I have had great fun reading Orlando and have felt for some time an urge to give it the sort of affectionate parody that I gave Jane Eyre. The problem is, a parody of Orlando would be Orlando only not as good.
Here's something, however. One of my favourite bits of the novel is the stuff about The Spirit of the Age, so I decided to create a scene in which the Age it helped to define gives way to a new one.
The scene was a moderately-sized country residence amidst its grounds. Autumn was coming: the landscape of that well-known but elusive place, which has had libraries written about it but cannot be found on an OS map, Rural England, looked dignified but weary. Everything was at its most achingly beautiful and also its most painfully transitory. Birds sang about mortality. Petals fell from roses with exaggerated slowness.
Inside the house, some of the rising and established stars of English literature had gathered for tea and debate. It was impressive to hear: with only their words, they dismantled centuries of literary heritage and re-assembled it in new and exciting shapes. They were very keen, indeed, on the new and exciting. There was little of it to be found occurring naturally on their snoozing amber island, forcing them into more and more extreme experimentation: they ripped up the boundaries of class, race, gender, time, and space.
Were one in a position to listen quietly in at the breakfast table on a particular September morning, one could here all of the following: the renowned critic Scratching demonstrating that Donne had been the first modernist; Euphrosinia Plum-Duff proving that being a man and being a woman were both equally impossible; a recitation by the avant-garde poet Smealley in which the motor-car was hymned as the lily of the 20th century; a discussion of the latest piece by Schotterboldt, ‘Man in blackface coughing repeatedly on the piano keys’; and a lot of really quite good homoerotic stuff.
Young David Oats, who had been proclaimed the proletarian Blake of the 20th century by Scratching, speared himself a fried egg with a sense of vague unease. It is true that any proper socialist feels uneasy after his fourth fried egg, but he had long since convinced himself that socialism did not mean that nobody would have four fried eggs for breakfast: it meant that everybody would, and so for a son of the mines to enjoy them in a country house amongst the finest intellectuals of the age was no doubt a step in the right direction. The left direction, that is.
But still, he felt troubled. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation to get up and go over to the French window. From this admirable vantage point, he witnessed one of the decisive moments in history. (It is true that nothing really decisive had ever happened at Tanglethorn Hall per se. But a look out of the French windows revealed a general world phenomenon.)
Storm clouds gathered, fat, black, and bombastic. Then they broke. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. It was clear that this process would continue for some time.
The rains they poured down instantly sent the entire world into a grim, soggy, demoralizing winter. All sorts of extra-ordinary things took place. In China, the piercing claws of a small, agile dragon in an awful pince-nez stirred a far larger, older, craggier dragon from its ancient slumber (although this all took place in conditions of immense inscrutability). In America, the party was declared over and the drunken guests were fished out of the swimming-pool and driven home, where to their horror they discovered that most people in America weren’t obscenely rich. In Russia, muscular heroes of labour were sent to sink a mine-shaft into the unexplored and surpassingly deep depths of the Slavic Soul. In Germany, a magnificent cabaret about the end of civilization had to be suspended in the middle of the second act when the theatre ran out of money and the producer was sent to a concentration camp. India, which up to then had been all adventurous Afghan frontier until you got to the temples of lost civilizations, turned out to be miles and miles of bloody India, full of coolies joining trade-unions and political parties. Africa was shown to exist for the first time.
Weighed down by heavy thoughts (and possibly also fried egg, we must confess) Oats returned to the breakfast table, listening to the rain patter on the roof like the machine-guns of aircraft in the coming war, which everybody had just realized was inevitable.
The atmosphere had changed in his absence. Scratching had joined the Communist Party and was now showing that Donne had been a pioneering Marxist. Euphrosynia Plum-Duff was trying to prevent the war by sponsoring seminars; everybody of course knew that the war was inevitable, but this only made them feel even more urgently the need for seminars. Smealey had gone off to Tuscany on invitation from Mussolini, but the company had been made up again by Schotterboldt, who had had to flee into exile.
Breakfast was allowed to go stale as everybody chewed on the world crisis. The servants came in to clear it away, and several people felt intense existential guilt about their existence.
Oats, who was particularly so affected, went outside to watch the drizzle on the hillsides. He lit a soggy fag and puffed at it, discontentedly. Standing in the doorway, we has suddenly jostled aside by the Scotsman Robert Wilson, who was on his way to catch a train.
Not much has been seen of Wilson at Tanglethorn that Summer except at dinner-time: he had been invited to replace a whole succession of Irishmen, all of whom had succumbed to the urge to travel to Paris which affects the men of Eirinn so strongly for some reason, as a provider of Celticism; but when it turned out that his brand involved no Lillies of the 20th century but only the potatoes, rain, poverty, and Calvinism of the 20th century he had fallen out of favour. These were the things literature was supposed to help abolish, people felt, or at any rate successfully ignore.
Oats had thought he might have stayed around to gloat now that the march of history had so eloquently proved him right, but as he explained, he suddenly felt an irresistible calling to alight on his native moors, there to brood more satisfactorily. Unfortunately Oats didn’t understand much of this, as Wilson said it in a new form of broad Scots which he had just invented.
Oats wished he had a native moor: he could do with a bit of brooding-room. He scanned the rainy grey horizon of Rural England. In a rush its oldness, its grayness, the endearing mediocrity of its landscape suddenly overcame him in a way that would have been quite impossible when it was the centre of the world, the sun never set on it, and its roses never wilted. Wilted roses, dead trees, and slag-heaps seemed suddenly to find their voices and join in a chorus of forgotten hymns.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain intensified. Oats sighed significantly.
Well, he said in the privacy of his mind, there’s nothing else for it. I shall have to fight fascism.
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