After Many a
Summer aka After Many a Summer Dies
the Swan – Aldous Huxley, 1939
Critics often describe this as Huxley’s satiric
“Hollywood novel.” For sure, Huxley, the most erudite writer of his generation,
takes funny potshots at American superficial crassness, tasteless kitsch, philistine
looseness of education, and worship of youth. However, Huxley does not focus on
the toilers in Tinsel Town’s major industry. Instead, the story focuses on oil
millionaire, Jo Stoyte.
Like Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ famous movie,
Stoyte is a collector of art and people. To his gothic castle in Southern
California, he has granted residence to his lascivious mistress, a battalion of
servants, and the only childhood friend that treated him decently, an academic
turned Vedantist sage. Stoyte also funds a private research lab whose director
is a cynical doctor working on extending human longevity. Because he was
brought up on mean religion, Stoyte fears death like nothing else:
Always, in the background of his
mind, there floated an image of that circular marble room, with Roden's image
of desire at the centre, and that wide slab in the pavement at its base--the
slab that would someday have his name engraved upon it: Joseph Penton Stoyte,
and the dates of his birth and death. And along with that inscription went
another, in orange letters on a coal black ground: It is a terrible thing to
fall into the hands of the living God.
Huxley, to my mind, is not as hyper-intellectual or
excessively articulate as Rebecca West. But the action is mainly the characters
doing a lot of talking. While he includes dabs of fantasy and science fiction
elements, Huxley delves into Vedantist thought, art, poetry, and morals. As
usual, though, Huxley keeps his feet on the ground, exploring the interior of
characters and identifying plausible justifications for their silly behavior,
which is irrational in an ordinary way. The senseless homicide in the story
will call to mind the TV reality cop show, The
First 48 Hours, on which virtually all the killings are committed for
reasons so trivial and stupid that it taxes belief. Huxley was a mystic, but he
lived in this silly scheming lurid world
where too many people just DGAF.
He also wrote clear prose, even when the dialogue
concerns the most fantastic issues in
Vedantist mysticism. Huxley called this
novel "a wild extravaganza, but with the quality of most serious
parable" and later called it "a kind of fantasy, at once comic and
cautionary, farcical, blood-curdling and reflective." Readers and advanced
yoga fans in search of a funny, scary novel of ideas, just as relevant nowadays
as it was 75 years ago may want to check this one out.
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