Laura Huxley, Her Husband’s Biographer, Dies at 96
Laura Archera Huxley, a writer who was best known for her memoir of her years with her husband, the novelist Aldous Huxley, died on Thursday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.
Laura Archera Huxley
The cause was cancer, said Karen Pfeiffer, who was reared by Mrs. Huxley.
Mrs. Huxley’s memoir, “This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was published in 1968, five years after her husband’s death. The book recounted her seven-year marriage to Huxley, best known for the dystopian novel “Brave New World,” which was published in 1932.
Reviewing “This Timeless Moment” in The New York Times Book Review, Nona Balakian wrote: “Despite its soap-opera title and occasional discursiveness, Mrs. Huxley’s memoir makes absorbing reading. It captures, if not the totality of Huxley’s genius, certain integral and warmly human aspects of it.”
Over the years, Mrs. Huxley was also a concert violinist; a freelance filmmaker; a lay psychotherapist; a self-help author; the head of a children’s foundation; a lecturer on the human potential movement; and, in her words, a restrained investigator of LSD.
Laura Archera was born in Turin, Italy, on Nov. 2, 1911. A musical prodigy, she made her United States debut in 1937, performing Mozart’s A major violin concerto in Carnegie Hall with the New York Women’s Symphony Orchestra. Miss Archera later studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. At the outbreak of World War II in Europe, she chose to remain in the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles.
After a close friend, Virginia Pfeiffer, became seriously ill, Miss Archera gave up her musical career to study psychology and alternative medicine. She later donated her Guarnerius violin to Yehudi Menuhin, Karen Pfeiffer said.
Miss Archera befriended Mr. Huxley and his wife, Maria, in the late 1940s, while working as a freelance associate producer of documentary films. In 1956, the year after Maria Huxley’s death, Miss Archera and Mr. Huxley were married at a drive-in wedding chapel in Yuma, Ariz.
In 1963, as Mr. Huxley was dying of cancer, Mrs. Huxley ministered to him by injecting him with LSD and by reading aloud to him from the manuscript of “The Psychedelic Experience,” by Timothy Leary and others.
In the mid-1970s, after her friend Virginia Pfeiffer’s death, Mrs. Huxley, then in her 60s, took in and raised her young granddaughter, Karen. Besides Karen Pfeiffer, of Los Angeles, Mrs. Huxley is survived by Karen’s daughter, Kaya.
In the late ’70s, Mrs. Huxley started Children: Our Ultimate Investment, a foundation concerned with the well-being of young people. Her other books include several self-help volumes, the best known of which is “You Are Not the Target” (Farrar, Straus, 1963), which has a foreword by her husband.
The book offers a set of what Mrs. Huxley called recipes for getting through life’s many difficulties. These include punching a tetherball, imagining one’s own funeral and dancing in the nude.
tether Show phonetics
noun [C]
a rope or chain used to tie especially an animal to a post or other fixed place, usually so that it can move freely within a small area
tether Show phonetics
verb [T]
tethered Show phonetics
adjective
teth・er
at the end of one's tether 万策尽きて, 窮して. beyond one's tether 力の及ばない所に, 権限外に.三省堂提供「EXCEED 英和辞典」より凡例はこちら
Tetherball is a game for two opposing players. The equipment consists of a 10 ft (3 m), stationary metal pole, from which is hung a ball from a rope, or tether. The two players stand on opposite sides of the pole. Each player tries to hit the ball one way; one
There is a version of this game called Swingball, where the two opposing players hold bats, and hit a tennis ball that is connected onto the rope. This is substantially different from Tetherball.
There is an alternate version called "pole", where many people can play. The object of the game is to not hit the pole with the ball. Hovever, you may hit the pole on a serve. You may swing the ball any way you like, but if you hit the pole with the ball, you are out. The last person standing wins.
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