AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN —Aldous Huxley—Harper ($2.50).
The Aldous Huxley whose early books so skillfully anatomized human viciousness and human hopelessness is no more. With Eyeless in Gaza he turned to painful self-searchings. With Ends and Means he grew stonily didactic. One of the gifted moral satirists of modern times, he had become, by logical development, a definitely religious man. He still is, but in his new book he turns to his earlier technique: uses once more the light realistic fantasy and the sharp surgical analysis which first made him famous, but uses them to say the most serious things he has ever had to say.
The "Swan" of Huxley's sour fable is Jo Stoyte: old, half-mad with wealth and power ("they are the same"), desperately hanging on to his sexual potency, desperately afraid of its loss, of age, of death. In his gigantic ferroconcrete château in Southern California he lives with his young mistress, Virginia Maunciple, a born courtesan with a short upper lip who frequently repairs, for penitence, to the "Lourdes Grotto" which "Uncle Jo" has built for her. Jo's other mainstay is sleek, Levantine Dr. Sigmund Obispo, who keeps the old man hopped up with hormone injections, and searches, meanwhile, for the substance by which, in Marxist John Strachey's optimistic phrase, "death might be indefinitely postponed." The doctor enjoys Jo Stoyte's mistress, old Jo himself does a bit of murder, and finally they all go to England, where Obispo uncovers the Fifth Earl of Gonister, who nominally died a century ago. The secret of living indefinitely has already been solved: the Earl, at 201, has matured into a raging fetal ape.
In the proper hands, it could be pulp fiction. In Aldous Huxley's it is quite as plausible as highly intelligent satire need be. In his hands, too, it is the excuse and occasion for the things he particularly wants to talk about. Scattered in short (but stiff) doses throughout the narrative, they are spoken by a Mr. Propter, the straightest and maturest straight man Mr. Huxley has ever permitted himself. As he speaks them, they are some of the firmest, most beautifully articulate essays Huxley has ever written.
Simple in essence, but by no means so simple as they sound, Mr. Propter's ideas boil down to this: "Time and craving, craving and time—two aspects of the same thing; and that thing is the raw material of evil." Good, impossible within time, exists only on the animal level and on the level of eternity, of "pure, disinterested consciousness." That level is attained in the loss of wilfulness, of desire, of personality.
With that leverage on good and evil, talking with a rational clarity most mystics have lacked, Mr. Propter makes moral mincemeat of everything in sight, "good" or "bad," within the purely human sphere of endeavor. Some of his enemies—war and fascism—are popular pushovers. Others will leave Propter few takers. A partial list of targets for his dialectic: politics, capitalistic society, organized religion, romantic love, science, socialism, humanitarianism, language, virtue, selfless devotion, sex, art—in brief, all activities on the purely human plane, however disinterested, are productive only of evil.