Aldous Huxley
SELECTED LETTERS
Edited by James Sexton
497pp. Chicago, IL: Dee. $35.
978 1 56663 629 2
Aldous Huxley and Maria Nys met at Garsington in 1916. He was in his early
twenties, she still in her teens. She was exceptionally attractive – as her
photographs show. They married in 1918 and lived together happily and more
or less inseparably until her death in 1955. That event is recorded with a
mixture of dignity, devotion and utter wretchedness in a letter from Huxley
to their son Matthew, included in James Sexton’s new selection. Cancer had
reached Maria’s liver, leaving her unable to keep down even fluids, but her
husband managed to relieve the nausea by hypnotizing her. This was
particularly difficult to do because he kept wanting to cry.
It was always clear to people who knew her that Maria was bisexual and that
she had been in love with Ottoline Morrell. What was kept a close secret was
that the marriage went through a long period during which both Maria and
Aldous were sexually involved with Mary Hutchinson – a writer, married to a
barrister. She was also, but less discreetly, a mistress of Clive Bell’s.
(An unflattering portrait of her by Bell’s wife, Vanessa, is now in the
Tate.) Mary Hutchinson lived until 1977. She was a friend of T. S. Eliot and
his first wife, a supporter of Samuel Beckett, an important figure in many
aspects of the arts in Britain, including, later, the Royal Shakespeare
Company. Her papers are now in the Ransom Center at Austin, Texas. They
include 134 letters from Aldous and 375 from Maria. Mary’s to them, on the
other hand, did not survive a fire at Huxley’s Los Angeles home in 1961.
“Literally nothing remains of the house or its contents”, he wrote to
Matthew at the time. “I am now a man without possessions and without a
past.”
In the late 1960s and early 70s, when Cleveland Grover Smith’s edition of
Huxley’s letters and Sybille Bedford’s otherwise intimate two-volume
biography appeared, Mary Hutchinson was still alive and her papers had not
been fully catalogued. Bedford wrote that the Huxleys had been
“sophisticated people who were not afraid to experiment”, but left the
details to the reader’s imagination. James Sexton’s Selected Letters, by
contrast, while involving many correspondents and themes, has that affair at
its centre. The book fails to do justice to it; inevitably so. How could a
triangle be represented by a single line between two points (and travelling
in only one direction)? Not only are Mary’s letters to both Maria and Aldous
missing, but the single-author approach excludes Maria’s to Mary. Aldous and
Maria, meanwhile, had less need to write to each other because they lived
together. In any case, much of their early correspondence, too, was lost in
the fire.
Another problem, from the reader’s point of view, is that while Huxley’s
personality was multitudinous, Hutchinson brought out only its showiest,
archest side – unremitting displays of erudition combined with remorseless
suggestiveness:
"Your letter, Mary, was altogether charming and reminded me – albeit
superfluously, for I think of it constantly without need of such memento
vivere’s – of what Shakespeare calls, marvellously (let us add our floral
tribute)
“The stealth of our most mutual entertainment.”
How mutual it was, Mary! At least I inferred as much – scientifically, on good
behaviourist grounds and without resort to either my or your introspection;
which however confirmed the observed facts, I think."
A little of this sort of thing goes a long way but Sexton includes about a
hundred of Huxley’s letters to Hutchinson, some of them not only very long
but full of his self-absorption at its most extreme. On a visit to India,
for example, he unstintingly describes scenery, local customs and expat
behaviour to Mary, perhaps forgetting that she had spent her early childhood
there, having been born into a line of colonial administrators uninterrupted
since her great-great-grandfather served as Warren Hastings’s private
secretary.
Not that a reader of this volume will learn anything from it about
Hutchinson’s background. The annotation is as arbitrary-seeming as if the
letters had been parcelled out to a mixed-ability group of students as an
exercise and then sent off to the printers with no further intervention.
(This could also be true of the transcription, at least on the evidence of
the fact that “owing to”, perfectly legible and sense-making in the
manuscript illustrated on page 96, is rendered unintelligible in the printed
text as “going into”.) The popular novelist and literary journalist Naomi
Royde-Smith makes unheralded (and at first unindexed) appearances in letters
from 1922 on and is herself among Huxley’s correspondents from 1926. Not
until 1931, though, half- way through the book, does the editor suddenly
vouchsafe to us who she was. The flamboyant Francis Rodd, on the other hand,
a contemporary of Huxley’s at Eton and Balliol, mentioned just once in a
letter of 1918, is immediately but uselessly glossed with the sole
information that, twenty-seven years later, he became President of the Royal
Geographic Society. A letter to Mary Hutchinson mentioning “Jeremy” and
“Peggy [Ashcroft]” is unaccompanied by any explanation that these are her
son and daughter-in-law. We’re told at some length what the Mappin Terraces
are, but not who Benjamin Robert Haydon was. Most enjoyably, a letter
beginning “Dear Sir” – evidently to a newspaper editor – is given the
Molesworthian heading, “To Sir”.
Even, or especially, when readers are most likely to look for help, the editor
is dumb. On October 11, 1916, Huxley writes to Ottoline Morrell: “I was
amused by the mélange of abuse and middle-aged patronage to which I was
favoured by the Times Literary Supplement. It would be pleasant to meet the
critic in order to tell him one was not such a black-hearted fellow as all
that”. What is this about? There is no footnote. Huxley’s first book of
poems, The Burning Wheel, had appeared a month earlier, but it wasn’t until
The Defeat of Youth, in 1918, that he was reviewed in the TLS. In the issue
of October 5, 1916, though, the paper noticed the latest novel by Huxley’s
prolific aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward. Lady Connie is set in the Oxford of the
1880s, but anyone who knew its author’s nephew would have been struck by how
the principal male character, Douglas Falloden, resembled him. In the
reviewer’s words:
"This young man is not at first placed in a very amiable light. He
appears – how many others have appeared so – as an exceptionally brilliant
undergraduate, tall . . . well-born, and so forth, who is just about to take
his First. And a fine, selfish, domineering animal he is . . . ."
Falloden is among the heroine’s suitors and instigates an undergraduate
“ducking” expedition against one of his rivals, Radowitz, a pianist, whose
right hand is permanently injured in the scuffle. This is the
“black-hearted” act about which the brilliant, tall Huxley, with his recent
First in English, etc, jokes in his letter. The anonymous reviewer,
incidentally – as James Sexton could have found out with much less
difficulty than Huxley himself – was a sexagenarian parliamentary editor and
chess-problem compiler at The Times, Arthur Brodribb.
There are wonderful things in these letters: dazzling historical,
literary-critical and etymological excursions; very funny gossip;
reflections on Huxley’s writing, not least as the Andrew Davies of 1940s
Hollywood (his screenplays included Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre), and
on his increasingly religious reading and sympathies; patient, firm,
practical advice to the many writers who sent him their work for comment
(“You would do better, I believe, to leave the book for a year or two,
forget it, then take it out, read it with new eyes and re-write it . . . .
All this is not, I fear, very immediately helpful. But I think it may be
helpful in the long run”). We see Huxley doing his best to protect D. H.
Lawrence’s literary estate from Frieda Lawrence’s worst impulses; working
closely with Dick Sheppard on the Peace Pledge Union; and, in 1935, using
every gay contact he had in his eventually successful efforts to set up
Isabelle von Schönebeck (soon, Bedford) with a marriage not so much of
convenience as of preservation: she was Jewish and would otherwise have been
sent back to the camps. Huxley mounts a persuasive defence of Appeasement in
a 1938 letter to Naomi Mitchison; then, writing to Raymond Mortimer three
years later, takes the opposite line. We also learn something of the brisk,
get-on-with-it approach to life and death with which the First World War had
forced people of Huxley’s generation and class to replace the very different
customs of the Victorians. Every letter he writes to someone bereaved is
constructed on a simple antithesis, usually in the form of two paragraphs –
as in the case of Clive Bell on the death of his son Julian in the Spanish
Civil War: first, condolence. “There is no consolation, but . . . I would
like to tell you how deeply we both sympathize . . . .” Second, distraction.
“Some day you should come and explore this very strange country [New Mexico]
. . . where we are spending the summers on a mountain, 9,000 feet up,
overlooking a desert that is completely empty except for . . . .”
It is a pity such material has not been served better. And it is something
else that a book dominated by the Huxleys’ relationship with Mary
Hutchinson, and claiming to publish relevant letters for the first time,
makes no mention of Nicholas Murray’s Aldous Huxley (2002), in which the
affair is sensitively recounted and the most vivid and interesting parts of
the surviving correspondence – including Maria’s side of it – are quoted
with intelligent selectivity.
Jeremy Treglown's books include biographies of Henry Green and V. S.
Prtchett. His edition of Roald Dahl's Collected Stories was published in
2006.
