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  Finally, Firbank had completed a novel of which he felt proud. He promptly returned to London, determined to see it published, and immediately sent a typescript to Martin Secker for consideration. The publisher, here, recalls his role in the author’s career:

  I was amused by his first book, when I read it in typescript, but I saw no reason at all why it should sell, and, not being gifted with second sight, I had no idea that one day he would become a cult and that monographs would be devoted to him and his work. I recommended him to take his book to Mr Grant Richards, so that I feel I am in a very small degree responsible for his career.49

  Firbank was not inclined to take the gesture as anything other than a rejection. Once rival publisher Grant Richards had been persuaded to take Vainglory on, its author returned to Secker’s offices, ‘put his head coyly round the door and announced to no one in particular: “Grant Richards has taken my novel – so there!” ’50

  Richards read Vainglory over Christmas 1914, and met its author to discuss it on Monday 28 December. The book had exerted a ‘curious fascination’ on the publisher – though primarily because of its unorthodox presentation:

  I took it for granted that the extraordinary punctuation or lack of punctuation was a mere carelessness of an uninstructed copyist, and that the printer would, if the book came to be produced, follow the usual custom and supply the deficiencies and correct the errors of the author.51

  Richards initially refused Vainglory. Eventually, though, he coaxed favourable terms out of the author, purporting to agree to publish it against his better instincts. Firbank effectively underwrote the entire costs of production, paying an arrangement fee on top. Richards later wrote that he ‘felt as if [he] were dealing with a child’.52 Firbank, however, felt he had brought the publisher around, but it was only by swapping roles: the author bought a service, rather than selling a masterpiece.

  They came to terms immediately, and a contract was signed the next day. Five hundred copies of Vainglory were to be published. The author stipulated they should closely resemble Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams, a 1907 volume he particularly admired.53 On 8 January 1915, Firbank approved a specimen page. He remained most solicitous concerning the novel’s appearance, informing Richards: ‘That expression of not being able to “put a book down” I’m convinced has nothing to do with the inside.’ It was the exterior that mattered: ‘Do,’ he added, ‘please let the book be delightful to hold.’ The ‘smartness & style’ of the lettering mattered. Firbank stipulated a typeface close to that used for an edition of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. In addition, ‘light rather coarse Venetian paper would be just the thing.’ He sent Richards a ‘German book’, the edges of which had been stained green. Could something similar be done to Vainglory? It might provide ‘quite a thrilling contrast’ to the black covers.54 Richards conceded only to the top edge being stained thus. Otherwise, he reassured Firbank – doubtless in exasperation: ‘[e]very one of your admonitions shall be carefully considered and if possible carried out.’55 Just to make sure, Firbank wrote directly to George Wiggins, Richards’s production manager, reminding him that Vainglory ought to live up to its title and be ‘beautiful & attractive more than anything in the world’.56 He was willing to pay a further £12.17s.6d to provide for an illustrated frontispiece and dust-jacket, settling on a crayon drawing by the Belgian symbolist Félicien Rops, which he owned, depicting a nude in a black hat.57 Firbank called it ‘charmingly corrupt’.58 Richards commented: ‘I think now that his ideal was to have a thing look very simple and unadorned and yet to be in very fact as corrupt and depraved as art could make it.’59 Appearance remained of the utmost importance to Firbank.

  Vainglory marked a vital development in Firbank’s literary career. Though he specified that his name in the form ‘A. A. R. Firbank’ be given on the jacket, the title page announced him for the first time as Ronald Firbank, a name he came to adopt in everyday life. He saw proofs in late January, and insisted on restoring some of his idiosyncratic capitalizations. He professed himself ‘delighted’ with the appearance of a prepublication copy: ‘In such charming looks who could have the heart to be horrid[?]’60 The publisher then began to be doubly besieged, as Lady Firbank took up her son’s interests, providing Richards with an unsought-after list of names of suitable reviewers. She also wrote to bookseller W. H. Smith, as a result of which they agreed to allow some stores to stock the novel on a sale-or-return basis.61

  On 15 April 1915, Vainglory appeared. It scarcely caused a splash, securing just two reviews – in The Times Literary Supplement and the Observer.62 The first damned its author with faint praise:

  If Mr Firbank would only introduce some slabs of good, honest commonplace dullness he might write a very amusing novel. He can be witty enough and gives a neat turn to his sentences, but his endless flow of scintillating nonsense is most exhausting. Moreover though we give him credit for a perpetual sparkle, we are by no means certain that our poor dazzled eyes have always seen the right point … Since this appears to be his first novel we trust that he is young enough to learn better, but we cannot hel[p] feeling a little afraid that he is too hopelessly and impenitently clever.63

  Its author’s ignorance of Firbank’s prior publication would have been particularly frustrating, since the TLS had been the only journal to acknowledge Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament in 1905; even then, its single-line verdict had been equivocal.64 The Observer piece did not help much either; Vainglory, it simply noted, was ‘[a]n incessant sparkle’.65

  The limited coverage of Vainglory led to at least one sale. The TLS’s must have been the review Osbert Sitwell referred to as having ‘filled us with curiosity about [Vainglory’s] author’.66 Sitwell procured the book, and found in it ‘an extraordinary mastery, within its scope, of words and technique, and with its own quaint but unbiased view of a mad world’.67 With his younger brother Sacheverell, Sitwell befriended Firbank soon afterwards. A week after the TLS review, Firbank risked tiring Richards by writing: ‘It is almost embarrassing to have “exhausted” two reviewers. I feel so positive there must be critics who would not feel the “strain”.’68 It was clearly Richards’s duty to find them. Thus began a decade-long, antagonistic correspondence between author and publisher.

  Desperate for other means of publicity, Firbank had arranged to be drawn by Augustus John for Tatler magazine. Asking John – whom he had long become acquainted with at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant, and admired as an artist – made Firbank desperately nervous, but the sitting took place (however little the subject was capable of sitting), and John sent the drawing in late January 1915. In an accompanying note, he drily added that he could manage an even better portrait whenever his sitter was feeling more stable. Firbank disliked the sketch intensely. His hair was wrong; his head had ‘got somehow out of focus’; John had been ‘too slow’. Firbank told Landsberg that John had ‘made an XVIII La Tour of me’ – a reference to a favoured portraitist of Louis XV, intended as no compliment.69 Tatler published the sketch on 28 April 1915, undoing the little chance that it might promote Vainglory by wrongly announcing it as forthcoming. A brief biographical note commented only that Firbank was ‘artistic’, and that Hugh Benson had brought him over to Rome.70

  In its first eight months, Vainglory sold just 179 copies.71 Most of the prominent individuals who encountered the book would have been sent copies at Firbank’s suggestion. Still, the novel generated a small profile. Robbie Ross privately considered it very clever; Augustus John himself thought the first half ‘immensely’ amusing, but that the novel degenerated into ‘too much cackle and nobody did anything’.72 Copies were sent to at least four other Wilde associates: Lord Alfred Douglas, the painter Charles Shannon, Ada Leverson and Vyvyan Holland. Two special editions were also made, for the two most precious people in Firbank’s life: himself and Baba.73 There was a copy too for Rollo St Clair Talboys, Firbank’s former school tutor, who, offering thanks, let slip that – though he had
steeped the young Artie in the literature of French symbolism which he revered – Vainglory had confounded him: ‘I must speak of that with the humiliating sense of misunderstanding.’74 Leverson – now a prolific novelist – reported that, though entertaining, she also found Vainglory ‘restless and witty and elusive enough to give anyone who understands it a nervous breakdown’.75 Nonetheless, the Firbankian mode was born. Firbank’s technical accomplishments underline the efficient break with his previous, lesser work. Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, editor of the Memoir on Firbank (1930), later pronounced the novel ‘a significant cenotaph. It commemorates the death of Arthur Firbank, a charming dilettante, and it proclaims the birth of Ronald Firbank, an artist in the rhythm of thoughts and verbal forms.’76

  All three of the novels in this volume have been interpreted as reactions to the First World War, even if in an escapist sense. As England turned in on itself and on the world Firbank loved – travel, cultural exchange and the foreign or exotic – all receded, so Firbank preserved them in his fiction. Initially he struggled to know where to base himself. London’s chatter, nervousness and jingoism were unbearable, even if all England, in truth, had turned, in Osbert Sitwell’s words, ‘war-mad, [and] khaki-clad’.77 Firbank told him he had always considered Germans ‘most polite’, and came to call the war ‘that awful persecution’.78 It was, he intuited, a mean, petty political squabble, utterly unworthy of the sacrifices made for it. Firbank’s lifelong ill-health – breathing difficulties, purported nervous illness – exempted him from being called up. So he went to Stratford-upon-Avon, then Pangbourne, then Oxford.

  Firbank had no staff and could not cook. He lived mostly on cold chicken.79 It could have been much worse. To augment the estate’s revenue, there were family pressures to take a job – something Firbank had never previously considered. He asked around about positions in publishing houses before resigning himself to living on relatively little and devoting himself to the next step of his literary career, Inclinations. Firbank wrote in letters of slow but sure progress on the book in November 1915.80 That Christmas, he and Richards discussed publishing terms; Inclinations was placed on the spring list. On 7 January 1916, Richards asked Firbank ‘to get typewritten immediately’ what he had written to date.81 Firbank replied that he could send all but one chapter by 17 January, with the remainder to follow before the end of the month. He was concerned, however, that he might have ‘hurried & spoilt my book although I can make it quite complete by compression’.82 Business terms again involved five hundred copies being printed, at a cost of £80. By 6 February, Firbank was pressing Richards for proofs so that he could begin the ‘many revisions’ needed.83 Between then and the book’s appearance in June, Firbank asked for many more – including directly from Wiggins as late as 28 May.84 As with Vainglory, Firbank expressed disappointment at the normalized punctuation. He longed – in vain – for the pages to be edged with a ‘malmaison’ pink, ‘a sort of “Sumerun”-Bakst’.85

  Inclinations duly appeared on 17 June 1916, with a jacket design and two illustrations by Albert Rothenstein. Presentation copies were sent to a list very like that drawn up for Vainglory. Richards reported Ada Leverson’s view that it was ‘quite amusing and jolly and deliciously quaint and old fashioned’ – an improvement, perhaps, on her view of Vainglory, but certainly a reserved judgement.86 The novel attracted a number of brief, mostly unhelpful, notices, and a longer piece from The Times Literary Supplement:

  There is some humour, if one could get at it, underlying this tale … But as it is written almost entirely in snappy dialogue in which it is impossible to make out who is speaking without close and prolonged calculations, and as the characters have an inveterate habit of not finishing their sentences, we cannot honestly say that the humour is worth the trouble. There is no time nowadays to give to unnecessary puzzles.87

  The New Statesman was similarly baffled by precisely the qualities which marked out Firbank’s innovativeness in dialogue – though admittedly Inclinations marked a sort of extreme condition, in the sense that dialogue literally predominated over description, and moments of difficulty about the identity of any given speaker were intentional and frequent.88 Inclinations’ obscurity perhaps stems indirectly from its central, unorthodox relationship between Geraldine O’Brookomore (or ‘Gerald’) and a girl, Mabel Collins, ‘not yet fifteen’ (p. 189). In one of his most celebrated and extreme narrative gambits, Firbank made a single word, repeated eight times, constitute a whole chapter (Part I, Chapter XX); one in which every vicissitude of the fear, upset, anger, desperation and loss implicit in being abandoned romantically may be inferred:

  ‘Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel!

  Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel!’ (p. 256)

  Ingrid Hotz-Davies calls this a ‘moment of authorial cruelty’. Gerald’s speech is merely overheard by a stranger. Thus ‘the extreme withdrawal and detachment with which Firbank treats this moment is an exact measure of its undertow of unuttered feeling.’89 Firbank, however, takes no particular view, nor plays a particular role. Rather, he stages a dramatization of an immature girl’s betrayal and cruelty, and then retires. Inclinations, for all its challenges, passes on the work of interpretation to the reader very cleanly. It is Firbank’s most fully achieved symbolist work, then, striving to bear out Oscar Wilde’s precepts in the Preface to Dorian Gray: ‘No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.’

  Inclinations had shifted just ninety-two copies by the end of 1916. By 25 August, it had received nine notices. Firbank suggested Richards ‘insert fearlessly from those nine newspapers & announce the book as a success’.90 He had decided on a revised version of Odette d’Antrevernes for his next publication. This surprising move can only be explained by his impatience to be published. Perhaps, too, Firbank feared that, having written two novels in close succession, he had nothing immediate to put to paper. Through June and July, he revised the text of his eleven-year-old novella, mostly making just minor changes. He asked for the absurd quantity of two thousand copies of Odette: A Fairy Tale for Weary People to be printed. The book appeared on 13 December. The Glasgow Herald, which had reviewed Inclinations, noticed the revised Odette and commented positively.91 No other publication did. By the following April, Firbank resigned himself to its failure: ‘I am so sorry it didn’t take, as it looked so nice.’92

  Following Odette, he started a new novel, which Firbank had described in August 1916 as ‘in preparation’.93 By April 1917, Firbank thought Caprice might be finished within three months. He worried Richards would think it ‘scandalously short’, but otherwise agreed not to ‘bore you with a Queen’s Hall resumé of the “characters and situations” ’.94 Firbank tactfully acknowledges here Richards’s entire lack of interest in his books’ contents.

  The author, meanwhile, petitioned Augustus John for a frontispiece. John’s first drawing was a ‘dancing subject – only rather over Oriental to suit Caprice perhaps’, Firbank wrote to Richards on 29 July.95 A second was solicited and accepted. There were three sets of proofs, each revised. This time, the printers were clearly instructed not to alter Firbank’s odd punctuation and capitalization; overall, things went more smoothly. Firbank decided that the date of 17 October augured well for publication. On that day, Richards somehow procured a small number of pre-publication copies, ‘got very specially’, and sent these to the Morning Post, Baba and Firbank.96 Full-scale distribution began on 9 November 1917.

  Long before its publication, Lady Firbank began to intervene, encouraging Richards to promote Caprice more energetically. Richards confirmed that he would, but his response to his author’s mother indicates his low expectations for Firbank:

  In the two previous books he was very obviously feeling his way towards a method, and as he made no capitulations and conceded nothing to the public they presented all sorts of difficulties. The book should really help him towards a reputation even though the number of people who care for the kind of cleverness and abil
ity he shows is limited.97

  In terms of critical reception, Richards would be proven right. The book fared little better than its predecessors. Gerald Gould, who had reviewed Inclinations ambivalently for the New Statesman, grew more favourable:

  If brevity really is the soul of wit, Mr Firbank must be a wit indeed. The sheer fantastic imbecility which made his Vainglory and his Inclinations so remarkable has here been curbed into something almost resembling a coherent plot.98

  Still, Gould missed ‘that jocular air of absolute meaninglessness which gave the earlier books their peculiarity’. He concluded: ‘occasionally through the nonsense gleams a comprehensible epigram, or a bit of characterisation deftly phrased.’99

  The Times Literary Supplement was yet again unsupportive:

  Out of Mr Firbank’s explosive style, his continuous barrage of crisp paragraphs and chippy talk, it is hard to get any continuity or sense of character and atmosphere … He seems much more concerned to get out smart remarks than to tell the story, or even to let the reader know what is really going on (how did Sara[h] die?), or in dialogue who is speaking.100

  These reviews excepted, Caprice went overlooked, though – in another curious ‘what if’ moment – Firbank once told Osbert Sitwell that a ‘transatlantic cinema magnate’ had been in touch regarding film rights for the novel.101 It would have made an odd choice, since Caprice perpetuated the lesbian theme found in its predecessors, if discreetly. Its epigraph, quoted in Greek, is taken from the Ancient poet Sappho, and heroine Sarah Sinquier is said to need ‘a lover: a sort of husbandina’ (p. 362); that is, a woman.

  In a final attempt to soothe his author’s sense of hurt, Richards arranged for Firbank to be photographed by celebrated portraitist Bertram Park. The picture appeared in the Tatler on 30 January 1918. Firbank again reacted to Caprice’s lack of commercial and critical impact by berating his publisher. His complaint brought the following blunt response: