FLOWER PHANTOMS
Sir Arthur Ronald Fraser was born in 1888, the fourth son of an Inverness-shire cloth merchant who had moved to London. Fraser had a conventional education at St Paul’s School, but by his early teens was writing poetry, which was published in the Westminster Gazette, much to his family’s amusement. At eighteen he was put to work in an insurance company, but in his spare time read at the British Museum; he was particularly interested in Buddhism. He served in the First World War and was in the trenches by November 1914. He was seriously wounded at the battle of Beaumont Hamel and invalided out. He made his career in the overseas section of the Department of Trade, and in the Foreign Office, serving in Argentina and France as the Commercial Minister in the British Embassies there, and later as a Government Director of the Suez Canal, when he was resident in Egypt. His knighthood in 1949 was one of several decorations in recognition of a distinguished diplomatic career. He published twenty-seven novels between 1924 and 1961 and in later life became involved in the New Age movement, running a healing and meditation centre with his partner Ingrid from a temple attached to his home. He died in 1974.
Mark Valentine is the author of several collections of short fiction and has published biographies of Arthur Machen and Sarban. He is the editor of Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural, and decadent, and has previously written the introductions to editions of Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. P. Hartley, and others, and has introduced John Davidson’s novel Earl Lavender (1895), Claude Houghton’s This Was Ivor Trent (1935), and Oliver Onions’s The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939) for Valancourt Books.
Photograph of Ronald Fraser courtesy of Dahlia Saxby
FLOWER PHANTOMS
by
RONALD FRASER
With a new introduction by
MARK VALENTINE
Kansas City:
VALANCOURT BOOKS
2013
Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser
First published London: Jonathan Cape, 1926
First U.S. edition published New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926
Reprinted from the 1926 Boni & Liveright edition
Copyright © 1926 by Ronald Fraser
Introduction © 2013 by Mark Valentine
Published by Valancourt Books, Kansas City, Missouri
Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins
20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
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ISBN 978-1-939140-10-4
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INTRODUCTION
Ronald Fraser’s work does not earn a reference in any major study of twentieth century English literature: neither does it appear in many studies of the fantastic in literature, though in a few he merits a bare paragraph or two. Nothing in my reading guided me to his books, only a fortunate find. In a bookshop in the cathedral city of Chichester one day, which must have been before I had reached thirty years of age, I saw a slim volume with a spine of faded green, the wan colour of a field in winter. There was a glimmer from the worn gilt of the lettering, like tired sunlight. I took up the book and was at once attracted by the title. Flower Phantoms. Could it possibly be a rare, lost fantasy? I opened the book to the demure pages in the good quality paper of Jonathan Cape, the publisher, and began to read.
Flower Phantoms (1926) is indeed an exquisite fantasy, about a mystic communion with the soul of an orchid in Kew Gardens, the famous botanical park in London. It is told with a fine delicacy, in a languorous, sultry prose that is apt for its setting. As a study in what the eminent scholar of the fantastic E.F. Bleiler called art deco rococoism, it is beautifully rich and sinuous. But it is also more than this. It really tells of the dawning of a young woman’s independence of spirit as she finds herself through her work in horticulture, when professional women gardeners were few, and through her exploration of a more exotic mysticism than her upbringing would normally countenance. The book is also about the possibility of higher forms of consciousness, and succeeds in suggesting these without recourse to the specialist esoteric language seen in much occult fiction. It expresses rarefied states of mind with an evanescent subtlety.
These themes, of independent young women and of rarer forms of spiritual encounter, were also seen in contemporary fiction such as Stella Benson’s Living Alone (1919) and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), as well as in the pagan gamines of Mary Webb’s novels. They were a prevailing interest of Ronald Fraser: he returned to them frequently in subsequent novels. They are not necessarily the sort of preoccupations that might be expected from a man with Fraser’s background and vocation.
Sir Arthur Ronald Fraser (1888-1974) was the fourth son of an Inverness-shire cloth merchant, who had moved to London. His father is recalled as an unimaginative man, a firm Presbyterian, hidebound in his beliefs. Fraser had a conventional education at St Paul’s School, but by his early teens was writing poetry, which was published in the Westminster Gazette, much to his family’s amusement. At eighteen he was put to work in an insurance company, but in his spare time read at the British Museum: he was particularly interested in Buddhism. He served in the Honourable Artillery Company in the First World War, and was in the trenches by November 1914. He was seriously wounded at the battle of Beaumont Hamel and invalided out. This left him with deep physical scars, a paralysed left arm and a claw hand, but he never let his injuries inhibit his life: he was always active and busy. He made his career in the overseas section of the Department of Trade, and in the Foreign Office, serving in Argentina and France as the Commercial Minister in the British Embassies there, and later as a Government Director of the Suez Canal, when he was resident in Egypt. His knighthood in 1949 was one of several decorations in recognition of a distinguished diplomatic career.
But he also wrote twenty seven novels, nearly all published by Cape, between 1924 and 1961, and a few other miscellaneous books. Many of his novels are tinged with mystical fantasy. They are illumined by Fraser’s deeply-held conviction that there is an order of reality superior to our familiar daily existence, and that this has the potential to show us worlds infinitely wondrous and gracious: a vision he has in common with better-known writers of the fantastic such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. But Fraser’s inspiration was largely drawn from Chinese spirituality, both Taoist and Buddhist. He never visited the Far East, but he made a deep study of its philosophy and culture.
There was a great deal of fiction inspired by Far Eastern religions in the 1920s and 30s, much of it rather breathless and winsome. Where oriental characters are not inscrutable villains, they are all-wise masters: the influence of theosophy and occultism was strong. But Fraser’s work was of a different order. With only a few exceptions, his books have very English characters and settings, and he is interested in exploring how insights and concepts from China might work out if applied in the West.
Fraser’s first book, The Flying Draper (1924) earned him comparisons to H.G. Wells, and he was in fact a great friend of Wells’ oldest son, the zoologist George Philip (‘Gip’) Wells. His novel t
ells, with calm detail and subtle characterisation, how a young man in London learns, by spiritual discipline and passion, to fly of his own accord: and the confusion and hostility this provokes. It was a bold, imaginative beginning. He followed it with a book even further removed from the everyday, Landscape With Figures (1925). Inspired by his study of Chinese artefacts at the British Museum, this depicts the voyage of a magnate and his entourage from the South China Sea up a secret river to a Taoist paradise where three sages dwell. At once both witty and profound, the book is in one way a forerunner of James Hilton’s more famous Shangri La book, Lost Horizon (1933). The sumptuous, strange beauty of the realm is finely and lingeringly described by Fraser.
However, these works are not in fact typical of Fraser’s central body of fiction and there is much else that justifies greater interest in his writing. There are at least a handful of other novels that have a delicate distinction. The most memorable of his books is surely Flower Phantoms, but this was the harbinger of later work following up the themes he explored there. These works, with their celebration of the liberation of the feminine psyche, are at the heart of Fraser’s vision.
In Rose Anstey (1930), the young hoyden of the title has a strong affinity with nature. Again, this was not an uncommon theme in its time, and the fey maiden dancing among the daisies and making friends with wild animals was a sufficient staple of interwar fiction to be frequently satirised. But Fraser is shrewder and steadier than that; his Rose is more earthbound, with a child’s self-centredness and contrariety, and also its sly wisdom. She lives in an unconventional household made up of eccentrics – a worldly savant, a raffish artist and an austere hermit. Her understanding of their individual ways of life, and the development of her own way, give the book its peculiar charm and force.
His next book, Marriage in Heaven (1932) explores the world of a stained-glass artist, Adrian, who seeks to perfect “the charging of light with emotion” and, by analogy, the charging of life with spirit. His inspiration and distraction alike come from his wayward young lover, Linnet. Critics continued to try hard to say precisely why Fraser’s work was so alluring, this time evoking “the delicate but compelling skill in conveying a sense of the undercurrents that pervade and rule our surface lives.”
Again, a young woman’s defiance of convention and ardent identification with the things of the spirit are proclaimed in Miss Lucifer (1939). Fraser had met and befriended Joan Grant, author of a highly popular series of novels based on what she believed to be her previous incarnations, beginning with Winged Pharoah (1937). She seems to be reflected in the title character of Miss Lucifer. Fraser himself was a firm believer in reincarnation, and in karma.
In Maia (1948), he conveys beautifully the pleasure in transient moments such as the experience of a shared meal, or exploring old ruins, and he captures also how the eye, or an inner eye, may see a fine significance in simple things: marrows, shadows, flowers, faces, walls and hallways. As in Flower Phantoms, he writes about that rare sudden sense of essence in a form, a tint, a texture, a grain. And beneath these he lightly implies an eternal truth or force at work. His characters are charming or shrewdly observed – a young married couple (both painters), an ex-soldier who studies now at the British Museum and is a sage, a brace of comfortable, hospitable widows and a practical spinster, a soothsaying charlady, two fierce and tormented young lovers, aloof French chateau-dwellers. But here he worked at greater length than the slim volume of Flower Phantoms: the story moves very studiedly, slowly, so needs readers who are content to linger.
Although Fraser’s novels are usually intimately concerned with spirituality and the conviction of a supernal world, there is no overt insistence upon any personal deity or ultimate being, and in this he clearly differs from other writers in the field, such as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Neither does Fraser make use of the concept of an active principle of evil, often the key presence in traditional ghost stories where it provides tension and opposition in the plot. Instead, the challenges facing his characters are often more human in scale and closer to everyday experience. The trials and dilemmas his characters encounter often derive from the difficulty of sustaining an identification with the numinous while locked into more mundane matters. This could become a too-solemn or programmed theme: but in Flower Phantoms especially, Fraser has a wonderful lightness of touch.
The critic Brian Stableford has observed acutely that a dominant theme in Fraser’s work is the gulf that divides individuals who are spiritually aware from the general run of humanity who have more worldly concerns. This was perhaps the influence of his own upbringing, where his literary work and interest in Eastern religion were not understood by his family. It is certainly the case that in some of his novels, such as The Flying Draper and The Fiery Gate (1943), a well-regarded work about a grocer who is also a visionary, set during the Blitz, such seers seem doomed to find incomprehension, indifference, even scorn and resentment. But in others Fraser does imply that some sort of rapprochement between the world and the spirit is possible. This is also the inference from his own life, in which he balanced the materiality of commercial negotiations between states, the attention to the details of economic statistics and treaties, with an inner life, expressed in his books, which yielded his subtly shaded insights into spiritual experience.
In his later work he also introduced an element of the comic, with a series of four books that feature the butler Trout, a sort of interplanetary Jeeves, in space trips that are also spiritual journeys. And his final work in fiction returned more overtly to his first interest, in a group of delicate, willow-plate novels imbued with Chinese mysticism.
Late in his life, in retirement, the direction of Fraser’s thought led him to what may seem his natural home in the nascent New Age movement. He and his unconventional partner Ingrid ran a healing and meditation centre from a private temple attached to their home, Swanlands, near Chinnor, Oxfordshire, and he was associated with the College of Psychic Studies and the Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation, translating books on the symbolism of Chartres Cathedral and on an initiate of the Egyptian mysteries. It would be natural to expect that this affinity with what has proved to be an enduring new movement of the late 20th century might lead to the rediscovery of his novels, but that has not yet happened.
This is the more surprising since Fraser is a fine prose writer whose evocation of colour, shape and movement is almost tactile in its vividness. The poet Humbert Wolfe described him as “probably the most distinguished writer of English prose in the novel form at present living. He cannot do other than write beautifully.” There is a chaste sensuality in Fraser’s writing, and a spiritual ardour which is often the equal of the most successful passages in Machen or Blackwood, when a similarly intense mystical ecstasy is conveyed. It must surely be only a matter of time before the subtle power of his prose and the graceful conviction of his mysticism, both at their rare height in Flower Phantoms, receive their long-overdue recognition.
Mark Valentine
January 11, 2013
(With thanks to Dahlia and Michael Saxby, Ronald Fraser’s daughter and son-in-law, for their recollections and their kind support of my interest in his life and books).
FLOWER
PHANTOMS
§
I
Kew gardens were ice-bound, there was biting frost in the air, and early darkness had fallen. The world was in the death and rigor of winter, and Judy, who loved light and heat, kept indoors, when she could not be at her work in the plant-houses, like a seedling that wraps itself up close in warmth and oblivion under the ground.
They lived in a moderate and comfortable house in the lime avenue that runs from the station to the Gardens. Their father’s money, which was all that survived of him, manifested itself in the house and in a moderate annuity. She lay in a window-seat under the fern-window on the first landing, over hot-water pipes – her brother, a
most sensible young man, having had the house centrally heated for his own comfort. There was no light in the hall, but the mirror at the turn of the stairs dimly reflected a saffron fringe, a fern-green skirt and a pale pair of legs in the glow of an electric radiator. The eyes that gazed through a smudge of lashes seemed unusually light. Beyond the yellow head a shadowy appearance of frosted window, with a faint pattern of ferns.
She felt cold at the sight of her own legs so unkindly exposed to the draughts that circulated about the staircase. Her skirt was too short to cover her knees, so she drew up a rug, turned over, hid her face in a cushion, and tried to imagine that she was a young plant, snug in black earth over the steam-pipes of a hot-house. Her imagination was not successful at first, because there was a draught on her bare neck; but when she had managed to stop it out, and to close all other avenues by which the cold might approach her, she was able to sink into a condition beautifully comatose, a state resembling sleep, in which, among queer fragments of dreams to do with plants, she seemed once or twice about to fall into some unfamiliar night. She rescued herself from this strange experience with a start; but still she played with it; fearfully opened a door and looked out into a wintry cold and darkness of disembodiment. Even a smart pinch did not fully awake her.
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