Financial Times (London,England)
December 9, 1989, SaturdayBooks;
Life after cynicism – ‘Huxley in Hollywood’ by David King Dunaway
Stephen Amidon
Bloomsbury Pounds 18.95, 458 pages
DAVID KING Dunaway’s Huxley in Hollywood is actually two books. The first is an engaging, often amusing account of Aldous Huxley’s American years, which lasted from 1937 until his death in 1963. The second is a more sombre and poignant account of the writer’s attempt to find spiritual meaning, a quest which took him through radical pacifism, Eastern mysticism and psychedelic drug use. Woven together, these two narratives make for a fascinating portrait of Huxley that does much to dispel the often-dismissive myths surrounding his later years.
When Huxley left London in the summer of 1937 he was a man who had grown tired of the cynicism which had made him famous. He had, according to Dunaway, ‘run out of meaninglessness.’ He had also run out of money. These twin deficits made Hollywood an attractive destination, a sunny and optimistic place where he could replenish spiritual and economic coffers. He arrived there at a time when the studios were eager to ensnare big name writers – Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Wodehouse, among others, did their time in Los Angeles.
Huxley made the transition from the page to the screen rather less easily than most, however, due primarily to his near-blindness, which made it difficult for him to present his work in visually dynamic terms. His treatments were cumbersome and preachy, causing his agent’s secretary to claim of his first work:’It stinks.’There were a few successes – he worked on Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice – yet with the advent of the House Un-American Activities Committee (which mistakenly named Huxley as a fellow-traveller), he could only find work on such projects as a cartoon version of Don Quixote starring Mr Magoo.
Huxley fitted more readily into the Hollywood emigre community, a population which grew with each advance Hitler made. Dunaway details those heady years with skill, capturing the dynamic and often absurd flavour of artists-in-exile. From the secret ‘Sewing Circles’ of lesbians (which Huxley’s wife Maria quickly joined) to the divisions within the British community over whether to return to join the war effort, Dunaway paints a vivid portrait of a remarkable episode in American (and European) history. His anecdotes are also well drawn, in particular the meeting between Huxley and Thomas Mann on a Los Angeles beach strewn with half-inflated condoms that fluttered in the breeze like a field of poppies.
Less comical is Dunaway’s rendering of the often-maligned spiritual quest of Huxley’s American years. It has always been tempting to dismiss the later Huxley as a once-brilliant novelist who lost his satirical edge in the diffuse, cultish haze of southern Californian mysticism. Yet Dunaway paints a far different picture, showing a man who sought to remedy family traumas and crippling eye problems by attaining an inner peace and vision.
Rather than being soft-headed, Huxley appears to have simply outlived a cynicism which had cocooned him from the early death of his mother, the suicide of a beloved brother and a long spell of childhood blindness. His fascination with psychedelic drugs is also well depicted, showing him to be a reluctant guru of the acid droppers of the 1960s as he urged Timothy Leary to limit the use of LSD to a select few.
Although this aspect of the book is less entertaining than the show business stories, it does flesh out Huxley’s mysticism, making it difficult to dismiss his American years as the sorry end of a once promising literary career. Dunaway rightly points out that much of Huxley’s later writing, especially The Doors of Perception and his utopian novel The Island, were standard reading for the youth of the 1960s. The fact that they are now rejected in favour of the dark satire of Point Counter Point and Brave New World may say more about the prejudices of contemporary readers than it does of their author.
