A hothouse atmosphere
D.J. Taylor
THE EARLY FIRBANK by Steven Moore
Quartet, (15.95, pp. 240
The Early Firbank is an expanded ver- sion of Ronald Firbank: Complete Short Sto- ries — a misleading title in any case — first published last year in America by the Dalkey Archive Press. To the original text has been appended Firbank's two one-act plays The Mauve Tower and A Disciple From the Country. The whole, with the exception of some schoolboy fragments and a few debatable items from the booksellers' catalogues, brings together everything of Firbank's which has not found its way into the 1928 Collected Edition, available as a Picador paperback, or the 1962 edition of The New Rythum.
The result is a collection of nearly 20 short pieces, ranging from 'True Love', Firbank's first sustained attempt at prose writing, to 'Lady Appledore's Mesalliance', which bears perhaps the strongest resem- blance to his mature work. Steven Moore, whose textual comments reflect the find- ings of Firbank's first biographer, Miriam Benkovitz, has been able to date them to the years 1903-8, a period taking in Firbank's departure to France at the age of 17 to study the language, his arrival at Cambridge in 1906 and his association with Lord Alfred Douglas, who as editor of the Academy printed the essay 'An Early Flem- ish Painter', reproduced here.
Despite the narrow timescale, the effect is something rather less than homo- geneous. In fact, as Alan Hollinghurst sug- gests in his pithy introduction, the contents of The Early Firbank can be divided into two main categories: a series of religiose fables, mostly written for presentation to his mother, and a number of Edwardian `society' tales which reflect the somewhat exalted social circles in which she moved. A similar division applies to The Mauve Tower
and A Disciple From The Country which reveal the influence, respectively, of the Wilde of Salome and the Wilde of the comedies. The religious pieces, sentimen- tal, much concerned with the visions of dying nuns and again fairly obviously derived from Wilde's fairy tales, are dated even by the standards of the Edwardian age. The origins of novels such as Vain- glory and Caprice are more easily glimpsed in the malicious garden-party sororities of `When Widows Love' and 'A Study In Opal'.
As the work of an apprentice novelist with little in the way of formal training, these pieces are marked by a style that has not quite tugged free of its origins. The tone, caught somewhere between The Yel- low Book and The Eton Candle, is not yet the sharp, elliptical vehicle that it was to become in the last ten years of Firbank's life (he died in 1926); the influence of Wilde and Victorian society novelists like Ouida is undisguised, and there is a sort of free admission ticket for the mannered Ninetyish flourish. Firbank's early work is `decadent' in the strictest sense, which is to say that his analogies tend to be taken from art rather than nature. So a character will be said to resemble 'a tired king in a Maeterlinck play'; a signpost look like 'a very thin Pierrot'. It is a tiny, tightly circumscribed orbit of reference, governed by a curiously inhuman sense of beauty. Firbank seems at his happiest in describing flowers, and there is an odd sense in which everything he writes appears to be taking place in a gigantic greenhouse.
These attributes, it has to be said, are not to everybody's taste. Any critical estimate of Firbank's work has to begin with the acknowledgement that you either like him or you do not — no amount of persuasion ever convinced a waverer of the merits of Concerning The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. At the same time there are the drawbacks associated with the cult of Firbank's personality — it is a fact that anyone expressing an interest in his writing `Scruffy creatures, aren't they?' is automatically assumed to be a homo- sexual. To make these complaints — which in fairness are more often aimed at the dandified exquisite who announces that he simply adores 'dear Ronald' than at the work itself — is to miss the point about Fir- bank. That it is not, as even his detractors allow, that he foreshadowed in a surpris- ingly exact way the work of Waugh and Powell, but that he is a brilliant comedian in his own right. 'When Widows Love', a very early piece, contains some vintage descriptions: Mrs Fanley, who tad only 12 expressions. She wanted so much to have another'; Mrs Van Cotton, her American guest, who 'reminded one vaguely of a restaurant ceiling'; the vicar's wife who, in answer to an innocuous question about clothing for the church bazaar, remarks, with a look at Lady Berkley's 'transparent muslin', that 'one can never wear too many clothes'.
One-liners apart, The Early Firbank provides several pointers to Firbank's developing technique as a comic artist. His trick is not to produce a satiric account of life, but a sort of fantasia on it in which quite plausible situations are gradually burlesqued into unreality. 'Lady Apple- dore's Mesalliance' is a good example of this, the story of a young man of noble birth named Wildred who, by dint of pover- ty, is forced to take the position of assistant gardener to the widowed Lady Appledore. Arriving at the estate — the head gardener naturally has been 'sitting up all night with a sick orchid' — he apologises to the par- lour maid for his lack of visiting cards. Almost immediately Wildred's cover is blown: Lady Appledore, who has taken a fancy to him, is shocked to see the volume of mail forwarded to him from the Pall Mall Club. Eventually, having discovered him digging and assuming him to be a house-guest (tut why these Tolstoi habits?') his aunt exposes the imposture. Wedding bells follow, whereupon Lady Appledore is disparaged by the gossips for having 'married her gardener'.
The sting in the tail is characteristic. The vein of melancholy which runs through Firbank's later work, the sly mockery of social aspiration and the assumption of human inconstancy are here embodied in the women, whose romantic misfortunes are of rather less importance than the colour of their hair. The bishop's wife in 'A Study in Opal', having learned of her hus- band's sudden death, reflects that it is `lucky' she had recently ordered a black velvet dinner-gown and wonders, 'may a widow wear pearls?' For all the camp air of suppressed naughtiness, there is something sharp and hard about these fragments and about their creator. 'A certain steely something', Hollinghurst calls it. Even here, as a very young man, aloofness and watchful self-possession were the distin- guishing marks of Firbank's character. The result may be juvenilia, but of a rare and scintillating sort.
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