After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan Review

Huxley moved to California in 1937, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, published two years later, is his response to what he found there. It is a Hollywood novel — not quite in the mode of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon or Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, both being written at roughly the same time, but sharing their sense of Los Angeles as a place where the normal cultural guardrails have been removed, leaving desire and money to arrange themselves without interference.

The central figure is Jo Stoyte, a California oil millionaire of spectacular vulgarity and genuine menace, who is terrified of death and has employed a Dr Obispo to find a solution. Stoyte’s vast estate — a pseudo-medieval castle stocked with European art purchased by the truckload — is Huxley’s satirical vision of American wealth’s relationship to culture: it acquires the products of civilisation without absorbing its values. Into this world arrives Jeremy Pordage, a diffident English scholar engaged to catalogue a collection of papers from an eighteenth-century English Earl, and — more importantly — Mr Propter, a sage who lives on the estate’s grounds and serves as the novel’s moral intelligence.

The plot hinges on Pordage’s discovery in the Earl’s papers that the fifth Earl of Gonister found a method of extending life indefinitely by eating a diet of carp intestines. Obispo traces him to his estate, where they find him — and the discovery is the novel’s great set piece, both literally and metaphorically a reversion to something pre-human. The title is from Tennyson’s Tithonus, a poem about the man who asked for immortality and was granted it without eternal youth, and Huxley’s point is adjacent: the desire to live forever, pursued without wisdom, does not result in an enriched life but in a diminished one.

What redeems the novel from being a simple satirical fable is Propter, whose philosophy — broadly a non-attached, Eastern-inflected ethics of the kind Huxley would develop more fully in Island — provides a genuine counterweight to Stoyte’s fearful acquisitiveness. The novel does not entirely trust Propter either — he is a little too serene, a little too complete — but his presence gives the satire a depth that West’s Locust, for all its brilliance, lacks. This is a book about what happens when the fear of death is not philosophically confronted but merely evaded, and Huxley’s answer is both comic and, in the final pages, genuinely alarming.