Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley

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Just recently, Finlay Lloyd publishers sent me a copy of Crow Mellow by Julian Davies, which the blurb says is a satire based on Aldous Huxley’s early social satire, Crome Yellow, but transplanted to contemporary Australia.  Crow Mellow looks like fun to read, especially since there are playful illustrations on every page, but it’s much too long ago since I read the original Crome Yellow for me to spot the resemblances, so I decided to re-read the original first.

My copy is an ancient grey Penguin Classics edition, one of four Huxleys that my father bought me as a present when I was a teenager.  My recollection is that I enjoyed them all, especially Brave New World, but I suspect that I was too young to really appreciate Huxley’s wit.  Considering that he was only in his middle twenties when he wrote it, it’s rather amazing that he wasn’t too young to write it!

The blurb draws attention to the science fantasies of Mr Scogan because this debut novel anticipates the Huxley of Brave New World, but I was more interested in the way that Huxley used  this character to satirise himself within his own novel.  Denis Stone is a middle-class young graduate with literary ambitions, paying a visit to Mr Wimbush’s country house.  He fancies himself as a poet, and is writing his first novel.  When Mary Bracegirdle, thinking it would be nice to have a little literary conversation, asks what he is writing and he replies that he is writing verse and prose, Mr Scogan pounces, unerring in his target:

“Of course,” Mr. Scogan groaned, “I’ll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a ‘novel of dazzling brilliance”; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.”

 

 

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