In search of Ronald Firbank

D. J. Taylor

This type of criticism is understandable — there is a particular vein of preciousness in Firbank which never quite goes away but it is a pity. For at his best Firbank is a strikingly original writer, and much of what we have come to admire in the mainstream of 20th-century British fiction, a group of writers as diverse as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Ivy Compton- Burnett, is recognisably derived from his influence. It is a fatal thing, of course, to say of a novelist that he is a great origina- tor, but Firbank is this and something more. In fact it is not stretching the case unduly to say that he is the finest English comic writer of the early part of the century, in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Congreve.

Born in 1886, the grandson of a famous railway contractor, Firbank led a restless, vagrant life based around the hotels of Southern Europe. The bulk of his output, notably the novels Caprice, Valmouth, The Flower Beneath The Foot and Prancing Nigger, was written in the ten years be- tween 1916 and his death in Rome in 1926. With the exception of a minor vogue for his work in America in the Twenties he remained completely obscure in his life- time. Dandy, aesthete, recluse, homosex- ual, Firbank defies obvious categorisation. Bluntly it might be said that he is a link between the aestheticism of the 1890s, Wilde, Beardsley et a!, and the galloping modernism of the post-war era: Cyril Connolly, who remains one of his most effective critics, marked down Concerning The Eccentricities Of Cardinal Pirelli , (1926) along with Ulysses and A La Recherche du Temps Perdu as the three key modernist texts of the period.

However, thiS easy taxonomy gives only a vague idea of the point of Firbank. Slim, stylised, self-referential, his novels might be described as exercises in pure form. They have broadly distinguishable plots, they are 'about' things, but ultimately their importance rests in the way they are written rather than in what they are written about. Together they create an orchid- aceous, hothouse world of almost im- penetrable subtlety: dense mosaics of con- cealment, set in imaginary principates, in country rectories or the Ritz hotel, which bring together fragments of disconnected conversation, ghostly intimations of pain, tragedy and sexual ambiguity, the whole characterised by an extraordinary brand of humour. 'Whenever I go out', King Wil- liam of Pisuerga complains in The Flower Beneath The Foot, 'I get an impression of raised hats'.

Prancing Nigger (1925) might be taken as a representative Firbank novel. Set in Haiti and featuring a family of rustic negroes who migrate to the capital in search of social advancement ('Cit); of Cuna-cuna' Mrs Mouth recites from the estate agent's catalogue, 'in the heart of a brainy district'), it conceals familiar Fir- bank themes of misguided aspiration, thwarted love and futility. At its close the family's collective life lies in ruins: daugh- ters corrupted, sons led astray, a sort of frightful sink of tragedy and suffering which is unable to dislodge the sheer comedy of the action. But Prancing Nigger is perhaps more impressive in its technical accomplishment. Firbank, it is fair to say, bequeathed two chief legacies to fiction. The first is his ability to recreate 'talking heads', two-, three- or even four-way conversations in which no speaker is ever named, but where the author's ear for speech patterns enables the reader to distinguish immediately between the con- tending voices. As a technique it is won- derfully imitable, as in the following ex- change which might have come straight out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh: 'Do you remember the giant with the

beard?', she asked. 'At the Presidency fête?'

'Do I?'

'And we wondered who he could be?'

'Well?'

'He's the painter of Women's Backs, my dear'.

'The painter of women's what?'

'An artist'.

'Oh'.

'I wanted to know if you'd advise me to sit'.

Firbank's second technical advance is the way in which his style, by this time utterly stripped down and composed, manages to convey a tumult of impressions — move- ment, scene, talk — in a minimum of words. The Mouths' journey to Cuna-cuna in their rickety, luggage-strewn cart, is given in a single sentence: 'Little jingley trot-trot over the Savannah — hey!' It achieves the same sort of effect as a poem by e. e. cummings — bare, unadorned, but capable of stoking up extraordinarily po- tent images in the reader's eye. More to the point, it is a participatory style, which involves the reader doing a great deal of the work.

Very little of any consequence has been written about Firbank: as Walter Allen once put it, any criticism of Firbank's novels is almost bound to appear an act of clumsiness. Two biographies exist: one, an oddly dour book — you would, for exam- ple, gain no inkling from it that Firbank was a humorous writer — written by an American scholar, the late Miriam Benk- ovitz, in the 1960s; the other, massive and embattled, produced by Brigid Brophy in 1973. Both are ripe to be superseded. At which point the search for Firbank runs into a gloomy, high-walled cul-de-sac.

At the heart of any Firbank biography lie the 300 or so letters which Firbank wrote to his mother (on whom he was fixated) and the 450 postcards addressed to his sister Heather. For the last 30 years these have been the property of an elderly gentleman in Hampshire who bought them at Sotheby's sale of the Firbank family papers and has not permitted anybody else to lay eyes on them since. Miriam Benk- ovitz quoted a few; Brigid Brophy saw none. As a consequence, Firbank is still, over 60 years after his death, a figure more of legend than of substance, a repository for amusing anecdotes: the Firbank whose shyness was so proverbial that he once slid beneath the table at the Café Royal rather than face his dinner guest, the Firbank whose appetite was so negligible that when entertaining Siegfried Sassoon he con- sumed only a single grape. Of no major English writer of the century, perhaps, is less known. Until the old gentleman in Hampshire dies or has a change of heart the prospect of getting any nearer to Firbank's genius is remote.