The London Review of Books

After years of reading the TLS and being exasperated by its antiquated editorial policies, I used to turn with relief to the London Review of Books for some informed and passionate writing.

Unfortunately, the LRB does not always oblige. The brief for reviewers to the LRB seems to be: create lengthy reviews (at around 3,000 words per review, over twice as long as the average TLS review), don’t worry about including your personal life and attitudes, and don’t worry too much about the book you are reviewing.

Thus, for example in one issue (5 October 2017) the LRB devotes almost 8,000 words on a review of two biographies of Freud, almost unintelligible to a non-specialist. It is full of word-play at the expense of meaning:

Strachey’s translation is of course part of this story. It was overseen by Jones, and is forever accused of forsaking Freud’s idiom for a scientistic lexicon, which misled some Bloomsburies (as Roudinesco calls them) to deplore the materialism of psychoanalysis, as offering not an excess but a poverty of news from the nowheres of unconscious life.

Some reviews are a such a foregone conclusion that we wonder why they were commissioned at all. Jonathan Ree, for example, carries out a hatchet job on a life of Darwin by A N Wilson. Wilson is an opinionated and untrustworthy writer at any time, but Wilson on science is a very unlikely combination. So the reviewer behaves as I would, spending around half the review chatting pleasantly about Darwin, before getting down to the matter in hand, which is a demolition of Wilson’s accuracy and approach.  You feel that even this number of words is wasted on such an inadequate object.

Reviewers are encouraged to add personal notes, some of which are at odds with the review they are supposed to be writing. For Rivka Galchen, writing about women astronomers in the early C20 at Harvard, at the same time as duly noting their achievements, she feels “seasick” that they entitled a New Year’s Eve musical put on by the women “The Observatory Pinafore”.  Worse, she claims she has “an irrational if predictable fear that reading this stuff might somehow result in having to live alongside these people. One admires but doesn’t want to be the women in this book.” Such middle-class nimbyism! It’s as if the slightest lack of conformity with 2019 sexual attitudes might affect our reviewer terribly.  

There are times when the LRB carries a magnificent insight into a topic or book, but those moments of insight are far too often outweighed by indulgent commissioning and failure to edit the supplied copy. Are these reviewers paid by the word? It reads like it, at times.

Huxley's first novel

Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow combines three themes, which don’t always fit very well together (not surprising for a first novel): young love, the house party, and the organization of society.

First, there is the predictable love interest. Denis Stone, in what appears to be a barely concealed self-portrait, is a sensitive would-be poet, who spends as much time throwing his latest compositions into the wastepaper basket as he does writing them. Dennis dreams of romantic involvement but flings himself at the wrong woman, Anne Wimbush, who is more interested in a painter, Gombauld, who, unlike Dennis, is far more established as an artist. Gombauld and Anne are able to have meaningful conversations with each other, while Dennis can only bring himself to state “I love you” and for Anne to reply, “poor Denis”. At the same time, Dennis learns that women he ignores and takes for granted are actually writing sharp critiques of his behaviour.

All this takes place in the context of the house party, an event that in this novel seems to last several weeks. It’s difficult to imagine the sheer lavishness of the hospitality involved, but at the same time the sheer oppression of co-existing with the same few people for weeks at a time; I wouldn’t be able to survive more than 24 hours in such an environment. The world depicted is summarised by the owners of the estate: Mrs Wimbush, obsessed with spiritualism, and Henry Wimbush, the master of Crome, who is mainly occupied in pointing out various historical features of the estate, including the “oaken drainpipes”, and admitting he knows next to nothing about politics or the local populace – and has little interest in either. As the man responsible for running the local fete and inviting the whole village for the last twenty or more years, this is something of an indictment; it would be elegiac if you felt any sympathy for him or his world, and there is little of either in this novel.

More interesting is the last theme, albeit embryonic: that of examining social systems and considering others. You feel that as a first novelist, Huxley had some idea the above two themes were not sufficient to carry the novel; Huxley himself has an interest beyond conversation, towards how society should be organized. The reader finds social critics such as Mr Scogan intriguing, even if the ideas are rather amateurishly attached to the main action in a rather rudimentary way.  

What are we to make of Crome Yellow? Not as satirical as Evelyn Waugh; Waugh is careful to reveal much less of himself in the main characters. Huxley’s satire threatens to become rather unpleasant, an unexpected twist, for example when Mr Scogan disguises himself as a witch to tell fortunes, and foretells terrible things for all of them.

Denis looked and listened while the witch prophesied financial losses, death by apoplexy, destruction by air-raids in the next war.

This is very entertaining, if horribly cynical, but as if that is not bad enough, he appears to be shamelessly engineering an assignation for himself with one of the unsuspecting young women naively paying sixpence for the privilege of having their fortune told.

Then there is Huxley’s fascination with words. There is a long passage about Dennis and his obsession with the word “carminative”, which is founded largely on a misunderstanding. There are many words like carminative that have a strange, haunting effect on us, probably because we don’t quite know what they mean: “hapless” has a similar effect for me.

“Words," said Denis at last, "words – I wonder if you can realise how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind.

For me, the most memorable aspect of Crome Yellow, however poorly integrated with the remainder, is the toying with, the exploration of, some potential themes. Scogan, the unfeeling man of ideas, is the main vehicle for these ideas. He compares everyone at the house party to the Caesars, and suggests Dennis is a potential Nero and Ivor a potential Caligula. More significantly, there is a long passage about the eccentricity of the aristocracy, and you feel a little as if Huxley was assigning himself the challenge of writing 500 words on any topic. He is toying with ideas, but perhaps this is like the house party itself: outside the real world, idly and ineffectually commenting on what is happening (or what the characters believe might be happening). Scogan tries to justify it:

Eccentricity...It's the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you're to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work.

Precious little honest work in Crome Yellow.