Books: Huxleyan Heaven and Earth

When 17-year-old Sebastian Barnack, adolescent poet-hero of Aldous Huxley’s new novel, arrived in Florence, Italy, he found life in the British colony revolving in oldtime Huxleyan fashion:

¶ Old Lord Worplesden, the amateur astronomer, had invited some girls up to his cosy observatory.

¶ Old Mrs. Gamble, the blind, tyrannical spiritualist, was listening to her hired companion, husky-voiced, Madonna-faced Veronica Thwale, absently read aloud from the works of Sir Oliver Lodge. Mrs. Thwale’s mind was mainly absorbed in mulling over her favorite dream—in which her father, a Church of England canon, was crucified by a troop of Boy Scouts.

¶ Sebastian’s Uncle Eustace, a wealthy art collector with a failing heart, was on the phone listening to Laurina, his ex-mistress, read aloud from his old love letters. “You have the power,” she read, “of arousing desires that are infinite and . . . can never be assuaged by … a merely finite body.” “Golly!” said Eustace, absently stroking his current Mistress Mimi, “did I say that?”

¶ Bruno, the saintly Anglo-Italian mystic, was making a final effort to tear the dying Eustace from a “sepulcher . . . built of . . . sloths and sensualities.”

Rascals and Homilies. Out of these characters, plus odds & ends of art comment and lengthy interpolations on issues of politics and society, Aldous Huxley has fashioned one of the most peculiar novels of his career. Two-thirds of Time Must Have a Stop concerns the period—and is written in the sparkling, scathing style—of his famed satirical Point Counter-Point and Antic Hay. The other third presents Author Huxley’s latest religious beliefs.

The mixture of deplorable characters and homiletic essays is deliberately artificial, packed with wit, rarely dull. Its basic theme is the Huxleyan conviction that world reform must begin in the individual soul, and that men may enter “the Divine Ground” of eternity only by a regime of selflessness and contemplation. Nor should man imagine that death will save him the trouble of choosing between flesh and spirit. Author Huxley’s alarming notion is that the same choice will confront all men in the hereafter.

Youthful Sebastian was far from such thoughts when he reached Florence. He had never dreamed of meeting such wicked, thrilling people. His father was a gruff leftish idealist who thought it would be immoral to buy his son evening clothes. But gorgeous Mrs. Thwale gave Sebastian a look that made his head swim, and Uncle Eustace not only promised to give him a valuable Degas drawing but evening clothes as well.

Uncle Eustace also had a few cheering words on the subject of Good People. “Progress . . . backwards and downwards,” he called their vagaries. Then he rushed off to get some bicarbonate for the pain in his heart. Next morning the servants found Uncle Eustace dead on the bathroom floor.

The butler wept. Sebastian sighed: “Now I won’t get my evening clothes.” “Was it Marcus Aurelius or Julius Caesar . . . who passed on in the W.C.?” inquired Mrs. Gamble. She arranged a seance at once.

Uncle Eustace in the Void. They all sat in a dark circle, holding hands. “Tell [Eustace] we’re waiting,” snapped Mrs. Gamble.Gamble “Only just come over,” squeaked the medium. “Seems he doesn’t rightly know he’s passed on.” In the darkness, Mrs. Thwale crooked her forefinger and traced the letters L O V E on Sebastian’s palm. Then she traced a few other, unprintable, four-letter words. “Is it true?” she asked Eustace, “that where you are, there isn’t any marrying?” “Backwards and downwards, Christian soldiers,” retorted Eustace sarcastically.

Truth was, Eustace was having a difficult time on the other side. Floating about in the Huxleyan semivoid of the next world (“an all-pervading silence that shone and was alive. Beautiful with more than the beauty of even Mozart’s music. . . .”), he was embarrassed to find his digestive processes continuing with a “purring” noise. If he tried hard, he managed to recapture physical sensations and sensual memories of Mimi. But to his horror he found himself faced by the same spiritual problems as had dogged him on earth. A “divine white light” kept trying to make a decent human being out of him, but Eustace preferred to float vacuously throughout eternity rather than give in to it.

Nephew Sebastian, meanwhile, was tossing miserably on his bed one night when the latch clicked and he was enveloped in an aroma of “spring freshness and musky animality.” It was Mrs. Thwale. ” ‘Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love,'” she quoted later, huskily. Then she married Paul De Vries, the breakfast-food heir.

Sebastian returned to England sadder and wiser. Unlike the unhappy, ever-floating Eustace, he intended to follow the “divine white light” before it was too late. When World War II got under way, Sebastian naturally decided that one of the “indispensable conditions of peace” was the establishment of a single religion that could be shared by East and West alike. “It is only by deliberately paying . . . our primary allegiance to eternity that we can prevent time from turning our lives into a pointless or diabolic foolery.”

The Author. Since settling (1938) in California, where climate and treatment have helped his ailing eyesight, Aldous Huxley has collaborated on two cinema scripts (Pride and Prejudice; Jane Eyre), written five books. Now 51, he lives with his wife Martha on a lonely ranch near Llano in the Mojave Desert, 80 miles from Los Angeles. “The only social life,”he says, “is with the cows.” The Huxleys’ son Matthew, 22, is a reader for Warner Bros.

Author Huxley has no current commitments in Hollywood, no plans for returning to England. He is at present completing The Perennial Philosophy—”a kind of anthology with comments—an anthology of the highest common factors in world religion and metaphysical systems.” For his own craft as novelist and poet, Aldous Huxley now has small respect. Says Sebastian in Time Must Have a Stop: “Even the best play or narrative is merely glorified gossip. . . . And lyric poetry? Just ‘Ow!’ or ‘Oo-ooh!’or ‘Nyum-nyum!’ or ‘Damn!’ or ‘Darling!’ or ‘I’m a pig!’ “