Books: More Than Just Dandy

THE COMPLETE RONALD FIRBANK (766 pp.)—New Directions ($7.75).

But at that moment the door opened, and his Weariness the Prince entered the room in all his tinted Orders.

Handsome to tears, his face, even when he had been a child, lacked innocence. His was of that magnolia order of colouring, set off by unpleasantly untamed eyes, and teeth like flawless pearls.

“You’ve seen them? What are they like . . . ? Tell Mother, darling!” the Queen exclaimed.

“They’re merely dreadful,” his Weariness, who had been to the railway station to welcome the Royal travelers, murmured in a voice extinct with boredom.

The Queen gently groaned. “I see life to-day,” she declared, “in the colour of mould.”

The Prince protruded a shade the purple violet of his tongue.

“Well, it’s depressing,” he said, “for us all, with the Castle full of blacks.”

The Flower Beneath the Foot

The English novel is a great natural-history museum of all species great and small. From Fielding to C. P. Snow, British novelists have tanned, stuffed and labeled the leathery hide of reality. Ronald Firbank is one of a handful of writers who have refused to contribute to this useful collection, have instead preferred to people their own wonderland with creatures of their own invention. Firbank’s wonderland—one story, nine “novels” and a sort of play—is all contained in the 766 pages of the Complete Firbank.

In the 35 years since he died, Firbank’s books have sold scarcely 10,000 copies in the U.S. But in recent years, he has posthumously acquired a band of devoted disciples. Among his current admirers are Edmund Wilson (“His books are extremely intellectual and composed with the closest attention: dense textures of in direction that always disguise point”), Sir Osbert Sitwell, who compares his style to “silver cobwebs,” and Poet John Betjeman, to whom Firbank is “a jewelled and clockwork nightingale.”

The market for silver cobwebs and clockwork nightingales has never been large. Those who never would and never will buy Firbank at any price include those who can’t stand the affectations of others (“even my lungs are affected,” Firbank admitted); those who like a story with a beginning, middle and end; those who find vicious or blasphemous a sketch of a homosexual cardinal; and, finally, those who ask that a novel should be about the sort of people they know or would like to know.

Gravity in Thistledown. In the introduction to this new collection, Novelist-Critic Anthony Powell attempts to explain the down-to-earth gravity of Firbank’s thistledown art, and to deal with the strange power of such lines as ” ‘He has only one eye and I never know which one is looking at me,’ the Queen would sometimes complain.” Although apparently a freakish offshoot of modern literature, Firbank was actually a great innovator, Powell suggests. Two masters of dialogue, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh, sat in Firbank’s school. In fact, Firbank’s exotics—improbable princesses, epicene cardinals, Caribbean market queens and so on—talk with the raw strength of Hardy’s Wessex peasants. Even Hemingway’s brusque and hirsute mannerisms, Powell argues, may owe something to the ambiguous ellipses of the characters in Ronald Firbank’s fairy kingdoms.

Contrived and perverse as it is, Firbank’s world seems curiously real. Poet-Critic Wystan Auden argues that Firbank’s enchanted literary garden is really a “picture of the Earthly Paradise,” where everything is pure fun because all are pure. Moral judgments do not apply to Firbank’s innocents any more than to the characters in Through the Looking Glass. A police dog with baby-blue eyes is baptized in white crème de menthe. Why not? “Where all are innocent, what difference is there between a dog and a baby?”

Past the Grave. Firbank was as queer a bird as ever fluttered. Pathological shyness contorted his thin frame. It constricted his throat so that he could hardly eat in company; at a dinner given for him, he managed to down one green pea. At his club, he once took fright at the sight of the headwaiter and hid under the table. He had, of course, an independent income (poor people with Firbank’s temperament simply die or are shut away). He came from solid stock: his grandfather worked his way up from the coal mines to become a contractor, and his baronet father built “beautiful railways.”

At Cambridge, he seems to have become a convert to Roman Catholicism. But nothing much else is known about his life except that he traveled, drank and died young. Countless anecdotes but few insights were preserved by his ever fewer friends. “Tomorrow I go to Hayti. They say the President is a Perfect Dear!” he scribbled to a friend. He never traveled abroad without some big blocks of selected coal in his trunk to protect him against a sudden chill in a foreign villa. Ambiguity, misunderstanding and loneliness followed him to the grave and beyond. As he lay dying in Rome, he would not have friends visit him because he would not expose them to the dreadful wallpaper. In its way, it was as sad a death as that of Keats—near whom he was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Uncomfortable for Keats, suggested Wyndham Lewis, one of the many artists who drew Firbank. The authorities dug up his body, reburied it at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Catholic ground. Firbank’s work belongs to the great body of literature which says that life is cruel, beautiful and impossible to explain. He wrote on large blue postcards and is said to have cut out the sentences that pleased him, then assembled them into paragraphs, like a Byzantine artist constructing a mosaic.

This trick of his gives a clue to the best tactic for reading him—a bit at a time. The Complete Firbank cannot be read through any more than can an anthology of aphorisms.