The Last Gardener

A HOUSE IN ORDER by Nigel Dennis. 188 pages. Vanguard. $4.95.

Gardening is regarded as the province of nice ladies and retired gentlemen, but it is well to remember that it is also a primal human activity. In a parable of human anguish raised to an existential level, Nigel Dennis pursues Voltaire's suggestion that man should look to his own garden, and shows in a nightmare vision what it would be like to be the last gardener--one man alone, devoted to growing things in a mechanized military world.

To do so, he peels his hero down to man's quintessential being. The Dennis hero is anonymous. The reader is told only that he had been a cartographer, that he is a 44-year-old bachelor, and, more important, that he is a coward without shame for his cowardice, totally opposed to the objectives of the army in which he finds himself.

Without history or features or known nationality, Dennis' Everyman is technically some sort of soldier, but as he explains early, "I am a victim, not a soldier." A very ignominious victim he is, unable even to get himself captured with the rest of his surrendering battalion. He was left behind because, in terror, he had hidden in a closet. An enemy soldier consents to take him prisoner, but then steals his spectacles, thus further cutting him off from the world, and forgets him. Here cowardice becomes the better part of valor. The hero takes refuge in an abandoned greenhouse near the headquarters of an enemy regiment. He sits in plain sight of the enemy soldiers on the sound theory that he cannot be convicted of trying to escape. He is right. He is ignored in his transparent house. The enemy cannot grasp this military absurdity; they do not really "see" this most visible of men, and they, of course, are only a blur to him. This is the first of many paradoxes that Dennis develops in this deceptively simple tale.

Cowardice Confounds. Hunger at length forces the man back into the world of men--or, as Dennis suggests with his bleakly sardonic view of the human race, of madmen and brutes. He is interrogated as a spy, but his unabashed cowardice confounds the military. The enemy colonel, a man of some humor, decides to let him stay in his greenhouse--with the remark that if all his countrymen were like that, the war would be over very soon. The greenhouse thus becomes a "glass house," British soldiers' slang for a military prison. But it is a greenhouse to the prisoner. In civil life he had been a noted amateur gardener. Deftly, he sets about restoring to life the plants he lives with.

It is a touch-and-go affair. Winter nearly kills him. His feet become like "stewed bags of plums." When he takes off his newspaper underwear in the spring, the skin comes away with the paper. Yet he has survived, "always knowing that war is not forever and that we live by growing things." Surviving with him are a few sempervivums, or everlivings--among them the European houseleek, sometimes known as "hen and chickens"--a proper plant for this chickenhearted man. Another surviving plant is the Sempervivum melintese, thought extinct for a hundred years and now, like the hero, "resurrected in captivity."

Bugs & Men. Some sort of miracle has been indicated. When the war nears its end, an enemy official turns him loose with the words: "You cannot expect wars to continue forever, just to make you live your whole life under the protection of your enemies." Another had asked him: "Are you prepared to pretend that you endured silently and without complaint a captivity that would kill an ordinary person only because you were born with the heart of a chicken?" The question is never answered but it is obvious that Dennis opts for Everyman to his own garden, where the enemies are bugs, not men. He fails to consider that while people who live in glass houses may not throw stones, stone throwers abound outside. But he tells his parable in praise of life--vegetative, creative, nonpredatory--with cold wit. Ironically, it is told also with the utmost savagery. It is a quality perhaps more appropriate to gardeners than Dennis would concede. It was the horticulturist Cain who killed Abel.

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