Making the finest choice

Table of Contents

On the whole, a good part of the material I had found was already partially cited in the books I knew of. If there were omissions and errors, the reading of the letters helped me to sort out the true from the false and allowed me to forge my own personal opinion. Yet there was no need to repeat what others had said. The logical choice was to expose what Fosca had revealed, in parallel to the letters sent by Maria to her own family, and to Fosca’s own mother.

If Mrs Sybille Bedford had been called by a journalist ‘The Sphinx of Sanary35, Mrs Fosca Gori for her part was more than willing to share her memories of the sweet days of her youth, as according to her it was ‘le meilleur des mondes’, the best of worlds in the French sense of the expression. For me it was became obvious that along with the material I had assembled, I should put Fosca’s precious testimony in the centre of a monograph detailing at best the life and work of Aldous Huxley in relation to the world and the domestic events which often reveal the little known details of the life of a famous public man, to make him more human.

All his life Huxley had been criticized by those who knew how brilliant he was and always expected a lot from him. But Huxley was all too human with his physical limitations and psychological flaws, as much as anyone else considering the illness and sorrow endured when he was young. Some of those critics had been hard on him, the British particularly, never totally forgave him for not staying in England for the duration of the war, but well, he never really lived long in England anyway, simply because warmth and light suited him better.

Maria and Aldous Huxley through the course of their lives spent a great deal of time, energy and money helping relatives, friends and people who had served them. Fosca Gori’s story is worth the telling so that the Huxley’s readers, the old like the new will know for sure that the Huxleys applied on an everyday basis what Aldous had declared towards the end of his life as the sum of his thinking; ‘just be a little kinder’.
Below are condensed excerpts of Fosca’s recollections as recorded on tape by Fosca’s daughter and later on by myself.