Brooke's Orchid Trilogy

Jocelyn Brooke, The Orchid Trilogy. King Penguin, 1981.

The fiction disguised as an autobiography, or more commonly as a segment of autobiography, is one of the great perennials of literary art. For dramatic immediacy there is nothing like dwelling inside a single ego for the duration of a whole novel. But what about the other way round? An autobiography which confesses to being half fiction? That is much less common. “None of the characters is entirely fictitious,” Brooke tells us in a note to the second part of his trilogy. “None, on the other hand, attempts to be a ‘truthful’ portrait”; and he goes on to insist that even the narrating ‘I’ (whom the unwary reader would certainly identify with the author, if only because other characters call him ‘Jocelyn’) is a composite creation. Composed of what ingredients, and in what proportions, he does not tell us.

The censorious might be inclined to dismiss such a hybrid form as just plain lies, or as a convenient way of sailing just as close to the wind as possible without foundering on the rock of the libel laws. We might reflect, however, that this method is just a more transparent version of what novelists do anyway. Brooke is simply not covering his tracks so carefully, not digesting his raw material so thoroughly as they do in order to make the customary declarations about all within being imaginary and if there do turn out to be any resemblances to real people it’s a regrettable coincidence . . .

Though the Orchid Trilogy appears in its present format for the first time, its constituent parts, The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents and The Goose Cathedral were all written in the immediately post-war period and published, respectively, in 1948, 1949 and 1950. Brooke later became a quite prolific writer of novels, poetry and botanical books (a major interest of his, the latter) but it is on this trilogy that his reputation, such as it is, now rests. The foregoing two paragraphs may have given the impression that the Orchid Trilogy is a mysterious work of the avant-garde, much involved with problems of points of view, unreliable narrators and other Jamesian complexities. Nothing could be less true. To be sure, it is difficult to think of any other examples of this genre which Brooke made particularly his own and which, it appears, could most successfully fire his imagination. But apart from the ambiguities of knowing where real, historical people and incidents leave off and the mythologising starts – hardly a matter of pressing concern anyway – the Trilogy is far from being arty in any modernistic, experimental way.

Indeed, it is positively old-fashioned, both in content and style. It belongs firmly to that belletriste tradition started by the essays of Charles Lamb, whose many (mostly bad) imitators have dogged literature up to the pres­ent day: rambling, discursive, never too worried about starting hares and then leaving the high road of narrative to chase them into the thickets. To choose the better examples, it is very much in the manner of Gissing’s The Pri­vate Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) or, more akin in period and mood, Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave: in a word, causerie of the more erudite and entertaining kind. Brooke's style, certainly, is not free of the pre­ciousness which so often afflicts this genre. He is fond – a bit too fond – of flourishes like im­planted French, Italian or Latin phrases. For him, a novel has a mise-en-scene, never just a set­ting; and one is borne down by lacrimae rerum, not mundane depression: touches which evoke the Edwardian leisure, learning and stodginess of his youth rather than the gritty years just after the war. But even at its very worst ("among other niaiseries of that silly season we collected graffiti . . . we collected other curiosa, too") it’s a preciousness of an inoffensive kind, and it's not often at its worst.

In such writing success is utter­ly dependent on the attractiveness of the authorial persona: the width as well as the depth of his reading, the lightness with which he rides his hobby-horses, the amusingness of his anecdotes, the perceptiveness of his insight. For­tunately the ‘I’ of the Trilogy is an admirable companion. In reading it, it is as though he is at one's side in the sunny, open- windowed compartment of a slow train. The landscapes are admir­able: rural South-east England, Oxford, Tuscany, the Abruzzi. Many wreaths of half-familiar verse float past. From time to time the train stops; an amusing and vivid tableau presents itself. Then it's on again. The brain is not taxed; it is soothed. Only those who demand something more bracing will not find the company congenial, for all that is missing is passion and strong formal organisation.

Speaking of the latter in an authorial note, Brooke is somewhat misleading. He calls his tri­logy “sets of variations upon the same or similar thematic material.” This is true enough insofar as each book, as a Proustian re­construction of the past, returns over and over to the same basic scenes of the author's life, but it is quite misleading (as far as this reader can judge) if one wants to press home the musical analogy. What we have here are not varia­tions but improvisations on a theme; and that theme is the un­attainable nature of one's desires, for which the title objects are personal symbols: the Orchis militaris, an exceedingly rare, almost mythical English wildflower; the Mine of Serpents, a grand product of the pyrotechnic art; the Goose Ca­thedral, a private name given to a neo-Gothic lifeboat shelter on the coast, home to a flock of geese. All these love-objects prove elu­sive or else disappointing when possessed. Only congeners of the orchid are found despite a search which begins in boyhood; the fireworks saved through the war years are, when ignited after the Armistice, never as exciting as their elaborate boxes and names invite one to believe; the Cathed­ral when entered at last in adult­hood has become a prosaic tea­room.

If this makes Brooke sound mawkish or like a Wildean aes­thete born at the wrong time, a strongly astringent flavour is present as well. For this scion of a prosperous wine merchant, this product of a progressive school and pre-war Oxford whose circle was made up of Firbank-reading gays, this self-styled "futilitarian homocommunist" and orchido­phile actually spent the happiest years of adulthood as a private in the Army Medical Corps (though perhaps the fact that he was an orderly in a VD clinic gives some clue: Brooke is very evasive about sex). Soldiering, in fact, was his only career until he bought him­self out to write full-time. It had become enough of a habit after five years of war for him to re­enlist after it ended, and the in­credulous reactions of his barrack mates to this mad act are very amusingly done. The army and the war took Brooke to Italy, and one of his best realised scenes describes a First Communion festa to which he and two friends are invited by a peasant family in the Abruzzi. This occasion, and a la­ter not so extraordinary Florentine dinner, are lovingly detailed and transformed into a Lucullan feast:

we began with an antipasto – slices of salame, and delicious curled fragments of smoked ham; tagliatelli followed — vast, steaming platefuls, gener­ously laced with a sauce of to­mato and peperoni; then came calamai — small cuttlefish fried in oil . . . finally strawberries swimming in bowls of red wine.

Very nice, but hardly an epicure's dream. To understand this litany, we have to remember that Brooke's middle-class readers in the fifties would have needed to be told — and would have en­joyed being told — what calamai are; that is, something fearfully exotic. In the dark, immediately post-war period there was evi­dently a taste for this sort of lip- smacking. Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (1945) gives his characters some superb din­ners including, memorably, a caneton à la presse: "We ate to the music of the press — the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow." (In a revised edi­tion, Waugh toned down some of these passages, saying he had then been in full revolt against an era of "soya beans and Basic En­glish".) Brooke follows on with some broader musings on Italian food habits as opposed to English ones: “in Italy eating was given its proper status as one of the civilized arts . . . in England, our Puritanism extends even to the stomach.” Most, I suppose, would concede the truth of this: even thirty years later the only place in the world where the average public cooking is worse than provincial England is provincial New Zealand. However, one is moved indignantly to reflect (as Brooke does not) that the English, after years of rationing, had little choice about wearing a gastronomic hair shirt. Brooke, despite a few misgivings, allows himself to be persuaded by his companion that the Italians, though they’ve lost the war, are not so badly off. The English, he is told, suffer from their determination to be bourgeois; “the peasant here is satisfied if he’s got a bed to sleep in and enough to eat . . . they just say Cosi é la vita and go off and have a drink.” Brooke, “lapped in my state of rosy contentment” is inclined to believe her, not least because his dinner, on the collapsed exchange rate, has cost less than six shillings.

The critical reader might feel at this point that “rosy contentment” is a great deal too generally suffused through the Orchid Trilogy. And it’s easy to jeer at it, just as it’s easy to jeer at its author who, having bought himself out of the army, went back to his childhood scenes with his mother and old nanny in Ivy Cottage, Bishopsbourne. When they died, an overdose of pills removed the necessity of long surviving them.

But this is unfair; an impression given by selective quotation. Taken in bulk, there is more to the Trilogy than that. It may be anodyne reading, but anodynes have their place. One wouldn’t want to make them a habit, that’s all.

Quadrant, December 1981