XXXII

Devils

Huxley spent the whole of 1951 researching and writing The Devils of Loudun, his second full-length historical/biographical study in which he sought to explore ideas in the concrete context of a specific life. Conscious of a lack of complete success with the ‘novel of ideas’, this seemed to him a solution to the problem of how to present ideas in a form that would prove more attractive than the abstract thesis: the story was graphic and extraordinary but it also gave an opportunity for ‘trying to formulate a coherent picture of the mind.’¹ Meanwhile his own intellectual explorations were continuing. Dianetics, taken up at the end of 1950, was followed by a renewed interest in parapsychology. He suggested to Professor J.B. Rhine, whose Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University had been one of the first places he had visited when arriving in the USA in 1937, that he should publish an anthology of basic parapsychology texts – experimental material and philosophical background material.

All this was done against a background of continued struggling with eye problems. In March 1951 both Aldous and Maria caught a bad ‘flu virus that was prevalent in Los Angeles and it attacked Huxley’s right eye, the poor one, with the result that he lost all sight in that eye for a period. He was given a treatment that was intended to break down some old scars covering the pupil but it produced some disturbing side-effects and great pain. Huxley was very shaken by the state he was in. ‘He was so rattled. It really was horrible,’² Maria told Matthew. Although he recovered by May there were further problems throughout the year and generally he was, as Maria put it, ‘in an off mood’, disappointed in part by the failure of the play which would have given him some freedom.

In June Huxley went to Ojai, where Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal ran the Happy Valley School, to give the Commencement Address on the theme of the school’s motto – which he had probably given them because it was a favourite of his own – aun aprendo, I am still learning. His sister-in-law Rose’s son, Sigfried Wessberg, attended the school and remembered that although it was run generally on what would be called ‘progressive’ lines (if you didn’t want to go to lessons you didn’t have to) there was no rock and roll or junk food and the day began with readings from the Prophet. Huxley gave lectures there, sage-like in the oak grove. Sigfried, as a thoroughly American teenager, was sometimes baffled by his famous relative. He recalled for an interviewer how Huxley watched a young man across the street lovingly waxing and polishing a red Alfa Romeo every Sunday morning. ‘How red can it get?’ Huxley asked, perplexed at the passion for consumer goods, cars, material possessions that gripped 1950s America. ‘That kind of culture, he couldn’t grasp it.’³ It was for similar reasons that he employed Anita Loos as an interpreter of America and its mores. Until she enlightened him he thought an ice-cream sundae was a drink. Sigfried also remembered the house at North King’s Road: ‘They’d have all these seances and all these mushrooms and big pots of seeds and God knows what.’ The house smelt of cloves and other herbs and spices and there was ‘a big dish in the main living room full of all kinds of dried seeds and dried bushes and jars of things’.

The house became the focus of Tuesday evening sessions, exploring various forms of parapsychological phenomena and hypnotism. The participants started off by dining at the World’s Largest Drugstore (now demolished but familiar to readers of The Doors of Perception, a book whose groundwork was being prepared in these sessions) after which they gathered in the long living room of the house to explore such things as ‘magnetic passes’ and the work of mediums. L. Ron Hubbard himself was a visitor. Around this time Gerald Heard published an article on flying saucers which caused Huxley to say: ‘I have no settled opinion so far, but keep my trap shut and wait.’⁴ That captures the essence of Huxley’s outlook at the time: his mind was open and he wanted to find out about these unusual phenomena which others would dismiss out of hand or mock. These Los Angeles years, after the desert and the mountains, which were to be Huxley’s last decade, were filled with more ordinary kinds of social life. They had open air lunches twice a week at Yolanda’s in the Town and Country Market (still flourishing and a favourite haunt of elderly Los Angeles residents) with Vera and Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, Peggy Kiskadden (whose husband Bill, a doctor, took an interest in Huxley’s health) and Betty Wendel (screenwriter and collaborator with Huxley on The Genius and the Goddess).

It has already been noted that Huxley is popularly assumed to have been in Hollywood at the centre of a dazzling web of social contacts. But, notwithstanding the distinction of some of these names, it was a small circle. Huxley’s modest lifestyle and distaste for swanky restaurants and raucous living and endless socialising meant that his range of acquaintance was not large. Moreover, in the twenty-five years that he spent in America, from 1937 to his death in 1963, he seems to have met very few of the writers who dominated the epoch in literary terms. If one were to draw up a list of the key works of mid-century American writing during these years none of the names would figure in Huxley’s published essays or in his published and unpublished private correspondence – though we cannot be certain that he did not read them. He did, by contrast mention frequently works like The Organisation Man or The Hidden Persuaders and enthusiastically recommended them to friends. He seems to have preferred the company of scientists and social thinkers – and, some would say, quacks. A book like Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death excited him more than A Streetcar Named Desire. Pressed on this by interviewers in 1959 he admitted that he had little interest in contemporary fiction. He had read Kingsley Amis but thought he was ‘repeating himself’.⁵ John Braine’s Room at the Top was ‘quite good, don’t you think?’ It seems he had tried Kerouac’s On the Road but, ‘I got a little bored after a time. I mean, the road seemed to be awfully long.’

In April, Huxley asked Robert Craft one day if he would read to him because his good eye was overtaxed. The picture Craft paints is not the one of a triumphant disciple of Dr Bates: ‘I find him typing the witchcraft book … in the den at the end of the darkened corridor, and on a table stacked ominously with publications in Braille. He is wearing his ‘Chinese glasses’, black cellulose goggles with perforations in place of lenses: they force the pupils to perform a kind of stroboscopic movement, and consequently prevent staring; Aldous has taped a bandage over the pin-holes on the right side, which means that he no longer has any sight at all from his opaline right eye.’⁶ Talking to Huxley about his new book, Craft was puzzled, as many have been, by the contrast between the searching, lucid, rational intelligence which was Huxley’s most obvious characteristic and the most striking evidence of his Victorian inheritance, and the credulity with which he greeted (though he did not necessarily swallow whole) each new Southern Californian fad of mind and consciousness. As the year went on he went deeper and deeper into the horrible events and cruelties of the Loudun story – forced to pass over an invitation to go to India with Robert Godel and his wife to visit the holy places of the Himalayas – and pausing only to offer his extreme reflections on a world that seemed, as usual, to be going to the dogs. The Cold War was now raging and on 23 May the House Committee on Un-American Activities heard testimony that Huxley was one of a number of writers involved in an organisation called ‘Friends of Intellectual Freedom’. The purpose of this organisation, according to an FBI briefing note in Huxley’s file, was ‘to raise funds to help former Communist writers rehabilitate themselves’.⁷ It was not until 15 May 1953, however, that the FBI finally grasped what should have been obvious from the outset. A confidential memorandum from the Los Angeles Field Office (which had been monitoring his activities) to the Washington Bureau noted: ‘Aldous Huxley is well known, highly respected, and far removed from any pro-Russian or Communist Party sympathies.’

In spite of the hard work on the new book, which was only half-complete by the end of May, Huxley managed to break off in July to revise the dialogue of what he called ‘a very ingenious and effective stage adaptation’ of After Many A Summer by a writer called Ralph Rose, whose radio version had already been broadcast. And then he succumbed to more trouble, an attack of iritis, which incapacitated him for five weeks, keeping him in the house and in darkness because he could not stand any light. The doctors thought that this could have been connected to a long-standing chronic bronchitis, which may have been a focus of infection for the eye trouble. The summer was hell. Back on course in October, he was gladdened by the news that he had become a grandfather (to Mark Trevenen Huxley). There was also talk of a new film project on the life of Gandhi ‘which perhaps I may tackle when the book is done. Interesting – but dreadfully difficult. Still, a challenge.’⁸ This was another project, planned by the director Gabriel Pascal, that would come to nothing. On 23 January 1952 Huxley announced at last to Chatto: ‘My book is finished.’⁹

All should have been well but now it was Maria’s turn to be ill. She had been taken to hospital for treatment of a cyst, which, though Huxley does not seem to have acknowledged or to have been told this, turned out to be a malignant tumour. In fact he told Jeanne: ‘The doctors are confident there will be no recurrence as the trouble was taken in good time and got rid of very thoroughly. No radiation will be necessary.’¹⁰ Maria was said to be well and to have become ‘a reformed character in regard to eating and consumes large quantities of meat – the proteins of which have speeded up the healing of the wound in a remarkable way.’ Aldous and Maria went out at the start of the year for a brief holiday in the Arizona desert, glorying in the sight of snow on the higher mountains and the carpets of spring flowers and the remarkable desert lilies: ‘It is an unforgettable spectacle – the good will of life, the tenacity of it in the face of the most adverse circumstances, the patience of it (the lilies will lie dormant for as much as ten or fifteen years, if there is a drought, and then come bursting through the sand at the first moisture), the profusion, the beauty. And the yearly miracle takes place in an enormous, luminous silence.’¹¹ For the first time Huxley wrote explicitly of the desert as a place associated with mystical vision: ‘as a means to purifying insight into the divine otherness, there is nothing to compare with that silence’. On his return he struck Robert Craft as ‘refreshed and in high spirits’¹² when he dragged him off for his favourite walk over the summit of Doheny Hill, pouring out abstruse dendrological information and ending with a drive to an ice-cream parlour in Beverly Hills where he ordered a banana split. ‘Cerebrotonics should eat bananas very day,’ he informed Craft.

As well as banana splits, Huxley was treating himself to a newly invented pressure-breathing treatment which he was taking at home with an oxygen tank and a special attachment. This seemed to have eliminated the chronic bronchitis that had been ‘a source, over many years, of general under-parness and various troubles of an acuter nature’.¹³ He continued to haggle with Pascal over a contract for the Gandhi film. And in London, Chatto were looking over the manuscript of The Devils of Loudun. They were not completely happy and felt that it was not going to be as successful as Grey Eminence. ‘In places the tangential discussions produce a somewhat excessive interruption to the story’ and the story itself ‘might occasionally prove more than a queasy stomach could assimilate’.¹⁴ Harold Raymond asked Huxley to delete some of the more gruesome details in the torture of Urban Grandier such as ‘there was a sound of splintering bone … ooze of marrow’. Huxley agreed happily, as he agreed at the same time to a proposal for a book by Robert Hamilton about his work. He said that he would not be among its readers because he never read criticism which was ‘always unhelpful, since the critic cannot, in the nature of things, know what the writer is working with and against, what his resources are, what his handicaps and special obstacles … That I am not Dostoevsky or Goethe is admittedly deplorable but it is not by deploring that one can add a cubit to one’s stature.’¹⁵

The Huxleys’ psychic explorations continued. Maria had a few years earlier been helped by hypnosis after an intestinal infection and Aldous claimed to have become ‘a rather good hypnotic operator’ ¹⁶ who was able to help Maria again after the tumour was removed in January. He thought he was not, as regards himself, ‘a particularly good hypnotic subject’ but when he was suffering from iritis the previous year he had received hypnotic treatment from the UCLA Psychology Department and from Leslie LeCron, a psychotherapist. The ego, under hypnotherapy, was able to ‘let go, to get out of the way, to stop interfering with the beneficent action of the “entelechy”, which is at once the physiological sub-conscious that sees to the proper functioning of the body, and the higher, non-personal subconscious …’ Huxley had discovered ‘E’ therapy and immediately began to proselytise amongst his friends, sending them copies of a pamphlet by A.L. Kitselman describing the technique. He was also using various kinds of auto-hypnosis on himself to cure insomnia. Maria was every bit as enthusiastic and she wrote to tell Jeanne that all this therapy was transforming him: ‘You know how all these years we have loved Aldous, and known his kindness, sweetness and honesty … but you also know how, in spite of all that, he was exhausting to live with, and sad to live with. Well, now he is transformed, transfigured … Aldous no longer looks the same, or has the same moral and intellectual attitude towards animals, people, the clouds, or even the sound of the telephone (which is remarkable).’¹⁷ He was helping out in the house, proposing ways of acting practically to help others, in short coming out of his protective shell, all of which she put down to his exposure to these various therapies. Maria wrote to Matthew at this time a letter which tried to explain all these changes and to reassure him that they had not become ‘Faddists’.¹⁸ In a spirit of great frankness – did she know the real truth of her illness by now? – she talked about her first meeting with Aldous at Garsington in terms that have already been described in an earlier chapter. From now on both Maria, in the brief time left to her, and Aldous would strike others as having gained a greater serenity.

The Devils was about to be published in October and Huxley was planning a book of reflective essays on the American West as well as negotiating for a trio of short stories for cinema and television to be played by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. He was toying as well with the script of ‘a popular science movie on the sun’.¹⁹ When The Devils appeared it was considered ‘horrible’²⁰ by Basil Blackwell. The Odhams Press Book Club also turned it down as the subject ‘would cause much raising of eyebrows among the members’. But Huxley was convinced that it had worked and that his notion of embodying general ideas in a particular case was the reason it had done so: ‘Because they ignore the particular case, the facts of individual life in a body, science, philosophy and philosophical history are always inadequate to reality as we know it by direct experience,’²¹ he told Mary Hutchinson. The book, set in seventeenth century France, tells the story of Urban Grandier, the priest who is accused of witchcraft, and the possession by devils of the nuns of Loudun. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible of the same year, the persecution of Grandier has an obvious contemporary resonance. Huxley was named in November 1952 by an hysterical anti-Communist newsletter Counterattack as one of a number of authors who had signed an Authors’ World Peace Appeal and by doing so had ‘fallen for one of Moscow’s biggest lies’.²²

The violence of the torture scenes is excessive and the overall picture of human affairs is profoundly pessimistic, notwithstanding the mellowing of Huxley the man at this time. Successfully transferred to stage and to film (by Ken Russell after Huxley’s death) the story is gripping in outline but it is the scaffolding onto which Huxley loads reflections on the seventeenth century mind, excursions around his mystical preoccupations, and dissertations on his view of the world. He was at pains to stress, in the philosophical passages, that mystical experience is above all real. ‘The heavenly kingdom can be made to come on earth; it cannot be made to come in our imagination or in our discursive reasonings. And it cannot come even on earth, so long as we persist in living, not on the earth as it is actually given, but as it appears to an ego obsessed by the idea of separateness, by cravings and abhorrences, by compensatory phantasies and by ready-made propositions about the nature of things. Our kingdom must go before God’s can come.’ In these and many other passages we hear the voice of Huxley the essayist and the moralist, as it were grafted on to the story, transparently using the story as a device to enable him to do so, where one might wish the artistic creation itself might accomplish the task implicitly. Only those who can accept that strategy will find it a wholly successful book.

After publication of The Devils, Huxley spent the first half of 1953 engaged on miscellaneous film and journalistic projects – such as his one hour documentary on the Sun which taught him that ‘one must read 100% in order to be able to leave out 99%, as has to be done in this medium’.²³ Increasingly, his contacts were with scientists, doctors, social scientists, academic specialists in a range of disciplines. His reading, likewise, was in the works of such men and women. Having spent much of his career as a freelance writer tilting at ‘the professors’, he was now increasingly in their company, trying in some cases to persuade them – ironically, in the case of a proposal to Alan Watts of Stanford for a ‘post-graduate school for the study of synthesis and all its methods of practical application to the education process on all its levels,’²⁴ intending to bankroll the plan with funds from ‘Our Ford’. These would all be designed to launch programmes of study designed to further Huxleyan grand notions. Huxley was becoming aware of the power of institutions and the big foundations to co-ordinate work on a large scale. One of the last things he would do in the weeks before he died was to try to draft a programme for the World Academy in Stockholm on ‘Human Possibilities’. The imbalance of elements, the artistic failure, of his last great attempt at a fictional synthesis of his ideas for a better world, the novel Island, has its roots in this omnivorous intellectualism, this pursuit of good ends that ran too eagerly ahead of the necessary artistic delight in means.

Early in January 1953, Huxley’s old friends Sir Osbert and Edith Sitwell arrived for tea. Edith was in Hollywood, working with the screenwriter Walter Reisch and George Cukor on a screenplay for her Fanfare for Elizabeth. ‘It’s so nice seeing dear Aldous and Maria Huxley – two of my oldest friends,’ she told Geoffrey Gorer. ‘Aldous hasn’t changed at all since he was 23 (when I knew him first). He drove me to tea with Dr Hubble, the astronomer, the other day, and on the way kept up a long grumble – the drive took 40 minutes – on the subject of Coleridge and Wordsworth. “Really, Edith, that any man reputed to be sane should have written, quite deliberately, ‘I need not say, Louisa dear,/How glad we are to have you here,/A lovely convalescent.” ’²⁵ Grace Hubble was present at two of these tea parties, the first of which disclosed Edith Sitwell in her full splendour: ‘Today she wore a black turban with a border that reached her shoulders, so that only her face, framed in its borders was to be seen. Fresh, fair, transparent complexion, slanting blue eyes with pale gold lashed, aquiline nose, with thin-lipped curling mouth. Her dress was of masses of black drapery to the floor, concealing her figure completely. She wore one ring, of two aquamarine stones set one above the other, as big as walnuts.’²⁶ This astonishing phenomenon rose again ten days later to demolish what Aldous described as ‘the monstrous Victorians, who became increasingly alien and unnatural. More and more they seem like characters in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.’²⁷ Eavesdropping on this tea-party today, as Huxley and the Sitwells – relics of upper-middle class intellectual England in the Californian sun – proceeded to demolish, not only Carlyle and Elizabeth Barrett Browning among the Victorians but Christopher Fry, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Ford Madox Ford (‘and his dreary wife’), a certain narrowness in this patrician taste is revealed. Poor old Sir George Colefax, husband of Sybil, was dismissed as ‘a bore’²⁸ at the next tea party, having tried to elucidate the Swiss banking system to Aldous. ‘He told me the entire story of Joyce’s Ulysses!’ complained the apparition in black drapery.

Huxley was approaching the age of sixty and told Julian: ‘Age, I find, has its compensations – but also a great deal which has to be compensated for.’²⁹ He quoted ‘Uncle Matt’ – Matthew Arnold’s – poem ‘Growing Old’ and noted that Maria was well ‘so long as she doesn’t overdo it. Her margin of reserve strength is small, since last year’s operation.’ In February he learned of the death of a very old friend, Lewis Gielgud, which was ‘a great shock’.³⁰ He told Juliette: ‘We had been friends for half a century, and he was part of the order of things.’ They had first met as prep-school boys in 1903. His own powers were being tested for a series of lectures on art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington which he had been invited to give the following spring. The necessary reading was putting a strain on his eyes. He had resumed his siege of the Ford Foundation, hoping to persuade it to fund research into the role of language in international relations, ‘intemperate and improperly used’³¹ language being the cause of many problems on the world stage. It was for this reason that he withdrew from the Author’s World Peace Appeal, membership of which had been noted by the FBI. He felt that the duty of writers was to the language and he was not a joiner and had not realised the Appeal was an ongoing organisation rather than a one-off gesture.

The same month Huxley received a letter from an English doctor in Canada called Dr Humphry Osmond. He wrote back, telling Osmond that: ‘Under the current dispensation the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the “real” world.’³² It may be, Huxley reflected, that the drug mescalin might have a role to play in opening minds. Osmond was due to visit Los Angeles for a conference. Huxley offered to put him up.

1

L.633

2

SB2.120–21. Citing letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley, March 1951

3

HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview between David King Dunaway and Sigfried Wessberg, 3 February 1988

4

SB2.122. quoting letter to Matthew Huxley. Undated

5

UCLA, West Wind, Fall 1959 Interview

6

Robert Craft, ‘With Aldous Huxley’, Encounter, November 1965, p12

7

FBI file on Huxley

8

Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 10 December 1951

9

Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 21 January 1952

10

RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 26 January 1952

11

L.642

12

Robert Craft, ‘With Aldous Huxley’, Encounter, November 1965, p14

13

L.644

14

Reading, letter from Harold Raymond to Aldous Huxley, 6 March 1952

15

Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 24 March 1952

16

L.646

17

RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 16 April 1952

18

SB2.135–37. Quoting letter from Maria Huxley to Matthew Huxley, 1952

19

Reading, letter to Harold Raymond, 26 December 1952

20

Reading, Letter from Basil Blackwell to Harold Raymond, 19 September 1952

21

HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 2 November 1952

22

Counterattack, 7 November 1952, Vol 6, No 4

23

L.663

24

L.657

25

Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell (1998) edited by Richard Greene, Letter to Geoffrey Gorer, 21 February 1953, P353

26

HL, Hubble Diary, 20 January 1953

27

HL, Hubble Diary, 30 January 1953

28

HL, Hubble Diary, 5 March 1953

29

L.663

30

L.665

31

L.667

32

L.669