Wild Orchids in the Garden

The past is never what it seems. The 1950s is often viewed as the moment the working-class erupted into literary life. It was not so. Apart from a few exceptions literature remained a middle-class game. What was new: a place and a tone. An aggressive provincialism. It began with William Cooper, his Scenes from Provincial Life. 

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Blow jobs. Gay love. Illegal abortions. Slacker teachers. A knowing wink at the establishment…. No wonder a hit. In the provinces you can get away with anything, hey? Seventy years on, and it’s bound to feel tame; a favourite word of the narrator, who loves a woman whom he doesn’t want to marry, scared she will domesticate and therefore remove his artistic spirit – Myrtle has no interest in what he writes. It is the novel’s weakness; this self-aware hero who is too ordinary to be artistically interesting. The descriptions of his characters, his evocation of place, a portrait of a particular time, are handicapped by a clever knowingness that has nothing original to say. Unlike the genius, who has no idea what they’re going to think next….

The novel feels too literary, although its intent is the opposite: to serve up a slice of authentic middle class existence; where a desire for sex and the easy life - this lot are lazy - battle it out with a need to maintain the proprieties. When young there is little contest. Desire and instinct usually triumph; though they’ll have only a few years on the lash (bourgeois boys are expected to settle down by their mid-twenties). The most powerful feel is that of late adolescence, when hormones and concepts (crude and clichéd) go wild. It is why Joe Lunn, mistakenly mixing up his youthful liberty with his literary talent, tries to remain single. The provinces a place for social activities that are both pseudo-sophisticated and authentic; a backwater able to make even the most banal of metropolitan ideas look crazy and avant-garde.

The self-reflexive nature of the narrative gives this novel an odd feel. Too aware that a writer is telling the story, the story itself feels safe; this confirmed by the tongue-in-cheek conclusion, a pastiche of the Victorian blockbuster. We hear the sound of fingertips on a typewriter. Standing in the street we look up at an author at work; he turns and winks at us; an army of books staring out from the shelves; those guardians at the gates of romance. He is playing. A directness, of feeling, of thought, is thus lost through such knowing games. We too conscious that this is a novel. While the writer is lame. His own narrative intrusions not original enough to offset his unwelcome presence; he’s like a gatecrasher at a party forever reminding everybody he wasn’t invited. This narrator more innocent than he realises, for he is too respectable, because too knowing, about his Bohemianism. A little tweaking and this description of Myrtle could apply to the novel.

Whatever she was thinking about, whatever she was doing, Myrtle preserved a demeanour that was meek and innocent – especially meek.  Sometimes I could have shaken her for it, but on the whole I was fascinated by it.

With a demeanour that was meek and innocent, Myrtle had two characteristic facial expressions.  The first was of resigned reproachful sadness; the other was quite different, and only to be described as of sly smirking lubricity. As her face was both mobile and relaxed, she could slip like a flash from one expression to the other, naturally, spontaneously and without the slightest awareness of what she was doing.  

Myrtle wants to get married. This book wants to be liked, even though it is describing things that may shock the more genteel reader.  

Although a literary fiction this novel does allow us to see a different lifestyle. The provinces as bohemian as London’s Soho; even if their bohemianism isn’t quite the same thing. It is less wild and original, more attuned to the local customs and the moral codes of its place and past. Place dominates these characters in a way it doesn’t the establishment renegades, who, with that radical break that only money and an aristocratic education can bring, have freed themselves to live a truly independent life. And London. Both anonymous and a cluster of villages situated either in space or in temperament; making it easy for those inclined to live in self-contained communities, where sex and aesthetics hold sway. It is why Myrtle, though a graphic designer, who goes to wild parties and has multiple boyfriends, is only interested in marriage.  Her social promiscuity a ruse to get Joe Lunn jealous, and into the connubial bed. The constraint of the provinces. These are respectable bohemians, on a short holiday between the end of schooling and the start of secure employment and the domestic home. A time when some freedom is allowed, even encouraged; these young chaps expected to be a little wild. It’s safe to let them have their fun.

Tom is the most interesting character. A red-headed Jew who doesn’t hold the same opinion for more than a couple of sentences, and whose sexuality is all over the place: one morning he visits the parents of his boyfriend and demands that Steve goes on holiday with him not them; in the afternoon he proposes to Myrtle. Tom is all feeling and fleeting ideas, which gives him a certain charisma, but also makes him bumptious and weak. An overgrown teenager who can’t see anybody else, thus that extraordinary visit to the parents’ house; but which produces no angry reaction – they view this “friendship” as a career opportunity for their son. Are they ignorant? Or is gay sex less important than cash in the bank? The former is more likely, the latter a critic’s wet-dream: because a sign that one morality is giving way to another; a Christian nation is turning capitalist, with all its polymorphic permissiveness.

This is a young man’s book (though the author was 40 when he published it), with all a young man’s gaucherie (which is believed sophistication).

These boys conform to type. They are not revolutionaries. Nor rebels. They do not even talk about politics and art, although they think Britain is condemned to peace and defeatism. Youthful pessimists are not really interested in politics; they use it to express a too conventional misanthropy. Love affairs are what really matter. Then there are the dreams of escape…to some utopia, where society and one’s self are in perfect harmony; the teenage fairy-tale, when child not yet born again as man. In Joe’s case the idea of America is an aversion to marriage, that siren call signalling the end of late adolescence. Their ideas are traps, the common places of a provincial bohemian-class. Only their emotions are feral. Although this novel’s conceit is that these characters are free thinkers, the Nazis a threat to their independent minds. This is the role of America: it burnishes the image of themselves as intellectuals and artists. They never get there. Because they are fantasists, fantasy the mode of thought for children. It is why, in the Dickensian epilogue, everyone apart from the narrator (he has written this book) leads a contented family life. These are not intellectuals, nor radicals; they are intelligent men who, picking up the detritus of public debate, as they travel through their university years, end up in a typical small town; a place with no time for ideas and revolutionary politics. Of course they will adapt to their new surroundings. Such conventional souls.

It is the biggest revelation in the book. The “political 1930s” weren’t so political after all. The radicalism a summer jacket the graduate-class wear when in season. Soon to change to the thick, heavy coats of their winter respectability. Once the girls, or in Tom’s case the boys, arrive that idealism fades away…their instincts far stronger than their minds, that will to think, to create. Despite all the political and intellectual talk it is love and sex that count; although Joe worries that a mistress prevents him writing; the artist the one free character in this novel.

There is a suggestion that Tom and Joe are out of place. It has something to do with their education. Thus most of the teachers at the school, the poorest one in town, seem disconnected from their work; Bolshaw, the senior master, even lazier than Joe, although like him he has his own intellectual interests – he may be doing interesting work in astrophysics. The teachers are more indolent than their pupils; the book a catalogue of the ruses of how they get out of work. How true this feels. And how unexpected! The reason is boredom and incompatibility; schoolwork doesn’t stimulate them, and they’ve been educated to be something else. Teaching’s just a job. No vocation here. Joe the teacher is the same as Tom the accountant; work a slot machine in which you feed in time to get money out.

The dream of America can be seen in two ways. The most obvious is a metaphor for an escape from uncongenial work. Tom and Joe are not really concerned about Hitler and his cronies. It is their jobs that are the Nazi thugs. Work stealing their youthful liberty. It is romanticism of course. They’ll never leave for America because their ideas are weak – they have no compelling force to move them. Also, they want the idea of escape, shattered if they actually got there; for in America they’ll be dragooned into office or factory. The lazy must have their dreams.

The other view is more circuitous and speculative. Oxford graduates like Tom and Joe (and Bolshaw) are an army invading the provinces. However, after their first conquests - the jobs, the love of Myrtle and Steve - they cannot dominate this place. Myrtle wants to be a wife. Steve loves Tom but needs to be independent of him. After their early triumphs they are finding resistance, and they don’t like it; Tom trying to control his lover, Joe to escape from his. The biggest danger, though, is to succumb to the provincial life itself; their education, their youth, even their bohemianism, unable to withstand the temptations and pressures of small town respectability. Unable to conquer they are reluctant to assimilate. 

Simms is the best you can do in such a place.

I was very fond of Simms. I liked his face. He had a broad head, bald with a fringe of grey hair, and narrow, delicate jaw. His skin was pink, and his face showed his passing shades of emotion. It was the face of a man who had always gone his own way, and had thus arrived at a state of lively self-satisfaction. He was now old and frail, but it was probable that he had always looked frail. He was gentle and unaggressive – the opposite of Bolshaw. Yet had I been asked to say which of the two had done fewer things he did not want to do, I should have said Simms.

But the war is coming, and saves them. Free for a little longer….

Review: Scenes from Provincial Lifei

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i. A useful contrast: Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, two novels which are scathing about such a provincial life - she hates it - yet at the same time reveal the same stimulus to be free. For a celebration of this freedom: John Wain, Hurry on Down.