After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel [Paperback]

Reading it and some other Huxley material this year, I am struck by how singleminded AH is in his ideas. Every essay, every story, at least after the 1930s, is driven by his desire to show how humanity is lost in a maze of materialist illusion. He is a mystic, and if that tickles you, perhaps his extended intellectual diaglogs in this book will interest you. Otherwise, just read the deliciously satirical parts. (His detached verse describing the movements of the nearly naked young starlet's body are a tour de force of clinical eroticism).

His literary skills are enormous, his description of southern california in the 30s rang true in the 70s when I lived there and read it, and still do. His humour, arch, esoteric, but sharp, can be a joy. When he gets serious, that's when he has a problem as he lapses into portentous nonsense about the ground of being, the One, etc. Huxley was a acid head long before he started dabbling with drugs - and his mystical discussions make little sense, unless you are already of that mind. Aesthetically, they are highly repetitive and rather irritating.

Readers who want an introduction to his work would do better, I think, to begin with his best, Brave New World. In that one, he used his considerable gifts to their best advantage, and kept his endless and indulgent maundering to a minimum.

That isn't exactly the question that Huxley addresses in this novel, but it is similar--and his answer is one that should surprise Religion and Science both. And he delivers it with a conclusion so lurid and grotesque it will haunt you long after the rest of the book has faded away.

But getting to the conclusion is the problem. I am a great admirer of Huxley, yet I consider this to be one of his weaker books. The scientific machinery, both that which leads to the conclusion and that which explains it, is a tad clumsy--H. G. Wells _Invisible_Man_ clumsy. It's easy to pardon Huxley for this; the science is merely a plot device. But it still seems like a weakness to me.

Since Huxley was born to write novels of ideas, his characters are (as usual) more types than individuals. Here they almost seem to have been an annoyance, as if regarded by their author as a necessary evil between him and the exploration of ideas. Stoyte strides on to the scene as a caricature and never can be taken seriously thereafter as a portrait of the homme moyen sensuel. His mistress is of a physical type that Huxley clearly loathed; her peculiar residue of childhood Catholicism fails to make her complex or wholly interesting. Huxley's attempt at Steinbeck's game must not have pleased even himself: after one abortive appearance of an Okie named Bill, migrant farmworkers disappear into the generalization of their class.

Obispo is sharp, as a kind of unexpectedly suave Mephistopheles doing Stoyte's bidding in his laboratory. (Even in satire, Faust always loses.) But the only characters with any real depth are Pordage and Propter: Pordage, an urbane scholar but stunted human being; Propter, a non-denominational mystic and philosopher-saint of the orange groves. It is not presuming too much to interpret these two as competing sides of Huxley's personality. Their conversations and monologues make for the most interesting reading: this is a novel desperately trying to break into an essay. Huxley fits in many provocative ideas about God, time, language, literature, culture. It's a valuable record of where his thoughts were leading at this point in his career.

But had Huxley written an essay instead, there would have been no place for his brilliant rendition of a skeptical and dissolute earl's epigrammatic journal--just one example among many of Huxley's notable stylistic versatility.

I hope readers who enjoy any part of this book go on to Huxley's later fiction, like _Island_ or _The_Devils_of_Loudun_. And don't miss any of his later non-fiction, above all the summa of his spiritual investigations, _The_Perennial_Philosophy_.