Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

Home , Dora Carrington, Garsington Manor, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Leonard Huxley (writer), Lytton Strachey

Chapter 1 Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey. He came from a distinguished intellectual lineage: his grandfather was T.H. Huxley, who was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his advocacy of evolution- ary theory; and his great-uncle was the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. His childhood was marked by three traumatic episodes: in 1908, his mother Julia died of cancer; three years later, at the age of sixteen, he contracted an eye infection (keratitis punctata) that permanently impaired his eyesight; and in 1914, his brother Trevenen committed suicide.1 The unforgiving satire and cyni- cal assessments of human nature that mark Huxley’s early work can be inter- preted as a response to these tragedies.2 After attending Eton, Huxley read English at Balliol College, Oxford (1913– 1916). He had originally intended to study biology like his brother Julian (1887–1975), but his damaged eyesight rendered lab work impossible.3 At the outbreak of World War i, he initially shared the patriotic enthusiasm of his peers, but by March 1916 he was expressing his disgust with the war in a letter to Julian, and maintaining that in retrospect he’d have been a “conscientious objector, or nearly so”.4 But he never had to take this stance officially as he was rejected for military service as a result of his poor eyesight.5 His sympathy for conscientious objectors may have been encouraged by his friendship with Lady Ottoline Morrell, who invited Huxley to her home, Garsington Manor, on November 28, 1915,6 and thereafter he became a frequent guest, and socialised

1 See Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (London: Abacus, 2003), 20, 29–30, 37–38. 2 See David Bradshaw, “Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)”, in Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2004), xvii–xviii and Julian Huxley, Memories, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972–73), 1: 65. 3 David Bradshaw, “‘A Blind Stay-at-Home Mole’: Huxley at Oxford, 1913–1916”, Aldous Huxley Annual 12/13 (2012–13): 196. 4 Smith, Letters, 97. 5 See Murray, Aldous Huxley, 60, 100. 6 Much to my chagrin, I have twice previously given this date in articles as November 29, 1915. I was led astray by the fact that Huxley’s name appears in the Garsington visitor’s book under this date (see George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, eds., The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 452). However, in Smith, Letters, 86, Huxley writes to his father on December 8, 1915, that he visited Garsington “on Sunday”, i.e. the twenty-eighth, rather than Monday November 29. This also makes sense of the fact that

14 chapter 1 with notable pacifists such as Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey. It was through the agency of Morrell that in December 1915 Huxley met D.H. Lawrence, who became a great friend and mentor to Huxley a decade later.7 At Garsington, Huxley first encountered many eminent artists and in- tellectuals, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington, as well as the Belgian refugee Maria Nys (1898– 1955), whom he married in 1919. While W.B. Yeats also became a Garsington regular, his first visit was in December 1919,8 after Huxley’s visits had all but petered out (Huxley spent a week at Garsington at the end of July 1920 and did not visit again before quarrelling with Morrell over Crome Yellow in December 1921), and there is no evidence that they met.9 It was as an undergraduate at Oxford that Huxley became interested in mysticism. In a letter to Julian in December 1915, he affirms: “One cannot escape mysticism; it positively thrusts itself, the only possibility, upon one”.10 There’s a jaunty pageantry in Huxley’s early letters and I’ve no doubt that Huxley is being hyperbolical here. One might expect Julian Huxley, as a scientist, to be sceptical about mysticism, but as a boy at Eton he reports a few episodes of ex- trovertive experience.11 In an interview in 1961, Huxley recalled reading Jacob Boehme at Oxford and “having various Catholic friends who knew a certain amount about the mystical tradition in Catholicism”; he read mystical texts during this period “with a mixture of admiration and hostility”.12 In a letter to the critic Chad Walsh, Huxley reports that he derived the title of his first volume of poetry, The Burning Wheel (1916), from Boehme.13 Huxley may well have read Boehme as a result of references to him in Blake, whose work he

D.H. Lawrence’s name appears under the November 29 entry, but Morrell notes that when Huxley visited, she and her husband were alone. 7 See James Sexton, ed., Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 20. For more on the influence of Lawrence, see Chapter 2 and Jake Poller, “The Philosophy of Life-Worship: D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley”, D.H. Lawrence Review 34–35 (2010): 75–91. 8 See R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 2., 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 158. 9 See Smith, Letters, 188–189, for his letters from Garsington in July 1920, in which he men- tions the presence of Eliot at a party on August 1 but not Yeats. 10 Smith, Letters, 88. 11 See Julian Huxley, Memories, 1: 50. 12 From Sybille Bedford’s transcript of the BBC John Chandos interview with Aldous Huxley recorded on July 7 and 11, 1961, in the Huxley archive of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 13 Chad Walsh, “Pilgrimage to the Perennial Philosophy: The Case of Aldous Huxley”, Journal of Bible and Religion 16, no. 1 (January 1948): 7.