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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!' "