Sorrow
On 5 February 1955 Huxley wrote an extraordinary letter to Jeanne Neveux. Extraordinary because this fluent and copious letter writer rarely gave vent to exposed, personal feeling. The letter begins:
Dear Jeanne, I write to you from the depths of an immense sadness. Maria is very, very ill – ill, if the doctors are to be believed, without hope. What appeared to be a lumbago is in fact the symptom of a cancer of the spine; and, for two weeks the liver has been attacked, also the lungs, and probably the spleen and the intestine.’1 At last, Huxley had admitted the truth that must have been apparent to everyone else for a long time (Humphry Osmond had broken down in tears when he discovered the truth from Maria during his 1953 visit). He wrote to Matthew on the same day that ‘I try not to cry when I see her, but it is difficult after thirty-six years.’2
Maria returned home in an ambulance on Monday 7 February to the care of a nurse, Helen Halsberg, who had looked after her in 1952, after her mastectomy operation. Huxley himself treated her by hypnosis, conquering the nausea that had prevented her from eating. She was weak from having received intravenal injections of glucose and
vitamins. ‘Think of her with all your love, and of me also,’ Huxley ended his letter to Jeanne. Matthew flew out to be with his mother on the Tuesday but when Suzanne arrived on Wednesday she was only just conscious.3 Suzanne told Jeanne how Aldous had been constantly on the verge of tears but had tried to distract them by offering tea and playing ‘beautiful’ gramophone records.4 Maria could hardly speak or recognise anyone. Aldous sat with her, ‘sometimes saying nothing, sometimes speaking’ and practising hypnotic suggestion and ‘passes’ to ease her pain. He recalled her mystical experiences in the Mojave desert: ‘This was the reason for her passionate love of the desert. For her, it was not merely a geographical region; it was also a state of mind, a metaphysical reality, an unequivocal manifestation of God.’ All her mystical experiences were associated with light. ‘Light had been the element in which her spirit had lived, and it was therefore to light that all my words referred.’ He would ask her to ‘look at these lights of her beloved desert’ which he had conjured up by describing for her the desert scenery.
A little before three on the Saturday morning the nurse said her pulse was failing. Aldous went and sat with her, leaned across and spoke into her ear ‘that I was with her and would always be with her in that light which was the central reality of our beings’. And then ‘there was peace … How passionately, from the depth of a fatigue which illness and a frail constitution had often intensified to the point of being hardly bearable, she had longed for peace!’ For the last hour he sat or stood with his left hand on her head and the right on the solar plexus to create ‘a kind of vital circuit’. The breathing became quieter ‘and I had the impression that there was some kind of release’. In her ear he continued to whisper, ‘“Let go, let go … Only light …” When the breathing ceased, at about six, it was without any struggle.’ Matthew and Peggy Kiskadden were also present as these words from the Tibetan Book of the Dead were uttered. Matthew later told his wife that these were ‘the most anguishing and moving hours of my life … It was over so quietly and gently with Aldous with tears streaming down his face, with his quiet voice not breaking.’5 Gerald Heard observed: ‘She has been wonderfully and gently brave through it all’6 Everyone said that the end had been swift and painless but Maria’s
anxiety not to be a burden to anyone may have led her to minimise her suffering. The Huxleys’ Breton cook, Marie Le Put, one of those devoted family servants who enjoyed such a good relationship with the Huxleys, was interviewed in 1986. She said that, at a lunch party at North King’s Road, Maria had said to her when they were on their own: ‘“Marie, I can’t take it any more. Only you understand what I am going through …” She was in such pain.’7 But at the same time, according to Jeanne, ‘she was not afraid of death’.8
Maria was buried on 14 February in Rose Dale Memorial Park in Los Angeles. There were only a few mourners in addition to the family: Christopher Isherwood, the Stravinskys, Gerald Heard, Eva Herrmann. For some reason the service was in an Episcopalian church not, as might possibly have been expected, a Catholic one. ‘Aldous ashen and worn-looking and there was uncontrolled crying here and there,’9 reported Eva Herrmann. After the funeral, Aldous stayed on at the house for more than two months. It seemed that he wanted to be alone. Eva Herrmann paid a visit on the night of the funeral: ‘The house was dark when A. opened the door. No one else was at home. He had a strong light in his study and was just correcting proofs. You might have thought Maria was in the next room, everything seemed so peaceful.’ A month later Christopher Isherwood organised a dinner for Aldous, Gerald Heard and friends. Huxley was tired after a visit to Grace Hubble at Pasadena. ‘He yawned and kept closing his eyes, and his face was thin and grey … Aldous refers without hesitation to Maria and the times they were together, but he is utterly lacking in any other kind of intimacy.’10 Another month later, just before he went to New York, he was looking no better: ‘He looked so thin and worn. Almost a death mask.’11 On this occasion, Huxley talked about a new kind of radiation that had produced an entirely new kind of cancer in mice. ‘Aldous no longer has the right to mention cancer at all,’ wrote Isherwood angrily. Another, less obtrusive, visitor during these two months was the Huxleys’ friend, Laura Archera. ‘In the months that followed Maria Huxley’s death in 1955, I dined quite often at Aldous’s home,’ she wrote in This Timeless Moment.12 She said he was going through the most difficult period of his life but he got through it by trying to follow the exhortation he
had given Maria: ‘Let go.’ He made a point of accepting all social invitations to keep his mind from brooding and Marie Le Put carried on cooking for him, leaving meals in the fridge. Not knowing about Laura’s visits, she was puzzled at how much he was eating.
In April, having worked all this time at finishing the play with Betty Wendel, he decided to go to New York to discuss a production and to stay with Matthew and his family. It was decided that he would be driven by Rose – in Maria’s Oldsmobile – to New York, a twelve-day trip that Rose was nervous of taking because, without Maria’s constant facilitating, how would people now learn to approach Aldous directly? He had been lent the playwright George Kaufman’s apartment on Park Avenue in New York where he stayed for eight weeks, working on the play and living ‘in a style to which I am not accustomed – penthouse with terraces overlooking the City, French butler and wife (admirable cook) Siamese cat and an enormous library of plays’.13 In the months before this trip, Matthew had written to Jeanne that he had to respect Aldous’s wish for solitude ‘so left him alone in the house’.14 He had been left, as Huxley put it to Edith Sitwell, with ‘this daily and hourly presence of an absence‘.15 To Mary Hutchinson, he wrote: ‘And now her absence is a kind of insistent presence – I am conscious of it constantly. However, I work a great deal, and the mechanics of life have been well-settled.’16 To Jeanne he talked of his loss as an ‘amputation’,17 a metaphor repeated to several correspondents, insisting to Lady Sandwich that life, nonetheless, must go on ‘a life that seems, after the thirty-five years of being two in one, strangely amputated’.18
In July, leaving his New York apartment, Huxley went to stay with Matthew and his family in Guilford, Connecticut in ‘a pleasant 18th century house on a tidal river 2 miles from the sea in the midst of woods & green fields’.19 It was there that he finished off the appendices of Heaven and Hell. To Rina Montini, their favourite old member of staff, he wrote in Italian that: ‘I do not know what I will do next,’20 and to Reginald Pole he said bereavement was ‘a kind of physical shock, as after an amputation, and a continuing sense of the absence of something which ought to be there but is not’.21 In response to a poem on Maria written by Maria’s niece, Claire, Huxley told her: ‘She was more
capable of love and understanding than almost anyone I have ever known, and in so far as I have learned to be human – and I had a great capacity for not being human – it is thanks to her.’22 The precise extent of the contribution that Maria made – from those first tentative days at Garsington to her death in 1955 – to the growth and humanisation of Aldous Huxley is immeasurable.
It was during the early summer that Huxley learned from Eileen Garrett that Maria had, as Huxley solemnly reported, ‘appeared to her several times since her death’.23 Perhaps this sort of thing was what he had in mind when he told Julian on the latter’s birthday that: ‘We both, I think, belong to that fortunate minority of human beings, who retain the mental openness and elasticity of youth, while being able to enjoy the fruits of an already long experience.’24 He had a further sitting in New York with a medium called Arthur Ford, who also reported on Maria’s progress into ‘lightness, youth, gaiety, freedom’.25
In July, Huxley began to write a series of regular articles for Esquire, a magazine which allowed him to combine the sort of fluent lucubrations on the great issues which he did so well, and so effortlessly, with the traditional concerns of a gentleman’s magazine. His efforts to find a producer for the play – there were hopes that Ingrid Bergman would star – continued and The Genius and the Goddess appeared in July after being serialised in Harper’s Magazine. The novel – hardly more than a long short story – is Huxley’s briefest and in its subject matter connects with his earlier novels: the family, lost childhood experiences, the hint of troubled sexuality. It is told in flashbacks (he was once going to call it The Wrong End of the Telescope) and makes much of the unreliability of fiction. ‘The trouble with fiction,’ says John Rivers, ‘is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.’ Early in the novel, Rivers picks up The Life of Henry Maartens the scientist, the ‘genius’ of the title. It is the official biography, or what he calls ‘The official fiction … an unforgettable picture of the Soap Opera scientist – you know the type – the moronic baby with the giant intellect; the sick genius battling indomitably against enormous odds … the absent-minded Professor with his head in the clouds but his heart in the right place …’ Maartens is described as: ‘An idiot where human relations were concerned, a prize ass in all the practical
affairs of life.’ Maarten’s wife, Katy, the ‘goddess’ (who may have had something in her of Frieda Lawrence) comes to Rivers while her husband is dying. The sexual relationship which ensues restores her. ‘I was indirectly responsible for a miracle,’ observes Rivers. Maartens is restored ‘to a state of animal grace through satisfied desire’, a rather Lawrentian conclusion. The book seems to have been a success, selling 20,000 copies in England very quickly with a second printing ordered by August.
Huxley returned to Los Angeles in September, fleeing from the heat of the East Coast in August to an equally hot California with temperatures of over 110 degrees. He had told Grace Hubble that he wanted some time to ‘chew the cud’,26 but the play – and the endless need to rewrite it to please the producers (especially Joseph Anthony whom he liked) – denied him that creative pause. ‘All this jigsaw work entailed in shaping a play for stage production is extremely boring,’27 he complained to Humphry Osmond. After reading about the oddity of the composer Gesualdo, he told Osmond: ‘I always have the feeling, when I read history, or see or listen to or read the greatest works of art, that, if we knew the right way to set about it, we could do things far more strange and lovely than even the strangest and the loveliest of past history.’ This is a characteristic expression of Huxley’s sense of being unsatisfied aesthetically. He was constantly seeking some new sensation that the mere practice of his art would not yield him. He wanted visions, perceptions, mystical experiences that he could not gain unaided by the force of the creative imagination alone. He needed other keys to unlock the doors of perception.
On his return to Los Angeles he was keen to extend his experiments. At lunch with Isherwood on 5 October he was ‘thin and pale but lively and full of talk. He urged me to get him some mescalin in New York, spoke of his play, and discussed money – practically asking me outright how much I have. I told him at once, of course. He has $80,000.’28 A fortnight later he wrote to Humphry Osmond to tell him about another ‘extraordinary experience with mescalin the other day’.29 After reading about a Canadian engineer who had thrown off some childhood traumas through taking LSD, Huxley decided ‘it might be interesting to find out why so much of my childhood is
hidden from me, so that I cannot remember large areas of my early life’. What exactly were these childhood experiences Huxley was denied? He seems to have been preoccupied with the notion – which is of course a commonplace of therapy-that something in childhood was blocked off. In this instance, he took half the contents of a 400mg capsule (the rest forty minutes later) in the company of Laura ‘the first one, as far as I know, alone with an individual, and one which was not a planned scientific experiment,’30 she wrote.
He reported to Osmond: ‘There was little vision with the eyes closed, as was the case during my experiment under your auspices, but much transfiguration of the outer world.’ The desired recovered memory did not come but instead ‘the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact’. He admitted that this sounded like ‘twaddle’ but ‘the fact remains’. Unlike previous experiences this meant that he did not feel cut off from the human world. The experience convinced him that ‘mescalin does genuinely open the door’. According to Laura Huxley, he had his first LSD experience with her in the same month, October 1955 (though she did not join him in taking it). Huxley, however, told Osmond that the first LSD experiment was in mid-December 1955, with Gerald Heard and two others. At this he took 75mg of LSD and found it more potent than mescalin. The results were very similar to mescalin, with no visions, only ‘external transfiguration’.31 In the experiment described by Laura Huxley they listened to Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto together and she quotes directly from descriptions in Island his last novel, that mirror this experience. When the music stopped, Laura got up to deal with the record player and suddenly felt a sense of Maria in the room and then inside herself. It seemed for a moment that she actually was Maria. Then Huxley spoke, extremely firmly yet gently: ‘Don’t ever be anyone but yourself.’ There were numerous further experiments of this kind which can be found in This Timeless Moment, especially in the chapter, ‘Love and Work’.
At the end of the year the play was still ‘in a state of suspended animation’,32 and Huxley reported that he saw few friends and that Maria’s death had ‘deprived me of a pair of vicarious eyes’.33 His relationship with the play’s director, Joseph Anthony, deteriorated in
the new year with the director accusing Huxley of being unwilling to co-operate with him. In January Huxley had yet another mescalin trip in which he thought of Maria ‘and was overwhelmed by intense grief … It was something very painful but very necessary.’34 In February, Heaven and Hell – in a sense a sequel or companion piece to The Doors of Perception with which it was subsequently reissued – was published. Its foreword honestly states Huxley’s need to make use of the artificial road to paradise: ‘For a person in whom “the candle of vision” never burns spontaneously, the mescalin experience is doubly illuminating. It throws light on the hitherto unknown regions of his own mind; and at the same time it throws light, indirectly, on other minds, more richly gifted in respect to vision than his own.’ He anatomised the kinds of visionary experience reached in these experiments, which were ‘strange with a certain regularity, strange according to a pattern’. The visions were not ‘our personal property’ but an Other World into which we were admitted, making contact with ‘the animal otherness underlying personal and social identity’ at ‘the mind’s antipodes’. The book is less personal than The Doors of Perception but more informative about the iconography of visions and their artistic correspondences.
Huxley had sent off to Chatto his latest essay collection, Adonis and the Alphabet, and was continuing to pump out his monthly contributions to Esquire – ‘the only magazine that will print an essay about anything or nothing’35 – at $1000 a time. And then, with astonishment, his friends caught sight of a headline in the Los Angeles Times: ‘NOVELIST HUXLEY WEDS VIOLINIST’. The report was datelined Yuma, Arizona, 20 March and it was the first anyone, including his son Matthew, knew about his proposal to remarry barely a year after Maria had died. Realising his oversight, Huxley sat down on 19 March to explain to a range of correspondents. To Matthew and Ellen he described Laura as ‘a young woman who used to be a concert violinist, then turned movie-cutter and worked for Pascal. I have come to be attached to her in recent months and since it seemed to be reciprocal, we decided to cross the Arizona border and call at the Drive-in Wedding Chapel (actual name). She is twenty years younger than I am [he was sixty-one, she was forty], but doesn’t seem to mind. Coccola
was fond of her and we saw her a lot in Rome, that last summer abroad. I had a sense for a time that I was being unfaithful to that memory. But tenderness, I discover, is the best memorial to tenderness. ’36 Matthew was very hurt by the suddenness of this announcement and the fact that he had to learn of it when people quoted a newspaper report to him. It shows a side of Huxley that was either very insensitive or simply unaware, in his cerebrotonic universe, of what was going on down below in the world of normal human relations. The day before the wedding he had lunch with his old friend Gerald Heard and there was no mention of it. He claimed that his desire for privacy had been ambushed by the press and told Anita Loos: ‘I think some day we shd write a farce called ‘“The Drive-in Wedding Chapel’” … with Jimmy Durante starring as the Minister and various lesser lights driving up, and honking, for a quick nuptial.’37
In her book, Laura wrote that Huxleys, early in 1956, had asked her: ‘Have you ever been tempted by marriage?’38 and she was frank about not wanting to surrender her liberty as a young woman who had already had several careers. The choice of venue seems to have been a combination of frivolity and cocking a snook at convention. A ladies room attendant was pressed into service as one of the witnesses but by the time they emerged some quick-witted local newspaper reporters recognising a good story were on the case. Because Laura was not Maria and could never be, and because she had a career of her own (Maria’s being the full time one of supporting, protecting, managing Aldous) she was always going to risk a certain amount of coolness from friends of Aldous and Maria. The Nys family in particular have tended to make disparaging comments in interviews and letters. But significantly, close friends of Maria and Aldous such as Christopher Isherwood and Anita Loos did not share this view. ‘It is such a pleasure to have a happy event in one’s life like Aldous’s marriage,’ Anita Loos told Betty Wendel. ‘I have seen Laura twice and find her absolutely enchanting. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know the origin of the romance, but how lucky for all of us that she is so divine. When I think of the women who were after him it makes me shudder. ’39 Far from being repentant, Huxley enjoyed recounting the tale of
the ‘broken-down cowboy’ who accompanied the ladies room attendant as a witness – for the benefit of Isherwood who found him ‘deeply happy and in a most benign state of mind’.40
The couple soon thought about moving and found a house at 3276 Deronda Drive in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the house of Virginia Pfeiffer, with whom Laura had been living, ‘with virtually no smog and an incredible view over the city to the south and over completely savage hills in every other direction, hills which remind me of Greece by their barrenness, their steep-sided valleys and the unsullied sky overhead’.41 There were raccoons, coyotes and snakes in the vicinity and there were good walks in the firebreaks, a sign that this countryside was at risk of fire. Huxley was telling everyone that Laura was getting on with his friends and that as he put it to Mary Hutchinson: ‘The pain and sadness of those last months have lost their intensity and my memories of Maria are now predominantly happy memories.’42 He was still convinced, however, that Maria’s spirit was in touch. He told Victoria Ocampo that he was sure ‘she survives and develops’43 and that several people who, unlike himself, were not opaque to voices from beyond, on the basis of ‘contacts’ with her, concluded that ‘she has achieved an extraordinary degree of liberation – that she gives an overwhelming impression of youthfulness and happiness’. The Huxley of the chapel at Beirut who frowned on superstition was not the Huxley of this letter.
He was now at work on his new ‘phantasy’, the revived project of a ‘good Utopian’ novel which would be his last, Island. Revisions to the play still kept breaking in on this task and there was even talk of reviving a musical comedy version of Brave New World. And there were the endless letters to and from Humphry Osmond – the two men having now invented the word ‘psychedelic’ to describe the visionary consequences of the drugs they were exploring. Julian and Juliette came over to visit, and in October he flew to New York to give a speech on ‘The History of Tension’ to the New York Academy of Sciences. The Academy’s publicist was so effective that he had lined up no less than seven television and radio appearances for him. Huxley was beginning to emerge as an adornment of the sort of serious television interview that went out in the 1950s on the networks – less
frequently today – and his brand of elegant and lucid commentary was perfectly adjusted to the format. At the same time he was disinclined to preach, telling a member of the Vedanta Society who asked him to do so, ‘I am not a religious man – in the sense that I am not a believer in metaphysical propositions, not a worshipper or performer of rituals, and not a joiner of churches –and therefore I don’t feel qualified or inclined to tell people in general what to think or do.’44
In October, Huxley’s new essay collection, Adonis and the Alphabet (in the US it would be titled Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) appeared. It was a summing-up of Huxley’s intellectual concerns since the last essay collection in 1950, Themes and variations. The opening essay advocating ‘non-verbal education’ wanted educators to recognise the ‘world of the unconscious intelligences immanent in the mind-body’ as well as the ‘world of self-conscious verbalized intelligence’. It was called ‘The Education of an Amphibian’ and based on the assumption that, ‘every human being is an amphibian … we inhabit many different and even incommensurable universes’. Of no-one was this more true than Huxley. The scientific investigator was also a believer in the spirit world, the non-Christian talked about God, the logical analyst wrote fiction, the unremitting highbrow wrote scripts for Walt Disney, the indicter of ‘the fantastic over-valuation of words’, was a consummate literary artist. And in spite of his obsession with encyclopaedias and factual knowledge, his second essay argued for the vital distinction between ‘Knowledge and Understanding’. Denouncing ‘the learned foolery of scholars’ he praised the dictum of St John of the Cross: know yourself, empty the memory. But there was one word which he was anxious to retrieve for proper use: ‘Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word.’
Huxley the pessimist is again present in these essays. While casting, however, a gloomy eye over the arms race, the ecological ruin of the planet, the rapid growth of world population in relation to food resources, he also exhibited faith in the ability of human beings to
transfigure themselves. ‘I am still optimist enough to credit life with invincibility, I am still ready to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man’s being will ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides.’ Yet, in the essay on the early twentieth century socialist experiment at Llano of Job Harriman and his followers, ‘Ozymandias’, which foundered as human selfishness arose to destroy the co-operative idea, one perhaps has a right to expect more from Huxley. His wryly amused account (‘Except in a purely negative way, the history of Llano is sadly uninstructive’) is all very well but he was an advocate of Utopia who perhaps should have had some answers to the all too common phenomenon of failed idealism. Huxley the futurologist is present in these essays, too. In the essay on ‘Censorship and Spoken Literature’ he seems to anticipate both Internet publishing and the talking book. In the best of these essays, Huxley combines attention to the contemporary world with a sense of wider possibilities. Looking, in the World’s Largest Drugstore, at the appalling Mother’s Day card verses he asks: ‘How is it that we have permitted ourselves to become so unrealistic, so flippantly superficial in all our everyday thinking and feeling about man and the world he lives in?’
At the end of December another newspaper headline was set up in type, this time in the British tabloid, The People. It read: ‘HE HOAXED THE WORLD WITH AN EYESIGHT CURE.’ The story beneath was based on a book called The Truth about Eye Exercises by Dr Philip Pollack, a leading American eye specialist who set out to demolish the claims of Dr Bates and in particular to describe ‘the great Aldous Huxley tragedy’. Pollack described a lecture given by Huxley in the middle of which he faltered and began to bring his eyes closer and closer to the manuscript. ‘At last he took a magnifying glass out of his pocket to decipher the words. Huxley was not cured. But he had tried to convince himself that he was. He had memorised the script, but had forgotten one passage.’ The moral drawn by The People was that one should not throw away one’s glasses if one did not wish to fall victim to ‘a great American hoax’. Chatto told Huxley that the article and the book might well be actionable but he told them that it was best to do nothing about it, either because he felt the issue
too trivial or because he feared that there might well have been a grain of truth in what was described. Although this was clearly part of an anti-Bates backlash, he admitted that he had ‘never claimed to be able to read except under very good conditions’.45 This was not necessarily what was claimed on Huxley’s behalf. This incident was probably the address given by Huxley in April 1952 to the Screen Writers’ Guild of America, without glasses. The diarist of The Saturday Review who described it, said it was: ‘An agonizing moment, not improved by scattered titters from embarrassed onlookers.’46 Such accounts raise the puzzling question of why Huxley put himself in this position and what he hoped to achieve – if the reports are true – by attempting to create a false impression. It remains doubtful whether he had anything other than the briefest of intermissions in his struggle to see adequately.
1
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 5 February 1955. Author’s translation
3
Huxley’s own account of the death is given in This Timeless Moment, pp20–25
4
RL, Letter from Suzanne Nicolas to Jeanne Neveux, 3 March 1955
5
SB2.187. Letter from Matthew Huxley to Ellen Huxley. Undated
6
UCLA, Letter from Gerald Heard to Lucille Kahn, 10 November 1955
7
HL, Oral History Transcripts, Interview between David King Dunaway and Marie Leput, 10 July 1986
8
Reading, Letter from Jeanne Neveux to Harold Raymond, 5 September 1955
9
UCLA, Letter from Sybille Bedford to Allanah Harper, 25 February 1955 quoting Eva Herrmann’s words
10
Isherwood Diaries, p482,18 March 1955
11
Ibid. P490, 8 April 1955
12
This Timeless Moment, p27
14
RL, Letter from Matthew Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 26 February 1955
15
HRC, Letter to Edith Sitwell, 6 March 1955
16
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 7 March 1955
17
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 27 March 1955
18
HRC, Letter to Amiya Corbin, Lady Sandwich, 17 April 1955
19
Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 18 April 1955
20
RL, Letter to Rina Montini, 27 May 1955. Author’s translation from Italian
21
NYPL, Letter to Reginald Pole, 17 June 1955
26
HL, Letter to Grace Hubble, 26 July 1955
28
Isherwood Diaries, p535, 5 October 1955
30
This Timeless Moment, p138
35
Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 3 January 1956
38
This Timeless Moment, p35
39
HRC, Letter from Anita Loos to Betty Wendel 23 April 1956
40
Isherwood Diaries, p598, 25 March 1956
42
HRC, Letter to Mary Hutchinson, 10 July 1956
46
The Saturday Review, 12 April 1952