B007TB5SP0 EBOK (5 page)

‘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 ability 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:

If you want to sell large numbers you must write like Conan Doyle or Miss Dell, or Mrs Barclay. Personally, if I were in your place I would prefer to write as you do write. But you cannot expect to please the great public at the same time.
¹⁰²

Richards understood that Firbank was incapable of writing popular fiction. Firbank’s next novel,
Valmouth
, to appear in a little under two years’ time, would confirm the author commercially as a rarely appreciated literary bloom. Richards must genuinely have considered that Firbank’s best course was to get used to this.

Firbank’s claims to literary significance were largely disregarded in his lifetime. He is unfortunate, though, not to have had the case subsequently made for his extraordinary innovations in dialogue and narrative compression, constituting a vital bridge between the
fin de siècle
and the modern age, between
fin de siècle
preoccupations and aesthetics and those of literary modernism. Consequently, his brilliance continues to be overshadowed by writers with more appealing personalities and those better at self-promotion. The dominance of cinema and broadcasting in today’s narratives has perhaps sharpened popular appetites for sincere, hackneyed or sentimental expressions of feeling: among the things Firbank conspicuously opted to do without.

Consumed in his brief life by Oscar Wilde’s legacy and that of other symbolists, aesthetes and decadents, yet single-handedly capable of stripping away the pretence and languor of their often moribund prose, Firbank has benefited neither from
his identification with the
fin de siècle
nor from being viewed appropriately as among the supreme prose stylists of high modernism. He was gay, of course, which today might be thought a calling card for popularity. He could not have written as he did without his profound sense of sexual marginality. Yet Firbank waved no flags, produced no theses and would not, I suppose, have argued for normalizing homosexual desires. He celebrated perversity.

If he can hardly be said to have led a fortunate life, Firbank’s posthumous reputation has also suffered from various vicissitudes. Miriam Benkovitz’s 1969 biography was prone to absurd emphases, speculations and errors of fact. Firbank has been further obscured by his most ardent devotees, as in Brigid Brophy’s huge, sometimes scarcely intelligible monograph
Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank
(1973). Some of his biggest fans have been discreet if not secretive in their praise, while others – Waugh, Huxley, Powell – may have learnt or borrowed much, but conceded little.

History shows, however, that literary reputations may not be formed in a day or even in a century. Let your possession of this book herald a new beginning for the author who dared to countenance his own marginal literary reputation in the form of
Vainglory
’s Claud Harvester. Firbank’s oeuvre looks set to become readily available again, in editions that will do him justice, bought, consumed and cherished by people of taste and discernment. That can be celebrated.

Richard Canning, 2012

In the notes below, the main archives of letters written by, to or about Firbank are abbreviated as follows:

1.
  Quoted in Alan Ansen,
The Table Talk of W. H. Auden
, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990), p. 54.

2.
  William Plomer,
Electric Delights
, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Boston: David Godine, 1978), p. 16.

3.
  Evelyn Waugh, Preface to
Vile Bodies
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1965), p. 7; quoted in Steven Moore,
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials, 1905
–
1995
(Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996), p. 106.

4.
  Quoted in Moore,
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography
, p. 92.

5.
  Quoted in Edmund Wilson,
The Fifties
, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), p. 298.

6.
  Anthony Powell, Introduction to Ronald Firbank,
The Complete Firbank
(London: Picador, 1988), p. 10.

7.
  Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
(New York: Scribners, 1964), p. 27.

8.
  Firbank to his mother, Paris (June 1922) (Hobson, p. 94).

9.
  Quoted in Brigid Brophy,
Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank
(London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 166.

10.
 Leonard Woolf, ‘Butterflies’,
Nation and Athenaeum
44 (14 January 1929), p. 495.

11.
 Ibid.

12.
 Virginia Woolf,
Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead
, ed. Nigel Nicolson with Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), p. 526.

13.
 Ronald Firbank,
Sorrow in Sunlight
(1924), reprinted in his
Three Novels
, with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 147. In his Introduction, Hollinghurst persuasively argues that the book is more properly identified as
Sorrow in Sunlight
, Firbank’s preferred title, rather than
Prancing Nigger
, as it was generally known at the time.

14.
 Ibid.

15.
 Quoted in Meryvn Horder (ed.),
Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques
(London: Duckworth, 1977), p. 82.

16.
 Quoted in Sjeng Scheijen,
Diaghilev: A Life
(London: Profile, 2009), p. 184.

17.
 Alan Hollinghurst, Introduction to Ronald Firbank,
Three Novels
, p. viii.

18.
 Stuart Rose to Firbank, New York, 3 October 1924 (Fales).

19.
 Quoted in Moore,
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography
, p. 97.

20.
 David Paul, ‘Butterfly at Large’,
The Times Literary Supplement
, 28 April 1961, p. 259; quoted in Moore,
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography
, p. 25.

21.
 Quoted in Moore,
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography
, p. 80.

22.
 Alan Hollinghurst, Introduction to Firbank,
Three Novels
, p. xii.

23.
 Quoted in Horder (ed.),
Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques
, p. 108.

24.
 Ibid.

25.
 Ibid.

26.
 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), in
The Common Reader
, Volume 1 (London: Vintage, 2003), p. 150.

27.
 Jocelyn Brooke,
Ronald Firbank
(London: Arthur Barker, 1951), p. 55.

28.
 Firbank to Stuart Rose, Rome, 17 May 1924 (Fales).

29.
 Brooke,
Ronald Firbank
, p. 57.

30.
 Joseph Bristow,
Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp. 103, 102.

31.
 Ibid., pp. 104, 113.

32.
 Alan Hollinghurst, Introduction to Ronald Firbank,
The Early Firbank
, ed. Steven Moore (London: Quartet, 1991), p. vii.