Waiting for the Great Crested Grebe
Frances Partridge
LEAVES OF THE TULIP TREE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Juliette Huxley
John Murray, L12.95
e waste so much time in life by not paying attention,' wrote Lewis Carroll in Sylvie and Bruno. Quoting his aphorism, Juliette Huxley goes on to tell us that if she had her life again she would set herself to repair the deficiency. An admirable objec- tive, but she needn't have worried — the art of attending comes naturally to her. It is one of the facets of the attractive character modestly portrayed in this autobiography, others that emerge being beauty, honesty and loyalty. It is her attention to what is going on around her, the people she meets and the books she reads, that gives a peculiar freshness to her powers of observation.
. Juliette Baillot came of a Swiss family living at Neuchatel. When she was a child her father's partner absconded with the funds of their firm of solicitors, and the bogeys of debt and poverty had to be faced. Madame Baillot took in girl students as pensionnaires. Juliette's upbringing was Calvinistic and strict; on more than one occasion her mother spanked her bare bottom with a wicker carpet-beater, and she developed a sense of sin. Despite this harsh training, she grew up to write later that she had never believed in the God of the Church and Genesis, tut I turn daily to what for want of a better word I call the Power of Life . . . the supreme mystery.' Her bachot finished, it was necessary for Juliette to earn her living. She was sent away to stay in St James's Palace with 'Tante Juliette', a fashionable dressmaker, whose husband looked after George V's wardrobe. Thus it was that she was intro- duced to her adoptive country, and in due course a place was found for her as governess to Julian, only daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell.
Lady Huxley's description of the two following years at Garsington is one of the most interesting passages in her book; she is not content with lists of names, but brings her characters to life throughout her story in a few apparently effortless but felicitous phrases. For instance we read that 'Philip Morrell sat at the pianola and with his usual panache began to play Tchaikovsky'; we hear Sertie Russell's high cackle', 'Clive Bell's shrill gusts of laughter' and Jack Haldane 'reciting poetry like a train puffing steam',while Aldous Huxley's voice was 'unhurried, evenly tuned, pearl-like'. D. H. Lawrence was `full of the unpasteurised milk of human kindness', but Lady Chatterley 'was a rather blunt instrument', bruising to that residue of puritanism left by Juliette's Swiss upbringing. However, far the most important relationships springing from the soil of Garsington were those with Lady Ottoline herself and the Huxley brothers, Aldous and Julian. For Ottoline Juliette felt love and gratitude compounded with loyalty, and it seems clear that her youthful charm brought out the best in that warm, generous, yet extremely eccentric charac- ter, and that her devotion was returned. Naturally enough, she was horrified when she saw her patroness subjected to carica- ture and mockery in the letters or fiction of the very recipients of that generosity and warmth — Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Aldous himself. Yet from Aldous's published letters, and from numerous subsequent conversations about Ottoline, I am led to believe that genuine affection nearly always lay beneath the mockery. Indeed it is arguable that they are very often found together, though not perhaps in such strident contrast as at Garsington.
The arrival of the Huxleys in 1915 and 1916 created a turmoil in Juliette's life. She was dazzled by them both, and describes Aldous as lovingly as Julian. But she was still very young and innocent, and never even guessed that Julian's frequent visits to the schoolroom came from quick subjec- tion to her own charm. When she left Garsington he followed her to Scotland, where she was now looking after the children of the Ranee of Sarawak (nee Brett), proposed and was accepted. To use her own phrase, she was fascinated by him `like a rabbit bewitched by a snake'. They were married in the spring of 1919.
Julian Huxley was a difficult husband. Brilliantly clever, and eager to achieve distinction in his field — as he did — he was by nature dominating, self-centred, and determined to get his own way at all times — a fact he may well have been unaware of, but which his wife discovered on their honeymoon when, absorbed in zoological observation, he showed a total disregard for her feelings. She threw her- self bravely into lying in wait for the Great. Crested Grebe in an icy wind, and helped her husband's experiments on frogs by separating copulating pairs. This is not to deny that she enjoyed many of their zoological expeditions, especially those in Africa, as well as meeting a great many interesting people, and family life with her two sons. But Julian was neurotic and unstable as well as egocentric, and Juliette had to cope with two nervous breakdowns (he had had one before marriage) and, more painfully still, with a long and disrup- tive infidelity, the first news of which 'went through me like a hurricane'.
She found solace in sculpture and in writing about Africa. One of the happier episodes of the marriage was a visit to Les Diablerets, where the Huxleys joined the D. H. Lawrences and Aldous and family. Lawrence was busy planning the new community which he afterwards founded in Mexico. He and Freda are made vivid by Juliette's attentive eye for detail. When Freda got a crumb stuck in her throat 'her violent coughing . . . enraged him. "Stop it, woman," he snarled. Tears sprang into her eyes, her large loose body shook with choking efforts under his white fury.' And again: in the evenings the women took up embroidery, Juliette embarking on Adam and Eve in Paradise. 'Lawrence finished Adam's genital organs which I had fum- bled,' she writes, 'adding a black virile business to a perfectly sensible phallus. He obviously enjoyed the last touch.'
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