References in parentheses indicate page numbers in the Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. Edition of The Complete Ronald Firbank (1961) with a preface by Anthony Powell. The title is not altogether accurate as The New Rythum and other pieces was published the following year by Quartet Books and The Early Firbank (also from Quartet) in 1991. My essay, however, cites only passages from in the first of these volumes, with figures in parentheses indicating page numbers. Those in brackets refer to endnotes.
In my first
semester as a university freshman in the fall of 1963, barely seventeen years
old, I chose Ronald Firbank as the subject of my research paper. As I recall, my professor thought well of my
writing, but felt constrained to note among her comments, “I fear your
enthusiasm is misplaced.” She doubtless
had a point. I believe my retelling of
anecdotes of the author’s extravagant eccentricities may have occupied nearly
as many words as my callow literary criticism [2], but, upon recently rereading
Firbank, I find my admiration for his writing undimmed.
He remains one of
a kind in spite of affinities to Wilde, Saki, and Norman Douglas [1]. The usual concerns of fiction-writers for
character, plot, and description play little role in his works. His characters are almost all of a piece. None has individuality; none indeed is
sufficiently complex to suggest a developed personality. And all these strikingly similar people go
about doing virtually nothing. They
spend all their time in talk, mostly in the idlest of gossip. Firbank’s novels are scarcely narratives at
all. Action means nothing. As one of his characters asks, “What does it
matter – the plot?” (347) The reader
finds only the limpest excuse for a narrative arc, the meagerest gesture toward
incident. Though lyric lines sometimes
describe nature or costume, the scene is always luminous and unreal, a fairyland
no reader could mistake for lived experience.
The words do,
however, convey themes, attitudes, and suggestions about lived experience. Firbank’s focus is always on pose and style,
and this very emphasis alone makes a definitive point about his sensibility. Given the strains and inadequacies of
everyday life that make his characters weary and languid, they can only, he
seems to say, retreat into a defensive stance, ironic and clinging to humor and
sex and aesthetic judgements as the only dependable elements in a generally tiresome
world. They are forever engaged in conversation
(though often enough they pay little attention to each other), and thus his
works are almost entirely dialogue.
Their words, laid down like a mosaic or, to be more contemporary, a bricolage,
define over and over again, the same perspective, as though there were nothing
whatever more to be said.
Though some
development is traceable from Odette d'Antrevernes to The Artificial
Princess, Firbank’s basic attitude,
the posture he assumes, changes little.
Thus, in the following discussion no distinction is made of one work
from another; all references will be to page numbers of The Complete Ronald
Firbank [3] rather than to specific novels.
Firbank does, in
a playful manner, include several self-referential passages. He calls himself a hothouse flower, “a dingy
lilac blossom of rarity untold,” beautiful, though dirty, and quite anomalous (631). A similar mixture of praise and criticism is
suggested by the description of Vainglory, parodied as Vaindreams:
“odd spelling, brilliant and vicious”(199), similarly suggesting an
impressive yet somehow sinful strangeness.
Hs habitual lack of narrative, the likeness of his many characters, and
their avoidance of emotional appeal are highlighted in the description: “He has
such a strange, peculiar style. His work
calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same
way. If one should by chance turn about
it’s usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace. Only occasionally his figures care to
beckon. And they seldom really
touch.” (199)
His disdain for
what is natural may owe something to Oscar Wilde who declared “The first duty
in life is to be as artificial as possible.” To Firbank captive nightingales are altogether
superior to wild ones (57), and, after all, “Nature . . . can produce dew but it
takes Art to make tears” (65). Even
peoples’ temperaments may be quite artificial (82). Thus his texts tend to turn from much of observed
reality, preferring references to art, to paintings, costume, coiffures, and
poems.
The many mentions
of works of art indicate how Firbank conceived his own project. There are no less than eight references to
Salomé,
the theme of Wilde’s play and Beardsley’s illustrations [6]. Doubtless Firbank was drawn to the story’s
combination of perverse sexuality, violence, and Christian lore. There are references as well to the Symbolist
Maeterlinck (87), to Verlaine, author of Les Poètes maudits (125), and
to Sappho, including a poem based on her “Ode to Aphrodite” (81, 93).
The first work in
The Complete Ronald Firbank is subtitled A Fairy Tale for Weary
People, and surely the dominant note in the Firbankian fantasyland is
ennui, languor, lassitude. (Perhaps the best
single word is acedia – Firbank always relished a word off the beaten path, and
he would have appreciated the notion that so serious a sin could be committed with
so little effort.)
Firbank
repeatedly uses forms of the word “weary” itself. As their conversations maunder and they
ponder how to pass their time, one lady remarks that another looks “very weary”
(263). The topic of travel suggests a
volume titled Notes on the Tedium of Places – “comprising almost
everywhere” (264). But there seems to be
a grace, a sort of charm, a sweetness in the Weltschmerz. A lady
is described as “beautifully weary” (110)
Alarmingly, though, the beautiful can metamorphose rapidly into weariness
(69). A character whose “weariness
exceeds most things” promulgates a philosophy called Indifferentism, with the central
teaching being “not to care” (273). Firbank’s
royal courts even include a noble with the title “his Weariness” (not to
mention “her Gaudiness,” “her Dreaminess,” “his Naughtiness” and “Lady Listless”
[95] [499-500] and [531]). In his world
even “butterflies loitered” and “flowers languished” (43).
This terminal
fatigue recalls Villiers de l'Isle-Adam’s Axel who notoriously declared “Live?
Our servants will do that for us.” It
arises in the very sensitive (those afflicted with “hyperaesthesia with
complications” [660]) reacting to “Life, the saddest thing of all” (556). His characters find themselves “attached
first to one thing and then another, without ever being attached to any” (535). Each is “like a loose leaf, tossed about the
world” (153). What, then, is to be
done? “Above, a sky so blue, so clear,
so luminous seemed to cry out, ‘Nothing matters! Why worry?
Be sanguine! Amuse yourself! Nothing matters!’” (520)
Though such ennui
cannot, perhaps, be overcome, the sufferer may be distracted. One lady is “glad I can drug my senses with a
book” (279), while another is somewhat vaguer: “We might frivol round together
some evening if you like” (726). Very
often sexuality provides a stimulation, though in Firbank such comforts are
generally voyeuristic or gay or savor of sado-masochism. He is capable of slightly shocking even his
own fictional creations. “But this
Ronald Firbank I can’t take to at all.
Valmouth! Was there ever a novel
more coarse? I assure you I hadn’t gone
very far when I had to put it down” (532).
To Firbank oblique
hints of impropriety are all that appear, but they are nonetheless salacious. In
his version of the Caribbean, men walk the street “with fingers intermingled”
(594). With very little excuse Mrs.
O’Brookmore says “It sounds like the Incest-music for some new opera” (256). Lady Parvula de Panzoust (one might write a
monograph on the names Firbank comes up with, as expressive and unlikely as
Dickens’) enjoys having “her aphrodisiac elements nicely titillated” (454). When
she goes calling, she is told “’The mistress, I presume, is with the scourge’”
(401) An altar boy lad is “witching as
eros” (693) A “cherif” is “daily
expecting a cargo of very young boys from Tunis. He had amassed vast wealth, rumour had it, in
the traffic of handsome youths” (479). The
widow Ruiz includes in the objets d’art of her boudoir “a masterly
marble group, depicting a pair of amorous hermaphrodites amusing themselves”
(612).
References to
dominance and submission occur regularly, though they provide atmosphere and
tone rather than incident. Thus Cardinal
Pirelli muses over “a liqueur-glass of brandy,” ‘Jewel-boy. Yum-yum’” (691) and preaches on the theme of
Flagellation (693). Msgr. Parr’s aides
are “entrenched at the corner of Whip-me-Whop-me Street at Mrs. Cresswell’s old
Flagellite’s Club” (138). On e can only
imagine what “the bwan-wam bwam-wams are up to, as they are described only as of
“blanch-faced queens, youths of a certain life”; we are told it is “more shocking than the shocks” (625, 627). The potential “Vice-Consul at Sodom” must be
chastised with a good spanking (538). Miss
Whipsina Peters, “the most resigned of women” (336) indulges in a ménage à trois with the
confidence that “un trio n’excite pas de soupçons.” (343)
Mixing, perhaps
at first uneasily, with such sensuality is Firbank’s obsession with the church. He in fact converted to Roman Catholicism at
the age of twenty-three, but his writing betrays not the slightest spiritual
ambition though it repeatedly returns to religious topics [7]. The same Cardinal Pirelli mentioned above, who
is addressed at times as “my queen” (651) found himself sufficiently idle that
he decided to christen a “week-old police dog” with great ceremony (641). A certain Pope Tertius “had the head of an
elderly lady’s-maid” (657). The average
curate is described as “something between a eunuch and a snigger” (534). “From the over-elaboration of his dress
[Winsome Brookes] suggested . . . a St.
Sebastian with too many arrows” (84). Upon
hearing that “the marchioness will be birched tomorrow” Mlle. De Nazianzi thinks “Oh, the charm, the
flavour of the religious world!
Where match it for interest or
variety!” (553) and considers becoming a nun: “the impulse to take the veil had
been strong with her – more, perhaps, to be near one of the nuns whom she had
idolized than from any more immediate vocation” (516). As the “impotent” church bells quarrel and
complain Sarah Sinquier looks at the steeples and sees a devil (319). Sister Ecclesia a full-blown hysteric who
kicks and punches and draws blood with blows of a broomstick (428). Religious topics rarely arise without a scent
of sinful sexuality wafting about the scene.
Apart from sex
and religion, Firbank finds a certain solace in thoughts of darker races. Among their representatives are the
redoubtable Miami Mouth of Prancing Nigger (the British title was the
less transgressive Sorrow in Sunlight), “the widow Embarka (who was of
negro extraction)” (482), and a doll called “Topolobango, Queen of the Sunset
Isles” (306). This theme, at roughly the
same time as Parisian Negrophilia, appears in such references as the “dark
children of the sun” (672) who appreciate “tuberose punctuated with inebriating
jasmine” (672) and many of the occasional songs, including one in which the
lover is praised as “like the Congo serpent” (323). Blacks are shamelessly appropriated for the
air of the exotic and of passion they lent his mise-en-scene.
These interests –
the largely observational sexual antics, the Catholicism of incense and
vestments and masochistic penitence, the tropical and sensual Blacks -- are all
at bottom aesthetic. Firbank and his
admirers may be devotees of Madame Wetme’s religion, “her cruel God was the Chic:
the God Chic” (518). They may aspire to
a sort of salvation if it may be said at the end, as it was of Mrs. Shamefoot “You
adorn life. You have not lived in vain”
(179). Yet Firbank does not fool
himself; he does not deign to dodge mortality.
Even the life lived for beauty must conclude in tragedy. Mrs. Thumbler declares of an acquaintance, “Poor
man, in the end he became so decorative that he died” (186). And the remedy is sometimes unequal to the
complaint, no matter how extravagantly applied.
They “were, each in their own way, ready for” what is “too
ornate” as they “go about, as other fools, in quest of pleasure,” usually
finding “tedium” instead (404), living
in a state of “bored magnificence” (89).
A writer’s
writer, when backed into a corner, Firbank will play with words, allowing words
alone to explode pyrotechnically, distracting his characters, himself, and susceptible
readers. All writers, of course, do
special effects with words, that is what constitutes the aesthetic use of
language, but Firbank seems often to vault over any implied reinforcement of
meaning into the pure joy of babble, something like what speech sounds like to
the pre-verbal infant or what that baby’s utterances sound like to the doting parents.
Most of the
interpolated poetry privileges sound over sense, though concept may play a role
[8]. We know only the title of the “folk-song
of the Paralytics” and can only imagine the “pas of the Bare-footed
Nuns” (95), but these verses that are included are typical.
A negress with a margaret once lolled frousting in the sun
Thinking of all the little things that she had left undone .
. .
With a hey, hey, hey, hey, hi, hey ho!
(511)
As an adult nursery rhyme this negress bears comparison to
Slim Galliard’s “Flat foot floogie with a floy, floy” or the lyrics of Walt
Kelly. Similarly, the “Belle of Benares”
begins somewhat intelligibly before it dissolves into gibberish that seems to
suggest the obscene.
My other females all yellow, fair, or black,
To thy charms shall prostrate fall,
As every kind of elephant does
To the white elephant Buitenack.
And thou alone shalt have from me,
Jimminy, Gomminy, whee, whee, whee,
The Gomminy, Jimminy, whee!
(342)
Torrents of funny names sometimes burst
onto the page, among them the Duchess of Netherland, Sir Gottlieb and Lady Gretel
Teuton-Haven, Zillah Bottom, Almeria Goatpath, and Thisbe Brownjohn. [9] Slightly absurd alliteration may enter at any
moment: “The plaintive pizzicato of Madame Mimosa’s Pom pup ‘Plum Bun’ . . .”
(431). Disconnected snatches of
conversation recall Cole Porter’s “Did You Evah” as they fade into his
soundtrack:
“. . . As if I were no more than the wife of an
Aide-de-camp!”
“Above social littleness.”
“Those ‘Isolde’ cocktails make one very amorous.”
“Would you mind not hurting me with your fan?”
“Oh, be careful there, Countess, of some horses’ offal.”
I hear that your wife and my wife . . . but I fancy there’s
nothing in it.”
(70-71)
“. . . above-board, when one can!
“ . . . Half the profits.”
“Ce gros Monsignor Parr!’
“ . . .A day together.”
“ . . . Rabbits.”
“As tall as Iss’y.”
(204)
“Once while beagling, accidentally – “
There came a murmur of voices.
“ . . .terrifying nightmare women.”
“ . . .One of his wild oats.”
“ . . . fascinating, fiendish colours.”
“It’s unmistakably his.”
“Pish!”
(232)
At times Firbank resorts to Wildean
inversion. Thus plainness is a
distinction (69), a fiasco is better than a success (111), a play would have
had a longer run were it not so exquisite (85), and scaffolding enhances the
cathedral (123). A certain lady tells
the truest lies, dear, of anyone I know!” (688)
Often, however,
his verbal play is expressed in singular images, odd and fascinating like the
objects in Joseph Cornell’s boxes. Advertisements in the buses provide a
readymade montage: “Stella Starcross – The Lady from the Sea – This evening,
Betty Buttermilk and Company – Rose Tournesol – Mr. and Mrs. Mary’s Season: the
Carmelite – The Shop Boy – Clemenza di Tito” (330). Often, though, the strange, glowing images
arrives singly. Towers are like “the
helmets of eunuch in carnival-time” (124).
The King complains, “Whenever I go out, I get “an impression of raised
hats” (503). A peach tastes “like a dark
carnation” (225). The Baroness is “all
feathers and nerves” (38).
It remains only
to explain the broader attractiveness of this singular sensibility. It is a locus classicus of high camp
and thus subculturally meaningful for gays, but it possesses considerable, if
not universal, crossover appeal. Much
derives from Firbank’s consistent humor; his comedy sparkles on every page, as
if Norman Douglas or Noel Coward were
boiled down until they became not only intense, but also a bit weirder. In fact, though their roots are in fin de
siècle Aestheticism, Firbank’s characters face the abyss, the early twentieth
century breakdown that led to Modernism and then Existentialism. They believe in nothing, for all the Catholic
folderol, and thus there is a sort of courage in their gossiping and posing and
performing and sniffing after the salacious.
Whistling in the dark, they elaborate the most fabulous symphonic
exercises and while away their time in the most human of pastimes, playing with
words.
1. Though, strictly
speaking, the same could be said of every writer, even the most imitative. See my essay from last month: “A Unique
Oeuvre.”
2. I will abstain
from these anecdotes in this account, though, like Wilde, some of Firbank’s
best art may have been in the incidents of his life. Interested readers may consult the
reminiscences of his friends, for instance in Ifan Kyrle Fletcher’s Ronald
Firbank: A Memoir. With Personal Reminiscences by Lord Berners, Augustus John,
V.B. Holland, and Osbert Sitwell or Firbankiana : being a collection of
reminiscences of Ronald Firbank, edited by Raymond Foye and Francesco
Clemente.
3. I append the table
of contents from this volume so the specific novel from which each quotation
comes may be easily determined.
4. From his “Phrases
and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.”
5. See pages 32, 36,
67, 98, 150, 157, 666, and 754.
6. While Beardsley
notorious pictures appeared in the 1894 English edition of Salomé,
the original French edition had a vignette by the equally erotic Félicien Rops
(not made specifically for the book) depicting a wild sort of female sprite who
apparently has not one but two fish tails as well as legs crouching over the
remains of a meal with the slogan “non hic piscis omnium” (“the fish
here is not for everyone”) which became the motto of the Librairie de l’Art
Indépendant.
7. The reader may be
reminded of Wilde’s embrace of Catholic spirituality in De Profundis.
8. Other songs with
nonsense elements are found on pages 245, 265, 365, 511, and elsehere.
9. See pages 380 and
441.
Table of Contents of The Complete Ronald Firbank
Odette: A Fairy Tale for Weary People 17
The Artificial Princess 27
Vainglory 75
Inclinations 223
Caprice 319
Valmouth - A Romantic Novel 387
Santal
479
The Flower Beneath The Foot 499
Prancing Nigger
593
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli 645
The Princess Zoubaroff - A Comedy 699
