Did Aldous Huxley ever visit Lake Chapala?

Did the great English author Aldous Huxley ever visit Lake Chapala? Let’s take a look at the evidence.

A single sentence of Ruta de la Ribera de Chapala, suggests that he did. The book is one in a series of guides to tourist routes in the state of Jalisco, published more than a decade ago by the State government. The single sentence (page 79) is, in translation:

Foreigners as diverse as the famous Werner von Braun—founder of NASA—or the renowned English writer Aldous Huxley, spent time in the region, attracted by the climate, which is said to be one of the best in the world.”

[Original: “Extranjeros tan dispares como el célebre Werner von Braun —fundador de la NASA— o el reconocido escritor inglés Aldous Huxley, pasaban temporadas en la región, llamados por el clima, que se dice es uno de los mejores del mundo.”]

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963), writer and philosopher, author of dozens of books, certainly spent some time in Mexico, as evidenced by Beyond the Mexique Bay, his book of travel essays published in 1934. That book was based, according to his biographer Sybille Bedford on five months in the Caribbean, British Honduras (now Belize) and Southern Mexico in 1933.

The final essay in Beyond the Mexique Bay is about D. H. Lawrence (a friend and mentor of Huxley) and The Plumed Serpent, the novel Lawrence drafted at Lake Chapala in 1923. Perhaps it is this final chapter that has led casual readers to suppose that Huxley was also in Chapala?

Unfortunately for anyone claiming Huxley ever visited Chapala, his life and movements are well documented and he never came anywhere near the Lake Chapala region.

The sentence quoted above does get two things correct: Werner von Braum did live for a short time (in the mid-1970s) in Chula Vista, the residential subdivision between Chapala and Ajijic, and the area does indeed have one of the best climates in the world! On the other side of the ledger, alongside the (false) claim that Huxley ever lived in Ajijijc, von Braum was not a founder of NASA, even though he did direct its Marshall Space Flight Center and was the architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle which sent Apollo spacecraft into orbit and to the moon.

Huxley’s only link to Lake Chapala is vicariously, via the travels and writing of biographer Sybille Bedford. Bedford, born in Germany in 1911, grew up in southern France, in Sanary-sur-mer, a town visited by D.H. Lawrence, which in the 1930s attracted intellectuals fleeing from central Europe, including Aldous and Maria Huxley, who became Sybille’s mentors and inspiration. Bedford’s travels in Mexico in 1946-47, which included an extended stay at Lake Chapala, were the basis for her fictionalized travel book, The Sudden View, first published in 1953 and re-issued later as A Visit to Don Otavio.

Sources

• Arabella González Huezo (ed). 2006. Ruta de la Ribera de Chapala. (Rutas Culturales Jalisco #4). Gobierno de Jalisco: Secretaría de Cultura.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Tony Burton

Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).

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