Jake Poller on Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

Jake Poller

reaktion books

For Ayako

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First published 2021

Copyright © Jake Poller 2021

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

isbn 978 1 78914 427 7

Contents

Abbreviations 7

Introduction: Island Universes 9

1 Bildung and Roman, 1894–1921 15

2 Dangerous Liaisons, 1921–8 39

3 Intimations of Technocracy, 1928–33 61

4 The Oceanic Feeling, 1933–9 81

5 The Perennial Philosophy, 1939–45 102

6 Following the Tao, 1945–54 129

7 Death and the Moksha-medicine, 1954–63 153

Epilogue 176

References 183

SelectBibliography 201

Acknowledgements 206

PhotoAcknowledgements 207

Abbreviations

ae Ape and Essence [1948] (London, 2005)

ah Antic Hay [1923] (London, 1990)

amas After Many a Summer [1939] (London, 2015)

bnw Brave New World [1932] (London, 2004)

ce Aldous Huxley Complete Essays, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, 6 vols (Chicago, il, 2000–2002)

cp The Collected Poetry of Aldous Huxley, ed. Donald Watt (London, 1971)

cy Crome Yellow [1921] (London, 2004)

dl The Devils of Loudun [1952] (London, 2005)

dp The Doors of Perception [1954] and Heaven and Hell [1956] (London, 1977)

eg Eyeless in Gaza [1936] (London, 1977)

gg The Genius and the Goddess [1955] (London, 1982)

hh The Doors of Perception [1954] and Heaven and Hell [1956] (London, 1977)

i Island [1962] (London, 2005)

jp Jesting Pilate [1926] (London, 1948)

lah Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London, 1969)

pcp Point Counter Point [1928] (London, 1986)

pp The Perennial Philosophy [1945] (New York, 2004)

sl Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. James Sexton (Chicago, il, 2007)

tbl Those Barren Leaves [1925] (London, 2005)

tmhs Time Must Have a Stop [1944] (London, 1982)

Introduction: Island Universes

The work of Aldous Huxley is haunted by the notion of ‘island universes’. In The Devils of Loudun (1952), he asserts that humans ‘long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that tiny island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined’ (dl, 78). On one level, Huxley’s longing for transcendence can be traced to his body. At the age of sixteen, an inflammation of the cornea permanently impaired his eyesight. As an adult, he was plagued by respiratory complaints and chose to live abroad as soon as he was able in order to avoid the brumous British winter, but even in the temperate climates of Italy, the south of France and California he was beset by influenza, bronchitis and pneumonia. His friend Gerald Heard wrote that ‘Huxley’s body hurt quite a lot most of the time; a little nearly all of the time; intensely, far too often.’1 He was also dogged by eczema, hives and oedema and suffered from piles in his twenties. It was because of his beleaguered body that he pursued such (at the time) unconventional treatments as the Alexander technique, the Bates method and colonic irrigation and submitted to faddish diets.

Huxley put great stock in the American psychologist William Sheldon’s psycho-physical classification, and believed it explained many things about his personality. Sheldon identified three body types: the soft fat endomorph, the large-boned muscular mesomorph, and the small-boned lanky ectomorph. These body types were correlated with three temperaments: viscerotonia is

characterized by love of food, company and ceremony; somatotonia is associated with ‘love of muscular activity, aggressiveness and lust for power’; while cerebrotonia is marked by nervousness, shyness and introversion. Huxley classified himself as a ‘cerebrotonic ectomorph’, a type he described in passing as ‘almost insanely sexual’ as a result of their ‘over-sensitiveness’ (pp, 149–50). Given his Sheldonian classification, it is perhaps no surprise that Huxley attempted to transcend the island universe of himself through sex, but libidinousness, as can be seen from his satirical early fiction, only led to loneliness and jealousy. Indeed, part of Huxley’s early reputation derived from his frank treatment of sexuality and his depiction of hedonistic flappers whose restless promiscuity was an index of their anomie.

The second sense of the ‘island universe’ is one of social isolation. In The Doors of Perception (1954), he writes:

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain . . . From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. (dp, 11–12)

Throughout his work, Huxley acutely chronicled the frustration, confusion and humour that arise from social interactions. After a comic misunderstanding with the hearing-impaired Jenny Mullion in Crome Yellow (1921), the young poet Denis Stone reflects: ‘Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines’ (cy, 15). Another significant feature of cerebrotonia that chimed with Huxley was a distaste for displays of emotion and an almost total inability to communicate one’s feelings. This made him a terrible father and, at least with his first wife Maria, a fairly indifferent husband. In his diary Christopher Isherwood recorded

Gerald Heard as confiding ‘that Maria, just before she died, told him that she had no idea if Aldous really loved her or not’.2 It is worth noting, though, that Heard had a highly competitive friendship with Huxley, and consequently he – and the bitchy Isherwood for that matter – cannot be completely trusted.

The third sense of the ‘island universe’ relates to the phenomenal world, to ‘one damned thing after the other’, as Huxley sometimes put it. In the poetry anthology Texts and Pretexts (1932), he writes: ‘Our experience is divided up into island universes. We jump from one to the other – there are no bridges.’3 Huxley is contrasting this sense of everything being isolated and unconnected to the ‘all feeling’ of mysticism, in which the multiplicity of the world is revealed as the surface illusion of a much greater, deeper unity. The phrase ‘island universe’ originated with Immanuel Kant, who back in the eighteenth century speculated that the cloudy objects (spiral nebulae or ‘island universes’, as Kant dubbed them) observed by astronomers could be other galaxies. At the time the Milky Way was considered to be the only galaxy, and it was not until 1923 that Edwin Hubble was able to confirm that these island universes did indeed lie outside the Milky Way.4 Never had the universe, which had just increased in size exponentially, seemed more awesome. Huxley would come to conceive of the cosmos, and everything in the cosmos, from atoms to ants to human beings and stars, as an emanation from the divine Ground of Being. He believed that mystics made contact with this godhead, the divine Ground, and from this ineffable experience they derived teachings that bore a genealogical resemblance to the teaching of mystics from different eras and religious traditions. The implication being that these otherwise disparate mystics had an experience of the same godhead, rather than an exclusively Christian, Jewish or Muslim God.

During the Second World War Huxley compiled an anthology of these mystical teachings that he titled The Perennial Philosophy (1945). From 1935 onwards, he hoped that mysticism would furnish

him with a bridge between his island self and the rest of the world. But while he attempted to lead a more ascetic lifestyle and practised meditation, he had to wait another two decades until, under the influence of mescaline, he was able to experience this cosmic unity for himself. Mescaline afforded him the perfect means of selftranscendence. There was a collapse of conventional subject–object dualism. In the mystical phase of the psychedelic experience, Huxley writes, ‘the world is now seen as an infinite diversity that is yet a unity, and the beholder experiences himself as being one with the infinite Oneness that manifests itself, totally present, at every point of space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual perishing and perpetual renewal.’5 Psychedelic drugs also helped Huxley to overcome his emotional allergy. In a mescaline experiment from 1955, not long after Maria’s death, he handed his guide Laura Archera (who would become his second wife) a piece of paper on which he had written: ‘I want to know, and constantly be in, the state of love.’6 In a letter to the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, he writes that during this trip he was able to experience ‘love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact’ (lah, 769). In a subsequent session the following year, he was finally able to weep over Maria’s death and that of his mother, who had died of cancer when he was fourteen.

Huxley also used the term ‘island universes’ as a metaphor for different and often incommensurable varieties of knowledge. In the novel Time Must Have a Stop (1944), the narrator refers to the ‘island universes of discourse’ (tmhs, 270). Huxley often complained that academics knew a great deal about their own specialisms, but almost nothing about the other island universes outside their field. As an author and essayist, Huxley saw his role as a bridgebuilder between these different island universes, and made a conscientious effort to stay abreast of scientific developments as well as literature and the arts, parapsychology as well as psychiatry, the new physics and metaphysics. Huxley came from a formidable

line of educators. His father Leonard Huxley had been an assistant master at Charterhouse School. His mother Julia Arnold had single-handedly established the Prior’s Field School in Godalming, Surrey, and served as its headmistress. Julia was the niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School and one of Lytton Strachey’s eminent Victorians. Huxley’s grandfather, the renowned scientist T. H. Huxley, held a number of different teaching posts, including professor of biology at the Normal School of Science, where he exerted a great influence on H. G. Wells. Huxley’s sister Margaret would also found her own school in Bexhill, Sussex, with her partner Christabel Mumford.

This is a comparatively brief ‘Critical Life’ of Huxley, and I’ve had to leave out quite a bit of his extensive oeuvre. Huxley published six volumes of poetry, but I only analyse a small selection. However, I believe that his poetry has not been unjustly neglected; it lacks the affecting simplicity of D. H. Lawrence at his best (I’m thinking here of ‘The Ship of Death’), or the astounding, wrong-footing originality of W. B. Yeats (‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’). Huxley’s essays, on the other hand, deserve a much wider readership. He published eight essay collections in his lifetime but composed countless others for a wide array of magazines, newspapers and journals, and his Complete Essays run to six unwieldy volumes. Consequently, I have only been able to touch on a handful of his essays. This is a pity as Huxley’s great gift as a writer was not for storytelling or characterization but for the lucid exposition of ideas, and as such the essay was the perfect vehicle for his talent. He often lamented that he was not a ‘born novelist’ but was able ‘to simulate a novelist’s behaviour not too unconvincingly’. This failing was due, he believed, to his ectomorphic body, for he notes that the most fertile novelists who painted on a broad social canvas were all ‘burly genial fellows’, in other words viscerotonic endomorphs, such as Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens (lah, 516). Huxley

also wrote plays and published five volumes of short stories and three books of travel writing, but space does not permit more than a glancing examination of them.

The present book is not the only biography of Huxley. Inevitably, each biographer offers a variegated portrait of Huxley that is inflected by her own interests and idiosyncrasies. I am indebted to Sybille Bedford’s two-volume life of Huxley, but Bedford would never have revealed that she was Maria’s lover while they both lived in Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France; nor that Bedford’s friend and former lover, the artist Eva Herrmann, slept with Huxley.

Bedford also chose to omit Huxley’s affair with the socialite Mary Hutchinson. Fortunately, I do not share Bedford’s aristocratic German politesse. David King Dunaway’s biography, Huxley in Hollywood (1989), is very good on the America years (1937–63).

Nicholas Murray did some magnificent archival work in his 2002 biography, for instance fishing up the affair with Hutchinson. But I think it is fair to say that neither Bedford, Dunaway nor Murray possessed a scholarly understanding of the subjects of mysticism and alternative spirituality – without which, I believe, a nuanced understanding of Huxley’s work is impossible. The professor of religion Dana Sawyer wrote with authority and sympathy about Huxley’s vacillating spiritual interests in his 2002 biography, but did not examine his fiction in any depth. The distinguishing feature of this biography is that I have devoted an equal amount of space to the life and the work. Given the perennial pertinence and profundity of Huxley’s thinking, I very much doubt my biography will be the last.