Crome Yellow
by Aldous Huxley
Summary
Denis Stone, a young poet, spends a summer at a country house party at Crome, mostly failing to say the right thing to Anne Wimbush, his hostess's niece, whom he loves without ever quite managing to tell her so, while she drifts instead toward the more confident artist Gombauld. Huxley builds the novel around the party's talk rather than its plot, letting each of Crome's assorted guests, a mystic, a scientist obsessed with eugenic theories, an old family historian, expound a pet theory that the novel quietly lets fall apart under its own weight. Denis's own attempts to declare himself to Anne keep collapsing into overthinking and bad timing, and after a final failed opportunity he arranges to be called home on invented urgent family business, departing on the very train that brought him at the novel's start, having gained nothing and changed almost nothing about himself in the process.
Huxley lets the comedy of manners carry real intellectual weight without ever losing its lightness, and the novel reads briskly, almost entirely through conversation, its wit doing the work that plot would normally carry in a more conventional social novel. One guest's throwaway prophecy about children someday raised in incubators, engineered from birth into an impersonal, conditioned future, reads now as a direct preview of the ideas Huxley would expand eleven years later into Brave New World.
Huxley modeled Crome closely on Garsington Manor, the real country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who sat for the character of Priscilla Wimbush; the philosopher Bertrand Russell reportedly informed the character Scogan, and the painter Mark Gertler informed Gombauld. This was Huxley's first published novel, written during the summer of 1921 in Forte dei Marmi, Italy.
Historical Context & Significance
Britain already had two book prizes in 1921, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, both founded in 1919, and neither went to this debut satire: the Tait Black for 1921 went to Walter de la Mare's Memoirs of a Midget and the Hawthornden to Romer Wilson's The Death of Society. Chatto and Windus published Crome Yellow in Britain that November, with George H. Doran issuing the American edition the following year. H. L. Mencken praised the author's shrewdness and impudence while questioning whether the loosely plotted book even qualified as a novel, and F. Scott Fitzgerald described it as something too ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony.
Huxley published nearly fifty books across five decades, was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times, and won only one book prize, the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for After Many a Summer, never one for Brave New World, which grew directly out of ideas first sketched here in miniature through the character Scogan's prophecies. The Spectator's contemporary description of the book as a Cubist Peacock, situating it within Thomas Love Peacock's older tradition of the country house novel of ideas, has stuck as a fair account of what Huxley was doing with the form.