It was over with drugs: What Thomas Mann connected with Aldous Huxley

AWhen Thomas Mann moved to Pacific Palisades in April 1941, he was barely a hundred meters from Aldous Huxley. The German exile rented a house with his family at 740 Amalfi Drive, and the British writer colleague had lived with his wife diagonally across the street at number 701 since April 1939. However, the closeness between the two authors was of more than purely geographical nature: Shortly before Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, Huxley’s novel Counterpoint of Life had been published, a major work not only of his work but of the entire genre of the psychological novel, to which Thomas Mann also felt a part. In chapter 22 there is a passage that must have excited the German, a quote from the fictional notes of writer Philip Quarle, Huxley’s literary alter ego in Counterpoint of Life: ‘The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, subordinating sense to sound. . . But on a large scale, in the construction. Think of Beethoven. The change of mood, the abrupt transitions.” This already contained some of the program of combining musicality and literature that Thomas Mann was to give the form of a novel from 1943 with the writing of “Doctor Faustus”. And many interpreters had seen the English answer to the “Magic Mountain” in “Contrapoint of Life”.

Huxley was Mann’s guest

No wonder Mann was interested in Huxley. He first met him in 1933 in Sanary-sur-Mer, France, where Huxley had lived since 1929 and had written Brave New World. Mann had moved there after Hitler came to power, and Huxley was his guest when the master of the house read from the second part of his Joseph novel, which was then in progress. The two remain in touch even after Huxley moved to Los Angeles in 1937. Coincidentally, Thomas Mann also went on one of his American lecture tours on the steamship “Normandie”, which took him and his family to the United States. In 1938 Mann followed Huxley into American exile and in 1941 even into the neighborhood.

From then on, both families maintained close ties. In Thomas Mann’s diaries there are regular entries about visits to the Huxleys for dinner and especially for tea (the host’s British origins were an obligation!) as well as return invitations from the Manns. They met again and again while walking the streets of the nearby hill where the Manns’ future house was being built high up on San Remo Drive, or on the beach in Santa Monica. Huxley had just published Gray Eminence: a study of a seventeenth-century Capuchin friar who had acted as a close adviser to Cardinal Richelieu under the name Père Joseph – a fascinating parallel for Thomas Mann to his own literary work, the Tetralogy of Joseph. On New Year’s Day 1942, the Manns brought flowers to their neighbors, but a few weeks later, in February, both families left Amalfi Drive in quick succession: the Huxleys to a desert house in Llano del Rio, about seventy miles away, the Manns to their new home in the San Remo Drive. They relied on the Huxleys’ recommendations for hiring domestic help, taking on their old staff.

This ended the physical proximity of two of the most famous writers of the twentieth century, but not Mann’s curiosity about Huxley’s books. After “Brave New World” was published in German in 1950 for the first time since 1932, Mann followed with interest its reception in the former home country, which had been freed from totalitarianism, as well as the harsh criticism of Huxley’s book by Theodor W. Adorno, which had been given to him months earlier by the author had been leaked as a manuscript.

Thomas Mann’s sympathy for Adorno’s point of view, which is documented in the diaries, now revealed a substantive distancing movement on the part of Huxley: in July 1950 he still felt that he belonged to him literary and counted Huxley alongside Joyce and Proust among his “bourgeois” and “formalist” relatives. The last personal word about Huxley, however, was harsh. It was in 1954, a year before Thomas Mann’s death and already after his return to Switzerland from America. Upon reading The Doors of Perception, Huxley’s accounts of his dealings with psychedelic drugs, Mann noted in his journal: “Preoccupation with Huxley’s mescaline glorification. Don’t like her and don’t like him.” He would not accept any intoxicant other than tea for the bourgeoisie.