Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), most popularly known for his early novel Brave New World is of specialised interest as a student and champion of Alexander Technique and the Bates Method of Natural Vision Improvement. Huxley came to F.M. Alexander and his Technique sometime between October and December 1935, at the height of his popular fame and at a personal nadir. Personal tragedies of his early life and a consequent veneer of cynicism and fear of emotional involvement were clashing with his zest for life, his passionate curiosity and his sensitive social conscience.

It seems agreed by those who knew him that lessons transformed him in many ways, despite his spending long periods away in France in 1936. According to Walter Carrington, he also had lessons with FM in New York "sometime in 1940/41"2, and Frank Pierce Jones says that Huxley had lessons with him in 1960, and wrote three letters to him in 1962, the year before his death.3 In the 1976 introduction to Jones's book (then Body Awareness in Action) J. McVicker Hunt says "Huxley was a pupil who came back repeatedly whenever distressful symptoms convinced him that his use of himself had again become habitually wrong in some fashion."4

The technique definitely had a lifelong influence on him. Although FM had some doubts about his understanding at times, Lawrence Bruce reports that in about 1936 he said to Walter Carrington, "You know, Aldous is a remarkable man. He might very well have discovered the same principle that I did.-5

In any case, Huxley incorporated and advocated many of Alexander*s ideas in his future writing, nonfiction and fiction, notably in Ends and Means (1937)6 and Island (1962)7, his last novel.

THE ROAD TO ALEXANDER

At sixteen, two years after the death of his adored mother, an attack of keratitis punctata rendered Huxley virtually blind for about 18 months. It is a sign of his unquenchable spirit and insatiable curiosity that he learned Braille in three weeks. He was left with his right cornea virtuallv opaque and with 25% clear in the left eye. Using atropine to dilate the pupil he later managed a first class degree at Oxford (despite a brother's suicide and the loss of many friends to World War 1) followed by a brilliant, fashionably cynical literary career. But by 1931 in his poem "The Cicadas" he spoke of:

... my own spirit's dark discouragement. Deprived of inward as of outward sight.8

Despite health problems, Aldous travelled extensively with his first wife, Maria. Roy Fenton, a coffee planter who led them on a gruelling ride over the Sierra Juarez to Oaxaca, Mexico, said "He seemed to be looking for an experience."9

The quest led him to Alexander. In 1935 he was suffering extreme writer's block with Eyeless in Gaza10, his most personal novel. A combination of writing the early stages of the novel, financial anxieties, his distress at the rise of fascism, and his growing involvement with pacifism-painful for a man physically afraid to speak in public-led him to insomnia, depression and constipation. In fact, this is a drastic simplification of the situation. He was said to be so debilitated that he worked lying with his typewriter (18 point type) on his chest.

It was in this state be began lessons with FM in London in autumn 1935, with positive results. At the same time he was sent by FM to Mr J.E.R. McDonagh, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and pursued a course of colonic irrigation to which he attributed relief of many of his symptoms:

... these were all symptoms of chronic intestinal intoxication (insomnia, overtired, low blood pressure). With the washing out of the intestine and two injections ... the whole business has cleared up... Symptoms of asthenia-nervousness, indecision, phobias etc.-have disappeared.11

But how much of this was in fact achieved through the Alexander Technique itself? In February 1936 Maria wrote:

... the old enemy insomnia is checked, and by the man Alexander... Aldous ... goes to him each day since autumn. He believes he has made an important, in fact essential, discovery. He certainly has made a new and unrecognisable person of Aldous, not physically only, but mentally, and therefore morally. Or rather he has brought out, actively, all we, Aldous' best friends, know never came out either in the novels or with strangers.12

In Eyeless in Gaza, finished March 1936, he explored the way out of disillusionment and bad health (in 1921 he had been refused insurance) through pacifism, meditation and "Dr Miller's" technique. The Miller character includes characteristics of F.M. Alexander and LE.R. McDonagh.

I have found little direct comment from Huxley about lessons. But a quote from "Anthony's Diary " in the book is revealing:

To learn proper use one must inhibit all improper uses of the self... This process entails knowing good and bad use-knowing them apart ... Increased awareness and power of control result ... There is an increased ability to detect one's motives for any given piece of behaviour... Acquire the art of inhibiting muscular bad use and you acquire thereby the art of inhibiting more complicated trains of behaviour. 13

THE SEARCH FOR LIGHT

In April 1937 the Huxleys left for the US and drove to California where, it had been suggested, a lucrative career in Hollywood awaited. Despite the good light and climate, Huxley's health and vision deteriorated almost parallel with the developing war situation in Europe. Huxley turned to the Bates Method, with which he had considerable success in the winter of 1938-9. A letter written by Maria at the time mentions his reading diamond type after three months of not reading at all.14 Huxley then began serious study of the Bates Method with Margaret Corbett, Bates best known disciple-at times six days a week-and continued to take lessons till at least 1959. In 1939 Maria wrote about the dramatic results:

The left eye has altogether cleared up. The right eye is clearing rapidly and above all he is able to move it, it moves back; you remember that as he wasn't using the eye, there was a marked strabismus... He has put on a lot of weight and with it a different air.. He is somehow smoothed out. His moods and depressions have smoothed along with it... From having vision of 15% he now has a vision of 50% and is making more rapid progress ...15

' Graduating from glasses of minus 10 dioptres (-15 for reading), Huxley wrote in the same year:

I have just done the revision of my typescript ... without glasses and ... without fatigue... And all through a perfectly rational and simple series of practices ... to relax the eye and increase its circulation ... to train the mind to interpret what the eye sends it and not to interfere with the functioning of the eye by straining or staring. 16

But as his biographer and family friend Sybille Bedford says:

What Aldous did not mention were the daily hours spent on learning those simple practices... Not to strain, not to stare, is as hard to learn for an urban adult as cartwheels; harder. It needs a patience which, as Maria said, we would only understand if we ourselves had been half blind. 17

All was not smooth sailing. Huxley's health and vision were seemingly tossed about by the progress of the war and other events. He seemed unable to inhibit his habit of expressing his feelings through his health, although he wrote: "To become ill with sympathy and anxiety is the one sure way of widening the scope of the war.18

Given his family tendency to severe depressions, his tenacity of purpose was remarkable and although he used pinhole glasses and a magnifying glass at times, he never consistently wore glasses again. His pursuit of vision-physical and spiritual (through meditation)was the one discipline he kept recommitting to, even though, as Lawrence Bruce says: "He was like a grasshopper and never stayed for long in any one discipline."19 Perhaps this constant questing was part of his openness and his need for empirical proof.

Certain breakthroughs kept up his commitment. In 1940 he wrote in a letter:

Yesterday ... I succeeded ... in getting a single fixed image from both eyes together-a thing I have never had... Anything that can be got momentarily .. can be built up by proper exercise into a permanent acquisition.20

Alas, Huxley never achieved this bliss again until his experiments (under medical supervision) with mescaline in the 1950s.

THE ART OF SEEING

Huxley's concise and elegant "little book of pure utility", The Art of Seeing, was written in "gratitude to ... Dr W.H. Bates and ... Mrs Margaret D. Corbett, to whose skill as a teacher I owe the improvement in my own vision."21 He wrote it without glasses between April and July 1942. It sold 10,000 copies in a few days in UK, is in print today, and became a best-seller again as recently as four years ago, in Italy.

Did Huxley have a secondary motive for writing this book? Could he have been trying to demonstrate to FM that he was indeed working within Alexander principles? According to Frank Pierce Jones, FM had "dismissed the Bates Method as another form of end-gaining. He ... expostulated with Huxley for deserting the means-whereby principle in favour of 'beastly exercises'."22 Certainly Huxley uses much Alexander Technique terminology in the book, and he quotes FM: "In the words of Mr F.M. Alexander we all tend to be greedy 'end-gainers', paying no attention to our 'meanswhereby'."23 He also extols FM in the appendix for his success in improving vision through his work.

In spite of this, says Walter Carrington, the book disappointed FM:

Alexander strongly believed in the wholeness of the Self and considered that specific eye exercises were a contradiction of this principle. (In other words, he believed that the efficient practice of his technique would achieve everything possible with regard to the use of the eyes.) He also thought that Huxley had been less than candid with his readers by not recording the large number of lessons in the technique he had received... It was not that Huxley had used his principles without sufficient acknowledgement that upset him, but that he had failed to point out the significance of the primary control that must have been crucial in respect of any beneficial changes that took place.24

"These two techniques have demonstrated the possibility of a complete reconditioning. "

But Huxley had written widely of his debt to Alexander. In 1942 he wrote in a private letter:

... the damaged organs of vision get better in proportion as the visual function is improved. The practice of the Bates method as also of the method for mastering the primary control of the organism as devised by FM Alexander has been profoundly important to me. These two techniques have demonstrated the possibility on the physiological plane of a complete reconditioning, analogous to that which takes place through the techniques of mysticism on the psychological and spiritual planes.25

Did he perhaps feel that his "little book" was not an appropriate place to try to explain primary control?

According to Carrington, Huxley and FM also exchanged letters on the subject. It would be interesting to see that correspondence but FM's letters at least were probably victims of the fire that destroyed the Huxley house in 1962.

I conclude with this extract from Huxley's 1918 poem, "The Reef'. Peter Furchow sees it as expressing a desire to escape from the mindlessness of contemporary existence and a protest at the lack of balance in his early years. It also seems to show an early affinity with the spirit of the Alexander Technique.

... these are the things I search for:-passion beyond the ken Of our foiled violences and, more swift Than any blow which man aims against time, The invulnerable, motion that shall rift All dimness with the lightning of a rhyme, Or note, or colour. And the body shall be Quick as the mind; and will shall find release From bondage to brute things; and joyously Soul, will and body, in the strength of triune peace, Shall live the perfect grace of power unwasted.26

ABOUT THE WRITER

Louise Gauld is a New Zealander. She did an Executant Diploma in violin at Auckland University in the 60s, coincident with two operations on eye muscles, and later completed a BA in Art History.
She is a lapsed weaver, caver and Scottish Country Dancer but continues tramping and has recently begun piano lessons. She first met the Alexander Technique during a term of singing lessons with Jane Heirich in Michigan and began study with Peter Grunwald in 1995. Her ambition is to complete training to be an Alexander teacher in Auckland.
Louise is the author of Crangucat Moves In, Reed (1997), a children's picture book. 140A Campbell Road, One Tree Hill, Auckland, New Zealand Phone: +64-9-636.8144. Email: gauld@math.auckland.ac,nz

LAURA HUXLEY

When I passed through Los Angeles in June 1998, Michael Frederick kindly arranged a brief meeting for me with Laura Archera Huxley, who takes A.T. lessons with him, Laura, second wife and widow of Aldous, confirmed the importance of Alexander Technique in Huxley s life and its role in making space in the body and space for new ideas in the mind. She also spoke of the space in cells-the space between cell wall and nucleus being proportionately greater that that between the earth and the moon.

Her early career was as a violinist and she made her Carnegie debut just before the war playing a Mozart concerto. Later, she became a psychotherapist-she wrote several related books-and she has a particular interest in prenatal influences. But now her interests are pre-womb! She founded "Our Ultimate Investment", five projects involving child welfare at different stages which were '...conceived together, all at once". "Prelude to Conception' involves 10 to 14-year-old boys and girls in baby-sitting toddlers, making them aware of the hardships and responsibilities involved. She says it is a potent contraceptive device.

Like Huxley, Laura retains an open, questing mind. With my mathematician husband she discussed a favorite theme of Huxley's, the overlapping and integration of different disciplines. She has also investigated Rolling and Feldenkrais, and takes the occasional Bates lesson when her teacher is in town.

We discussed the increased awareness of the involvement of the whole body and of intuition and imagination in enhancing three-dimensional vision. 1 asked about the importance of primary control and she said "The primary control is primary. That's it."

Many writers have noted the huge change in Huxley that began in the mid 1930s, Approximately coincident with his interest in the A.T. he had become a committed pacifist and began meditation which helped him greatly when he took up the Bates Method in California.

Laura said that by the time she married him Huxley was "Very easy to live with because he was not at all neurotic". I said that he also seemed free of intellectual jealousy "He was always delighted to find someone more intelligent or more inspired," she answered.

She gave me a copy of This Timeless Moment, her biography of Huxley, for which I was particularly grateful-the local library copy is getting rather battered. It also offers evidence of the continued importance of the Alexander Technique to him. On his deathbed Laura encouraged and comforted him with the idea that he was going "forward and up into the light".

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ENDNOTES

  <font size="-1">Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, London: Chatto
and Windus (1932). 2. Walter Carrington, Letter to Louise Gauld (28/4/98).
3. Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change, London: Mouritz (1997) p.56. 4.
ibid., Fax. 5. Lawrence Bruce, "A Meeting of Two Remarkable Men: F.M. Alexander
and Aldous Huxley", AUSTAT Newsletter (1996) p.2. 6. Aldous Huxley, Ends and
Means, London: Chatto and Windus (1937). 7. Aldous Huxley, Island, London:
Chatto and Windus (1962). 8. Aldous Huxley, The Cicadas and Other Poems, London:
Chatto and Windus (1931) P.M. 9. Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography,
London. Chatto and Wmdus (1973) VoL 1, p.266. 10. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in
Gaza, London: Chatto and Windus (1936). 11. Grover Smith, led.), Letters of
Aldous Huxley, New York; Harper and Row (1968) p.402. 12. ibid., p.400. 13.
Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, London: Chatter and Windus (1936) p.327. 14.
Sybille Bedford, op. cit., VOL L p.366. 15. ibid., p.373. 16. ibid., p.374.
17. ibid., p.375. 18. David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, London: Bloomsbury
(1990) p.145 (available from author, fax: 001505 345 0185). 19. Lawrence Bruce,
loc.cit. 20. Grover Smith, op. cit., p.450. 21. Aldous Huxley, The Art of
Seeing, Seattle: Montana Books (1975) p.viii. 22. Frank Pierce Jones, op.
cit. p.77. 23. Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing, Seattle: Montana Books (1975)
p.45. 24. Walter Carrington, Letter to Louise Gauld (28/ 4/ 98). 25. Grover
Smith, op. cit., p.473. 26. Aldous Huxley, "The Reef", from Verses and Comedy
(1946) o.p., quoted in Peter Furchow, Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1972) p.27. </font></font></font></font>