The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank By Alan Hollinghurst

 

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

By Alan Hollinghurst

From "The Spectator Magazine" – 10 November 2023

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose work was path-breaking, and influence enduring. Each plaque that goes up is the result, first and foremost, of advocacy by a member of the public, and after that of strong support from the deciding panel, on which I sat for six years. We ended up each time rejecting the majority of the proposals, and it was a happy day for me, an almost unexpected breakthrough, when Firbank was proposed five years ago, and the panel readily accepted him. Acceptance has not always been his lot.

In person he was both extremely shy and a Wildean dandy who wore make-up and painted his nails.

Why does he merit this honour? I think for three reasons: his own remarkable work, his literary influence, and something more diffuse but equally important, his defining presence as a queer icon. Firbank wrote seven radically original novels and one full-length play. His first novel, Vainglory, published in 1915, is the first true modernist novel in English, and the most original since Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 150 years earlier. Plot is largely suppressed and what remains is glimpsed obliquely through a montage of fragments of talk and passages of lyrical description; the effect is both aesthetically dazzling and unnervingly like life, action caught in cinematic jump cuts and conversation sampled as if by a roving microphone.

Firbank was a master of omission. ‘I think nothing,’ he wrote, ‘of filing 50 pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.’ Ellipsis, at the level of the sentence and of the whole book, were central to his art, which represented a jubilant but purposeful throwing out of the baggage and conventions of the Victorian novel. Here, and in the three largely English-set novels that followed (Inclinations, Caprice and Valmouth), he often feels closer to the poetic experiments of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’ than to other contemporary fiction. The novels published in the 1920s – The Flower Beneath the Foot, Sorrow in Sunlight and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli – are his major achievement, and all set abroad, in a Balkan capital, a Caribbean island and a Spanish cathedral city. They build on the revolutionary groundwork of the earlier books, but are bolder, clearer and more sharply satirical.

Vainglory came out in April 1915 – not a good moment for such an adventure, and it seemed to set a pattern for the ignoring and deploring of Firbank’s subsequent fiction. But if sales were tiny in his lifetime, the effect of his work on writers of the next generation was revelatory. Evelyn Waugh wrote the first serious critical essay on Firbank in 1929, and his acute understanding of Firbank’s method bore fruit in the novel he was starting at the time, Vile Bodies, the first part of which reads like a direct transfusion of master to pupil. The fragmentary design the older writer had pioneered proved prophetically apt for the depiction of a disoriented post-war world. The setting of Henry Green’s Living, a Birmingham factory, could hardly be less Firbankian, but an envious Waugh saw that he had organised his plot in ‘exactly the way Firbank managed his’.

The line of influence proliferates – you see it in many of Noël Coward’s plays, in Ivy Compton-Burnett and Muriel Spark. Joe Orton wrote pastiche Firbankian novels – as did (jointly) the American poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler in A Nest of Ninnies. Angela Carter wrote a very good radio play, A Self-Made Man, about Firbank, and Brigid Brophy produced a lesbian novel, The Finishing Touch, in the master’s manner, as well as the formidable Prancing Novelist, still the most detailed and passionate study of his life and work. The late Barry Humphries was a lifelong Firbank fanatic and collector, and Firbank’s exceptional interest and absorption in female dress and accessories clearly found an echo in the creator of Dame Edna.

I was introduced to Firbank by my Oxford supervisor John Bayley, when I was starting out on a thesis about the hidden gay tradition in English fiction (in 1975 still an unexplored area). I felt at once I had entered an intensely individual world, whose very artifice gave voice to desires and intuitions never touched on in other novelists of the time. The formal experiment was inseparable from the moral one, a sustained and glittering act of subversion. Camp, high camp, was part of it, but the wit and the melancholy were deeper and, again, more individual.

The formal experiment was inseparable from the moral one, a glittering act of subversion

Firbank in person was both extremely shy and a Wildean dandy who wore make-up and painted his nails and drew attention wherever he went with his undulating walk. In his work too he has the paradoxical boldness of the shy – he vibrates with his own irrepressible selfhood. Already in the 1930s ‘Firbankian’ was a byword for gayness of a performative and orchidaceous kind. As his titles hint, what concerned him was the workings of whim, caprice, libido. Nothing interested him less than the conventional marriage-plot. His world view is from the start daringly queered, and pervasively feminised – the sexuality of the books is frequently lesbian, but with an increasingly defiant depiction of male gay desire. When I wrote my own first novel in the mid 1980s, I knew I couldn’t emulate his style, but I brought him in as a kind of patron saint of gay culture.

Blue plaques marking residences often cast light on the odd shape of a life. When Firbank moved into 33 Curzon Street with his recently widowed mother and younger sister, he was 25. His education had been patchy: a term and a bit at Uppingham, private tutors at home and abroad, three years at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, without ever sitting an exam. He’d published two Wildean short stories in 1905, but in 1911 the career that lay ahead of him was unimaginable: the war (totally exempted from service, he spent four years in painful isolation in Oxford, sustained mentally by writing three novels), and then after the war a few nomadic years in Italy, France, North Africa, the Caribbean, before his early death in Rome in May 1926.

 

A BOOK REVIEW OF "RECORD OF A BAFFLED SPIRIT: A LIVERPOOL CHILDHOOD 1947–1973" MICHAEL KEYTON

 You Can Take The Boy Out Of Liverpool,

But You Can’t Take Liverpool Out Of The Boy.

Record of a Baffled Spirit: A Liverpool Childhood 1947 – 1973

By Michael Keyton ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8851564499 Published 2023

 

In the 1960s we kept a long stay holiday caravan near an old windmill at Carnforth in Lancashire and I recall visiting cousins at Southport during hot summers that never seemed to end.

En route to Southport by road I suffered claustrophobia inside a long concrete and metal tube that appeared on the AA Route map as “The Mersey Tunnel”.

Finally exiting the grim, unnaturally- lit white-lined chicken coop there was only a human settlement called Birkenhead until we reached the end of the long canopy to view the most glorious waterfront at Liverpool, the City of “ The Liver Birds”, “The Beatles” and the Titanic’s White Star Shipping Line.

Here at Harland and Woolfe’s shipyards ( twinned across the water with Belfast) they built the doomed liner of 1912, and whose riveters, dockers and stevedores tolerated their rivals in the shipyards at Govan and Clydebank on Clydeside that built the majestic Queens.

Liverpool sucked me in whole, like Jonah’s whale, I gasped for air. But it was terrific to come out of semi-consciousness into the shadow of huge buildings like overhanging cliff tops, and the great River Mersey on which the City stands, with its ferry boats, sailing ships and sea and ocean going cruise ships bobbing and plying along mechanical birds up and down and across the waves, it smelt good too as it was just like the whiff of Glasgow’s Broomielaw.

Excuse my childhood ramble. Why write of childhood? Well because it matters, it’s the ultimate blue print to excuse ourselves – unfrocked, stripped of the veneer that attaches as we learn about real life and takes the licks and knocks. It’s innocence and guilt in one, it’s who we are, where we’ve been, who we have been close to, who and what we’ve hated, and not least an elegy on those who have been an influence or a set back to our past life.

The tag line of “ Memory is Everything” makes it gel. Childhood memories are the stuff of the shrink’s couch, and explain proclivities, moods, faults, monsters; it often celebrates pride in our heroes and heroines, what blood lines made us what we are and ultimately how we made ourselves or how we adapted. The genealogy carries the DNA, we do the rest to confound it all. If a story line has any truth then we hang up all the triumphs and disasters out to dry, all the nitty- gritty but if wise only offer up a careful selection of our experiences. It helps understand these years when the jigsaw pieces are reassembled.

This is the case here, compiled in some style, by Michael Keyton.

With the necessary touches of sentimentality coupled with a mastery of revealing history ( living it, and, of course, this fella is also well known for teaching it) he offers sweet and bitter rambles from his childhood, and quite a bit of his journey beyond.

“ A Liverpool Childhood” , 1947-1973 is a psychedelic trip with Michael flashing his writers wand, and conducting his own band, the Keytons of Aintree. This tribute is often accompanied by sound tracks from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and with an expose of all the great layers and sinews from Northern life.

First impressions in getting a hard copy of the book ( kindle is way beyond my ken) was that it was a very tactile publication and it was good to finger over its covers and edges.

Later came the judgement upon reading it, of gorging on its delights, envious of it being such a terrific feat memory by a septuagenarian, and that this dotage is the best period in anybody’s life to recall one’s childhood.

The book’s been a great escape from the present bombs and inclement weather and it reeks of so many memories of childhood held in common, it shines like a magic lantern across its 288 pages with fabulous photographs of the Keyton- Parr etc families and their faces and places and cast iron cladding.

The City of Liverpool is renowned for the sly and amusing tickles of its denizens, the scousers, and these fine people of the Mersey ripple through Keyton’s various ages of man, but when he roams away from his bedrock to engage with his life’s influences to other places including time in Swansea, Aberystwyth, and Newport, South Wales, and to North Africa and Europe, Liverpool is still in the shadows. I was excited by an adventure involving a most extraordinary fleecing by a policeman in Morocco, I felt empathy with him being penniless on a escape through Spain back to England, so many similar accounts of himself are revealing, readable and amusing.

No matter where you spent your childhood or development years you’ll find nostalgia here paved with gold, often laced with real ale, with as many Madelaine moments in the food count as in Monsieur Proust.

Tripe and onions in milk touched a nerve end. We endured the relentless chewing of that family fixture with champit ( mashed) tatties on Clydeside.

As you get stuck inside this time tunnel of Mr Keyton’s past, it’s almost as long as that caged one previously navigated through – since our hero spent much of his childhood held down hard by claustraphobic forces that clung over him ever finishing his childhood, with a confusion of religions, of the infinite rituals of Roman Catholicism v the rest, blue rosary beads indeed; also on being held captive by nuns with snooker cues, and a set back of serious illness that confined him to a prolonged period in a hospital ward where treatment included penicillin injections in the bum, with only the relish of eating sausages and sipping Vimto as a god send for coping with the ordeal.

I liked the first wail of the budding author at birth, competing with the vendors announcing the arrival of the Christmas turkeys and how he held back the inevitable sighs caused by an absentee dad, the “disciplinarian” Cyril, constantly at sea, and of Michael and his brother missing him. But hurrah, they score at being raised by a splendid mother, May Parry, whose “ black curls bounced and red lips smiled”, and who provided love and wisdom enough for two parents.

Alongside the darling buds of May are perched a motley crew of intergenerational relations giving support and opposition to equal the Boswells of Dingle. I especially related to the author’s regrets too, at the loss of a boyhood friend, Owen, or not ever knowing personally his parental grandparents, Sergeant John Keyton ( a Welshman) killed in the Boer War and John’s widow Bridget, who died a few years before Michael was born. But these folk are all vividly recorded and Keyton’s touching coverage of them enriches the narrative. I also enjoyed the encounter with an autistic aunt called Doris, what a hoot, she should be reposted as a heroine by the author in one his future books.

Released from hospital incarceration to seek a stint in the normal world there are the new struggles of Keyton’s schooling with the harshness of the divide caused by passing or failing the 11 + exam, of coping with the disappearance of a yellow haired would-be seductress named Gabrielle, of even yet more incarceration of challenging years downcast in a unholy Catholic Secondary Modern School and leaving there scarce half undone, unfinished to find any unattractive job.

But Keyton was ( and is) not one to accept a dead end outcome. He proves in some wonderful mid- book Chapters entitled “Mabel Fletcher Technical College” and
“ Bloody Minded Cooks” that whilst inside the growing boy is annoyance at making a duff choice at being a cook is emerging a hungry adult with ambitions to establish himself for employment and in not least perfecting the ultimate recipe for jam buns.

Keyton makes friends easily, he draws in both sexes and shares many of his past friendships, passions and loves. Some early ones distracted him more than others, like Toni with an alluring striptease to shock the readers using the Liverpool Central Library. But one gets the impression that Keyton coped well with such temptations, his student life was enjoyed to the full beer barrel, including flirtations with a friend Ken and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and a frenzy with an American Barbie doll named Debbie in wild scenes from inside the famous Liverpool Cavern Club.

The paths to glory after Catering College and sorting out the inevitable extra paper credentials ( City and Guilds and GCEs and bar) from study at an Northern Institute, dubbed “a portal both magical and human” all eventually enable Keyton to study for an MA degree at Swansea University, to rank an expert on the Victorian writer Anthony Trollope and take up a long career in “ God’s Own Profession ” of teaching in Secondary Schools.

Two intriguing what might have beens stand out that could have changed the story, one of Michael rejecting a handsome job offer to go to London as a trainee catering manager at Lyon’s Restaurant, and another to enrol at McGill’s University in Canada.

I’m glad Michael snubbed these offers and established himself as a glorious Mr Chips in his late lamented grandfather, Sergeant John Keyton’s native Wales, even if he remains – in his own words - only “ a grubby scouser”.

William Cross

2 November 2023