Crome Yellow is a slight and often overlooked work nestling at the root of Huxley’s oeuvre. Nevertheless this novella manages, despite its brevity, to encapsulate succinctly - albeit in embryo form - the dichotomy between scientific rationalism (or ‘paganism’ as Dennis defines it in the above quotation) and the human quest for meaning: a division which, I intend to argue, lies not only at the heart of Huxley’s vision but equally at the epicentre of the twentieth century novel.
Certainly, the exploration of the divide between those who search for a raison d’être and those that simply exist is not a novel theme, and one can observe the roots of Dennis’s dilemma since the time of Epicurus. However it must be underlined that it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that this existential angst began to reach its zenith - for it was this era which marked the first epoque where, to paraphrase Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, the believer had simply ‘nowhere left to go’. The gulf of fundamental emptiness that began to yawn with Galileo, stretched to an abyss with Darwin, and then finally split in two with the introduction of Freudian theory to the general public and the outbreak of the bloodiest war in world history had per force to lay the ground for a new style of writing. No longer could man lay claim to a central place in the universe, a privileged role amongst natural species, power over his actions and impulses or even a vestige of innate civilisation. A belief in God, in morality, in nature, in the imagination, in the special place of man, could only appear to both writer and reader as perfunctory and even naive next to the persuasive realities of scientific and historical fact. From this moment on one can perceive the debut of an empiric crisis amongst writers, who could henceforth divide themselves into roughly two essential parts: on the one hand, those who dealt with the tangible nature of a material reality and on the other a diminishing number who nourished the increasingly vague hope of something more significant. It was thus in conjunction with this crisis that Huxley emerged as the first eloquent spokesperson of his century to remark this divide - examining with encyclopedic scope the ideological wasteland that stretched before the modern author.
Admittedly, this divide is portrayed in Crome Yellow, Huxley’s first literary endeavour, with rather heavy handed satire. The protagonist, Dennis, a youthfully earnest writer, goes to stay for a weekend at Crome where the other country-house guests represent, with almost one dimensional clarity, the multifarious dimensions of this debate. In the above quoted passage the hero and heroine of the novella meet in the garden of Crome. Dennis holds forth with vigour on the tricky subject of life and philosophy - the crux of his dilemma stemming around the crucial question of whether one should live first and then develop a philosophy to fit the life one has led, or whether one should develop a philosophy early on and then subsequently adhere one’s life to its principles. In diametric contrast Anne, personifying down-to-earth rationalism, simply admires how charming Dennis looks when worked up. The other characters in the novella are divided equally clearly between those in the the camp of ‘higher meaning’ and those who lurk in the pagan watering-hole of the material. The hostess, Priscilla, an ex-gambler, together with her personal guest, Mr Barbecue-Smith, are portrayed as having already complacently found meaning behind the superficies - through the mediums of astrology as well as Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s tomes of comfort and spiritual teaching: Humble Heroisms and Pipelines to the Infinite. Mary, a young, doll-like, and earnest advocate of modern thought has found faith through the self-imposed reverence of all things that are ‘first rate’ - of which she recognises that there are very few in the world, and ‘that these were mostly French’. Her philosophy revolves largely around the scientific trying out of life’s experiences - which involve both sex and roman catholic mass - in order to develop her comprehension of the great infinite. The sensual french artist, Gombauld, finds meaning in the traditional virtues of wine, women, song and cubist art, whilst the fanatic priest of the diocese freely draws personal succour from selected biblical passages. In diametric opposition to these ‘sincere’ or ‘searching’ characters, Huxley portrays the scientist, Mr. Scogan, who sees the maximisation of reproductive facilities as the ultimate human goal. His character is complimented by that of the charming dilettante, Ivor, who is excellent at everything which has the potential to amuse - singing, writing, making love, acting - and equally Henry Wimbush, owner of Crome, who entirely ignores the present and spends his time enjoyably writing up peripheral anecdotes from his ancestor’s unexceptional past.
It would of course be naive to suggest that Huxley condones or condemns either camp of thought in his novel. Certainly, as in his later works, one can see that Huxley uses his satirical gift in order to portray with microscopic accuracy certain generic types. In Point Counter Point he delicately mocks the sensibilities of his more aspirational characters - drawing crystalline caricatures of D.H. Lawrence and Ottoline Morrell - whilst the lugubrious pessimism with which he portrays their cold-hearted, rational counterparts leaves the reader in no doubt that he espouses their ideology even less. His pastiche covers an almost panoramic breadth - deconstructing science, education, intellect, art, nature, humanity itself. And - as must be the result when society and humankind is dissected in its entirety - every character appears finally as merely ridiculous. Yet, it would be facile to assert that Huxley’s novels are merely those of a disillusioned and talented cynic; for at the centre of each of his novels the reader can perceive the persistent presence of the quêteur - the searcher of values - who does not disappear even when he is at his most blisteringly satirical. Rampion in Point Counter Point, Gumbril in Antic Hay, not to mention the Savage of Brave New World are all, broadly speaking, faced with the same existentialist conundrum as Dennis in Crome Yellow: how to find meaning or principles in a world that increasingly reveres a complete absence of sincerity or profundity. One could portray them as maladroit versions of the romantic Knight Errant - in search of higher significance in a world where the word belief has become obsolete or, at best, synonymous with knowledge.
Certainly, it is the attempts of his central characters to reach out for a belief system - whilst striving to trust their convictions against the eloquent allures of proof - that generates one of the most interesting features of Huxley’s novels. In the above passage Dennis defines Anne’s stance as a ‘pagan’ one. This denomination is important because it indicates, from the outset, a concern with the concept of faith - a word which denotes here no particular religion, but rather a general belief in a higher power or being that exists behind the mere material world. The word ‘pagan’ currently infers, according to the shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main religions of the world, spec., a non-christian; (derog.) a follower of a polytheistic or pantheistic religion’. This definition seems to be fundamentally flawed - notably when one considers that the United Kingdom Pagan Federation draws from the ‘derogatory’ definition of their faith in order to define their belief system (‘A polytheistic or pantheistic nature-worshipping religion which incorporates beliefs and ritual practices from ancient traditions’). It equally seems unwise to define so specific a word on the basis of proportional representation - does the diminishing number of Zoroastrianists make their’s a ‘pagan’ religion? However, this is not our current concern. What Huxley clearly intends to infer in the context of this passage by the term ‘pagan’ is its use (now rare) to describe ‘a person considered as being of irreligious or unrestrained character or behaviour’: Anne, unlike Dennis, does not follow a religion - a structured set of beliefs - and therefore both her behaviour and her character are unrestricted by the bonds of guilt that her companion imposes upon himself. Her universe is a godless one, her philosophy firmly Epicurean - her embracing of ‘the pleasant things’ and avoidance of the nasty, echo explicitly the teachings of Epicurus. It is further relevant to underline that it was Epicurus, the emphatic upholder of the finite nature of the physical world, who insisted on the absence of a creator, there is, he claimed, no god in charge of the universe to give life purpose and that humanity’s lot was simply to experience life - maximising pleasure and minimising pain - and then death. This depiction of a godless universe allies itself implicitly with Huxley’s definition of pagan - which must consequently be regarded equally as an oblique allusion to epicureanism.
For it is of course both a ‘pagan’ and an ‘epicurean’ world which Huxley portrays in his novels of the twenties and thirties. It is a universe which no longer admits any ‘higher’ - that is to say ethereal or intangible - concept. What counts is to follow one’s instincts, to enjoy the moment and to repulse any attempt to impose sense or to analyse that moment. Yet, it is a perverted form of the Epicurean ideal, often verging nearer to a Dionysian dystopia. Love, hate, belief, ideals are ignored as faddish and out of date. Gossip, wine, parties, narcissism and languid debauchery seal over the human need to add meaning to existence. Gumbril, in Antic Hay, turns to Italian and French in order to express words which, in English, could only be used with deprecating humourousness - ‘molto simpatica’ expressing so much more easily the uncomfortable concept of ‘goodness’. In Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh equally instigates the usage of a new language in order to express the ennui of his bright young protagonists. The verb ‘to shame’ becomes an adjective - ‘it was too, too shame-making’, rather than ‘I was shamed’ - the static nature of the adjective distancing the character effectively from any emotional engagement. And yet, despite this anodyne setting, both Waugh and Huxley continue to depict at the centre of their novels a protagonist who is still trying to make sense of the world, is trying to see beyond the rational, scientific outlook of their environment; to try and organise some sense of purpose to their existence. It is always tempting for the critic - notably when remarking that the protagonists of these two writers works share so many superficial qualities with their creators (they are writers, journalists, school masters) - to see the author himself as the paratextual quêteur, trying, through writing, to make some sense of the seeming pointlessness of existence. Thus, it is of course pertinent that Huxley, the great cynic, the mighty artist of elegant disillusion does, himself, eventually turn to eastern mysticism whilst Waugh adopts, more conventionally, the catechisms of the Catholic church. The portrayers of ‘pagan’ futility turn eventually to the succour of ‘faith’, of meaning, of higher purpose, to the hope of meaning behind the material world. (Incidentally, in this context it is interesting that both Aubrey Beardsley and T.S. Eliot also turned to the church - Beardsley to Catholicism and Eliot to high Church of England).
Yet, by drawing these parallels I wish in no way to imply that organised religion, in whatever form, furnishes the novelist with an archetypal happy ending - the questing knight having found his grail. Rather, it is to simply to emphasise a particular motif that seems to recur throughout the literature of late nineteenth and early twentieth century - that of the perpetual human conflict between a valid belief system and the tangible persuasiveness of material reality which Huxley so deftly defined in Crome Yellow. For, the emphatic ‘Yes’ at the end of Ulysses has as little to do with the church as has Raskolnikov’s ‘reawakening’ at the end of Crime and Punishment. E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf largely ignore the subject of religion in their novels. The completion of Lily’s painting in To the Lighthouse, and the installation of the Schlegels into Mrs Wilcox’s home in Howard’s End indicate, not a religious denouement, but rather the presentation of a belief in what could be called the ‘unnameable universal’ - the harmony expressed by Forster in his famous epigraph: ‘only connect...’. However, it is obviously Eliot - drawing explicitly from the legend of the Grail - who captures best the sense of this search for a higher plateau of consciousness. After the complex, footnote riddled, bleak futility of the first four parts of The Waste Land, the poem concludes with the word ‘Shantih’ - of which Eliot explains in the footnote: ‘Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth all understanding’ is our equivalent to this word’. The poem reaches the point of universal harmony which marks both the end and the beginning of a quest.
And, it is this search for a peace which passes all understanding which seems to characterise the quest which can be found standing at the centre of human literary endeavour since even the first oral folk and fairy tales. Indeed, the theme of searching, of quests, must, by definition, stand implicitly at the centre of all true literature. For it must be stressed that the writing of a novel is, in a sense, the rightful quest of the author himself. A true and significant author - one who does not simply replicate works and thoughts which have been explored before - must, in writing, go himself some way down that winding fairy tale path in order to uncover new truths. Aragon wrote that ‘le poète a toujours raison qui voit plus loin que l’horizon’ - and this can be applied to the analogy of the writer as questor. For, even if he does not manage to arrive at the end of his journey, to see right ‘over the horizon’, the author’s quest will nevertheless have uncovered new ground and he will have enabled us to see, a little more clearly, something which could not be made out before. Huxley, like Eliot, uses the pen to explore new vistas. He, like his first protagonist, Dennis, is an écrivain quêteur - a writer in search of higher truths - and he subsequently opens up to the reader a work of far wider significance than the social setting of his oeuvres might initially suggest.

Yet, it appears now that the figure of the quêteur has all but vanished from our literature. Having braved the hardest part of the twentieth century both the questing writer and his protagonist have disappeared. Attempts to reach for a higher comprehension - the peace which passeth all understanding - appear to have passed away during the Thatcher years; our questioning of the universe has died, killed by an american psycho of superficiality and material trend. For, in the West, our publishing houses seem to be nurturing a sort of micro-literature - lilliputian novels which, whilst capable of minutely reflecting our reality, seem unable or unwilling to explore the fact that they might be mirroring something bigger. The popular novel is a novel of reality, with the social and political work being in great evidence. The modern novelist depicts specific social realities in classifiable settings - and they often depict them with admirable verisimilitude - but it must be acknowledged that the reaching out for a wider significance has gone. One does not read a novel now to see the world afresh, to find a description which perfectly encapsulates a thought. Instead, the modern novel exists in a two-dimensional landscape - it shows us nothing further than a specific scene, in a specific time in a specific place - and whilst they bring to life for the reader new places, new social structures, they do not go any further. Their subject is social, political, contextual - but never ideological, exploratory.

E.M. Forster once commented that the child that is born with a silver spoon in its mouth will learn nothing but the shape of the spoon, and this insight can surely be applied to today’s literary landscape. The modern novel in many respects fails to teach us anything more than the physical, social and geographical shape of the world. Which is not unworthy, but it is limited. Literature has never had to bend beneath the yolk of hard facts that bind the disciplines of history or science. Yet, for a novel to be taken seriously today it has to portray political and social actuality. Reality and fiction have begun to merge as man attaches less and less value to the irrational, the imaginary, the spirit. Literature has begun to merge with journalism, and, instead of fighting against this the writer merely seems to bow to the current vogue and to ignore his rightful purpose - that of exploring what the scientist, John Abernethy, called the ‘subtile, mobile, invisible substance’ which is at the centre of our very sense of humanity. And, if this is so, if the writer has accepted that the noting down of day to day reality is his task, then yes, it is true that the novelist is finished, we have no further use for him. For we have now the journalist, the documentarist, the diarist, the presenter, the confessional writer, the historian, the political backbencher, the scientist: they are our weavers of the real and we have no need of any more. Thus the author will begin a new life composing extended journalistic articles which we will call literature, and we, like Billy Weary’s mother in Slaughterhouse 5, will learn to construct a life from the things we find in gift shops - knickknacks, peccadillos, articles, quiz shows - we will learn to stop turning to art to find something more satisfying and more rich.
But this does not have to be the case. It has been argued that the form of the novel is dead. Yet to say that there is no further capacity within the novelistic structure for innovation is a lazy argument. The form of any work has to compliment its content - never the other way round. Once a writer has chosen the content of his projected work it is his next step to chose the truest and most just form for his subject. It is unfortunate that most modern art seems to see this formula through a Panglossian inverted lens. The contemporary artist choses form primarily and then later applies ‘meaning’ or ‘sense' to the work in order to imbue it with some semblance of validity. Yet true originality comes principally from content, which can, in turn, influence an originality of form. If an author attempts to reach further, to stretch higher, to imbue the world with his perception of its deeper structures, then no contrived stylistic innovation will be necessary. For it doesn’t matter if he looks and doesn’t see clearly. Even a dim and murky attempt to grasp at the unknown can be worth more than a vividly realistic sketch. There is validity in the mere effort of trying to see what is not simply hovering on the surface. There is a poverty of ambition amongst contemporary novelists. They strive for the tangible nature of the beautiful in lieu of the tricky sublime. But the micro must prepare to become the macro. For in this time of impoverished spirit, where science, politics and journalism reign supreme, to whom will humanity turn for a sense of self, a sense of unity, but to the artist - the writer, the painter, the musician. If the author wishes to continue to hold a valid place in contemporary society he needs to remove his blinkers, to stop looking at his feet, and to try, tentatively - always mistrustful of the finite conclusion - to try to tap, once again, into the sense of the universal which has gradually been supplanted by the cult of the petty and the hallowing of the personal.