Aldous Huxley: The Devils of Loudun

ON 26 JULY 1894, near Godalming in Surrey, Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a family which had only recently become synonymous with the intellectual aristocracy. Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had earned notoriety as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and fame as a populariser of science, just as his own probing and controversial works were destined to outrage and exhilarate readers and non-readers alike in the following century. Aldous Huxley’s mother was a niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and he was a nephew of the redoubtable Mrs Humphry Ward, doyenne of late-Victorian novelists. This inheritance, combining the scientific and the literary in a blend which was to become characteristic of his vision as a writer, was both a source of great pride and a burden to Huxley in his formative years. Much was expected of him.

Three traumatic events left their mark on the young Huxley. In 1908 his mother died of cancer, and this led to the effective break-up of the family home. Two years later, while a schoolboy at Eton, Huxley contracted an eye infection which made him almost completely blind for a time and severely impaired his vision for the rest of his life. The suicide of his brother Trevenen in August 1914 robbed Huxley of the person to whom he felt closest. Over twenty years later, in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Huxley’s treatment of the death of the main character’s mother and his embodiment of ‘Trev’ in the novel as the vulnerable Brian Foxe give some indication of the indelible pain which these tragic occurrences left in their wake. To a considerable degree, they account for the darkness, pungency and cynicism which feature so prominently in Huxley’s work throughout the inter-war period.

Within months of achieving a First in English Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford in 1916, Huxley published The Burning Wheel . Huxley’s first collection of verse, and the three which followed it, Jonah (1917), The Defeat of Youth (1918) and Leda (1920), reveal his indebtedness to French symbolism and fin de siècle aestheticism. Also discernible, however, beneath the poetry’s triste and ironic patina, is a concern with the inward world of the spirit which anticipates Huxley’s later absorption in mysticism. These volumes of poetry were the first of over fifty separate works of fiction, drama, verse, criticism, biography, travel and speculative writing which Huxley was to produce during the course of his life.

Unfit for military service, Huxley worked as a farm labourer at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor after he left Oxford. Here he met not only D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Mark Gertler and other Bloomsbury figures, but also a Belgian refugee, Maria Nys, whom he married in 1919. By then Huxley was working for the Athenaeum magazine under the adroit editorship of Middleton Murry. Soon after he became the first British editor of House and Garden , worked for Vogue and contributed musical criticism to the Weekly Westminster Gazette in the early 1920s.

Limbo (1920), a collection of short stories, preceded the appearance of Crome Yellow in 1921, the novel with which Huxley first made his name as a writer. Inspired by, among others, Thomas Love Peacock, Norman Douglas and Anatole France, Huxley’s first novel incorporated many incidents from his sojourn at Garsington as well as mischievous portraits of its chatelaine and his fellow guests. More blatantly still, Crome Yellow is an iconoclastic tilt at the Victorian and Edwardian mores which had resulted in the First World War and its terrible aftermath. For all its comic bravura, which won acclaim from writers such as Scott Fitzgerald and Max Beerbohm, Crome Yellow may be read, along with Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and Huxley’s second novel Antic Hay (1923), as an expression of the pervasive mood of disenchantment in the early 1920s. Huxley told his father that Antic Hay was ‘written by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind’. He went on to say that it was intended to reflect ‘the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch’.

Even as a schoolboy Huxley had been an avid browser among the volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and it did not take long for him to acquire a reputation for arcane eclecticism. Moreover, as his prestige as a debunker and an emancipator grew, so Huxley was condemned more roundly by critics of the old guard, such as James Douglas of the Daily Express , who denounced the explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction. Antic Hay was burned in Cairo, and in the ensuing years many of Huxley’s books were censured, censored or banned at one time or another. Conversely, it was the openness, wit, effortless learning and apparent insouciance of Huxley’s early work which proved such an appetising concoction for novelists as diverse as Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Anthony Powell and Barbara Pym. Angus Wilson called Huxley ‘the god of my adolescence’.

From 1923 onwards Huxley lived abroad more or less permanently, first near Florence and then, between 1930 and 1937, at Sanary on the Côte d’Azur. In Along the Road (1925), subtitled ‘Notes and Essays of a Tourist’, Huxley offered a lively and engaging account of the places and works of art he had taken in since his arrival in Italy, and both the title story of his third collection of tales, Little Mexican (1924), and his third novel, Those Barren Leaves (1925), are set in that country. According to Huxley, the theme of Those Barren Leaves is ‘the undercutting of everything by a sort of despairing scepticism and then the undercutting of that by mysticism’. For W.B. Yeats, Those Barren Leaves heralded the return of philosophy to the English novel, but it was with his fourth novel, Point Counter Point (1928), that Huxley cemented his reputation with the reading public as a thought-provoking writer of fiction. Point Counter Point is Huxley’s first true ‘novel of ideas’, the type of fiction with which he has become most closely identified. He once explained that his aim as a novelist was ‘to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay’, arguing that the novel should be like a holdall, bursting with opinion and arresting ideas. This privileging of content over form was one of the many things he had in common with H.G. Wells; it was anathema to the likes of Virginia Woolf. Huxley was fascinated by the fact that ‘the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc’, and one of his key aims in Point Counter Point was to offer this multi-faceted view of his principal characters.

Huxley’s more sombre mood in the late 1920s was epitomised by Proper Studies (1927), the most important of the four volumes of essays he published during the decade, and the one in which he first set himself unequivocally against what he regarded as the vulgarity and perversity of mass civilisation. Between September 1925 and June 1926 Huxley had travelled via India to the United States, and it was this visit to America which made him so pessimistic about the cultural future of Europe. He recounted his experiences in Jesting Pilate (1926). ‘The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values,’ Huxley wrote, ‘a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards’, and it was soon after visiting the United States that Huxley conceived the idea of writing a satire on what he had encountered.