Ronald Firbank (1886–1926)

On the basis of this book, I feel confident saying that Firbank's family tree obviously leads to early Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Muriel Spark: extreme minimalism, a high dose of dialogue, and far greater attention to sentences than to the tropes of realism (character, setting, etc...). I imagine this would be a great litmus test for those who claim that they value literature as literature rather than literature as cod philosophy, because it has many characteristics of modernism show more (the aforementioned minimalism demands a lot from the reader; if you're not paying attention from line to line, you'll get completely lost)--but it avoids the usual ideas of the modernists (nothing here about the ineradicable absurdity of existence, no ultra-individualism, no epatering of the bourgeoisie).

I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it at the time, but in hindsight I do enjoy it, and I'm looking forward to more. It's funny, it's gleefully artificial, and it's completely uninterested in all the things that serious literature is meant to be about (other than linguistic playfulness), and, quite frankly, that makes me very happy. show less

This novella is set in the London theatre world of the early 20th century. Sarah Sinquier feels constricted in the cathedral town where her father is a canon. She longs for the London stage, and she runs away to fulfill her true calling as an actress. Sarah quickly falls in with a theatre crowd. Most of the novel builds toward the opening night of a production of Romeo and Juliet. Young Sarah learns how quickly triumph can turn to tragedy.

Apparently, Firbank’s novels are characterized by a show more heavy emphasis on dialogue. I’ve always appreciated this quality in Agatha Christie’s novels. Sadly, Firbank is no Christie. A century later, most readers will not have enough context to easily make sense of the dialogue. However, I’m not sure readers of a century ago would have had enough context either, unless they moved in the same social circle as Firbank. Maybe that was the point. show less

"There she sits all day, reading Russian novels. Talk of gloom!" So says Mr. Smee of his wife, Mrs. Smee, in Firbank's Caprice, which is here to dispel any such gloom with its campy and satirical take on London's theatre scene in the early twentieth century. A modernist contemporary of Woolf and Joyce, Firbank wrote Caprice mostly in zany dialogue, quickly jumping from one scene to the next as if dubious of the reader's attention span.

Miss Sally Sinquier, daughter of a respectable provincial show more clergyman, sneaks off to London with some family heirlooms and a grandiose ambition to be an actress. Careless of an intriguing world about her, she falls in with a theatre crowd who both help and exploit her. She rejects the suggestion to start with small roles... I shall play Juliet. I shall have a season.... and throws her ill-gotten money into financing a production of Romeo and Juliet. Improbably it opens with great success, only for Miss Sinquier to fall through a stage trap door to her death the following day. C'est la vie, eh?

My dear, I once was thought to be a very pretty woman... All I can do now is to urge my remains. show less

Ronald Firbank’s novels describe a world which is only adjacent to this one, having many of the features of reality, but a reality which is altogether ‘too much’. In Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, there is a class structure, a Cardinal harassed by an overwheening aristocrat, presumptious servants, lavish banquets, and so on. But the overwheening aristocrat has recently had her latest adopted dog baptized in full ceremony in the Basilica, the Cardinal has a crush on show more an altogether too knowing acolyte, and Madame Poco the wardrobe mistress is a Vatican spy. A world of gossip, barely suppressed scandal, Catholicism of the Scarlet-Whore-of-Babylon variety, and a limpid prose style with roots in the Decadent movement, have ensured for Firbank a place in the pantheon of gay classics. But Firbank is not just a gay writer. He is also one of the great unsung 20th century masters of English prose, a magnificent stylist of the very first rank.

Firbank’s rhetorical devices range between two characteristic gestures: 1) an entirely modern separation of the signifier from its usual signified, opening a new realm of inconsequential beauty, and 2) an extreme use of metonymy, in which smaller and smaller units of language: the oevre, the novel, the chapter, the sentence, the phrase, stand in isolation for something bigger.

He is the master of the double entendre, that most British of rhetorical devices, (but one that needs a French name): In my little garden, I sometimes work a brother. ‘And your Queens, I presume, are Pitchers?

Another device is the use of silences to punctuate an otherwise respectable discourse to bring out the unspeakable:
‘But is he ripe?’ Mrs Thoroughfare wondered.
‘Ripe?’
‘I mean-’
There was a busy silence.

And in the passing silence the treble voice of Tiny was left talking all alone.
‘…frightened me like Father did, when he kissed me in the dark like a lion’: - a remark that was greeted by an explosion of coughs.

The sense of a reality removed from reality is achieved by the use of imaginary titles: the Duquesa DunEden, The Grand Xaymaca; rococo names of people: Mrs Hurstpierpoint, Lady Parvula de Panzoust; and places: Valmouth and Clemenza. Firbank’s characteristic method is to take a name of place: the more euphonious the better, and to transfer it to a person. He is the master of the adjoinage. Consider the made up name ‘Valmouth’, with its associations of the mundane: Falmouth, a small port town in the south of England; and the risqué: Valmont, the villain of Laclos’s Les Liaison Dangereuses, and vermouth, that sin-inducing drink…Saint Euphraxia of Spain, so similar to the real Saint Euphrasia, and yet off by just one letter…

Felix Feneon, the inventor of the three line novel, wrote sentences which were so carefully crafted as to contain within them a whole world, hermetically sealed from anything around it, and containing within itself whole worlds of imaginative possibility. Firbank’s sentences have the same quality. Their matchless rhythms and sounds create marvels of miniature precision. Each one can be lifted from the text and enjoyed in isolation for the jewel-like quality of its images and euphony:

From the Calle de la Passion, beneath the blue-tiled mirador of the garden wall, came the first brooding sound of a seguidilla.

Here and there, an orchard in silhouette, showed all in black blossom against an extravagant sky.

At the season when the oleanders are in their full perfection, their choicest bloom, it was the Pontiff’s innovation to install his American type-writing apparatus in the long Loggie of the Apostolic Palace that had been in disuse since the demise of Innocent XVI.

Likewise, each of the chapters his (very short) novels are marvels of taught construction, in which every element has its crucial role to play. Just as one can enjoy each sentence lifted from its context, so each chapter can be read and enjoyed separately from the whole story.

Firbank has absolutely no political purpose, no wider or deeper meaning. His is a style and a vision entirely preoccupied with artifice and the aural and visual surfaces of language only.

Underlying all the aesthetics is a waspish humour:

The College of Noble Damosels in the Calle Sante Fe was in a whirl. It was ‘Foundation’ day, an event annually celebrated with considerable fanfaronade and social éclat. Founded during the internecine wars of the Middle Age (sic) the College, according to early records, had suffered rapine on the first day of term.

Fraulein Pappenheim was a little woman already drifting towards the sad far shores of forty…

A writer to read with a grin, a chuckle, an occasional eye rolled heavenward at the silliness of it all, and a sustained sense of toe-curling delight at the sheer loveliness of the prose. show less