Aldous and Laura Huxley: Important Thoughts from a Loving Couple in LA
The memoir (This Timeless Moment) of Aldous Huxley’s second wife, Laura, who married him in 1956, a year after the death of his first wife, Maria, is a valuable book. In it she has a chapter entitled “One Never Loves Enough.” She refers to those words as her husband’s “theme song,” and writes that “as the years passed,” it “increased in intensity.” It is this thought, this emphasis on the paramount importance of love, love in the best and fullest sense, that is Huxley’s most important contribution. But there are also others. (His emphasis on love was probably also influenced by a letter his mother wrote to him before she died when he was ten. She wrote, “Judge not too much and love more.”)
Although he was best known for Brave New World (1932), it will not be that famous novel that will be examined here, but rather Laura’s memoir and his final novel, Island (1962), published a year before his death on November 22, 1963—the same day as President John Kennedy’s assassination.
And in those two works, we shall look at some of the important ideas presented—and there are many of them. But first some background on Aldous, and also a bit about Laura, who lived on until age 96, part of her widowed life devoted to philanthropic contributions.
He was born in 1894 into a distinguished English family. His father was the editor of a well-known magazine; and his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, was a scientist and friend of Charles Darwin. At age 16, Aldous was afflicted with an eye infection that compromised his vision for the rest of his life, but he also matured into an imposing figure—a little over 6’4.” He graduated from Oxford, with a degree in English, and his first novel, Crome Yellow, appeared in 1921—Brave New World in 1932 was his fifth novel. In addition to his many longer fictional works, in his four-decades-plus career he also wrote short stories, poetry, plays, essays, philosophical works, and travelogues.
To provide an example of his wide-ranging talents, he once authored a book entitled The Perennial Philosophy (1947), which he defined as “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.” In this work, as in Island, he displayed a wide-ranging knowledge of Buddhism and other Eastern religions.
In 1919, Huxley married Maria Nys, who was then living in England, a Belgian refugee from the world war that had just ended. The following year they had a son, Matthew, and Maria died of breast cancer in 1955. The following year, Aldous married a friend of the couple, Laura Archera, who (like Maria) was foreign-born (in Italy). She was also 17 years younger than Aldous.
As a child, she had been a violin virtuoso and later played in the Los Angeles Philharmonic—she had come to the United States in the 1930s to further her musical career, but was set to return to Italy until her father warned her against doing so with Mussolini still in power.
By 1948, when she first met the Huxleys, she was living in LA, where the Huxleys had also settled in 1937. He, the writer, was a life-long pacifist, and the growing threat of Hitler to European stability was one of the reasons why he and his wife remained in the USA.
Laura became a documentary filmmaker, and had first contacted Aldous to see if he would write a filmscript for her—after moving to LA, Aldous had written some scripts and made some money as a Hollywood script writer, part of which he used to help Jewish and other writers and artists come to the USA to escape Hitler's increasing persecutions. (See here for more on those persecutions and emigration.) By the time Laura married Aldous in 1956, she was also a a lay psychotherapist and had previously treated first-wife Maria.
Soon after the 1956 marriage of Aldous and Laura, the couple moved into an LA home on Deronda Drive in Beachwood Canyon, where they lived until a fire destroyed their house in 1961. Much of Island was written there.
Most of this utopian novel is set on the fictional island of the Kingdom of Pala, located about half way between Sumatra, Indonesia, and the Andaman Islands. The book’s central character is the Englishman Will Farnaby, who deliberately wrecks his boat on the island. He does so in order to persuade the island's queen (Rani in Hindu) to sell untapped oil rights to his boss, the English oil baron Joe Aldehyde. But the government of Pala has not been run by the queen (or her son, Murugan, who is still a minor), but by (in the words of Murugan) "the Cabinet, the House of Representatives and... the Privy Council."
And those three institutions have produced a government and system that both Murugan and his mother, the Rani, intensely dislike. Already in the nineteenth century, Pala set out to create happiness and freedom on the island. The twentieth century, however, as one of Island’s characters states, brought to the world “movies, cars, airplanes, radio. Mass production, mass slaughter, mass communication and, above all, plain mass—more and more people in bigger and bigger slums or suburbs. By 1930, any clear-sighted observer could have seen that, for three quarters of the human race, freedom and happiness were almost out of the question.”
But Huxley’s Pala was trying to produce the kind of progress Russia’s Leo Tolstoy called for already in the 19th century—a progress not measured by the production of more and more products but by an increase in overall well-being. In the 20th century, other critics of modern Western societies, like the economist/environmentalist E. F. Schumacher, also warned of the danger of equating the growth of Gross National Product or increased material possessions with happiness.
In 1972 (five years before the death of Schumacher) the king of the Asian nation of Bhutan even came up with the idea of “happiness economics.” And in 2011, the United Nations “first encouraged member countries to measure and use the happiness of their people to guide public policies.” Soon afterwards, Columbia University’s Earth Institute began a practice of issuing annual happiness reports (see here for the 2024 report.)
Although Will’s original intent was to get oil rights for his boss, the English oil baron Aldehyde, Will gradually comes to see the wisdom of Pala’s customs and its rejection of many Western practices. One of his guides in his gradual enlightenment is Susila, the mother of two children and the daughter-in-law of Dr. Robert MacPhail, one of the three Privy Council members. Susila's husband, Dugald, recently died in a climbing accident, and she is still grieving his loss.
In one of his last conversations with Susila, Will reveals what he has learned about love. He tells her, “I shall go on loving you—loving you in the way one's supposed to love people if one's a Christian.... Believe it or not, now I can understand what it means when they say, ‘God is love.’”
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When he was still young, Will had experienced that kind of moral love when he observed his Aunt Mary. As he told Susila, she devoted “herself to the aged. Old people in institutions, old people cooped up in their own homes, old people living on and on as a burden to their children and grandchildren. . . . Aunt Mary really loved them—loved them through thick and thin, loved them in spite of everything. . . . Her love was like a kind of physical radiation, something one could almost sense as heat or light. . . . It was like escaping from a refrigerator into the sunshine. I could feel myself coming alive in that light of hers, that radiating warmth.”
Later, however, Will failed to practice such love when he cheated on his wife, a failure that he only fully acknowledges once Pala’s influences transform him.
But the realization of the true nature of love, which he acknowledges in his conversation with Susila, reminds us of what that great lover and helper of the poor Dorothy Day wrote just a few years before the publication of Island: “If we could only learn that the only important thing is love, and that we will be judged on love—to keep on loving, and showing that love, and expressing that love, over and over, whether we feel it or not, seventy times seven, to mothers-in-law, to husbands, to children—and to be oblivious of insult, or hurt, or injury—not to see them, not to hear them. . . . not judge, not do anything, but love, love, love.”
Besides his thoughts on love, Will’s transformation regarding other ideas is depicted in many of his additional comments. In a conversation with Pala’s Under-Secretary of Education, Will tells him that children in the USA are trained “for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate [a drug to treat anxiety disorders], positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production . . . [their children will be] just like the boys and girls in America.”
As with E. F. Schumcher, who like Huxley was both open to Asian ideas and critical of many Western practices, Aldous had non-conforming ideas on education. Pala’s Under-Secretary of Education tells Will that Pala children are “helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they're learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody's different from everybody else." [See here on “transcendental unity.”]
In this conversation on education, the use of psychedelic drugs is mentioned, and we will shortly discuss Huxley’s views on them. But before doing so a few other topics that Huxley thought important need to be aired.
One was dealing with death, something discussed in both Island and in Laura’s memoir. In Island Susila not only has to grapple with the death of her husband, but also the later dying of his mother, Lakshmi, who is also the wife of Dr. Robert MacPhail.
As Lakshmi is dying in a hospital bed, Susila tells her, “I think we've all come out of the same light, and we're all going back into the same light.” Like most people on the island, Susila has been influenced by Buddhist ideas and believes that Lakshmi will experience Nirvana, a final blissful state. But Susila also tells Will that the Buddhist “Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.” In her memoir, Laura writes that “in his later years Aldous put more and more emphasis on the danger of being addicted to meditation only, to knowledge only, to wisdom only—without love [italics are hers].”
In the words of a text I once used when teaching Comparative Religions, “[The Bodhisattva] puts off his Nirvana to help others gain theirs, and by so doing saves them from untold miseries and afflictions. The Bodhisattva became a living symbol of compassion.” Those words remind me a little of the Christian view of Jesus as someone who came down from heaven and had such great compassion that he died on a cross to redeem humankind. (As Huxley demonstrated in his The Perennial Philosophy, many of the world’s great religions have similarities, and one of the great Catholics of the 1950s and 1960s, the monk Thomas Merton, had great sympathy for Buddhism.)
In Island Buddhist influences are strong and meditation is taken seriously, but so too are many other practices of the islanders. They have no military and deemphasize consumerism and the production of oil (one of the foundations of modern economies). They also engage in unique child-rearing practices, pre-marital sex--but keep their population limited--and encourage the use of psychedelic drugs.
In her memoir, Luara spends many pages on her husband’s final days, weeks, and months before his November 1963 death from oral cancer. For example, two months before his death he wrote to her from London, where he was visiting his relatives: “I keep asking myself what I ought to do in the immediate future...How to be more loving, more aware, more useful.”
In the LA area, the Huxleys had many friends. One of them was another English-born writer, Christopher Isherwood, the author of stories on which the play/film Cabaret was based. About his friend, Isherwood wrote, “Fearless curiosity was one of Aldous’s noblest characteristics, a function of his greatness as a human being,”
It was that curiosity, that openness to new experiences, that led Aldous to embrace LA life. His use of psychedelic drugs was mentioned earlier, but as one article on him in LA points out, “Huxley was vehemently opposed to the casual, recreational use of psychedelics and only experienced around a dozen ‘sessions’ during his 10 years of experimentation.”
Island also depicts the careful use of psychedelics by Will and Pala islanders to help experience expanded consciousness and the realization of the oneness of being. (In the early 1960s, another LA resident, until 1965, English-born neurologist Oliver Sacks also experimented with psychedelics and later wrote, “Some people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques, or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex brain functions.”)
In addition to drug experiments, Huxley also was influenced by California’s openness to Asian religious ideas. As the article on him in LA mentions, “upon his arrival in LA, [he] became a serious student of Vedanta, the Hindu-based system of philosophy and spirituality.”
The curiosity and openness to new ideas that his friend Isherwood noted about Huxley meant that he sometimes made mistakes. But one of his most attractive qualities—in addition to his stress on the importance of loving—was his willingness to be open-minded, to consider new possibilities. Both Laura’s memoir and Aldous’s final novel (Island) indicate that abundantly.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
