Born January 17: Ronald Firbank

Growing up in the shadow of Oscar Wilde's downfall, Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank showed a peculiar kind of bravery in celebrating the dainty aesthete in his life and fiction. According to his own Lady Parvula de Panzoust in Valmouth, "None but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate." A sickly child largely home-schooled, Firbank started Cambridge at nineteen, converted to Catholicism at twenty-one, and quit university without a degree at twenty-three. Drawn to the Church's high pageantry, he went to Rome to take holy orders, only to be rejected. Living off newish family wealth amassed by his grandfather, he traveled for his poor health to warmer, more sensual climes: Italy, Spain, North Africa, the Middle East. At home he added glitter to London's cafe society, and he had no intention of butching up or joining up when World War I broke out in his late twenties. He decamped to Oxford and continued to write sparkling novels: Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice, [now in one edition], and Valmouth. In the 1920s he created his most enduring works, The Flower Beneath the Foot, Sorrow in Sunlight, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. In all, the wispy plots are mere bubbles on which to float his style, wit, and pokes at human foibles. Lesbian, bi, and gay characters abound, as do queer situations, which helps to explain why his work was unpublished, self-published, financially disastrous, or widely shunned by the critical establishment at the time. Since his death in 1926 in Rome at forty from alcoholism and lung disease, his champions have included Forster, Waugh, Auden, Orton, and Sontag. Alan Hollinghurst made Firbank a key part of The Swimming-Pool Library, wrote the introduction to a collection of his novels, and selected him for the National Portrait Gallery's exhibit Gay Icons.

 

Comments

[Bob Smith]

Firbank's dialogue is genius. One novel has a party scene where the fragments of conversation are hilarious. I actually bought 3 first editions in Buffalo when I was in college.

[Bruce Lewis]

If you like Firbank, you should read a wonderful tome on him by one Bridget Brophy entitles Prancing Novelist, A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank, Harper and Row Publishers, 1973.

[Bob Smith]

I own it!