Aldous Huxley's Hands by Allene Symons

Author:Allene Symons
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633881174
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2015-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

After the second interview with John Smythies I was relieved to have new leads in pursuit of half-century-old history. An hour later, back at my desk, I saw that John had e-mailed me a black-and-white photograph showing a dozen or so men and women seated in small groups on an airy veranda. Some were leaning back and apparently engaged in light conversation, others leaning forward with signs of intense concentration.

When I look at that photograph these days I imagine cicadas providing the soundtrack of a particular time and place: the two-part 1954 Symposium on Philosophy and Parapsychology that took place in the south of France at a private hotel called Le Piol. Aldous Huxley's first visit came in late April and early May of that year, two months after publication of The Doors of Perception.

Le Piol was the property of the internationally known trance medium Eileen Garrett and served both as her second home and as the setting of the Parapsychology Foundation's annual conference. Every year an elite group of philosophers, psychologists, and physicians converged on St. Paul-de-Vence, a Provençal village high on a rocky outcrop encircled by medieval ramparts. Overlooking the Mediterranean and the Cap d'Antibes, St. Paul is known for its unusual light.

Le Piol was the Huxleys’ destination that spring, but first came Manhattan. The Huxleys had booked their trans-Atlantic passage on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, where the port of debarkation meant a chance for Huxley and Humphry Osmond to see each other in New York. Their frequent letters to each other were brimming with ideas, but replies involved postal delivery delays—though it was not as if their ideas grew cold. In what would be their second face-to-face meeting, they could explore mutual interests—ESP and hypnosis, the state induced by mescalin, and the thin line between mysticism and madness.

It was easier for Osmond to find excuses to travel from Saskatchewan, Canada, to New York than to Los Angeles, and it happened that the annual psychiatric conference would take place in nearby New Jersey. Osmond added on days by lining up appointments for the purchase of much-needed cleaning equipment to improve what he had inherited as the director of Weyburn Hospital, where the most severely disturbed patients lived in a constant state of barely contained filth. Apart from those business meetings he would have free time to spend in the city with Aldous. It would provide a chance for Jane Osmond to meet Maria Huxley and the famous author who had become such an important part of her husband's life.

Aldous had reserved rooms for both couples at the Warwick, Huxley's favorite New York hotel. Located at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, it offered a convenient location and the afterglow of a scandalous past.

William Randolph Hearst had commissioned the Warwick in 1926 for his ladylove Marion Davies. Meanwhile, Hearst's estranged wife, Millicent, resided in resentful opulence elsewhere, at one or another of the Hearst's far-flung estates. The Warwick Hotel's architect Emery Roth had created a Beaux Art–style

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