The Life of the Mind and the Importance of the Bedchamber in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

One of the greatest comic novels in the English language is At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the first published novel of Irish author Flann O’Brien. It is a metafictional joke of epic breadth and density. The title itself appears entirely unfathomable and unhelpful to the first-time reader; however, it is a simple literal translation of an Irish place name, Snámh Dá Éan. “Snámh” is a common Irish word most often translated as “swim” but in the context of a place name it denotes a ford or river crossing. Snámh Dá Éan, “the ford of the two birds”, is a real place, a ford over the River Shannon which is associated in Irish mythology with the mad king Sweeney, an important character in the novel.

If the title is not as tricky as it sounds, the opening of the book is more so. It begins with the most apparently straightforward of markers: “CHAPTER ONE”. This is reassuring but it is only on rereading that one realises the work is not divided into chapters and this is the only chapter heading in the whole book. “CHAPTER ONE”, then, is a joke at the reader’s expense.

The opening sentence of the novel is worth lingering on. Though I don’t remember seeing it in lists of best opening sentences in English novels, it is very striking and immediately establishes the singularity and precision of O’Brien’s style, and introduces several themes of the novel:

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

Paperview, 2005, 1

Flann O’Brien 1911-1966

The language here is not conventionally literary, rather it is absurdly formal and precise. The first detail, relating to the amount of chewing time provided by the bread he has eaten, takes the book out of the realm of conventional literary preoccupations and into that of a narrator whose attitude to his own bodily processes is marked by distance and calculation. There is a distinctly alien or robotic feel to the narrator’s reflections and observations, and this is heightened by the fact that he remains nameless to the reader throughout.

Having eaten the amount of bread specified, the narrator “withdrew his powers of sensory perception”. This brings in a key theme of the novel: the life of the mind as opposed to that of the body and the apparent impossibility of fully taking part in both. The second sentence makes apparent the reason for the narrator’s mental abstraction:

I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. (1)

Throughout the book, this subordination of the empirical to the intellectual, specifically literary activities, is explicitly stated.

This dichotomy of sensual v. literary brings to mind one of O’Brien’s major influences: Aldous Huxley. A couple of pages in, the narrator notes that in the bedroom of his uncle’s house where he lodges, he keeps a small collection of books “ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A Huxley, the eminent English writer” (3). O’Brien’s debt to Joyce is well known, and it is rare to read an article on At Swim without reference to Joyce. The Huxley influence is much less discussed.

Huxley became a household name in the 1920s for a series of novels which were social satires with elements of novels of ideas. Later in his career, the ideas took precedence and his books became less novelistic, even those that were nominally novels. Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), created a significant stir on first publication and set the tone for his early work. It has been described as “the brightest and wittiest of Huxley’s books” (Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, Kindle, loc 2635), and gives perhaps a better indication of the reasons for Huxley’s immense popularity and influence among his contemporaries than the now more famous Brave New World (1932).

The narrator of Crome Yellow, Dennis Stone, is reminiscent of that of At Swim. Dennis, too, is an intellectual young man. I have quoted the opening of Crome elsewhere, but here it is again. It relates Dennis’ experiences on a train:

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, too, is consciously making a choice to renounce the sensual realm. Once he sits down in the train, his first action is to close his eyes to the outside world. Then he begins to reflect that he could be writing a perfect poem or reading an illuminating book before the smell of the dusty cushions intrude and create in him a feeling of disgust. All sensuality is tiresome or disgusting to Dennis, and he tries throughout the novel to escape from life into ideas, often failing in a semi-comic manner.

This same sensual disgust is a feature of At Swim. For the narrator of the novel, the everyday world he hates and wishes to flee is represented by the uncle he lives with, a resolutely unintellectual middle-class, middle-aged man whose worldview is reduced to a series of cliches about the value of work and the vice of idleness. There is a revealing episode halfway through the novel when the narrator is observing his uncle interact with his similarly bourgeois friend from the Rathmines and Rathgar operatic society, Mr. Corcoran:

Suddenly [Mr. Corcoran] sneezed, spattering his clothing with a mucous discharge from his nostrils. As my uncle hurried to his assistance, I felt my gorge rise. I retched slightly, making a noise with my throat similar to that utilized by persons in the article of death.

[…]

I went to my room and lay prostrate on my bed, endeavouring to recover my composure.

[…]

Such was the degree of my emotional disturbance that I walked down to the centre of the town without adverting to my surroundings and without a predetermined destination. (108)

The narrator’s response is clearly disproportionate. A poorly guarded sneeze leads him into a state of “emotional disturbance”, one of very few admissions of deep feeling in the novel. Like Huxley in the opening lines of Crome, O’Brien uses the metaphor of the gorge rising. It reveals what all of the narrator’s previous interactions with his uncle have suggested, a deep and unbridgeable fissure between the intellectual and literarily ambitious narrator and his working-class uncle. He never tries to analyse his feelings or his difficult relationship with his uncle, just as he never gives any personal or family background. He merely presents their various run-ins, in which the language they use is jarringly different. The one pedantically formal and exact; the other colloquial, conventional and full of trite moralising. True communication is impossible.

In the aftermath of the sneeze episode, the narrator’s retreat to his bed when he is upset points to the importance of that article throughout the novel. The narrator rows consistently with his uncle about the inordinate time he spends in bed. “Aren’t you very fond of your bedroom now” his uncle asks with exasperation. He is, and justifies it in the narration, referring to “the tender trestle of my bed’ and “the envelope of my bed”. Later, another character of an intellectuo-literary disposition, one Byrne, offers a lofty panegyric to beds and sleep. An opposing view appears in the dark and disorienting final passage of the novel, attributed to a Professor Du Fernier of the Sorbonne:

It is of importance the most inestimable, he writes, that for mental health there should he walking and not overmuch of the bedchamber. (246)

That is bad news for our narrator, for whom bed is the locus of reflection, ideas and the life of the mind. It is freedom from the repulsive vulgarity of the other. The narrator has cast off the world even more drastically than Dennis Stone in Huxley’s novel. The results of such a course of action are uncertain, and may hint at encroaching darkness and madness. All we know for sure from reading At Swim is that they are funny, to a degree perhaps unparalleled in literature.

“One huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine”: Carlyle, Existentialism and Schizophrenia

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34) was one of the classic coming-of-age texts of Victorian Britain. The protagonist, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, based to a significant extent on Carlyle himself, endures a long period of aimlessness and ostracisation, which he calls the “Everlasting No”, before finding a sort of God and embracing life in the “Everlasting Yea”. One of the most powerful sections of the book is the description of the Everlasting No. This occurs in Teufelsdröckh’s mid-20s, a time when he has no vocation, no money, no friends, has been unlucky in love and has renounced the faith in which he was brought up. Carlyle provides a searing account of the existential despair Teufelsdröckh undergoes:

It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. 

[…]

A feeble unit in the middle of a threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness. Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living: was there, in the wide world, any true bosom I could press trustfully to mine? O Heaven, No, there was none! I kept a lock upon my lips: why should I speak much with that shifting variety of so-called Friends, in whose withered, vain and too-hungry souls Friendship was but an incredible tradition? In such cases, your resource is to talk little, and that little mostly from the Newspapers. Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death!

Sartor Resartus, Bk. II, Ch. 7

Men and women became figures or automatons to Teufelsdröckh, the universe is a huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, he has not even the consolation of a devil on whom to blame the state of his life. His angst and despair is not religious but existential. It is the angst of a non-religious age, when God is dead and leaves a gaping void.

Carlyle’s description is an early and particularly powerful articulation of the existentialist dilemma. Sartor Resartus is sometimes considered an early existentialist text, though perhaps not as often as it should be.

It is also the ultimate anti-poetic vision, the aesthetic nightmare par excellence, cited as such by Aldous Huxley in an appendix to Heaven and Hell. Huxley’s essay, a sequel to The Doors of Perception, is about the artistic vision, which he likens to a mescalin trip. While Huxley has to take mescalin to heighten the sense and, in his phraseology, lift the veil, the artist – Blake, Vuillard and so on – can do it without external stimulant. He goes on to note that a close relation to the negative artistic vision is the schizophrenic:

But for […] the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal – an intense electric glare without a
shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to [the schizophrenic] only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Vintage, 2004), p. 89.

This schizophrenic, anti-artistic vision Huxley finds in Van Gogh, Kafka and in Sartor Resartus (which he discusses in Appendix VIII, p. 124 of the essay) and it is the Hell of the essay’s title, identical to that experienced by the individual on a bad mescalin or lysergic acid trip (p. 90).

Carlyle’s passage then, is not only a precursor of existentialism, but an early description of both the bad trip and the schizophrenic state. Indeed, R.D. Laing’s famous The Divided Self (1959), a detailed and ambitious investigation of schizophrenia from a combined clinical and philosophical (specifically, existentialist) standpoint, includes excerpts which bring Teufelsdrockh strongly to mind. Laing, too, cites Kafka as the prose artist of existentialism and schizophrenia, though not Carlyle. Laing refers to one patient who declared herself to be “frightened of everything, ‘even of the sky'” (Penguin, 2010, p. 59); another put it that she felt herself to be “scorched under the glare of a black sun” (p. 112). For both the threat is truly existential, emanating from the universe itself. Laing documented that schizophrenics experienced others as automatons, but this, he contended, was different only in degree and not in kind to how sane people did:

Most relationships are based on some partial depersonalizing tendency in so far as one treats the other not in terms of any awareness of who he or what he might be in himself but as virtually an android robot playing a role in a large machine in which one too may be acting yet another part.

(p. 47)

R.D. Laing, from here

Laing felt that schizophrenia was a particularly 20th-century condition: not an illness, but a response to an insane world. Similarly, existentialism was the 20th-century philosophy. Reading about Teufelsdröckh’s Everlasting No in Sartor Resartus, however, we feel that Carlyle lived the 20th century before it happened, and that he articulated a form of being that was well before his time. It was so far before its time that it has been almost forgotten, subsumed by later articulations of that experience. Yet in Teufelsdröckh’s progress we find a powerful precursor to the existential anguish that was widely experienced in the 20th century and that is still relevant today in the perhaps even more anxious age we live in.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and the Sage Tradition

I wrote in my last post on Crome Yellow about how Aldous Huxley´s novels were a large influence on 1920s and 30s literature. Now, however, the only one of his novels that is widely read is Brave New World (1932), a classic text of the dystopian genre which is often included in science fiction collections.

Such categorisations emphasise the forward-looking elements of the novel, and, indeed, it is set in the future – AF 632 (After Ford) to be precise, which equates to some 600 years after the novel´s publication. In several respects, however, Brave New World owes a great deal to the 19th-century sage tradition and many of the preconceptions underpinning it are rooted in sage writers such as Thomas Carlyle.

The job of the sage, of course, was to tell the future by examining the present:

The Past is a dim indubitable fact: the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For the Present holds it in both the whole Past and the whole Future;—as the Life-tree Igdrasil, wide-waving, many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars; and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree!

(Past and Present, 1843, Bk. I, Ch. VI)

The dystopian novelist has a different but closely related task: to use an imagined future to pass judgement on the tendencies and mores of the present. Like the sage, the dystopian novelist devotes his intellectual energies to teasing out the links between past and future and working out the destiny of his society. A sage like Carlyle was constantly preaching disaster for his society, and this pessimism is also, by definition, characteristic of the dystopian novelist.

The first principle of the 19th-century sage stance was a sense that the world was becoming mechanised in the wake of the industrial revolution, and this posed a threat to humanity, body, mind and soul:

[L]et us observe how the mechanical genius of our time has diffused itself into quite other provinces. Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.

[…]

Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

(Signs of the Times, 1829)

The sage, then, was a specifically post-industrial figure, one who saw the effect the mechanisation and systematisation of society was having on the individual consciousness. Man was not just mechanical in the way he used his hand, that is, the repetitive physical work he undertook in an industrial workplace; he was also growing mechanical in head and in heart.

The correlative of the industrial revolution in philosophical terms was utilitarianism, which Carlyle equated with mechanical modes of thinking. The utilitarian idea of arranging society and collective human existence around the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number was anathema to Carlyle:

Does not the whole wretchedness […] of
man’s ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that
unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls
‘happy’? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his
head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and
divine laws ought to be ‘happy.’ His wishes, the pitifulest
whipster’s, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest
whipster’s, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment,
impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be
happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people
clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things?

(Past and Present, Bk. III, Ch. IV)

The concept of happiness, then, central to how we have experienced the world since the 18th century, is, for Carlyle, deeply flawed.

Sagely stances such as the above are similarly central to Brave New World. The most basic element of Huxley´s dystopia is that it is industrialised to the maximum extent. Industrialism has moved on from being an organising and productive principle to being a religion, hence the After Ford annual chronology. The inhabitants of Huxley´s World State are truly mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand – they do not just perform mechanical work, but they literally worship mechanism. The most popular oaths in the society are Dear Ford/Our Ford, playing on ¨Dear Lord/Our Lord¨. And, equally pointedly, the iconography of the crucifixion has been replaced by the T (as in the pioneering model-T Ford): ¨All crosses had their tops cut and became T´s¨ (loc 1260).

In line with this attitude, all things are under the purview of science. Individuals are carefully constructed through genetic engineering and relentless conditioning. There is a College of Emotional Engineering and there is the administration of drugs, notably soma, to make sure everyone is in a constant state of placid contentment. As Lenina Crowne says, ¨Everybody´s happy nowadays¨ (loc 1720). The brave new world is, paradoxically, dystopic yet happy. People are happy and they have no choice but to be so.

At times, indeed, the descriptions of the happiness of some of the inhabitants is disturbingly convincing:

Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium.

loc 1653

What then, one is tempted to ask, is the problem with all this happiness? The answer given by Bernard Marx relates to the erasure of self that takes place under conditions of chemically induced happiness: ¨I´d rather be myself,¨ he sullenly announces. ¨Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly¨ (loc 1694). Everybody – almost – is happy but individuality and free will are absent, prompting Bernard to ask the question:

¨[W]hat would it be like if I could, if I were free – not enslaved by my conditioning[?]¨

loc 1717

In Bernard Marx, Huxley offers a Carlylean vision of the embattled individual, the last bastion of strength and vision, fighting against an all-encompassing system:

[H]e stood alone embattled against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance.

loc 1816

It is the possibility for such a self-conception that is lost in the world of soma dreams. Bernard is the last fighter for individual consciousness against the somatic happiness.

In a significant passage that is internally focalised on Mustapha Mond, a high-ranking official in the World State, there is the most precise articulation on what the State works to suppress and exclude, and it is the idea that:

the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

loc 2802

What that involves is not clear in the novel, but reading later Huxley works like the essay The Doors of Perception gives a clue to the answers he settled on: they involved mind-altering drugs. The ending Brave New World, however, makes it clear that, at this stage, Huxley does not hold out any hope for Bernard Marx and his individualistic ilk. Further, it is not certain that he finds Bernard´s position worth saving.

That is perhaps the most jarring element of Brave New World for a contemporary reader: eugenics and mind-control notwithstanding, it is not always clear that Huxley is really describing a dystopia. Sometimes, he seems to be drifting towards acquiescence in and even celebration of the coming world of drug-induced happiness and ¨achieved consummation¨. He gives space to the sagely tradition of exalting the individual, but it is not where his priorities lie. Huxley, in this novel, is not taking on the mantle of the sage. He does, however, try it on before tentatively casting it aside and hedging his bets. If Huxley saw a possible or even theoretical better world than the hyper-industrialised World State of AF 632, its lineaments or underpinning ideals are not at all clear from this disorienting novel.

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.