B007TB5SP0 EBOK (7 page)

1920
Travels through France and on to Algeria and Tunisia. Begins writing the novel
Santal.
Publishes
The Princess Zoubaroff
with Grant Richards (26 November), with a frontispiece and decoration by Michel Sevier. A proposed dedication to Evan Morgan is removed at the last minute at Morgan’s insistence.

1921
Leaves Tunisia for Sicily and heads north through Italy and France. Begins writing a new novel, which would become
The Flower Beneath the Foot.
Takes rooms in London in May and June; moves to Versailles in July, from where he attempts to generate interest in a London production of
The Princess Zoubaroff
. Publishes
Santal
with Grant Richards (8 September). Moves to Montreux, Switzerland.

1922
Leaves Switzerland for Italy, renting a villa in Fiesole. Flirts with retitling his novel-in-progress
A Record of the Early Life of St Laura de Nazianzi and the Times in Which She Lived
, which he completes in May. Receives fan letter from American author Carl van Vechten, whose article on Firbank is published in the
Double Dealer
. Returns to London, via Paris. Sits for Percy Wyndham Lewis. Begins work on a ‘Negro novel’, initially entitled
Drama in Sunlight.
In August, he boards the RMS
Orcoma
, bound for Cuba. Moves on to Jamaica, returning to London by October. Compelled to remove libellous references to Evan Morgan from forthcoming novel,
The Flower Beneath the Foot
. Travels to Bordighera in Italy for the winter.

1923
Publishes
The Flower Beneath the Foot
with Grant Richards (17 January), with a decoration by C. R. W. Nevinson and portraits by Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. Experiences declining health, particularly trouble with breathing. Completes the ‘Negro novel’ in June, returning to London in July. Travels to Paris, Madrid, southern Spain and Lisbon, before returning to London and then heading on to Rome, where he takes rooms for the winter. In November, Brentano’s in New York agree to publish his novel, under a title
suggested by Carl van Vechten:
Prancing Nigger.
Firbank begins work on his last complete novel,
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli
.

1924
Death of Lady Firbank in March. Firbank returns for her funeral, then goes back to Rome. Publishes
Prancing Nigger
with Brentano’s in the USA (11 March). By late April the first print run of three thousand has sold out. An admiring review article by Edmund Wilson appears in the
New Republic
in May. British edition, published by Brentano’s of London, appears on 6 November, under Firbank’s preferred title,
Sorrow in Sunlight
.

1925
Spends the summer in London arranging publication of
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.
Sees Vyvyan Holland, Augustus John and Osbert Sitwell, but is generally both ill and reclusive. In August, travels to Paris, Arcachon and via Marseilles to Cairo. Begins work on a New York jazz novel,
The New Rythum.

1926
Returns to Rome. Dies in the Quirinale Hotel in Rome (21 May) of a respiratory condition, attended in his last days by Lord Berners. On 1 June, Firbank is erroneously given a funeral service in the non-Catholic cemetery in Testaccio. A plot in the Catholic cemetery of Verano finally becomes free by late September. Firbank is buried at last, though once again erroneously, as the free plot is once again not a Catholic one. His final novel,
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli
, is published posthumously by Grant Richards (29 June), with an author portrait by Charles Shannon.

Ansen, Alan,
The Table Talk of W. H. Auden
, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990)

Benkovitz, Miriam J.,
A Bibliography of Ronald Firbank
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963; revised edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)

——,
Ronald Firbank: A Biography
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969)

Bristow, Joseph,
Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After
1885
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995)

Brooke, Jocelyn,
Ronald Firbank
(London: Arthur Barker, 1951)

Brophy, Brigid,
Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank
(London: Macmillan, 1973)

Caserio, Robert L., ‘Artifice and Empire in Ronald Firbank’s Novels’,
Western Humanities Review
51.2, pp. 227–35 (Summer 1997)

Clark, William Lane, ‘Degenerate Personality: Deviant Sexuality and Race in Ronald Firbank’s Novels’, in David Bergman (ed.),
Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 134–55

Davies, Gill, David Malcolm and John Simons (eds.),
Critical Essays on Ronald Firbank, English Novelist
1886
–1926 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004)

Davies, Paul, ‘ “The Power to Convey the Unuttered”: Style and Sexuality in the Work of Ronald Firbank’, in Mark Lilly (ed.),
Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays
(London: Macmillan Press, 1990) pp. 199–214

Davis, Robert Murray, ‘The Ego Triumphant in Firbank’s
Vainglory
’,
Papers on Language and Literature
9 (Summer 1973), pp. 281–90

——, ‘From Artifice to Art: The Technique of Firbank’s Novels’,
Style
2 (Winter 1968), pp. 33–47

——, ‘ “Hyperaesthesia with Complications”: The World of Ronald Firbank’,
Rendezvous
3.1 (Spring 1968), pp. 5–15

——, ‘The Text of Firbank’s
Vainglory
’,
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
63 (1969), pp. 36–41

Firbank, Ronald,
The Complete Firbank
, with an Introduction by Anthony Powell (London: Duckworth, 1961; reprinted London: Picador, 1988)

——,
The Early Firbank
, ed. Steven Moore with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst (London: Quartet, 1991)

——,
Letters to His Mother
1920
–
1924
, ed. and with an Introduction by Anthony Hobson (Verona: Stamperia Valdonega, 2001)

——,
The New Rythum and Other Pieces
, ed. Alan Harris (London: Duckworth, 1962)

——,
Three Novels,
with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst (London: Penguin, 2000)

Hanson, Ellis,
Decadence and Catholicism
(Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1997)

Hollinghurst, Alan, ‘The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and L. P. Hartley’, Oxford M. Litt. thesis, 1980

Horder, Meryvn (ed.),
Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques
(London: Duckworth, 1977)

John, Augustus,
Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography
(London: Jonathan Cape: 1952)

‘Keeping the Camp Fires Burning’,
Tatler
, December 1985–January 1986, pp. 34, 36

Kiechler, John Anthony,
The Butterfly’s Freckled Wings: A Study of Style in the Novels of Ronald Firbank
(Bern: Francke, 1969)

Kiernan, Robert F.,
Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel
(New York: Continuum, 1990)

Kopelson, Kevin,
Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern
Homoerotics
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994)

Lane, Christopher,
The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire
(Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1995)

McCarthy, Shaun, ‘Firbank’s
Inclinations
and the
nouveau roman
’,
Critical Quarterly
20.2 (Summer 1978), pp. 64–77

Merritt, James Douglas,
Ronald Firbank
(New York: Twayne, 1969)

Moore, Steven,
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials, 1905
–
1995
(Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996)

Nicolson, Harold,
Some People
(London: Constable, 1927)

Potoker, Edward Martin,
Ronald Firbank
(New York/London: Columbia University Press, 1969)

Sassoon, Siegfried,
Siegfried’s Journey: 1916
–
20
(London: Faber & Faber, 1945)

Van Leer, David,
The Queening of America: Gay Culture in a Straight Society
(New York/London: Routledge, 1995)

Among the last things Firbank did was to revise the manuscript of
Vainglory
(first published in 1915) for its American publication by Brentano’s in 1925. This edition – reflecting the author’s last wishes – should be seen as definitive. However, most subsequent volumes of Firbank have not used it. In particular, as Robert Murray Davis pointed out, the text of the novel in
The Complete Ronald Firbank
(1961) was not only based on the 1915 UK edition but also contained numerous errors.
¹
This 2012 edition of
Vainglory
is, then, the first not only to be based on the 1925 Brentano’s text, but also to record each of the substantial changes Firbank made (see
Appendix 1
). I have used my discretion in not recording every minor correction to spelling or punctuation, but have endeavoured to note every instance in which a word, phrase or sentence has been altered. When preparing the revised edition, incidentally, Firbank initially sought revenge on Sacheverell Sitwell for playing a practical joke upon him in Rome, by changing the name ‘Winsome’ (Brookes) to ‘Sacheverell’ throughout. He then thought better of it.

Inclinations
(first published in 1916) poses a different problem. We have no edition with which the author was satisfied. In 1916, Firbank was being pressed by Grant Richards – first, for a manuscript, and then for proof corrections – a process which preoccupied him heavily, twice over, chiefly because of printers’ supposed amendments to his very particular punctuation, to which he objected: ‘They have dressed me out in armour – far too much. By changing the punctuation all “goes”. Since one never attempted to be classic … I feel like “a waiter” in
evening-dress!’ A strike put paid to any further changes, though Firbank had doubts about the novel’s ending, as well as about certain phrases and aspects of the book’s layout and design.
²
Though no other edition would be published in Firbank’s lifetime, he had come to believe in 1925 that Brentano’s (US) would take the book, and began revisions. The
Inclinations
which formed part of the definitive edition of
The Works of Ronald Firbank
by Duckworth in 1929 – paid for by a donation Firbank made to the Society of Authors – accommodated just one change, but it was substantial: a totally revised version of
Part II
,
Chapter IV
, the ‘dinner party’ chapter. Awkwardly, this was placed abutting the original version, before the narrative resumes with
Chapter V
. In the present edition, for transparency and ease of reading, this revised version has been adopted in the main novel text, with the original 1916 chapter included as
Appendix 2
.

The case of
Caprice
(1917) is simple. For once, author and publisher were agreed on the textual presentation. A dispute arose only out of Richards’s well-meaning description of the novel as ‘like nothing else on earth’. For some reason, both Firbank and his mother took this amiss.
³
In 1925, Firbank apparently wrote a new Preface to the novel to stimulate interest in New York. But Brentano’s decided to pass on it, and the preface has never been located.

1
. Robert Murray Davis, ‘The Text of Firbank’s
Vainglory’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
63 (1969), pp. 36–41.

2
. Quoted in Miriam J. Benkovitz,
A Bibliography of Ronald Firbank
, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 11; see further, pp. 9–12.

3
. Ibid., pp. 14–16.

‘And, then, oh yes! Atalanta is getting too pronounced.’ She spoke lightly, leaning back a little in her deep armchair. It was the end of a somewhat lively review.

On such a languid afternoon how hard it seemed to bear a cross! Pleasant to tilt it a little – lean it for an instant against somebody else … Her listener waved her handkerchief expressively. She felt, just then, it was safer not to speak. Tactfully she rose.

On a dark canvas screen were grouped some inconceivably delicate Persian miniatures.

She bent towards them: ‘Oh, what gems!’

But Lady Georgia would not let her go.

‘A mother’s rôle,’ she said, ‘is apt to become a strain.’

Mrs Henedge turned towards her: ‘Well, what can you do, dear?’ she inquired, and with a sigh she looked away sadly over the comparative country of the square.

Lady Georgia Blueharnis owned that house off Hill Street from whose curved iron balconies it would have seemed right for dames in staid silks to lean melodiously at certain moments of the day. In Grecian-Walpole times the house had been the scene of an embassy; but since then it had reflowered unexpectedly as a sympathetic background, suitable to shelter plain domesticity – or even more.

Not that Lady Georgia could be said to be domestic … Her interests in life were far too scattered. Known to the world as the Isabella d’Este of her day, her investigations of art had led her chiefly outside the family pale.

‘It is better,’ Mrs Henedge said, when she had admired the
massive foliage in the square, and had sighed once or twice again, ‘it is better to be pronounced than to be a bag of bones. And thank goodness Atalanta’s not eccentric! Think of poor little Mr Rienzi-Smith who lives in continual terror lest one day his wife may do something really strange – perhaps run down Piccadilly without a hat … Take a shorter view of life, dear, don’t look so far ahead!’