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.