Author | Aldous Huxley |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Chatto & Windus (UK) George H. Doran Company (US) |
Publication date | 1921 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | Print (Hardback) |
Pages | 307 pp |
ISBN | 9781613109847 |
Followed by | Antic Hay |
Text | Crome Yellow at Wikisource |
Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published by Chatto & Windus in 1921, followed by a U.S. edition by George H. Doran Company in 1922. Though a social satire of its time, it is still appreciated and has been adapted to different media.
Crome Yellow was written during the summer of 1921 in the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi and published in November of that year. In view of its episodic nature, the novel was described in The Spectator as "a Cubist Peacock". This was in recognition of the fact that it was modelled on (and publicised as in the tradition of) [1] Thomas Love Peacock’s country-house novels. [2] There diverse types of the period are exhibited interacting with each other and holding forth on their personal intellectual conceits. There is little plot development. Indeed, H. L. Mencken questioned whether its comedy of manners could be called a novel at all but hailed with delight the author's "shrewdness, ingenuity, sophistication, impudence, waggishness and contumacy." [3]
At the same time F. Scott Fitzgerald observed how within the novel's ambiguous form Huxley created structures and then demolished them "with something too ironic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony." [4] In addition, the open treatment of sexuality there appeared significant to Henry Seidel Canby. Although "Nothing important happens…the story floats and sails upon the turbid intensity of restless sex." [5]
A house party at Crome is viewed largely through the eyes of Denis Stone. Described by his hostess as "one of our younger poets", he has been invited by Priscilla and Henry Wimbush to join their summer guests. Denis is secretly in love with their niece, Anne Wimbush, who appears more interested in the artist Gombauld. The rather naïve flapper, Mary Bracegirdle, decides to embark on an amorous adventure so as to overcome her repressions and makes unsuccessful advances to Denis and Gombauld before falling for the libertine Ivor Lombard one summer night. The hard-of-hearing Jenny Mullion confines most of her thoughts on what goes on to her journal, in which Denis eventually discovers a devastating deconstruction of himself and fellow guests. Mr. Wimbush, the owner of Crome, has been writing a history of the house and its family, from which he gives two evening readings. His wife is obsessed with alternative spirituality and finds a fellow sympathiser in the prolific literary hack, Mr. Barbecue-Smith. Also part of the party is Henry's former schoolfriend, the cynical Mr. Scogan, who lies in wait for anyone he can waylay with his reductive criticisms of the time and his visions for a dystopian future. After several ludicrous failures in trying to capture Anne's affection, Denis despairingly arranges to be recalled home on 'urgent family business' at the very moment when he might have succeeded and departs on the same slow train that had brought him.
Huxley's satire on the fads and fashions of the time is generally based on real places and people. The description of the country house at which the characters gather is recognisably based on Garsington Manor, while Ottoline Morrell has been taken for the model of Priscilla Wimbush. [6] Scogan has been identified with Bertrand Russell, [7] Gombauld with Mark Gertler, Mr. Calamy with H. H. Asquith, [8] and Mary Bracegirdle with Dora Carrington. [9] Even small comic details sometimes have a foundation in fact, as for example Mrs Bunch's massive consumption of peaches as part of the war effort. Osbert Sitwell claimed that this was based on an anecdote he had told Huxley about his own father. [10]
Some incidents in the novel allow others to grow out of them. The story of Sir Hercules Lapith, Henry Wimbush's predecessor at Crome, has imbedded within it some 64 lines in Augustan heroic couplets, far longer than all the parodies of modern verse in the book. Its function is to give an insight into its author’s motives for creating his alternative society for dwarfs at his home. At the same time it is a parody within a parody, since it appears as part Sir Henry's modern-day history of the house, itself a narrative within the main narrative.
Scogan's withering sketch of the contemporary novel whose subject is a sensitive young man’s development so appalls Denis Stone that he destroys the first two chapters of the novel he has brought with him to continue at Crome. On the one hand this may have been directed at James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , which had been published in the previous decade. But it has also been conjectured that Crome Yellow itself is a parody of the sort of novel Denis is dissuaded from continuing. [11] Here too the comparatively recent past model encapsulates the present text.
Conversely, a future text is prefigured in Scogan's prophecy of the "impersonal generation" that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system" by raising its children in incubators. "The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world." It is an idea that Huxley would revisit at greater length in Brave New World (1932), but by that time he had passed from satirising the self-absorption and consequent lack of a vision of a positive way forward following the destructive barbarism of the First World War [12] to examining aspects of the failure of humanity manifested in that war and its inevitable result in the 'Rational State' that Scogan proposes. [13]
The story of Sir Hercules Lapith, who briefly turned Crome into a haven for dwarfs, was later adapted as a 60-minute radio play by Peter Mackie. This was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1986 and has been repeated since. [14]
In 2014, the novelist Julian Davies wrote Crow Mellow, which he described as closely based on Aldous Huxley's novel. Set in contemporary Australia, it updates the satire to cover the hyper-capitalist 21st century in which the sex is more overt and art too has become a commodity. [15]
Virginity, an American musical taking its start from Crome Yellow, has lyrics written by Germaine Shames, music and additional lyrics by Daniel M. Lincoln. In this the deaf Jenny is given the leading role. [16] [17]
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems,
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared as an inversion counterpart to George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
Love and Mr Lewisham is a 1900 novel set in the 1880s by H. G. Wells. It was among his first fictional writings outside the science fiction genre. Wells took considerable pains over the manuscript and said that "the writing was an altogether more serious undertaking than I have ever done before." He later included it in a 1933 anthology, Stories of Men and Women in Love.
A hamadryad or hamadryas is a Greek mythological being that lives in trees. It is a particular type of dryad which, in turn, is a particular type of nymph. Hamadryads are born bonded to a certain tree on which its life depends. Some maintain that a hamadryad is the tree itself, with a normal dryad being simply the indwelling entity, or spirit, of the tree. If the tree should die, the hamadryad associated with it would die as well. For this reason, both dryads and the other gods would punish mortals who harmed trees.
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists including Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.
Garsington Manor, in the village of Garsington, near Oxford, England, is a country house, dating from the 17th century. Its fame derives principally from its owner in the early 20th century, the "legendary Ottoline Morrell, who held court from 1915 to 1924".
Anthony Berkeley Cox was an English crime writer. He wrote under several pen-names, including Francis Iles, Anthony Berkeley and A. Monmouth Platts.
Point Counter Point is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1928. It is Huxley's longest novel, and was notably more complex and serious than his earlier fiction.
Eyeless in Gaza is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1936. It is an account of the life of a socialite named Anthony Beavis between the 1890s and 1936.
The Sitwells, from Scarborough, North Yorkshire and the family seat of Renishaw Hall, were three siblings who formed an identifiable literary and artistic clique around themselves in London in the period roughly 1916 to 1930. This was marked by some well-publicised events, notably Edith's Façade with music by William Walton, with its public debut in 1923. All three Sitwells wrote; for a while their circle was considered by some to rival Bloomsbury, though others dismissed them as attention-seekers rather than serious artists.
The Huxley family is a British family; several of its members have excelled in science, medicine, arts and literature. The family also includes members who occupied senior positions in the public service of the United Kingdom.
Antic Hay is a novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1923. The story takes place in London, and gives a satiric depiction of the aimless or self-absorbed cultural elite in the sad and turbulent times following the end of World War I.
Literature and Science, published in September 1963, was Aldous Huxley's last book - he died two months after it was published. In it, he strives to harmonize the scientific and artistic realms. He argues that language is what divides the two realms and makes communication between them difficult. He analyzes the ways in which scientists and fiction writers use language differently to achieve their desired effects. Although he concedes that many differences in language use are inevitable, he urges both camps to seek mutual understanding and appreciation. He directs his argument primarily to fiction writers: "Whether we like it or not,” he tells them, “ours is the Age of Science."
The Albany or, more correctly, and simply, Albany, is an apartment complex in Piccadilly, London. The three-storey mansion was built in the 1770s and divided into apartments in 1802.
Pride and Prejudice is a 1940 American film adaptation of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, the screenplay was written by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin, adapted specifically from the stage adaptation by Helen Jerome, in addition to Jane Austen's novel.
After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death. It was published in the United States as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Written soon after Huxley left England and settled in California, the novel is Huxley's examination of American culture, particularly what he saw as its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth. This satire also raises philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in Huxley's final novel Island. The novel's title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a figure in Greek mythology to whom Aurora gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book was awarded the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Men Like Gods (1923) is a novel, referred to by the author as a "scientific fantasy", by English writer H. G. Wells. It features a utopia located in a parallel universe.
Literary Taste: How to Form it is a long essay by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1909, with a revised edition by his friend Frank Swinnerton appearing in 1937. It includes a long list of recommended books, every item individually costed.
The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.