During
World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at
Garsington Manor, home of Lady
Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several
Bloomsbury figures including
D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and
Clive Bell. Later, in
Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria Nijs, a Belgian woman he had met at Garsington. They had one child,
Matthew Huxley (1920–2005), who had a career as an
epidemiologist.
The family lived in Italy part of the time in the 1920's, where Huxley would visit his friend
D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, he edited his letters (1933).
In 1937, Huxley moved to
Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend
Gerald Heard. At this time Huxley wrote
Ends and Means, while living in Taos, New Mexico; in this work he explores the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of 'liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love', they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it. Heard introduced Huxley to
Vedanta, meditation and
vegetarianism through the principle of
ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended
J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a
Vedantist in the circle of
Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced
Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas,
The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.
Aldous Huxley was close friends with
Occidental College president Remsen Bird during Huxley's time living in Southern California. He spent much time at the college, which is located in the beautiful
Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the college is portrayed under the name of Tarzana College in his 1939 satircal novel
After Many a Summer, for which he collected that year's
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period he was also able to tap into some Hollywood income using his writing skills, thanks to an introduction into the business by his friend
Anita Loos, the prolific novelist and
screenwriter. He received screen credit for
Pride and Prejudice, 1940, and was paid for his work on a number of other films. However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of
Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that 'he could only understand every third word'. Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else.
For most of his life since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, his eyesight was poor (despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). Around 1939 Huxley encountered the
Bates Method for
Natural Vision Improvement and a teacher (Margaret Corbett) who was able to teach him in the method. In 1940, relocating from Hollywood to a forty-acre
ranchito in the high desert hamlet of
Llano, in northernmost Los Angeles County, Huxley claimed his sight improved dramatically as a result of using the Bates Method, particularly utilizing the extreme and pure natural lighting of the Southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was able to read without
spectacles and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method,
The Art of Seeing which was published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK).
However, while Huxley undoubtedly believed his vision had improved, other evidence suggests that Huxley may have been fooling himself. In 1952
Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern without difficulty:
:"Then suddenly he faltered—and the truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address—he had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought it closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonizing moment."
(p. 241: quotes Bennett Cerf re Huxley's vision in 1952)
On 21 October 1949 Huxley wrote to
George Orwell, author of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating Orwell on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". His letter to Orwell contained the prediction that: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience".
(p. 605:quotes Aldous Huxley re Huxley's opinions in 1949 about the technologies to be employed by governments)
