Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“AFTER MANY A SUMMER” by Aldous Huxley
(first published in 1939)
I’ve dealt with
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) a number of times before on this blog, noting my
opinion that Eyeless in Gaza is his
most compassionate novel, while the garrulous and gossipy Point Counter Point is probably the most malicious fun. (I also,
for some reason that now escapes me, wrote a post on his early short story
collection Mortal Coils). If I were
to nominate the Huxley novel that is most interesting because it is also very
flawed, my choice would be After Many a
Summer. It was published in America under the fuller title After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, both
titles coming from lines in Tennyson’s dramatic monologue Tithonus: “And after many a
summer dies the swan. / Me only cruel immortality / Consumes.”
Tennyson’s
poem is based on the Greek legend of the man who asks for unending life and is
granted it, but without the condition that he would remain young and healthy.
Consequently Tithonus ages as we all do, but remains alive ancient, sick, in
permanent pain; miserable and lamenting; but never knowing the release that
death would give.
Huxley’s novel is about a
millionaire wanting never to die.
Before I read it, I located
(thank you, internet) an American radio adaptation of the novel broadcast in
the early 1950s and introduced by the actress Eva Le Gallienne. It was a neat
one commercial hour long. Is simplified. It stuck to the essential fable that
is buried in Huxley’s novel – a fabulously-wealthy American millionaire wants
to achieve physical immortality and invests in a new scientific process to help
him do so. But the punch-line shows that this will lead to his reverting to an
ape-like animalistic state – all vitality and very little brain. Hence the
vanity of human wishes, the fatuity of sheer materialism, the imbecility of
clinging to worldly riches; not to mention generous side-swipes at American
narcissism.
I think this simple fable is
indeed the heart of Huxley’s novel and is quite strong in itself. The
experience of actually reading the novel is the experience of finding the
strong central fable muddied up with a lot of extraneous side-issues and the
more typical Huxlyan sardonic chitter-chatter.
It goes thus:
Jeremy Pordage, weakling
English intellectual and bachelor, is summoned to California to catalogue and
put in order the Hauberk Papers, heirlooms of an English aristocratic family,
which have been bought and are in the possession of the billionaire Jo Stoyte.
Jo Stoyte (only once in the
novel is he referred to by his full name, Joseph Panton Stoyte) is a philistine
who has made his money in oil and real estate, but wants to conquer Art and
Culture by possessing them. He has built a castle. It is stuffed with the
world’s treasures. He has endowed a nearby college (“Tarzana”) and hospital,
which he enjoys visiting and where he basks in the adulation of sick children
to whom he gives gifts. He also owns a vulgar and monument-filled cemetery. But
he is obsessed with health and (as he is moving from middle age to old age)
with the possibility of prolonging his life, perhaps even of reaching physical
immortality.
Stoyte has a young and very
nubile mistress, Virginia Maunciple. She is Catholic and devoted to kitsch
statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But she is also sexually promiscuous,
despite having such a wealthy sugar daddy. Jo Stoyte also retains a rather
creepy doctor, Sigmund (“Sig”) Obispo, who ministers various potions to him,
but also experiments (with mice, fish etc.) on prolonging life. In his
laboratory, “Sig” is assisted by the young and idealistic American Peter Boone,
who has come from Mid-Western Protestantism by way of Marxism and an
involvement in the Spanish Civil War, which is coming to an end at the time the
novel is set (and when it was written).
All this is the novel’s
set-up, and Huxley does his usual Theophrastian once-over with each character.
As in a late play by George Bernard Shaw,
or a comedy of humours by Thomas Love Peacock or Ben Jonson, each character
clearly and obviously represents a philosophical position or point of view.
Jeremy Pordage (another of Huxley’s partial self-portraits) is the
representative of pointless and fussy scholarship for its own sake – a man who,
we are told, loves his mother and finds sexual relief in weekly visits to a
pair of genteel prostitutes. Jo Stoyte is brainless materialism – vulgarity,
the impulse to dominate without understanding, and the belief that merely
prolonging life is the equivalent of living life to the full. “Sig” Obispo, who
is cynical and manipulative, is scientific experimentation for its own sake,
regardless of the human consequences. Virginia Maunciple is fake religion,
where erotic and sensual self-gratification is mistaken for spiritual
experience. And Peter Boone is immature idealism, always looking for something
to worship or be led by, rather than examining himself realistically.
Pointless scholarship, vulgar
materialism, misdirected science, religious false consciousness and immature
idealism – and against these comes the Huxley spokesperson as pat as the
presentation of pacifism as panacea in Eyeless
in Gaza. Here he takes the form of the philosopher William Propter.
Presumably he is thus named by the novelist because “propter” is the Latin for
“because”, and he explains things. William Propter is the neighbour and
sometime classmate of Jo Stoyte. He
explains that real human growth will come only when the ego is submerged in the
divine oneness. Propter explains to Jeremy Pordage that he too was once a
scholar (of Catholic Reformation writing) until he saw the pointlessness of it.
Propter has a great influence on young Peter Boone, who may, however, merely be
seeking, in his immature fashion, another idol to worship.
Thus the set-up: the thesis
and antithesis.
“Plot” has Jeremy Pordage discovering
in the 18th century and early 19th century sections of
the Hauberk Papers the diary of an earl who sought for, and apparently found,
the secret of physical immortality. Jeremy Pordage shares this discovery with
“Sig” Obispo. Meanwhile Obispo has been seducing Stoyte’s mistress with the
help of erotic readings from the Maquis de Sade. But at the same time young
Peter Boone worships Virginia Maunciple from afar, believing (as Jo Stoyte
does) in her innocence and (like the character of Brian Foxe in Eyeless in Gaza) imagining that love is
an ideal unconnected with the erotic. Climax comes when Jo Stoyte believes he
has discovered Obispo and Virginia in
flagrante. He runs off to find his revolver to shoot Obispo. But when he
returns, Obispo has left the scene and Peter Boone is innocently talking to
Virginia. In error (he is looking at them from behind) Jo Stoyte shoots and
kills Peter Boone.
Obispo is able both to clean
up the mess and to keep the details from becoming public. He is also now able
to blackmail Stoyte and make him become dependent on him. Obispo, Stoyte and
the ironically-named Virginia travel to England and visit the Hauberk estate to
find what became of the earl who claimed to have found the secret of
immortality. What they discover is a gibbering two-hundred-year-old ape-man,
matured from an “ape foetus”. Obispo laughs ironically and understands that
their researches are at an end. But to the very last, Jo Stoyte is still
convinced that he can have his life prolonged.
It does not take much
research to realise that After Many a
Summer draws upon a number of sources.
It was Aldous Huxley’s
brother, the biologist Julian Huxley, who had once worked on an experiment
which involved pumping an axolotl full of hormones and then watching it slowly
become an unknown sort of salamander. The evolutionary principle was that, in
their sexually-mature form, some species are the immature form of other
species. Out of this, the novelist drew the idea of a man becoming a form of ape with unlimited longevity – but
certainly not a man with unlimited
longevity.
Quite unrelated to this, it
is clear that Jo Stoyte is based on William Randolph Hearst. He has obvious
parallels with Hearst – a castle-like mansion, obsessive collecting etc.,
although Huxley gives the Catholicism to Jo Stoyte’s mistress. In real life, it was
Hearst’s wife who was Catholic and wouldn’t give him a divorce when he had
taken up with his long-time mistress. As I’ve noted before on this blog (see
the posting on David Nasaw’s The Chief – The Life of William Randolph Hearst), the part about
the accidental killing of an innocent man instead of the mistress’s lover
echoes the – probable, but never definitively substantiated – rumours that in
1924 Hearst accidentally shot and killed the film producer Thomas Ince, when he
had meant to shoot Charlie Chaplin, who had been making up to Hearst’s mistress
Marion Davies. This well-known rumour was the basis of Peter Bogdanovich’s 2001
film The Cat’s Meow. Outside Huxley’s
novel, the other famous fictional version of Hearst is Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane, though I do note that
Huxley’s name Joseph Panton Stoyte “rhymes” better with William Randolph Heart
than Charles Foster Kane does.
There are other
miscellaneous things in this novel that interest me. Just as Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (published in 1923)
anticipates Evelyn Waugh’s novels about Bright Young Things (published in the
later 1920s), so does Huxley’s disabused description of a Californian
theme-park cemetery anticipate by nearly a decade Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948). The two men had
quite different temperaments and beliefs – but they often did choose the same
targets for satire. Its also interesting that in expounding his ideas, the
philosopher William Propter regards Stalin and Bolshevism as being as much of a
menace as Hitler and Nazism – another nail in the coffin of the idea that
nobody in the West really understood the nature of the Soviet Union in the
1930s.
Having noted all
this, however, I’m also bound to note the literary shortcomings of After Many a Summer. There are the
wearisome interpolated discussions and undramatised conflicts of opinions.
There is the muddying of the central robust fable by too many side issues.
There is the unceremonious dumping from the novel of Jeremy Pordage and William
Propter after the death of Peter Boone, even though they have been built up as
major characters. The novel’s thematic anchoring in the theories of Propter is
as unconvincing as the world-embracing pacifism of Eyeless in Gaza. It is one thing to preach that one must step
outside the fray of the ego, but this once again puts Huxley (or his most
sympathetic character) in the position of looking down on humanity from a great
height. When Peter Boone expresses concern about the fall of Barcelona in the
Spanish Civil War, Propter insists he needn’t worry his head about it as it is
like attaching oneself to another false idea driven by the ego. This is
dangerously like caring for humanity in
general (i.e. theoretically), while not caring for real suffering people.
After reading
this novel, my mind also jangles with rude ideas about Aldous Huxley and
California. The novel begins with Jeremy Pordage being driven to Jo Stoyte’s
castle through a landscape of Californian billboards and hucksterism and crassness.
Upon all of this, Pordage makes satirical observations, which we are clearly
meant to endorse. Yet this rejection of crass materialist culture comes from a
very suspect source, given that Pordage has accepted a deal to earn his living
working for the crass materialist Stoyte. Likewise, Stoyte’s neighbour William
Propter lives the affluent Californian life, and though he does at one point
rebuke Stoyte for exploiting underpaid migrant labour, his otherworldliness
never leads him to question his own affluence. Are we seeing in embryo the
development of Aldous Huxley? He was happy to go to California and earn his
living writing screenplays for Hollywood (which he was already doing when After Many a Summer was written). But he
still took potshots at the hand that fed him. And his later development (see
his lamentable final novel Island)
shows that his final enlightenment basically meant passive self-absorption. Not
so much a rejection of the ego as a complete sinking into it.
So much for my
perceptive dyspepsia. Apart from my grumble, I do salute After Many a Summer for being readable, as Huxley always is, and it
has plenty in it to amuse. Pity about its flaky philosophy.
No comments:
Post a Comment