Crome Yellow
Authors: Aldous Huxley
Contents
Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MALCOLM BRADBURY
Denis Stone, a naïve young poet, is invited to stay at Crome, a country house renowned for its gatherings of âbright young things'. His hosts, Henry Wimbush and his exotic wife Priscilla, are joined by a party of colourful guests whose intrigues and opinions ensure Denis's stay is a memorable one. First published in 1921,
Crome Yellow
was Aldous Huxley's acclaimed debut novel.
See also:
Point Counter Point
Novels
Point Counter Point
Antic Hay
Those Barren Leaves
Brave New World
Eyeless in Gaza
After Many a Summer
Time Must Have a Stop
Ape and Essence
The Genius and the Goddess
Island
Short Stories
Limbo
Mortal Coils
Little Mexican
Two or Three Graces
Brief Candles
The Gioconda Smile
(Collected Short Stories)
Biography
Grey Eminence
The Devils of Loudun
Travel
Along the Road
Jesting Pilate
Beyond the Mexique Bay
Plays
The Burning Wheel
Jonah
The Defeat of Youth
Leda
Verses and a Comedy
The Gioconda Smile
Essays and Belles Lettres
On the Margin
Proper Studies
Do What You Will
Music at Night
Texts and Pretexts
The Olive Tree
Ends and Means
The Art of Seeing
The Perennial Philosophy
Science, Liberty and Peace
Themes and Variations
The Doors of Perception
Adonis and the Alphabet
Heaven and Hell
Brave New World Revisited
Literature and Science
The Human Situation
Moksha
For Children
The Crows of Pearblossom
Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel,
Crome Yellow
(1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by
Antic Hay
(1923),
Those Barren Leaves
(1925) and
Point Counter Point
(1928) â bright, brilliant satires of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy but in the 1930s he moved to Sanary near Toulon.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, Huxley's work took on a more sombre tone in response to the confusion of society which he felt to be spinning dangerously out of control. His great novels of ideas, including his most famous work
Brave New World
(published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material âprogress') and the pacifist novel
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as
Music at Night
(1931) and
Ends and Means
(1937).
In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (
Time Must Have a Stop
, 1944 and
Island
, 1962) and non-fiction (
The Perennial Philosophy,
1945,
Grey Eminence
, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience,
The Doors of Perception
, 1954.)
Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.
Aldous Huxley
With an Introduction by
Malcolm Bradbury
And a Biographical Introduction by
David Bradshaw
Aldous Huxley was still just twenty-seven when he published
Crome Yellow
, his first novel to reach print. It stays the most light-hearted, and in some ways the most purely brilliant, of his early novels â the four books in which, with wit, malice and anxiety, he captured the intellectual, social and emotional flavour of the unhappy Twenties. This was the decade when fiction went modern, pained by the terrible crisis and slaughter of the war, then to be followed by an age of apocalyptic unease, sexual confusion, intellectual doubt, changing gender roles, and an awareness among the young that the age of their elders, which meant not just the Victorian but the Edwardian and Georgian ages, was somehow over and done. It was a time for young voices, for new styles and changed intellectual attitudes, for the self-conscious modern mood itself. Part of that modernity was a spirit of biting and ironic comedy, and some of the best novelists of the Twenties â Wyndham Lewis, Ronald Firbank, Michael Arlen, Evelyn Waugh â expressed their modernity in a sharp and condensed comic spirit that has shaped the fortunes of modern fiction ever since: far more so, perhaps, than the work of writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who represent the vaster aesthetic experiment of the same decade.
Crome Yellow
, which came out in 1921, was a youthful book, and it hit the Twenties themes and spirit early. So it was read with fascination right through the decade, and influenced a good deal of the fiction of that period, not least that of Evelyn Waugh. It was a bitter comedy for a darkened and pessimistic time, a time conscious of its own intellectual and emotional sterility; but what carries the book along is the lively wit, deep intelligence and vigorous style of its youthful author. Huxley was not descended from one of the great British intellectual clans for nothing. T.H. Huxley, the noted scientist and supporter of scientific evolution,
most remembered now for his remark that he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop, was his grandfather. His father, Leonard, was a writer who also edited the
Cornhill
magazine, and by his marriage united the Huxleys with the Arnolds. His brother, Julian, became not only one of the great modern zoologists but the first Director-General of UNESCO. Huxley had a burden of intellectual and moral duties on his shoulders, and the possibility that apes and essence were in conflict, that ideas and actions never quite united, that mind and sexuality were at war with each other, that the transition from the age of religion to the age of modern science might lead not to utopia but universal anarchy, concerned him greatly.
But the gloomy, anti-utopian prophecies that became part of his fiction emerged rather later, in works like
Brave New World
(1932); in his early novels, they are largely mocked or teased.
Crome Yellow
is the young Huxley at his brightest and most buoyant. It's a book about ideas and the things that conflict with them or betray them, and owes a lot to the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, those great comedies of playful ideas. It owes most, though, to the turmoil of opinions that passed through an age of evident intellectual transition, sexual disorientation, moral uncertainty, bored idealism. It shows an unwavering delight in conversation, argument, absurd self-knowledge, the endless play of the intellect, even though it implies that ideas are what betray us. That is what makes it one of the most pleasant and delightful of his always brilliant novels, and a masterwork of the Twenties.
The book's feel is original, but its shape is on the surface hardly experimental. A little bit like the kinds of novel that Mr Scogan firmly and satirically mocks in the second chapter, it follows out the fortunes, experiences, artistic pretensions and romantic disappointments of the solemn and self-conscious young poet Denis Stone â twenty-three and agonizingly conscious of the fact â when he joins a summer house party at Crome, that mellow old manor house, set in its âdinted, dimpled, wimpled' and very sexual landscape. The talkative
crème de la crème
of the modern arts and opinion is gathered there under the patronage of Priscilla and Henry Wimbush; many contemporary ideas are aired, and many stories told. It's well known that
Crome owes a good deal to Garsington Manor near Oxford, the residence of the famous patroness, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Garsington and its flamboyant hostess not surprisingly made their way into a good many of the period's novels, not least D.H. Lawrence's
Women in Love
, always to the dismay of the patroness. All this is wonderfully recorded in Miranda Seymour's
Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale
(Hodder, 1992) which portrays Garsington not just as a lively, jealous, sexual hotbed for a consciously self-liberating generation, which included in its numbers Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon and most of the Bloomsburies, but also a clearing-house for some of the liveliest and most radical thinking of the day.
Here, from 1916 onwards, the youthful Huxley, tall, shy, partially-sighted (it was his blindness that kept him out of the war), was a regular visitor, finally marrying one of Ottoline's several protégées. He came to know well the house itself, often sleeping out (like Denis) on the roof, and most of the visitors, who thus provided him with something of the setting and characters for his first novel. It is no doubt relevant that Russell, Mark Gertler, Carrington, Dorothy Brett and the host and hostess themselves provide some hints for his central characters, though this fact was no doubt of more significance, and pain, to the subjects involved than it is to the modern reader. For the fact is that, though there is personal satire involved,
Crome Yellow
, like any good book, easily transcends all its first stimuli. The characters become unmistakeably Huxleyan, just as their world of obsessive ideas becomes the means for the author to analyse a time when chatter does not disguise despair, people live all alone in their own individual worlds of story, and all lives, as Denis comes to see, are parallel straight lines â with Jenny, who is deaf, only âa little bit more parallel than most.'
Crome Yellow
is a modern comedy, a comedy of fresh, vivid ideas. It has âmodern' characters: Mr Scogan, the cynical philosopher, who looks like âone of those extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary'; Gombauld, the modern painter who has been through abstraction and has now come out the other side of it; Mary, the serious virgin with aspirations to sexual release; Anne,
the chilly and doll-like heroine; Mr Barbecue-Smith, the prophet-journalist; and the deaf and observant Jenny. They all have their own narratives and views of life to unfold. Meanwhile the modern reveals itself in other ways, as self-consciousness and despair. As Denis observes, âIn the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising one was miserable, horribly unhappy?' Against the spectacle of ideas, art and beauty, is the world of crude life, rutting, farrowing, going to the slaughter. âI make up a little story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with art and goodness,' Denis tries to explain. âI have to say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the mystical roads to union with the infinite â the ecstacies of drinking, dancing, love-making. As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they're the broad highway to divinity. And to think I'm only just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing!' There is the pervasive sexual unease, always an important Huxley theme; there is the eternal split between ideals and actualities; and there are the comic intimations of apocalypse, as when at the village church the iron-faced Mr Bodiham rebukes and warns his careless parishioners on behalf of the coming Armageddon, whose signs are clear, though the outcome is somehow strangely delayed.