Idealism and Disgust in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921)

In Flann O´Brien’s comic masterwork At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the narrator describes his book collection in his distinctively formal style:

Each of them was generally recognised as indispensable to all who aspire to the nature of contemporary literature and my small collection contained works ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer. (Paperview, 2005, p. 11)

At this time, a knowledge of Huxley’s works was indispensable, and he was both widely read and eminent.  Now, in literary circles he has aged less well than the other author mentioned by O’Brien, James Joyce.  Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is still a significant contribution to the dystopian genre, but as an author he no longer has much recognition, and many of the works that made his name have fallen out of the selective tradition.

Among the semi-forgotten works is his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), the Peacockian satire that made his name.  After reading it, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: ¨I find Huxley, after Beerbohm, the wittiest man now writing in English¨ (Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, Kindle, loc 2644).  The title itself, Huxley wrote, is ¨pleasingly meaningless except in so far as the Peacockian house in which the scene is laid is called Crome” (Murray, loc 2580).

Crome Yellow is a light and witty book, and it is not difficult to see why it appealed to reviewers at the time.  Similarly, its lack of interaction with modernist techniques and its setting in an aristocratic class that was dying out (and that had already been extensively mined for literary material by preceding English authors) help explain why it now seems less relevant than work by Joyce or other contemporaries.

The book is focalized through Dennis Stone, a young man with poetic pretensions who is also desperate for romance, but clueless about it.  One of the primary themes that becomes apparent from the beginning, and that echoes through Huxley’s work, is an opposition between rationality on one side and emotion and sensuality on the other.  This is even prefigured in the character’s name: Stone.  Dennis does not feel the things that other people do, and does not understand the emotions of the other.  Even though he wants to connect, he also wants to avoid messy human interaction.  In his inability to feel normal emotions, he is a stone.

At the beginning of the book, Dennis is on a train journey:

They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which—his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning. (Chapter I)

Dennis’ first action is to close his eyes as he tries to avoid the people around him and close off the sensual world.  This is a typical Huxleian gesture.  Even then, he cannot help sensual disgust, his gorge rising at the smell of the dusty cushions.  This sensual disgust is a major factor in all of Huxley’s protagonists.  At times in later works such as Ape and Essence (1948), this disgust before all sensual existence and before humanity in general is indulged by Huxley to a level which is quite difficult to read and has a fevered quality.  In Crome Yellow, the writing does not quite reach that level, but the difficulty of living in a sensual world is apparent.

While retreating from sense in this opening passage, Dennis takes refuge in literature: pure enjoyment for him involves poetry and books.  In Chapter IV, Dennis diagnoses his own malady: “Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple.  In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.  Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?”  The entire book, then, follows Dennis’ attempts to reproduce the comfort he feels in the world of pure ideas in the much messier world of the senses.

Later in his career, Huxley came to be known for pronouncements about the state of the world and where it was heading.  In Crome Yellow, the greater world barely intrudes.  There is one passage which prefigures Huxley’s later preoccupations:

To-day we are no longer surprised at these things.  The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted.  Since the war we wonder at nothing.  We have created a Caesarean environment and a host of little Caesars has sprung up. (Chapter XVI)

These are the words of Mr. Scogan, who Murray believes to be based on Bertrand Russell, though he also has a tinge of H.G. Wells.  Here, Scogan’s words seem sincere, but as with the novel as a whole, a touch of undermining satire is never far away.  Huxley is not concerned with providing socio-political analysis in Crome Yellow, but in documenting various forms of illogic and absurdity.  Each character is a little island of foibles and cranky notions and they cannot communicate with each other.

Huxley was a member of the war generation.  When he wrote Crome Yellow, the war was a recent memory.  He had spent it as a teacher, exempt from military duty because of his near-blindness.  One does not necessarily think of World War I when one reads the novel, but contemporaries did think of Huxley’s early satires as being “a direct outcome of the mood of dissatisfaction, even despair, by which honest thoughtful young people were seized as they saw the consequences of four years of slaughter”. (Frank Swinnerton, qtd. in Murray, loc. 2961)  From reading Huxley of various periods, I tend to think there was much of Huxley’s mood of despair and misanthropy that was personal to him and that remained in his outlook regardless of political circumstances but the acceptance his harsh outlook found was evidently related to the feelings amongst the war generation.

Even then, there were some who had misgivings.  Julia Huxley, the author’s sister-in-law, said: “One had the feeling that he was almost corrosive… There was something vindictive in those early books.” (Qtd. in Murray, loc. 2741)  Misanthropy runs deep in Crome Yellow.  In retrospect, Huxley’s views can be discerned dimly through Mr. Scogan’s Wellsian tour de force of political theorizing:

“Sanity!” said Mr. Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence. “Sanity—that’s what’s wrong with me and that’s what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you’re old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don’t exist. I am just Vox et praeterea nihil.”

Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. “After all,” he said to himself—“after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he’s already somebody and I’m still only potential…”

“Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,” Mr. Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr. Scogan’s discourse gradually compelled his attention. “Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We’re too sane; we’re merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason—never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory—reason.” (Chapter XXII)

Despair at the madness and unreason of humanity is very Huxleian, yet here the notion is deliberately undercut by Dennis’ trite reflections on romance.  The reader is left amused, intrigued and uncertain. 

Crome Yellow is a vortex of unsettling ideas in a traditional form and setting.  Huxley’s mind roams over many elements of human existence, probing for answers but unable to accept any he is given.  This precarious uncertainty gives it an energy and interest lacking in some of Huxley’s more decidedly theoretical works.  It was Huxley’s uncertainty, rather than his knowledge, that was his gift as a writer.