Crome Yellow

Summary

Picture a young poet on a train, rehearsing the clever things he’ll say when he arrives at the country house where the woman he loves is waiting. He imagines their conversation—his witticisms, her admiring laughter. By the time the train pulls in, he’s scripted the whole encounter.

Then the car arrives to pick him up. And every single brilliant remark evaporates from his mind.

This is Denis Stone, and this is Crome Yellow.

The Setup

Aldous Huxley published Crome Yellow in 1921, when he was twenty-seven years old. It was his first novel, and it announced to the literary world that a new satirist had arrived—one with a gimlet eye for intellectual pretension and the social comedy of the English upper classes.

The novel is set at Crome, a grand country house in the English countryside. The name probably comes from chrome yellow, that bright, almost garish pigment—and there’s something apt about that. The world of Crome is vivid, artificial, a stage set for social performance.

Our hero, if we can call him that, is Denis Stone. He’s a poet, which means he’s read twenty tons of books and has ready-made ideas about everything, but he has no idea how to live. He’s in love with Anne Wimbush, the niece of his hosts, and he’s come to Crome hoping to tell her so.

He will fail, spectacularly.

The Cast

Part of the delight of Crome Yellow is its gallery of grotesques—each guest a specimen of some intellectual or social type, pinned to the page like a butterfly.

There’s Mr. Scogan, a wizened cynic with a head like a bald cat’s. He delivers long, sardonic monologues about the future—predicting, with eerie accuracy, things like state-controlled reproduction and the end of natural childbirth. “In vast state incubators,” he muses, “rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires.”

There’s Mr. Barbecue-Smith, a pompous self-help author who writes by putting himself into trances. “Inspiration!” he tells Denis. “That’s the secret!” He produces three thousand eight hundred words between tea and dinner by simply hypnotizing himself and letting the Infinite flow through him like Niagara. Denis is appalled.

There’s Mary Bracegirdle, an earnest young woman obsessed with psychology, who worries constantly about her “repressions.” She’s read all the books about sex and dreams and is determined not to become a neurotic. Her scenes with Anne, discussing which of the available men she should seduce to avoid becoming a nymphomaniac, are wickedly funny.

There’s Gombauld, a painter—confident, Mediterranean, everything Denis is not. He’s working on a large canvas of a man fallen beneath a horse, all dramatic chiaroscuro. He represents action, virility, the artistic life as lived rather than merely thought about.

And presiding over it all are the Wimbushes: Henry, calm and scholarly, writing a history of Crome and its eccentric inhabitants; and Priscilla, his wife, who reads horoscopes, communes with spirits, and takes the astral plane entirely seriously.

Denis and Anne

At the center of this carousel is Denis, watching it spin, unable to join in. He loves Anne, but he can never find the right moment to tell her. When they walk in the garden together, he talks about books. When they sit on a bench, he quotes poetry. When she says something that might be an invitation, he misses it entirely.

Anne, for her part, treats him like a charming boy—“perfectly sweet in your white trousers,” she tells him, which is not at all what he wants to hear. She’s four years older, which feels like a generation. She sees through him, but not unkindly. She’s waiting, perhaps, for him to become a man. He can’t quite manage it.

The tragedy—and it is a kind of tragedy, though a very small one—is that Denis knows exactly what’s wrong with him. “One should have lived first,” he says, “and then made one’s philosophy to fit life.” But he has it backwards. He’s read all the books, constructed all the theories, and now reality won’t cooperate. Life is messy, embroiled, confusing. Ideas are clean. He prefers ideas.

Stories Within Stories

One of the pleasures of Crome Yellow is the stories that Henry Wimbush reads aloud from his history of the estate. These embedded tales are little gems of black comedy.

The most memorable is the story of Sir Hercules Lapith, a dwarf who inherits Crome in the eighteenth century. Determined to live in a world scaled to his size, he imports dwarf servants, dwarf horses, dwarf dogs. He marries a dwarf woman from Italy, a singer, and they create a perfect miniature civilization at Crome—elegant, cultured, complete.

Then their son is born. And the son, horrifyingly, is normal. He grows and grows. By the age of eight he’s taller than his father. By adolescence he’s a giant, crude and brutal, who brings his loutish friends to mock his tiny parents.

The story ends in tragedy. Sir Hercules, seeing no place for himself in the world his son will inherit, poisons his wife and opens his own veins in the bath, reading Suetonius as he bleeds out. “He died a Roman death,” he writes in his diary.

It’s a parable, of course—about the fragility of civilized spaces, about how easily they can be invaded and destroyed by the ordinary brutality of the world. But Huxley tells it with such deadpan elegance that you’re not sure whether to laugh or weep.

The Escape

In the final chapters, Denis can bear it no longer. He’s watched Gombauld flirt with Anne. He’s watched Ivor, a charming dilettante, seduce Mary on the roof. Everyone seems to be living while he merely observes, paralyzed by self-consciousness.

So he does the most Denis-like thing imaginable: he asks Mary to send him a telegram. “Return at once,” it should say. “Urgent family business.” He’ll use it as an excuse to leave—to flee the scene of his failure.

The telegram arrives. Denis announces he must go. And then, to his horror, Anne seems genuinely upset. “But that’s absurd, impossible,” she says. “You’ve only been here such a short time.”

He realizes, too late, that he might have had a chance. If only he’d spoken. If only he’d acted. If only he hadn’t arranged his own escape.

The car comes. Denis calls it “the hearse.” He taps the barometer in the porch—the needle sinks. “‘It sinks and I am ready to depart,’” he quotes, from Walter Savage Landor.

Nobody notices the reference. He climbs into the hearse and is driven away.

What It Means

Crome Yellow isn’t a novel of plot. It’s a novel of talk—brilliant, cutting, endlessly inventive talk. Huxley had read everything, and he poured it all into these characters, each one a walking essay on some aspect of human folly.

But beneath the wit there’s something melancholy. Denis is Huxley’s self-portrait as a young man—too clever for his own good, too bookish to live. The novel is a comedy about the failure of the intellectual to engage with actual life.

It’s also prophetic. Mr. Scogan’s visions of the future—test-tube babies, the end of the family, the rise of psychological manipulation—would become the themes of Huxley’s later, darker work. Twelve years later, he would publish Brave New World.

But here, in 1921, the tone is lighter. The satirist is still young enough to laugh at himself.

The Last Word

Crome Yellow is a slim, sharp, impossibly clever first novel. It’s a novel about people who talk too much and feel too little. Or maybe they feel too much and can only talk about it. Either way, they’re trapped in their own eloquence, and the world spins on without them.

Denis Stone never does tell Anne he loves her. He escapes instead, into the safety of absence, quoting dead poets as he goes.

Some of us know the feeling.

This has been Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley.