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Either you find entertainment – even food for thought – in the Firbankian universe, or you do not. Some readers complain that they have no idea what the whole thing is about; others, that they
know what it is about, but are not in the least interested. There is no persuading either of these schools of thought. In any case, it would be a mistake to claim too much. Ronald Firbank’s range is limited; his narrative devious; his characterizations stylized.
⁶

With advocates such as this, one might conclude that Firbank had no need of enemies. Waugh, Powell and the Sitwells had distinct reasons for disowning Firbank, but they derided him in a similar way, describing their former admiration as adolescent folly.

So much for the trajectory of the English comedy of manners. What of Firbank’s putative role in the literature of high modernism? Of peer experimenters, we have Ernest Hemingway’s word that Gertrude Stein revered Firbank, and pressed him on to others.
⁷
James Joyce may never have read him; a pity, since they shared an enthusiasm for music-like prose. Equally, Firbank may not have been familiar with Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Writing to his mother in 1922, Firbank recounted seeing a copy of Joyce’s expensive book in Paris. He told her Joyce was ‘supposedly almost as corrupting to good morals as me’, but left the book, hoping to find a second-hand copy.
⁸
Katherine Mansfield appears to have developed a personal dislike (we do not know when they met), urging John Middleton Murry in a letter of 1920: ‘
please
don’t praise Firbank. He’s … a sniggering, long-nailed, pretentious and very dirty fellow. As to
honesty
– the fellow would swoon at the sight of such a turnip’ – whatever that means.
⁹
Mansfield also suggested, quite wrongly, that Firbank was in thrall to the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, read Firbank in the wake of her husband Leonard’s judgement that Firbank’s prose was ‘terribly monotonous … always doing the same thing’.
¹⁰
Given Firbank’s polyphonous, dexterous writing, it is an extraordinary criticism to make. But Leonard Woolf, in the piece ‘Butterflies’, regretted the lack of ‘the solid and sordid seriousness of the real world’ in Firbank’s novels. Firbank, he insisted, was serious only as a
poseur
and ‘that kind of pose cannot produce a masterpiece.’
¹¹
Nevertheless, some months later, in May 1929, Virginia Woolf confided to a friend that she had been devouring Firbank’s novels ‘with some unstinted pleasure’.
¹²
It is curious to note that both Woolfs seem to have come to Firbank’s novels – and to form quite divergent judgements of them – some four years after ushering Kitchin’s first novel, the entirely Firbankian
Streamers Waving
(1925), into print through the Hogarth Press.

At nearly the same time as Virginia Woolf recorded her view, fellow Bloomsbury member E. M. Forster was committing to print the essay on Firbank that is reproduced in this volume as
Appendix 3
. Originally entitled ‘Our Butterflies and Beetles’, it is a curious mixture of appreciation and condescension. Many of the things Forster considered vital to the modern novel were lacking, he felt, in Firbank. Like Leonard Woolf’s appraisal, Forster’s essay leaves the reader with the sense that, whatever Firbank’s achievements, a fundamentally unserious talent is being indulged. He interprets Firbank’s writing as part of a genre of fantasy literature incorporating many children’s authors and writers such as David Garnett, author of
Lady into Fox
(1922). This literature ‘omits not merely the soul but many material actualities, and, if taken in large quantities, is unsatisfying’ (
p. 400
).

Still, Forster as an advocate not only anticipated but effectively countered objections voiced by Firbank’s detractors, identifying much of what makes Firbank pleasurable to read: ‘his taste, his choice of words, the rhythm both of his narrative and of his conversations, [and] his wit’ (
p. 400
). He concluded that Firbank had ‘genius’, and appreciated how much the writer drew on the work of the writers of the 1890s and their art-for-art’s-sake pretensions, although Firbank oscillated between valorizing and ridiculing an aestheticist world view. What Forster – like many authors who read Firbank – failed to appreciate was the radical modernism in Firbank’s capacity for compressing narrative and condensing storylines. Instead of trailblazing such narrative developments – lauded in Joyce and Woolf – Forster erred, describing Firbank as looking backwards:

there is nothing up-to-date in him. He is
fin de siècle,
as it used to be called; he belongs to the nineties and the
Yellow Book
; his mind inherits the furniture and his prose the cadences of Aubrey
Beardsley’s
Under the Hill
. To the historian he is an interesting example of literary conservatism … (
p. 400
)

Woolf and Forster’s use of the butterfly to evoke Firbank was not accidental. Butterflies flitter through the Firbankian world.
Vainglory
’s Monsignor Parr is described as ‘[s]omething between a butterfly and a misanthrope’ (
p. 11
). In a celebrated moment in
Sorrow in Sunlight
, Firbank portrayed the young Charlie Mouth ‘trailing a muslin net, and laughing for happiness’ as he approaches the city of temptation and pleasure, Cuna-Cuna.
¹³
Passing through customs, the boy unwittingly evokes Oscar Wilde’s famous declaration of his genius on Ellis Island, New York:

‘Have you nothing, young man, to declare?’

‘… Butterflies!’

‘Exempt of duty. Pass.’
¹⁴

Let us hold on to the image of the butterfly for a moment. Firbank, a devotee of the Ballets Russes, saw them often in London, from their very first season in 1911. Many have recalled his odd, restless behaviour in theatres, which Lord Berners went so far as to associate directly with Serge Diaghilev’s company:

The atmosphere of the Russian Ballet in particular seemed to go to his head, and his behaviour during the
entractes
and even during the performance itself was distinctly fantastic. One would become aware of a growing uneasiness in a certain portion of the audience, and after a time one discovered the cause of it to be the extraordinary antics of Ronald Firbank. One of his favourite postures seemed to entail sitting with his head nearly touching the floor and with his feet in the air.
¹⁵

It is unsurprising, then, to find Firbank’s novels replete with references to the Ballets Russes. Mrs Henedge might speak for her progenitor when she announces in the first chapter of
Vainglory
: ‘I do so
adore
Nijinsky in
Le Spectre de la Rose
’ (p. 8).

Firbank’s reverence for the Ballets Russes suggests two things. Firstly, it confirms him as someone schooled in aestheticist ideas, but who rethought them, so that they not only fit into the modernist
avant garde
, they helped define it. Serge Diaghilev had done the same, introducing
fin de siècle
European artistic ideas to Russia in the journal
Mir iskusstva
. With the ballet company, Diaghilev looked forward, collaborating with purveyors of new styles and art forms, whether in music, the visual arts or choreography. Each might instruct the other. Firbank might well have recognized a kindred spirit.

Secondly, consider Nijinsky, the star of the 1911 season, who enthralled London society with his stage presence, agility and bizarre technique. Nijinsky’s Ballets Russes roles stretched or overturned traditional distinctions between male and female performance. His squatness, combined with his overdeveloped thigh muscles, conveyed masculinity, but the grace of his movement and the often reactive roles Nijinsky interpreted on stage could utterly feminize him. In 1909, German diplomat Count Harry Kessler described Nijinsky as ‘a butterfly, but at the same time … the epitome of manliness and youthful beauty’.
¹⁶
If Woolf and Forster’s ‘butterfly’ appellation suggests effeteness, impotence or lack of will, it is, as with Nijinsky, only one side of the author.

Firbank possessed, above all, great nerve: ‘a certain steely something,’ wrote Alan Hollinghurst, ‘… that only hardened with the passing of time and the critical neglect, bordering on contempt, with which the continuing experiment of his writing was met.’
¹⁷

The American critic Edmund Wilson aside, the 1940s and 50s brought Firbank little attention, with the exception of Jocelyn Brooke, who wrote a simple book on Firbank’s works and adopted the Firbankian style in memoirs such as
The Military Orchid
(1948). Wilson’s interest in Firbank, which had begun in the latter’s lifetime, continued, however, and to some degree epitomized a shift, at this point, in the attention paid to the author. Certainly, from 1945, Firbank received more critical attention and acclaim in the United States than in Britain.
Sandy Wilson’s musical based on
Valmouth
was premiered in 1958. This is still, surprisingly, the sole dramatic adaptation of Firbank’s oeuvre, even though, in 1924, George Gershwin had been close to producing a musical based on
Sorrow in Sunlight
– another perilous ‘what if’, which might have turned Firbank into a literary staple.
¹⁸

Interest in Firbank’s writing then gradually revived. John Betjeman’s
Summoned by Bells
(1960) records
Prancing Nigger
among the books in the poet’s Oxford rooms. Betjeman also once said: ‘The polished work of Ronald Firbank is like a jewelled and clockwork nightingale singing among London sparrows.’
¹⁹
On this occasion, at least, Firbank’s ‘bejewelledness’ is not being ridiculed. The New York poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara were all fans too, the first two collaborating on the now cult Firbankian novel
Nest of Ninnies
(1969). Firbank’s prose is more poetic than that of most novelists. In the 1961 article ‘Butterfly at Large’, David Paul argued: ‘No other novelist has travelled so light, or conveys so much in proportion to weight … He applies the economy of poetry to the novel, proceeds by hiatus. A phrase fills out a paragraph …’
²⁰
All true, but Paul also touches on a typical paradox which can make ‘explaining’ Firbank so hazardous. In part, what he is celebrated for lies not in what he wrote, but in what he did not write, what he skipped over, assiduously excised or truncated.

In 1962, Firbank’s uncompleted jazz novel,
The New Rythum
, was published. A spate of critical books appeared soon after, as well as more novels indebted to Firbankian techniques, especially Brigid Brophy’s
The Finishing Touch
(1963) and Harry Mathews’s
Tlooth
(1966). Then, when Joe Orton’s comic fiction – all written in the 60s – was posthumously published, it too showed a profound debt: from
Head to Toe
(1971) to
Lord Cucumber
and
The Boy Hairdresser
(1999). On reading
Caprice
, Orton acclaimed Firbank as ‘the only impressionist in the English novel’.
²¹
In the last forty years, the works of novelists such as Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Edmund White and James Purdy have shown a less direct imprint. There are still rare cases of open homage, though, such as the American writer James
McCourt’s fiction, particularly his brilliant 1975 opera novel
Mawrdew Czgowchwz
, or English author Duncan Fallowell’s deeply rural (and
Vainglory
-esque)
A History of Facelifting
(2003). Alan Hollinghurst’s
The Swimming-Pool Library
(1988) is no stylistic kin, but it pays tribute to the author’s longstanding fascination with Firbank, by including him as a minor character.

Vainglory
was Ronald Firbank’s first substantial piece of fiction. It heralded a decade-long period of fecundity – from 1915 to 1926. The child Artie, who wrote fluent and memorable verse in both English and French for his mother, grew into an ambitious author, who was confident, regardless of others’ opinions, in the significance of his work. He could not wait to be published.

The appearance of
Odette d’Antrevernes and A Study in Temperament
(1905) ensured he became an author before his twentieth birthday. The novella
Odette
and the considerable juvenilia gathered in Steven Moore’s
The Early Firbank
offer an infinite richness of clues, teases and provocations for the Firbank devotee concerning the author’s early conceptualization of how fiction ought to impress. However, even the most accomplished work,
Odette
itself, has been dismissed as ‘mawkish’.
²²
Vainglory
announced a huge leap in proficiency, confirmed by Firbank’s next two novels,
Inclinations
and
Caprice
. Together, these books constitute the first of three distinct periods in the Firbankian canon.

When Firbank began
Vainglory
in 1913, the stakes could scarcely have felt higher. The published
Odette
had had no impact on the reading public whatsoever; subsequently, his first attempt at writing a full-length fiction,
The Artificial Princess
, had ominously misfired. Firbank ceased work on it sometime between 1911 and 1915, probably around 1912. Still, at least there was a working method. Firbank gathered single expressions, phrases, dialogue and character names, noting them on small blue cards. He regularly sorted through these, sifting as if for fine objects, placing and replacing each until a pleasing sequence resulted. (Perhaps he was reminded of the Tarot card reader, a favourite source of entertainment and instruction for
this deeply superstitious writer.) Coleridge Kennard, a fellow student, spoke of Firbank’s habit at Cambridge of keeping ‘long strips of paper … in his desk’.
²³
On these were written ‘any phrase that [had] particularly struck him’.
²⁴
His fictional dialogue evolved from sticking these pieces together ‘mosaic-wise’.
²⁵
The fractal method underlines how radically Firbank would – almost inadvertently – reconceive the passing of time in narrative, doing nothing to smooth over its jagged, subjective edges.