Here's a contrarian and extremely extertaining rant from James Agee on the orchid (on the occasion of having to do the rewrite of a piece titled "The U.S. Commercial Orchid" for Fortune magazine in 1935):
About the orchid. It is silly of me I know to dislike the flower as such: it is not responsible. I think probably I dislike it by transference: because I do much dislike the kinds of people who like it and their reasons for liking it: liking a thing because it is the Largest, the Loudest, the Most Expensive, the most supercharged with Eroticism, Glamor, Prestige—I don't like. Automatically thinking a thing is beautiful for such reasons I like even less. As a commodity, and that is the way I'm supposed to write of it, it is more completely endowed with snob-appeal and with nothing else, than any other commodity I know of. And then for that matter I just privately don't like the plain looks of the flower. Any flower is built of course for one special purpose: to propagate itself: of any flower, the private parts and the face are one & the same, and that seems more than all right to me: but it does seem to me that the orchid abuses the privilege. "The orchid gets its name from the Greek orchis, which means testicle; and there are those who condemn that title as understanding the case, since to them the flower resembles nothing printable so much as a psychopathic nightmare in technicolor. It has also been favorably compared in sexual extravagance to the south apse of an aroused mandrill, and it sports a lower lip that qualifies to send the Bourbon Dynasty into green visceral spasms of invidious love's labors lost." And so, "though not a single promotive gesture had been made over the orchid throughout all the centuries up to 1929, the orchid was already, in the minds of many select ladies and gentlemen who could afford to have the idea, a very definite if sort of Special last word, if it was a last word you wanted to touch off the establishment of a young woman as at liberty for marriage, or most gracefully and with most conspicuous expense to assert your opinion of her as something pretty nice to be seen with, or to set her off at her virginal sweetest as she was wedded in unsunderable wedlock, or indeed to lend Class to any occasion of social or sentimental stature such as the celebration, by snotting one's neighbor along Fifth Avenue, of the embarrassment and ultimate destruction of Death through the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ." That was written for but will probably not be included in the orchid ms.I don't know. Even though I have never managed to keep one alive under my care, I like orchids very much. Their strangeness is very appealing, in a sci-fi sort of way. But I often find myself enjoying whatever Agee writes even as I find myself disagreeing with what he says, as in this bit on Ford Madox Ford: "...haven't seen the June Mercury: have read in it things of Huefferford Madoxford before [....] Ford can certainly at times write and does certainly at times have fine ideas & 'reactions' [....] Would add, on Ford: he is very fond of using what Englishmen think of as the American language, and has less ear on it than anyone since Galsworthy and, if you bar G., since The Venerable Bede." As a Fordie fan, I took great umbrage at this...right after I stopped laughing.
Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. Ballantine Books, 1971. SBN 345-02360-9-125.
I have to say I agree with you on disagreeing with him!
Posted by: orchid care | July 29, 2010 at 02:28 AM