1916 Publishes Inclinations with Grant Richards (17 June), with two drawings by Albert Rutherston (aka Rothenstein). Publishes revised version of Odette d’Antrevernes as Odette: A Fairy Tale for Weary People with Grant Richards, with four illustrations by Albert Buhrer (13 December). Begins next novel, Caprice.
1917 Publishes Caprice with Grant Richards (17 October), with a frontispiece by Augustus John. Begins next novel, Valmouth.
1919 Moves from Oxford to Bath and thence back to London. Publishes Valmouth with Grant Richards (17 November), with a frontispiece by Augustus John; it is reviewed anonymously and hostilely by Aldous Huxley, who nevertheless will borrow extensively from Firbank for his own Crome Yellow (1921). Firbank starts work on a play, The Princess Zoubaroff. Frequently seen out socially, including at the Ballets Russes, at Covent Garden, at Negro dance reviews, drinking in the Café Royal or eating at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant.
1920 Travels through France and on to Algeria and Tunisia. Begins writing the novel Santal. Publishes The Princess Zoubaroff with Grant Richards (26 November), with a frontispiece and decoration by Michel Sevier. A proposed dedication to Evan Morgan is removed at the last minute at Morgan’s insistence.
1921 Leaves Tunisia for Sicily and heads north through Italy and France. Begins writing a new novel, which would become The Flower Beneath the Foot. Takes rooms in London in May and June; moves to Versailles in July, from where he attempts to generate interest in a London production of The Princess Zoubaroff. Publishes Santal with Grant Richards (8 September). Moves to Montreux, Switzerland.
1922 Leaves Switzerland for Italy, renting a villa in Fiesole. Flirts with retitling his novel-in-progress A Record of the Early Life of St Laura de Nazianzi and the Times in Which She Lived, which he completes in May. Receives fan letter from American author Carl van Vechten, whose article on Firbank is published in the Double Dealer. Returns to London, via Paris. Sits for Percy Wyndham Lewis. Begins work on a ‘Negro novel’, initially entitled Drama in Sunlight. In August, he boards the RMS Orcoma, bound for Cuba. Moves on to Jamaica, returning to London by October. Compelled to remove libellous references to Evan Morgan from forthcoming novel, The Flower Beneath the Foot. Travels to Bordighera in Italy for the winter.
1923 Publishes The Flower Beneath the Foot with Grant Richards (17 January), with a decoration by C. R. W. Nevinson and portraits by Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. Experiences declining health, particularly trouble with breathing. Completes the ‘Negro novel’ in June, returning to London in July. Travels to Paris, Madrid, southern Spain and Lisbon, before returning to London and then heading on to Rome, where he takes rooms for the winter. In November, Brentano’s in New York agree to publish his novel, under a title suggested by Carl van Vechten: Prancing Nigger. Firbank begins work on his last complete novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.
1924 Death of Lady Firbank in March. Firbank returns for her funeral, then goes back to Rome. Publishes Prancing Nigger with Brentano’s in the USA (11 March). By late April the first print run of three thousand has sold out. An admiring review article by Edmund Wilson appears in the New Republic in May. British edition, published by Brentano’s of London, appears on 6 November, under Firbank’s preferred title, Sorrow in Sunlight.
1925 Spends the summer in London arranging publication of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. Sees Vyvyan Holland, Augustus John and Osbert Sitwell, but is generally both ill and reclusive. In August, travels to Paris, Arcachon and via Marseilles to Cairo. Begins work on a New York jazz novel, The New Rythum.
1926 Returns to Rome. Dies in the Quirinale Hotel in Rome (21 May) of a respiratory condition, attended in his last days by Lord Berners. On 1 June, Firbank is erroneously given a funeral service in the non-Catholic cemetery in Testaccio. A plot in the Catholic cemetery of Verano finally becomes free by late September. Firbank is buried at last, though once again erroneously, as the free plot is once again not a Catholic one. His final novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, is published posthumously by Grant Richards (29 June), with an author portrait by Charles Shannon.
Further Reading
Ansen, Alan, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990)
Benkovitz, Miriam J., A Bibliography of Ronald Firbank (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963; revised edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)
——, Ronald Firbank: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969)
Bristow, Joseph, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995)
Brooke, Jocelyn, Ronald Firbank (London: Arthur Barker, 1951)
Brophy, Brigid, Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank (London: Macmillan, 1973)
Caserio, Robert L., ‘Artifice and Empire in Ronald Firbank’s Novels’, Western Humanities Review 51.2, pp. 227–35 (Summer 1997)
Clark, William Lane, ‘Degenerate Personality: Deviant Sexuality and Race in Ronald Firbank’s Novels’, in David Bergman (ed.), Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 134–55
Davies, Gill, David Malcolm and John Simons (eds.), Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist 1886–1926 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004)
Davies, Paul, ‘ “The Power to Convey the Unuttered”: Style and Sexuality in the Work of Ronald Firbank’, in Mark Lilly (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan Press, 1990) pp. 199–214
Davis, Robert Murray, ‘The Ego Triumphant in Firbank’s Vainglory’, Papers on Language and Literature 9 (Summer 1973), pp. 281–90
——, ‘From Artifice to Art: The Technique of Firbank’s Novels’, Style 2 (Winter 1968), pp. 33–47
——, ‘ “Hyperaesthesia with Complications”: The World of Ronald Firbank’, Rendezvous 3.1 (Spring 1968), pp. 5–15
——, ‘The Text of Firbank’s Vainglory’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 63 (1969), pp. 36–41
Firbank, Ronald, The Complete Firbank, with an Introduction by Anthony Powell (London: Duckworth, 1961; reprinted London: Picador, 1988)
——, The Early Firbank, ed. Steven Moore with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst (London: Quartet, 1991)
——, Letters to His Mother 1920–1924, ed. and with an Introduction by Anthony Hobson (Verona: Stamperia Valdonega, 2001)
——, The New Rythum and Other Pieces, ed. Alan Harris (London: Duckworth, 1962)
——, Three Novels, with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst (London: Penguin, 2000)
Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Hollinghurst, Alan, ‘The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and L. P. Hartley’, Oxford M. Litt. thesis, 1980
Horder, Meryvn (ed.), Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques (London: Duckworth, 1977)
John, Augustus, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape: 1952)
‘Keeping the Camp Fires Burning’, Tatler, December 1985–January 1986, pp. 34, 36
Kiechler, John Anthony, The Butterfly’s Freckled Wings: A Study of Style in the Novels of Ronald Firbank (Bern: Francke, 1969)
Kiernan, Robert F., Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel (New York: Continuum, 1990)
Kopelson, Kevin, Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994)
Lane, Christopher, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1995)
McCarthy, Shaun, ‘Firbank’s Inclinations and the nouveau roman’, Critical Quarterly 20.2 (Summer 1978), pp. 64–77
Merritt, James Douglas, Ronald Firbank (New York: Twayne, 1969)
Moore, Steven, Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials, 1905–1995 (Normal, IL: Dalkey Ar
chive Press, 1996)
Nicolson, Harold, Some People (London: Constable, 1927)
Potoker, Edward Martin, Ronald Firbank (New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1969)
Sassoon, Siegfried, Siegfried’s Journey: 1916–20 (London: Faber & Faber, 1945)
Van Leer, David, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in a Straight Society (New York/London: Routledge, 1995)
A Note on the Texts
Among the last things Firbank did was to revise the manuscript of Vainglory (first published in 1915) for its American publication by Brentano’s in 1925. This edition – reflecting the author’s last wishes – should be seen as definitive. However, most subsequent volumes of Firbank have not used it. In particular, as Robert Murray Davis pointed out, the text of the novel in The Complete Ronald Firbank (1961) was not only based on the 1915 UK edition but also contained numerous errors.1 This 2012 edition of Vainglory is, then, the first not only to be based on the 1925 Brentano’s text, but also to record each of the substantial changes Firbank made (see Appendix 1). I have used my discretion in not recording every minor correction to spelling or punctuation, but have endeavoured to note every instance in which a word, phrase or sentence has been altered. When preparing the revised edition, incidentally, Firbank initially sought revenge on Sacheverell Sitwell for playing a practical joke upon him in Rome, by changing the name ‘Winsome’ (Brookes) to ‘Sacheverell’ throughout. He then thought better of it.
Inclinations (first published in 1916) poses a different problem. We have no edition with which the author was satisfied. In 1916, Firbank was being pressed by Grant Richards – first, for a manuscript, and then for proof corrections – a process which preoccupied him heavily, twice over, chiefly because of printers’ supposed amendments to his very particular punctuation, to which he objected: ‘They have dressed me out in armour – far too much. By changing the punctuation all “goes”. Since one never attempted to be classic … I feel like “a waiter” in evening-dress!’ A strike put paid to any further changes, though Firbank had doubts about the novel’s ending, as well as about certain phrases and aspects of the book’s layout and design.2 Though no other edition would be published in Firbank’s lifetime, he had come to believe in 1925 that Brentano’s (US) would take the book, and began revisions. The Inclinations which formed part of the definitive edition of The Works of Ronald Firbank by Duckworth in 1929 – paid for by a donation Firbank made to the Society of Authors – accommodated just one change, but it was substantial: a totally revised version of Part II, Chapter IV, the ‘dinner party’ chapter. Awkwardly, this was placed abutting the original version, before the narrative resumes with Chapter V. In the present edition, for transparency and ease of reading, this revised version has been adopted in the main novel text, with the original 1916 chapter included as Appendix 2.
The case of Caprice (1917) is simple. For once, author and publisher were agreed on the textual presentation. A dispute arose only out of Richards’s well-meaning description of the novel as ‘like nothing else on earth’. For some reason, both Firbank and his mother took this amiss.3 In 1925, Firbank apparently wrote a new Preface to the novel to stimulate interest in New York. But Brentano’s decided to pass on it, and the preface has never been located.
NOTES
1. Robert Murray Davis, ‘The Text of Firbank’s Vainglory’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 63 (1969), pp. 36–41.
2. Quoted in Miriam J. Benkovitz, A Bibliography of Ronald Firbank, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 11; see further, pp. 9–12.
3. Ibid., pp. 14–16.
VAINGLORY
I
‘And, then, oh yes! Atalanta is getting too pronounced.’ She spoke lightly, leaning back a little in her deep armchair. It was the end of a somewhat lively review.
On such a languid afternoon how hard it seemed to bear a cross! Pleasant to tilt it a little – lean it for an instant against somebody else … Her listener waved her handkerchief expressively. She felt, just then, it was safer not to speak. Tactfully she rose.
On a dark canvas screen were grouped some inconceivably delicate Persian miniatures.
She bent towards them: ‘Oh, what gems!’
But Lady Georgia would not let her go.
‘A mother’s rôle,’ she said, ‘is apt to become a strain.’
Mrs Henedge turned towards her: ‘Well, what can you do, dear?’ she inquired, and with a sigh she looked away sadly over the comparative country of the square.
Lady Georgia Blueharnis owned that house off Hill Street from whose curved iron balconies it would have seemed right for dames in staid silks to lean melodiously at certain moments of the day. In Grecian-Walpole times the house had been the scene of an embassy; but since then it had reflowered unexpectedly as a sympathetic background, suitable to shelter plain domesticity – or even more.
Not that Lady Georgia could be said to be domestic … Her interests in life were far too scattered. Known to the world as the Isabella d’Este of her day, her investigations of art had led her chiefly outside the family pale.
‘It is better,’ Mrs Henedge said, when she had admired the massive foliage in the square, and had sighed once or twice again, ‘it is better to be pronounced than to be a bag of bones. And thank goodness Atalanta’s not eccentric! Think of poor little Mr Rienzi-Smith who lives in continual terror lest one day his wife may do something really strange – perhaps run down Piccadilly without a hat … Take a shorter view of life, dear, don’t look so far ahead!’
‘I was thinking only of Monday.’
‘There will be eleven bridesmaids besides At’y!’
‘I don’t know, yet,’ Lady Georgia said, ‘what I shall wear. But I shall be very plain.’
‘He’s twenty-three … with lovely eyebrows,’ Mrs Henedge said, beginning to purr.
‘Do you know where the honeymoon’s to be spent?’
‘They begin, I believe, by Brussels—’
‘I can hardly imagine,’ Lady Georgia observed, ‘anyone setting out deliberately for Brussels.’
‘I suppose it does seem odd,’ Mrs Henedge murmured, looking mysteriously about her.
The room in which she found herself was a somewhat difficult room. The woodwork by Pajou had been painted a dull, lustreless grey, whilst the curtains and the upholstery of the chairs were of a soft canary-coloured silk striped with blue. Here and there, in magnificent defiance, were set tubs of deep crimson and of brilliant pink azaleas. Above the mantelpiece was suspended a charming portrait of Lady Georgia by Renoir. No one ever warmed their hands there, or before the summer wilderness of plants, without exclaiming: ‘How wonderful it is!’ In this portrait she was seen promenading slowly in an economical landscape, whilst a single meagre tree held above her head its stiff branches lightly, screening her from the sun, by its just sufficient leaves. On the opposite side of the room hung a second portrait of herself with her husband and her children – a lovely Holy Family, in the Venetian manner, and in between, all round the room, at varying heights, in blotches of rose and celestial blue, hung a sumptuous Station of the Cross, by Tiepolo. Upon the ceiling, if one cared to look so high, some last few vestiges of the embassy might be seen – quivers, torches, roses, and all the paraphernalia of Love … But the eyes, travelling over these many obstacles, would invariably return to the Venetian portrait, spoken of, as a rule, somewhat breathlessly, as the Madonna in the Osprey.
Glancing from it to her hostess, Mrs Henedge had not observed the remotest resemblance yet. She was waiting … Except, she considered, for dear Sir Victor Blueharnis, a fine, dashing St Joseph, with blue, slightly bloodshot eyes, and the darling children, and the adorable Pekinese, it was decidedly a Madeleine Lisant. Striking, as it most unquestionably was, of Lady Georgia herself, it was not a satisfactory portrait. But how, it might pardonably be asked, was it likely to be? How was it possible for a painter to fix upon canvas anyone so elusive – he must interpret. He must paint her soul, taking car
e not to let her appear, as an inferior artist might, an overdressed capital-sin.
Lady Georgia’s face, indeed, was as sensitive as a calm sea to the passing clouds. She had variety. Often she managed to be really beautiful, and even in her plainest moments she was always interesting. Her nature, too, was as inconsistent as her face. At first sight, she was, perhaps, too individual to make any very definite impression … A single pink flower on her black frock, this afternoon, made her look, somehow, very far away.
Who can she be angling for, Mrs Henedge wondered, and for whom is At’y becoming too pronounced? Was it for poor Lord Susan, who was sick, so everyone said, of the world at three-and-twenty?
At this notion she caressed, with a finger of a creamy glove, a small bronze of a bird with a broken wing.
Mrs Henedge, the widow of that injudicious man, the Bishop of Ashringford, was considered, by those who knew her, to be Sympathy itself. His lordship, rumour reported, had fallen in love with her at first sight one morning while officiating at a friend’s cathedral when she had put him in mind of a startled deer. She was really only appropriating a hymn-book, as she had afterwards explained. Their marriage had been called a romance. Towards the end, however, the Bishop had become too fe-fi-fo-fum-Jack-in-the-Beanstalk altogether. She had had a horrid time; but still, she was able to speak of him always as ‘poor, dear Leslie’, now that he was gone. To-day, perhaps, it might be said of her that she had deserted this century, for she had hardly settled which. Wrapped in what looked to be a piece of Beauvais tapestry, she suggested a rumble of chariots, a sacking of Troy. As Lady Georgia observed, quite perceptibly, she was on the brink of … Rome.
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