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  RONALD FIRBANK

  Vainglory

  with Inclinations

  and Caprice

  Edited and with an Introduction by

  RICHARD CANNING

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chronology

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Texts

  Vainglory

  Inclinations

  Caprice

  Appendix 1: Variants in the 1915 Edition of Vainglory

  Appendix 2: Part II, Chapter IV, of the 1916 Edition of Inclinations

  Appendix 3: ‘Ronald Firbank’ (1936) by E. M. Forster

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  VAINGLORY

  ARTHUR ANNESLEY RONALD FIRBANK was born into a prosperous family in London in 1886. He published his first book, Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament, in 1905, before studying at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he converted to Catholicism but did not complete a degree. The novel Vainglory (1915) announced the author as ‘Ronald Firbank’ for the first time. It was rapidly followed by a succession of novels that achieved instant cult status, from Inclinations (1916), Caprice (1917) and Valmouth (1919) to The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Sorrow in Sunlight, renamed at the suggestion of the American author Carl van Vechten as Prancing Nigger (1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). Prancing Nigger was Firbank’s sole commercial success, and he paid for the publication of his other books. He lived an itinerant, often obscure life, spending the duration of the First World War in Oxford, but the rest of his time moving between London, the Italian Riviera, Paris, Rome, North Africa and even Cuba and Jamaica. His lifelong poor health culminated in his death in Rome, probably due to lung failure, at the age of forty, just before the appearance of Cardinal Pirelli. Firbank is buried in Rome’s Verano cemetery.

  RICHARD CANNING has published extensively on Ronald Firbank, the literature of the inter-war period and the history of gay literature. He is author of Gay Fiction Speaks (2001) and Hear Us Out (2004), Editors’ Choice award-winner at the Lambda Literary Awards, as well as lives of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster (2008 and 2009). He has edited an anthology of American AIDS fiction, Vital Signs (2008), and two volumes of gay male shorter fiction, Between Men (2007) and Between Men 2 (2009). His most recent publication is the essay anthology Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (2009). For the past decade, with the support of a Leverhulme Trust award, he has been researching a major critical biography of Ronald Firbank. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Richard Canning has taught at Warwick and Sheffield universities, and is presently Head of English and Senior Lecturer at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln.

  Introduction

  First-time readers should be aware that some plot details are revealed in this Introduction

  ‘I sometimes think that Vainglory is the best of them all’ – W. H. Auden1

  Auden was discussing a project that never came off – a Portable Firbank, which he might edit. It may or may not be true that the great poet once dressed for a fancy-dress party on Fire Island, New York, as Cardinal Pirelli, one of Firbank’s most flamboyant characters. No matter; Auden was that rare thing: an unabashed enthusiast.

  Has there been a less fortunate writer of genius in the history of English literature than Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank? ‘Ronald Firbank’ – to use his professional name (to his mother he remained ‘Artie’) – was among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic innovators of the modernist novel. He virtually single-handedly revolutionized the representation of dialogue on the page, and constitutes one of few tangible connections between the aesthetic values of the fin de siècle and the modernist credo articulated by Ezra Pound in 1934: ‘Make it New’. Today’s critics are belatedly coming to appreciate that the ‘newness’ of many modernist ideals in literature developed directly out of the radical revolt against High Victorianism, initiated by a tranche of gifted late nineteenth-century writers. Oscar Wilde, their doomed lost leader, embodied this celebration of paradox, wit and ethical inversion, and it is a small step from Walter Pater to T. S. Eliot, whose early work is squarely symbolist; or from John Ruskin to Marcel Proust (as Proust, who translated Ruskin into French, himself understood). Figures spanning both periods, such as W. B. Yeats and Henry James, underline the continuities. Yet, while compelling but less significant innovators than Firbank – such as Dorothy Richardson, Sophie Treadwell, even Gertrude Stein – have benefited from critical reassessment and being brought back into print, Firbank, in recent decades, has almost fallen off the literary map. Bizarrely, there are currently more titles in print of C. H. B. Kitchin, a talented but minor follower.

  Despite this contemporary neglect, Firbank has never lacked for supporters among fellow writers. In his day, he was celebrated by the three Sitwells, Lord Berners, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, and Duff and Diana Cooper. He sat for Augustus John and Percy Wyndham Lewis, both of whom admired his writings. Even the mocking account of Firbank as the fictional aesthete ‘Lambert Orme’ in Harold Nicolson’s Some People (1927) may have helped Firbank’s reputation, coming hard on his untimely death, aged forty, in 1926. In the few years afterwards, first editions of Firbank were fought over and a small cult blossomed.

  Among this and the next inter-war generation, interest in Firbank – if select – hardly waned. Most readers concentrated on the last novels – Sorrow in Sunlight, The Flower Beneath the Foot and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli – though South African author William Plomer agreed with Auden that an earlier book, Vainglory (1915), best displayed Firbank’s innovative rendering of social speech:

  He noticed that people don’t listen much to one another, that in conversation they pursue their own thoughts rather than other people’s, and that much of what they say is calculated to advertise their own importance, beauty, cleverness, knowledge or taste.2

  In 1929, Evelyn Waugh discerned Firbank’s influence on Osbert Sitwell, Carl van Vechten, Harold Acton, William Gerhardie and – most surprisingly – in the young Ernest Hemingway. Elsewhere, Waugh noted similarities between Firbank and the young, late modernist Henry Green, author of Blindness (1926) and Living (1929).

  In Firbank’s wake, there was a stream of ‘Firbankian’ writers, largely forgotten today. His American advocate, Carl van Vechten, a Harlem-based promoter of African-American culture, learnt whimsy from him, as illustrated by a run of novels from Peter Whiffle (1922) to Feathers (1930). Van Vechten’s bestseller, Nigger Heaven (1926), came straight out of Firbank’s own ‘Negro novel’, Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), which van Vechten retitled Prancing Nigger for the US market. Richard Oke’s (pen-name of Nigel Stansbury Millett) Frolic Wind (1929) and Wanton Boys (1932) flaunt the debt in their risqué titles. Two satires about sexual tourism on Capri – Norman Douglas’s South Wind (1917) and Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women (1928) – bear Firbank’s unmistakable influence too. Meanwhile, C. H. B. Kitchin’s early books are steeped in his technique – especially Streamers Waving (1925) and the sexually ambiguous Mr Balcony (1927).

  A second group of renowned writers read Firbank and absorbed many of his innovations, stopping short of pastiche. Evelyn Waugh’s early fiction shows traces of Firbank, particularly Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), for example. Many writers borrowed from Firbank; Waugh largely preferred to adopt by stealth. In a 1965 edition of Vile Bodies, Waugh described starting to write ‘under the brief influence of Ronald Firbank’ yet soon ‘struck out for myself’.3 The sexually provocative, modernism-fixated aesthete Antony Blanche in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) may have been based closely on a real-life figure – self-confessed failed writer Brian Howard – but Blanche
can also be understood as a gesture of expiation in Waugh, the, by now, devout Catholic writer. Waugh was making an implicit statement against the kind of aestheticist impulses Firbank embodied and promoted. Firbank, after all, cut a distinctly Blanche-like figure at Cambridge and, afterwards, in London society.

  Aldous Huxley’s first two novels – Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923) – rest firmly in Firbank’s creative shadow, as does every one of Anthony Powell’s inter-war fictions: Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932), From a View to a Death (1933), Agents and Patients (1936) and What’s Become of Waring? (1939). The humorous dialogue in E. F. Benson’s ‘Mapp and Lucia’ stories (1920–39) is buoyed up by Firbankian musicality. Cult short-story writer Hector Hugh Munro’s fey Edwardian style (published under the nom de plume of ‘Saki’) also has affinities with Firbank’s prose, although Saki’s oeuvre – from the ‘Reginald’ short stories of 1904 onwards – preceded Firbank in part. A key distinction between Firbank and Saki, too, lies in the fact that – excepting his last complete novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) – Firbank rarely allotted much fictional space to men. Like the eponymous heroines of Benson’s ‘Mapp and Lucia’ series, women drive his plots, and sometimes children do too, such as Charlie Mouth in Sorrow in Sunlight. It is likely both Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse studied Firbank’s dialogue as well, though Wodehouse more readily acknowledged Saki’s tutelage. Ivy Compton-Burnett’s darkly comic novels – written over a forty-year period, from Pastors and Masters (1925) on – inherited Firbank’s empty brilliance in dialogue. She often delineated her characters with comparable brittleness and gave a caustic representation of the nuclear family, much as Firbank did.

  Late in life, Waugh turned on Firbank entirely, noting in 1962: ‘In youth I was fascinated by Firbank. Now I can’t abide him.’4 In a post-war climate of austerity, Firbank became – mistakenly – yoked to the Edwardian world of banality and superficiality that he had so remorselessly mocked.

  Fittingly, the one literary critic in the post-war period to understand Firbank’s inventiveness was an American, Edmund Wilson. When meeting the Sitwell siblings in 1955, Wilson was disappointed at their reaction when he mentioned Firbank’s name: ‘We don’t care about Firbank anymore,’ Edith Sitwell opined, ‘we think he’s silly now.’5 By 1961, Anthony Powell – who, as a young employee of the Duckworth publishing company, was heavily involved in the publisher’s decision to reissue Firbank’s oeuvre in 1929 – found that his youthful enthusiasm had deserted him.

  Either you find entertainment – even food for thought – in the Firbankian universe, or you do not. Some readers complain that they have no idea what the whole thing is about; others, that they know what it is about, but are not in the least interested. There is no persuading either of these schools of thought. In any case, it would be a mistake to claim too much. Ronald Firbank’s range is limited; his narrative devious; his characterizations stylized.6

  With advocates such as this, one might conclude that Firbank had no need of enemies. Waugh, Powell and the Sitwells had distinct reasons for disowning Firbank, but they derided him in a similar way, describing their former admiration as adolescent folly.

  So much for the trajectory of the English comedy of manners. What of Firbank’s putative role in the literature of high modernism? Of peer experimenters, we have Ernest Hemingway’s word that Gertrude Stein revered Firbank, and pressed him on to others.7 James Joyce may never have read him; a pity, since they shared an enthusiasm for music-like prose. Equally, Firbank may not have been familiar with Joyce’s Ulysses. Writing to his mother in 1922, Firbank recounted seeing a copy of Joyce’s expensive book in Paris. He told her Joyce was ‘supposedly almost as corrupting to good morals as me’, but left the book, hoping to find a second-hand copy.8 Katherine Mansfield appears to have developed a personal dislike (we do not know when they met), urging John Middleton Murry in a letter of 1920: ‘please don’t praise Firbank. He’s … a sniggering, long-nailed, pretentious and very dirty fellow. As to honesty – the fellow would swoon at the sight of such a turnip’ – whatever that means.9 Mansfield also suggested, quite wrongly, that Firbank was in thrall to the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, read Firbank in the wake of her husband Leonard’s judgement that Firbank’s prose was ‘terribly monotonous … always doing the same thing’.10 Given Firbank’s polyphonous, dexterous writing, it is an extraordinary criticism to make. But Leonard Woolf, in the piece ‘Butterflies’, regretted the lack of ‘the solid and sordid seriousness of the real world’ in Firbank’s novels. Firbank, he insisted, was serious only as a poseur and ‘that kind of pose cannot produce a masterpiece.’11 Nevertheless, some months later, in May 1929, Virginia Woolf confided to a friend that she had been devouring Firbank’s novels ‘with some unstinted pleasure’.12 It is curious to note that both Woolfs seem to have come to Firbank’s novels – and to form quite divergent judgements of them – some four years after ushering Kitchin’s first novel, the entirely Firbankian Streamers Waving (1925), into print through the Hogarth Press.

  At nearly the same time as Virginia Woolf recorded her view, fellow Bloomsbury member E. M. Forster was committing to print the essay on Firbank that is reproduced in this volume as Appendix 3. Originally entitled ‘Our Butterflies and Beetles’, it is a curious mixture of appreciation and condescension. Many of the things Forster considered vital to the modern novel were lacking, he felt, in Firbank. Like Leonard Woolf’s appraisal, Forster’s essay leaves the reader with the sense that, whatever Firbank’s achievements, a fundamentally unserious talent is being indulged. He interprets Firbank’s writing as part of a genre of fantasy literature incorporating many children’s authors and writers such as David Garnett, author of Lady into Fox (1922). This literature ‘omits not merely the soul but many material actualities, and, if taken in large quantities, is unsatisfying’ (p. 400).

  Still, Forster as an advocate not only anticipated but effectively countered objections voiced by Firbank’s detractors, identifying much of what makes Firbank pleasurable to read: ‘his taste, his choice of words, the rhythm both of his narrative and of his conversations, [and] his wit’ (p. 400). He concluded that Firbank had ‘genius’, and appreciated how much the writer drew on the work of the writers of the 1890s and their art-for-art’s-sake pretensions, although Firbank oscillated between valorizing and ridiculing an aestheticist world view. What Forster – like many authors who read Firbank – failed to appreciate was the radical modernism in Firbank’s capacity for compressing narrative and condensing storylines. Instead of trailblazing such narrative developments – lauded in Joyce and Woolf – Forster erred, describing Firbank as looking backwards:

  there is nothing up-to-date in him. He is fin de siècle, as it used to be called; he belongs to the nineties and the Yellow Book; his mind inherits the furniture and his prose the cadences of Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill. To the historian he is an interesting example of literary conservatism … (p. 400)

  Woolf and Forster’s use of the butterfly to evoke Firbank was not accidental. Butterflies flitter through the Firbankian world. Vainglory’s Monsignor Parr is described as ‘[s]omething between a butterfly and a misanthrope’ (p. 11). In a celebrated moment in Sorrow in Sunlight, Firbank portrayed the young Charlie Mouth ‘trailing a muslin net, and laughing for happiness’ as he approaches the city of temptation and pleasure, Cuna-Cuna.13 Passing through customs, the boy unwittingly evokes Oscar Wilde’s famous declaration of his genius on Ellis Island, New York:

  ‘Have you nothing, young man, to declare?’

  ‘… Butterflies!’

  ‘Exempt of duty. Pass.’14

  Let us hold on to the image of the butterfly for a moment. Firbank, a devotee of the Ballets Russes, saw them often in London, from their very first season in 1911. Many have recalled his odd, restless behaviour in theatres, which Lord Berners went so far as to associate directly with Serge Diaghilev’s company:

  The
atmosphere of the Russian Ballet in particular seemed to go to his head, and his behaviour during the entractes and even during the performance itself was distinctly fantastic. One would become aware of a growing uneasiness in a certain portion of the audience, and after a time one discovered the cause of it to be the extraordinary antics of Ronald Firbank. One of his favourite postures seemed to entail sitting with his head nearly touching the floor and with his feet in the air.15

  It is unsurprising, then, to find Firbank’s novels replete with references to the Ballets Russes. Mrs Henedge might speak for her progenitor when she announces in the first chapter of Vainglory: ‘I do so adore Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose’ (p. 8).

  Firbank’s reverence for the Ballets Russes suggests two things. Firstly, it confirms him as someone schooled in aestheticist ideas, but who rethought them, so that they not only fit into the modernist avant garde, they helped define it. Serge Diaghilev had done the same, introducing fin de siècle European artistic ideas to Russia in the journal Mir iskusstva. With the ballet company, Diaghilev looked forward, collaborating with purveyors of new styles and art forms, whether in music, the visual arts or choreography. Each might instruct the other. Firbank might well have recognized a kindred spirit.

  Secondly, consider Nijinsky, the star of the 1911 season, who enthralled London society with his stage presence, agility and bizarre technique. Nijinsky’s Ballets Russes roles stretched or overturned traditional distinctions between male and female performance. His squatness, combined with his overdeveloped thigh muscles, conveyed masculinity, but the grace of his movement and the often reactive roles Nijinsky interpreted on stage could utterly feminize him. In 1909, German diplomat Count Harry Kessler described Nijinsky as ‘a butterfly, but at the same time … the epitome of manliness and youthful beauty’.16 If Woolf and Forster’s ‘butterfly’ appellation suggests effeteness, impotence or lack of will, it is, as with Nijinsky, only one side of the author.