ALDOUS HUXLEY AND MUSIC IN THE 1920s

Abstract

THE IMPORTANCE of music in the writings of Aldous Huxley has always been recognized, yet it is not often remembered that the confidence of his musical judgements had its foundations in a period that he spent, in 1922-3, as music critic of the Weekly Westminster Gazette. This remains one of his least-known ventures, and his criticisms have not been reprinted. Huxley was to profess himself to be without formal musical training, 'beyond the usual youthful piano teaching of the bad, unintelligent kind generally current at the time of my youth'.' He seems nonetheless to have spent many hours at the piano during his earlier years. He might work at particular pieces: for example, 'we have just polished off the Beethoven Funeral March, having before that completed one of the variations in the sonata: I think that we are going to begin on a Chopin prelude next time-the one in F major, I think'.2 Or he would play more improvisatorily, finding his way round the keyboard, one imagines in a kind of questing, exploratory fashion, seeking out, remembering, not composing as such but perhaps trying out a sequence of chords, enjoying the discovery of certain sonorities; his sister remembers these hours spent 'playing rather curiously on the piano'.3 Much of this is consistent with the quiet withdrawal into himself that accompanied the eye infection, keratitispunctata, which seriously affected his sight in 1911 and led to his withdrawal from Eton; he was never wholly to recover from it despite some advances during 1912 and a marked improvement of vision in the late 1930s, when he was instructed in the Bates method.4 The determination shown in 1911 by the boy of sixteen in the face of what might have seemed hopelessness is quite remarkable; Sybille Bedford has described how, 'with tough concentration, he taught himself to read Braille and to type on a small portable. He taught himself to play the piano-first with one hand on the Braille page and the other hand on the piano keys; then the other way round: reading with the right, learning to play with the left, until he knew both parts by heart.' In October 1913 Huxley went up to Oxford; he had a piano in his rooms at Balliol; L. P. Hartley recalls hearing him play." Gervase Huxley, his cousin and Oxford contemporary, remembers that at that time Aldous discovered jazz and the delights of syncopation: 'he was always picking up something new-and this was certainly brand new to us'.7 Huxley was later to despise and pillory the vulgarity, cheapness and sensuality of jazz.