With thanks to Paul Breeze for discovering that Aldoux Husley wrote and published poetry during and about The First World War
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| Portrait of Aldoux Huxley by John Maler Collier |
Initially educated at home by his mother and a governess, Aldous went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford University, graduating with a degree in English Literature. He published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine “Oxford Poetry”.
Exempted from military service due to extremely poor eyesight, during the First World War, Aldous worked on the land as a farm labourer at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell. While at the Manor, he met several Bloomsbury Group figures, including Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. In September 1916 Aldous Huxley’s first collection of poetry, "The Burning Wheel", was published by Blackwell.
In 1919, when John Middleton Murry was reorganising “The Athenaeum” magazine and invited Huxley to join the staff, he accepted immediately, and married Belgian refugee Maria Nys (1899–1955), who he met at Garsington.
The Huxleys lived with their young son in Italy part of the time during the 1920s, where Aldous used to visit his friend D. H. Lawrence.
In 1937 the Huxley family went to live in Hollywood, USA. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, and for a time in Taos, New Mexico, until his death on 22nd November 1963.
As a Hollywood screenwriter Huxley used much of his earnings to bring Jewish and left-wing writer and artist refugees from Hitler's Germany to the US. He worked for many of the major studios including MGM and Disney.
Aldous Huxley died in the UK on 22nd November 1963.
NOTES:
Garsington Manor in the village of Garsington, near Oxford, UK, is a country house, dating from the 17th century. The owner in the early 20th century was Lady Ottoline Morrell, who held court there from 1915 to 1924.
Garsington became a haven for the Morrells’ friends. In 1916, they invited conscientious objectors among their friends to go and work on the home farm for the duration of The First World War - as civilian work classified as being of national importance was recognised as an alternative to military service.
“Oxford Poetry”, founded in 1910, is the oldest dedicated poetry magazine published in the UK, and one of the oldest in the world.
“The Athenæum” was a British literary magazine published in London, UK from 1828 to 1921.
Although Aldous Huxley is famous as a writer of novels, his WW1 poetry collections were “The Burning Wheel” (Blackwell, Oxford, 1916), “The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems” (Blackwell, Oxford, 1918) and he had two poems published in the anthology “Oxford Poetry 1918”.
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| Aldoux Huxley by Vanessa Bell |
ALDOUS HUXLEY (BALLIOL)
TWO SONGS
I
THICK-flowered is the trellis
That hides our joys
From prying eyes of malice
And all annoys,
And we lie rosily bowered.
Through the long afternoons
And evenings endlessly
Drawn out, when summer swoons
In perfume windlessly,
Sounds our light laughter,
With whispered words between
And silent kisses.
None but the flowers have seen
Our white caresses —
Flowers and the bright-eyed birds.
II
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,
Oh, bitter laughter
And bitter tears!
SONG OF POPLARS
SHEPHERD, to yon tall poplars tune your flute:
Let them pierce, keenly, subtly shrill,
The slow blue rumour of the hill;
Let the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold,
And the great sky be mute.
Then hearken how the poplar trees unfold
Their buds, yet close and gummed and blind,
In airy leafage of the mind,
Rustling in silvery whispers the twin-hued scales
That fade not nor grow old.
“Poplars and fountains and you cypress spires
Springing in dark and rusty flame,
Seek you aught that hath a name?
Or say, say: Are you all an upward agony
Of undefined desires?
“Say, are you happy in the golden march
Of sunlight all across the day?
Or do you watch the uncertain way
That leads the withering moon on cloudy stairs
Over the heaven’s wide arch?
“Is it towards sorrow or towards joy you lift
The sharpness of your trembling spears?
Or do you seek, through the grey tears
That blur the sky, in the heart of the triumphing blur,
A deeper, calmer rift?”
So; I have tuned my music to the trees,
And there were voices, dim below
Their shrillness, voices swelling slow
In the blue murmur of hills, and a golden cry
And then vast silences.
From “Oxford Poetry 1918” pp 33 and 34.
THE BURNING WHEEL.
Wearied of its own turning,
Distressed with its own busy restlessness,
Yearning to draw the circumferent pain —
The rim that is dizzy with speed —
To the motionless centre, there to rest,
The wheel must strain through agony
On agony contracting, returning
Into the core of steel.
And at last the wheel has rest, is still,
Shrunk to an adamant core:
Fulfilling its will in fixity.
But the yearning atoms, as they grind
Closer and closer, more and more
Fiercely together, beget
A flaming fire upward leaping,
Billowing out in a burning,
Passionate, fierce desire to find
The infinite calm of the mother's breast.
And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,
Bright, tenderly radiant;
All bitterness lost in the infinite
Peace of the mother's bosom.
But death comes creeping in a tide
Of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear
Wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness
And burns with a darkening passion and pain,
Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.
And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,
Begetting once again the wheel that yearns —
Sick with its speed — for the terrible stillness
Of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.
And so once more
Shall the wheel revolve till its anguish cease
In the iron anguish of fixity;
Till once again
Flame billows out to infinity,
Sinking to a sleep of brightness
In that vast oblivious peace.
VISION
I had been sitting alone with books,
Till doubt was a black disease,
When I heard the cheerful shout of rooks
In the bare, prophetic trees.
Bare trees, prophetic of new birth,
You lift your branches clean and free
To be a beacon to the earth,
A flame of wrath for all to see.
And the rooks in the branches laugh and shout
To those that can hear and understand;
"Walk through the gloomy ways of doubt
With the torch of vision in your hand."
THE CHOICE.
Comrade, now that you're merry
And therefore true,
Say — where would you like to die
And have your friend to bury
What once was you?
"On the top of a hill
With a peaceful view
Of country where all is still?"...
Great God, not I!
I'd lie in the street
Where two streams meet
And there's noise enough to fill
The outer ear,
While within the brain can beat
Marches of death and life,
Glory and joy and fear,
Peace of the sort that moves
And clash of strife
And routs of armies fleeing.
There would I shake myself clear
Out of the deep-set grooves
Of my sluggish being.
“ THE BURNING WHEEL” BY ALDOUS HUXLEY (B. H. Blackwell, Oxford, 1916)
Sources: Find my Past, FreeBMD, Wikipedia and
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70771
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-burning-wheel-aldous-huxley/1138559289
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-burning-wheel-aldous-huxley/1138559289
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Burning-Wheel-Aldous-Huxley-ebook/dp/B07BS5BGJP
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47912/47912-h/47912-h.htm
https://www.oxfordpoetry.com/
https://archive.org/details/defeatofyouthoth00huxluoft/page/n5/mode/2up
