Visiting Aldous Huxley in Llano, California

Aldous Huxley

There are a handful of writers that I find myself coming back to again and again.  Aldous Huxley is one of them—but not so much Huxley the British satirist as Huxley the American proto-hippie.

Like most people, I discovered Aldous Huxley in high school via the 1932 novel BRAVE NEW WORLD.  But that was not the book that hooked me.  Around the same time, one of my teachers pointed me toward THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION.  A bold move, introducing an impressionable teenager to a book about mind-expanding drugs.  For the record, I have never taken any psychedelic drugs but I still have an abiding faith in the idea of “doors of perception.”  And for my 18-year-old self, Huxley’s book provided a mission statement: “To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.”

A few years out of college, I read Huxley’s 1921 novel CROME YELLOW back to back with THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, his 1945 treatise on mysticism.   A few years after that, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I read AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN and attended a Huxley symposium at The Huntington Library.  I could not reconcile Huxley the satirical novelist with Huxley the pseudo-mystic, so I kept avoiding a deeper dive into the author's work—although I continued to be drawn to anthologies like MOKSHA: WRITINGS ON PSYCHEDELICS AND THE VISIONARY EXPERIENCE and THE DIVINE WITHIN: SELECTED WRITINGS ON ENLIGHTENMENT, as well as Allene Symons’ 2015 book ALDOUS HUXLEY’S HANDS: HIS QUEST FOR PERCEPTION AND THE ORIGIN AND RETURN OF PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE.  This most recent book made me more aware of Huxley’s time in southern California. 

For years, I had known that Huxley wrote THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY in house in the “Mojave desert.”  What I didn’t know was that “Mojave desert,” in this case, meant Antelope Valley, roughly an hour away from my current home.  A quick google search turned up an address for the Pearblossom Picture Ranch in Llano, California.  When I reached out to owners Anne Barry and Jim Karow, they kindly invited me to pay them a visit at Huxley’s old home.  (Actually, if I’m being honest, I invited myself… but they kindly agreed…) 

In preparation for my visit—and because I am a research geek—I read David King Dunaway’s biography HUXLEY IN HOLLYWOOD.  This book solidified my sense of two Huxleys, defined by Dunaway as the “descriptive cynic” and the “prescriptive mystic.”  Dunaway's book is entirely focused on the latter, the American Huxley.  This "other" Huxley was born around 1934, when the author was 40 years old and living in England during the lacuna between world wars, and suffering from debilitating depression. 

In 1936, Huxley corresponded with his friend and esteemed peer T.S. Eliot about his attempts to revitalize his life through meditation and the study of mysticism.  An agnostic descended from a strong line of agnostics (his grandfather invented the term), Huxley approached the “art of mental prayer” as a matter of discipline.  Meditation did not come easy to him, but Huxley worked to develop a steady practice—much as Eliot had done a few years earlier, when he converted to Anglo-Catholicism.  Eliot advised him that one needs a specific “metaphysic” (i.e. religion) in order to achieve what some mystics call enlightenment.  Huxley agreed with this idea in principle, but unlike Eliot he had not yet embraced a specific metaphysic.    

At the time, both writers were deeply concerned about contemporary nationalistic ideologies—namely Fascism and Communism—creating chaos in Western civilization by masquerading as religions, but their solutions to the problem were different.  Huxley made some preliminary conclusions in his 1937 book ENDS AND MEANS, while Eliot proposed his solution in the 1948 book THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY.  Eliot thought that rebuilding a cohesive Christian culture was the answer, but Huxley did not share Eliot’s faith in organized religion; he believed that the world had to change at a more basic level, one person at a time—and he started by trying to change himself.

In 1938, Aldous and his wife Maria and their 17-year-old son Matthew went to the U.S. for a vacation and wound up settling permanently in Los Angeles.  Many of Huxley’s British peers (including Eliot, an American expat who had consciously decided not to return to America in the mid-30s) accused Huxley of a wartime defection.   Huxley wouldn’t have been much help in a fight—he was a middle-aged pacifist, and practically blind—but he was a symbolic figure, and British nationalists attacked him as a symbol of abandoning the fight for the future of Western civilization. 

From his own perspective, Huxley didn’t abandon the fight; he chose to fight in a different way: by envisioning the world without war—or, perhaps more to the point, the world without warmongers.  In THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, he wrote, “The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.”  In his 1944 novel TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, he clarified, “One can either go on listening to the news—and of course the news is always bad, even when it sounds good.  Or alternatively one can make up one’s mind to listen to something else.”  Huxley opted to listen to the desert.

In November 1941, one month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he and Maria and Matthew moved to the high desert community of Llano.  Nearly three decades earlier, Llano had been the site of a secular socialist colony with several hundred members, but disputes over groundwater rights had long since driven the settlers away.  All that remained in 1941 was the stone foundations of a rather large ghost town.  The Huxleys settled in a ranch house near the ruins.

A few weeks ago, I drove out to the house via the Route 14 freeway, and tried to imagine what the drive must have been like for the Huxleys in the early 1940s.  Route 14 didn’t exist at that time, and there weren’t any reliable roads through the Angeles National Forest.  Biographer David Dunaway suggests that the Huxleys somehow traveled over the San Gabriel Mountains by way of Mill Creek Summit, but that doesn’t seem right to me.  I assume they must have gone north through the Newhall Pass and then followed the Sierra Highway east to Antelope Valley.   It probably took them several hours. 

  

What did they see when they got there?  Dunaway describes a simple one-story ranch house, to which the couple eventually added an extra floor and a hexagonal “apartment.”  They also built a separate house—designed by Aldous himself—next door.

Front of the renovated house

Back of the renovated house (Aldous Huxley's office was the upstairs loft)

The house the Huxleys built (or designed, anyway...)

View from the backyard, looking south toward the San Gabriel Mountains

The now-abandoned Huxley swimming pool

Dunaway writes that tall trees and an irrigation ditch “marked the oasis for miles.”  The couple reportedly had an orchard and a garden, where they grew apples, almonds, grapes, pears, radishes and potatoes.  They also had a goat named Spike, who had to be kept out of the garden.  Their daily routine consisted of hard work and reflection: “breakfast at ten, work through the morning, lunch and siesta, with the afternoon for hiking and painting, followed by reading aloud in the evening.”  Maria read her nearly-blind husband the biographies of several saints and mystics, which prepared him to write THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY.

Many of those famous saints and mystics experienced ecstatic visions in the desert, and the Huxleys might have had some comparable experiences.  In a 1956 essay entitled “The Desert,” Aldous writes about divine grace, declaring that “the desert and silence and the desert emptiness are the most expressive symbols” of it.  Although the author never claimed he had a mystical experience at Llano, he said that his wife Maria did.  According to Laura Archera Huxley’s book THIS TIMELESS MOMENT, Aldous reported that Maria lived at Llano “with an abiding sense of divine immanence, of Reality totally present, moment by moment in every object, person and event.”  He seems to have learned from her example, and spent the rest of his life trying to realize the same state of mind.

Maria Huxley

While at Llano, Aldous also wrote his pivotal novel TIME MUST HAVE A STOP and a little-known essay called the THE ART OF SEEING, as well as the screenplay JACOB’S HANDS and the children’s fable THE CROWS OF PEARBLOSSOM.  THE ART OF SEEING is, on the surface, an account of his experience with a controversial treatment for failing vision—but, really, it’s a book about meditation, discipline, balance, and Self-realization.  I'm going to quote the book at length because it's relatively unknown and currently out of print.  Huxley writes:

“Whatever the art you may wish to learn… there is one thing that every good teacher will always say: Learn to combine relaxation with activity; learn to do what you have to do without strain; work hard, but never under tension.  To speak of combining activity with relaxation may seem paradoxical; but in fact it is not.  For relaxation is of two kinds, passive and dynamic.  Passive relaxation is achieved in a state of complete repose, by a process of consciously ‘letting go’… Dynamic relaxation is that state of the body and mind which is associated with normal and natural functioning.”

“Mal-functioning and strain tend to appear whenever the conscious ‘I’ interferes with instinctively acquired habits of proper use, either by trying too hard to do well, or by feeling unduly anxious about possible mistakes. In the building up of any psycho-physical skill the conscious ‘I’ must give orders, but not too many orders—must supervise the forming of habits of proper functioning, but without fuss and in a modest, self-denying way.  The great truth discovered on the spiritual level by the masters of prayer, that ‘the more there is of the I, the less there is of God,’ has been discovered again and again on the physiological level by the masters of the various arts and skills.  The more there is of the ‘I,’ the less there is of Nature—of the right and normal functioning of the organism.”

“We all tend to be greedy ‘end-gainers,’ paying no attention to our ‘means-whereby.’  And yet it must be obvious to anyone who will give the subject a moment’s thought, that the nature of the means employed will always determine the nature of the end attained.  In the case of the eyes and the mind controlling them, means that involve unrelieved strain result in lowered vision and general physical and mental fatigue.  By allowing ourselves intervals of the right sort of relaxation, we can improve the means-whereby and so arrive more easily at our end, which is, proximately, good vision and, ultimately, the accomplishment of tasks for which good vision is necessary.  ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all the rest shall be added.’  This saying is as profoundly true on the planes of spirituality, ethics and politics.  By seeking first relaxed visual functioning of the kind that Nature intended us to have, we shall find that all the rest will be added to us...”

TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, written around the same time, articulates Huxley’s philosophy of action and non-action, and advocates for religion-by-research, the individual maintenance of an ever-evolving metaphysic that is both deeply personal and trans-personal.  Do the work, the author suggests, and you can help the whole world escape mental and emotional enslavement to past and future.  This is the essential message of Huxley's later work: Be Here Now.

Visiting Llano in 2019, I was awed by the space and silence surrounding the author’s one-time home…. although there is much less today than there would have been in the early 1940s.   Anne and Jim graciously took me on a short walk to the nearby silo that highlights the ruins of Llano del Rio, a place Huxley himself called “Ozymandius.” 

It’s hard to visit a place like this and not think about the ravages of time.  People come and go.  What was here before us and what will be here when we’re gone?  

More than half a century ago, Aldous Huxley looked through the walls of the silo and saw “a heap of tin cans, some waste paper and half a dozen empty bottles of Pepsi-Cola.”  Nevertheless, he was awed by an “almost supernatural silence” in the place.  He wrote that it reminded him of “the natural silence” of his “own real self—a thousand thunders which have their source in silence and in some inexpressible way are identical with silence.”  

He wasn’t running away from the world; he was running to it.

Inside the silo at Llano del Rio

Beside the abandoned concrete pool behind the old Huxley house

Health problems eventually drove Aldous and Maria away from Llano, but for the rest of his life Aldous kept returning (or trying to return) to that desert in his mind.  When Maria died in 1955, he held her in his arms and regaled her with vivid descriptions of the place where they had been so happy together.   

After Maria's death, Aldous followed the writings of philosophers William James and Henri Bergson to the idea that mystical experiences can be chemically induced—and to his own variation on T.S. Eliot’s desire to move “beyond words.”  There is much to be said about Huxley’s later years and experiments, but for now I’m going to end with something he wrote in 1961, two years before his own death.  To me, it seems like a good way to sum up the influence of this important man of letters...

“Self-knowledge is always an awareness of first-order experiences—of events below the level of words; of the mysteries of existence before we have conceptualized them into a specious intelligibility.  But if this is the case, why bother with literature, why go to the endless trouble of hunting out the right, the uniquely perfect form of verbal expression?  The paradoxical answer to this question is that it is through words that we are made aware of the subtler forms of nonverbal experience.  We do not need a novelist or a lyric poet to tell us what it feels like to have a tooth-ache or to be afraid of an oncoming tiger.  But wherever more complex, less obvious experiences are concerned, good poets and novelists can be enormously helpful. […] Good literature presents the reader with the results of an honest investigation into what is, and so encourages him to break out of the role he happens to be playing and to discover for himself the realities of perception, thought, and feeling that lie behind his assumed mask and have been eclipsed by it.”

For me, this is the value of Huxley’s work.  He has helped me to re-discover, at various times in my life, that I am where I am meant to be.

Simply Eliot

 

NOW AVAILABLE! 

There is nothing simple about T.S. Eliot.  At least, that's the simple conclusion to be drawn from the existence of thousands of books, essays and dissertations about the Nobel Prize-winning poet.  Collectively, this body of critical work has created a popular conception of Eliot as an impossibly complex writer and a man of many contradictory masks.  Critics have presented him as an avant-garde poet and a conservative critic, a modernist and a traditionalist, a Romantic and a Classicist, a philosopher and a moralist, an American and a European, a proto-fascist and a pseudo-mystic, a bigot and a sage.  Each of these masks can be peeled away, but then what are we left with?  Who was T.S. Eliot and what did he really stand for?

“The next time I teach Eliot to undergrads I will assign this swift, witty, enjoyable invitation to T. S. Eliot’s work and thought. Maddrey knows everything about Eliot, but he grinds no axe which frees professors and students to grind their own. Scrupulously footnoted for professional use, not short but concise, it is stuffed with unfamiliar and apt quotations. Maddrey quotes a 1949 interview about The Cocktail Party, in which Eliot said, 'If there is nothing more in the play than what I was aware of meaning, then it must be a pretty thin piece of work.' There’s the New Criticism in 25 words, 21 of them monosyllables. Eliot asks us to quit asking what he thought and to do some thinking ourselves. This book will help.”

—George J. Leonard, Author of Into the Light of Things and The End of Innocence. Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities, San Francisco State University

“Joseph Maddrey provides an illuminating spiritual biography of T.S. Eliot that treats his writings as markers of Eliot’s lifelong spiritual drama and development while avoiding reducing his poetry to biography because he treats the texts as products of creation that all can contemplate. Maddrey admiringly captures the creativity of both Eliot’s character and his poetry. The two are elusive not only because Eliot’s poetry employs a vast and encyclopedic storehouse of poetic images ('3,000 years of word made flesh'), but also because his poetry strives to move 'beyond poetry,' at the apophatic 'ever-present frontier of consciousness—where words fail, though meanings persist.' Maddrey introduces Eliot to a new generation of readers, and guides wanderers anew at the 'point of intersection with the timeless / With time.'”

—John von Heyking, Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

“T. S. Eliot considered that 'a worthwhile biography should show the development of an artist and give readers a proper sense of how each work of art fits within the whole.' In Simply Eliot Joseph Maddrey has fulfilled the directive, brilliantly compressing a gargantuan amount of previous Eliot studies and providing a fresh dynamic manual for understanding this storied literary icon.”

—Quinton Hallett, Poet, and Author of Mrs. Schrödinger’s Breast 

“Simply Eliot is an accessible, artfully-written book that positions a well-known literary figure in a seemingly new landscape. One of the book’s greatest strengths is its extensive engagement with archival sources. Maddrey draws on those sources to give weight and depth to his narrative, which weaves interpretations—close-readings, even—of Eliot’s poetry into the broad strokes of his biography and intellectual genealogy. The approach is neither reductive nor esoteric, and Maddrey’s way with language draws the reader—one suddenly realizes one is reading and enjoying literary criticism. For this reason, the book will appeal not just to an audience of academics or students, but to intelligent, cultured people of all kinds.”

—Dr. Siân White, Associate Professor of English, James Madison University

“Joseph Maddrey's Simply Eliot is an elegant addition to the Great Lives series, providing an authoritative introduction to T.S. Eliot's work and influences. Accessible and yet well researched, Maddrey's biography gives readers a deeper understanding and appreciation for Eliot's life and his development as an artist by tracing the personal and critical influences of the individual poems and plays written throughout the writer's long career. Maddrey focuses on the individual works themselves to demonstrate how each fits into the whole and represents Eliot's journey as a spiritual seeker and artist. Maddrey's book will make a great introduction to all who are interested in Eliot as well as to everyone and anyone who wants to learn more. Simply Eliot is simply what all biographies should be.”

—Carol Scarvalone Kushner, Professor of English & Humanities at Dutchess Community College

“Joseph Maddrey’s brief vita of Eliot is a tale of a search for identities both human and divine. Maddrey is right to say that 'Eliot’s total commitment to the church transformed his poetry.' Was that church, though, the Church of England, with its distinctive patrimony of the King James Bible, and Lancelot Andrewes, and George Herbert, and their like, or the Anglican faith as a world religion which Eliot experienced first in the USA during his flight from Unitarianism? Maddrey’s analysis of Eliot as an American High-Church Anglican living in Britain insightfully explores the relationship between religious and cultural identities, and helpfully places Eliot, nationally and religiously respectively, as 'stranger and pilgrim.'”

—The Reverend Graeme Napier MA MPhil (Oxon), Rector, St. John’s in the Village, Greenwich Village, New York

“This relatively brief account of the life of T.S. Eliot admirably enlarges one’s appreciation of his poetry and other writings by situating them within their historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Not of least value is the final section entitled ‘Suggested Reading’, which is actually a summary of the responses of critical scholarship to Eliot’s work rather a mere list of books.”

—The Reverend Dr. Paul Bradshaw, Professor Emeritus of Liturgical Studies, University of Notre Dame

“I had to stop my daily life, almost, to read Simply Eliot;  for me, it is compelling, refreshing, and genuinely exciting to read a biography that speaks to Virginia Woolf’s “common reader.” Cats saved Eliot for millions of people, but it did not make people want to read Eliot’s challenging poetry. I think Maddrey’s book will.”

—Charles W. Spurgeon, Professor Emeritus at Marymount University and Author of The Poetry of Westminster Abbey and J. Henry Shorthouse, The Author of John Inglesant (with Reference to T.S. Eliot and C.G. Jung)

T.S. Eliot in Love and Los Angeles: A Photo Essay

Cover art for the forthcoming book Simply Eliot

In the summer of 2009 I attended the inaugural T.S. Eliot Summer School in London, England.  Before the first session, I started chatting with a group of international Eliot scholars.  One of them asked me where I was from.  When I said Los Angeles, he responded dryly, “I’m sorry.” 

It was a predictable bit of snobism, entirely appropriate to the setting.  T.S. Eliot hated California.  In a series of private letters written in early 1933, he called it “a horrible place,” “a nightmare,” and one of America’s “two great mistakes” (the other being New York).  Eliot’s correspondents were, not surprisingly, British—and the missives may be partly indicative of the poet’s longing for England, after nearly a year abroad, rather than of full-hearted contempt for California.  At the very least, there was one thing about California that he was sincerely devoted to.

From late September 1932 until late June 1933, the poet served as a visiting professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a guest lecturer at several other east coast schools.  In the middle of that year, he traveled west—making stops in St. Louis, Missouri (his birthplace); Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Claremont, California.  Eliot had been planning his trip to the west coast for months.  In early 1932, he wrote to his brother Henry that he saw this as his “only opportunity” to “explore America.”  As the trip drew closer, he hinted that he had a more specific reason for going to California. 

T.S. Eliot (Harvard yearbook, 1910) and Emily Hale (1914)

We now know that Eliot made the journey primarily to see his friend Emily Hale, who was the new Drama teacher at Scripps College in Claremont.  Eliot and Emily Hale first met in 1912 when he was a student at Harvard University.  In the spring of 1914, before going on an extended trip to Europe, Eliot professed his love to her.  According to the poet’s own account, Miss Hale made it clear that she did not share his feelings.  A year later, in London, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and resolved to settle permanently in the UK.  His correspondence with Emily Hale ceased until the late 1920s, by which time the poet's marriage was a disaster.

T.S. Eliot probably viewed his 1932-33 trip to the U.S., at least in part, as a second chance with Emily Hale.  In late December 1932, the famously staid poet secretly boarded a train from Boston to southern California.  Officially, he was a renowned scholar accepting an invitation to give a paid lecture at a liberal arts college.  Unofficially, he was a spirited romantic chasing a long lost love. 

Eliot arrived on the platform of the newly-built, Spanish-style Santa Fe depot in Claremont at 6:20am on December 27.  Emily was there waiting for him, alongside fellow Scripps faculty member Paul Havens, who had previously met the poet at Oxford University and who (more importantly) owned a car that could deliver him to his destination. 

The trio’s next stop was the College Avenue home of Miss Mary B. Eyre, who had agreed to loan Eliot some rooms for the duration of his stay.  Emily Hale and Mary B. Eyre were probably bonded by their mutual enthusiasm for drama; local historian Judy Wright reports that the Claremont Community Players group was formed under Eyre’s roof in 1928.  It was fitting, then, that one of England’s foremost verse dramatists should hang his hat there for a while.

Santa Fe depot in Claremont

Former home of Mary B. Eyre on College Ave. in Claremont

It didn’t take long for word to get around Claremont that T.S. Eliot was in town—and that he was visiting Emily Hale.  A former Scripps student told Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon that everyone understood he was in Claremont because of “something” between him and the new Drama teacher.  “How else,” the former student asked, “could he have been attracted to our campus?” 

Claremont had historically held some appeal for easterners.  In the late 1800s, it was widely advertised as a destination for New Englanders seeking a natural paradise.  Reflecting on his time in Claremont in early 1933, Eliot highlighted the novelty of seeing trees full of oranges in the same place where one could get a car stuck in the snow—but such novelties had obviously not been the lure for him. 

Aerial of Claremont in the 1930s (photo credit: Scripps College Archives, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College)

View of Mt. Baldy from an orange grove in Claremont (photo credit: Los Angeles Public Library)

The California land boom of the 1920s and the subsequent creation of the Claremont Colleges consortium were stimulated what is now known as a community of “trees and PhDs.”  Scripps College was founded in 1927, so it was barely five years old at the time of Eliot’s visit.  In 1933, the PhDs were still vastly outnumbered by the orange groves.  Teachers like Emily Hale and Paul Havens were young members of a new institution—pioneers in a cultural wilderness.  At least, that’s how Eliot probably saw it.

During his time in Claremont, the poet was welcomed as a cultural emissary.  At the home of Paul and Lorraine Havens, he engaged in a discussion of Shakespeare, Milton, John Donne, and John Dryden.  The discussion ran long enough for Eliot to demonstrate his preference for watercress and cucumber sandwiches, and to drink a whopping fourteen cups of tea.  Similar social events reportedly took place at the homes of Pomona College English professor Harold Davis and Scripps History professor Nathaniel Stephenson.  

Former home of Pomona College professor Harold Davis

According to historian Judy Wright, Eliot was also a guest at this house on Harvard Avenue in Claremont

In early January, Eliot made multiple visits to the Scripps campus, where he inscribed copies of his newly-published play Sweeney Agonistes, attended several classes (including one on 17^th century literature taught by Paul Havens), and gave an informal talk to students in the Toll Hall browsing room.  Emily Hale was, at the time, the head of Toll Hall, which perhaps explains the choice of location.  On January 5, in Balch Hall auditorium, Eliot gave a formal lecture on the English nonsense poets Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

Toll Hall

Toll Hall browsing room (photo credit: Scripps College Archives, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College)

Balch Hall

Balch Hall auditorium (photo credit: Scripps College Archives, Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College)

The fourth volume of The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot collates several contemporary accounts of the lecture.  According to one report, “Mr. Eliot came to the conclusion that the greatest poetic art is that which sacrifices the least of the other poetic elements in the approximation toward the condition of music.”  A separate account indicates that the poet spoke about a type of musical poetry in which words fail, but meanings still exist.  These notes suggest that the masterpiece Four Quartets may have been germinating in the poet's mind during his time in California. 

Eliot scholars usually point to a real rose garden beside the Burnt Norton manor house (which the poet visited with Emily Hale in the summer of 1934) as the inspiration for the first of the Four Quartets—but, according to Helen Gardner, Eliot himself also pointed to “the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, and the garden” in that work.  Eliot was certainly aware of Lewis Carroll’s novel before his trip to California, but he seems to have focused more attention on Carroll’s work during his year in America than he ever did before or after. 

On May 18, 1933, shortly before he returned to England, Eliot wrote to his friend Paul Elmer More that Alice in Wonderland seemed hauntingly relevant to the present moment in his life: “My life seems like Alice and the glass table: there is something I want here (domestic affection) and something I want in England, and I can’t have both; fortunately the time of choice is long since past.”

In early January 1933, however, he might not have been so certain that the moment of choice had already passed.  During his final days in southern California, Eliot gave lectures at UCLA and USC, and attended Sunday morning service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Upland with Emily Hale and the Havenses.  Lorraine Havens later remembered sharing a prayer book with the poet and—to her embarrassment—dropping it during the service.

St. Mark's on the corner of Euclid and F Street in 1915 (photo credit: Cooper Regional History Museum)

Fleur De Lis Chapel (a reconstructed St. Mark's) on East 16th Street today (photo credit: fleurdelischapel.com)

On January 10^th, Eliot shed his formal role as a cultural emissary and made arrangements to spend his last day with Emily alone.  Marie McSpadden, a Scripps drama major from nearby Glendale, drove the couple to Balboa Island, where her mother had a summer cottage—so that T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale could have some "uninterrupted time" together.

Like Claremont, Balboa Island was a sleepy community in 1933, especially during the winter months.  The island had only been in existence for a few decades—literally dredged up by an ambitious developer at the turn of the century.  Lots on the western end of the island had been parceled out in 1909, but property values plummeted during World War I.  In January 1922, as things were finally beginning to rebound, Marie McSpadden's mother Hiltrud bought a single lot [Resub Sec 1, Block 6, Lot 24 ] on Garnet Avenue from a Glendale artist named Claude G. Putnam.  Today, the “summer cottage” that sat on her property in 1933 is long gone—as is much of the quaintness of the island, which was sparsely populated at the time of Eliot’s visit.  
 

Balboa Island in 1921 (photo credit: Newport Beach Historical Society)

Balboa Island in 1930 (photo credit: Balboa Island Museum)

1939 map of Balboa Island by Claude G. Putnam (photo credit: Balboa Island Museum)

One of the oldest houses on Garnet Ave., built in 1920 (photo credit: Balboa Island Museum)

1933 house on Garnet Ave., right next door to the McSpadden lot (photo credit: Balboa Island Museum)

On that Tuesday in January 1933, T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale were probably every bit as isolated on Balboa Island as they would be later at the English manor house called Burnt Norton.  Marie McSpadden told Lyndall Gordon that she took the couple out into Newport Bay on a motor boat, then dropped them off at nearby Corona Del Mar beach.  We have no other account of the day, although I like to imagine that they briefly hid from the world behind the bluffs at Big Corona.  (I am not the first person to craft a bit of historical fiction about these two purported lovers—see Martha Cooley's The Archivist, as well as Steven Carroll's The Lost Life and A New England Affair.)

Marie McSpadden offers the only authentic postscript: When Eliot returned to England, he sent her a copy of his 1930 poem “Marina,” a beautiful and haunting rumination on death and rebirth.  

Corona Del Mar around 1940 (photo credit: Newport Beach Historical Society) and in 2017

The bluffs at Corona Del Mar, past (photo credit: Newport Beach Historical Society) and present

On January 11^th, the day after his trip to Balboa Island, T.S. Eliot headed north—by way, apparently, of Hollywood.  He wrote to his friend Frank Morley from The Brown Derby restaurant near the corner of Wilshire and Vine.  Later, he remembered that strange place—“built of concrete to look like a Brown Bowler Hat”—to fellow author Virginia Woolf, saying, “you go there and eat Buckwheat Cakes & Maple Syrup and Coffee at Midnight, and it seems just as normal as an A.B.C.”  In the same letter, he remarked on a striking green skyscraper—presumably the Eastern Columbia Building downtown—that one "hardly notice[s]" among all the other oddities.  The tone of the letter is unmistakable; to Eliot, Los Angeles was a ridiculous Wonderland.

The Brown Derby in 1927 (photo credit: Mark Wanamaker / Bison Archives)

The Eastern Columbia Building on South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles

In spite of his tantalizing note about The Brown Derby, it remains difficult for me to imagine T.S. Eliot dining among the stars of early Hollywood.  Did anyone there recognize England’s premier poet?  Probably not.  Did Eliot himself recognize any Hollywood royalty?  Doubtful.  All his life, Eliot was rather disparaging about cinema as an art form.  He professed admiration for Charlie Chaplin and Akira Kurosawa—and, later in life, he initiated a correspondence with Groucho Marx—but he was never a cinephile.

Friends like Robert Sencourt and Joseph Chiari claimed that Eliot loved Westerns, and the L.A. noir fiction of Raymond Chandler, but the poet himself didn't make such claims in public—and he never expressed any particular enthusiasm or affection for the west coast culture from which those stories sprang.  After a return visit to Los Angeles in 1951, he told his friend John Malcolm Brinnin, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so far from home in my life,” suggesting that the place had brought out in him "some grotesque condition of the spirit."  By then, his relationship with Emily Hale had deteriorated; the moment of choice had most certainly passed.

As of 2017, the relationship between T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale remains mysterious.  New evidence will come to light in January 2020, when more than 1,100 letters from the poet to his supposed paramour will be unsealed at Princeton University Library.  Maybe then we’ll also learn a few more details about T.S. Eliot’s love / hate relationship with southern California.

Illustration from Martin Rowson's L.A. noir comic book adaptation of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Acknowledgments 
I am indebted to Susan Allen and Dorran Boyle of the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College, who helpfully guided me through that library’s T.S. Eliot Collection, as well as to Jennifer Keil and Sue Sibley of the Balboa Island Museum and Historical Society.

Sources

Allen, David.  “T.S. Eliot may have found Claremont the chaste land.”  Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.  December 25, 2012.

Brinnin, John Malcolm.  Sextet: T.S. Eliot and Truman Capote and Others.  New York: Delacorte, 1982.

Eliot, T.S.  The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition Volume 4: English Lion, 1930-1933.  Ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins and Faber, 2015.  Via Project Muse Online.

Eliot, Valerie and John Haffenden, ed.  The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 6: 1932-1933.  London: Faber, 2016.

Gardner, Helen.  The Composition of Four Quartets.  New York: Oxford, 1978.

Gordon, Lyndall.  The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot.  London: Virago, 2012.

Loucks, James F.  “The Exile’s Return: Fragment of a T.S. Eliot Chronology.”  ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring 1996.

Wright, Judy.  Claremont: A Pictorial History.  Claremont Historic Resources: 1999.

The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition

After many years of hard work, the team behind the T.S. Eliot Editorial Project has completed the first two volumes of The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, now available via Project Muse.  This is important not only because literary scholars now have definitive editions of the poet’s influential early essays (including “Tradition and the Individual Talent, “Hamlet” and the whole of The Sacred Wood) but because scholars and non-scholars alike now have access to a wealth of previously uncollected material by one of the 20^th century’s most influential writers – material that has been teasing readers since the 1952 publication of Donald Gallup’s Eliot bibliography.

VOLUME ONE, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard, is divided into three sections.  The first section gathers a few pieces of juvenilia, including a pair of college essays on Rudyard Kipling, and a few early prose experiments that (ironically, given the “unduly harsh” nature of the aforementioned essays) demonstrate the strong influence of Kipling on the young writer.

The second, and most intimidating, section collects Eliot’s philosophy papers from his years at Harvard and Oxford.  During the author’s lifetime, the only remnant of the period that saw publication was the poet’s PhD dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley – which has now been out of print for many decades.  When I first discovered Eliot, one of my favorite teachers kindly loaned me her personal copy, with a warning that it might not help me to understand the poet any better.  Eliot himself issued a similar warning when he published the thesis in 1964, saying, “Forty-six years after my academic philosophising came to an end, I find myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay.  Indeed, I do not pretend to understand it.”

Understanding the dissertation—or at least understanding the mind that produced it—is made a bit easier by the publication of the academic essays that Eliot wrote immediately prior.  The point of departure is a trio of essays on the idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant.  These notes toward a philosophy of nondualism should be read in conjunction with editor Jewel Spears Brooker’s related essay “T.S. Eliot’s Theory of Opposites: Kant and the Subversion of Epistemology,” included in her 2001 book T.S. Eliot and Our Turning World.   Eliot’s subsequent essays on F.H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, and Walter Lippman’s A Preface to Politics show the development of a personal philosophy, which Eliot attempts to sum up, in an essay called "The Relativity of the Moral Judgment," as a kind of thoroughgoing idealism without the feeling of pessimism.

The second section also includes analyses of works by sociologist Emile Durkheim, ethno-psychologist Luciene Levy-Bruhl and anthropologist James George Frazer—all of whom would prove to be lasting influences on Eliot—as well as one essay on Plato and four on Aristotle.  One of the shorter essays in this section also references the Monadism of Gottfried Leibniz, an important clue to Eliot’s perception of Bradley.  (Two of Eliot's later essays on Leinbiz were originally appended to the 1964 version of Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, at the urging of  editor Anne C. Bolgan, who recognized their importance.  Those essays are included elsewhere in the Complete Prose, but Brooker and Schuchard have helpfully added footnotes that link them to the newly-edited Knowledge and Experience.  How I wish I’d had this scholarly edition when I was studying Eliot's dissertation for the first time!) 

The third section of Volume One is, for me, the most exciting.  It reveals Eliot’s initial efforts to distinguish himself as a professional critic, developing and testing his own nascent theories about art and religion.

In a 1916 review of a book by Paul Elmer More, for instance, he asserts his own intellectual conservatism and lays a foundation for future Classicism v. Romanticism debates with John Middleton Murry.   His subsequent review of Reflections and Violence illustrates the pivotal influence of T.E. Hulme on Eliot’s concept of Classicism.  (Ronald Schuchard elucidated this important connection many years ago, in the essays that led to his book Eliot’s Dark Angel, but it's nice to see the proof for oneself.)

That same year, in reviews of books by Clement C.J. Webb and Durkheim, Eliot ruminates on the nature of religious instinct, providing notes toward a type of religion that might be worthwhile to  him.  Reviews of Mens Creatrix by William Temple and Religion and Philosophy by R.G. Collingwood suggest a surprising open-mindedness to the teachings of the Anglican Church, while expressing the poet's intellectual reservations about religious conversion.

In his review of a contemporary translation of Euripides, Eliot hints at defining statements to be made in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” about the alchemy of poetry – his paramount obsession during these early years.  He writes:

“… the value of translation lies in the exact combination of fidelity and originality.  Faithful, because otherwise the translator will produce only eccentricities; he would do better to write an original poem than to devote himself to a false veneer: original, because the fusion of the minds of two languages, the vivifying force, takes place within the translator’s mind.  What he produces must be foreign, but not strange, something that is new, but to which we have rightful claim.” 

He might just as easily have been talking about his own future – as a poet who would take the old, the primitive, the traditional and make it new and modern by recalling and rejuvenating the original essence of printed words.  In “A Note on Ezra Pound,” he seems to justify the allusive style he will use in The Waste Land.  In a subsequent review of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, he states his mission as a poet:

“A poet, like a scientist, is contributing toward the organic development of culture: it is just as absurd for him not to know the work of his predecessors or of men writing in other languages as it would be for a biologist to be ignorant of Mendel or de Vries.  It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already, as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries.”

Eliot was at the same time asserting the importance of intelligent criticism, in his essays “Observations” and “Studies in Contemporary Criticism.”  These are perhaps the most useful fragments in the volume, because they begin to elaborate a scheme for the seven volumes to come, and for the future of literary criticism.

VOLUME TWO, edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard, is subtitled “The Perfect Critic” because much of the writing collected therein elaborates Eliot’s personal critical theories.   While developing his own alternative canon of English literature (in a series of essays for the London Times Literary Supplement and the 1926 Clark Lectures at Cambridge), he offered insights on literary criticism itself.  These essays are well worth collating for the Internet age.

In a pair of articles that appeared in The Egoist in the fall/winter of 1918, Eliot divides critical writing into three main categories: (1) biography, (2) historical criticism, and (3) philosophical criticism.  (“Reviews” are a less important fourth category – serving only to “call attention to something good and new,” and useful only in the most practical terms, to help a writer make a living.)  He seems to value philosophical criticism above the others, and writes that the useful critic compares and analyzes, rather than merely judging and appreciating.   Writing in The Athenaeum a few months later, he adds that the best criticism expresses the “personal point of view” of the critic.  A careful reading of Eliot makes it clear that he is not talking about opinions, but about a thoroughly educated perspective on art. 

Like a lot of readers, I have always been slightly baffled by Eliot’s “impersonal theory of art” (espoused in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 1919).  On one hand, Eliot says that true art is never a reflection of personality or an expression of personal emotions.   On the other hand, it’s easy to read Eliot’s own poetry as pseudo-autobiography, and he himself once claimed that The Waste Land was a personal “grouse against life.”   Setting aside the fact that no poet is obligated to follow his own critical prescriptions, I have always wondered if I have misapprehended the precise meaning of Eliot’s impersonal theory of art.    The new essays provide some clarification.

The important critic, Eliot says in a December 1919 article for The Athenaeum, is “the person who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems.”  The same is true for artists, because “the critical genius is inseparable from the creative” and “every form of genuine criticism is directed toward creation.”  Although the artist-critic has a heightened awareness of the past, he does not repeat it.  By combining a comprehensive awareness of historical philosophies and techniques with an intense absorption in the present problems of art, the artist-critic transmutes the old into something new.

One of the most revealing new essays in Volume Two is “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” published in Shama'a magazine in April 1920.  This essay reiterates that poetry must be more than a product of youthful personality.  Eliot writes: “[I]f we take poetry seriously as a work and not as the mere ebullition of a personality, we shall find that the poet’s training and equipment is parallel to the training and equipment of the scientist; we find that his purpose is parallel; and that his attitude toward his work is parallel.  First, his equipment: his knowledge of what has been done in the past.  This is germane to the question of modern tendency; for it is only in relation to the past that anything is new.” 

Eliot goes on to suggest that too many “contemporary” poets merely pour out their feelings, without considering the fact that these feelings have already been expressed better by someone else.  The value of poetry as true art, he says, is comparable to the value of science in that both are discoveries, and both must be cumulative.    A scientist does not start from scratch.  He stands on the shoulders of giants and, if he makes a genuine contribution, he in turn provides the same support for future scientists.  Eliot says the same is true for artists – and that is the key to understanding his impersonal theory.   The personalities of great poets disappear into “one great Mind.” 

There is a profoundly spiritual quality to this theory that I’ve never fully appreciated before.  In deep meditation, a person surrenders his or her individual "story" and embraces a larger consciousness -- what many Eastern philosophers refer to as The Self.  The implications of this concept are simple: Individuals do not create stories, or poetry, anymore than we create science.  Rather, we find these already-existing truths.  Perhaps more to the point, we allow them to find us. 

Eliot uses the metaphor of alchemy to explain this idea, which is why I wanted to title my Eliot book The Alchemy of Words.  For the medieval world, alchemy was never simply a matter of combining two base elements to create gold.  It was not a hard science.  There was always a mysterious spiritual component to the process--something beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend and express.

Eliot's later essays in Volume Two explain and develop his ideas within the context of other art forms (modern theater and, briefly, cinema) and criticism (literary reviews and anthologies), and begin to stray cautiously into the realm of religion and politics, his main arena in years to come.  For me, the most compelling instance of foreshadowing appears in a 1925 essay from The Nation, in which Eliot reflections on the distinction between urban and rural poetry.  He seems to regard the latter as an anachronistic product of Romanticism (although he never says so explicitly).  Still he refuses to dismiss it, instead expressing a curiosity to better understand the impulse behind it.  Just as in Volume One he showed an openness to the teachings of the Anglican Church that would significantly define the second half of his life, so this essay hints at his future as a poet—suggesting a point of departure for the rural meditations of his mature masterpiece Four Quartets.