XXXVI
Fire
In January 1960, in an unusually cold Southern California – snow down to 2500 feet and frost on the oranges – Huxley resumed work on ‘my Utopian fantasy’,1 telling Julian that it ‘presents extraordinary difficulties’. A few days later he was informing Matthew that it ‘already runs to more than 200 pages and shows no sign of coming to an end – indeed, I don’t yet know how the damned thing is going to end’.2 This sounded rather inauspicious. He admitted to Ian Parsons at Chatto that he had been ‘disturbed by the low ratio of story to exposition’,3 and, after discussions with Christopher Isherwood, he had tried to remedy the defect ‘by the introduction of a brand new personage’. Jeanne was told that the book was ‘horriblement difficile à écrire’.4 The now certain dissolution of Matthew’s marriage was another lowering event, and Huxley found himself having to do what he did not do best, advise on the conduct of ordinary life, which he did by quoting Dante at the couple and telling them that they must find a way out of the ‘dark wood’. This same gap between ‘the conceptual and constitutional’ was one he highlighted in John Midddleton Murry, whom he had not seen since the late 1930s, and whose biography had just appeared. He said that Murry was ‘divided against himself (as so many intellectuals are)’,5 a fact that had so provoked Lawrence.
Huxley spent March and April 1960 as a Visiting Professor at the Menninger Foundation at Topeka, Kansas, which he described as ‘this curious world centre of psychiatric training. There are more lunatics here per square mile and more analysts than anywhere else, I imagine, in the solar system. My stay will, I hope, be educational, at least for me.’6 Never an admirer of Freud, Huxley felt that Freudian ideas held too much sway at Topeka ‘as tho’ a multiple amphibian cd be cured of his troubles by psychology alone, and psychology of only one, not too realistic brand’.7 The Middle West was under eighteen inches of snow, now melting, so he had to wade about in rubber boots ‘like a salmon fisher’. No sooner had his spell in Kansas finished than Huxley was off to lecture to a capacity audience at Berkeley and to the Idaho State College at Pocatello. Huxley was receiving good financial news from his publishers and was clearly in funds so it is not clear why he accepted so many of these speaking engagements when he had a book to write – unless it was a means of escape from a novel that refused to respond to his touch.
In May, Huxley flew with Laura to San Francisco to the Moffitt Hospital to be examined. Although he asked everyone, including Bill Kiskadden who knew all the details, to keep it a secret, including from Matthew, he was suffering from cancer of the tongue. Surgery would have involved removing half the tongue, a possibility which Huxley rejected, preferring to explore the potential of radium needle treatment, which would leave his speech unaffected. Dr Max Cutler, who had been a consultant to Maria during her cancer, was brought in. Cutler later said he found Huxley a ‘remarkable’ man. ‘His interest in his own case was minimal, but he had a tremendous interest in the creative aspects of science and medicine. He considered his own illness as a curious phenomenon which extended his own capacity for experience.’8 The tongue responded to treatment and healed completely, but within a year and a half Cutler found himself having to remove a cancerous gland from Huxley’s neck for diagnosis. Other glands appeared soon afterwards. Unfortunately news got out that he was in hospital and he had to write to Matthew saying he had been suffering from ‘a laryngitis that has made eating and talking very hard’.9 By September, however, he was well enough to attend a ‘Convocation on the Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine’ at Dartmouth College, followed by a flight to Boston and then a visit to New Hampshire where he received an honorary degree. He also lectured at the University of Pittsburgh. He was not one of those enthused by the election of John F. Kennedy as President, in part because of the ‘distasteful’ presence of old Joe Kennedy and his millions ‘lurking in the background of the young crusader’.10 He was still taking LSD, though disappointed as always by his inability to visualise.
And in September a new reason for not writing Island came along – a Carnegie Visiting Professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The residency would be for nine weeks and it paid $9000. It was ‘an interesting job in an interesting place.’11 He told Chatto that the book might be finished by the end of the year, depending on the amount of leisure left to him by MIT. He was very much looking forward to Cambridge, Mass., because ‘MIT has a galaxy of topflight scientists on its payroll’.12 Humphry Osmond paid him a visit at Cambridge and was shocked by the first signs of the cancer and his appearance, ‘worn, tired, and pale’.13 From Cambridge he corresponded with the English dramatist John Whiting who was adapting The Devils for the stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon. Huxley gave plentiful and detailed comments on Whiting’s script. The lectures which Huxley gave at MIT – on the topic, no less, of ‘the problem of human nature’14 – were hugely popular. He spoke from a sheaf of notes and loudspeakers had to relay his voice outside when the hall was full. On some of these Wednesday nights the traffic across the Charles River was jammed, with extra police being called out. He generously invited students back to his campus apartment at 100 Memorial Drive but found time also in the mornings to press on with the novel.
Back in Los Angeles for Christmas he worked ‘like a madman’15 on the novel which he hoped to finish by the spring. In January 1961, he and Laura went to Hawaii for a week ’the excuse being some lectures, the motive a wish to look at the islands which I haven’t seen for many years’.16 This was followed by a conference on Control of the Mind at San Francisco. If he was tired and unwell, he was not slackening his pace. Hawaii would also give him some time with Laura whom he would not have seen a great deal of during these last months. He admired her work in psychotherapy, telling Jeanne about her ‘remarkable results – for she is full of resource and has a real intuitive gift’.17 He would later write an introduction to her book of ‘recipes for living’, You Are Not The Target (1963).
In January 1961, Huxley was approached by Claire Eschelbach, who was working on a bibliography of his writing. He agreed to write a foreword but confessed, ‘I stand appalled at the thought of all I have written over the years’.18 What he had not written was Island, but he told Ian Parsons: ‘I hope to have the damned thing done by May’.19 After that he planned to go to London and he asked Parsons to fix him up with a service apartment with kitchen so that he could make his own meals, ‘for one gets very bored with unmitigated Club or restaurant food, & likes to do a little picknicky cooking for a change’. He told Ian Parsons that he was ‘weary’20 of the novel but had had a sudden inspiration to call it Island – ‘Brief & to the point as the phantasy is placed in a hypothetical island between Ceylon & Sumatra, & the society described is an island of relative sanity in a world of madness.’ He had to go back to MIT in early April to deliver a centennial address but he did finish the book by June. Even before he finished it he was planning a travel book on the West Coast of America, paid for by a Ford Research Professorship at Berkeley to be taken in 1962. This was another volume that would never materialise. More immediately, he planned to be in Copenhagen for a psychology conference in mid-August, then Italy, then India for a few weeks in late October. But in May all these plans were to receive rather a severe jolt.
May began well, with Max Cutler giving Huxley a clean bill of health and pronouncing him one of his most successful cases. Radical surgery had been avoided. But on 12 May, in the early evening, Laura was returning from a psychotherapy session she had been giving when she stopped at the nearby house of her friend Virginia Pfeiffer to feed the cat (Virginia was away). Then she suddenly noticed the red car of a fire chief and saw smoke and flames coming from the canyon below. The wind was up and she heard a siren. What followed next depends on Laura’s account; Huxley gave no details himself. She herself described it as ‘unexplainable’. Normally she acted decisively, but in this instance, in spite of the fact that two houses were threatened – her own and Virginia’s (the latter the house of her closest friend where she had spent ‘some of the most momentous years of my life’21), she ‘stood immobile, fascinated by the wild grace of the flames, by the ever changing voice of the wind’. She went into Virginia’s house and took out some papers then drove home to tell Aldous who was upstairs at work. They then drove down the hill to attend to the fire before realising that it might spread to their own home. The roads were blocked by fire vehicles but a stranger came forward to offer to drive them back to Deronda Drive. Huxley had the presence of mind, when he saw the flames approaching, to seize the manuscript of Island while Laura walked through the house, seemingly mesmerised by the flames, incapable of seizing anything. Aldous appeared with some suits on a hanger which jolted her into doing the same and then she remembered her Guarneri violin, which she rescued, along with a Chinese porcelain statue. And they were driven away – ‘I was unaware of anything except how beautiful everything was’.
This whole episode is very strange. Why, when the flames had not yet reached the house, did they not rescue more items? Why was there this paralysis of will? The fire destroyed so much that was precious to Huxley (including, effectively, the archive of his entire first marriage). It was material which would have made the work of biography so much easier: Maria’s pre-war journal, her letters to Suzanne which had been sent to Aldous because he was thinking of writing an autobiography, the love letters between Aldous and Maria which, in a tin box, had followed them in all their journeys through Europe and Southern California. And there was Huxley’s library with its copious annotations on every book. There was the manuscript of Lawrence’s ‘St Mawr’, fragments of two unfinished novels, letters from Lawrence, Paul Valéry, Max Beerbohm, Wells, Virginia Woolf, H.L. Mencken. There was Thomas Huxley’s first edition of Candide, Huxley’s Proust, in the original 1915 Mercure de France edition, and of Lady Chatterley, as well as his own first editions and editions signed by T.S. Eliot, Gide and others.22
The television cameras and reporters were immediately on the scene and some colourful fictions were woven, including one that Huxley had ‘wept like a child’ (in fact, in another odd episode, he had gone off in his car with a local teenager with the plan, at such a moment, to fill up the car with gas). Huxley wrote to Time magazine to challenge this account. ‘As an old hand at fiction, may I congratulate the write-up artist who penned the account of my actions.’ In the aftermath of the fire the couple checked in to a hotel in Franklin Avenue for two weeks, then Huxley went to stay with Gerald Heard at Santa Monica until he left for London on 15 June. He carried on writing and the book was finally finished before he went to England. On 17 May he had written to Matthew: ‘I am now a man without possessions and without a past. This last I regret as much for you as for myself; for what has gone is a piece of your life and heart and mind as well as of mine. But there is nothing to do except try to start from scratch.’23 To a friend, Robert Hutchins, he wrote: ‘I am evidently intended to learn, a little in advance of the final denudation, that you can’t take it with you.’24 To another friend, Alan Napier, he said that what he missed most were his telephone and appointment books: ‘One is lost! I think I’m supposed to go to India in September to talk about something – but I’ve no idea where, when, or what about.’25 When asked by Sybille Bedford how he had coped he said simply: ‘One goes out and buys a toothbrush.’26 To Anita Loos, he described the denuded feeling as a sensation of being ‘clean’ and to Humphry Osmond he declared: ‘I took it as a sign that the grim reaper was having a good look at me.’27 His response was truly oriental. Among the first titles with which he wished to restock his library were, significantly, Mallarmé, Gide, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Apollinaire.28
More worryingly, however, than the losses in the fire, he had discovered that the cancer in the mouth had returned, though at first he kept it from Laura, thinking that she had enough anxiety to cope with. From London, where everyone noticed his tiredness and greyness, he wrote to Laura from his flat at 4 Ennismore Gardens, ‘a fantastically quiet apartment overlooking a large garden full of trees’.29 He was met by Julian and Juliette at the airport and went out to Surrey with Julian one day to see Prior’s Field again. ‘There are trees in the school garden which I remember being planted and which are now 60 feet high with trunks 6 feet round. They look as if they had been there for 300 years … After California everything is extraordinarily green and luxuriant.’ Revisiting his childhood home, Laleham, he reflected ‘How posthumous one feels!’ Although Huxley came to England on his own he poured out a series of long, loving letters to Laura throughout June and July, telling her of his activities, which included visits to Gervas and Elspeth Huxley in Wiltshire, and attempts to plan a trip to Russia, which foundered over visa delays.
It was in London that Huxley gave a long television interview to John Chandos. Astonishingly neither the BBC nor the National Sound Archive has managed to preserve a copy of this interview but long extracts from it are printed in Sybille Bedford’s biography.30 He told Chandos that ‘One can be agnostic and a mystic at the same time’ and regretted that the modern world lacked potent symbols, ‘cosmic symbols’, only nationalist flags and swastikas. He accepted that it was not possible to have ‘the flower of mysticism without the drug of superstition’ and argued that religion is ‘infinitely ambivalent … there are good and bad sides to it’. He said he had remained in California because he had found someone who could help him with his vision and because Maria needed a hot, dry climate. He revealed he had taken mescalin twice and LSD five times: ‘I’d like to take it once a year. I wouldn’t want to wallow in it.’ All his drug experiences had been ‘very positive’ and the ‘gratuitous grace’ it gave (a term from Catholic theology of which he was very fond) yielded an experience which he characterised as: ‘The Universe is All Right. Capital A, Capital R.’
The Devils was now playing in London and he was pleased with it. And the manuscript of Island, which had crossed the Atlantic at about the same time as his BOAC jet, was now being examined by Chatto in London and Harper’s in New York. Correspondence between the two publishers had indicated they felt it ‘too rambling’, especially the ‘Notes on What’s What’ section. They also felt the characters were ‘wooden’ and were simply vehicles: ‘I guess we have to accept that, for this book is really a long essay in fictional form and I doubt that he would take the time to put more flesh on the characters.’31 Chatto had rightly surmised that Huxley wanted no more to do with the novel. He did, however, accede to the cuts and promised to send a revised version. Huxley never disagreed with his publishers on such matters and was always very co-operative.
On 15 July, the book now off his hands, he left for a parapsychology conference organised by Eileen Garrett at Le Piol, St Paul de Vence in the South of France and went from there to stay with Jeanne and Georges Neveux at Vaison-la-Romaine. From there he went to Gstaad in Switzerland, where he was at last joined by Laura at the Palace Hotel. They met Krishnamurti at Gstaad, who had not seen Huxley for five years. According to Laura, he immediately noticed the improvement in Huxley’s vision, references to his ‘blindness’ at this time and later, striking her as highly inaccurate.32 He also met Yehudi Menuhin and his wife at Gstaad. From there the Huxleys went on to Italy to see Laura’s family, then Copenhagen for the conference on applied psychology where Huxley gave a paper on the visionary experience. Then they went to Zurich to meet Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, then Bergeggi and Turin. They arrived in London on 12 September. Huxley remained there for another three weeks while Laura returned to Los Angeles. The Huxleys would stay thereafter at Virginia Pfeiffer’s house in Mulholland Highway. The couple had exchanged letters in the summer, drawing facetious plans for the house they would build on the site of the one destroyed, but they never did so and remained at Mulholland Highway until Huxley’s death. Laura Huxley lives there still. In November they were off again to India for the Tagore Centenary celebration at New Delhi. At Madras they stayed with Krishnamurti then returned via Colombo, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. India he found ‘almost infinitely depressing’ because of its social and political problems. He predicted a military dictatorship when Nehru went.
Huxley spent January and February 1962 at Berkeley as ‘a visiting Ford Professor with no functions’,33 hoping that it would allow him to do his West Coast travel book in the manner of Beyond the Mexique Bay. This idea might be interesting and educational, he thought, ‘for how little one knows, really, about anything! And how grossly incurious one remains about so many things, what an enormous number of intrinsically astonishing achievements one merely takes for granted!’34 Huxley knew a great deal more than most people but was true to his motto, aun aprendo. I am still learning. With some foreboding, he corrected the proofs of his last novel, ‘wondering if the book is any good’. He was not alone in that apprehension.
1
L.884
2
L.885
3
L.886
4
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 11 January 1960
5
L.888
6
Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 26 March 1960
7
L.888
8
Mem. Vol., p125
9
L.892
10
L.893
11
L.898
12
Reading, letter to Ian Parsons, 30 August 1960
13
Mem. Vol. p120
14
SB2.265–72 gives a full account of the professorship
15
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 27 December 1960. Author’s translation
16
L.901
17
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 11 January 1960. Author’s translation
18
L.903
19
Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 12 March 1961
20
Reading, Letter to Ian Parsons, 8 January 1961
21
This Timeless Moment, pp69–82
22
UCLA, inventory compiled by Jake Zeitlin, 6 June 1961
23
Cited in This Timeless Moment, p82. Letter to Matthew Huxley, 17 May 1961
24
L.912
25
Quoted in Christopher Rand, Los Angeles: The Ultimate City (1967), p46n
26
SB, in conversation with the author
27
Mem. Vol., p121
28
RL, Letter to Jeanne Neveux, 4 June 1961
29
This Timeless Moment, p84. Letter to Laura Huxley, 17 June 1961
30
The National Sound Archive has an unofficial tape of part of the interview from which quotations here are drawn
31
Reading, Letter from Ian Parsons to Cass Canfield at Harper’s, 19 June 1961
32
This Timeless Moment, p63
33
L.926
34
L.927