Among serious novelists, Aldous Huxley is surely
the wittiest and most irreverent. Ever since the early twenties, his name has
been a byword for a particular kind of social satire; in fact, he has
immortalized in satire a whole period and a way of life. In addition to his ten
novels, Huxley has written, during the course of an extremely prolific career,
poetry, drama, essays, travel, biography, and history.
Descended from two of the most eminent
Victorian families, he inherited science and letters from his grandfather T. H.
Huxley and his great-uncle Matthew Arnold respectively. He absorbed both
strains in an erudition so unlikely that it has sometimes been regarded as a
kind of literary gamesmanship. (In conversation his learning comes out spontaneously,
without the slightest hint of premeditation; if someone raises the topic of
Victorian gastronomy, for example, Huxley will recite a typical daily menu of
Prince Edward, meal by meal, course by course, down to the last crumb.) The
plain fact is that Aldous Huxley is one of the most prodigiously learned
writers not merely of this century but of all time.
After Eton and Balliol, he became a member of the
postwar intellectual upper crust, the society he set out to vivisect and
anatomize. He first made his name with such brilliant satires as Antic
Hay and Point
Counter Point, writing
in the process part of the social history of the twenties. In the thirties he
wrote his most influential novel, Brave New World, combining satire and science fiction in
the most successful of futuristic utopias. Since 1937, when he settled in
Southern California, he has written fewer novels and turned his attention more
to philosophy, history, and mysticism. Although remembered best for his early
satires, he is still productive and provocative as ever.
It is rather odd to find Aldous Huxley in a suburb
of Los Angeles called Hollywoodland. He lives in an unpretentious hilltop house
that suggests the Tudor period of American real-estate history. On a clear day
he can look out across miles of cluttered, sprawling city at a broad sweep of
the Pacific. Behind him dry brown hills rise to a monstrous sign that dominates
the horizon, proclaiming hollywoodland in aluminum letters twenty feet high.
Mr. Huxley is a very tall man—he must be six feet
four—and, though lean, very broad across the shoulders. He carries his years
lightly indeed; in fact he moves so quietly as to appear weightless, almost
wraithlike. His eyesight is limited, but he seems to find his way about
instinctively, without touching anything.
In manner and speech he is very gentle. Where one
might have been led to expect the biting satirist or the vague mystic, one is
impressed instead by how quiet and gentle he is on the one hand, how sensible
and down-to-earth on the other. His manner is reflected in his lean, gray,
emaciated face: attentive, reflective, and for the most part unsmiling. He
listens patiently while others speak, then answers deliberately.
INTERVIEWER
Would
you tell us something first about the way you work?
ALDOUS HUXLEY
I
work regularly. I always work in the mornings, and then again a little bit
before dinner. I’m not one of those who work at night. I prefer to read at
night. I usually work four or five hours a day. I keep at it as long as I can, until
I feel myself going stale. Sometimes, when I bog down, I start reading—fiction
or psychology or history, it doesn’t much matter what—not to borrow ideas or
materials, but simply to get started again. Almost anything will do the
trick.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you do much rewriting?
HUXLEY
Generally,
I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts. And I
correct each page a great deal, or rewrite it several times as I go along.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you keep a notebook, like certain characters in your novels?
HUXLEY
No,
I don’t keep notebooks. I have occasionally kept diaries for short periods, but
I’m very lazy, I mostly don’t. One should keep notebooks, I think, but I
haven’t.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you block out chapters or plan the overall structure when you start out on a
novel?
HUXLEY
No,
I work away a chapter at a time, finding my way as I go. I know very dimly when
I start what’s going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the
thing develops as I write. Sometimes—it’s happened to me more than once—I will
write a great deal, then find it just doesn’t work, and have to throw the whole
thing away. I like to have a chapter finished before I begin on the next one.
But I’m never entirely certain what’s going to happen in the next chapter until
I’ve worked it out. Things come to me in driblets, and when the driblets come I
have to work hard to make them into something coherent.
INTERVIEWER
Is
the process pleasant or painful?
HUXLEY
Oh,
it’s not painful, though it is hard work. Writing is a very absorbing
occupation and sometimes exhausting. But I’ve always considered myself very
lucky to be able to make a living at something I enjoy doing. So few people
can.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you ever use maps or charts or diagrams to guide you in your writing?
HUXLEY
No,
I don’t use anything of that sort, though I do read up a good deal on my
subject. Geography books can be a great help in keeping things straight. I had
no trouble finding my way around the English part ofBrave
New World, but I had to do an enormous amount of reading up on
New Mexico, because I’d never been there. I read all sorts of Smithsonian
reports on the place and then did the best I could to imagine it. I didn’t
actually go there until six years later, in 1937, when we visited Frieda Lawrence.
INTERVIEWER
When
you start out on a novel, what sort of a general idea do you have? How did you
begin Brave
New World,
for example?
HUXLEY
Well,
that started out as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods, but gradually it got out of hand and
turned into something quite different from what I’d originally intended. As I
became more and more interested in the subject, I wandered farther and farther
from my original purpose.
INTERVIEWER
What
are you working on now?
HUXLEY
At
the moment I’m writing a rather peculiar kind of fiction. It’s a kind of
fantasy, a kind of reverseBrave New World, about a society in which real efforts are made to
realize human potentialities. I want to show how humanity can make the best of
both Eastern and Western worlds. So the setting is an imaginary island between
Ceylon and Sumatra, at a meeting place of Indian and Chinese influence. One of
my principal characters is, like Darwin and my grandfather, a young scientist
on one of those scientific expeditions the British Admiralty sent out in the
1840s; he’s a Scotch doctor, who rather resembles James Esdaile, the man who
introduced hypnosis into medicine. And then, as in News
from Nowhere and
other utopias, I have another intruder from the outside world, whose guided
tour provides a means of describing the society. Unfortunately, he’s also the
serpent in the garden, looking enviously at this happy, prosperous state. I
haven’t worked out the ending yet, but I’m afraid it must end with paradise
lost—if one is to be realistic.
INTERVIEWER
In
the 1946 preface to Brave New World you make certain remarks that seem to
prefigure this new utopia. Was the work already incubating then?
HUXLEY
Yes,
the general notion was in the back of my mind at that time, and it has
preoccupied me a good deal ever since—though not necessarily as the theme for a
novel. For a long time I had been thinking a great deal about various ways of
realizing human potentialities; then about three years ago I decided to write
these ideas into a novel. It’s gone very slowly because I’ve had to struggle
with the fable, the framework to carry the expository part. I know what I want
to say clearly enough; the problem is how to embody the ideas. Of course, you
can always talk them out in dialogue, but you can’t have your characters
talking indefinitely without becoming transparent—and tiresome. Then there’s
always the problem of point of view: who’s going to tell the story or live the
experiences? I’ve had a great deal of trouble working out the plot and
rearranging sections that I’ve already written. Now I think I can see my way
clear to the end. But I’m afraid it’s getting hopelessly long. I’m not sure
what I’m going to do with it all.
INTERVIEWER
Some
writers hesitate to talk about their work in progress for fear they’ll talk it
away. You aren’t afraid of that?
HUXLEY
No,
I don’t mind talking about my writing at all. In fact, it might be a good
practice; it might give me a clearer notion of what I was trying to do. I’ve
never discussed my writing with others much, but I don’t believe it can do any
harm. I don’t think that there’s any risk that ideas or materials will
evaporate.
INTERVIEWER
Some
writers—Virginia Woolf, for example—have been painfully sensitive to criticism.
Have you been much affected by your critics?
HUXLEY
No,
they’ve never had any effect on me, for the simple reason that I’ve never read
them. I’ve never made a point of writing for any particular person or audience;
I’ve simply tried to do the best job I could and let it go at that. The critics
don’t interest me because they’re concerned with what’s past and done, while
I’m concerned with what comes next. I’ve never reread my early novels, for
example. Perhaps I should read them one of these days.
INTERVIEWER
How
did you happen to start writing? Do you remember?
HUXLEY
I
started writing when I was seventeen, during a period when I was almost totally
blind and could hardly do anything else. I typed out a novel by the touch
system; I couldn’t even read it. I’ve no idea what’s become of it; I’d be
curious to see it now, but it’s lost. My aunt, Mrs. Humphry Ward, was a kind of
literary godmother to me. I used to have long talks with her about writing; she
gave me no end of sound advice. She was a very sound writer herself, rolled off
her plots like sections of macadamized road. She had a curious practice: every
time she started work on a new novel, she read Diderot’s Le
Neveu de Rameau.
It seemed to act as a kind of trigger or release mechanism. Then later, during
the war and after, I met a great many writers through Lady Ottoline Morrell.
She used to invite all kinds of people out to her country house. I met
Katherine Mansfield there, and Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, and all
the Bloomsburies. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Roger Fry. Listening to
his talk about the arts was a liberal education. At Oxford I began writing
verse. I had several volumes of verse published before I turned to writing
stories. I was very lucky; I never had any difficulty getting published. After
the war, when I came down from Oxford, I had to make my living. I had a job on
the Athenaeum, but that paid very little, not enough
to live on; so in spare moments I worked for the Condé Nast publications. I
worked for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and for House and Garden. I used to turn out articles on
everything from decorative plaster to Persian rugs. And that wasn’t all. I did
dramatic criticism for the Westminster Gazette. Why—would you believe it?—I even did
music criticism. I heartily recommend this sort of journalism as an
apprenticeship. It forces you to write on everything under the sun, it develops
your facility, it teaches you to master your material quickly, and it makes you
look at things. Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to keep at it very long.
After Crome
Yellow—that
was 1921—I didn’t have to worry so much about making a living. I was already
married, and we were then able to live on the Continent—in Italy until the
Fascists made life unpleasant, then in France. We had a little house outside
Paris, where I could write without being disturbed. We’d be in London part of
every year, but there was always too much going on; I couldn’t get much writing
done there.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you think that certain occupations are more conducive to creative writing than
others? In other words, does the work you do or the company you keep affect
your writing?
HUXLEY
I
don’t believe there is an ideal occupation for the writer. He could write under
almost any circumstance, even in complete isolation. Why, look at Balzac,
locked up in a secret room in Paris, hiding from his creditors, and producing La
comedie humaine.
Or think of Proust in his cork-lined room (although of course he had plenty of
visitors). I suppose the best occupation is just meeting a great many different
kinds of people and seeing what interests them. That’s one of the disadvantages
of getting older; you’re inclined to make intimate contacts with fewer people.
INTERVIEWER
What
would you say makes the writer different from other people?
HUXLEY
Well,
one has the urge, first of all, to order the facts one observes and to give
meaning to life; and along with that goes the love of words for their own sake
and a desire to manipulate them. It’s not a matter of intelligence; some very
intelligent and original people don’t have the love of words or the knack to
use them effectively. On the verbal level they express themselves very badly.
INTERVIEWER
What
about creativeness in general?
HUXLEY
Yes,
what about it? Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the
creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted
perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop
mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another
question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age,
whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they’re fifty? It’s a
problem in biochemistry and adult education.
INTERVIEWER
Some
psychologists have claimed that the creative urge is a kind of neurosis. Would
you agree?
HUXLEY
Most
emphatically not. I don’t believe for a moment that creativity is a neurotic
symptom. On the contrary, the neurotic who succeeds as an artist has had to
overcome a tremendous handicap. He creates in spite of his neurosis, not
because of it.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve
never had much use for Freud, have you?
HUXLEY
The
trouble with Freudian psychology is that it is based exclusively on a study of
the sick. Freud never met a healthy human being—only patients and other
psychoanalysts. Then too, Freudian psychology is only concerned with the past.
Other systems of psychology, that concern themselves with the present state of
the subject or his future potentialities, seem to me to be more realistic.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you see any relation between the creative process and the use of such drugs as
lysergic acid?
HUXLEY
I
don’t think there is any generalization one can make on this. Experience has
shown that there’s an enormous variation in the way people respond to lysergic
acid. Some people probably could get direct aesthetic inspiration for painting
or poetry out of it. Others I don’t think could. For most people it’s an
extremely significant experience, and I suppose in an indirect way it could
help the creative process. But I don’t think one can sit down and say, “I want
to write a magnificent poem, and so I’m going to take lysergic acid.” I don’t
think it’s by any means certain that you would get the result you wanted—you
might get almost any result.
INTERVIEWER
Would
the drug give more help to the lyric poet than the novelist?
HUXLEY
Well,
the poet would certainly get an extraordinary view of life which he wouldn’t
have had in any other way, and this might help him a great deal. But, you see
(and this is the most significant thing about the experience), during the
experience you’re really not interested in doing anything practical—even
writing lyric poetry. If you were making love to a woman, would you be
interested in writing about it? Of course not. And during the experience you’re
not particularly interested in words, because the experience transcends words
and is quite inexpressible in terms of words. So the whole notion of
conceptualizing what is happening seems very silly. After the event, it seems to me quite
possible that it might be of great assistance; people would see the universe
around them in a very different way and would be inspired, possibly, to write
something about it.
INTERVIEWER
But
is there much carryover from the experience?
HUXLEY
Well,
there’s always a complete memory of the experience. You remember something
extraordinary having happened. And to some extent you can relive the
experience, particularly the transformation of the outside world. You get hints
of this, you see the world in this transfigured way now and then—not to the
same pitch of intensity, but something of the kind. It does help you to look at
the world in a new way. And you come to understand very clearly the way that
certain specially gifted people have seen the world. You are actually
introduced into the kind of world that Van Gogh lived in, or the kind of world
that Blake lived in. You begin to have a direct experience of this kind of
world while you’re under the drug, and afterwards you can remember and to some
slight extent recapture this kind of world, which certain privileged people
have moved in and out of, as Blake obviously did all the time.
INTERVIEWER
But
the artist’s talents won’t be any different from what they were before he took
the drug?
HUXLEY
I
don’t see why they should be different. Some experiments have been made to see
what painters can do under the influence of the drug, but most of the examples
I have seen are very uninteresting. You could never hope to reproduce to the
full extent the quite incredible intensity of color that you get under the
influence of the drug. Most of the things I have seen are just rather tiresome
bits of expressionism, which correspond hardly at all, I would think, to the
actual experience. Maybe an immensely gifted artist—someone like Odilon Redon
(who probably saw the world like this all the time, anyhow)—maybe such a man
could profit by the lysergic-acid experience, could use his visions as models,
could reproduce on canvas the external world as it is transfigured by the drug.
INTERVIEWER
Here
this afternoon, as in your book, The Doors of Perception, you’ve been talking chiefly about the
visual experience under the drug, and about painting. Is there any similar gain
in psychological insight?
HUXLEY
Yes,
I think there is. While one is under the drug one has penetrating insights into
the people around one, and also into one’s own life. Many people get tremendous
recalls of buried material. A process which may take six years of
psychoanalysis happens in an hour—and considerably cheaper! And the experience
can be very liberating and widening in other ways. It shows that the world one
habitually lives in is merely a creation of this conventional, closely
conditioned being which one is, and that there are quite other kinds of worlds
outside. It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in
which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I
think it’s healthy that people should have this experience.
INTERVIEWER
Could
such psychological insight be helpful to the fiction writer?
HUXLEY
I
doubt it. After all, fiction is the fruit of sustained effort. The
lysergic-acid experience is a revelation of something outside of time and the
social order. To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about
people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of hard work on the basis
of those inspirations.
INTERVIEWER
Is
there any resemblance between lysergic acid, or mescaline, and the “soma” of
your Brave
New World?
HUXLEY
None
whatever. Soma is an imaginary drug, with three different effects—euphoric,
hallucinant, or sedative—an impossible combination. Mescaline is the active
principle of the peyote cactus, which has been used for a long time by the
Indians of the Southwest in their religious rites. It is now synthesized.
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) is a chemical compound with effects similar
to mescaline; it was developed about twelve years ago, and it is only being
used experimentally at present. Mescaline and lysergic acid transfigure the
external world and in some cases produce visions. Most people have the sort of
positive and enlightening experience I’ve described; but the visions may be
infernal as well as celestial. These drugs are physiologically innocuous,
except to people with liver damage. They leave most people with no hangover,
and they are not habit-forming. Psychiatrists have found that, skillfully used,
they can be very helpful in the treatment of certain kinds of neuroses.
INTERVIEWER
How
did you happen to get involved in experiments with mescaline and lysergic acid?
HUXLEY
Well,
I’d been interested in it for some years, and I had been in correspondence with
Humphrey Osmond, a very gifted young British psychiatrist working in Canada.
When he started testing its effects on different kinds of people, I became one
of his guinea pigs. I’ve described all this in The Doors of Perception.
INTERVIEWER
To
return to writing, in Point Counter Point you have Philip Quarles say, “I am not
a congenital novelist.” Would you say the same of yourself?
HUXLEY
I
don’t think of myself as a congenital novelist—no. For example, I have great
difficulty in inventing plots. Some people are born with an amazing gift for
storytelling; it’s a gift which I’ve never had at all. One reads, for example,
Stevenson’s accounts of how all the plots for his stories were provided in
dreams by his subconscious mind (what he calls the “Brownies” working for him),
and that all he had to do was to work up the material they had provided. I’ve
never had any Brownies. The great difficulty for me has always been creating
situations.
INTERVIEWER
Developing
character has been easier for you than creating plots?
HUXLEY
Yes,
but even then I’m not very good at creating people; I don’t have a very wide
repertory of characters. These are difficult things for me. I suppose it’s
largely a question of temperament. I don’t happen to have the right kind of
temperament.
INTERVIEWER
By
the phrase “congenital novelist” we thought you meant one who is only
interested in writing novels.
HUXLEY
I
suppose this is another way of saying the same thing. The congenital novelist
doesn’t have other interests. Fiction for him is an absorbing thing which fills
up his mind and takes all his time and energy, whereas someone else with a
different kind of mind has these other, extracurricular activities going on.
INTERVIEWER
As
you look back on your novels, which are you most happy with?
HUXLEY
I
personally think the most successful was Time Must Have a Stop. I don’t know, but it seemed to me
that I integrated what may be called the essay element with the fictional
element better there than in other novels. Maybe this is not the case. It just
happens to be the one that I like best, because I feel that it came off best.
INTERVIEWER
As
you see it, then, the novelist’s problem is to fuse the “essay element” with
the story?
HUXLEY
Well,
there are lots of excellent storytellers who are simply storytellers, and I
think it’s a wonderful gift, after all. I suppose the extreme example is Dumas:
that extraordinary old gentleman, who sat down and thought nothing of writing
six volumes of The Count of Monte Cristo in a few months. And my God,Monte
Cristo is damned good! But it isn’t the last word. When
you can find storytelling which carries at the same time a kind of parable-like
meaning (such as you get, say, in Dostoyevsky or in the best of Tolstoy), this
is something extraordinary, I feel. I’m always flabbergasted when I reread some
of the short things of Tolstoy, like The Death of Ivan Ilyich. What an astounding work that is! Or
some of the short things of Dostoyevsky, like Notes from Underground.
INTERVIEWER
What
other novelists have especially affected you?
HUXLEY
It’s
awfully difficult for me to answer such a question. I read individual books
that I like and take things from and am stimulated by. . . . As a very young
man, as an undergraduate, I used to read a lot of French novels. I was very
fond of a novelist who is now very much out-of-date—Anatole France. I haven’t
read him now for forty years; I don’t know what he’s like. Then I remember
reading the first volume of Proust in 1915 and being tremendously impressed by
it. (I reread it recently and was curiously disappointed.) Gide I read at that
time too.
INTERVIEWER
Several
of your early novels, Point Counter Point especially, appear to have been written
under the influence of Proust and Gide. Is this so?
HUXLEY
I
suppose some of my early novels are faintly Proustian. I don’t think I shall
ever experiment again with the kind of treatment of time and remembrance of
things past that I used in Eyeless in Gaza, shifting back and forth in time to
show the pressure of the past on the present.
INTERVIEWER
Then
in some of those early novels you also make use of musical effects, much as
Gide does.
HUXLEY
The
marvelous thing about music is that it does so easily and rapidly what can be
done only very laboriously in words, or really can’t be done at all. It’s
futile to even attempt to write musically. But I’ve tried in some of my
essays—in Themes and Variations, for instance. Then I’ve used the
equivalent of musical variations in some of my stories, where I take certain
traits of character and treat them seriously in one personage and comically, in
a sort of parody, in another.
INTERVIEWER
Were
you much taken with Joyce?
Never
very much—no. I never got very much out of Ulysses. I think it’s an extraordinary book,
but so much of it consists of rather lengthy demonstrations of how a novel
ought not to be written, doesn’t it? He does show
nearly every conceivable way it should not be written, and then goes on to show
how it might be written.
INTERVIEWER
What
do you think of Virginia Woolf’s fiction?
HUXLEY
Her
works are very strange. They’re very beautiful, aren’t they? But one gets such
a curious feeling from them. She sees with incredible clarity, but always as
though through a sheet of plate glass; she never touches anything. Her books
are not immediate. They’re very puzzling to me.
INTERVIEWER
How
about Henry James? Or Thomas Mann?
HUXLEY
James
leaves me very cold. And I find Mann a little boring. He’s obviously an
admirable novelist. You know, I used to go every summer to the place described
in Mario
and the Magician, and
it seemed to me that I never got any sense of the place out of Mann. I knew it
very well: the coast where Shelley was washed up, under the mountains of
Carrara, where the marble comes from. It was an incredibly beautiful place
then. Now, needless to say, it’s all become like Coney Island, with millions of
people there.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking
of places, do you think your own writing was affected when you transplanted
yourself from England to America?
HUXLEY
I
don’t know—I don’t think so. I never strongly felt that the place where I lived
had great importance to me.
INTERVIEWER
Then
you don’t think the social climate makes much difference to fiction?
HUXLEY
Well,
what is “fiction”? So many people talk about “fiction” or “the writer” as
though you could generalize about them. There are always many diverse members
of the group; and fiction is a genus of which there are many species. I think
that certain species of fiction quite clearly call for a certain locale. It’s
impossible that Trollope could have written except where he did write. He
couldn’t have gone off to Italy like Byron or Shelley. He required the English
middle-class life. But then look at Lawrence. At the beginning you would have
said that he had to stay in the Midlands of England, near the coal mines. But
he could write anywhere.
INTERVIEWER
Now,
thirty years later, would you care to say what you think of Lawrence as a
novelist and as a man?
HUXLEY
I
occasionally reread some of his books. How good he is! Especially in the short
stories. And the other day I read part of Women in Love, and that again seemed very good. The
vividness, the incredible vividness of the descriptions of nature is amazing in
Lawrence. But sometimes one doesn’t know what he’s getting at. In The
Plumed Serpent, for
instance, he’ll glorify the Mexican Indians with their dark life of the blood
on one page, and then on the next he’ll damn the lazy natives like a British colonel
in the days of Kipling. That book is a mass of contradictions. I was very fond
of Lawrence as a man. I knew him very well the last four years of his life. I
had met him during the First World War and saw him a certain amount then, but I
didn’t get to know him really well till 1926. I was a little disturbed by him.
You know, he was rather disturbing. And to a
conventionally brought up young bourgeois he was rather difficult to
understand. But later on I got to know and like him. My first wife became very
friendly with him and understood him and they got on very well together. We saw
the Lawrences often during those last four years; they stayed with us in Paris,
then we were together in Switzerland, and we visited them at the Villa Mirenda
near Florence. My wife typed out the manuscript of Lady
Chatterley’s Lover for
him, even though she was a bad typist and had no patience with English
spelling—she was a Belgian, you know. Then she didn’t always appreciate the
nuances of the language she was typing. When she started using some of those
four-letter words in conversation, Lawrence was profoundly shocked.
INTERVIEWER
Why
did Lawrence keep moving around so much?
HUXLEY
One
reason he was forever moving on is that his relations with people would become
so complicated that he’d have to get away. He was a man who loved and hated too
intensely; he both loved and hated the same people at the same time. Then, like
a great many tubercular people, he was convinced that climate had a great
effect on him—not only the temperature, but the direction of the wind, and all
sorts of atmospheric conditions. He had invented a whole mythology of climate.
In his last years he wanted to go back to New Mexico. He had been very happy
there on the ranch in Taos. But he wasn’t strong enough to make the trip. By
all the rules of medicine he should have been dead; but he lived on, supported
by some kind of energy that seemed to be independent of his body. And he kept
on writing to the end. . . . We were there, in Vence, when he died. . . . He
actually died in my first wife’s arms. After his death his wife Frieda was
utterly helpless and didn’t know what to do with herself. Physically she was
very strong, but in the practical affairs of life she depended on Lawrence
entirely. For instance, when she went back to London after his death to settle
his affairs, she stayed in a particularly dreary old hotel, simply because she
had stayed there once with him and didn’t feel secure in any other place.
INTERVIEWER
Certain
characters in your novels seem to have been based on people you knew—on
Lawrence and Norman Douglas and Middleton Murry, for instance. Is this true?
And how do you convert a real person into a fictional character?
HUXLEY
I
try to imagine how certain people I know would behave in certain circumstances.
Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can’t escape
it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they’re much less complex than
the people one knows. There is something of Murry in several of my characters, but
I wouldn’t say I’d put Murry in a book. And there is something of Norman
Douglas in old Scogan of Crome Yellow. I knew Douglas quite well in the
twenties in Florence. He was a remarkably intelligent and highly educated man,
but he had deliberately limited himself to the point where he would talk about
almost nothing but drink and sex. He became quite boring after a time. Did you
ever see that collection of pornographic limericks that he had privately
printed? It was the only way, poor fellow, that he could make some money. It
was a terribly unfunny book. I didn’t see him at all in his later years.
INTERVIEWER
Lawrence
and Frieda are represented in Mark and Mary Rampion of Point
Counter Point, aren’t
they? You even follow the story of the Lawrences quite closely in many
particulars.
HUXLEY
Yes,
I suppose so, but only a small part of Lawrence is in that character. Isn’t it
remarkable how everyone who knew Lawrence has felt compelled to write about
him? Why, he’s had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!
INTERVIEWER
How
do you name your characters? Do you pick them at random, like Simenon, out of
telephone directories? Or are the names meant to convey something? Some of your
characters in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan have odd names; do these have any
particular significance?
HUXLEY
Yes,
names are very important, aren’t they? And the most unlikely names keep turning
up in real life, so one must be careful. I can explain some of the names in After
Many a Summer.
Take Virginia Maunciple. That name was suggested to me by Chaucer’s manciple.
What is a manciple, anyhow? A kind of steward. It’s the sort of a name that a
movie starlet would choose, in the hope of being unique, custom-made. She’s
called Virginia because she appears so virginal to Jeremy, and so obviously
isn’t in fact; also because of her devotion to the Madonna. Dr. Sigmund Obispo:
here the first name obviously refers to Freud, and Obispo I took from San Luis
Obispo for local color and because it has a comical sound. And Jeremy Pordage.
There’s a story connected with that name. When I was an undergraduate at
Oxford, Professor Walter Raleigh (who was a marvelous teacher) had me do a
piece of research on the literature connected with the Popish Plot. One of the
authors mentioned by Dryden under the name of “lame Mephibosheth” was called
Pordage. His poetry, when I read it at the Bodleian, turned out to be
unbelievably bad. But the name was a treasure. As for Jeremy, that was chosen
for the sound; combined with Pordage it has a rather spinsterish ring. Propter
came from the Latin for “on account of”—because, as a wise man, he is concerned
with ultimate causes. Another reason why I chose the name was its occurrence in
a poem of Edward Lear, “Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly.” Let’s see, how
does it go now?
Like the ancient Medes and Persians,
Always by his own exertions
He subsisted on those hills;
Whiles, by teaching children spelling,
Or at times by merely yelling,
Or at intervals by selling
“Propter’s Nicodemus Pills.”
Pete
Boone doesn’t mean anything in particular. It’s just a straightforward American
name that suits the character. Jo Stoyte, too—the name simply means what it
sounds like.
INTERVIEWER
You
seem to have turned away from satire in recent years. What do you think of
satire now?
HUXLEY
Yes,
I suppose I have changed in that respect. But I’m all for satire. We need it.
People everywhere take things much too seriously, I think. People are much too
solemn about things. I’m all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds, and that
sort of thing. It seems to me a most salutary proceeding.
INTERVIEWER
Were
you fond of Swift as a young man?
HUXLEY
Oh,
yes, I was very fond of Swift. And of another book, a wonderfully funny book,
one of the few old books that have stayed funny: The Letters of Obscure Men, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. I’m sure Swift must have read it; it
is so much his method. In general, I get a great deal out of the eighteenth
century: Hume, Law, Crebillon, Diderot, Fielding, Pope—though I’m old-fashioned
enough to think the Romantics are better poets than Pope.
INTERVIEWER
You
praised Fielding long ago in your essay “Tragedy and the Whole Truth.” Do you
still believe that fiction can give a fuller view of life than tragedy?
HUXLEY
Yes,
I still believe that tragedy is not necessarily the highest form. The highest
form does not yet exist, perhaps. I can conceive of something much more
inclusive and yet equally sublime, something which is adumbrated in the plays
of Shakespeare. I think that in some way the tragic and comic elements can be
more totally fused. I don’t know how. Don’t ask me how. If we get another
Shakespeare one of these days—as I hope we will— perhaps we’ll see. As I say in
that essay, Homer has a kind of fusion of these elements, but on a very
simple-minded level. But, my goodness, how good Homer is, anyhow! And there’s
another really sublime writer who has this quality—Chaucer. Why, Chaucer
invented a whole psychology out of absolutely nothing: an incredible
achievement. It’s one of the great misfortunes of English literature that
Chaucer wrote at a time when his language was to become incomprehensible. If he
had been born two or three hundred years later I think the whole course of
English literature would have been changed. We wouldn’t have had this sort of
Platonic mania—separating mind from body and spirit from matter.
INTERVIEWER
Then,
even though you have been writing fewer novels in recent years, you don’t think
less highly of the art of fiction than you used to?
HUXLEY
Oh,
no, no, no. I think fiction, and biography and history, are the forms. I think one can say much more
about general abstract ideas in terms of concrete characters and situations,
whether fictional or real, than one can in abstract terms. Several of the books
I like best of what I’ve written are historical and biographical things: Grey
Eminence, and The
Devils of Loudun, and
the biography of Maine de Biran, the “Variations on a Philosopher.” These are
all discussions of what are to me important general ideas in terms of specific
lives and incidents. And I must say I think that probably all philosophy ought to be written in this
form; it would be much more profound and much more edifying. It’s awfully easy
to write abstractly, without attaching much meaning to the big words. But the
moment you have to express ideas in the light of a particular context, in a
particular set of circumstances, although it’s a limitation in some ways, it’s
also an invitation to go much further and much deeper. I think that fiction
and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake,
because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as
vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas,
social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard,
because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going
on and on—like Coleridge—why, it’s nothing compared with the really profound
Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have
the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the
expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the
exciting thing—both in life and in art.
