By Guy Stevenson.
Allene Symons, Aldous Huxley’s Hands (Prometheus Books)
Aldous Huxley was a famous but unlikely crusader for psychedelic drugs and their mind-expanding capabilities. English, classically educated and the hard-thinking contemporary of T.S. Elliot and Bertrand Russell, his position as a precursor to Timothy Leary remains one of the most intriguing subplots of 1960s American counterculture. Unlike his friend D.H. Lawrence, for example, who voices his rebellions against mainstream culture angrily throughout his essays and fiction, Huxley writes with an objectivism and gentlemanly calm apparently at odds with his radical visions. Allene Symons’ Aldous Huxley’s Hands is part Huxley biography, part history of psychedelic science but also – and less promisingly – an attempt by a daughter to commemorate her father’s amateur scientific research into the physiognomy of hands. Symons, a medical journalist and media studies lecturer, set out to write the book after finding a sample with Huxley’s name on it amongst a thousand photographs of hands in her father’s attic. Beyond a surprising but not particularly close friendship, her investigations into the photo’s origins led to some illuminating discoveries about the crank scientific and occult leanings that motivated Huxley’s fixation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1950s and the production of his Blake-inspired and Jim Morison-inspiring The Doors of Perception (1954).
As biographies by Sybille Bedford, David King Dunaway and Nicholas Murray have also noted, Huxley spent a large part of the fifties collaborating with psychiatrists to promote the study of mescalin. Alongside Huxley and her father Howard Alban Thrasher, the main subjects of Symons’ book are the Dr.’s Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies, two Saskatchewan-based specialists in schizophrenia who gave Huxley his first dose of the drug and enlisted him for a national campaign to win research funding. Quoting from their correspondence, Symons shows us the grandiose and practical sides to their mission, which Huxley christened ‘onsight’ – from the belief that mescalin, and later LSD and Psilocybin (magic mushrooms), could engender rapid and fundamental “change [in] the intellectual and spiritual climate” to more plausible theories about the biochemical replication of schizophrenic states to investigate a cure. They believed, Symons says, that “since taking mescalin induced a distorted visionary experience similar to schizophrenia … a naturally occurring chemical in the human body might be related to schizophrenia”. Symons also gives us some entertaining insight into Huxley’s first trip – which became the basis for The Doors of Perception. Opposite a photo of the elder literary statesman peering out over the Hollywood Hills, professorially attired but clearly out of his skull, Simmons pieces together information from Osmond’s records to show us Huxley’s immediate reactions, like his childlike hysterics at the warping of his car into a “cartoon car” with a “bulbous top”, rather than the recollected feelings and thoughts presented in The Doors.
Touching (and amusing) though this is, it and the story of Huxley’s ‘Onsight’ project have been well covered elsewhere. More revealing and original sections of Aldous Huxley’s Hands arise from Symons’ research into her father’s time in his company. Howard Thrasher was, he tells his daughter, a regular at the weekly salons Huxley and his wife hosted in Hollywood throughout the 1950s. Never one, according to his friend Christopher Isherwood, “to bother about the neighbours”, Huxley would bring together shwarmis, mediums, and various unproven or discredited amateur scientists for discussions he hoped would inspire future projects. As Symons says, Huxley and his first wife Maria had been half-interested in hands as a clue to personality since living near a “hand healer” in France during the 1920s, and they asked her father along to display his findings and photograph their guests. Although no professional collaboration came from this, Symons finds a link between her father and Huxley in their common skepticism about the received wisdom of Freudian and behaviorist ideas. Where Huxley and his psychiatrist collaborators saw drug-inspired visions as evidence that schizophrenia was biochemically rather than unconsciously or experientially induced, Thrasher drew similar conclusions from the recurrence of hand markings among the mental patients he photographed. Huxley and her father, Symons claims, were part of the same fight to prove the ” biochemical basis for mental illness” at a time when that was a “radical, and even a ridiculed, idea”.
If Symons overplays Huxley’s enthusiasm for her father’s hand project, as well as its relevance to psychedelic science, the personal accounts of the Huxleys’ house parties are a good way into the subject of ‘parapsychology’. A school of psychology that refuses to rule out the paranormal, it had an important influence on much of his pre-psychedelic writing, from 1925’s Those Barren Leaves through to A Brave New World (1932) and his last novel, The Island (1960). After the revelation that Huxley was holding s éances and hanging out with Ron L. Hubbard in the fifties, Symons takes us back to the First World War and his discussions of ‘theosophy’ – ‘an amalgam of so-called ancient wisdom spun into cosmic laws and astral planes’ – with D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell. These took place at grander but equally unconventional salons hosted by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Morrell, the model for Lawrence’s Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, was an early advocate of ‘Free Love’ and possibly inspired Huxley to undertake what Symons tactfully calls a ‘marriage loosely tethered by creative consent’. This, we are told, resulted in his wife arranging affairs for him with various renowned women, including shipping heiress and modernist muse Nancy Cunard. Later, approaching middle age in the 1940s, we find him training under “Swami Prabhavananda, the guru of the Vedanta temple in Hollywood”, then living alongside Christopher Isherwood and the BBC announcer Geoffrey Heard on the latter’s quasi-Hindi commune at Laguna Beach. Here Huxley and his old friend Heard explored their interest in “telepathy and precognition”.
Huxley’s part in the development of unconventional occultist ideas from the 1910s to the 1960s is the most interesting thing about this book. Unfortunately, Symons neglects to give that genealogy the critical attention it deserves. The Freudians and behaviorists, dismissed as the “establishment”, objected to experiments like her father’s – and Huxley’s – for their potentially regressive implications. In her understandable hurry to defend her father, Symons mentions but doesn’t interrogate the accusation that he was “bringing [the conversation about mental illness] back to heredity again”. No doubt she is right to celebrate Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies for the foresight and courage it took to challenge psychiatric norms, but Huxley’s involvement in this – and his background in alternative religion and science – should have presented an opportunity to explore the pressing counter-arguments. There is nothing in here, for example, about what “bringing it back to heredity” meant in the 1950s, just a decade after Auschwitz. Likewise, as an advocate of the existential and healing benefits of psychedelic drugs, Symons glosses over their damaging recreational use from the 1960s onwards. Talking about Osmond, Symthies and Huxley’s ‘Onsight’ project, she writes that “no idea of any possible or desirable recreational use of these hallucinogens crossed their innocent minds”, but mentions next to nothing about the acid-induced psychoses experienced by abusers over the next two decades. Osmond’s fear, that “the real dangers” to their mission might eventually come from “success, not failure”, is left hanging.
Aldous Huxley’s Hands offers sometimes illuminating insight into the extra-literary activities that mean this important literary figure “lives on in the scrap-book of a generation”. While it is good on his move into the world of psychiatric research and provides valuable information about the unorthodox interests that led him there, its main flaw is the inability to check that against Huxley’s writing itself. Symons is too self-deprecating when she says she “knew [she] could not incorporate all this source material into the flow of the story, nor do justice to the accomplishments of Smythies, Osmond, and others in Huxley’s circle, much less draw a proper picture of a polymath like Aldous.” She does in fact manage to tell Symthies, Osmond and Huxley’s story well. But Huxley’s own theories about the psychedelic experience are more complicated than the book allows for. Too often we get reductive paraphrasing in place of his actual, hard-wrought words. The section about the philosopher Henri Bergson, for example, a major influence on Huxley’s theory that LSD could bypass the “brain as filter”, requires Huxley’s explanation or some deeper analysis or both. H.H. Price, an academic of psychiatry sympathetic to the ‘Onsight’ project, has it right when he says that the erudite and eloquent Huxley was “just the man who ought to” record his experiments with mescalin and LSD. In contrast to Huxley’s concentrated observations in The Doors of Perception, Symons writes vaguely about ‘profound feelings of interconnectedness’ and ‘expression from the realm of no words that made [her] spirits take flight’. These stylistic shortcomings and gaps in literary and philosophical knowledge are reminders of the learning and skill required to write meaningfully on a subject that so easily lends itself to clich é.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guy Stevenson is a freelance literary critic and associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He recently completed a doctoral thesis on Ezra Pound, Henry Miller and radical modernism of the 1930s and is now researching modernism’s legacy in the American counter-culture after World War Two. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Financial Times and Toronto’s National Post and an essay, ‘Miller and Modernism’ was published last year in the Bloomsbury anthology, Henry Miller: New Perspectives.
