Aldous Huxley writes one of his closest friends, Lewis Gielgud, while on Easter break during his time as a schoolmaster at Eton. Huxley attended Eton himself until he contracted keratitis; an illness that left him virtually blind and shifted his focus from science to literature. Due to his poor vision, he was deemed unfit by the Army in 1916—the same year he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a First in English. In the letter below, Huxley encloses a poem, eventually published with minor changes in the 1918 volume of Oxford Poetry, where Huxley had been an assistant editor two years prior.
Garsington Manor, Oxford
18 April, 1918
My dear Lewis,
It pains me to think that you are as gloomy as your letter would lead me to think you are. Not that one can offer much comfort these days; there is no superfluity of it now to pass round.
However, as far as circumstances will permit, I am enjoying my brief liberty a good deal. First a week or so in London, the first three days of which I seem to have spent with Hugh Terriss [Terres], Marie [Beerbohm] and Lady Constance Stuart [Stewart]-Richardson either in the Eiffel or on divans in Constance’s flat, where we used to lie day and night eating bread and honey and indulging in desultory conversation—the whole so unreal that it is difficult to remember whether it was all a nightmare or not. Then a week end with Aunt Sapphira [Sophy], then two or three more days of London, brightened by interludes of an almost nuptial character with Marie, then down here, where it almost immediately started to snow and rain and blow. If it wasn’t that one thought about the bloody war and the horrors of the situation, one would be able to do more writing; as it is, I blot a little paper every now and then and contrive to read a few heavy books for the good of my soul. I wrote my masterpiece yesterday, when bicycling into Oxford in the icy rain I composed a lyric on Middle Age of exquisite beauty.
Men of a certain age
Grow sad remembering
Their youth’s libertinage,
Drinking and chambering.
She whom devotedly
Once they solicited
Proves all too bloatedly
Gross when revisited
Twenty years after —
Sordid years.
Ironic laughter,
And bitter tears.
When we are bald and fat, my dear Lewis, how revolting we shall be.
There is utterly no news: —a letter from Evan the other day describing the picturesque beauties of nature in Algeria, the rumoured reappearance of Harwood upon the stage of common life… nothing.
So much for the life of action, and as for the life of thought, it has come to a standstill. Some day I hope to be able to write more rationally.
Have you any news of the Times man? More important, what news of peace? O God.
Yours,
A.L.H.
From Letters of Aldous Huxley. Ed. by Grover Smith. London; Chatto & Windus, 1969.
FURTHER READING
Huxley’s poem under “Two Songs” in the 1918 volume of Oxford Poetry.