Crome Yellow

Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley's first novel.  When published in 1921, it was regarded as a a smart, and "modern" book.  Huxley was funny, a satirist, and an iconoclast. Along with his youthful essays of earlier years, Crome Yellow established Aldous Huxley as "modern"n, a purveyor of new ideas, and a dynamiter of Victorian morals.  What strikes me about the book, one hundred years after it was written, was its humor and even basic good nature--how infrequently good humor and hilarity are put to such good use--so few satirists are kindhearted.

The protagonist is Denis Stone, a young man who is a Huxley self-portrait, one of many of these self-portraits that developed over time in many of his books. The other characters in Crome Yellow were based on urbane personalities of the day, England postwar. The physical setting is a country home, the residence of  Lady Ottoline Morrel, a culturati of the time who gathered around her a smart set.  The book was appreciated by critics.  Scott Fitzgerald and H.L Menken, the latter the opinion maker of the day from his perch at the Baltimore Sun, remarked favorably on Crome Yellow.

The story starts with Denis traveling via train to the Wimbush home, lamenting the time he should instead be spending writing poetry. He laments his manque genius--what greatness he should be achieving. Once at Chrome, he is greeted lackadaisically, to his disappointment, by the host, Ms. Wimbush, the portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell. When first met she is intently losing money betting, using horoscope signs, on horse raises, a process, Denis wryly thinks, that must in her view be so complicated that it is not surprising it does not work. The mild Henry Wimbush, her bland and mild-mannered husband, spends his days records the long history of the manor, particularly the ancient Roman wood plumbing. 

The week at the retreat is marked by romance, thwarted desire, comic digressions, and dalliances between the youthful characters, in a Bloomsbury type atmosphere.  Scogan, ever cynical, is based on Bertrand Russell.    Nicely included in the group are some poseurs who lend comic relief to the high-minded antics of the others.

The book describes a time that was unusual in its dynamic intensity, and possibility of change--the 20s. That era, full of artful and self-focussed characters who, in that period between wars had the leisure and charged milieu to develop new ideas, was one that makes this a particularly engaging book. Also, Huxley describes some very real psychological insights that I have seldom seen reified before in writing. One is the sense of lost time in adolescents, the feeling that opportunity and achievement are passing them by as they live an ordinary life, and the other is the sense of ontological insecurity described by RD Laing in the "Divided Self."

Worth reading, and free online.

Damon LaBarbera, PC, FL