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Stan Lauryssens: Our Brave New World
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Our Brave New World
The Life and Loves of Aldous and Maria Huxley
© Stan Lauryssens
A non-fiction novel based on real events.
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Brave New World on the Big Screen
"When Leonardo DiCaprio was a young boy, he used to play hide-and-seek in the overgrown gardens of a Hollywood Hills mansion owned by the family of the visionary British author Aldous Huxley.
Now, 30 years later, the star of Titanic and The Aviator is paying back the hospitality by putting his Hollywood muscle behind the first big-screen production of Brave New World, Huxley’s most enduring novel, to be directed by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, The Gladiator)."
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Aldous Huxley
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I had never even heard of Maria Huxley before. I wasn’t that much interested in Aldous Huxley either. I had planned to write a non-fiction account of the tribulations of Caryl Chessman who was executed in 1960 at the San Quentin gas chamber.
At the time, two world famous writers took up the Chessman case: American novelist Norman Mailer and British expat Aldous Huxley. I asked Mailer what had been his motive for rallying against the death penalty for a convicted serial rapist. Mailer sent me a typically Maileresque reply: “Dear Stan, I simply can’t remember. At the time, I was either stoned or drunk.” Signed, Norman Mailer.
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Norman Mailer
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Aldous Huxley died in November 1963, on the day and almost in the hour President John F. Kennedy was killed. I started reading everything about Huxley I could lay my hands on—and the more I read about him, the more I became convinced that not the partially blind Aldous but his diminutive wife Maria was the stronger partner in the Huxley marriage. Maria’s maiden name was Nys, unmistakeably a Belgian name. In order to locate surviving family members, I wrote to every “Nys” in the Belgian telephone directory. An elderly lady remembered that many years ago, her family had donated a handful of letters Maria Huxley had sent from Hollywood to the Albertina Royal Library in Brussels.
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Royal Albertina Library in Brussels
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The Albertina is a square, concrete building that looks exactly like the former KGB headquarters in Moscow. Nothing in the Albertina was on computer; researchers had to wade through millions of index cards. After two weeks in the Albertina, I landed in the Literature Museum on the fifth floor where I found a yellowed index card with the caption: “Maria Nys Huxley: 2C”. I asked the archivist what the “2C” could possibly mean. She said: “Two cards, obviously.” Two is not a handful but you can as well start on a small scale.
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Half an hour later, the archivist brought me two heavy cardboard boxes. “2C” apparently meant “2 cartons”. It was a real treasure-trove: three thousand letters Maria Huxley wrote to her younger sisters Jeanne, Suzanne and Rose—as well as some fifty previously unpublished letters from Aldous Huxley, some handwritten, all of them signed.
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Maria’s letters chronicled a lifetime in her own words. The first letter was sent from Oxford in 1916, the last one—a deeply moving scribble—in 1955, only days before she died of cancer.
On top of the pile was the very first letter Maria wrote from Hollywood in 1937: “Chère Jeanne, I’ve met Gary Cooper, the man with the most lovely eyes in the whole world. Walt Disney invited us to visit his film studio. We met Greta Garbo. She is shy and neurotic but such a beautiful woman.” Then and there, I knew I had a book.
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Gary Cooper
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An excerpt from Our Brave New World by Stan Lauryssens:
"Maria is delicately scented. She is wearing coral earrings. She has done her yoga excercises on her bedroom floor, her eyes fixed on the scabrous painting that is a gift from Lorenzo [D.H.Lawrence].
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D.H.Lawrence
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She's also got a Marie Laurencin print in her room, very feminine, lots of elegant blonde-haired women in an idyllic summer garden on a swing. Maria is a little tired. Aldous is working in his cool room. His publishers would like him to write a D.H.Lawrence biography but Aldous has had a marvellous idea for a new novel—and he's got a wonderful title, too. Brave New World.
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It will be a novel about a utopian world, a world far away in the future in which there is no sickness, no old age, no solitude, not one sleepless night, no war, no violence, no freedom, no crime, no poverty, no art, no past, no God and ultimately no happiness. [ ...] Aldous wants Brave New World to be a suspense novel that will also be an influential and prophetic philosophical and political denunciation. Maria is sitting at her own desk in the downstairs living room, typing page after page of the new manuscript on
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Aldous’s portable Corona, adding a descriptive adjective here and there or omitting a sentence or two. She is typing fast, with innumerable mistakes, but that doesn’t bother her. Spelling has never been her forte. Whenever Maria gets tired or suffers a migraine attack, Sybille [Bedford] replaces her in typing Aldous’s manuscript."
On publication, Brave New World sold badly in America. The book was banned in Australia on grounds of obscenity. Even the national press in Britain was no longer kind to Huxley. The Sunday Express carried a two-page attack under the headline ALDOUS HUXLEY---THE MAN WHO HATES GOD.
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A cache of unknown Huxley snapshots
The National Portrait Gallery (London) was bequeathed a cache of previously unknown vintage snapshot prints from 1915 to around 1930 that were taken---most likely---at Garsington in Oxfordshire where Aldous and Maria Huxley spent many a wonderful weekend at the manor of Lady Ottoline Morrell. The photographer died before 1939 and his (or her) identity is not known. Here are some of these vintage snapshots. Doesn't it look like a Victorian period movie or a custume drama in an elaborate set?
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Michio Ito (Japanese dancer, debuted in London, died 1961), Maria Huxley, Julian (Lady Ottoline Morrell's daughter) and Lady Ottoline Morrell.
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Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, elder sister of Virginia Woolf.
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Aldous and Maria Huxley, their son Matthew, Mimi Gielgud (1930)
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