After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley

First published: 1939

Type of work: Satiric novel of ideas

Time of work: The late 1930’s

Locale: Southern California

Principal Characters:

• Jo Stoyte, the protagonist, a self-made multimillionaire
• Jeremy Pordage, an English scholar hired by Stoyte to catalog manuscripts
• Dr. Sigmund Obispo, Stoyte’s personal physician
• Virginia Maunciple, Stoyte’s mistress
• Peter Boone, Dr. Obispo’s handsome and idealistic assistant
• William Propter, a retired professor who expresses many of Huxley’s key ideas

The Novel

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan opens with the arrival of Jeremy Pordage in Southern California. He has been hired by Jo Stoyte to catalog the Hauberk papers, a collection of miscellaneous materials recently purchased by Stoyte which had accumulated for centuries on an English estate. Although he is less directly involved in the principal events of the novel than most of the other characters, Pordage serves an important function as an observer of the social milieu and of the actions of the other characters, thus helping tie together the sometimes disparate materials that Huxley includes in the novel.

Pordage’s drive from the railway station to Stoyte’s residence gives him his first taste of the culture of Southern California—an incongruous mixture of slums, billboards, cocktail lounges, hamburger stands, and extravagant Hollywood mansions in a clutter of architectural styles. His chauffeur also takes him to the Beverly Pantheon, a cemetery owned by Stoyte, where the fact of death appears to be disguised by sensual sculpture, eclectic art reproductions, and Wurlitzer organ music. They also pass a carload of migrant workers from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and offer a ride to William Propter, a scholar who knew Stoyte as a young boy and who lives on a small farm near him.

Stoyte’s castle, perched on the top of a mountain, is a grotesque combination of architectural styles and is decorated with an astonishing variety of art objects purchased by Stoyte’s agents in Europe. Stoyte himself is an uneducated multimillionaire whose personality combines elements of sentimentality, sensuality, ostentation, and greed. Members of his household include Virginia Maunciple, his ingenuous and intellectually vacuous mistress who refers to him as Uncle Jo; Sigmund Obispo, his sinister and aggressive personal physician; and Peter Boone, an idealistic young man who works as Obispo’s assistant.

It is soon clear that Stoyte is governed by an almost obsessive fear of death. Obispo’s role is not only to provide him with any medical treatment that is needed but also to conduct experiments that might lead to some discovery that could prolong his life indefinitely. Stoyte’s fear of death gives Obispo a power over him that the doctor is only too willing to use. Keeping Stoyte sedated at night, Obispo easily seduces Virginia. Although she is almost overwhelmed by guilt and by her dislike of Obispo, she is never able to resist his cold and aggressive lovemaking. In order to conceal her affair with Obispo, Virginia lavishes attention on Peter, who loves her in a remote and idealistic way. Increasingly suspicious of the innocent Peter, Stoyte discovers him kneeling by Virginia’s side one evening and kills him with an automatic pistol he always carries with him.

In the meantime, Pordage’s research in the Hauberk papers has led him to develop a special interest in the fifth Earl of Gonister, born in 1738. The earl was a lecherous rapscallion, but a person of intense vitality, possessing a somewhat cynical appreciation of life. In an effort to prolong his life, the earl ate raw the entrails of a carp, a fish with a life span of several centuries. (Dr. Obispo has speculated that the digestive organs of the carp might hold the secret of extended life.) Conspicuously revitalized after this unsavory diet, the earl fathered three illegitimate children at the age of eighty-one. While he was in his nineties, he became involved in a scandal and, threatened with incarceration in a hospital for the insane, appeared to have died. A close reading of his diary, however, suggests that he might simply have concealed himself underground.

Stoyte’s remorse and fear after he realizes that he has killed Peter puts him even more in Obispo’s power. Obispo certifies that Peter died of a heart attack and quickly has him cremated at the Beverly Pantheon. Then Stoyte, Obispo, Maunciple, and Pordage sail to England to pursue their theories about the earl.

Gaining admission to the underground passages in the earl’s estate, they discover the fifth earl himself. Now a grotesque animalistic creature two hundred years old, still wearing the tattered remains of the Order of the Garter, he merely gibbers at them and then retreats to a dark corner to copulate with his ancient housekeeper. Stoyte, still clinging to his desire for extended life, speculates, “Well, they look like they were having a pretty good time.”

The Characters

On one level, Jo Stoyte is simply another of the many satiric portraits of the self-made American businessman that appear frequently in British and American fiction of the 1920’s and 1930’s. He eagerly pursues money and relishes a lavish, tasteless display of the material things that money can buy, from the swimming pool on the terrace of his castle to the painting by Jan Vermeer in his elevator. He is grossly sensual in his desire for Virginia but is also gratified by her regarding him as a paternal benefactor. He sees no inconsistency in exploiting migrant workers by paying them the lowest wages possible, while at the same time sentimentally supporting a children’s hospital and donating large sums of money to Tarzana College for buildings that will bear his name. Yet Stoyte is not entirely a one-dimensional figure. His drive to achieve financial success stems from his experience of poverty as a child and his being ridiculed as a fat boy in school, and his love for Virginia, although limited in depth, is tender and genuine. In spite of the fact that Stoyte is a satiric figure, he invites some degree of compassion.

Virginia Maunciple and Peter Boone are less complex, although they, like Jo Stoyte, are treated with both satire and compassion. Virginia combines ingenuousness with sensuality, and though unintelligent, her sense of guilt over her affair with Obispo is intense. Peter is almost equally naive in his idealistic love of Virginia and in his devotion to the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, and he is eager in his pursuit of such truth as he can comprehend.

Sigmund Obispo is almost a stock figure of a villainous scientist. He carries out the research that may prolong Stoyte’s life, but feels only contempt for Stoyte himself. His pleasure in repeatedly seducing Virginia is intensified by his awareness of Virginia’s reluctance.

Jeremy Pordage is characterized as a somewhat absurd example of an upper-class English scholar, but he functions in the novel primarily as a central consciousness in which all the other characters are reflected. He has the intellectual background, the human compassion, and the ironic detachment to comprehend the garish culture of Southern California, the absurd and pathetic quest of Jo Stoyte, and the arcane theories of William Propter.

In considering these characters it is important to remember that Huxley was writing a satire and a novel of ideas. He was not so much interested in creating vivid, “living” characters as he was in creating characters who would represent or express his philosophical perspectives. From this point of view, the most important character in the novel is one who takes almost no part in the main action, William Propter. Propter exists in the novel as Huxley’s mouthpiece. A former university professor who now lives simply on a farm near Stoyte’s castle, Propter has written a book which Pordage greatly admires for its scholarship. A boyhood acquaintance of Stoyte and the only person who did not tease Stoyte for being fat, he can interpret Stoyte’s character for Pordage. A person who provides decent shelter for the migrant workers while also trying to show them how they are in some measure responsible for their own plight, he exhibits the two virtues Huxley regards as important: understanding and compassion. As Peter’s mentor, he expresses in several long conversations the ideas which, for Huxley, were probably the main reason for writing this novel.

Critical Context

Huxley began his long and productive career by writing witty, epigrammatic novels satirizing the bright young intellectuals and hedonists of England of the 1920’s; he ended it searching, through Eastern religions and efforts at the expansion of consciousness, for a mystical vision of truth. Throughout his career, he was as much a writer of essays as of novels, and toward the end of his life, he turned more and more to nonfiction as the appropriate medium for the expression of his ideas.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan combines these two tendencies in Huxley’s writing. His move to California in 1937 opened up for him a new field for satire: One can easily imagine that Pordage’s astonishment at the frequently bizarre contradictions of the culture of Southern California directly reflects Huxley’s own experience. At the same time, Propter’s extended conversations represent Huxley’s own search for truth through mysticism. In this novel, the sometimes contradictory impulses toward satire and toward mysticism work well together; Pordage’s awareness of the absurd and crass materialism of Southern California complements Propter’s insight that time and craving are the sources of evil. Thus the novel, in spite of its varied content and long stretches of philosophical conversation, attains a degree of unity that many of Huxley’s other novels do not.

On the other hand, Huxley’s satirical manner and mystical doctrine prevent his aspiring to what novels are most often praised for: a compassionate and insightful portrayal of convincing characters struggling with the real concerns of life. Huxley seems aware of this objection and answers it in the novel by having Propter maintain that when literature accepts the usual human aspirations, it helps “to perpetuate misery by explicitly or implicitly approving the thoughts and feelings and practices which could not fail to result in misery.” Satire, then, is “more deeply truthful” and “much more profitable” than tragedy. The only problem is that most satirists are not prepared “to carry their criticism of human values far enough.” This is, presumably, what Huxley seeks to do in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

Bibliography

Bowering, Peter. Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels, 1969.

Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, 1972.

Holmes, Charles M. Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, 1970.

May, Keith. Aldous Huxley, 1972.

Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003.

Watts, Harold J. Aldous Huxley, 1969.