The August 14, 1926 issue of The Spectator spared a scant blurb on a book released the previous month:
FLOWER PHANTOMS. By Ronald Fraser. (Cape. 5s.)— A curious tale of the hysterical imaginings and experiences of a young girl to whom the vegetable kingdom has a peculiar significance. She is a botanical student at Kew Gardens, where she entertains curious fantasies and sees strange visions. The book is exquisitely written.
This review undersells the matter, and “exquisitely written” is doing heroic work. There is a wonderful treatment of the story from the Sherds Podcast, but a brief summary will suffice. It’s cliché to call a book ahead of its time, but Flower Phantoms feels refreshing in its preoccupations. Filtered through contemporary sensibilities, the book’s "hysterical imaginings" begin to look less like period eccentricity than an eclectic field of fixations by the knighted British civil servant Fraser: Buddhist philosophy, femininity, fantastical whimsy, eroticism, and a slight sadomasochistic charge that feels startlingly current.
The tale follows the wayward Judy, a student at Kew Gardens, who is caught between the paternal control of her brother Hubert and the importunate ardor of her lover Roland. Since the livelier business is the weird juxtaposition of human and botanical romance, I’ll focus mainly on Judy and Roland, who’re physical but badly mismatched in desire. Roland burns for her, but his needy, ham-handed advances leave her unmoved and a tension grows from Judy’s inability to name what would move her instead. Judy’s dissatisfaction finds solace among the plants whose hidden lives she longs to understand. As her uncertainty intensifies, the flowers in her care begin to manifest as physical beings with their own personalities and desires. Among them are a water-lily of dubious intent, a fig tree that can only be described as Buddhist, and an orchid with whom she begins a psychosexual affair. Through this affair, Judy learns the shape of her desire, and her human entanglements loosen enough for that knowledge to find artistic expression.
Judy is fascinating because while her experiences belong to the fantastical, her motivating forces are all too human. Judy keeps her eyes open when kissing Roland, signaling a foreboding display of ennui. The more Judy refuses to answer him, Roland’s longing festers into melodrama. Judy may not understand her desires at first, others feel their effects readily enough. Indeed, Fraser imbues Judy with an almost vampiric erotic force: beauty not merely admired, but spiritually wounding. A late episode gives her beauty a victim:
Still triumphant with the splendor of her experience, she would have liked everybody to be happy. She put her hand in his, therefore, and lightly kissed his cheek. In a year, poor man, he had pined and died, and she regretted what she had done. But the mackintosh was most useful to her.
Judy’s power over this man and her brisk remorse haunt me, as a compelling character should.
The orchid answers Judy’s force with force of its own, its regal presence decisively flips the erotic dynamic on her, showing her that adoration alone will not do. Instead, she wants a love that can meet, resist, and even overmatch her without reducing her to a mere possession. When she returns to Roland, she wins acceptance of the part of her that requires more than reverence and instead desires a love tempered by fierceness, distance, discipline, and even danger. Here the original review, for all its brevity, finally proves useful. In the orchid’s presence, the prose’s exquisiteness blooms in proportion to Judy’s enchantment:
There he was, the Orchid, with his substance of evening sunlight indwelling in frozen snow, symbol of Himalayan cold rising from tropical sunset. Gently she touched the flower with her fingers and ventured a little pinch, and threads of flame ran through her nerves from his body of white fire. Beyond him, through the glass, she saw twilight lawns and darkening tree-masses; beyond that, burning through tones of purple, a deep glory of the sun.
The ending’s ambiguity is practical as much as metaphysical. It remains unclear if the maladroit Roland can truly accept the fiercer terms of love that Judy desires.
Returning to its own moment, Flower Phantoms belongs to a curious and largely neglected British literary mode that flourished in the interwar and early WWII years. In Past Lives of Old Books, R.B. Russell calls this loose tradition “whimsical fantasy,” offering a handful of exemplars: The Brontës Go to Woolworths (1931) by Rachel Ferguson, Lady Into Fox (1922) by David Garnett, Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Miss Hargreaves (1940) by Frank Baker, His Monkey Wife (1930) by John Collier, and The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier. Proceeding by induction from this handful of examples, I would describe whimsical fantasies as tightly constructed narratives in which unexplained fantastical events intrude upon an otherwise realistic middle-class setting and are handled in a dry, matter-of-fact tone. Yet the whimsy is not always benign as the impossible often briefly displays an edge of menace. These stories favor intimate social and psychological interactions under pressure from the impossible over adventure or tidy resolution. Fraser’s novel fits remarkably well. As to why this mode flourished in the interwar years, I suspect the period favored fantasies that could dramatize social anxieties without outright disturbing middle-class propriety.
To expand the speculative whimsical fantasy shelf, we might include: Living Alone (1919) by Stella Benson, The Camel (1936) and Count Omega (1941) by Lord Berners, and perhaps Memoirs of a Midget (1921) by Walter de la Mare. The shelf, I suspect, will grow with more Bleiler-spelunking. As progenitor, Russell names John Kendrick Bangs’s Roger Camerden: A Strange Story (1887), giving the search a useful point of departure. These books differ in their particulars, but all share the habit of admitting the impossible into the parlor, talking desperately of the weather, and pretending not to notice a host’s knife hand trembling over the seed-cake.
(Fogus)
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