The Orchid Man

I owe the discovery of The Passing of a Hero and Conventional Weapons to a fellow-visitor to the London Library who, shrewdly interpreting the glazed stare of a fellow shelf-crawler, urged me to make my way to English fiction and look for Jocelyn Brooke.

Brooke is known today, although not widely, for three wartime novels – The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents and The Goose Cathedral, which were reissued in 1981 by Secker & Warburg as ‘The Orchid Trilogy’. Unashamedly autobiographical, they use the twin devices of orchids and fireworks, subjects on which Brooke had acquired a rich store of recondite knowledge, to tell the story of Brooke’s upbringing in Kent, his years at Oxford and his experiences as a soldier posted to Italy in the Second World War. Seductively ironic, marvellous in their evocation of the tranquil English landscape to which Brooke thankfully returned in later life, the ‘Orchid’ novels celebrate the poignancy of beauty lost in the moment of its realization. The fireworks which glitter above the roofs of an Italian city in the second novel, A Mine of Serpents, are cunningly used to parallel the author’s descriptions of the elusive orchids for which many an intrepid plant-hunter lost his life and to which Brooke would gladly have devoted his. ‘I was more interested, at that time, in flowers, than in people,’ he observes in a revealing aside on his 7-year-old self. ‘Indeed, except in particular cases, I still am.’ This heightened fastidiousness is a hallmark of Brooke’s writing. The Scapegoat (1948), one of his most mysterious explorations of tenderness, terror and yearning in a child’s mind, describes the sensations of a young soldier who finds himself, in 1939, seated alone in a closed railway carriage with a weeping boy whose beauty and grief present him with an immediate challenge, a demand for an emotional response to such baffling anguish. The sense of attraction is strong and immediate; so is the fact that there are barriers here, of age, class and gender which the soldier is unable to break down. Brooke celebrated rarified elegance; when he turned to biography, his subjects were Firbank, Bowen and Denton Welch. In the 1940s and 1950s he became a reviewer for The Listener; he did not, however, spend more time in London than was necessary. ‘The prospect of being a professional littérateur depressed me,’ he wrote. ‘I prefer to remain an amateur. I know the booksy racket too well.’ Not well enough, unfortunately, for Brooke to apprehend how much a future reputation might depend on the friendship of his literary peers. Anthony Powell, condescending from a great height to a man whose books were certainly a match for his own, graciously wrote that Brooke had created a ‘magical’ world of his own, artfully communicating the idea that Brooke was (a) twee and (b) minor. When Brooke died in 1966, not a single one of his works was in print. Today, only The Scapegoat is available. This is a shame. Most writers have their unfashionable moments – think of Wells and Shaw, unread and unmentioned in the postwar years – but they also have their revivals. Brooke is still waiting for his. Nobody under the age of 40 is likely to be able to produce more than, at most, the name of the trilogy; yet Brooke is a writer of marvelous sharpness, grace and elegant brevity. He can conjure up a summer afternoon and scent it with chalk dust and petrol. He can be proudly sentimental, imbuing the disappearance of the last Orchis militaris with tragic significance – ‘gone with scarlet and pipe-clay, with Ouida’s guardsmen and Houseman’s lancers; gone with the concept of soldiering as a chivalric and honourable calling’. Brooke can, at such a moment, seem Ford Madox Ford’s direct successor, an ironic, elegiac and detached master of a certain style. My unknown friend in the London Library recommended Conventional Weapons (1961); it took me a while to discover that it formed a loose sequel to The Passing of a Hero (1953). Both are narrated by a middle-aged man whose literary connections and attitude make it difficult not to see him as Brooke, thinly disguised. The Passing of a Hero is a journey of self-discovery, from the narrator’s youthful infatuation with a handsome schoolmate, to the realization that his idol, Denzil, has failings which range from the inappropriately released fart to plagiarizing the work of his more talented friends. Our own attitude to Denzil and his family is directed by small and subtly coded observations. His sisters enthuse about Aldous Huxley – Brooke fell out of love with Huxley’s novels in his twenties – but they get the titles of his novels wrong. Denzil has read Proust but is unable to make intelligent comments on his work. Throughout the book, Denzil remains convinced that his friend, the narrator, is a thoroughly nice chap. The narrator, meanwhile, borrows Denzil’s money, uses him as a free lunch ticket, makes vicious jokes at his expense and acquires some singularly unpleasant friends of his own, while mocking Denzil’s. ‘I didn’t really like successful people,’ is the only remark the narrator makes which shows a glimpse of self-knowledge; it is impossible for him to acknowledge that in each episode intended to denigrate Denzil, another aspect of his own flawed self is exposed. Conventional Weapons is a more subtly constructed book, once again set in the mid-1920s in locations which were drawn from Brooke’s own recollections, with characters who seem to be only lightly disguised by fiction. As in the earlier novel, Brooke here displaysa feline and almost visceral loathing for anything that he perceived as suburban or middle-class, a snobbery which is redeemed by the acuteness of his observation. In The Passing of a Hero, it was the home of Denzil’s parents which was mercilessly dissected. Here it is the narrator’s rich cousins, who are alloted a Venetian Gothic home in lavatory yellow brick, complete with the turrets which are a sure sign of Brooke’s contempt. By their house shall ye know them; the narrator is eager to heap contempt on his relations but loneliness forces him into a languid friendship with Nigel Greene, the younger of his two cousins. Geoffrey, the older, is noisy, truculent and menacing; Nigel, awkward, reticent and anxious to conform, seems to be made of equally unpromising material. Just as with The Passing of a Hero, however, Brooke cunningly turns the tables on the reader. Nigel, a timid employer of conventional weapons of rebellion, becomes a celebrated author who is revered for his originality and vitality. Geoffrey, the bullying older brother who loathes gays and scorns literature, is revealed as a guilt-ridden homosexual who takes immense pride in Nigel’s success. The odd one out, once again, is the narrator; in the closing pages, he acknowledges defeat. I felt, obscurely, that it was not only the end of the season, but the end, so far as I was concerned, of an epoch: I was nearly fifty, and the coming winter became identified, in my mind, with the melancholy prospect of old age and impotence. Glum though this sounds, the novels are leavened by peppery humour and sharp asides. ‘An Hon. goes a long way in Malta, you know,’ is one of my favourites. You’ll make no friends among his characters, but you’ll know them and wonder, if you read the books a second time, at the skill with which Brooke controls your shifts of perception. Reader-control is a hard trick to pull off without being noticed in the act; Brooke is a master of the art.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Miranda Seymour 2005