Introduction to the Edward James – Aldous Huxley Correspondence

James Sexton (University of British Columbia) & Sarah Hughes (West Dean College)
 

When I read Ends and Means with fervid attention and made many pencil notes in the margin, I also made many mental notes really to do something about what it suggested. Of this the direct consequence was that, last winter, I even had quite a correspondence with Mr. Huxley on the subject of his social philosophy as set forth in Ends and Means. I wrote him, in relation to a definite intention of mine—which is no less than to realize the pattern of one of his social schemes, by giving over my estate at West Dean in England for such an experiment—there one could at least try out whether his principles of such a cooperative would work.[1]

The very wealthy British landowner Edward James (1907–1984) wrote these words in an unpublished text written in December 1940. What chiefly caught James’s eye in Huxley’s “practical cookery book for reform,”[2] Ends and Means, was his belief that social reform could never come from centralized government based on hierarchical principles. Instead, Huxley proposed that change needs to start “at the periphery” (EM, 127) and that this could be achieved through private individuals and autonomous activity. It was this approach to social reform that inspired James to write to Huxley seeking his advice about turning most of his 8,000 acre estate of West Dean Park, Sussex, into a quasi-utopian co-operative community, which, given the uncertain outcome of the war against fascism, might even have been seen as a self-supporting “saving remnant”[3]that from its relatively isolated location in the South Downs could have helped preserve key elements of civilization.

But just who was Edward James? His name appears only once in Grover Smith’s Letters of Aldous Huxley, where, in a letter of 23 June 1960, Huxley calls him an “inveterate gossip” for revealing to his mother-in-law that he was entering hospital.[4]He was the godson and reputedly the grandson of then Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII. Perhaps James, a poet and novelist, is now best-known as a major patron of surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte, whose painting Not to Be Reproduced, commissioned by James while hosting the artist at his London townhouse in 1937, famously depicts two images of the back of James’s head.[5]

A financial backer and short-term co-editor of the surrealist journal Minotaure, James was also an intimate of Huxley’s friends and fellow art patrons Marie-Laure and Charles, le vicomte de Noailles. Later in his life he created what is now known as Las Pozas (‘The Pools’), a surrealistic sculpture-garden situated in a subtropical rainforest, seven hours north of Mexico City.

At the outbreak of war in Europe, James wrote to Huxley recognizing that he had the means to realize the ideas laid out in Ends and Means, particularly those outlined in the tenth chapter, “Individual Work for Reform,” which provided a theoretical foundation for the establishment of small groups of organized individuals working in association. In a letter that begins their correspondence in December 1939, James quotes Huxley’s words from Ends and Means back to him:

Their task is to act upon the ideas of the solitary writer or speaker, to make practical applications of what were merely theories, to construct here and now small working-models of the better society imagined by the prophets. (EM, 128)

At this point, James had been a careful reader of Huxley’s writing for over a decade and recognized in Ends and Means a proposal that “adumbrated a possible line of better-balanced living.”[6]By the time Huxley came to write the book, he was no longer the amused Pyrrhonic observer of human folly. Under the influence of Gerald Heard, the Dr. Miller figure of Eyeless in Gaza (1936), he was now able to offer several concrete alternatives to the dystopian social blueprints which heretofore had been the objects of his satire. He was now a proponent of philosophical anarchism, and his proposed program of pacifism had several other components in addition to disarmament; notably decentralization, distribution and banking reform through the co-operative movement, reform of industrial management, and educational reform.[7]

The “Individual Work for Reform” section of Ends and Means provides various examples of communities that have come together for a common aim to establish noble goals. Huxley emphasizes the civilizing effect that such associations have on society and outlines the lessons that can be learnt from them. The three types of radically different but historically successful communities—each with common and high-minded aims—referred to by Huxley were the Jesuits, the Benedictines, and the Quakers, the latter two being pacifist. As is made evident in the Huxley/James correspondence, by the time Huxley responded to James’s initial letter in early 1940 he had come under the influence of Ralph Borsodi (1886–1977), whose “School for Living,” a community of self-sustaining homesteaders, Huxley had visited in Suffern, New York, shortly before March 1938.[8]Like the three religious communities in Chapter Ten of Ends and Means, Borsodi’s secular, decentralized and self-sufficient community was designed as an alternative to the existing American order. Therefore it is necessary to read Ends and Means in light of the influence of Borsodi and his associates in order to understand the influences that led to James’s founding, in 1971, of West Dean College of Arts and Conservation.

Huxley lays out his vision of the prerequisites for purposeful reconstruction in a letter to his brother Julian on 12 April 1938, and here his appropriation of the ideas of his new guru, Ralph Borsodi, becomes clear:

Meanwhile I’m working on a novel and collecting whatever information I can pick up in regard to the technique for giving a viable economic and social basis to philosophic anarchism—it being more and more clear that the present system of production necessarily involves centralization and dictatorship, whatever the political context—communist, fascist, or merely plutocratic. I was much interested, out East, in seeing Ralph Borsodi, whose work you probably know and who has set up what he calls a ‘School of Living’ for giving practical effect to his ideas about decentralization and small-scale production. One of the interesting things he has discovered, as a result of very careful investigation of the subject from the point of view of a cost accountant (which was his profession), is that in ⅔ of the field of economics decentralized production in the home and the small workshop, using small power units and machines, is from 20% to 35% cheaper than centralized mass production. So that quite apart from any question of social and political desirability, decentralized production is in a large number of cases demonstrably more efficient, in contemporary circumstances, than mass production. Meanwhile, unfortunately, people are so much obsessed with the old idea that mass production is the only possible method, that economists and legislators go on working out more and more elaborate (and consequently more and more dictatorial) plans for the purpose of making a centralized mass-producing industry work. It’s a bad and depressing business—like everything else. (Letters, 434–35)

The novel to which Huxley refers was After Many a Summer (1939), and one of the main characters, William Propter, is a self-proclaimed Jeffersonian democrat who reflects both Huxley’s and James’s belief in the desirability of experimenting with the means of establishing decentralized, self-sufficient communities which might not need to be “‘restrained by […] authorities independent of their will,’”[9]such as big Capitalism or the kind of State Communism then current in the Soviet Union.

Huxley had admitted that William Propter, at least in his spiritual incarnation, sounds like Gerald Heard.[10] Edward James also noted Heard’s impact on Huxley in an unpublished critical examination of the latter’s work, in which he refers to Heard’s influence as being a “clearing in the fog.”[11] However, when it comes to Propter’s social and economic ideas, he is undoubtedly based on Borsodi. On 15 March 1938, shortly after Huxley’s visit with Borsodi, he wrote to the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had asked him to provide a written statement that would be read at a fundraiser for the SIA (International Antifascist Solidarity Organization):

“To my mind, the urgent problem at the moment is to find a satisfactory technique for giving practical realization to the ideal of philosophic anarchism. If we are to have decentralization, if we are to have genuine self-government, if we are to be free from the tyranny of political and big-business bosses, then we must find some satisfactory method by which people can become economically independent, at any rate in large measure. I am trying to collect relevant information on this subject and I am convinced that the technique for realizing the libertarian ideal in practice could be formulated and would work perfectly well, if intelligent people were to desire this consummation and were to set their minds to it. Much is to be learned from the theoretical and practical work of Ralph Borsodi while certain contemporary trends of invention—Kettering’s work on small Diesel power plants for domestic purposes, Abbott’s [sic] work on a machine for making direct use of solar energy[12]—point clearly to the possibility of realizing that economic independence which must be the material basis of a libertarian society.”[13]

InAfter Many a Summer, Propter unsuccessfully tries to persuade tycoon Jo Stoyte to take a financial interest in the domestic and even small-scale industrial applications of “‘a gadget that Abbot of the Smithsonian has been working on for some time […]. A thing for making use of solar energy. […] Much more compact than anything of the kind that’s ever been made before,’ he said. ‘Much more efficient, too.’”[14]This was Huxley’s first novel since Ends and Means, and he is sanguine about the possibilities for Borsodi-like self-sufficient communities, and given the potential of the new dams he had personally visited, conveys his hopes for future technological benefit in the following words of Propter:

“[W]ith all the water that’ll be available when the Colorado River aqueduct starts running next year, you could do practically anything you liked.” He unplugged the smoothing-tool and went to fetch a drill. “Take a township of a thousand inhabitants; give it three or four thousand acres of land and a good system of producers’ and consumers’ co-operatives: it could feed itself completely; it could supply about two-thirds of its other needs on the spot; and it could produce a surplus to exchange for such things as it couldn’t produce itself. You could cover the State with such townships.” (AMS, 241)

In Huxley’s response to James’s request for guidance concerning the West Dean estate, he suggests that James visit Borsodi’s establishment, and that he make contact with two of Borsodi’s like-minded colleagues: Chauncey Stillman[15]and George Weller.[16]Together with Borsodi, these two men had founded Free America, a journal that promoted Jeffersonian democracy, decentralization, and economic self-sufficiency. 

Practical applications such as those Huxley cited above would no doubt have caught the eye of Edward James, who wanted West Dean to become, in Propter’s words, a center of

“active work on the technics of a better system, and active collaboration with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization. Incidentally, the price is […] [m]uch lower than the price of war, for example—particularly war with contemporary weapons. Much lower than the price of economic depression and political enslavement.” (AMS, 151)

James’s own acknowledgement that “only with foresight—and by preparing for every emergency well ahead, can one make this community a possibility,”[17]can be heard in Propter’s reply to a sceptic’s question about the community’s chances after a war:

“[…] Will the few be any better off than the many?”

“Oddly enough,” Mr. Propter answered, “there’s just a chance they may be. For this reason. If they’ve learnt the technique of self-sufficiency they’ll find it easier to survive a time of anarchy than the people who depend for their livelihood on a highly centralized and specialized organization. You can’t work for the good without incidentally preparing yourself for the worst.” (AMS, 152)

The watchword in the letters Huxley and James exchanged is surely “reconstruction.” At the moment James was asking for advice, he feared that post-war social unrest in England would lead to untold destruction and a prolonged disruption in systems of communication and distribution. This is made explicit in his introductory letter. He also states elsewhere that, owing to the influence of Huxley and Heard, he believes he would be of “more use in the reconstruction than [he] should be effective in the demolition.”[18] James goes on to make this observation even clearer when he states that, having found himself in America at the outbreak of war, he “ought to avoid going back to England in case [he] would have to throw away, wastefully, what would be needed so much later.”

James was keenly aware that remaining in America throughout the war would be seen by some as an ignoble act (even with 4-F status) and, reflecting on the choice he made, states in a letter to Huxley that “only time, of course, can prove whether I am deluding myself over this or not.”[19] Like James, Huxley left himself open to criticism for choosing not to return to Britain as war approached. In a letter of 30 August 1938, T. H. White observes to L. J. Potts:

That fellow Huxley (so Hester Sassoon [Siegfried Sassoon’s wife] told me—I can’t vouch for it) has cleared off to America in anticipation. He always was a bloodless fellow, and let’s hope this will result in his dropping all that loving-the-fellow-men stuff. Better for him to run away and be a satirist than stick it out and blither. It’s more in his nature.[20]

Despite these criticisms, James and Huxley focussed their attention on reconstruction. In his 1946 preface to Brave New World Huxley conceived of a sane alternative to the materialism of the rationalized corporate state: a community of exiles and refugees from the brave new world, living within the borders of the reservation.[21] In this community, economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, and politics a Kropotkinesque cooperative. In turn, James considered the practical application of the pacifism expounded in Ends and Means, and possibly Huxley’s later works, to be of the utmost importance in the reconstruction of post-war society. It was to this end that he founded West Dean College.

Surprisingly, although James makes clear his intention for West Dean to be a place of learning, his correspondence with Huxley does not explicitly refer to the chapter entitled “Education” in Ends and Means and we see only cursory details as to how the pedagogical aspects of such a society would work. In his responses to James’s requests for guidance, Huxley initially focuses on his engagement with the contemporary secular community outlined by Borsodi and the key observation he had already made in Ends and Means: for such a cooperative community to be successful its members must be united in their pursuit of noble ends, either religious or political. Huxley declared that “we can see what future communities ought to be and do” (EM, 136) and emphasized that any new community should reflect on its contemporary situation and “break the new ground” (EM, 138).  

James added his own ‘noble end’—the common aim to preserve certain crafts and promote new creative practices. One of his proposals for the West Dean community is for students to copy the forms of old crafts in order to “design upon totally new lines.”[22] That he supports this proposal with the suggestion of inviting his artistic friends and associates—including Pavel Tchelitchew,[23] Salvador Dalí,[24] Rex Whistler,[25] Christian Bérard,[26] and  Eugène Berman[27]—to become West Dean mentors underlines the importance of ‘breaking new ground’ in James’s thinking, evidenced already in his patronage of artists at the forefront of avant-garde thinking in the 1930s.

Huxley also describes how this new ground necessarily embraced new technologies, and in relation to machine production he states that the “problem of modern industry […] cannot be solved by setting up irrelevant little associations of handy-craftsmen and amateur peasants incapable of earning their livelihoods” (EM, 158), thereby distancing himself from those he sees as impractical romanticizers of the Middle Ages. He had disparaged William Morris in 1932[28] and again (implicitly) in Ends and Means, as one who would “preach and practice” a return to a pre-industrial age, thereby “shirking the real issues” (EM, 158).

These issues, as Huxley saw them, are outlined by William Propter in After Many a Summer and had much in common with related decentralist, anti-plutocratic Distributist ideas advocated by Hilaire Belloc in the Servile State (1912) and his later elaboration of these ideas in An Essay on the Restoration of Property (1936). In turn, these ideas were promoted by members of the editorial board of Free America—particularly Borsodi and his fellow editor of Free America, Herbert Agar, who had been converted to the Distributist economic philosophy of Belloc and Chesterton when he served as editor of The English Weekly and GK’s Weeklybefore returning to his native New York. Borsodi and Agar were described as “the northern associates” of the Southern Agrarians, the closest allies of the Distributists in America.[29] So by the time Huxley was counselling James about how best to set up his community at West Dean, the reformist ideas of Ends and Means were being mirrored by the British Distributists, the Borsodi-Agar-Stillman Free America group, as well as the Southern Agrarians such as Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and other intellectuals associated with Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who, since the late twenties, had been inveighing against

industrialism and its concomitant evils—specialization and the dissociation of sensibility, against big business and commercialism, against ‘progress’ and its manifestations in a New South—all elements of a Northern and Eastern way of life. At the same time they were defending agrarianism and the values they found inherent in or accruing to it—religion, stability, gentility—those characteristics of a ‘traditional’ Southern culture.[30]

James may well have been familiar with Belloc’s writing, having corresponded with him in the mid-1930s, and was seemingly sympathetic to the approach of agrarianism. He again quotes Huxley back to him in his opening letter when he writes that “‘the early Benedictines revived agricultural life after the collapse of the Roman Empire—recolonised the land that had been deserted, reintroduced industrial techniques in places where they had been most lost’” and goes on to state, in his own words, that “agricultural life is not dead in England yet and industrial techniques are not lost; but at the end of a very destructive war some of them may be.”[31]

Interestingly, an article by Lewis Mumford, published in Free America in 1941, effectively weaves together James’s desire to preserve the arts whilst creating closer ties with the land. Mumford writes:

The current war probably marks the end of the period of metropolitan aggrandisement. As a condition of survival in this disordered world, we must conceive and build decentralized communities; and these communities must be close enough to the land to be able to function, at least on a subsistence basis, during a period of economic or social breakdown. This condition is a necessity; it is likewise an opportunity. More than a generation ago, long before the terrorism of war from the air had become patent, that opportunity was defined by Peter Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard, in “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” and in “Garden Cities of Tomorrow.”[32]

The references to Kropotkin and Howard also ground the discussion in the British landscape, something that James and Huxley go on to discuss in later correspondence. James was clear that his plans for West Dean were intended, in Huxley’s words, as a “‘small working-model of a better society’”[33] and, as Mumford continued:

For this decentralized order to enjoy fully the advantages of modern civilization it must be established on a world-wide scale; it involves, ultimately, a re-building of the entire structure of modern society. Meanwhile, the aim of sound planning and statesmanship must be to establish every new industry, every new highway, every new housing development with the new regional pattern of decentralized communities. This calls for a radical revision in much of the work that is now under way. At this moment, both military danger and social opportunity point in the same direction. (Mumford, 306)

In an unpublished letter of 12 June 1945 to Naomi Mitchison, written from his nearly self-sufficient homestead at Llano in the Mojave Desert, Huxley speculated on what the future might hold: “The best we can hope for is a pax Sovietica extending over all Eastern and Central Europe. Or perhaps England and the U. S. will push that expanding empire back. […] In practice most attempts to make radical changes in human society […] result in wholesale death and destruction.” He then outlines his own modest, but essential criteria for the kind of social reform that both he and Edward James hoped would be embodied in the social experiment at West Dean and which might serve as a model for a better human society: “The only way an individual can do good is by raising food or making useful commodities himself; by helping others to acquire the land or the tools for doing the same thing.”[34]

Published in the Aldous Huxley Annual Vol. 20/21 (2023) Publisher: Lit Verlag

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[1] Edward James, journal entry 1940, p. 8-a. Edward James Archive, EJA/2/1/4/3.

[2] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London, 1937), 8. Hereafter EM.

[3] The survivors of a catastrophe whose upright behaviour will result in their gaining entry to the Promised Land. See Isaiah11:11.

[4] Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London, 1969), 892. Hereafter, Letters.

[5] See <https://www.renemagritte.org/not-to-be-reproduced.jsp>.

[6] Edward James, journal entry 1940, p. 7. Edward James Archive, EJA/2/1/4/3.

[7] As early as 1932, Huxley approvingly referred to Fred C. Henderson’s analysis of capitalism in The Economic Consequences of Power Production (London, 1933); see his letter of 22 July 1932 to Leonard Huxley (Letters, 359).

[8] In the winter of 1937–38, Huxley and Maria had rented “Dairy Cottage” as a pied-à-terre for the winter months near their friends the Seabrooks. It was a short distance from Borsodi’s residence in Suffern, New York, so they probably visited Borsodi some time that winter before they left for Los Angeles via Colorado and New Mexico in their newly-purchased Ford on 11 February.

[9] Thomas Jefferson, cited in Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London, 1959), 49.

[10] See the deleted portion of the Paris Review interview with George Wickes and Ray Frazer in box 4, 2009, Aldous Huxley Collection in the Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

[11] Edward James, journal entry 1940, p. 2. Edward James Archive, EJA/2/1/4/3.

[12] Charles Kettering (1876–1958). American inventor and head of research at General Motors from 1920–1947. His lightweight two-stroke diesel engine revolutionized the locomotive and heavy-equipment industries. Charles Abbot (1872–1973). American astrophysicist and inventor. He was First Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute from 1928–1944.

[13] Aldous Huxley to Emma Goldman, 16 March 1938 (Goldman Archive, Amsterdam), cited in David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (Liverpool, 2006), 229.

[14] Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer(London, 1939), 130. Hereafter, AMS.

[15] Chauncey Stillman (1907–1989). Heir to an American banking fortune, he founded, funded and edited Free America from its inception in 1937.

[16] George Weller (1907–2002). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times, author, and decentralist.

[17] Edward James to Aldous Huxley, 25 December 1939, p. 6. Edward James Archive, EJA/1/50/1.

[18] Edward James. Edward James Archive, uncatalogued papers.

[19] Edward James to Aldous Huxley, 14 March 1940, p. 1. Edward James Archive, EJA/1/50/6.

[20] Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence Between T. H. White and L. J. Potts, ed. Francois Gallix (New York, 1982), 97.

[21] See Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Toronto, 2007), xix. Huxley frequently refers to isolated utopian communities as “red Indian reservations”; see particularly his Balzac essays from 1920: “[Aristocracy (I)],” The Athenæum (10 December 1920), 812, and “[Aristocracy (II)],” The Athenæum (31 December 1920), 893. Both essays were reprinted in AHA, 16 (2016).

[22] Edward James to Aldous Huxley, 25 December 1939, p. 5. Edward James Archive, EJA/1/50/1.

[23] Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957). A Russian-born artist, best-known for his surrealistic painting and set design. James had one of the world’s largest collections of his work and commissioned his design work for Les Ballets 1933.

[24] Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). Spanish surrealist artist. James is considered one of his greatest patrons. Their collaborations led to the Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa, and a contract from 1937 saw James give Dalí a salary for one year in exchange for his paintings.

[25] Rex Whistler (1905–1944). British artist and designer. He was killed in the Normandy campaign during WWII. Illustrated James’s books, designed interior furniture and decorative carvings at West Dean.

[26] Christian Bérard (1902–1949). French artist and designer. James commissioned him for Les Ballets 1933 and purchased a number of his works.

[27] Eugène Berman (1899–1972). Russian painter and theater designer.

[28] See his essay “On the Charms of History and the Future of the Past,” Music at Night (London, 1931), 143.

[29] William Fahey, “Introduction,” The Church and the Land (Norfolk, VA, 2003), 13.

[30] Virginia Rock, The Making and Meaning of ‘I’ll Take My Stand’: A Study in Utopian-Conservatism 1925-1939, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1961, 61.

[31] Edward James to Aldous Huxley, 25 December 1939, p. 5. Edward James Archive, EJA/1/50/1. James quotes EM, 136.

[32] Lewis Mumford, Land and Liberty: The Best of ‘Free America,’ ed. Allan C. Carlson (Amenia, NY, 2003), 306. Hereafter, Mumford. The original essay by Mumford appeared in Free America, 5.1 (January 1941).

[33] James quoting EM, 128, in his letter to Aldous Huxley, 25 December 1939, p. 2. Edward James Archive, EJA/1/50/1.

[34] Aldous Huxley to Naomi Mitchison, 12 June 1945; unpublished and uncatalogued letter, UCLA Special Collections (in the newly purchased R. Pieraccini collection).