Crome Yellow

Crome Yellow Review

Aldous Huxley was twenty-seven years old when he published Crome Yellow in 1921, and the novel has the quality of a first novel by someone who has already been paying very close attention. It is a country house novel — a form with a long English pedigree, from Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall (which it consciously echoes) to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (which it partially inspired) — and it does exactly what the form requires: it gathers a group of people together, removes them from the pressures of ordinary life, and watches what they say and fail to do.

The setting is Crome, a house in the English countryside belonging to the Wimbushes, and the visitor is Denis Stone, a young poet who has come for the summer and is hopelessly in love with Anne Wimbush, who is not hopelessly in love with him. The plot, to the extent there is one, is Denis’s failure to do anything about this. The actual interest of the novel is everyone else: the obsessive Mr Wimbush, who has spent decades writing a history of the Crome estate; the mystic Scogan, who delivers lectures on the rational future of humanity; the sculptor Gombauld; the larger-than-life Herschensohn; the magnificent Mary Bracegirdle, who has read too much psychology and not yet lived enough life. They talk. They talk at breakfast and after dinner and in the garden and in the library. What they talk about is consistently more interesting than what they do.

The comedy is gentle but precise. Huxley’s targets are not stupid people but intelligent ones — people who have perfectly good ideas about how life should be lived and are incapable of living that way. Denis knows exactly why he can’t speak to Anne; the knowledge doesn’t help. Scogan’s lectures on the rational organisation of human affairs are brilliant and slightly monstrous and entirely disconnected from how he actually treats people. This is Huxley’s central joke, and it is one he would return to in darker forms throughout his career.

What makes Crome Yellow a genuine achievement rather than just a promising debut is the quality of the writing. Huxley’s prose at twenty-seven already has the compression and precision that would characterise all his best work: no sentence is loose, every observation is shaped. The portrait of a particular stratum of English intellectual life in the years just after the First World War is incidental but accurate — these are people who have survived catastrophe by not quite acknowledging it, and whose brilliant conversation is partly a way of not looking at what happened.