant’ but he was working hard and was ‘calm and peaceful’. They were leading a quiet life, seeing only the people they wanted to see. The fever was abated.
1
L.385
2
NYPL, Letter to H.L. Mencken, 16 October 1934
3
The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, 1 November 1934
4
L.382
5
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 12 November 1934
6
King’s College Cambridge, Letter to E. M. Forster 17 January 1935
7
HRC, Letter to R.A. Scott James, 25 February 1935
8
L.390
9
King’s College, Letter to Sebastian Sprott, 5 March 1935
10
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 17 March 1935
11
Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 9 April 1935
12
L.392
13
Daily Express, 8 May 1935. Hidden Huxley, pp171–175
14
see Fascists at Olympia (1934) by ‘Vindicator’
15
L.393
16
L.395
17
King’s College, Letter to Sebastian Sprott, 22 August 1935
18
King’s College, Letter to Sebastian Sprott, 30 September 1935
19
The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4, p354 21 November 1935
20
Lambeth Palace Library, Letter to Dick Sheppard 9 November 1935
21
‘Pacifism and Philosophy’, The New Pacifism (1936) edited by Gerald Hibbert
22
SB in conversation with the author
23
Stephen Spender, Letters to Christopher (Santa Barbara, 1980) Letter to Isherwood, 27 July 1936
24
L.398
25
L.398
26
SB in conversation with the author
27
SB1.308
28
The Resurrection of the Body. The Writings of F. Matthias Alexander (1969) ed Edward Maisel
29
L.402
30
SB1.294
31
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 5, P452, letter to Julian Bell, 17 December 1935
32
RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, January 1936. Author’s translation