Jocelyn Brooke’s Orchid Trilogy

Jocelyn Brooke (1908-1966) is the kind of writer one finds out about by trawling in used bookstores or perhaps killing time perusing seldom-visited shelves in a university library or idly examining the contents of a venerable literary lady’s drawing room while one waits for tea to be served. Like the rare Military Orchid, which he uses as the central motif for the first book of his floral and semi-autobiographical trilogy, he is a chance encounter, a serendipitous trouvaille. Brooke is not part of the cannon: rather he is a largely forgotten ‘notable English writer’ from another age — a light, subtle, original, melancholy voice who emerged shortly after the Second World War and has since been drowned out by the ominous, hypnotic noise of the later twentieth century. He wrote poems, treatises on botany and curious little Proustian books that are like musical variations on the same themes: the country life, an idyllic childhood, Englishness, botany, fireworks, mild alienation from the conventional world, the War, the unexpected satisfactions of military life…

Brooke was born in Kent, on the south coast. His father was a successful wine merchant who called his shop ‘the Office’ to escape lowbrow associations. Very reluctant about the educational process, Brooke ran away from public school twice within a fortnight. Eventually, he went to Worcester College, Oxford, where he obtained mediocre results. He then moved to London for a while, trying his hand at various jobs, before briefly entering into the family business in Folkestone — but these attempts proved variously unsatisfactory. When the Second World War broke out, Brooke joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the War, finding himself once again at loose ends in civilian life, he decided to re-enlist as a regular, but ended up buying himself out of service with the money he got from the success of The Military Orchid (1948). He then settled down to write and published fifteen titles between 1948 and 1955.

In The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950), Brooke uses the facts of his life as raw material, arranging them imaginatively into pleasing, balanced, beautifully wrought set-pieces. Through the evocative magic of their names, a flower, a kind of firework rocket and an oddly shaped house — images taken from his childhood world — become the central metaphors of his books. Like Proust’s Madeleine, these objects are endowed with the power to vividly call forth the remembrance of things past: the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the smells, the feelings… For the narrator’s delicately sensitive consciousness, they represent knots of experience, tying together the loose strands of life into coherent narratives, into legible world-configurations. With his lively, articulate, frictionless style, it feels like Brooke is unassumingly leading the reader on a leisurely post-prandial walk through an English garden or a tame countryside. We grow accustomed to the landscape’s features, delighted once in a while by a surprising discovery. We come to confidently rely on our guide’s tone: humorous and warm and decorously reserved. His melancholy is tempered by a kind of quiet, unassuming wisdom, a capacity for appreciating the small things in life — the sometimes unlikely or mundane circumstances from which joy blooms.