Using the unifying device of a weekend party at Crome, the country house of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Wimbush, Huxley creates a sharp satire on the futile isolation of the human ego. Huxley’s protagonist, the poet Denis Stone, observes the many other guests and interacts with them without ever making any meaningful connection.

The proprietors and visitors at Crome constitute a catalog of contemporary human solipsism. Henry Wimbush is trapped in his admiration for the past, having devoted three decades to his history of Crome and its inhabitants. His greatest connection to the assembled guests is to read passages from his history to them. His wife (another caricature, with Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, of Lady Ottoline Morrell) consults spiritualists and gambles on racehorses. His niece Anne Wimbush has caught the affections of Denis Stone, but she cannot take seriously the emotional attachment of a man four years her junior.

Other guests represent cold science, Freudian repression, and failures of communication, in a kind of modernized medieval allegory. Denis eventually picks up the sketchbook of a deaf woman who has anatomized his ineffectual existence with objective honesty. Disheartened, he sends himself an urgent telegram so he can make a polite escape from Crome, and just as he is leaving, he realizes that Anne has begun to be interested in him.

Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley’s first novel, written when he was still in his 20s. Contemporary readers will see its faults, but the author’s dry satire and hopeless pessimism for human happiness captured the spirit of his age, or at least of his generation. The survivors of World War I were either jaded or devastated by the destruction and death it had wrought, and in the excesses of the 1920s, they settled for a search for pleasure instead of meaning. Huxley’s novel captured that outlook and made his reputation among his peers.

Analysis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Bibliography

Baker, Robert S. The Dark Historic Page: Social Satire and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley, 1921–1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Bowering, Peter. Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 1920s British literature, 20th-century British novels, Aldous Huxley, Aldous Huxley first novel, Aldous Huxley satire, Aldous Huxley themes, Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, British modernist satire, country house novel, Crome Yellow, Crome Yellow analysis, Crome Yellow characters, Denis Stone, history and nostalgia in fiction, Huxley and modernism, Huxley’s literary debut, intellectual detachment in literature, interwar British fiction, Lady Ottoline Morrell caricature, literary depictions of Freudian repression, literary representations of communication failure, literature after World War I, literature of disillusionment, modern allegory in fiction, modernist literature, post-WWI literature, satire of human ego, satire of upper-class life, solipsism in literature, spiritualism in literature