The Centenary of 'Flower Phantoms' by Ronald Fraser: A Guest Post by Fogus

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)

The Centenary of Ronald Firbank's 'Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli': A Guest Post by John Howard

Ronald Firbank’s biographer Miriam Benkovitz declared that ‘No one in the history of English letters has been more dedicated to the literary vocation than Ronald Firbank. Until his ninth novel was published in 1924, he had got back not “one farthing piece” for all his work, and even then he received less than a thousand dollars’ (Ronald Firbank, 1969). Benkovitz did not speculate on the earnings, if any, that would have accrued to Firbank for his tenth novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, which was first published one hundred years ago in July 1926. Benkovitz had reached the final page of her biography. Time and space had run out, for Firbank had died, aged forty, six weeks before. This centenary of an appearance is also that of a departure.

Of anecdotes concerning the eccentricities of Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank there seems no end. Benkovitz described how Firbank would saunter through London’s streets, ‘skirting Covent Garden to void the “massacre of flowers” and holding a handkerchief before his eyes when he passed a butcher’s shop’. In Charing Cross Road he would examine the books in the bins in front of the shops. H would frequently visit Cyril Beaumont’s bookshop and ask: “Have you anything in my line today; you know, something vague, something dreamy, something restful?” Did Firbank perhaps have his own novels in mind? The description could fit – but it is far from entirely accurate. Benkovitz considered Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli to be, in its way, ‘a masterpiece of morality and technique’. While it carried Firbank’s ‘deepest and most mature convictions, it is in fact a wholly imaginative creation inspired by the “rose coloured palace” of the Archbishop of Seville and the “giddy flight” of the “Giralda-tower”. She also wondered whether in his ‘compulsion to seem wicked, a feeling which recurred throughout his life, might not Firbank have presented in Pirelli a perverse apotheosis of himself and then, as he was almost ready to do with his own artificial temperament, stripped the Cardinal of his gaudy trappings?’

In the great cathedral of the Andalucian city of Clemenza, Cardinal Archbishop Don Alvaro Pirelli conducts a baptism – of the Duquesa DunEden’s new pet, a police-dog puppy called Crack. Pirelli’s latest eccentricity has not gone unnoticed – or unreported. There have been many previous ‘frolics’ and the ‘consequences of cutting too dashing a figure’. Perhaps the Pope will be asked to decide the fate of the figure responsible for the ‘scandals of Clemenza’… In the vast cathedral sacristy the Secretary of the Chapter, Don Moscosco, ‘a burly little man, a sound judge of women and bulls’, sits at his bureau and holds court ‘with tactful courtesy, at the disposal of anyone soliciting information as to “vacant dates,” or “hours available,” for some impromptu function.’ The sacristy serves as the place where information – gossip – is received and exchanged amid the backbiting.

In Rome Pope Tertius II, ‘out-of-doorish, as Neapolitans usually are’ strolls in his garden, contemplating the possibility of having to condemn or even unfrock Pirelli: ‘a snarl, a growl, a bark, a yelp, coming from the font, would be quite enough…’ In the ‘decaying monastery of the Desierto’ Pirelli is on retreat, ‘idly considering his Defence. “Apologia, no; merely a defence”’. Chicklet, a favoured young acolyte from the cathedral, is with him ‘serving both at Mass and table’. Lingering after dinner, Pirelli imagines that ‘the great Theresa herself would flit in from the garden […] seeking, it was supposed, a lost sheet of the manuscript of her Way of Perfection.’ After drinking bumper after bumper of wine he begs her to teach him (once again?) that Way.

In his palace Pirelli prepares to leave for Rome. While packing he muses on the punishment he has given Chicklet for chasing mice in the cathedral: ‘It must have been love that made me do it.’ The Cardinal, ‘his sensitiveness hurt by the lad’s disdain and frivolity’ had locked him into the cathedral in the dark, with the mice. Deciding to relax his punishment, Pirelli goes to release the boy. Their verbal fencing becomes a game, accompanying pursuit and evasion. No innocent, Chicklet keeps out of reach until dawn is near, when he escapes from the church. The chase ended and now alone, ‘dispossessed of everything but his fabulous mitre, the Primate was nude and elementary now as Adam himself’. Pirelli collapses before a painting of Christ’s crucifixion. Unknown to him, he had been observed by Madame Poco, his faithful housekeeper: ‘It looked as though his Eminence was far beyond Rome already.’ She coils her chaplet about him: ‘“It’s wonderful what us bits of women do with a string of beads, but they don’t go far with a gentleman”’.

Firbank was a cardinal of camp and snobbery whose ‘wholly imaginative creation’ in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli crafted a succession of set pieces or sketches, highly pictorial and brightly coloured, into a slim novel. Each scene is enacted within what is, effectively, a stage set where everything is bathed in heat, sunshine, or moonlight. All are packed with sensual detail, snatched incident, and dialogue at a slant. Even if there is ‘no story’ there are happenings – a gradual progression. Events, one thing after another hazily and partly revealed, lead to the surely inevitable conclusion. The narrative flows, switching scenes and characters as a dream does. In terms of dream it holds together and coheres – but purely on its own terms. To expect anything else in a Firbank novel is to look in the wrong direction.

Perhaps part of the explanation lies in the way Firbank wrote. Often on the move, he kept notebooks which he filled with single words, odd phrases and sentences, and cartoonish drawings. He would then select, assemble, and expand these into a string of pearl-like episodes – his new book. Firbank conceived Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli while staying in Seville, made notes in Lisbon, and wrote it in Rome. During that time his beloved mother died, and he suffered a ‘psychic and physical collapse’ – yet he continued to write. Ronald Firbank proved that nothing could prevent him from remaining true to his literary vocation. At the end there was a man alone, naked before death and his God – and a brutally funny novel.

(John Howard)