Flower beneath the foot
Richard Luckett
Prancing Novelist: In Praise of Ronald Firbanh Brigid Brophy (Macmillan £8) Other tombs boast their piles of wreaths; on Ronald Firbank's there repose but a few, yet to these are attached labels bearing names (Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden, Anthony Powell) surely distinguished enough. For all that, there have been dissident noises; indeed, a voice was heard in Bulstrode Gardens (vice Downing College) inveighing against those who thought Firbank any kind of novelist at all. Perhaps as a consequence of this tacit disagreement a convention has been established, by which 'minor classic ' has become the accepted evaluation, with the corollary that — in essence — you either like Firbank or you don't, and further debate is fruitless.
It is at this point that Miss Brophy, the Irish lady writer from SW5, advances into the ring. In so doing she intends to rescue Firbank from the epithet 'minor,' to present fiction from the charge that it is dead, and to save us all from the Queensberry rules for literature — which, it will be remembered, were established at the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and, implicitly, related literature to current standards of morality. The seconds scuttle for shelter, the bell sounds, and the shadow-boxing begins. . . .
Miss Brophy's endeavours fall into four parts: a theory of fiction, an account of Firbank's 'creative personality,' a consideration of the Wilde cause in relation to literature and to Firbank, and finally an analysis of Firbank's writings. Two subsidiary themes run through the book: an attack on the inadequacies and inaccuracies of Firbank's biographer, Professor Miriam J. Benkowitz, and a defence of Sigmund Freud, on whose theories Miss Brophy is heavily dependent, for they provide the only possible validification for much that is in the book.
It is Miss Brophy's contention that the novel, as an art form, suffers from disrepute because the novelist is forced to rely, so far as his material is concerned, on his (or her) ability to invent. But invention, she argues, is only a part of the whole: a novelist's greatness is revealed through his capacity to perceive and render a design, and thus in his apartness from his invention — which might, in Freudian terms, be expressed as the distance between his Ego and his Ego Ideal. The problem is that this initial faculty of invention is closely related to fantasising and day-dream, which in turn has associations with childhood, sexual wishfulfilment and hence masturbation. Consequently there are many people who subconsciously believe that novel reading is related to all these things, and to this we may trace the Victorian taboo on reading novels before lunch, The Victo rians, Miss Brophy contends, in any case largely evaded the issue by disguising fantasy as naturalism, but the decay of naturalism revealed fantasy in all its shamefulness, and from that exposure it has never recovered. Let Firbank then, whose fantasy is shameless, stand forward as exemplar of the novelist whose ordering and distancing capacity can make great fiction out of the most ' suspect ' materials, who can cut a giggle to the glitter and purity of a diamond.
This is scarcely a new debate, but Miss Brophy's contention that it can be elucidated by reference to Freud, her choice of Firbank as the vindication of her arguments, and her sense of the social context (Firbank was able to publish because he had a private income, but if society wants new Firbanks it must pay) all serve to give it a fresh emphasis, an emphasis that is further accentuated by the insistence (rising to shrillness) of her style. The questions that emerge are real ones and of real importance; at times, however, they are swept aside by an overriding, indeed overwhelming interrogative, a Deucalion's flood of doubt which can be summed up in a simple query: how seriously are we to take Miss Brophy? Ronald Firbank rejoiced in brevity and made it an essential part of his method. All his work is exceedingly complex, dependent for its resonance on allusiveness of the most difficult kind: the persistence, through silence, of the meaning of those things which have not been said. It is always pointed, always witty; it consummately skirts vulgarity, and is utterly and equally dependent on reticence and style. To his writings Miss Brophy has devoted an excessively fat, discursive volume, relentlessly speculative, leaving nothing to the imagination, and exploring at inordinate length every theory, however trivial, that crosses her mind. The one aspect of his style that she has borrowed, his use of short paragraphs, is profitable only to the paper industry. At this point we may conveniently recollect that, not long ago, Miss Brophy was one of the perpetrators of a work entitled Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. The reason for raking this up (not a very savoury recollection) is that it does demonstrate that Miss Brophy, along with her predilection for bourgeois-baiting, likes her little joke — and there, perhaps, is the key to the present volume. Can it be that what we have here is actually an elaborate spoof of the literary thesis, a hideously ironic reproof from SW5 to those who laboriously toil for PhDs, the glamour of the English schools in their eyes? In what other sense are we take the laborious investigation of remote biographical niceties„ the desperate humourlessness, the pretentious and irritating references forwards and backwards that litter each page? If we look we find clear clues to the fact that it's not serious: casual but significant slips of general knowledge (the erroneous opinion that Waugh illustrated A Handful of Dust, the misquoting of 'The Western Wind ') and continual reference to ' family papers' which might well clear up matters about which Miss Brophy speculates, without any proper explanation of why she has not troubled to trace and check them. A prolonged joke, and a bad one, but remarkable for the thoroughness (except where it involves hard work) with which it has been carried through.
Alas, the explanation won't hold. Miss Brophy wastes much ink on Firbank's cult of Wilde, but still more on her own cult of Firbank. Like the Queen in The Flower Beneath the Foot she commences to fidget, disliking that the King. should appear more interesting than herself. In her critical practice she fails to attend and that failure is crucial, and a little sad. She loses Firbank and finds instead Brigid Brophy; in the transition all proportion vanishes.
Fiction, she tells us, does not do good: " Its claims should be that it is good." This is a valid opinion, and relates to the powerful arguments, of the greatest importance to literary criticism, advanced by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good. But to refer to that work is to expose Miss Brophy; the matter is not as simple as she imagines, and the proper texts for an examination of it are surely the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, where a salutary corrective to her sloppy Freudianism may also be found. "The moral sense in mortals is the duty / We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty," and this relates back to ' merely ' formal problems in a way that Miss Brophy shows little awareness of. Mr Auden, discussing the dilemma in relation to a poem of homosexual love by Cavafy, wondered " what . . . will be the future of the artist's companion?" Reading Firbank there is no occasion for such speculations: we accept the world he creates and forget such issues. But his world, in its very allusiveness, derives from the real world in which he lives and writes, and the greatest literature, though removed from this primary world, does not permit us to ignore such concerns. That is why, provided it is not a lazy compromise, it is quite proper to call Firbank 'minor,' his magnificent artistry notwithstanding; and why Miss Brophy is irremediably wrong.
Miss Brophy singles out for praise just one critical assessment of Firbank, an essay by Evelyn Waugh which occupied six pages of Life 8c Letters for March 1929. In this essay (which, together with so much else of Waugh's, urgently needs collection) Firbank is, correctly, defined as "a figure of essential artistic integrity and importance." Waugh concludes, however, that " some silliness, a certain ineradicable fatuity, seems to have been inherent in him." The balance is one of high praise, but the qualification is insistently there. Miss Brophy seeks, ingeniously, to explain it away; in a sense her whole book is an endeavour of exculpation. But it won't do; to go back to Waugh's essay is to discover the magnitude of her mistake. Six pages suffice where a near six hundred fail. Firbank is caught there in a way that she cannot rival. Miss Brophy laments the irony that made Professor Benkowitz Firbank's biographer; it is equivalent only to the irony that made Miss Brophy his critic. The one consolation is that it is a situation Firbank might have understood: " ' The cake,' Mrs Henedge said, beginning to purr, 'is to be an exact replica of the Victoria Memorial.' "
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