Abstract

Huxley in Hollywood

This article focuses on the book "After Many a Summer Dies The Swan," by Aldous Huxley. This is Huxley writing very much in the manner of Huxley, which is to say, in the manner of a twentieth-century Jonathan Swift, with a withering contempt for the human animal. To him, practically everyone is eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, each pushing his puny shoulder against the colossal stone of his own stupidity. The only happy people in his novels are those who live on the completely "animal plane" of appetite and its satisfaction and those who live on the "eternal plane" of stoical realism, forgetful of self, armored against desire. "After Many a Summer" excoriates two human weaknesses: one local and specific, the other more or less universal. The local foible is the U.S. motion picture industry.