Books: Modernist Miracle

THE GARDENER WHO SAW GOD—Edward James—Scribner ($2.50).

Joseph Smith, a diffident, conscientious young man with moist hands and an awkward, absent-minded manner, was head gardener at Wotton Vanborough. In this subtly cockeyed novel so much is clear from the start. And his master, Sir John, was the son of a courtly rake whose adventures in the Edwardian era had burdened a number of titled matrons with offspring of discreetly doubtful parentage. One of the doubtful ones was Diana Haddon, now twentyish and one of London’s brightest young things, at the moment dallying innocently with Sir John’s young affections. There was also the startling Lady Mors, whose husband thought he was a firecracker and so lived in constant fear of going off. It was Lady Mors who had indirectly wrecked Joseph’s chances as a wine merchant and so, by switching him to gardening, had brought him still more indirectly to the most momentous’ day of his career: the opening of the annual show of the Royal Horticultural Society.

The book begins with Joseph nervously putting last touches on the Wotton Vanborough exhibit. With this scene as its casual centre it launches into a circling recital of upper-crust extravagances and lower-class problems, mixed, its methodical madness suggesting nothing so much as a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Marcel Proust. Proust and Waugh have at bottom much the same chillingly precise appreciation of high-flown decadence, and the combination of their two techniques here serves the author very well. Waugh-ish are the incidental plot and background, which largely describe the scurryings from London to Paris to the Lido of the richlings who make up the socialite crowd; while Proustian are the devices of memory-association and semi-essayistic progression by which the author relates their fantastic adventures to the placider doings and ruminations of Joseph Smith, the gardener, on his one big day. Having won second prize (a disappointment) at the Flower Show, and dined later (a rare treat) with an eminent horticulturist; having afterward heard, for the first time in his life, great music, in the form of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, he returns very tired, belatedly, to the almost deserted castle of Wotton Vanborough. There still further surprises await him. A search for a suspected rat-nest leads him into a series of secret passageways. He emerges from these to confront an antique statue, glitteringly gilded; the statue falls, bursts open, revealing a cache of medieval manuscripts. At last, from an atmosphere grown dreamlike in its portentous illogicality, he walks out into the moonlit garden, sees a dark half-familiar figure passing across the lawn—God. The meeting is surprisingly casual, perhaps one of the least apocalyptic of such encounters in literature:

At first assuming Him to be one of the castle servants. Joseph realizes his mistake, apologizes. “I’m sorry,” Joseph says.

“It is I who am sorry,” says God.

“I took you to be one of my men,” says Joseph.

“Indeed, I have often been a gardener,” says God, turns to show a face in which Joseph recognizes his own face, cryptically passes on. Joseph goes home to bed.

More a tour de force than a solidly creative work, with its strongest passage the long and really remarkable description of Joseph’s emotions at the symphony concert, the book is likely to baffle those readers who search beneath its discursive surface for significances deeper than it contains—will delight many others with its suave philosophy, its grave absurdities, the considerable skill its 30-year-old first-novelist author displays in the conduct of its curiously bifocal narrative.

Author James knows well the general field he writes about. Well-born and wealthy, godson of Edward VII, he was hardly down from Oxford before he was startling fellow-Londoners: 1) by reports of his magnificence during a year at Rome in the consular service, where he rented the huge Palazzo Orsini, employed a string quartet to play for him at meals; 2) by his marriage (1930) to Dancer Tilly Losch; 3) by the series of sumptuous modernist ballets he staged (1933-34) in London and Paris for her and other stars. Through the staging of these he met most of the modern composers and painters, played a youthful Maecenas to many, is now a particular friend of Surrealist Salvador Dali—of whom he complains only that Dali and his cronies “don’t believe in God.”