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.