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After Many A Summer by Aldous Huxley (view source)
Revision as of 15:11, 28 August 2020
, 15:11, 28 August 2020no edit summary
On the other hand, Huxley's lead into America as he drives Pordage from the airport to the estate, listing the sites and they flash by the window, the sheer incongruity of food and liquor adverts interspersed with religious exhortations in much similar vein, has become our archetypal shorthand for a certain kind of American-ness. Stylistically, brilliant – especially as it's brash reality jars against the already evident pomposity of the Englishman struggling to comprehend it.
Is that enough to drive the book's 'classic' status? A simple mockery of consumerist extreme in a time of global hardship? No. I think the point is that you have to take the book on its own terms. I'm sure others may disagree, but to me those terms are that on the one hand, it is a novel: it has to be, because it is written by a novelist, playing on his fame. There is indeed a wicked narrative that could have stood alone, and might have had a more popular impact had it done so.
On the other hand, and it seems to me that this was Huxley's primary objective, it is a discourse. The whole set-up is really an excuse for Huxley to explore world-views through the long and involved conversations between the protagonists.
The difference between them is that Pordage thinks that is a realistic proposition, if not the only real proposition, whereas Propter takes the wider view of the world and acknowledges that it is probably impossible. Which is no reason not to try.
There is a great deal of debate about good and evil. Pete's return from the war in Spain is the pretext for arguing the nature of war, the worsening global position would have been clear to Huxley as he wrote and by the time of publication , the conflict was under wayunderway.
Where God comes into all of this, naturally, cannot be ignored.
But I still say it's no reason not to try.
From politics the topic moves on to the nature of love, and lust (in all its forms) generated by some of the findings in the Hauberk papers (just in case you're wondering what any of this has to do with the plot). We should also however remember the time-slot for this. People of my generation might tout the view that emancipation (of women, of spirit) didn’t happen until the sixties, but in essence , much more progress was made in the interwar years. Women weren't giving up the economic freedoms granted them of necessity during the Great War, and on the back of that , they were exercising choices in other areas too. Free-thinking, and maybe even free-love, were already on the agenda. The Catholic Virginia struggles with this, but in Huxley's exploration of her feelings and responses, the shrine curtain tends to stay resolutely closed.
And from love onto what makes great literature… and on…
So he provides one. It's all a bit too pat. A bit too neat.
Oh yes, and then again: he is a dysopiandystopian, so he has to tie in the scientific ideas which he's laid as a breadcrumb trail to try and hold the thing together, which takes across the water to the origins of the Hauberk papers, and something nasty lurking…
As a novel , I'm not sure I'd rate After Many a Summer that highly. It doesn’t have the emotion of a Steinbeck as a response to 1930s America.
But as a semi-political tract – it's worth spending some time with, poring over the ideas and wondering how they applied then and how they still apply now.
And as for all the earnest-learning littering the pages, simply smile at it in passing, but only stop to really look if it genuinely catches your eye. It's not more than the pictures on the wall of the faux castle in California, treat it accordingly. If you read it seriously, you'll end up with numerous pages post-it marked as it is, without worrying about the window-dressing.
Another Vintage Classic we can recommend is [[The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood]]. You might also like to try [[Time Must Have A Stop by Aldous Huxley]].
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