Ouvertures mélopoétiques
|Illustrations
13. Calvin S. Brown in Oxford (1930-1933)
From Music and Poetry (1932) to The Musical Opus in Poetry (1934)1
Testo integrale
- 1 I wish to express my gratitude to Mrs Calvin S. Brown, Sanibel (Florida), for sending me a copy of (...)
Representative of the confusion, and perhaps most frustrating, are those all too frequent instances when the terms “musical”, “musicality”, and “the music of poetry” find their way into literary criticism.
Steven P. Scher, “How Useful is ‘Musical’ in Literary Criticism?”
I think it is worth while, before proceeding to conjectures of my own as to what we mean, or ought to mean, or can mean, when we say that a poem is musical or unmusical, to emphasize the difference between the approach of the scholar and that of the writer of verse.
T.S. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry”
The importance of music for poetry has been the subject of many rhapsodic discourses, yet the precise manner in which the art of tones may influence the arts of words has remained both fascinating and obscure.
Frederick W. Sternfeld, “Poetry and Music”
Abbreviations
AM = Jean-Louis Cupers, Aldous Huxley et la musique. À la manière de Jean-Sébastien, Bruxelles, Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1985.
CL = Grover Smith (ed.), Collected Letters of Aldous Huxley, London, Chatto & Windus, 1961.
CP = Jean-Louis Cupers, “Music and Literature. A Chinese Puzzle?”, Revue belge de musicologie, LVIII, 2004, p. 307-316 (in this volume, ch. 5)
FG = Farcical History of Richard Greenow (from Limbo, London, Chatto & Windus, 1920).
IO = Isashi Ozawa, “The Uncanny Self: The Great War, Psychoanalysis and Aldous Huxley’s Farcical History of Richard Greenow”, Aldous Huxley Annual, XV, 2015, p. 191-214.
HM = Steven P. Scher, “How Meaningful is Musical in Literary Criticism?”, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, XXI, 1972, p. 52-56 (reprinted in WMS 5, 2004, p. 37-45).
LM = Steven P. Scher, “Literature and Music”, in Jean-Pierre Barricelli & Joseph Gibaldi (ed.), Interrelations of Literature, New York, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1982, p. 225-250.
MF = Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction. A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality, Amsterdam/Atlanta, Rodopi, 1999.
ML = Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1948, 2nd ed., Hanover/London, University Press of New England, 1987.
MP = T.S. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (see note 5).
MPE = Sidney Lanier, Music and Poetry. Essays upon Some Aspects and Inter-relations of the Two Arts, New York, Scribner, 1898.
MPP = Jean-Louis Cupers & Ulrich Weisstein (ed.), Musico-Poetics in Perspective. Calvin S. Brown in Memoriam, WMS 2, 2000.
RM = Peter Edgerly Firchow, Reluctant Modernists: Aldous Huxley and Some Contemporaries, ed. Evelyn S. Firchow & Bernfried Nugel, Münster/Hamburg/ London, LitVerlag, 2002.
RAM = Calvin S. Brown’s review of AM in Comparative Literature, XXXIX, 1987, 2, p. 170-172.
SP = Northrop FRYE (ed.): Sound and Poetry, New York/London, Columbia University Press, 1956
TA = Jean-Louis Cupers, « Tensions et ambiguïtés du domaine mélopoétique », in Jean-Louis Backès, Claude Coste & Danièle Pistone (ed.), Littérature et musique dans la France contemporaine, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001, p. 19-30 (in this volume, ch. 3)
TM = Themes and Variations, London, Chatto & Windus, 1950.
TP = Texts and Pretexts, London, Chatto & Windus, 1932.
TW = Calvin S. Brown, Tones into Words: Musical Compositions as Subjects of Poetry, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1953.
VT = Jean-Louis Cupers, “Huxley’s Variations on a Musical Theme”, in Bernfried Nugel (ed.), Now More Than Never (Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium Münster 1994), Frankfurt am Main, Lang, 1994 (in this volume, ch. 12)
WMS = Word and Music Studies, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, now Brill.
- 2 An error should be corrected in the current biographical sketch of the pioneer. It is suggested in (...)
1Dates of publication can be deceptive. What with the Second World War and “its aftermath of paper shortages and general disruption” the publication of Calvin S. Brown’s Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts, which “opened up a new field of research”, that of musico-literary scholarship, was delayed until 1948. Dedicated to peace and – in expressive double entendre – to his wife (Mrs Calvin S. Brown’s first name was… “Irene”), it was eventually published as a paperback in 1987 by the University Press of New England2.
2In point of fact, however, the book had been finished (as the new preface to the paperback testifies) as early as December 1941:
- 3 Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts, Hanover/London, University Press o (...)
Music and Literature is actually older than its date of original publication would imply. I can date it precisely because I was in my study finishing the last chapter when my wife came in to tell me that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor3.
3When he published his second major book in the field of musico-poetics in 1953, the pioneer actually went back to his 1934 PhD, sizeable portions of which went into the new book. This second opus, Tones into Words: Musical Compositions as Subjects of Poetry, thus follows very closely in the footsteps of Aldous Huxley’s Music and Poetry, one of the longer essays in Texts and Pretexts, Huxley’s 1932 anthology with commentary.
4In Gerhard Wagner’s words:
- 4 “Im Spätherbst 1932, einige Monate nach dem Erscheinen seines heute unangefochten bekanntesten Werk (...)
[In the late autumn of 1932, a few months after the publication of his undisputedly best-known work, Brave New World, Huxley publishes a new volume, which he announces as ‘a sort of anthology interlarded with comments of my own – a mixture between an Oxford Book… and a book of essays’ (Letters, 356)]4.
- 5 I shall be quoting the Eliot essay from Steven P. Scher’s Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur The (...)
- 6 Calvin S. Brown, Tones into Words, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1953, p. 2.
5As suggested by T.S. Eliot in his essay The Music of Poetry, published ten years after Huxley’s essay in Texts and Pretexts, the writer’s method of going about the job is widely at variance with that of the literary scholar5. While in Tones into Words Calvin S. Brown examines some 239 poems, some “distinctly minor verse” and some “definitely bad6”, with a view to assessing these “attempts to treat music poetically”, Huxley concentrates in his essay on a limited number of examples in order the describe the “images” in terms of which poets have tried to render the sister art (in reality, as we shall see shortly, the “mother” art). In so doing he actually illustrates some of the main ways in which his own fiction uses the tools of description discovered in the poets.
6 Music and Poetry thus constitutes – with Music at Night in the preceding collection of essays (Music at Night, 1931) – the last apex of the great musical decade of the twenties in Huxley, and it corroborates the role the English writer is known to have played in the career of the American scholar.
- 7 Ulrich Weisstein, “The Miracle of Interconnectedness. Calvin S. Brown. A Critical Biography”, in Je (...)
7Indeed in 1930, as Ulrich Weisstein notes, “as it were in the midstream of his doctoral studies […], [Calvin S. Brown] received one of the much coveted and very prestigious Rhodes Scholarships and moved to […] Oxford where he remained until 19337”. And it so happened that his first tutor in Oxford was… Anthony Simpson, the famous Ben Jonson scholar who had been Huxley’s tutor a number of years before.
- 8 TA 21.
- 9 ACLA Newsletter (American Comparative Literature Association), XXI (1989), 1, p. 16.
8The interesting point now is that by Brown’s own admission it was the reading of the 1928 novel Point Counter Point that sparked his early interest in the field he came to “create almost ex nihilo” – the phrase is Ulrich Weisstein’s8 – some twenty years later. An impressive case in musico-literary influence indeed for by common consent Calvin S. Brown (1909-1989), Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at the University of Georgia, Athens (ACLA Newsletter9), is credited with being the “author of the first systematically conceived survey […] of the branch of interart studies now generally known as Melopoetics” (MPP, back cover of the paperback edition of the volume of homage to the pioneer).
- 10 Errata sheet from Yale University Press to be inserted in a volume published in 1955 (Stream of Con (...)
9If an effective touchstone of an author’s originality is how often he has been plagiarized then Calvin S. Brown can compete for the test. Never so tantalizingly, however, as when the University of Yale Press was made to send a list of addenda to be inserted with the comments: “The following quotations were taken substantially, with some variations, from Calvin S. Brown’s Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts, University of Georgia Press, 1948. By mistake no acknowledgment was made to Dr. Brown’s book. This sheet will remedy the omission10”. There followed a list of some twenty quotations!
10It may be of use at this juncture, before we proceed any further, to list (in chronological order) the relevant items:
1931 Music at Night (in the collection of essays Music at Night)
1932 Music and Poetry (in the anthology Texts and Pretexts)
1934 The Musical Opus in Poetry (Calvin S. Brown)
1941 Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts (Calvin S. Brown)
1942 The Music of Poetry (T.S. Eliot)
1953 Tones into Words: Musical Compositions as Subjects of Poetry (Calvin S. Brown)
But let us start at the beginning.
Introduction: Music and Huxley
11In many ways the Huxley symposium organized by Professor Nugel in Münster in 1994 can be said to mark the end of the “thirty-year purgatory” (a favourite idea of Jean Weisgerber’s!) that has generally been the plight of a good many writers after their demise. “Not important enough an author”, had been the usual reply, “to write a book about with regard to a single aspect of his work”. That was the general impression I got from publishers’ letters in reply to my enquiry in the sixties whether they were interested in the topic of Huxley and music.
- 11 Cf. AM 325. See chapter 2 (« De la sélection des objets musico-littéraires ») and 12 (« Analyses mu (...)
12So I am delighted to have the opportunity to welcome Michael Allis’ recent study, Temporaries and Eternals. The Music Criticism of Aldous Huxley, 1922-1923 (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), a task I advocated carrying out nearly forty-five years ago at the Innsbruck Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association11.
- 12 SP X.
13Today Oxford is a great opportunity for me to recollect a number of pleasurable events as well, not least meeting with Professor Frederick Sternfeld, the author of a seminal study on Goethe and Music, which, to quote Northrop Frye’s words in his preface to Sound and Poetry, one of the important books in the field, “is not only a fascinating book in itself, but what our friends in the social sciences would call a pilot study12”.
14As Matthew Arnold, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, one of the illustrious forebears in the Huxley family, put it in the Preface to his Essays in Criticism: “Beautiful city, so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene”!
- 13 Quoted from Georges Guibillon, La Littérature anglaise par les textes, Paris, Hatier, 1960, rev. 26(...)
15And he added: “[…] who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, – to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side13”?
- 14 See “Aldous Huxley as Anthologist” in the first issue of the Aldous Huxley Annual, 1, 2001, p. 145- (...)
16Beauty, truth: two words that lead up to the core of this paper. Indeed one cannot but think here of Gerhard Wagner’s perceptive study, The “Beauty – Truths” of Literature: Elemente einer Dichtungstheorie in Aldous Huxleys Essayistik, which appeared in 2001 as volume 3 of the Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture series in Münster. In a perceptive article published in the first issue of AHA Gerhard Wagner had already pointed out14 the importance of Huxley’s contribution to the enrichment of the ambiguous field of what is also called “florilèges” (in English “florilegia”, i.e. collections of choice extracts), using the Latin etymology of the word for flowers.
- 15 See AHA, vol. 10/11, 2011/2012, “Huxley’s Opus Magnum: An Anthology of Essays and Criticism” (1946) (...)
- 16 Abingdon/New York, 2013.
17The subject of anthologies is a favourite one in Huxley. Have we not recently learnt15 more about Huxley’s famous project of an anthology on criticism, the so-called Encyclopedia Britannica Essays? This was an ambitious project that should profitably be confronted today with the recent Global Literary Theory anthology, just edited by Richard Lane and published by Routledge in London16.
- 17 “Aldous Huxley as Anthologist”, p. 145.
18In Gerhard Wagner’s words: “As anthologist, last but not least, Huxley has hardly ever been taken into more detailed critical account”. And he adds: “It is, indeed, Huxley the anthologist whom critics have treated with particular superficiality or disregard17”. Yet Huxley himself regarded with a good deal of interest both Texts and Pretexts (1932) and The Perennial Philosophy (1945), his two anthologies.
19In one of the last essays in the late collection of essays Themes and Variations, Huxley has these comments on the subject:
There are anthologies of almost everything – from the best to the worst, from the historically significant to the sublime. But there is one anthology, potentially the most interesting of them all, which, to the best of my knowledge, has never yet been compiled; I mean, the Anthology of Later Works” (TM 209).
20The ultimate significance of art – so relevant to Texts and Pretexts – is indeed (as for all essays of the anthology) the “toile de fond” against which to study the relation of music to poetry.
21But it is useful to give first an idea of the complexity of the topic of “music in Huxley” as such. There is of course first and foremost, to use Brown’s words, the “biographical” fact that the writer “was in close touch with several important musicians, the most eminent of whom was Stravinsky”. Indeed, the summary of the topic of “music in Huxley” as given by Brown in his review of Huxley et la musique. À la manière de Jean-Sébastien (Brussels, 1985) can serve as a point of departure:
Aldous Huxley is almost the ideal subject for a study of a writer’s relationship to music. His serious lifelong interest in the art led him to acquire both technical and historical knowledge far beyond that of most literary amateurs, along with a wide familiarity with the repertoire over a period of five centuries – twice the span of most people interested in music, even today. In 1922 and 1923 he published 64 intelligent columns of musical criticism – essays on musical subjects, not mere concert-reviews – in the Weekly Westminster Gazette […]. He was, like most writers with real musical interests, a yearning but incompetent pianist. He devoted much study and thought to the intellectual aspects of music, especially the principles of structure and the basic, insoluble problems of musical aesthetics. As a writer, he drew on his knowledge and not only for references and allusions, but for extended descriptions of major musical works and for structural devices and principles which could be adapted to literary uses.
- 18 Calvin S. BROWN, Review of AM in Comparative Literature, XXXIX, 1987, 2, p. 170-171.
22And the pioneer goes on to refer to his own memories of reading Point Counter Point. “In my youth, he writes, Huxley’s account of the “Heiliger Dankgesang” of Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 132, introduced me to a masterpiece which provided me with an Arnoldian “touchstone” for 56 years – and counting18”.
23It would be tempting to go on to draw a full portrait of some of the more striking features of Huxley’s connection with music. His learning to read music and play the piano in Braille at an early age (first one hand and then the other) when blindness was threatening; later his room in Oxford (the room had a piano) and the playing of the newly-arrived syncopated music of the times (jazz), which drew to the room the elite of the year; rescuing the manuscript of Island and Laura’s violin in later life when the house was on fire in Hollywood, these are but some of the pregnant traits. The words of Yehudi Menuhin in the Memorial Volume must be in all memories: “He had made himself into an instrument of music. Like a violin to a trained hand […] this was a man in whom wisdom never destroyed innocence” (AM 46).
- 19 The reader will find an article on the relevance of the “like music” as a metaphor for life (with r (...)
- 20 AM p. 241-265 (“Anti-musique ou arabesque vitale?”).
24Studying music in Huxley, then, consists of two main dimensions. On the one hand, there is the fundamental question of “What is music?”. In Point Counter Point terms: “It’s all like music […], but you’ve got to be trained to listen”. The Point Counter Point phrase, “like music19, is reverberated in practically all the fiction of the writer. An entire chapter of AM is devoted to tracing its presence20”.
25But on the other hand there is also the question of the relevance of the question. And this second dimension consists in probing the exemplarity of music, which is indeed what the last important passage about music in Huxley’s fiction (the last chapter of Island) consists in. In other words, the latter text reiterates the implicit analogy of the first major text in the fiction. The description of the Mendelssohnian chord in the long short story Farcical History of Richard Greeenow from the first book of short stories way back in 1920 is but a step in the striking series of parallel passages throughout the entire œuvre.
26“Do you like music?” John Henry Newman had similarly asked in chapter 4 of book I in his 1848 autobiographical novel Loss and Gain. The same words, “Do you like music?”, are asked by Susila to Farnaby in Island, calling forth the tantalizing comment: “like music only incomparably more so”.
- 21 VT, p. 104-105. See also ch. 12 in this volume.
27“Not just a mere pattern of sound” (The Human Situation, 196): the few lines about music with which Huxley concludes his lecture on art at Santa Barbara on 7 November 1959 repeat his long-standing conviction about “the most difficult of all the arts” (The Human Situation, 195). Beyond Romantic irony (paradoxically, good music says more because it talks less, disclosing that which articulate discourse tends to dissimulate) and the symbolist realization of the genuine commonality of the two arts, Huxley’s musico-literary enterprise avails itself of the structural potentialities of the art discovered by modernism while at the same time implying that music understood as a science still to be constructed may constitute the highest mystery for the sciences of man to solve, the ultimate paradigm of an ideal which it is impossible to achieve, but which is nonetheless necessary21.
Convergences: Music and Poetry
- 22 Just to quote that one example, 1928 also saw the publication of Musique et poésie by Romain Rollan (...)
28In the apex of Huxley’s great musical decade, the twenties, the publication of Point Counter Point22 gave Brown’s musico-literary endeavour its initial and decisive impetus. The year before, 1927, had already witnessed the publication of Forster’s famous series of Cambridge lectures, Aspects of the Novel, which discovers in music the nearest equivalent to the art of the novelist, while proposing a brilliant definition of its elusive though all-pervasive element, rhythm. But this context must be almost infinitely extended for it is musico-literary relations in the inter-war years at the very least that are its proper context. Indeed, in the wake of the French symbolists (say Mallarmé or Valéry) the evidence of the interest of writers in the art of music at that time is staggering.
- 23 RM, p. 181 (A.H. Fox Strangways).
29Not to refer to such prominent – and early – examples as Proust and Rolland, and a host of other important writers, e.g. Gide (a difficult case when one wants to disentangle it from Huxley’s), one has to cross the boundaries of the different national literatures to throw any light on the subject. Brave New World’s contrapuntal chapter finds a magnificent counterpart in Jules Romains’ monumental 27 volume novel chain, Les Hommes de bonne volonté [Men of Good Will], whose first volume was published in February of that same year, 1932, that saw the publication of Huxley’s anthology. Indeed, Chapter 22 of book 14 (Le Drapeau noir [The Black Flag]), in the “midmost” part of the chain, inserts a remarkable example of Brave-New-World – like doubly contrapuntal chapter with a view to emphasizing the concomitance of events so brilliantly portrayed in Romains’ chain. It cannot be sheer coincidence that what Firchow felicitously calls the “aesthetics of simultaneity23” should play a central role in two writers writing at the same time!
30Significantly in 1920, when Huxley publishes his first collection of stories at the beginning of his great musical decade, a new journal, now “the leading British musicological quarterly” (witness the advertisement in the influential International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music), sees the light of day. Its title spoke volumes: Music and Letters. Way back in 1920, the first editorial read:
- 24 I, 1920, 1, p. 4.
To couple “music” with “letters”, or literature, is to suggest that there is a closer link between poetry and music than between any other two arts; their methods are so clearly analogous that in speaking of one we often seem […] to be explaining the other24.
- 25 Incidentally it must be noted that The Musical Quarterly is also the journal which some twenty year (...)
- 26 Frederick W. Sternfeld, “The Musical Springs of Goethe’s Poetry”, The Musical Quarterly, XXXV, 1949 (...)
31In 1921, then, the following year, Edward Sapir, the great American linguist who early on opened up the domain of linguistics to the field of culture, appears on the scene. In 1918 he had already written a ground-breaking article on “Representative Music” in The Musical Quarterly, where he describes what each art seems “best able to accomplish25”. Sapir soon goes on to write his “The Musical Foundation of Verse” (The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XX). Also noteworthy: “The Musical Springs of Goethe’s Poetry26” by Frederick Sternfeld, which was published only one year after Brown’s magnum opus and antecedes by some five years the pilot study mentioned at the very outset of this study. In the same year 1921 Sapir publishes his book on Language as well, where centrifugally as it were (in sharp contrast to his eminent contemporary Bloomfield) he is one of the first (and the last!) great linguists to include a chapter on literature in a global presentation of the field of linguistics.
- 27 André Suarès, Musique et poésie, Paris, Ed. Claude Aveline, 1928.
- 28 James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence. A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music, Ne (...)
- 29 See first epigraph.
- 30 A particularly interesting example is Sidney Lanier’s Music and Poetry (1909), who in a sense can b (...)
32Innumerable writings, from the small essay to the full-scale volume, from such diverse works as the already mentioned Musique et poésie by Suarès27 to the historically conceived Unsuspected Eloquence. A History of the Relations between Music and Poetry by James Anderson Winn28, from Brown’s own “The Poetic Use of Musical Forms” in The Musical Quarterly to Musique et poésie au xvie siècle published by the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the proceedings of an early congress on the subject (in 1954), which were published the same year as Sternfeld’s thesis, have been devoted with various degrees of suitability and interest to the topic of music vs. poetry, a complex and fascinating field of research. Most of them bear titles similar to Huxley’s or Eliot’s essays29. It would no doubt be worth one’s while to set out giving a full hierarchical account of all these disquisitions, some distinctly rhapsodic, but this is hardly the place to do so here. Suffice it to briefly list some of the most remarkable texts: among them Combarieu’s PhD published at the end of the xixth century (Les Rapports de la musique et de la poésie, considérées du point de vue de l’expression, 1894) and Kramer’s Music and Poetry. The Nineteenth Century and After, almost a century later. Indeed Kramer’s 1984 volume is one of the ten books short-listed in Scher’s Music and Text: Critical Enquiries (1992) to illustrate the soar of worthwhile studies in the (relatively) new field of musico-poetics. In between the two (among a host of other studies30) we must certainly mention the chapter “La Musique du vers” in Souriau’s La Correspondance des arts, whose first edition appeared in 1947, i.e. one year before Calvin S. Brown’s much-delayed Music and Literature.
33The basic difficulty in having music and poetry meet appropriately is the complexity of the material to be compared and also the striking asymmetry of this partly common material. There are both affinities and oppositions. Only metaphorically is music a language but language is already – literally – music of some sort. Music is thus both an alogon as it can dispense with language and the ultimate analogon just mentioned, that “language of the soul” – to have recourse to the felicitous phrase used by Edward MacDowell in his Columbia essays – which provides the ultimate paradigm of ideal reality.
34At grips with the problem of giving expression to a sensuous reality going beyond itself Huxley’s Text and Pretext essay points out that a good deal of poets have recourse to all the senses except that of hearing in order to come to terms with the reality of the art of sounds or – if they are at all conversant with it or even musically competent – they have sometimes recourse to a more technical approach. Elaborating a complex sensuous natural landscape that symbolically stands for the aural reality is in many cases the usual “procedure” of the verbal music, i.e. the various texts that attempt to “recreate” the music (AM 102). All of these means are found in Huxley’s short stories and novels.
- 31 Catherine D’Oultremont, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Waterloo, Ed. Avant-Propos, 2012.
- 32 Kirsty Gunn, The Big Music, London, Faber and Faber, 2012.
- 33 See Murielle Lucie Clément, Andreï Makine, New York/Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2012.
- 34 Roger Bichelberger, Noëls pour un enfant perdu, Paris, Albin Michel, 2006.
35Incidentally I can see no proof that Huxley’s own contribution to the “musicalization of fiction” should have turned out to be a “blind alley” as Brown seemed to think when he wrote his magnum opus (ML 211). There is today an increasing number of examples of further explorations of the vast field of the “musical” in contemporary fiction, both thematically and structurally. The incredible number of “musical” novels catalogued (say in recent French or English fiction) is a proof to the contrary. Witness the example of the recent Monumentum pro Gesualdo by Catherine d’Oultremont31, a novel that brilliantly counterpoints the life of the Italian composer from the Renaissance and an episode in the life of Stravinsky, or Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music, also published in 201232, which provides an extraordinary example of “variation on a theme” in the Scottish way (the etymological meaning of “pibroch”!). Siberian writer Andreï Makine’s La Musique d’une vie is another worthwhile example33 in a growing and impressive series of musico-literary endeavours. So is Roger Bichelberger’s use of plain-song scores in Noëls pour un enfant perdu, to give a quite different example34…
36In his own approach the pioneer poses the question of the appropriateness of the poetic medium as such. For apart from fairly rare successes like those of his fellow country man Conrad Aiken Brown discovers better representations of the problem of “musicalization” in the art of the novelist. And one can indeed ask the question whether this fairly pessimistic stance adopted at the end of Tones into Words (TW 142) might not be the principal reason why this second book – in comparison with the first – should be less popular than the 1948 Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts.
37Incidentally also one should realize the considerable lapse of time that will have been necessary to see Huxley’s early insight into the “musicalization of fiction” (the title of a standard work in the field, Werner Wolf’s The Musicalization of Fiction. A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality [MF]), turn into a common view shared by scholars all over the world. The International Word and Music Association will be founded in Austria in 1997.
38Likewise it is worth noting how long walls take to fall down. This stands out from the similar delay in effecting a rapprochement between the study of language and that of literature obvious from Sapir’s inclusion of the latter into his celebrated introduction to the world of linguistics. One has to wait until 1992 to see the foundation of a journal like Language and Literature, the journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, which had appeared on an informal basis heretofore, devoted to the specific study of such rapprochements.
39Steven P. Scher, next to Brown the mastermind behind the scenes in giving a scientific foundation to what is now the recognized sector of musico-poetic research, summarizes Huxley’s role as an initiator in the realm of fiction in a somewhat different way:
Aldous Huxley, an avid and not inept practitioner of music in literature, provides an illuminating theoretical digression in his novel Point Counter Point on how some musical techniques might be translated into novelistic practice […]. From a musical point of view, Huxley’s methodological musings verge on dilettantism. But as a writer of fiction Huxley is entitled to a laxer usage of terms like theme, modulation, or variation; as a precondition for creative reflection, he must be allowed to contemplate the other medium from a distance and interpret its ground rules with flexibility (LM 231-232).
- 35 See Benedict XVI, L’Esprit de la musique, Perpignan, Arpège, 2011, p. 6.
40The overall relevance of the work of French Jesuit anthropologist Marcel Jousse (1886-1961), who insisted that the undivided capacity for music in primitive man gave progressively way to some sort of reduction of the power of expression in (spoken, i.e. not sung) language (spoken language thus in this view appeared later), need not be stressed. And this development may have grown naturally out of what could be called “la loi du moindre effort”, that is man’s inevitable tendency to reduce the energy needed35. And quoting Goethe on Bach would have shown the linguist and the musico-literary critic speaking the same language: Sapir’s “The Musical Foundations of Verse” indeed – as we have suggested before – anticipates Sternfeld’s “The Musical Foundations of Goethe’s Poetry”.
41The problem as we have seen is not simple. Poets who try to render music in their own art aim at rendering as it were not a sister art (as is commonly said) but a mother art, i.e. – to use again MacDowell’s metaphor – that “strange language of the soul the why of which no man has ever discovered” by or through an art that uses language as its medium, and thus is already to some extent (literally) music. A Chinese puzzle indeed!
42Intermedial confrontation – the mutual illumination of the two arts – is thus vitally needed. It could not be otherwise. Language being the medium of literature, there is simply no short cut, no easy way out of the Chinese puzzle facing us. For language is from the start (literally) music and music is always to some extent (metaphorically) language.
43To the question “What can we say about music?” Music at Night had answered: “Not much”. Music and Poetry examines the ways in which poets have tried to render it. At the other end of the disquisition Island summarizes the meagre – but not altogether despicable – task of the critic, “the Logical Positivist, absurd but indispensable, trying to explain, in a language incommensurable with the facts, what it was all about” (Island, chapter 15).
44As one of the two essays entitled The Rest Is Silence puts it (TP 236):
However miraculously endowed a poet may be, there is always, beyond the furthest reach of his powers of expression, a great region of the unexpressed and inexpressible. The rest is always silence.
45The greatest poetry about music does corroborate Huxley’s essay. Witness the ultimate piece of verbal music in the last chapter of Island. “Seeing what I hear and hearing what I see”, is Farnaby’s answer to Susila: “What are you hearing?” as they are both listening with open eyes in typically Stravinskyan fashion to Bach’s music. The description is distinctly synaesthetic and an elaborate transformation into some sort of landscape. So is Rainer Maria Rilke’s:
Musik, Atem der Statuen | “Music the breath of sculpture” |
Wandlung, wandlung in was | “Transformation, transformation into what?” |
… in hörbare Landschaft | “into audible landscape” |
- 36 FG, p. 31-32.
46Indeed Island’s last chapter has its magnificent premonition or anticipation in the very first collection of short stories, way back in 192036!
47“That which nature has brought together let no man put asunder”, is Huxley’s parody of the Bible in The Human Situation: “let not the arbitrary academic division into subjects tear apart the closely knit web of reality and turn it into nonsense”. The study of the multifarious relations running from poetry to music and vice versa is a case in point!
- 37 Calvin S. Brown, op. cit., p. 172.
When I went to Oxford in 1930, writes Calvin S. Brown, my first tutor was Percy Simpson, who was just well launched on his monumental edition of Ben Jonson which, to the astonishment of everyone, he actually lived to complete. Knowing only that he had written a book on Shakespeare’s punctuation, I expected him to be a dull pedant, but was delighted to find that he had a lively interest in contemporary literature. Though it was outside the curriculum, we spent a good deal of time discussing it. One day Huxley’s name came up, and Simpson gave me a reminiscence on the subject. He had been Huxley’s tutor some fifteen years earlier, and Huxley’s first tutorial essay had been a brilliant effort, full of learning, paradox, and epigram, but not quite – well, sound. When Huxley finished reading it to him, Simpson said (and I remember these words exactly) “The trouble with you, Huxley, is that you’re just too damned clever”. And Simpson added, to me, that he had never found any reason to change that judgment. Neither have I37.
- 38 Quoted in CP 307 (CL 637). See AM, p. 35-36.
48Stravinsky once called his friend The Rake’s godfather (Huxley had been instrumental in bringing Stravinsky and Auden together) but the writer replied, “Vous me faites trop d’honneur en m’appelant le parrain du Rake. Je ne suis au plus que l’entremetteur qui a combiné heureusement la rencontre de ces deux éminentes lesbiennes, Musique et Poésie, dont le collage, depuis trente siècles, est si notoire” (“You do me too much honour in calling me The Rake’s godfather. I am at best the pimp who has happily brought about the meeting of those two distinguished lesbians, Music and Poetry, whose notorious collage has been celebrated for thirty centuries38”).
49It needed a great writer (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) who happened to be a musician as well (he even mistakenly thought he was a greater musician than he was a writer…) to discover all that the art of a great poet like Jean de la Fontaine owed to the art of music. But that was because both participate though in different ways in the same powers: in other words, it is the very medium of literature as such that is the really appropriate analogon, being indeed rudimentary music of some sort. And this fact in turn makes any “point counter point” comparison (say of this or that identified score and any text meant to render it) near to impossible.
50Calvin S. Brown’s ultimate conclusion of Tones into Words tends to underline this trend (TW 142):
It would be both unjust and inaccurate to close the discussion on such a depressing note without reminding the reader of the strict limitations of this study. The poem on a specific composition is, in general, inadequate and derivative. On the other hand, music has been an important source of inspiration and of techniques in recent literature […]. The difference is that they use music for suggestions, for new literary devices, and for various types of special effects, whereas the poets with whom we have been concerned merely set out, not to create something of their own, but to translate the untranslatable.
- 39 Alain, Système des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Gallimard, 1920, 2nd ed. 1926, p. 127. See TA, p. 19.
51In the words of the philosopher: “[…] les arts, dans leur perfection, se distinguent et même s’opposent, par ces analogies profondes qui rendent toute comparaison impossible39” (“[…] in their perfection the arts can be distinguished, and even opposed, through these profound analogies that render any comparison impossible”).
- 40 André Michel, Psychanalyse de la musique, Paris, PUF, 1951, p. 180.
52Caught in the perennial dilemma between sense and sound (in the wake of Combarieu’s PhD) one of the volumes (on psychoanalysis and music) in the impressive series headed by Gisèle Brelet at the Presses universitaires de France (Bibliothèque internationale de musicologie) aptly puts it in several felicitous expressions of the marvellous complexity of the problem: “[…] Musique et Poésie sont complémentaires […] en ce que chacune ne peut que dire ce que l’autre ne peut que taire [… ]40” (“Music and Poetry are complementary in that one can only say what the other one can only be silent about”).
- 41 Ibid., p. 180.
53Or in metaphorical terms: “Musique et Poésie […] réalisent ce tour de force d’accumuler au même instant la successive clarté de deux hémisphères41” (“Music and Poetry […] have this achievement on their part that they succeed at any given moment in accumulating the successive light of two hemispheres”).
- 42 See chapter 12 (“Analyses musicales chez Aldous Huxley”) in this volume.
- 43 Cf. for instance the recent University of Amsterdam PhD on the subject, Présence de l’absence, and (...)
- 44 See my contribution to the ICLA congress devoted to the Comparative Arts, “De la Sélection des obje (...)
54“To translate the untranslatable”, Brown’s final judgment in Tones into Words, rings a bell for the reader of Huxley. For it is a recurring thought in Huxley. One can think here of the two essays entitled The Rest is Silence already mentioned. Never, however, has the topic be treated more explicitly, with relation both to Beethoven’s Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis and to Shakespeare’s words, than in the title essay of the 1931 eponymous collection of essays, Music at Night. Never can our own words express the bard’s meaning, we can only evoke in very general terms the meaning of Beethoven’s sense of blessedness at the heart of things. Anticipating what Island’s final chapter will have to add to this attitude necessarily entails a certain attitude towards art criticism at its best, i.e. aware of its own limitations42. There are things, Huxley maintains, which, “untasted, may never be understood”. Indeed the way in which the “absent”, i.e. the other art that is the object of the search, can be made present in another art, is a major concern in the study of the comparative arts43. How the “absent” can be made present can only be an essential topic of any serious study of the interrelation44.
- 45 Those Barren Leaves, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1951 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 229 (see AM, (...)
- 46 See for instance Literature and Science.
- 47 A particularly welcome example, emanating as it does from a domain that seems rather remote from th (...)
55The quest of silence that is at the heart of Huxley’s questioning of musical reality at the crossroads of sense and sound (“If I were free, if I had time, if I could think and think and slowly learn to plumb the silences of the spirit…” is Those Barren Leaves’ phrasing of the problem45) does comply both with the importance of silence in music, an aspect of music that Huxley likes to underline, and Mallarmé’s phrase – again so important in Huxley’s late comments on the subject46 – about the “creux néant musicien” with a view to giving “un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”… Music is thus the “most difficult” of the arts because it succeeds in carrying out the double impossible task of being both an “alogon” (no words are needed) and an “analogon” (music serves as the supreme paradigm for man’s behaviour47). It can be no surprise then if its contemplation should perplex the mind.
56In Themes and Variations for example Huxley describes how Maine de Biran is overwhelmed by its sensuous powers (TM 111-15). At the same time, however, the art of sounds is also the art where the physical presence of the world is at its most reduced so that the relation of presentation and representation needs must be a subtle and complicated one, as it necessarily involves the solution to a dual concern about sense and sound.
- 48 Cf. Calvin S. Brown’s relevant part of his review of Aldous Huxley et la musique : à la manière de (...)
57In his letter to Dr Osmond of 23 December 1955 (acting belatedly on Texts and Pretexts’ wish to translate into modern terms what poets have to say about the ultimate reality) Huxley returns to the example of Bach which had played such an important role in Point Counter Point and has recurred at regular intervals in his entire œuvre (to culminate for one last memorable time in Island48):
Who on earth was John Sebastian? Certainly not the old gent in the stuffy Protestant environment, rather an enormous manifestation of the Other but the other canalized through the sense and the intellect and the emotions (CL 730).
58Is there any better conclusion than the magnificent lines which Alain wrote about Goethe and John Sebastian Bach in his 1932 article in La Revue musicale?
Je ne crois pas que même un beau poème soit plus près de nos pensées que ne l’est une des quarante-huit célèbres fugues du Clavecin. Plus près de notre pensée, je veux dire de notre loi toute blanche, telle qu’elle est avant qu’il ne soit écrit un mot. |
I do not think that even a beautiful poem is closer to our thoughts than is any one of the forty-eight celebrated fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Closer to our thought, I mean our law, one and all white, as it is before one word is written. |
Je ne puis oublier cette parole de Goethe, la plus étonnante qui ait été dite sur Bach: « Entretiens de Dieu avec lui-même, juste avant la Création ». Et certes la fiction du paradis terrestre signifie quelques moments de notre existence où, l’irrévocable commencement de quelque chose étant ajourné, nos purs pouvoirs jouent avec eux-mêmes selon la grâce de l’enfant. |
I cannot forget that word of Goethe’s, the most astonishing that ever was said about Bach: ‘Dialogue of God with God, directly before Creation’. And no doubt but the fiction about our earthly paradise designates one or other moment in our existence when, the irrevocable beginning of something having been adjourned, our sheer power plays with itself along the child’s inspiration. |
- 49 Quoted in Paule Du Bouchet, Magnificat : Jean-Sébastien Bach, le Cantor, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, ba (...)
59ALAIN, La Revue musicale, 193249.
- 50 See Alain on Dickens (“Le génie de Dickens se meut donc dans un commencement du monde”): “En lisant (...)
60This atmosphere of a world in beginning50 is precisely Huxley’s final judgment on the music of Bach.
- 51 See also last paragraph of the revised (second) edition of Françoise B. Todorovitch, Aldous Huxley (...)
61Three days before he passed away Aldous said to his wife that it was a pity words could not convey – like a musical chord – the sense of life. “Like Bach?” she had asked. “Bach, c’est autre chose, c’est de la musique51”. But he had gone on to say that it must be polyphony of some sort.
- 52 Quoted in AM, p. 14.
62As Laura Archera Huxley comments, “Aldous would be awed when listening to Bach. It is – he said – like witnessing Perpetual Creation52”.
Note
1 I wish to express my gratitude to Mrs Calvin S. Brown, Sanibel (Florida), for sending me a copy of her husband’s 1934 PhD, The Musical Opus in Poetry.
2 An error should be corrected in the current biographical sketch of the pioneer. It is suggested in the Memorial Volume that Calvin S. Brown had spent a year in Heidelberg before returning to the United States. In reality Calvin spent only a few days there in August 1931, when he met his wife. Calvin S. Brown took his First Class Honours degree in Oxford in June 1932, and received a third-year extension of his two-year Rhodes scholarship with a view to completing his research in European libraries for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin in 1934. So Brown remained in Oxford for the full academic year 1932-1933. See Mrs Calvin S. Brown’s letter to Jean-Louis Cupers, Feb. 22, 2001. Hence the title of this paper: “Calvin S. Brown in Oxford (1930-1933)”.
3 Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature. A Comparison of the Arts, Hanover/London, University Press of New England, 1987, 2nd ed., p. XI (preface to the new edition).
4 “Im Spätherbst 1932, einige Monate nach dem Erscheinen seines heute unangefochten bekanntesten Werkes, Brave New World, veröffentlicht Huxley einen weiteren Band, den er zuvor in einem Brief als ‘a sort of anthology interlarded with comments of my own – a mixture between an Oxford Book… and a book of essays (Letters, 356)’ ankündigt”.
5 I shall be quoting the Eliot essay from Steven P. Scher’s Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes [abbreviation LM], Berlin, Schmidt, 1984 (The parallel volume devoted to the visual arts, Ulrich Weisstein’s Literatur und bildende Kunst: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes, appeared in the same publishing house in 1992). It is interesting to note that Scher’s specialist anthology (indeed an anthology with commentary!), was published exactly a half century after Calvin S. Brown’s PhD. Scher’s “Bible” of musico-poetics appeared exactly a quarter millennium after the publication in xviiith century England of the first disquisition in the field, Hildebrand Jacob’s Of the Sister Arts (London, 1734). In the anthology is found – in a German translation – the pioneer’s final global assessment of the field he had opened up. The original English text can be read in WMS 2 (note 6). See my contribution to the Sorbonne congress on the field of musico-poetics, Littérature et musique dans la France contemporaine, « Tensions et ambiguïtés du domaine mélopoétique » (TA 21). Cf. chapter 3 (« Tensions et ambiguïtés »).
6 Calvin S. Brown, Tones into Words, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1953, p. 2.
7 Ulrich Weisstein, “The Miracle of Interconnectedness. Calvin S. Brown. A Critical Biography”, in Jean-Louis Cupers & Ulrich Weisstein (ed.), Musico-Poetics in Perspective: Calvin S. Brown in Memoriam, Amsterdam/Atlanta, Rodopi, 2000, p. 82 (WMS 2). The unfortunate “misprint” reads, “… and moved to the British Oxford, where he remained until 1932”.
8 TA 21.
9 ACLA Newsletter (American Comparative Literature Association), XXI (1989), 1, p. 16.
10 Errata sheet from Yale University Press to be inserted in a volume published in 1955 (Stream of Consciousness. A Study in Literary Method by Melvin Friedman).
11 Cf. AM 325. See chapter 2 (« De la sélection des objets musico-littéraires ») and 12 (« Analyses musicales chez Aldous Huxley et l’idéal de la critique d’art »). Unfortunately Allis’ study does not edit Huxley’s contributions to the Westminster Gazette (in its own terms it “corrects obvious misprints” [ “A Note on the Text”]) neither does it mention previous writings in the field to which it bears resemblances which cannot be coincidental. The very suggestion of Allis’ book – that Huxley’s concern with music should be viewed from the starting point of the music criticism – is contained explicitly in the chapter on the music criticism of AM (part II, chapter 4, Les 64 colonnes de la Weekly Westminster Gazette, p. 315-325). In reality the relation is more subtle as the third column of the Weekly Westminster Gazette for instance goes back to the Farmyard Imitations of Crome Yellow, a passage from the first novel! Cf. chapter 2 (“De la sélection”), notes 5-7. See also Michael ALLIS, “Searching for the Musical Messiah: Contemporary Music and Value in Aldous Huxley’s Music Criticisms”, AHA, vol. 14, 2014, p. 137-162.
12 SP X.
13 Quoted from Georges Guibillon, La Littérature anglaise par les textes, Paris, Hatier, 1960, rev. 26th ed., p. 653.
14 See “Aldous Huxley as Anthologist” in the first issue of the Aldous Huxley Annual, 1, 2001, p. 145-155.
15 See AHA, vol. 10/11, 2011/2012, “Huxley’s Opus Magnum: An Anthology of Essays and Criticism” (1946). We find relevant items like Sullivan, Goethe, Bosanquet, etc. (p. 133-135, etc.).
16 Abingdon/New York, 2013.
17 “Aldous Huxley as Anthologist”, p. 145.
18 Calvin S. BROWN, Review of AM in Comparative Literature, XXXIX, 1987, 2, p. 170-171.
19 The reader will find an article on the relevance of the “like music” as a metaphor for life (with reference to conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim) in an article by Elzbieta Gorska, “Life is music. A Case Study of a Novel Metaphor and its Use in Discourse”, English Text Construction ([formerly] Belgian Essays on Language and Literature), III, 2010, 2, p. 275-293.
20 AM p. 241-265 (“Anti-musique ou arabesque vitale?”).
21 VT, p. 104-105. See also ch. 12 in this volume.
22 Just to quote that one example, 1928 also saw the publication of Musique et poésie by Romain Rolland’s friend André Suarès’.
23 RM, p. 181 (A.H. Fox Strangways).
24 I, 1920, 1, p. 4.
25 Incidentally it must be noted that The Musical Quarterly is also the journal which some twenty years later will be entrusted with Brown’s first major publication in the new field, “The Musical Structure of De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue”.
26 Frederick W. Sternfeld, “The Musical Springs of Goethe’s Poetry”, The Musical Quarterly, XXXV, 1949, 4, p. 511-527.
27 André Suarès, Musique et poésie, Paris, Ed. Claude Aveline, 1928.
28 James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence. A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981.
29 See first epigraph.
30 A particularly interesting example is Sidney Lanier’s Music and Poetry (1909), who in a sense can be said to identify the two as he advocates “abandon[ing] […] the idea that music is a species of language – which is not true – and substitut[ing] for that the converse idea that language is a species of music” (MPE 3).
31 Catherine D’Oultremont, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Waterloo, Ed. Avant-Propos, 2012.
32 Kirsty Gunn, The Big Music, London, Faber and Faber, 2012.
33 See Murielle Lucie Clément, Andreï Makine, New York/Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2012.
34 Roger Bichelberger, Noëls pour un enfant perdu, Paris, Albin Michel, 2006.
35 See Benedict XVI, L’Esprit de la musique, Perpignan, Arpège, 2011, p. 6.
36 FG, p. 31-32.
37 Calvin S. Brown, op. cit., p. 172.
38 Quoted in CP 307 (CL 637). See AM, p. 35-36.
39 Alain, Système des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Gallimard, 1920, 2nd ed. 1926, p. 127. See TA, p. 19.
40 André Michel, Psychanalyse de la musique, Paris, PUF, 1951, p. 180.
41 Ibid., p. 180.
42 See chapter 12 (“Analyses musicales chez Aldous Huxley”) in this volume.
43 Cf. for instance the recent University of Amsterdam PhD on the subject, Présence de l’absence, and the subsequent volume on Ukrainian novelist Andreï Makine both by Murielle Lucie Clément, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2009 (see especially the entry sub voce “ekphrasis et musique verbale”).
44 See my contribution to the ICLA congress devoted to the Comparative Arts, “De la Sélection des objets musico-littéraires: Aldous Huxley critique musical”, in Steven P. Scher & Ulrich Weisstein (ed.), Literature and the Other Arts, Innsbruck, Verlag der Universität, 1981, p. 273- 280 (Ch. 2 in this volume).
45 Those Barren Leaves, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1951 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1925), p. 229 (see AM, p. 68-75).
46 See for instance Literature and Science.
47 A particularly welcome example, emanating as it does from a domain that seems rather remote from the one at stake (economics) is an article in the recent Newsletter of the Belgian Academy. It suggests that music can serve to enlarge the linking together of (at first sight) diverging fields. See Sébastien Van Bellegem, « Économie et musique », La Lettre des Académies, XXXII, 2013, 4, p. 9 (« La seconde est plus aventureuse. Il s’agit de comprendre en quoi l’art musical ouvre de nouveaux horizons à la science économique et inversement »).
48 Cf. Calvin S. Brown’s relevant part of his review of Aldous Huxley et la musique : à la manière de Jean-Sébastien (RAM 172): “Huxley’s remarks on music in the latter part of his career tend […] to shade gradually into mysticism. […] [I]t is perhaps significant that many critics (notably J.W.N. Sullivan) have found that Beethoven’s late sonatas and quartets follow the same course. In fact, Cupers’s subtitle refers to this aspect of music, for it is taken from a passage in Eyeless in Gaza expressing a hope “that humanity might some day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like” (See also VT, p. 88-89).
49 Quoted in Paule Du Bouchet, Magnificat : Jean-Sébastien Bach, le Cantor, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, back of the cover.
50 See Alain on Dickens (“Le génie de Dickens se meut donc dans un commencement du monde”): “En lisant Dickens” in Les Arts et les dieux, Paris, Gallimard, 1958, p. 847 (Alain’s En lisant Dickens first appeared in Paris at the Nouvelle Revue française in 1945).
51 See also last paragraph of the revised (second) edition of Françoise B. Todorovitch, Aldous Huxley 1894-1963, Paris, Salvator, 2013, p. 495.
52 Quoted in AM, p. 14.
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