Ronald Firbank Books

Due to a production error, the final line of my preface was cut off. It should read "... date due to a surge of new material." If you like, send me your copy and I'll handwrite the missing line and autograph the book gratis. E-mail me at smoore3@worldnet.att.net.

Firbank's name is now largely forgotten. Admired by Edmund Wilson, and read by the best of his contemporary English satirists, he carved out a special and unique niche. These novels are about as close to 'purple prose' as it's possible for fine literature to get without slipping into bathos. The stories range from the sublimely silly and devious, as in "The Eccentricities" with it's striking similarities to Norman Douglas' "South Wind", to the allegorical tales that call to mind the odd quirkiness of the French novelist Roussel.
Firbank's major limitation was always a general and consistent lack of any balancing perspective or straight forwardness. His fastidously over the top flights of prose fancy desparately call for a grounding that never occurs. At his best, as in the baptism scene beginning the Eccentricities, Firbank's brilliance overcomes these limitations - he approaches the artistic level of a Waugh. However, all too often his fussiness and self-indulgence overwhelm the best interests of his novels. His extraordinarily convoluted, elliptical and parallel plotting only makes things more difficult. Sans the brilliant hard-nosed poetic realism grounding the fussiness of a Nabokov, Firbank's books stagnate. An overt reticence to call things as they are doesn't help. Way too much in Firbank ends up half-said, vague or furtive. Endless snatches of gossip and/or broken dialogues irreparably rend any sustainable plot.
Firbank wrote his later books with a fastidiousness perhaps unequalled in all fiction, writing single sentences on large cards, instead of paragraghs on sheets of paper.(Steinbeck, in contrast, used legal paper, filling single pages with thousands of tiny nearly undecipherable words.) Firbanks's calligraphy was quite as important to him as the thoughts behind the words.This gives a hothouse tone to each over-written sentence, and weakens plot-lines already streched beyond all reason.
If this sounds harsh, perhaps it's because I think Firbank could have been a much better novelist. His refusal to face life squarely may be understandable, but he never really overcomes self-inflicted limitations.

And he writes well. It's true the books are somewhat obscure, but so what? Firbank doesn't take anything seriously. Everything is a fantasy. You float through a world of handsome choirboys, old ladies talking scandal, schoolgirls preening for marriage. Corruption is everywhere, and no one points a finger. I think his best novel is his last, "Concerning some eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli." His earlier works ramble a little. "Cardinal Pirelli" is set in Spain and is sort of a satire of the Catholic Church. If you take certain things seriously, Firbank is not for you. But if you are open minded and would like to read something different from most novels, you may enjoy him.

Firbank is seldom considered a serious novelist, or a major literary modernist. It's easy to see why he's underrated; most of his writings are quite brief, and infused with a daring sense of high camp. But Firbank's terse narration and elliptical dialogue require as much sophistication from readers as the novels of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.

This anthology contains most of Firbank's best work -- the outrageous _Flower Beneath the Foot_, the sublimely scabrous _Valmouth_, and his rueful final novel _Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli_. (Cardinal Pirelli, a closeted boy-lover, is probably the single strongest character in all of Firbank's fiction.) Even at his campiest, Firbank acknowledges the possibility of tragedy -- and this awareness distinguishes his novels from mere social whimsy.

The absence of _Caprice_ from this particular collection is a bit of a letdown, because this short novel is probably the best introduction to Firbank's skewed world view. (On a separate note, the regrettably racist title _Prancing N----r_ was not Firbank's own. Firbank actually called the novel _Sorrow in Sunlight_, and his American admirer Carl Van Vechten retitled the book to titillate U.S. audiences. Although Van Vechten's gambit worked, and _Prancing N----r_ was the only one of Firbank's novels to achieve substantial U.S. sales during his lifetime, the original British title is much better, and ought to be restored.)

Ronald Firbank, whose forty-year lifespan (1886-1926) covers a particularly bountiful era of English prose artistry, is so eccentrically individual an author he almost seems to be a creature invented by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. His five short novels, collected in this New Directions Paperback edition, are utterly unclassifiable; no genre suggests itself when they are being read. His prose, as fastidiously styled as a coiffured poodle, as twee as an afternoon tea, is bewilderingly florid even beyond the standards of his contemporaries. With the descriptive proclivities of an interior decorator, he paints with all the colors on the palette; an orchid is not just an orchid but a "rose-lipped" orchid with a "lilac beard." England had not seen lyrical flamboyance like this since Oscar Wilde a quarter century before, and would not see it again until the ascendance of Freddie Mercury a half century later.

But Firbank's writing is not just fancy window dressing. His stories may look like fairy tales because of the whimsical characters and settings, but his narrative technique fractures the linearity of the plots by focusing on external details. In "The Flower Beneath the Foot," for example, the subject of the conversation in the first few pages is not immediately apparent, but disclosure gradually occurs over the course of the following chapters: His Weariness the Prince Yousef's mother, the Queen of some mythical Arabesque realm called the Land of Dates, disapproves of her son's desire to marry the humble convent-dwelling Mademoiselle de Nazianzi instead of Princess Elsie of England. Not until the final paragraph does Firbank dispel the story's genteel facade to reveal a passionately beating, and broken, heart.

Firbank's characters are garish works of art, most of them either impossibly frivolous nobles of theatrically exaggerated primness or paupers with pride and dignity. As in "The Flower Beneath the Foot," a common theme is star-crossed love, a romance between two people of different social stations. This love can be interracial, as it is in "Valmouth," a British colony with a climate so salubrious that the inhabitants live well over a hundred years, as well as in another novel with an evidently Caribbean setting and a controversial title which I refrain from typing so as not to have to wrestle with the Amazon censorship filter. Infatuation can also be grotesque, as it is in "The Artificial Princess," whose heroine, reluctantly betrothed to a foreign Crown Prince, unwittingly encounters the Devil on the night of her debut.

Firbank, one of the first of many English Catholic writers to emerge in the twentieth century, is comfortable setting one of his novels in Spain. "Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli" is self-explanatory, as the good cardinal, who allows aristocratic dogs to be baptized as a favor to wealthy patrons and disguises himself in the street as laity of either gender, risks being defrocked by the Roman church for his perceived sacrileges.

This is humor, but of a less obvious sort; unlike P.G. Wodehouse, who made a handsome living with his comical portraits of the upper class, Firbank doesn't target a specific group of people or stratum of society, nor does he seem interested in such petty substantiality. His fiction, insulated in a world unscarred by war and populated by dainty animated dolls, is an idyllic extension of reality, somehow a reminder of the limitless expanse of literature where formulas lose their validity and time stands still. Toss aside all your preconceptions, because these novellas will surprise you.

Some of these novels are incredibly funny -- _Vainglory_, in particular, is a comic masterpiece. Firbank had a skill for writing fools' dialogue: imagine an Austen character who always says the wrong thing at the wrong time, then imagine a novel populated exclusively by these types.

Of course, this all gets a little tiring after a while. Firbank seems to have been a fervid misanthrope, and I can't think of an appealing character in any of these novels. Still, they're great, quick reads -- perfect, I would say, to pass the time while on vacation, or sick in bed.

This is the first, and only, book I've read written by Firbank. His writing is good but not great. However, this is an unusual "religious quest" novel both in the youth and in the failure of the religious seeker. It provides insights into North African Islamic culture, especially as observed by a religious misfit.

This volume is well worth your time.

Ronald Firbank wasn't a big seller in his day, but he has had a large impact on English language fiction. He influenced Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Muriel Spark, among others. And his spirit can be seen in the works of such contemporary novelists as Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst. Valmouth is his finest work.
Firbank blazed the path away from Naturalism. He did with prose what contemporary artists were doing with paint: fixing an impression of life rather than making a copy of it. He knows his work is fantasy so he can write beautiful and witty prose about subjects polite people pretend don't exist such as religious mania, bigotry and sex in all its flavors. Although the overall impression of his style is baroque, flowery and often oblique, the writing is really swift and tight. Like Hemingway or Truman Capote, there's not one word, one syllable more than absolutely necessary.
He writes marvelous dialogue. His innovation, I think, is how he captures the silences. A lot of what we understand from conversation comes from what remains unspoken--the pauses, the deflections, the silences. Firbank does the silences. The little sighs, the defensive change of subject, the little joke that hides a deep wound.
All his strengths are presented in abundance in Valmouth. Valmouth is an English seaside resort where the salubrious air promotes extraordinary longevity. Its most industrious citizen is Madame Yajñavalkya, (whom we would identify as South Asian, but everyone calls nig--r) a chiropodist, masseuse, beautician, quack and perhaps procuress. She serves a delightful assortment of fussy dowagers from all levels of the social strata who are obsessed with death, romance, marriage and a particularly exquisite brand of Catholicism.
Valmouth is a short read although not always an easy one. But becoming acquainted with this place where a footman may offer you "an ingenuity of tartlettes" is well worth the effort.

To begin with the bad:

I can't beat a drum for everyone to read CAPRICE. None of the characters aroused empathy in me. Not a single wrenching emotion is to be found in the pages. Plus, the plot seems thin. And yet . . . .

And yet there are those who consider Ronald Firbank a seminal contributor to the transition of novels from Victorian to modern mode. During the early 1920's he was considered one of the avant garde. All his novels except one he published himself, the price for preferring his own taste over the public's. Traces of his innovative approach can be found in the novels of Anges Wilson, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and I. Compton-Burnett.

CAPRICE could be subtitled: The Rise and Fall of Sara Sinquier. In short, the consequences of a young woman pursuing a theatrical career. One of the back cover puffs--those laudatory clips intended to convince a prospective reader the book is worth opening--praises the work as unobscure, 'classical'. The praise alludes to the difficulties his style usually imposed on readers.

This novel displays characteristics of that seminal style: abrupt transitions, frothy dialogue riddled with innuendo, brief paragraphs, well-honed imagery. Firbank's rich vocabulary may require a desk dictionary be handy while reading him.

He himself was a colorful person: fond of flowers, a foppish dresser, shy, and an incessant traveler. Toward fiction he remained a devoted disciple, compiling in violet ink copious notes for each novel.

I am somewhat uneasy using the word 'novel' in reference to CAPRICE. A paperback no larger than a 5x8 index card and less than a hundred pages thick begs a generous application of the term. Length may not be the subtlest criteria of a novel but it is the most patent. The further away a work is from the commonly accepted poles of size the more strained the term's use. A fifty thousand-word fiction can hardly be called a short story and a thousand word one a novel. In my opinion CAPRICE barely qualifies as a novelette. For its size it may well be considered a gem but if one is to call it a novel why then a midget is a short giant.