Who would have known that After Many a Summer would bring a greater impact than Brave New World? Well, at least for me. It is a shame that Brave New World overshadowed it.

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I loved this novel for the first six chapters, approximate the first fourth of the novel. After that I struggled to finish it. Luckily I read a few reviews on goodreads that gave me permission to skip the chapters containing Mr. Propter and the socratic questioning on his views. Some kind of metaphysical stuff that I found a bit condescending towards Dust Bowl refugees and the crises in Europe. What I loved initially was our entrance into Los Angeles of the 1930s, driving from the airport to Jo Stoyte's estate, which I can picture well. Huxley brings San Simeon and Occidental College to Tarzana, creating a pastiche of silly California. I live in Los Angeles and love the negative depictions (Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler) as long as they are based on experience or specificity (joining with the place, even when disparaging it) rather than assumption. I was surprised to find that Huxley stayed in Los Angeles because it seems like he looks down it. And why did people have to be so mean to William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies (sort of the basis for Jo Stoyte and his 'baby' Virginia? Yes, Hearst had money to squander and power to wield unfairly, but why could people not believe that Davies was truly devoted to him? There is some wry or black humor to be had here, but it requires too much sifting through philosophizing. If one were very selective, a movie like "The Loved One" could be made from this, though purists would cry foul.

I thought I would love this comic novel after reading the opening pages, which describe, from the viewpoint of a British academic, the commercialism and vulgarity of southern California during the interwar years. And I did enjoy much about the hilarious interactions in "the Castle," an edifice owned by Jo Stoyte, a millionaire who is determined to buy all the culture he doesn't come by naturally. Other occupants of the castle include the British academic, a naive young scientist, a nymphet who projects innocence to all who meet her, and a doctor who is researching, at Mr. Stoyte's request and with his funding, the secret to eternal life. With the exception of Pete, the young scientist, all of these characters are depraved in one way or another. Down the hill, on the other hand, is Mr. Propter, a longwinded advocate of enlightenment who holds the moral high ground of the novel by preaching a mishmash of mystic principles which the other characters seem willing to listen to for many, many pages. Me, not so much.

One of my favorite books, very disturbing take on American manias and Hollywood. Haven't read it in awhile but recommend it to anyone interested in the roots of literary science fiction or dark satire.

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To SEE a WORLD in a Grain of Sand,
And a HEAVEN in a Wild Flower,
Hold INFINITY in the palm of your hand
And ETERNITY in an Hour"
~ William Blake ~

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Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is form.
Form is not different than Emptiness;
Emptiness is not different than form
~ Heart Sutra ~

Like the ocean and its waves,
inseparable yet distinct

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" I and The Father are one,
I am The Truth,
The Life and The Path.”

Like a river flowing from its source,
connected and continuous

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Thy kingdom come.
Let the reign of divine
Truth, Life, and Love
be established in me,
and rule out of me all sin;
and may Thy Word
enrich the affections of all mankind

A mighty oak tree standing firm against the storm,
As sunlight scatters the shadows of night
A river nourishing the land it flows through

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Initially published in 1939, Aldous Huxley’s outrageous and sublime AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN is set in the self-same year. Current events receive passing mention. It was a fucking hellacious year, as I am sure you well know. Huxley had arrived in Los Angeles to settle indefinitely with his wife and son in 1937, and it is in Los Angeles that the novel is set. Hollywood, if you will, the term denoting more than merely a neighbourhood in the aforementioned city, as seen through critical (famously compromised) eyes, rendered with a caustic rue, not uncharacteristic of this author, but clearly roused by new inanities, horrors, and inane horrors. Europe and much of the world is on the brink of total conflagration. In the novel’s first chapter we find mention of newspaper headlines detailing events in Spain, the scuttlebutt appearing to be that General Franco and his Nationalist compatriots, a thuggish fascist alliance underwritten by Mussolini and Hitler, are on the verge of victory. Late in the novel, Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia, will indeed fall to Franco and Co. Huxley does not share the date with us, but we know it to be January 26th of 1939. The event is filtered in the novel through the sensibility of its presiding philosopher, William Propter. Propter is a doomsayer as regards the human level of things, but also an advocate for clear vision in service to transcendence. “Like every other community, Barcelona was part machine, part sub-human organism, part nightmare-huge projection and embodiment of men’s passions and insanities—their avarice, their pride, their lust for power, their obsession with meaningless words, their worship of lunatic ideals.” Barcelona may be specific and unique in its way, no doubt, but from the William Propter vantage it is little more than the eternal return of the same, the sordid business of human enterprise as it always has been and ever shall be. History wears the shroud human beings project onto it. History wears our defects and is the theatre of our unceasing folly. So it has been, so it is, so on and so forth. Propter espouses the transcendence over intellect, or the work of intellection anchored to worldly stupidities, and also over the individual personality, its likes and dislikes. He professes on behalf of a God that operates “as a free power, a pure working, a being withdrawn …” Man’s only hope lies in his proven spiritual capacities, testified to in the varieties or spiritual experience communicated by adepts down through the ages, especially those experiences that allowed such adepts to achieve elevation, a station of profoundly impersonal insight, a condition outside of history, even outside of time, thus as near as possible to God. Time is essentially potential history, or the ground of history. Time is potential evil. Potential evil (time) + human craving = the actual evil that is all of human history. Huxley’s novels famously have a tendency to break out in essay. The bravura essayistic passages contained in AFTER MANY A SUMMER primarily present us with the fascinating, prodigiously wise, and only sort of fatalistic World According to Propter. But the novel is not simply a treatise to that end, precisely because it is oriented ironically and engineered to culminate with savage, eviscerating glee. We will note that 1939 does not only accord with the end of the Spanish Civil War and the official beginning of the Second World War. It was also a famously terrific year for Hollywood movies. Take two cases in point: 1) three films directed by John Ford were released in ‘39, STAGECOACH, YOUNG MISTER LINCOLN, and DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, each of which is among this peerlessly great director’s very finest; 2) the character actor Thomas Mitchell, famous perhaps most especially for his skill at playing a loveable drunk, appeared in exactly four films in 1939 in addition to the aforementioned STAGECOACH, these happening to be ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, GONE WITH THE WIND, and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME—now, can you image having a year like that!? Things were proceeding merrily apace in Tinseltown even if the planet was tilting toward unspeakable horror on an impossible scale. Huxley was living and working in and around the hubbub. He would have had cause to come into contact with a great many Europeans, many of them Jews or married to Jews, all of whom had fled to California, a sensible move. However, AFTER MANY A SUMMER is not in any real way about the motion picture business. It features a monumentally crass Super Capitalist, but he is not a studio head, rather he oversees a vast empire with its original basis in oil, natural gas, and coal. He is also a Christian, and this may separate him from the likes of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn more decisively than does the previous factor. The novel begins with the habitually self-deprecating and erudite Jeremy Pordage arriving in Los Angeles where he is met at the station by a black chauffeur who promptly provides Jeremy with a roving vehicular vantage on the socioeconomically-determined strata of the American City in all its promotional abandon, one form of belligerent advertisement or another visible wherever the eye should happen to fall. “Jumbo Malts” or “Facials, Permanents, Manicures.” One is liable to see a “Jesus Saves” or its ilk with disconcerting regularity. William Propter, our resident philosopher, will later aver that “incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage; and so the preoccupation with possessions.” Mr. Pordage, chauffeured through the city, suddenly remembering an obligation, asks to make a stop-off at Western Union so he can send a promised telegram to his mother, reflecting on the irony of this sophisticated woman, onetime friend of Oscar Wilde, living at the amusingly middle-class-sounding “The Araucarius, Woking.” And not only that! There is also the mild comedy of he himself, Jeremy, providing to the world, from this ridiculous address where he too has recently resided, the “works of mingled scholarship and curiously rarified wit” that have “gained his reputation.” Onto Beverly Hills, past the estates of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Ginger Rogers. Past the BEVERLY PANTHEON, THE PERSONALITY CEMETERY with its two-hundred-thousand-dollar Tower of Resurrection, a reproduction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, only it doesn’t lean. The cemetery and its tower, asserts the driver proudly, assets held by his and Jeremy’s mutual employer. It turns out that Jeremy Pordage has come to Los Angeles to work for the filthy rich garrulous bozo Jo Stoyte. “Three months’ work, six thousand dollars.” The gig: “to catalogue the almost legendary Hauberk Papers.” You see, Mr. Stoyte likes to collect important things, even if he has no special appreciation of them beyond their having been deemed important by those who ought to know. The Beverly Pantheon and the Stoyte palace, as well as the myriad gauche objets d’arts that fill each, represent a dizzying, tasteless bricolage pulling from all eras, a replica of the grotto of Lourdes et cetera. As for Jeremy Pordage: “the humorous puritanism of his good taste was shocked.” This poor man’s idea of how to be filthy rich is connected to the consumerist hyperdrive of the American business model. Dubious religiosity enters into the picture as well. As does terror of mortality, the collapse of bodily integrity, the decay of all organic life an unpardonable affront to the American Mater of the Universe. The Beverly Pantheon is itself a landscape of death in paradoxical service to the reification of “the well-fed body, forever youthful, immortally athletic, indefatigably sexy. The Moslem paradise had had copulations six centuries long. In this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would have stepped up the period to a millennium and added the joy of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming.” Jeremy is an ironist, as already established, and he finds this new ghastly world highly amusing. He also represents cool intellection, and as such presents as something of a foil for resident philosopher William Propter, who tells him he looks like a “murderee” and must be careful lest Jo Stoyte eat him for breakfast. Jeremy knows and admires Propter, having been highly impressed by the man’s noteworthy text on the Counter-Reformation. Jeremy is also impressed if slightly galled by Propter’s fervid monologues on God and eternity and the future communards of transcendence, himself always having preferred to “take things as they come,” though “direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of books.” Pordage and Propter are not the only curious figures on the Stoyte payroll. Notable also are the sinister Dr. Sigmund Obispo and idealistic young Pete, men of science, essentially, employed on a pet project, tasked with unlocking the key to immortality or at least longevity, the defeat of the forces of senescence. “For the secret was there, the key to the whole problem of senility and longevity. There, between the sterols and the peculiar flora of the carp’s intestine.” Intellectual ironist Jeremy Pordage and the malignant Dr. Obispo both have a fondness for the Marquis de Sade and his pageants of abjection. Obispo is a transvaluation of values man, a self-styled Übermensch type who imagines he is brilliant enough to have his way with impunity. Young Pete, the idealist, fought with the Republicans in Spain and is a devoted man of the left. He is serious about his values, deeming them serious values. He is no fan of the Capitalist who provides his lunch ticket, but is perhaps committed to the work for its own sake. Or it all might have entirely to do with young Virginia (Jinny) Maunciple, a woman in her early twenties who is less Stoyte’s pet project than she is simply his pet. Viginia and Jo are not lovers. Virginia is more a kind of auxiliary daughter, thought of by her patron as the Baby, though this is a daughter in whom the father, more a keeper, clearly takes an unwholesome interest, naturally, not having a wholesome bone in his bloated body. Poor young Pete is besotted with Jinny, and Jinny is no idiot, she is in fact pretty smart, knowing that her desirability is her capital, and though she doesn’t dig Pete ‘that way,’ well, she does adore to be adored. Pete, idealizing the pretty miss, reads the terrain all wrong. Dr. Obispo doesn’t have the handicap of established values. He reads Jinny just fine, and reads TO HER from THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. He has a habit of slipping old Joe a Mickey at night so that he, the good doctor, may more easily insinuate himself into the young woman’s bedchambers. There are other characters on the fringes of this drama. Among them is a family of transients from Kansas, arrived from the dustbowl to pick oranges. The father is a cruel creep. Propter notes that “The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him,” adding that “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an involuntarily poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” I had a sense that the father from Kansas might represent the proverbial gun introduced in the first act that must go off in the third. No, instead he serves merely as a very interesting red herring. It is another gun entirely that will go off, and I think we would more strictly have to say that it does so at the end of act number two. Huxley’s early novels were basically satires, pillorying snobs and fatuous assholes, but they quickly came to represent something like satirical novels of ideas, the ideas being serious ones, the author unmistakably brilliant. William Propter suggests that the potential evil of time becomes actual evil through the synthesis of human folly. It was always human folly that Huxley satirized, his own character defects included. His 1928 masterpiece POINT COUNTER POINT, the key transitional text, has been addressed as a roman à clef in which Walter Bidlake and Philip Quarles are the two characters who would seem to represent elements of Huxley himself. Those two characters could be said to have distinct analogues in AFTER MANY A SUMMER: the ironic-to-the-point-of-cynical Walter Bidlake finds his later equivalent in Jeremy Pordage; the heartsick codependent Philip Quarles equates to poor idealist Pete. There is in both POINT COUNTER POINT and AFTER MANY A SUMMER a through-line not only in these characterizations, these types, but in the comedy of folly, at the heart of which is an encapsulation of modes of incongruity whereby characters fail to lineup with either themselves or their proper contexts. It is not a matter merely of hypocrisy, actually representing a deeper human incapacity. By AFTER MANY A SUMMER it has become clear that all that is human is incapacity and disaster-waiting-to-happen (again and again). In listening to William Propter, hapless and suggestible leftist idealist Pete even begins to suspect that there might be something to the idea that those positioned at any node on the political spectrum are ubiquitously in the nightmare-manufacturing business. Propter also has something of an predecessor in POINT COUNTER POINT. This would be Rampion, a character very clearly inspired to a large extent by D.H. Lawrence. It is this strain in Huxley that leads forward to an increasing focus on spirituality and personal emancipation. Rampion and Propter presage THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, the DOORS OF PERCEPTION, et cetera. Propter also has something of a predecessor in AFTER MANY A SUMMER itself. The Hauberk Papers, that bundle of pages Jeremy Pordage has been assigned to organize, which contain journals by The Fifth Earl of Gonister. I have a tendency to address what I call the pure heterogeneity of difference, basis of phenomenal reality and the human beings who abide there within their myriad systems. The Fifth Earl saw it more sardonically. Human beings and there aggregations, according to the Earl, constitute simply a “succession of inconsistencies,” the phrase emblematic of so much that is operative in Huxley’s peopled worlds. The Fifth Earl may also hide the key to longevity, even immortality. It amuses me that learn’d psychonauts Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, who both loved Huxley, believed so much in space travel and the extension of human life to the limits of the possible. It is precisely a desire for immortality that leads to the bestial Grand Guignol denouement of AFTER MANY A SUMMER. The novel ends with hideousness and peals of sick-making laughter, a miasmic hilarious hell at the depths not only of human life, but of animality itself. It is a tremendously ironic ending, but you couldn’t mistake it for allegory. It is far too direct and brutal to be temperately assessed as that.

This is one of those books that feels like an author was sitting around and thought of an allegedly-funny, obscure joke... and then wrote 200 pages of setup before getting to the joke.

Parts 2 and 3 were admittedly pretty good (relatively, at least), but I feel like this book would be significantly better if it dropped Part 1 entirely: it feels like an unnecessary prelude to the rest of the book, without really tying the first part in once things started picking up in the latter parts of the book.

If you enjoy Huxley's writing style, you'll probably enjoy this book a bit more. Many chapters feel rambly and slow, but if that's your bag you're in for a treat, I guess.

Outstanding book about the quest for longevity and other things. At times very philosophical, filled with quotes and allusions to literature, politics, art and so on, I had to keep my phone handy to look up and sometimes translate in order to understand. That did not detract from my enjoyment of the book. True confession: I read it because George Falconer, Colin Firth's character in A Single Man, assigned it to his class, and it is discussed briefly in the movie. Highly recommend, but definitely NOT for a general audience.

Fenomenal tur de forță intelectuală! Copleșitor, intimidant, strivitor acest Huxley! Pentru cunoscători, doar.

Aceasta este prima carte din challenge-ul 12 cărți secrete.

Nu pot să zic că mi-a plăcut foarte mult această carte, dar nici groaznică nu pot să zic că a fost. O carte în care se vorbește destul de mult despre eternitate și stoparea îmbătrânirii.

O poveste a unui om sărac, care ajunge să fie bogat. Acesta ajunge să-i fie frică de moarte, odată cu moartea soției sale.

Astfel că ajunge să fie obsedat de tot ceea ce înseamnă metodele de a stopa îmbătrânirea. Astfel că, ajunge să-și angajeze un doctor care să-i creeze cel mai bun remediu care să-l țină cât mai mult în viață.

Ce credeți, a reușit?
Vă las pe voi să aflați, în cazul în care vă atrage această carte. ❤️

Huxley's first California-based novel captures the millionaire/floozy/intellectual triad perfectly. This is a very funny novel with many asides that are often more amusing that the main story. Huxley is a master of irony and witty dialogue. Wonderful novel.