Crome Yellow
by Aldous Huxley
On vacation from school, Dany leaves to stay at Crome, an English country house where several of Huxley's most amazing characters live — from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 published words an hour, "connecting" with the "subconscious," to Henry Wimbusch, who is obsessed with writing Crom's latest story. Denis' stay turns into a disaster against the backdrop of his dreams' weak attempts to lure his daughter and the ridicule he endures about his plan to write a novel about love and art. Aldous Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow, was published in 1921, and as a comedy of manners and ideas, its relatively realistic setting and format may come as a surprise to fans of his later works, such as Point Counter Point and Brave New World. Some who only know Brave New World may not know that as a 16-year-old boy planning to enter medicine, Aldous Huxley struck him with a serious eye disease that left him temporarily blind and prevented what would surely become an extraordinary career as a doctor or scientist. Crome Yellow has often been called "witty" and "talkative," and he certainly owes as much of his ability to the Fair arrogance, surprisingly, to Tristram Shandy, but it's conceivable that characters like Mr. Barbecue-Smith and his extraordinary writing theories may have had some literary antecedents in Lawrence Stern. Following post-Victorian moral norms, Chrome Yellow is, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a humorous masterpiece that is, "too ironic to be called satire and too condescending to be called irony."
