Mr. Huxley on Longevity
After Many a Summer. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) After Many a Summer is in certain ways a reversion to Mr. Huxley's earliest habit as a novelist. Its setting is that of the earliest books—a country house, more fantastic than its European counterparts only to the degree that becomes the home of an American, instead of an English, eccentric ; the grouping of the characters, positioned round a middle-aged English man of letters of the Chelifer type (though more augustly employed), is familiar ; and much of the book (in- cluding the whole of the first ninety pages) is animated by the sophisticated, ironic gaiety that was the dominant tone of all Mr. Huxley's books from Crome Yellow to Those Barren Leaves, and was only dispossessed by the more mordant wit of Point Counter Point. A great deal of it is consequently much more entertaining than either of Mr. Huxley's later books. Unfortunately, the entertainment is frequently interrupted.
The characters in Mr. Huxley's novels have nearly always lacked reality. In the earlier books, whether amiable or repel- lent, obvious or freakish, they derived their vitality from the wit and cynicism expended on them by a creator whose atti- tude towards them was as detached as that of a conjurer towards his toys. Later, when Mr. Huxley abandoned his position of intellectual detachment and made satire alternate with sermons, his characters' lack of reality became even more apparent: the characters introduced to illustrate other than cynical points of view possessed interest not because they had a personal existence on an imaginative plane, but simply because of Mr. Huxley's expository skill. They were the creations in fact, not of a novelist, but of a tractarian. In this book the characters divide themselves sharply into two categories ; on the one hand, those (like Jeremy Pordage, the man of letters) representing attitudes which Mr. Huxley does not wish to defend and about which he permits himself to be ironic, or a simpler butt, Mr. Stoyte, the American multi- millionaire, with his fantastic surroundings, his infinite gulli- bility, and his terror of death ; on the other hand, those like Mr. Propter, who is the ventriloquist's dummy for Mr. Huxley's own philosophy. With the characters of the first category Mr. Huxley displays his customary destructive skill. With Mr. Propter, as a character, he displays little skill of any kind. His failure with him is a matter of proportion, for while there can be two opinions of the interest of what he says, the effect of his monologues, which occur much too frequently and at infinitely too great length, is to make the book periodically static, and to destroy the effect of what has preceded them. It does not matter that his philosophical lectures would not be credible in a person in real life ; it does matter that they have the effect, not of elements in a work of fiction, but of a series of casual tracts.
There remains one character with one foot bafflingly in each category. The private life and character of Dr. Obispo. Mr. Stoyte's domestic physician, is gaily and trenchantly satirised. But Dr. Obispo is engaged on experiments on the nature of longevity, about which, exchanging biological terms for those of metaphysics, he is permitted to talk almost as interminably (though not quite as grittily) as Mr. Propter. Jeremy Pordage makes his contribution to scientific progress by discovering in the course of literary research that Obispo's diagnosis had been anticipated, a century ago, by an English- nobleman, who had extended his span of life by eating the intestines of carp. The sequel to this discovery—Dr. Obispo's immediate descent on the last recorded residence of the fifth Earl of Gonister—gives Mr. Huxley the pretext for a descrip- tive passage of quite remarkable horror. It requires a biologist to review Mr. Huxley's treatment of this particular theme. Either his final scene is an imaginative illustration of a theory in whose validity he believes, or he has bolstered up the book with pages of bogus science to make his final horror scene seem plausible. Lacking the biological equipment to judge between these alternatives, one can only say that the clirmx strikes one as grimly farcical, and the preliminary science
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