FIREMAN FLOWER
by William Sansom, 1944

William Sansom's first collection of stories, Fireman Flower, was partly inspired by his experience as a fireman during the Blitz. The stories in this volume present common features and in many ways foreshadow characteristics of Sansom's themes and manner in his subsequent works. The stories in Fireman Flower are not all about fires and firemen, but all of them have allegorical undertones. In most of them, owing to the author's metaphysical preoccupations, the human condition is represented metaphorically. "Fireman Flower," besides openly being an allegory of humanity's progress toward self-awareness and the understanding of their condition, is the story of a fireman in search of the "kernel of a fire" in a huge city warehouse. As in his other fireman stories, Sansom finds here an opportunity to explore the gamut of sensory impressions, and he also exploits the high emotional potential represented by a building on fire. More striking still, his desire to extend the experience of his protagonist to that of all humanity transforms the setting and the events of his story. Colored by his imagination, these undergo a subtle metamorphosis and become unreal and at times surreal. The adventure of Fireman Flower can be seen, in Sansom's words, as a "surreal romance." It is also a realistic fantasy in which we recognize Kafka's influence, something Sansom acknowledged. The abundance of realistic details referring to the warehouse on fire stresses its strangeness: "great embattled cogwheels, lifeless pistons, curved shapes of rough-cast metal, stanchions, rods, the immense cylinders of two riveted boilers." From one huge room to another, each place is endowed with characteristics that make it both easy to visualize and strange to conceive.

All of the Sansom imagery, including his bestiary, appears in the story; pipes become coiling snakes, and a mobile steel ladder "extends swiftly like the neck of a lusting reptile." Some characters whom Flower meets in the course of his search evince typically Sansomian peculiarities. There is, for example, the unreliable and falsely reassuring fireman who, as he smiles, shows "two regular rows of false and pelleted teeth" whose "ordered achievement he fondly caresses." The variations of light—from "dull luminosity" and the "sluggish light of a pearl" to a "furnace glare"—as well as the wide range of smells, sounds, and tactile perceptions ceaselessly surprise Flower and sharpen his alertness. They also sharpen our own expectation of ever new stages in Flower's progress toward wisdom.

The first stage, which corresponds to his encounter with the man with false teeth, teaches Flower that freedom from doubt is dangerous, that it is "the greatest deception of all." The second results from Flower's fall into a lake of delight filled with the scents from hundreds of bottles of perfume that have exploded in the fire. His colleagues, who have reached a state of drunken bliss, appear as unreliable as the man with false teeth, and Flower learns not to yield to the pleasures of the senses. As he continues his search for the center of the fire, he is confronted with another temptation—the appeal of the past. But the past successively assumes the forms of a moth-eaten fur coat hanging in a wardrobe at the farther end of a deserted moonlit room and then of a headless human shape. The garment, which may be seen as a metaphor for a sterile past, is furiously hacked to pieces by Flower. But behind the wardrobe, the back of which he has cut through, he discovers another room and in it an old friend of his who no doubt represents a past enriched by the memory. Flower is lulled by his nostalgic evocations. The past becomes more real than the present, and it is seen as the only real experience, after which "what we imagine to be a recurrence of sensation is really a memory of [this] first experience; or, of the first time that the taste, smell, sound, sight, was fully experienced." But Flower has to tear himself away from these typically Sansomian considerations in order to resume his search. It is providential that his helmet has fallen over his face in the course of his conversation with his friend, which helps him sever himself from overly sweet evocations. At this juncture Flower is saved by the memory of his girlfriend Joan, who obviously embodies the necessity of ever struggling forward "with the will to create." The disappearance of a large mirror in which Flower had seen his own image sometime before leads to another temptation, that of rejecting reality in favor of nightmare, since the latter is more vivid, more enticing.

Having escaped this temptation, Flower resumes his advance toward various fires that reveal themselves as secondary ones, though their beauty magnetizes him. His journey is punctuated by philosophical considerations on his part and symbolic elements introduced by the author to emphasize his point. Both the philosophical considerations and symbolic elements tend to weigh the story down, but the reader is sometimes struck by the fine wording and the true ring of a statement. This is the case, for example, when Flower discovers a room burned with white and bright yellow light and filled with flour that lies silted in beautiful deep drifts: "His previous exhilaration faded beneath a sensation of profound and calm joy, so intense a joy that in its roots he perceived sadness." In "Fireman Flower" Sansom's visual power is given free rein and finds its expression in striking comparisons, among which is that of a green curtain, torn and discolored, lying on the floor with "a drowned old woman." And we seldom meet in Sansom's stories such straightforward and loving characters as Flower, who finds in friendship a driving force and in his love for his sweetheart the poetic expression of his love for his fellow creatures. Having found numberless fires, none of which is the central one, Flower ends his search at the top of the huge building. He gazes at the roofs around him and understands that his quest mattered more than its goal, that the apparent confusion and oppositions he has perceived have become explainable. He is filled with a love that encompasses everyone, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and with all manifestations of life "so that he loved a single rusted nail as he loved the Giaconda smile, the factory's time clock as he loved the mold of autumn leaves, a mausoleum as he loved the crèche, a cat's head in the gutter as he loved the breasts of Joan." In spite of some overlong passages the story stands as an exceptionally successful combination of philosophy, poetry, and imagination.

—Claire Larriere