Jacob's Hands A Fable by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood eVersion v3.0 / Notes at EOF Book Flap: Jacob Ericson is a shy, enigmatic, and somewhat inept ranch hand who works for crotchety Professor Carter and his crippled daughter, Sharon, on a ranch in California's Mojave Desert in the 1920s. One day he learns that his hands possess the mysterious gift of healing, a gift he uses to cure animals (whom he adores). Sharon (whom he also adores) then persuades him to heal her. When he successfully cures Sharon, his gift is quickly exploited and the boundaries of his charm and naïveté begin to stretch. First he offers his healing powers for free at a church in Los Angeles -- where Jacob has gone after Sharon, who fled her father and the ranch to pursue her dreams of stardom. Jacob and Sharon cross paths when they work for the same pair of exploitative showmen. Jacob stays with the seedy stage show only because Sharon is close by. It is when Jacob's gift is recruited to heal Earl Medwin, an eccentric, ailing young millionaire, that the love and security for which he has worked so hard begin to collapse. This previously unpublished tale by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and Christopher Isherwood (Good-bye to Berlin), two of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century, uses tight, vivid, and seamlessly crafted prose to show the dangers that a magical gift will undoubtedly bring to even the sincerest of characters. In the late 1930s, with war on the horizon, a large sector of the intellectual community of Europe immigrated to the United States, to California in particular. What they found there was Nirvana -- sunshine, freedom, mysticism, and the burgeoning movie industry. American writers such as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were trying their hands at the cinema, and the Europeans followed suit. Jacob's Hands is the result of a collaborative effort of two distinct geniuses in their fields, novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley and playwright/novelist Christopher Isherwood, whose stories of Berlin inspired Cabaret. Originally written for the screen, this fable has never been published before; it lay in a trunk at the Huxley estate for five decades before being discovered by actress Sharon Stone in 1997. JACOB'S HANDS. Copyright © 1998 by Laura and Matthew Huxley, Executors of the Estate of Aldous Huxley, and by Don Bachardy, Executor of the Estate of Christopher Isherwood. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Introduction copyright © 1998 by Laura Archera Huxley ENDPAPERS: The portrait drawings of Aldous Huxley (ink on paper, 1962) and Christopher Isherwood (ink on paper, 1979) are by Don Bachardy and are reprinted by permission. Design by Abby Kagan Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huxley, Aldous, 1894-1963 Jacob's hands : an original screen story / by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. p. cm. ISBN 0-312-19467-6 I. Isherwood, Christopher, 1904- . II. Title. PR6015.U9J33 1998 98-21575 823'.912-dc21 CIP First Edition: September 1998 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Heal or Not to Heal By Laura Archera Huxley Healing was a subject of enduring common interest for Aldous and me. We discussed a wide range of healing methods: old and new, accepted and not accepted, and even the unacceptable. Aldous told me that his great friend, the modern mystic Krishnamurti, had the power of healing -- but stopped using his gift when people who were physically healed often made no changes in their emotional and spiritual lives. Years later, in an unexpected and certainly one of the most extraordinary dialogues I ever had, Krishnamurti expressed his startling view about healing. I asked him how he dealt with the problem of alcoholism. He said nonchalantly that it had happened quite often that people, after one or two interviews with him, stopped drinking. When I asked how this came about, he said he did not know. He quickly dismissed the subject and was silent. His silence lengthened and deepened. Silently, he was holding my eyes with his dark, burning look. I don't know how long the silence lasted, but I shall never forget its intensity. Then, with overwhelming passion, he exploded: "Those people who go about helping other people -- they are a curse. . . I am not a healer or a psychologist or a therapist or any of those things. . . I am only a religious man." Although based on a profoundly different principle, Jacob the Healer also is a religious man. To heal or not to heal is the question tormenting him. To give physical health to anyone in need, to provide indiscriminately the boundless energy of which he is the privileged transmitter. . . should he first heal the body or care for the soul? For Jacob, this is a true dilemma, for not only is he a devotee of the Pentecostal Church, but also he had the experience of healing two persons whose souls had not benefited from the healing of their bodies. Thus he ponders: should a healer choose the healing of the soul -- or of the body? And, anyway, are they separate? Did Jesus select the recipients of his healing according to the state of their souls? Jesus, who proclaimed, "Judge not lest ye be judged." These and other dilemmas float through my mind as I think about Jacob's Hands. This cautionary tale was resuscitated by the intellectual curiosity of Ms. Sharon Stone, who read in Christopher Isherwood's diaries of his collaboration with Aldous on a screenplay and searched for it. In a seldom-explored large box full of precious souvenirs, I found the yellowed manuscript of Jacob's Hands that Christopher had sent us after the 1961 fire which totally destroyed our house and everything in it -- only the wood for the fireplace was saved. In Jacob's Hands the authors stimulate questions, present dilemmas, evoke enigmas which I face but am not ready to answer, solve, or unravel. Furthermore, might it be possible that, by now, Aldous and Christopher have found answers and solutions elusive to them when they were alive? I also wonder if they anticipated the vast changes from the "laying on of the hands" of the 1940s to the various methods included in today's integral medicine. Back then, healing by touch was generally limited to religious settings, and was performed by what were perceived as fundamental extremists. Now there are two hundred American hospitals where therapeutic touch has been embraced in their routine. Therapeutic touch has emerged as a sophisticated and specific technique with trained practitioners governed by professional associations. More important, the general area of healing has exploded from the field of the miraculous to the integration of practices from a rich, varied cultural and religious background involving different states of consciousness. It now includes meditation, music, movement, rituals, structured disciplines, and inexplicable spontaneous events. The dilemma of whether to heal or not to heal is no longer a question. The question now is: to which school, seminar, or workshop I should send my check? Which approach is best suited to me? Just glancing at my mail, I see the number of choices is impressive: Healing Journeys, School of Healing, Journey into Healing, Healing Process, The Business of Healing, Stories That Heal, Pleasure Healing, Spontaneous Healing, Psychedelic Healing, Distant Healing, Healing Sounds, Boundless Healing. . . and more. The rich variety of healing methodologies is natural, for the world of healing encompasses everything from surgery to a walk in the country, from a pill to a poem, from scientific discovery to an orgasm, from a well-cooked risotto to a mystical experience, from orthodoxy to freedom from orthodoxy, from a prayer to a gift of money -- the world of healing is wondrous and limitless, immanent and transcendent -- it is the fusion of Life Energy and Loving Intention. To many people, the healing experience reveals the unity of body and soul. For centuries, throughout thousands of volumes, the relationship between body and soul has been debated. In just four lines of poetic insight, William Blake, the visionary mysic, states precisely and luminously the oneness of the body/soul in this age. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discover'd by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. Prologue A car is traveling along one of the roads which cross the Mojave Desert, skirting the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Presently, it leaves the highway and turns uphill, along a rough dirt road. The slope is dotted with Joshua trees, striking still, fantastic attitudes. Higher up, there are thickets of juniper. The road gets worse and worse, deeply furrowed by mountain rains. It winds through a narrowing defile and climbs a flat shelf of land above the canyon. The flat land is cultivated. There are fruit trees, leafless at this season. The car stops in front of a gate. The driver, a man in his late thirties, leans out of the window and shouts: "Is this Mr. Ericson's place?" From the other side of the gate, a middle-aged man looks up from the beehive over which he has been bending. He wears the veil and gloves of a beekeeper, so that we cannot see his face. He walks to the gate and opens it in a leisurely manner. "Jacob'll be feeding the chickens, I guess." His pleasant, good-humored drawl reveals that he is a Negro. Bees are crawling all over him. Some of them fly off his arms, and one flies into the car. Next to the driver sits a woman, well-dressed and still attractive. Her makeup does not conceal the fact that she is no longer young. She flaps irritably at the bee. "Get it out! Do something, can't you!" she cries to her companion. Her voice betrays nervous tension, verging on hysteria. After a moment, the bee flies out of the window of its own accord. "Don't be such a fool, Mary!" the man exclaims angrily. His nerves are evidently as bad as her own. Crossly, he closes the window and drives on up the road. We see a rickety old house, unpainted and almost a ruin, standing on the rising ground above the trees. "You might at least not talk to me that way in front of strangers," says the woman, resentfully. "Haven't you any consideration? And you made him come to the gate when he was all covered with bees." "Oh, cut it out, for Pete's sake!" We sense the chronic bad feeling between these two people. The car stops in front of the house. They get out. From the seat, beside her, the woman picks up a round basket in which, covered by a blanket, lies a brown toy Pomeranian, obviously very sick. The woman pulls back the blanket and looks at the little animal. Her strained, angry expression changes to one of tenderness. "Poor little Topsy!" She follows the man to the back of the house. Here, in a ramshackle wire pen, surrounded by the chickens to which he is throwing corn, stands a tall, strongly built man in his fifties. His face is tanned, leathery, and deeply lined; with very bright eyes under bushy eyebrows. "It's Mr. Ericson, isn't it?" "Yes, I'm Ericson," says the big man. He speaks slowly and deliberately, in a deep quiet voice. His appearance and movements give us an impression of calm independence and strength. The woman feels this at once. She becomes much more amiable, even a little bit coy. "Well -- we certainly had a time finding you! Hidden away up here in the mountains, miles from anywhere! I certainly do hope you can help us -- I'm sure we've used up every drop of our gasoline ration -- but we just had to come, didn't we, Allan? Oh, this is my husband --" Jacob Ericson nods to the other man in a friendly, undemonstrative way. "This is our little dog," the woman continues. "The vet said there wasn't a thing he could do for her. Then our friends the Hiltons told us about you. They were here last month. The Mr. Hilton, you know. The president of the Hilton National Bank." Ericson looks blank. Evidently he doesn't know. "Their cocker spaniel was hit by an automobile. They said you did a miracle." "Yeah," says Ericson drily, "I remember the dog." He comes out of the chicken pen and takes the basket from the woman. He pulls back the blanket and, with a strange gentleness, lays his big, gnarled hand on the tiny dog. The woman watches him anxiously. "We should have come sooner. You don't think it's too late?" Ericson doesn't answer immediately. He is examining the dog, which lies quite passive, regarding him with feverishly bright eyes. "No," he says, after a considerable pause. "No. It isn't too late." Husband and wife both watch him with fascinated interest, as he sits down on a bench beside the house. He takes the little dog out of the basket and holds her between his two hands, looking at her closely. Then he lays her on his knees and passes his hands over the small body in a series of slow, rhythmical movements. His eyes become abstracted, and somehow indrawn, and we have the impression that all his senses are concentrated in his big, sensitive hands. "Just what do you think is wrong with her?" The woman evidently can't keep quiet for long. "The vet told us some Latin name or other." Ericson doesn't answer, but he looks up for a moment and gives her a surprisingly sweet, happy, reassuring smile. There is silence, while he continues to pass his hands over the dog. "It must be just too wonderful to have the gift of healing," says the woman, gushingly. "You think so?" Ericson speaks with a certain grave irony, not looking up. "Why, yes -- I should say I do! Being able to do so much good in the world!" "Don't you cure anything but animals?" the husband asks. "Kids, sometimes. When they're little." "But not grown people?" Ericson shakes his head slowly. "Not anymore." "Why not?" the woman insists. "Why not?" Ericson looks up at them. Then, after a silence, he says abruptly, "Read your Bible. 'Whether it is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and take up thy bed and walk.' " "I don't understand," says the woman. "Surely there's never anything wrong in healing people, is there? There couldn't be --" Ericson doesn't answer. He continues to move his hands over the dog. His face, deeply thoughtful, is seemingly troubled. His lips move. He murmurs to himself, "Yes -- whether it is easier. . ."