Word: crome
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Huxley's revisitation nevertheless is a fascinating intellectual exercise for those who like to think about the shape of things that have or might come. And sometimes Huxley still sounds like the brave young worldling who wrote Crome Yellow. Most original Huxleyism is a suggested law on the lines of habeas corpus, which would be a habeas mentem for the human race. Roughly translated it would mean the right for all to say: keep your dirty hands off my mind...
Stephen leaves Gair, but he cannot shake off a gnawing question. Why, he asks Crome on a second visit, did he stop writing after the critical success of Cockaigne? Nothing of the sort, confides Crome; he merely stopped publishing...
...confessional scatterbursts, the old scoundrel tells all. Nosing out some little-known scandal about-some well-known man, Crome would disguise it thinly in two or three chapters of a projected second novel, submit it to the victim through a go-between, and cheerfully agree to suppress it for a price. After World War I, Blackmailer Crome ruefully relates, the British upper classes lost their manners as well as their money, and his brand of crime no longer paid...
Resourceful Crome found new sheep to fleece. He rounded up a stable of picture forgers ("In Hollywood, for example, there has been a quite extraordinary demand for pictures by ... Matisse and Utrillo"). His misdeeds, he assures Stephen, will be forgiven, just like Cellini's, when posterity reads the autobiographical masterpiece he is writing...
...while Crome has been spinning a web around Stephen and his upcoming inheritance. Before the fly outwits the spider, drawing-room comedy gives way to drugstore melodrama, and no one is left to shed a tear for Hazeldon Crome except readers who cherish a well-turned rogue...