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 Flying Draper Centenary - A Guest Post by John Howard

 

 

Ronald Fraser (1888-1974) was a British soldier and civil servant who achieved a small and dedicated following through his more than twenty novels beginning with The Flying Draper, first published in February one hundred years ago. (His final novel, A Work of Imagination, appeared in the year of his death.)

The Flying Draper (1924) is narrated in retrospect by Sir Philip Wokingham, the fiancé and later husband of Lydia, free-spirited and unconventional daughter of the botanist Sir Thomas Holbrook. Sir Philip is the personification of a respectable establishment politician, and the relationship between him and Lydia might seem unlikely. However, their love is genuine and profound, surely meant to last. Throughout the novel, opposites abound and are kept in a lively tension.

Lydia first encounters the Flying Draper, Albert Codling, among his tanks of tropical fish and greenhouse ‘full of green light and ferns’ when she visits him in the company of her uncle, Codling’s vicar, the pompous and earth-bound Rev. Walter Arbuthnot. The two men are very different in outlook but show a guarded respect for each other’s beliefs. Arbuthnot symbolises conventional thinking; Codling, with his ability to enter states of detached reverie and self-hypnosis, putting his body under the control of his will and imagination, making Lydia think of him as one of the Rishi: ‘Mountain wizards. A sort of rarified human being that has resigned the world and attained immortality’ (38).  

Codling is able to levitate and propel himself through the air: he explains that the contemplation of the lives of his fish and plants sets his mind free for flight. Soon he is a local celebrity, and as his fame grows becomes an inspiration for the young, many of whom eagerly wish to become his ‘disciples’. But Codling is as much loathed as loved. The media stir-up disorder, and his past is subjected to scrutiny. Questions are asked in Parliament. The parallels with another charismatic figure are clear, although Fraser has no need to state them explicitly. Albert Codling is not destined to return to his shop or enter peaceful retirement; neither will he become a spiritual leader or mentor. Yet his failure and death leave their mark on those who knew him, and cherished him as much as were exasperated by him.

It is appropriate that the story begins and ends in April. Growth and renewal, freshness and openness, are recurring themes, expressed through a variety of symbols. Codling lives near Primrose Hill, in North London (which was also the setting of Fraser’s novel Rose Anstey [1930]). That high, breezy, open space overlooking the crowded city is the scene of Codling’s first public ‘miracle’ – and, months later, his lonely death while surrounded by a hostile crowd. Throughout, The Flying Draper is full of images of height, air, and light: elevated, and so better, thoughts can then abound. Transcendence can be within grasp – and it can slip away.

On the anniversary of Codling’s death Philip and Lydia return to Primrose Hill. The times they spent with the Flying Draper, the memories of his words and actions, have left them wiser, if not sadder but nevertheless more understanding of the reality of their lives together. ‘For we both know, now, of something that makes all life strange and beautiful. There is some secret, some experience . . . perhaps we shall find it’ (252).

A revised edition of The Flying Draper was published in 1931 (and was included in Cape’s Saint Giles Library, 1940), with an author’s note stating that he ‘has attempted to remove the crudities of the original version’. In his introduction to that edition Humbert Wolfe explained that ‘crudities is too harsh but is permissible in self-criticism . . . the book has been re-orchestrated and always with advantage’ (14). Wolfe had previously told us that The Flying Draper had ‘slipped quietly into the world,’ continuing: ‘But for the most part, in so far as the book was noticed at all, it was dismissed as a fantasy in the manner of Mr H.G. Wells, and an unsuccessful one at that. In fact no serious book of our time is less like the work of Mr Wells or more completely unaffected by him’ (7).

Even though Albert Codling was the owner of a thriving business and not a downtrodden draper’s apprentice or assistant, he was surely at least a small nod to both Wells himself and the sort of characters who populate his earlier novels. Despite his powers Codling is also still something of a suburban ‘little man’ – another Mr Hoopdriver or Mr Lewisham who desperately wants to think better thoughts and radically break out into a new life. In the end Albert Codling, the Flying Draper, may fail to do so – or does he? Whether The Flying Draper is a Wellsian novel or not, it is certainly a fully Fraserian one.

(John Howard)