Celebrity
Huxley’s unquenchable belief in the possibility of theatrical success ensured that he would persist throughout 1957 in the struggle to get The Genius and the Goddess staged on Broadway. This would finally happen on 10 December but the play survived for only five nights. ‘Why does anyone write for the theatre? It’s just asking for trouble,’1 he declared in January. Two years of his writing life had been wasted – it seems the appropriate word – on this project (not to mention work on rewriting Ralph Rose’s stage version of After Many A Summer and attempts to buy back the rights of Brave New World from RKO, which also involved approaching Stravinsky about writing a few numbers for the musical, then Leonard Bernstein). Two years that might have been put to more interesting creative use. It was also exhausting. At a dinner party in April, Christopher Isherwood found him ‘tired and sleepy’2 though one of his other guests, the young English poet Thom Gunn, was thrilled to meet the legendary older writer. Early in 1957 changes at Esquire meant his services were no longer required but the loss of $1000 a month (‘this convenient and well-paid pulpit’3) would not have troubled him for royalties continued to be high – English earnings alone being in excess of £4000 a year. In the spring he got together with a group of friends – Julian, Harrison Brown, Kingsley Davis, Fred Zinneman, Bill Kiskadden – in
order to make a documentary film on population, concentrating on the illustrative example of Egypt.
Huxley was also beginning to accept offers to lecture. In his youth this had been a painful duty and he had hated it but in his last years in California he took to it and offers increased steadily. In April he spent three days at Stanford talking to students ‘of Creative Writing, whatever that is’4 and was then at the University of New Hampshire and in New York. Stanford went well and he became involved with the comparative religion and post-graduate English classes. He told Osmond that ‘the young people were nice and some of their elders were very interesting’.5 He was now the senior man of letters, the itinerant intellectual and visiting campus guru, always a commodity in demand.
On 18 July Huxley left for New York to supervise the play (earlier Peter Brook had read the script but declined it) and spent the rest of the summer there, also making ‘slow progress’6 on a book of essays, Brave New World Revisited. Laura, who was in her native Turin seeing her father, wrote to Jeanne that there was ‘a shadow of tiredness’7 in Huxley’s letters from New York where he was staying at the Shoreham Hotel. He managed to see the Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – ‘what a lot of slapdash shoddy stuff surrounding the twenty or thirty masterpieces!’8 In November, however, things started to go badly wrong with the play. The producer Courtney Burr made changes that were unacceptable and Huxley and Betty Wendel threatened to withdraw. What one commentator described as ‘a weak, conventional domestic comedy’ created by Burr and his collaborator Alec Coppel out of their play opened in New Haven on 13 November and the following week at Philadelphia – where it turned out Burr had inserted lines secretly rehearsed. Betty Wendel and Laura Huxley attended a performance on 23 November and Huxley threatened to terminate rights. On the eve of the short, disastrous New York run Huxley declared at last: ‘I have wasted more than four months, which might have been profitably employed in doing my own work. The experience has been unpleasant and … boring. It has also been highly educational. We live and learn.’ But Huxley was unwilling to learn from the new practitioners. He could not comprehend the ‘consistent
mindlessness’9 of the characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays and was stuck in a more conventional playwriting mould. He flew back to Los Angeles with Laura, suitably chastened.
A few days later, a group of students from the Los Angeles School of Journalism arrived at Deronda Drive to interview the celebrity author. He told them about his blindness and how he had conquered it and how it cut off the medical career he had aspired to: ‘I happen to like writing very much … I feel quite sure that if I had been a doctor I should have been a pretty bad doctor and got out of it pretty quickly.’10 They asked him whether the old, satirical Huxley had been lost to the new thinker: ‘I don’t think I’ve sacrificed the old one. I hope I still write fairly funny things from time to time. I hope I’ve added another dimension; this is what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve maybe failed. I think in a certain sense the satirical side is the necessary complement to the other.’ Before the students left he warned them of the pitfalls of journalism: ‘It’s an awfully good field to get into, if you make very sure that you get out of it.’
In the spring of 1958 Huxley finished Brave New World Revisited, many of whose chapters had already appeared in the press during 1956 and 1957, and planned a trip to South America at the invitation of the Brazilian government. He was complaining to Julian about being too busy: ‘Why does one have to be? It seems absurd and unnecessary; but there it is.’11 A little later he told Matthew’s wife, Ellen, ‘I am sick and tired of this kind of writing; but at the same time find it frustratingly difficult to find the right story line for my projected Utopian novel.’12 This was to be Huxley’s last major fictional work, Island, the novel he had promised for so long, the story that would show the mirror image of Brave New World, the picture of the good and right society – or, as he put it to Jeanne: ‘Le Meilleur des Mondes à rebours, créatif, positif.’13 Just before the Huxleys left for Brazil in July Huxley was interviewed on television – the first of several television interviews over the ensuing months – by Mike Wallace. It was essentially an opportunity to publicise some of the ideas about ‘over-organisation’ in modern societies that he would develop in Brave New World Revisited. ‘Huxley Fears New Persuasion Methods Could Subvert Democratic Procedures’ was the headline in The New York Times on
19 May. The FBI tuned in and took notes, an internal memo dredging up yet again Huxley’s attendance in 1935 at the International Authors Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris, which according to a French publication turned up by the spooks had been exposed as ‘a Communist plot to take over France’ – a singularly ineffective one it would seem. Since the ideas expounded in the Mike Wallace interview were about the defence of freedom of the individual against the state one can’t help feeling that the FBI was wasting its time monitoring the broadcast.
The trip to Brazil taught Huxley how much of a celebrity he now was. ‘I was simultaneously touched and appalled to discover that I am now, as the result of having been around for so many years, a kind of historical monument, which sightseers will come quite a long way to inspect, and which radio and press reporters find newsworthy,’14 he told Osmond on his return. ‘In Brazil it was as though the Leaning Tower of Pisa had just come to town, wherever I blew in; and even in Italy I found myself in large theatres. It was really very odd and embarrassing.’ Laura Huxley, in her book, describes stopping off in the middle of the Brazilian jungle on the way to Brazilia and meeting members of a primitive tribe. A ‘frail-looking’ white man arrived and, realising it was Huxley: ‘With tears streaming down his cheeks, he approached him saying, “Uxley, Uxley … Contrapunto …” The two men embraced. Aldous too was moved.’15 After Brazil they went to Italy and to Turin. Laura left Aldous at a café table in Corso Vittorio Emanuele while she went shopping. When she returned, he handed her a letter he had written: ‘A letter to tell you that you really must be a strega [sorceress] – otherwise why should I keep falling more and more in love with you? … I love you very much and only wish I could love you more and better – could love you so that you would be well always, and strong and happy; so that there would never be that discrepancy between a tragic suffering face and the serenity of the nymph’s lovely body with its little breasts and the flat belly, the long legs … that I love so tenderly, so violently.’16 Whatever the truth of Huxley’s second marriage – whether it was indeed as ‘open’ as his first on both sides – the genuineness of his love for Laura is beyond doubt from this letter.
After Italy, Huxley (at first on his own) went on to see Julian and Juliette in London. This visit was ‘very agreeable, and I saw vast numbers of people from Bertie Russell to Rose Macaulay … and … Tom Eliot (who is now curiously dull – as a result, perhaps, of being, at last, happy in his second marriage)’.17 Jeanne’s daughter, Noèle, met Huxley in London: ‘A strange feeling about Aldous, he hasn’t changed, he has only aged. The English climate doesn’t suit him. No cutting of the Nys link. Coccola isn’t forgotten. He speaks of her frequently and tenderly … He is dressed in a grey suit with a red tie.’18 While in London, Huxley was interviewed by John Lehmann on 12 October for the BBC television programme, Monitor. He told Lehmann, disarmingly, that he would be ‘flattered’ to be considered a novelist but perhaps the claim was ‘fraudulent’ and he was no more than an essayist. But he had not lost faith in the novel: ‘You can do whatever you like with it. There are no rules except to do it well.’ On 26 October he made another appearance, with Julian, the philosopher Freddie Ayer, and the neurologist, Grey Walter on another BBC programme, The Brains Trust. The four gentlemen, with their well-bred voices and public school forms of address (‘What do you think, Ayer?’) discoursed on a number of questions that seemed to have been tailored to Huxley’s concerns. He was more precise than Julian and relaxed and fluent in his answers, eminently reasonable in tone. He brought out some of his hobby-horses about over-population and the exhaustion of natural resources, and made several references to eminent American scientists and researchers at the highest levels with whom he was evidently in close contact. He defended his interests in the paranormal (‘The evidence in favour of telepathy seems fairly solid … And clairvoyance’) and in mysticism. The author of Language, Truth and Logic listened politely, only pointing out that mystical knowledge was all right so long as it wasn’t regarded as ‘cognitive’.
After London Laura joined him in Paris and they went on to Venice. Huxley lectured in Turin, Milan, Rome, and Naples – in spite of an attack of ’flu. He wrote from Turin to Julian and Juliette to say how much he had enjoyed the ‘delightful’ joint television appearances. ‘When shall we three meet again? In these days of jets and
international congresses, almost anything may happen … I shall always remember these weeks in London as a specially happy and significant time.’19 He would make three more visits to London in the years that now remained to him and it is clear that California had not erased his love for the pleasures it could still offer him. But when he returned to Deronda Drive in December he admitted he was ‘glad to be back in a quiet place after 5 months of globe-trotting, interviewgiving, TV appearances, lectures and meeting people’.20 He was coming back to a great deal of work – on the novel and on the lectures he was to give at Santa Barbara. He told Chatto he was working ‘like a termite’ at the lectures. ‘I am not attempting to write them out, but am feverishly collecting & organising materials, so that I may be able to deliver them extempore, but with some measure of sense.’21 These lectures at the University of California at Santa Barbara would be published posthumously in 1978 as The Human Situation and they reveal the full breadth of his concerns about ‘this push towards catastrophe’ 22 of the contemporary world. But at the start of 1959 he told Julian: ‘The trouble with all these talks about culture is that they distract one from doing the things that make a culture worth having and eat up the time and energy that should go into one’s work.’23
In October 1958, while in London, Brave New World Revisited was published. This short book displayed once more Huxley’s gift for concise and clear argument and is powerful evidence for his own case that he was more effective as an essayist than as a novelist, at least by this stage in his writing career. Where his last novel would creak under the weight of its exposition and disappoint in its lack of fictional invention and imagining, his last two prose works, Brave New World Revisited and Literature and Science, were models of pellucid reasoning. The subject of the book was announced as ‘freedom and its enemies’. He pointed out that when Brave New World was being written in 1931, ‘I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically-induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching – these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my
grandchildren … Twenty-seven years later … I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when writing Brave New World … The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning.’ He predicted a ‘nightmare of total organization’ and in so doing revealed himself as essentially a liberal humanist thinker, defending the freedom of the sentient individual, resistant to bullying by the State, propaganda, conditioning by advertising and marketing, and brainwashing. This was a tradition that had its roots among the Victorian intellectuals from whom the Huxleys sprang, and, in spite of the best efforts of late twentieth century academic theorists, it remains a strong and pertinent and remarkably resilient tradition.
In his chapters on ‘education for freedom’ Huxley sketched a mode of resistance, ‘an education first of all in facts and values – the facts of individual diversity and genetic uniqueness and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity which are the ethical corollaries of these facts’. He called for decentralisation and small self-organising communities (even within the great metropolises where people were increasingly forced to live) to resist ‘the current drift towards totalitarian control of everything’ and turn back the powers of ‘Big Business and Big Government’. He knew that many people were not interested in such a resistance (‘Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty’) but he knew – as we know nearly fifty years later – that without such a resistance movement the enemies of freedom would triumph.
Huxley spent the whole of 1959 lecturing at Santa Barbara and working on his last novel, Island. In January he invited Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy to lunch. ‘He looked tired and older,’24 thought Isherwood, who was slightly resentful of Huxley and Heard for implying, it seemed to him, that their visionary insights under mescalin and LSD were somehow spiritually superior to his. Huxley may also have been upset by the news that Matthew and Ellen were splitting up. In a letter to Matthew, counselling him to show understanding to his ex-wife, he wrote: ‘Huxleys especially have a tendency not to suffer fools gladly – and also to regard as fools people who are merely different from themselves in temperament and habits. It is
difficult for Huxleys to remember that other people have as much right to their habits and temperament as Huxleys have to theirs … So do remember this family vice of too much judging.’25
In May Huxley flew to New York to collect the award of merit for the novel presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters – further evidence of his status as a ‘historical monument’. His eyesight continued to create problems. He was fond of walking and, one night in August, while doing so alone near the house, he stumbled and fell and considered that he had had ‘a providential escape’.26 He hurt his back and was in pain for two or three weeks. But it did not stop him working away at ‘my Utopian novel, wrestling with the problem of getting an enormous amount of diversified material into the book without becoming merely expository or didactic. It may be that the job is one which cannot be accomplished with complete success … I am trying to lighten up the exposition by putting it into dialogue form, which I make as lively as possible. But meanwhile I am always haunted by the feeling that, if only I had enough talent, I could somehow poetise and dramatise all the intellectual material and create a work which would be simultaneously funny, tragic, lyrical and profound. Alas, I don’t possess the necessary talent …’27 Once again Huxley’s searingly honest powers of self-criticism had accomplished what the critics would later merely echo. Chatto must have had some apprehensions when he told them that the book was developing ‘a horrid way of going backwards as new ideas occur to me and have to be incorporated into earlier chapters, so that what lies ahead still remains unexplained.’28 Throughout the summer and autumn he worked away stoically: ‘my subliminal self always tends to work rather sluggishly – creating not in first fine careless raptures, but in a series of second and third thoughts, which compel me to go back and change or add to or cut out from the material provided by my first thoughts.’29 And offers to lecture poured in – from India and from the Menninger Foundation at Topeka. The latter, he told Osmond, was ‘the holy of holies of American psychiatry’.30
Huxley broke off one morning in the autumn to admit some students from UCLA who interviewed him for West Wind. They found him ‘astonishingly tall and gaunt – like one of Daumier’s spectral
studies of Don Quixote. His face is bloodless, lined. The aristocratic, aquiline nose of all the photographs is there. A nervous, long-fingered hand passes and repasses through his receding hair … His manner is at all times patient, polite – and absolutely detached.’31 Huxley confessed: ‘Unfortunately I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I would like. I have to ration my reading due to the fact that I have this visual handicap, and so I don’t read as many contemporary novels as I ought to.’ That ‘ought’ is significant. They asked him about television and he replied in the same tone of mandarin courtesy: ‘I’m not in a position to talk about TV because I don’t own a set … I like seeing Mr Khruschev and things like that on TV … It’s a sort of Moloch which demands incessant human sacrifice … the people who write for it just go quietly mad.’ Huxley may have been reflecting the view of many screenwriters who had not successfully managed the transition to the small screen and who saw cinema under threat from television in the 1950s.
The interview encapsulated Huxley’s public image at this time: the grave and courtly intellectual speaking in the accents of another time and place, almost preternaturally cerebral. Around this time he received a letter from Rosamund Lehmann who had developed an interest in spiritualism and who seems to have sent him some sort of report of Maria. He felt that the account was uncharacteristic of her. He conceded that she might have said that ‘my excessive intellectuality was a bar to mystical experience’32 but in a different tone. He told her that Maria would sometimes compare him to the eponymous hero of the Chinese story Monkey who was ‘too unmitigatedly cerebral’. He added: ‘Her great desire was that I should be less isolated, more closely in contact with more kinds of people.’ And for good measure he rejected the ‘legend’ that he was in the habit of travelling with all twenty-eight volumes of the Encylopaedia Britannica and using it for information in lieu of a guidebook.
Throughout the next year it would be ‘Monkey’, the walking cerebellum, that would take centre stage as Huxley lectured far and wide. Progress on the novel would be slow as he moved from one campus to another elaborating his warnings about the planet and the careless custody of it exercised by its human stewards.
1
UCLA, Letter to Mrs Leon Lazare Roos, 21 January 1957
2
Isherwood Diaries, p744. 2 April 1957
6
Reading, letter to Ian Parsons 16 July 1957
7
RL, Letter from Laura Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 26 September 1957
10
UCLA, Interview with Aldous Huxley by students of LA School of Journalism, December 1957, ‘Library of Living Journalism’
13
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 29 March 1958
15
This Timeless Moment, pi26
18
RL, Note by Noèle Neveux in Nys family papers. Author’s translation
19
Eton, Letter to Julian and Juliette Huxley, 21 November 1958
20
HRC, Letter to Ralph Rose, 6 December 1958
21
Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 4 January 1959
22
The Human Situation (1978) edited by Piero Ferrucci, p83
24
Isherwood Diaries, P797, 10 January 1959
28
Reading, letter to Ian Parsons, 20 October 1959
31
UCLA, West Wind, Fall, 1959
32
King’s College Cambridge, Letter to Rosamund Lehmann, 16 November or December, 1959