Time Must Have a Stop

READERS of Aldous Huxley’s last two novels will not be greatly surprised by this one; to borrow a phrase from Somerset Maugham, it is “the mixture as before.” There is the familiar Huxley hero, who, in the words of Ovid, sees and understands the better, but follows the worse; there are the epicurean sensualist and the disillusioned siren, the background of a superficially cultured but futile society , the hatred and irony expended on lust and old age; and - most important of all for Mr. Huxley - there is the sage, the man with a vision of universal truth, to whose precepts the previously weak hero is converted at the end.

The hero this time is younger than usual, a shy and cherub-like poet named Sebastian Barnack, who, when the story opens in 1938. is only seventeen The victim of a rigorously high-principled father and of his own fantasy life, he is taken under the wing of his Uncle Eustace and transported to an exquisitely furnished villa in Florence. But on the night of his arrival his uncle dies of angina pectoris in a W.C. Shortly afterwards Sebastian is seduced by the unscrupulous and fascinating Mrs. Thwale, is caught in a tissue of lies and falseness, and is directly responsible for sending his relative Bruno (the sage) to a Fascist prison.

We next, see him on New Year’s Day, 1944, turning over the leaves of his notebook, a record of the leaves he has turned over in his life. He is now a successful playwright, but he has lost an arm in the war, his wife — of whom we hear for the first time — has died in bitterness and despair, and he has been through agonies of sell loathing for the damage he has done to Bruno.

No more than in Eyeless in Gaza and in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan has Mr. Huxley in this book discovered how to fuse the form of the novel with the material of the didactic essay. The narrative, to be sure, is never dull: some of the characters, especially Uncle Eustace, are very well done, and the sequence of events concerning Sebastian is cleverly manipulated; but for the most part the people move on strings, against a backdrop we can hardly believe in.

The major weakness of the book, as a novel, is that Mr. Huxley has neglected to write the essential part of it. If we are to be convinced that the maimed and reformed Sebastian of 1944 is the same person as the self-centered adolescent of 1928, and that the change from the one to the other is inevitable, we need a great deal more than the brief flash-backs over those sixteen years which are all that Mr. Huxley gives us. Mr. Huxley has never seriously attempted the novelist’s most difficult task, the presentation of a slow development in a chief character; his people have nearly always been fixed types, almost “humors” in the Jonsonian sense. Here we feel that his solution of his problem is perfunctory — as perfunctory as his use, three times in the course of the story, of the rubber arm of coincidence stretched to the limit.

The exposition of Mr. Huxley’s religious philosophy, presented in Sebastian’s notebooks but insufficiently related to his character, thus comes as a postscript to the novel, not as part of the novel itself. But earlier in the story Mr. Huxley does try to relate his philosophy to character, and what he does is the most original and ambitious thing in the book. When the self-indulgent Uncle Eustace dies in the W.C. we have a description of his state of mind after death. But even this part of the book lacks intensity, and the apparent hell of Uncle Eustace - which is not very hellish after all, since he does not seem to be unhappy in it — is in the long run no more convincing than the conversion of Sebastian to his vision of heaven.

It would appear from this book that the world he now sees about him is unavailable to Mr. Huxley as a novelist; the placing of his main action in 1928 is as significant as his refusal to deal with events of more recent date. Indeed his philosophic emphasis on eternity, which allows him to look at the human level of “time and craving only as something to flee from, makes an impossible basis for novel-writing; and as long as he insists upon it as his conviction tells him he must — his novels, like this one, can only describe a set of futile mechanisms writhing on sand. Harper, $2.75.

THEODORE SPENCER