In Which It Has Only Been The Two Of Us For So Long

A Little Less Spirituality

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Just tired and busy and amazed and amused and charmed and horrified. - Maria Huxley, in a letter

In 1913 Aldous Huxley began to lose his sight. His eyes clouded over, his vision was "steadily and quite rapidly failing. I was wondering quite apprehensively what on earth I should do." After seeing an oculist, it was decided that a milder climate might help him, so Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria Nys went to Italy. Their son Matthew spent the first four years of his life in Florence and Rome.

Matthew was an extremely large and difficult child. Aldous and Maria were a bit taken aback by who they had created; Matthew Huxley would later become a prominent epidemologist. The child was a picky eater and stuck to a vegetarian diet, causing Aldous to remark, "he realizes that meat is dead animals."

Matthew had no desire to read, which made him the polar opposite of his father. The entire family was practically grief stricken at the young boy's non-literary habits; only Aldous was able to be patient with him. "Too early a passion for reading distracts from the powers of observation," he told everyone.

The whole family liked Italy, but Aldous was the only one who admired it, more in theory than in practice. Florence never suited him; it was more a place where culture had been rather than a city where it was. He chose Rome as the young family's landing spot. "After a third rate provincial town," he concluded, "colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged lesbians, a genuine metropolis will be lively." They could not stay in Italy, however, as fascism was in the air. They left Matthew in Belgium with his grandmother and took a boat to Bombay.

Aldous despised the architecture of Lahore, and loathed Kashmir worse. They kept incredibly active, fortified by a gnawing fear and the weight they burned off from their time in Florence. At Srinagar they visited the lunatic asylum.

Every place that they visited, Aldous asked question after question, ostensibly as research for a series of articles that helped pay for the journey. He also did it when he felt he did not have something himself to say.

An attempt to travel second class did not go well - a holy man spit his mucus all over their car - so they paid the extra rupees for first class, money they knew they should not be spending. Maria could barely eat the food. "India is depressing as no other country I have ever known," Aldous wrote. "One breathes in it, not air, but dust and hopelessness."

Aldous was most put off by the beliefs of the people he met. "A little less spirituality," he wrote, "and the Indians would now be free - free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions. There would be less dirt and more food. There would be fewer Maharajas with Rolls Royces and more schools."

He was not impressed at all by the Taj Mahal, and told everyone so. "These four thin tapering towers," he wrote in Jesting Pilate, "are among the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands." Whatever one thinks of the Taj Mahal, it seems a greater dissatisfaction with the world and his place in it may have been the cause of this observation.

Things got better as soon as they left Calcutta for Burma. Dutch ships took them to the Philippines. From there they landed in Japan, taking the train to Kyoto and departing via Yokohama. Aldous watched Maria's eating closely, preventing her from having too much caviar, the only food she felt comfortable consuming at sea.

Japan was almost as nauseating to Aldous as India, but for different reasons. Kyoto was "such a collection of the cheap and shoddy, of the quasi-genuine and the imitation solid, of the vulgar and the tawdry." The industrial city did not suit Aldous' taste at all:

Little wooden shacks succeeds little wooden shack interminably, mile after mile; and the recession of the straight untidy roads is emphasised by the long lines of posts, the sagging electric wires that flank each street, like the trees of an avenue. All the cowboys in the world could live in Kyoto, all the Forty-Niners. Street leads into identical street, district merges indistinguishably into district. In this dreary ocean of log-cabins almost the only White Houses are the hotels.

with D.H. Lawrence

San Francisco was next, and from there Maria and Aldous took the Daylight Limited train to Los Angeles. They did not stay long in any one American city; Hollywood was "altogether too Antipodean to be lived in." (Aldous would spend the majority of the rest of his life in Southern California.)

When they returned to England from New York, Maria went to see Matthew while Aldous stayed in England. It had been only the two of them for so long.

While they were apart, Aldous wrote Maria long letters. They prefigure a latent unhappiness that would lead him to adultery, but also the connection that would allow the marriage to survive his mistakes until Maria died of breast cancer in 1955.

I think myself it's rather nice to be busy and practical on the outside - and daydreams, as you call it, inside. The things one cares about are all inside, like seeds on the ground in winter. But one has to attend to the things one only half cares about. And so life passes away.

Luckily, the inside thing corresponds with the inside thing in just a few people. I think it is so with us. We don't fit in very well outside - but the inside corresponds, which is most important.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Pretty Words" - Crissi Cochrane (mp3)

In Which Aldous Huxley Takes A Trip With His First Wife

Around the World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Just tired and busy and amazed and amused and charmed and horrified. - Maria Huxley, in a letter

In 1913 Aldous Huxley began to lose his sight. His eyes clouded over, his vision was "steadily and quite rapidly failing. I was wondering quite apprehensively what on earth I should do." After seeing an oculist, it was decided that a milder climate might help him, so Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria Nys went to Italy. Their son Matthew spent the first four years of his life in Florence and Rome.

Matthew was an extremely large and difficult child. Aldous and Maria were a bit taken aback by who they had created; Matthew Huxley would later become a prominent epidemologist. The child was a picky eater and stuck to a vegetarian diet, causing Aldous to remark, "he realizes that meat is dead animals."

Matthew had no desire to read, which made him the polar opposite of his father. The entire family was practically grief stricken at the young boy's non-literary habits; only Aldous was able to be patient with him. "Too early a passion for reading distracts from the powers of observation," he told everyone.

The whole family liked Italy, but Aldous was the only one who admired it, more in theory than in practice. Florence never suited him; it was more a place where culture had been rather than a city where it was. He chose Rome as the young family's landing spot. "After a third rate provincial town," he concluded, "colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged lesbians, a genuine metropolis will be lively." They could not stay in Italy, however, as fascism was in the air. They left Matthew in Belgium with his grandmother and took a boat to Bombay.

Aldous despised the architecture of Lahore, and loathed Kashmir worse. They kept incredibly active, fortified by a gnawing fear and the weight they burned off from their time in Florence. At Srinagar they visited the lunatic asylum.

Every place that they visited, Aldous asked question after question, ostensibly as research for a series of articles that helped pay for the journey. He also did it when he felt he did not have something himself to say.

An attempt to travel second class did not go well - a holy man spit his mucus all over their car - so they paid the extra rupees for first class, money they knew they should not be spending. Maria could barely eat the food. "India is depressing as no other country I have ever known," Aldous wrote. "One breathes in it, not air, but dust and hopelessness."

Aldous was most put off by the beliefs of the people he met. "A little less spirituality," he wrote, "and the Indians would now be free - free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions. There would be less dirt and more food. There would be fewer Maharajas with Rolls Royces and more schools."

He was not impressed at all by the Taj Mahal, and told everyone so. "These four thin tapering towers," he wrote in Jesting Pilate, "are among the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands." Whatever one thinks of the Taj Mahal, it seems a greater dissatisfaction with the world and his place in it may have been the cause of this observation.

Things got better as soon as they left Calcutta for Burma. Dutch ships took them to the Philippines. From there they landed in Japan, taking the train to Kyoto and departing via Yokohama. Aldous watched Maria's eating closely, preventing her from having too much caviar, the only food she felt comfortable consuming at sea.

Japan was almost as nauseating to Aldous as India, but for different reasons. Kyoto was "such a collection of the cheap and shoddy, of the quasi-genuine and the imitation solid, of the vulgar and the tawdry." The industrial city did not suit Aldous' taste at all:

Little wooden shacks succeeds little wooden shack interminably, mile after mile; and the recession of the straight untidy roads is emphasised by the long lines of posts, the sagging electric wires that flank each street, like the trees of an avenue. All the cowboys in the world could live in Kyoto, all the Forty-Niners. Street leads into identical street, district merges indistinguishably into district. In this dreary ocean of log-cabins almost the only White Houses are the hotels.

with D.H. Lawrence

San Francisco was next, and from there Maria and Aldous took the Daylight Limited train to Los Angeles. They did not stay long in any one American city; Hollywood was "altogether too Antipodean to be lived in." (Aldous would spend the majority of the rest of his life in Southern California.)

When they returned to England from New York, Maria went to see Matthew while Aldous stayed in England. It had been only the two of them for so long.

While they were apart, Aldous wrote Maria long letters. They prefigure a latent unhappiness that would lead him to adultery, but also the connection that would allow the marriage to survive his mistakes until Maria died of breast cancer in 1955.

I think myself it's rather nice to be busy and practical on the outside - and daydreams, as you call it, inside. The things one cares about are all inside, like seeds on the ground in winter. But one has to attend to the things one only half cares about. And so life passes away.

Luckily, the inside thing corresponds with the inside thing in just a few people. I think it is so with us. We don't fit in very well outside - but the inside corresponds, which is most important.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Bowls (Gavin Russo's Rework)" - Caribou (mp3)

"Odessa (Junior Boys mix)" - Caribou (mp3)

In Which It's Fun No Matter What We Do Or How Often We Do It

The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood

He was as gay as the day is long. Christopher Isherwood and sometime sexual partner Wystan Auden left England for America in 1939 as the Second World War was about to begin in earnest. A supremely accomplished novelist, Isherwood was generous to many young writers, and his novelistic talents are equalled by the kindness of spirit he shows in semi-private writings during his early American years. Isherwood wrote about his life with the idea that eventually it would be put into print, and he even edited the first publication of these journals. What follows are selected entries from the different periods of his life. - A.C.

1940

January 12. The weather is clearing. Blue sky at last, with immense clouds. Spent the day discussing the story with Thoeren; I couldn't put him off any longer. He is a big tomcat of an ex-leading man, who talks endlessly about his love affairs, with a kind of sadistic vulgarity. His attitude of cynical self-abasement amounts to saying, "I'm dirt myself. Therefore anyone who sleeps with me is less than dirt." He is a liar, but intelligent. We shall probably get along quite well together.

January 13. Thoeren and I had another interview with Hyman. We were taking about our hero's inferiority complex. Suddenly, Hyman started to tell us a story.

When he was a schoolboy, his best friend had a girl, and this girl had a sister. The first time Hyman saw her, he fell for her. "She was a perfect assembly of womanhood." Soon he was so much in love that he gave up making dates with her; he felt it was quite hopeless — there were so many rich, goodlooking boys around. Then, to his amazement, she sent for him and asked why he was staying away from the house. He told her the truth. She said, "I'm glad — because I've been in love with you for a long time."

In the same town there lived a very rich man, twenty years older than Hyman, who, for twelve years, had been unhappily married to an invalid wife. The wife died. The rich man met Hyman's girl at a party and fell passionately in love with her. He came to Hyman and appealed to him, humiliating himself before the schoolboy. "If you really care for her happiness, give her to me. Think of all the things I can offer her." The widower's relatives and friends joined in the campaign; they carried the girl off to spend a weekend with them. The girl telephoned Hyman: "If you still care for me at all, come and take me away." But Hyman did nothing. The rich man's arguments had convinced him. He never saw her again.

A year later, the widower and the girl got married. They have been happy. The girl now has grown-up sons. Her elderly husband has lost most of his money. Hyman is earning two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

Once, quite recently, he spoke to her, on the phone. She was very gay and "said all the wrong things." She also had a long conversation with Hyman's wife. Bernie told all this so modestly and simply that, for the moment, he seemed quite charming. The question is: how often does he tell this story, and to whom?

All day I have been happy. Chiefly because this morning, driving through the cold sunshine in our open car to the studio, I saw, far behind Hollywood, for the first time, the snow-covered mountains. "Look at them!" I kept repeating excitedly, to a hitchhiker I'd picked up. He agreed politely that they were pretty.

Mrs. MacCabe treated us to a turkey dinner. Happy chattered all through the meal — about aviation, sailing, automobiles, and the good times he'd had with his friend. "Boy, I had more fun — !" He has to have several shots a day for his diabetes, but he is exactly like any ordinary, healthy boy. It never occurs to him to feel sorry for himself. (It never occurs to me not to.)

January 15. Lunch with Huxley. Now that he is getting over his shyness, he is charming. We talked about the Bardo Thodol, which he has been reading lately. An old lady sold us bunches of artificial violets. I gave mine to Frau Bach, who said, "You're fortunate that I don't reward you with a kiss!"

January 25. In the afternoon, I went to Chaplin's studio. Chaplin was in a talkative mood. He repeats himself, amplifies, contradicts. (Meltzer later imitated him saying: "The only thing I can say for myself is — I've never been melancholy. Never. Of course, everybody is melancholy around the age of twenty. When I was twenty-one, I was terribly melancholy. I was melancholy until I was thirty. Well, no — not exactly what you could call melancholy. I'm never melancholy, really...etc, etc.")

July 21. Vernon and I dined at the Huxleys'. Maria served cold supper to a crowd of boys and girls — Matthew's friends. Aldous and I talked in a corner about Lengyel's dramatization of Lady Chatterly's Lover. He wants us to help him with it. The boys gaily bullied Vernon for liking Picasso. For some mysterious reason, the party was a success: the psychic currents were flowing harmoniously.

July 24. Down to RKO to see Stevenson, that smiling young renaissance cardinal, and Lipscomb, the actor-cricketer. We discussed the final details of the horror story for the British relief picture.

In the afternoon, I lay on the beach among the crowd. The old lady telling her sister what the rabbi said about her talented grandson; the youths bribing their kid brother with a candy bar to ask an attractive girl the time; the boys turning somersaults with an inner tub as a springboard, watched admiringly by an elderly man and his wife; the handball players, jostling and cursing; the lifeguard's Newfoundland dog; the Japanese brothers wrestling, with vague, oriental smiles; Nellie who keeps the hot-dog stand and was born in Sheffield; the kids with their tough talk: "Aw — what the heck. Park the junk here." No one is excluded. We are all welcome to the sunshine, and the dirty ocean with its dazzling surf, full of seaweed and last night's discarded rubbers.

November 12. Headache this evening, and rheumatism in my hip. So I did my meditation sitting upright in a chair in my room. Perhaps because of the headache, concentration was much easier than usual. I suddenly "saw" a strip of carpet, illuminated by an orange light. The carpet was covered with a black pattern, quite unlike anything we have in the house. But I could also "see" my bed, standing exactly as it really stands. My field of vision wasn't in any distorted.

As I watched, I "saw," in the middle of the carpet, a small dirty-white bird, something like a parrot. After a moment, it began to move, with its quick stiff walk, and went under the bed. This wasn't a dream. I was normally conscious, aware of what I "saw" and anxious to miss no detail of it. As I sat there, I felt all around me a curiously intense silence, like the silence of deep snow. The only sinister thing about the bird was its air of utter aloofness and intention. I had caught it going about its business — very definite business — as one glimpses a mouse disappearing into its hole.

1941

July 19. Beginning of sex dream with B. But this turned into a parting, and I saw B. go off with someone else, without regret. Woke at 4:30. First watch, one hundred twenty minutes, medium poor.

Read headlines at drugstore. Usual pointless despair. Must concentrate every moment on interior life. Avoid daydreaming. This idiotic desire to run upstairs, see what's doing, and run down again, like a chicken without a head.

Weekend disturbance. Many of the others plan to get away and "relax." But the real relaxation would be to stay here and try to calm myself inside.

April 22. Rene has separated from his wife, Esther: they maintain a queer, teasing relationship. She comes down to visit him every now and then, and they make love violently, after which his back hurts more than ever and they quarrel. Esther is very attractive and intelligent and funny. I met her the other day.

Rene lives in an apartment at the top of a house built in what Pete calls "Early Frankenstein." It has queer Gothic dormer windows and black eaves like the wings of bats. In the daytime it merely looks shabby; at night it is terrifying, especially by moonlight.

May 3. Carved in the wall of the Meeting House, near my usual seat, is a heart, with the initials R.D.B., J.L.R. After Meeting, one of the neighbors, Dr. Wilson, introduced me to an elderly gentleman who has the job of inspecting any cargo of birds or animals which arrives at the port of Philadelphia. His last assignment was a thousand monkeys from South Africa. He is very proud of his new harbor permit, issued since the war began, with his photograph and fingerprints. An Ibsen character.

Elizabeth and Ruth, after dark, destroying the nests of caterpillars in the big apple tree with a kerosene flare at the end of a long bamboo pole.

May 24. Now that the warm weather has come, the ladies at the Meeting House use leaf-shaped fans of cardboard or basketwork. The lady who sits in front of me has a fan with a picture of Frances E. Willard, the nineteenth century temperance crusader. I asked the Yarnalls about her, and Mrs. Yarnall, sensing my opposition, said very sweetly and apologetically, "You see, Chris, in those days the whisky in this country was very bad quality."

June 11. Mrs. Rich had a long talk with me about her children. She feels she hasn't been a good mother to them. What should she do? Told her to be a good mother.

June 28. Wystan is staying at Caroline Newton's house at Daylesford. Today he gave a poetry reading to a large party of rich women. Nobody understood a single word; but they were very impressed. Wystan's untidiness and brusqueness impress them. He is never untidier than when he is wearing his best suit. He read in a loud bored indistinct voice, repeatedly looking ahead to see how much further he had to go.

1943

August 18. Last night, because I was bored, I found myself doing what I would least have expected — hunting up Tennessee Williams. I located him, after some search, at a very squalid rooming house called The Palisades, at the other end of town — sitting typing a film story in a yachting cap, amidst a litter of dirty coffee cups, crumpled bed linen, and old newspapers. He seemed not in the least surprised to see me. In fact, his manner was that of the meditative sage to whose humble cabin the world-weary wanderer finally returns. He took it, with discreetly concealed amusement, as the most natural thing in the world that I should be having myself a holiday from the monastery. We had supper together on the pier, and I drank quite a lot of beer and talked sex the entire evening. Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he's tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he feels inclined. The autoglide has long since broken down, so Tennessee has stopped paying for it, and the dealer is suing him, and he doesn't give a damn. He also has a fight on with Metro. He probably won't stay here long.

1959

April 8. Grey all day yesterday. Grey again this morning. Dangerous idling weather. Last night we had supper with Jo and Ben, and they showed their slides of our Mexican trip. I wanted to see them, to recapture some of the Mexican atmosphere, for my novel. What chiefly struck me: the dark blueness of the sky, the extraordinarily strong light of the setting or rising sun striking upward at the undersides of palm trees and making their fronds flash with a metallic sheen, like swords. The bandstands — some of them imported from France, perhaps: fancy lace ironwork, supported by naked girls. The disproportionate size of the great twin-towered baroque churches. The utter absence of any sort of landscape gardening: buildings arise and stand up unapologetically in the midst of dumps and barren lots. I absolutely, absolutely must get on with the novel. Just add page to page, without too much considering, until I have a first draft — no matter how short, how crude.

May 11. Heinz has written, suggesting that I sponsor the immigration of Gerda, Christian, and himself to the States, and that we shall all then live together in a house that I'm to buy. He offers, of course, to pay all this money back by degrees. And now I must answer his letter — explaining tactfully that this scheme is impossible; that is, I'd rather die than agree to it.

You can purchase the diaries of Christopher Isherwood here.

"When Did You Leave Heaven (demo)" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

"Just When I Needed You Most (demo)" - Bob Dylan (mp3)

"Freedom for the Stallion (demo)" - Bob Dylan (mp3)