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  Firbank possessed, above all, great nerve: ‘a certain steely something,’ wrote Alan Hollinghurst, ‘… that only hardened with the passing of time and the critical neglect, bordering on contempt, with which the continuing experiment of his writing was met.’17

  The American critic Edmund Wilson aside, the 1940s and 50s brought Firbank little attention, with the exception of Jocelyn Brooke, who wrote a simple book on Firbank’s works and adopted the Firbankian style in memoirs such as The Military Orchid (1948). Wilson’s interest in Firbank, which had begun in the latter’s lifetime, continued, however, and to some degree epitomized a shift, at this point, in the attention paid to the author. Certainly, from 1945, Firbank received more critical attention and acclaim in the United States than in Britain. Sandy Wilson’s musical based on Valmouth was premiered in 1958. This is still, surprisingly, the sole dramatic adaptation of Firbank’s oeuvre, even though, in 1924, George Gershwin had been close to producing a musical based on Sorrow in Sunlight – another perilous ‘what if’, which might have turned Firbank into a literary staple.18

  Interest in Firbank’s writing then gradually revived. John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells (1960) records Prancing Nigger among the books in the poet’s Oxford rooms. Betjeman also once said: ‘The polished work of Ronald Firbank is like a jewelled and clockwork nightingale singing among London sparrows.’19 On this occasion, at least, Firbank’s ‘bejewelledness’ is not being ridiculed. The New York poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara were all fans too, the first two collaborating on the now cult Firbankian novel Nest of Ninnies (1969). Firbank’s prose is more poetic than that of most novelists. In the 1961 article ‘Butterfly at Large’, David Paul argued: ‘No other novelist has travelled so light, or conveys so much in proportion to weight … He applies the economy of poetry to the novel, proceeds by hiatus. A phrase fills out a paragraph …’20 All true, but Paul also touches on a typical paradox which can make ‘explaining’ Firbank so hazardous. In part, what he is celebrated for lies not in what he wrote, but in what he did not write, what he skipped over, assiduously excised or truncated.

  In 1962, Firbank’s uncompleted jazz novel, The New Rythum, was published. A spate of critical books appeared soon after, as well as more novels indebted to Firbankian techniques, especially Brigid Brophy’s The Finishing Touch (1963) and Harry Mathews’s Tlooth (1966). Then, when Joe Orton’s comic fiction – all written in the 60s – was posthumously published, it too showed a profound debt: from Head to Toe (1971) to Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser (1999). On reading Caprice, Orton acclaimed Firbank as ‘the only impressionist in the English novel’.21 In the last forty years, the works of novelists such as Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Edmund White and James Purdy have shown a less direct imprint. There are still rare cases of open homage, though, such as the American writer James McCourt’s fiction, particularly his brilliant 1975 opera novel Mawrdew Czgowchwz, or English author Duncan Fallowell’s deeply rural (and Vainglory-esque) A History of Facelifting (2003). Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) is no stylistic kin, but it pays tribute to the author’s longstanding fascination with Firbank, by including him as a minor character.

  Vainglory was Ronald Firbank’s first substantial piece of fiction. It heralded a decade-long period of fecundity – from 1915 to 1926. The child Artie, who wrote fluent and memorable verse in both English and French for his mother, grew into an ambitious author, who was confident, regardless of others’ opinions, in the significance of his work. He could not wait to be published.

  The appearance of Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament (1905) ensured he became an author before his twentieth birthday. The novella Odette and the considerable juvenilia gathered in Steven Moore’s The Early Firbank offer an infinite richness of clues, teases and provocations for the Firbank devotee concerning the author’s early conceptualization of how fiction ought to impress. However, even the most accomplished work, Odette itself, has been dismissed as ‘mawkish’.22 Vainglory announced a huge leap in proficiency, confirmed by Firbank’s next two novels, Inclinations and Caprice. Together, these books constitute the first of three distinct periods in the Firbankian canon.

  When Firbank began Vainglory in 1913, the stakes could scarcely have felt higher. The published Odette had had no impact on the reading public whatsoever; subsequently, his first attempt at writing a full-length fiction, The Artificial Princess, had ominously misfired. Firbank ceased work on it sometime between 1911 and 1915, probably around 1912. Still, at least there was a working method. Firbank gathered single expressions, phrases, dialogue and character names, noting them on small blue cards. He regularly sorted through these, sifting as if for fine objects, placing and replacing each until a pleasing sequence resulted. (Perhaps he was reminded of the Tarot card reader, a favourite source of entertainment and instruction for this deeply superstitious writer.) Coleridge Kennard, a fellow student, spoke of Firbank’s habit at Cambridge of keeping ‘long strips of paper … in his desk’.23 On these were written ‘any phrase that [had] particularly struck him’.24 His fictional dialogue evolved from sticking these pieces together ‘mosaic-wise’.25 The fractal method underlines how radically Firbank would – almost inadvertently – reconceive the passing of time in narrative, doing nothing to smooth over its jagged, subjective edges.

  In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), Virginia Woolf argued against the linear conventions of pre-modernist fiction. For fiction to reflect more truly our life experience, Woolf foresaw a revolution, according to which

  there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end …26

  Woolf’s comments have been widely interpreted as theorizing the innovations that she, Joyce and others worked into their fiction. Nobody, curiously, noticed that, by this time, Firbank had already abandoned plot in favour, in the case of Vainglory, of what Jocelyn Brooke later described as ‘a tangle of sub-plots, none of them very important – a mere scaffolding supporting a vast, rococo-Gothic superstructure’.27 Firbank had also endlessly sought to compress (and, more rarely, distend) time, turning this idea into narrative method more consistently and completely than Woolf herself. ‘I think nothing,’ he wrote in 1924, ‘of fileing [sic] fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots!’28 (Firbank’s rows of dots might also conceal a multitude of unstated truths, invariably sexual. Brooke argued that one ‘…’ connoted ‘the whole of Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis’ in its silence.29) If we date Woolf’s experimentation with time to Jacob’s Room (published in 1922) and Firbank’s to Vainglory (1915), his prescience (or precociousness) is laid bare. In book form at least, Vainglory also preceded Joyce’s narratively innovative A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Vainglory hit the shelves at the same moment as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), with its complex distillation of Ford and Joseph Conrad’s impressionistic literary style, extensive use of flashbacks and unreliable narrator.

  With Vainglory, Firbank launched what Joseph Bristow has called a ‘wholesale attack on naturalism’, according to whose logic his ‘fictional universe soon disabuses us of any illusion we may have had about time, manner, and place reverting to some conventional ordering. Here everything we might wish of a realist plot has been entirely obscured from view.’30 Chronological order is abandoned in favour of ‘interruptions, digressions, and hiatuses’; dialogue ‘characterized by absent-mindedness, chance overhearings, and well-timed coincidences, all of which are carefully played off against one another’.31 Alan Hollinghurst, meanwhile, has argued that Vainglory’s ‘fragmented texture, elliptical structure and suppression of plot certainly entitle it to be considered the most advanced and concentrated modernist novel that had so far appeared
in England’.32

  Given the radical sweep of his approach to narrative, it is unsurprising that Firbank embraced its implications slowly. Throughout his twenties he theorized about aesthetics in music, dance and literature, but his rejection of naturalism appears to have been based on his keen observation of developments in the visual arts; in challenges to naturalistic representation made by Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne. The radical claims Roger Fry made for Cézanne in his groundbreaking London exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (1910–11) were key here, though Firbank fantasized about owning a Matisse.33 Still, he hesitated before putting his ideas into practice:

  He talked so much of writing, but he never seemed to write. He was so taken up with attractive theories – the affinity between prose narrative and Impressionist painting and the ineluctable brightness of le mot juste – that his friends, in the midst of discussion, agreement and disagreement, would smile dubiously when he mentioned his own work.34

  The period 1911–13, then, was one of gestation – that vital moment prior to clarification of means and ends that, for many artists, must precede a creative outpouring. Once unblocked, Firbank was intensely productive for eleven years.

  In January 1913, he wrote to his mother of his plans for a Venetian novel, which would rely on ‘intrigue’ rather than causation.35 It is significant that Firbank saw his card-shuffling specifically as a way of creating something ‘intriguing’, but also, more importantly, as something which lacked the conventions of the Victorian novel. When Andrew, Winsome Brookes’s ‘mignon’ in Vainglory, gets depressed, he describes it as ‘a sort of Dickensey-feeling coming on’ (p. 42). Firbank had observed, perhaps from Wilde’s example in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), that it was easy for a novel to become trapped in a set of ethics that may not have been intended by its author. In Vainglory, Mrs Asp alludes to the sense that non-heterosexual relations had not been openly recorded in Western culture by describing a novel without a plot: ‘It’s about two women who live all alone’ (p. 19). Once Firbank perceived that narrative teleology itself enshrined sexually and romantically normative precepts, his instincts were simply to fend off the insidious opportunities for closure, instead proceeding by whim, wit, sleight of hand and apparent chance.

  The Venice project did not come off. In 1904 Joey, his elder brother, had died and then in 1913 Bertie, his younger brother, died. Firbank was now the only man in the family; the only one living capable of running the family estate in Wales, even from a distance. He had little choice: his younger sister Heather and beloved (but emotionally dependent) mother, ‘Baba’, showed no signs of numeracy, and his and Heather’s allowances depended upon the estate. Firbank determined, nevertheless, to act stoically in the face of Bertie’s death. He wrote to a friend from London:

  Here am I resting from the labours of my book until Monday, when I return to Bath again. I came to town for the Russian Ballet, but my brother’s sudden death has, (or ought) to deprive mine eyes of that sublime spectacle! However, I’m not conventional very & who knows what I may’nt do!!36

  It seems likely the book was Vainglory. The tragedy may even have catalysed Firbank into serious work on it. Out of desperation, perhaps, he mined previously published stories and unfinished writings, reusing what he could. The material Firbank was exhuming was anything up to six years old, though one extract – from a juvenile poem, ‘The Wind & the Roses’ (1902–3) – was more than a decade old. He recycled character names for Vainglory in particular, but sometimes also traits, titles, even whole sentences.

  The framing plot, too, was recycled. It is essentially that of ‘A Study in Opal’ (1907–8), though Mrs Shamefoot replaces the Bishop’s widow in that tale. Shamefoot is where we should begin the search for innovation. She was, as Nancy Cunard noted, his first ‘sweet-sad or yearning’ character.37 The accent very much fits the mood of an author in mourning; in other respects, the ‘self-entranced’ and ‘self-centred’ Shamefoot is a self-portrait (p. 10). Her quest to capture herself in a stained-glass window of her own design – thus enshrined in perpetuity – is another projection of Firbank’s impatient determination to become recognized for his artistry. The literal attempt to impose oneself upon the fabric of a church may hint too at the Vatican’s supposed snubbing of Firbank, when he offered to serve the Church.

  Shamefoot is also – if discreetly – the first of Firbank’s Sapphic heroines. Interestingly, a fragment of Sappho’s verse features prominently in the novel. Shamefoot is devoted to Lady Castleyard, of whom she asks, pointedly: ‘Do you suppose, if there were no men in the world, that women would frightfully mind?’ (p. 125). Her diet resembles her author’s: Shamefoot finds champagne more refreshing than tea, and drinks Veuve Clicquot in quantity. Firbank so desired to become a recognized author that he also created a version of what he wished to become in a character in Vainglory called Claud Harvester, an established novelist, playwright and author of Vaindreams (p. 150). The narrator’s estimate of Harvester as ‘almost successful’ is startlingly prescient of Firbank’s later status as an author: ‘His books were watched for … but without impatience’ (p. 11).

  Later, in Oxford, Firbank would prove disciplined, spending months in isolation on his manuscripts. Again, this is like Shamefoot, who ends up as a hermit, confessing to Lady Castleyard: ‘You wonder I can isolate myself so completely. Dear Georgia, just because I want so much, it’s extraordinary how little I require’ (p. 177). In 1913, however, Firbank lacked this application. By mid-July he was in France, where he secured an invitation to come to Paris from Tony Landsberg. Landsberg was a Cambridge friend with whom Firbank developed an epistolary relationship. He probably hoped for more. One letter – dripping with missed opportunities, and sent after several days together in the capital – informed Landsberg: ‘You are romantic! Somehow I find it very romantic to drive along the Quai Voltaire (three times … ) at four in the morning. I hope you realized at the time how romantic you were.’38 By August, though, Firbank was travelling through England, so extensively that the fictional cathedral city, Ashringford, could be drawn from Salisbury, York, Lincoln, Ely, Norwich and/or Bath.39

  Firbank’s need for society and culture lured him back to London in 1914. By that summer, he was often seen at bohemian favourite, the Eiffel Tower Restaurant, in Percy Street, Fitzrovia, dining with Evan Morgan. ‘Dining’ could be euphemistic in Firbank’s case. He sometimes ordered as little as a single pea, only to ignore the plate once it arrived, keeping to his preferred, wholly liquid diet. Augustus John recalled often seeing the couple together, Firbank ‘struggl[ing] almost manfully with his asparagus and a bottle of wine, while following intermittently the bird-like flights of the Hon[ora]ble Evan Morgan’.40 Seven years his junior, Morgan dabbled in all the arts, later publishing a number of poetry pamphlets and even one execrable novel. Like Firbank, he adored his mother, had difficult relations with an authoritarian father, and had an adolescent, impulsive temperament. He had been born into Roman Catholicism, unlike Firbank, yet, while a believer, remained fascinated enough by the occult to later grow intimate with Aleister Crowley, promoter of Satanism, orgies and more.

  No character in Vainglory is based on Morgan. They probably met as Firbank was making last manuscript revisions. (After their falling out, however, Morgan would be subjected to a brutal fictional portrayal as the Hon. Eddy Monteith in The Flower Beneath the Foot.) Their meeting, however, is glanced at in Vainglory. In 1940, Morgan recalled an encounter in the British Museum with a

  tall Sherlock Holmes-like figure, the face characteristically half covered with the coat collar held up with the right hand and one long hand in an Aubrey Beardsley attitude pointing out towards infinity, [who] suddenly whispered in my ear ‘Your name is Rameses’.41

  Firbank took the stranger to see his supposed likeness, halting not before a statue of Ramses II but ‘a sarcophagus in which lay an age-emaciated shrivelled discovery – a fanciful reproduction of myself’, as Morgan put it.42 Firbank had lon
g been fascinated by the Ancient Egyptian rulers and the concept of reincarnation. He may have developed a particular interest in this pharaoh after seeing him portrayed by the French actor Edouard de Max, whom he had got to know in Paris a decade earlier.43 Vainglory does not precisely replicate Firbank’s bizarre pick-up technique (which Morgan claims he took in good part). Chapter I, however, describes Lady Georgia’s children returning from the British Museum, where they go to ‘learn deportment from the Tanagras’44 (p. 6).

  Travelling through France and Italy in the summer of 1914, Firbank made further ‘excellent alterations’.45 He had arrived in Paris by 20 June, where a winningly named astrologer, Madame de Thèbes, predicted a long life for Lady Firbank and ‘a very great success’ for her son’s book.46 From Rome in July, he wrote that he was continuing to revise his novel, ‘by degrees … getting the “strained” parts away’.47 Rhythm and music were important to Firbank – not only as recreation, but by allowing his distinctive prose to flow. Firbank paid little attention to the wider world – especially to the incipient political drama haunting Europe. Only once Britain declared war on Germany did he appreciate the need to get home from Venice. Somehow, following advice from the British Consul in Milan, he was able to return to England via Paris. He headed north immediately, stopping briefly in York, but moving on to Edinburgh, where, in September, he finished the novel. He declared to Baba: ‘The impression is more or less what I imagined – a soufle! [sic] Anyway, nobody could guess of the sacrifice behind.’48 None of his novels would cost him anything like the eighteen months or so he had expended on Vainglory, the first book he generally admitted to having written, and the first publication under the name of ‘Ronald Firbank’.