Crome Yellow

I was a huge fan of Aldoux Huxley when I was in high school. Of course, the first of his books I read was Brave New World. I thought of it as the flip side of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and where I found Orwell somewhat depressing, Huxley's vision of the future struck a chord. (It turns out they were both prophetic, but that's material for another post.) After reading BNW I went on to other Huxley works in a similar vein: Ape and Essence, The Genius and the Goddess, and Island. All of these were later books; Island was published in 1962, shortly before I discovered it, and not long before Huxley died on November 22, 1963, a date that would be remembered for a very different reason. The next Sunday I donated flowers at my church in Huxley's memory, something that probably would have amused him. It certainly did not amuse the members of my church, who thought a memorial to John Kennedy would have been more appropriate.

My youthful passion for Huxley endured a while longer. The next book of his I read was The Doors of Perception (1954), which had been inspired by his continuing search for enlightenment and his very early experiments with psychedelics. No question about it, so far as I and my friends were concerned, Huxley was hip. But with the passing of time and the coming of more serious pursuits, both in literature and in life, my interest in Huxley began to wane. I did manage to pick up some of his earlier novels (some in first editions), but when I discovered that they were not what I expected, I put them aside and moved on to other authors. In time I realized that Huxley was not really a very good writer of fiction, however much I admired his analysis of human nature. Basically, his books are extended lectures or sermons. He was more a preacher than a novelist.

And so when I decided to go back and take a look at Huxley in his youth, starting with his first novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1921, I brought along with me some considerable baggage from my own youth. And I have to admit that Crome Yellow was pretty much what I expected. It's a country house novel, a popular genre of English fiction, which was experiencing another revival in those years just prior to and after World War I. Huxley's hero, Denis Stone (a young and very innocent poet hopelessly in love with the daughter of the current owner of Crome), spends a few frustrating days at the great house and encounters several familiar English types. What struck me most about the book was Huxley's tendency to break his novel into a number of set pieces, some of which merely advance his plot (what there is of it). But other chapters come across as rehearsals for his later works, as his characters examine human psychology and predict a future for human kind when children will be born in test tubes and raised to join specific social groups destined either to rule or to work for society. It isn't quite yet a vision of alphas, betas, and deltas, Brave New World would not appear for another decade, but those implications are clearly already there in Huxley's own imagination.

They say that the youthful Huxley, fresh from Balliol and a young teacher of French at his old public school, Eton, wasn't very good, particularly as a disciplinarian. But according to Cyril Connelly he had an influence on his students, who included, as well as Connelly, Eric Blair (George Orwell) and others of their set, who were impressed by Huxley's love and knowledge of literature, especially that then being written by his contemporaries. Crome Yellow has a certain appeal: its satire is amusing, and Huxley captures something of the aimlessness and yearning of postwar English youth. He also skewers some of the contemporary fascinations, with spiritualism for example, that appear in other books from that period or a little later, including Anthony Powell's. In fact, Crome Yellow seems almost a sort of primer for Powell's early fiction, particularly From a View to a Death, Powell's own go at country house satire.

But I think, since I don't have a copy of Antic Hay handy at the moment, I will leave Huxley for a time and move on to Evelyn Waugh. More of this later.