B007TB5SP0 EBOK

with Inclinations
and Caprice

Edited and with an Introduction by
RICHARD CANNING

Introduction

Chronology

Further Reading

A Note on the Texts

Vainglory

Inclinations

Caprice

Appendix 1: Variants in the 1915 Edition of
Vainglory

Appendix 2: Part II, Chapter IV, of the 1916 Edition of
Inclinations

Appendix 3: ‘Ronald Firbank’ (1936) by E. M. Forster

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

ARTHUR ANNESLEY RONALD FIRBANK
was born into a prosperous family in London in 1886. He published his first book,
Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament
, in 1905, before studying at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he converted to Catholicism but did not complete a degree. The novel
Vainglory
(1915) announced the author as ‘Ronald Firbank’ for the first time. It was rapidly followed by a succession of novels that achieved instant cult status, from
Inclinations
(1916),
Caprice
(1917) and
Valmouth
(1919) to
The Flower Beneath the Foot
(1923),
Sorrow in Sunlight
, renamed at the suggestion of the American author Carl van Vechten as
Prancing Nigger
(1924), and
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli
(1926).
Prancing Nigger
was Firbank’s sole commercial success, and he paid for the publication of his other books. He lived an itinerant, often obscure life, spending the duration of the First World War in Oxford, but the rest of his time moving between London, the Italian Riviera, Paris, Rome, North Africa and even Cuba and Jamaica. His lifelong poor health culminated in his death in Rome, probably due to lung failure, at the age of forty, just before the appearance of
Cardinal Pirelli
. Firbank is buried in Rome’s Verano cemetery.

RICHARD CANNING
has published extensively on Ronald Firbank, the literature of the inter-war period and the history of gay literature. He is author of
Gay Fiction Speaks
(2001) and
Hear Us Out
(2004), Editors’ Choice award-winner at the Lambda Literary Awards, as well as lives of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster (2008 and 2009). He has edited an anthology of American AIDS fiction,
Vital Signs
(2008), and two volumes of gay male shorter fiction,
Between Men
(2007) and
Between Men
2 (2009). His most recent publication is the essay anthology
Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read
(2009). For the past decade, with the support of a Leverhulme Trust award, he has been researching a major critical biography of Ronald Firbank. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Richard Canning has taught at Warwick and Sheffield universities, and is presently Head of English and Senior Lecturer at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln.

First-time readers should be aware that some plot details are revealed in this Introduction

‘I sometimes think that
Vainglory
is the best of them all’ – W. H. Auden
¹

Auden was discussing a project that never came off – a
Portable Firbank
, which he might edit. It may or may not be true that the great poet once dressed for a fancy-dress party on Fire Island, New York, as Cardinal Pirelli, one of Firbank’s most flamboyant characters. No matter; Auden was that rare thing: an unabashed enthusiast.

Has there been a less fortunate writer of genius in the history of English literature than Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank? ‘Ronald Firbank’ – to use his professional name (to his mother he remained ‘Artie’) – was among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic innovators of the modernist novel. He virtually single-handedly revolutionized the representation of dialogue on the page, and constitutes one of few tangible connections between the aesthetic values of the
fin de siècle
and the modernist credo articulated by Ezra Pound in 1934: ‘Make it New’. Today’s critics are belatedly coming to appreciate that the ‘newness’ of many modernist ideals in literature developed directly out of the radical revolt against High Victorianism, initiated by a tranche of gifted late nineteenth-century writers. Oscar Wilde, their doomed lost leader, embodied this celebration of paradox, wit and ethical inversion, and it is a small step from Walter Pater to T. S. Eliot, whose early work is squarely symbolist; or from John Ruskin to Marcel Proust (as Proust, who translated Ruskin into French, himself understood). Figures spanning both periods, such as W. B. Yeats and Henry James, underline the continuities. Yet, while compelling but less significant innovators
than Firbank – such as Dorothy Richardson, Sophie Treadwell, even Gertrude Stein – have benefited from critical reassessment and being brought back into print, Firbank, in recent decades, has almost fallen off the literary map. Bizarrely, there are currently more titles in print of C. H. B. Kitchin, a talented but minor follower.

Despite this contemporary neglect, Firbank has never lacked for supporters among fellow writers. In his day, he was celebrated by the three Sitwells, Lord Berners, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, and Duff and Diana Cooper. He sat for Augustus John and Percy Wyndham Lewis, both of whom admired his writings. Even the mocking account of Firbank as the fictional aesthete ‘Lambert Orme’ in Harold Nicolson’s
Some People
(1927) may have helped Firbank’s reputation, coming hard on his untimely death, aged forty, in 1926. In the few years afterwards, first editions of Firbank were fought over and a small cult blossomed.

Among this and the next inter-war generation, interest in Firbank – if select – hardly waned. Most readers concentrated on the last novels –
Sorrow in Sunlight
,
The Flower Beneath the Foot
and
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli
– though South African author William Plomer agreed with Auden that an earlier book,
Vainglory
(1915), best displayed Firbank’s innovative rendering of social speech:

He noticed that people don’t listen much to one another, that in conversation they pursue their own thoughts rather than other people’s, and that much of what they say is calculated to advertise their own importance, beauty, cleverness, knowledge or taste.
²

In 1929, Evelyn Waugh discerned Firbank’s influence on Osbert Sitwell, Carl van Vechten, Harold Acton, William Gerhardie and – most surprisingly – in the young Ernest Hemingway. Elsewhere, Waugh noted similarities between Firbank and the young, late modernist Henry Green, author of
Blindness
(1926) and
Living
(1929).

In Firbank’s wake, there was a stream of ‘Firbankian’
writers, largely forgotten today. His American advocate, Carl van Vechten, a Harlem-based promoter of African-American culture, learnt whimsy from him, as illustrated by a run of novels from
Peter Whiffle
(1922) to
Feathers
(1930). Van Vechten’s bestseller,
Nigger Heaven
(1926), came straight out of Firbank’s own ‘Negro novel’,
Sorrow in Sunlight
(1924), which van Vechten retitled
Prancing Nigger
for the US market. Richard Oke’s (pen-name of Nigel Stansbury Millett)
Frolic Wind
(1929) and
Wanton Boys
(1932) flaunt the debt in their risqué titles. Two satires about sexual tourism on Capri – Norman Douglas’s
South Wind
(1917) and Compton Mackenzie’s
Extraordinary Women
(1928) – bear Firbank’s unmistakable influence too. Meanwhile, C. H. B. Kitchin’s early books are steeped in his technique – especially
Streamers Waving
(1925) and the sexually ambiguous
Mr Balcony
(1927).

A second group of renowned writers read Firbank and absorbed many of his innovations, stopping short of pastiche. Evelyn Waugh’s early fiction shows traces of Firbank, particularly
Decline and Fall
(1928) and
Vile Bodies
(1930), for example. Many writers borrowed from Firbank; Waugh largely preferred to adopt by stealth. In a 1965 edition of
Vile Bodies
, Waugh described starting to write ‘under the brief influence of Ronald Firbank’ yet soon ‘struck out for myself’.
³
The sexually provocative, modernism-fixated aesthete Antony Blanche in Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
(1945) may have been based closely on a real-life figure – self-confessed failed writer Brian Howard – but Blanche can also be understood as a gesture of expiation in Waugh, the, by now, devout Catholic writer. Waugh was making an implicit statement against the kind of aestheticist impulses Firbank embodied and promoted. Firbank, after all, cut a distinctly Blanche-like figure at Cambridge and, afterwards, in London society.

Aldous Huxley’s first two novels –
Crome Yellow
(1921) and
Antic Hay
(1923) – rest firmly in Firbank’s creative shadow, as does every one of Anthony Powell’s inter-war fictions:
Afternoon Men
(1931),
Venusberg
(1932),
From a View to a Death
(1933),
Agents and Patients
(1936) and
What’s Become of Waring?
(1939). The humorous dialogue in E. F. Benson’s
‘Mapp and Lucia’ stories (1920–39) is buoyed up by Firbankian musicality. Cult short-story writer Hector Hugh Munro’s fey Edwardian style (published under the nom de plume of ‘Saki’) also has affinities with Firbank’s prose, although Saki’s oeuvre – from the ‘Reginald’ short stories of 1904 onwards – preceded Firbank in part. A key distinction between Firbank and Saki, too, lies in the fact that – excepting his last complete novel,
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli
(1926) – Firbank rarely allotted much fictional space to men. Like the eponymous heroines of Benson’s ‘Mapp and Lucia’ series, women drive his plots, and sometimes children do too, such as Charlie Mouth in
Sorrow in Sunlight
. It is likely both Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse studied Firbank’s dialogue as well, though Wodehouse more readily acknowledged Saki’s tutelage. Ivy Compton-Burnett’s darkly comic novels – written over a forty-year period, from
Pastors and Masters
(1925) on – inherited Firbank’s empty brilliance in dialogue. She often delineated her characters with comparable brittleness and gave a caustic representation of the nuclear family, much as Firbank did.

Late in life, Waugh turned on Firbank entirely, noting in 1962: ‘In youth I was fascinated by Firbank. Now I can’t abide him.’
⁴
In a post-war climate of austerity, Firbank became – mistakenly – yoked to the Edwardian world of banality and superficiality that he had so remorselessly mocked.

Fittingly, the one literary critic in the post-war period to understand Firbank’s inventiveness was an American, Edmund Wilson. When meeting the Sitwell siblings in 1955, Wilson was disappointed at their reaction when he mentioned Firbank’s name: ‘We don’t care about Firbank anymore,’ Edith Sitwell opined, ‘we think he’s silly now.’
⁵
By 1961, Anthony Powell – who, as a young employee of the Duckworth publishing company, was heavily involved in the publisher’s decision to reissue Firbank’s oeuvre in 1929 – found that his youthful enthusiasm had deserted him.