November 24, 2007
The shy, steely Ronald Firbank
Only this night I got to wondering, “Do my fellow ‘Flockers — and Friends — share my admiration for Ronald Firbank? Have they read — do they read — Ronald Firbank?” Answer came there none, and so here is Alan Hollinghurst on The shy, steely Ronald Firbank.
One of the first fellow novelists to write intelligently and gratefully about Firbank after his death was Evelyn Waugh. For Waugh, Firbank was a liberator, the person who had seen how to take the novel forward through a radical reconsideration of technique. This was very different from the Jamesian alternative, the ever-deepening interiorization of the novel through the elaboration of individual consciousness. Firbank achieved his highly complex originality not by expansion but by a drastic compression: instead of putting more and more in, he left almost everything out.
The comparison might more tellingly be made, though, with Proust, an artist with whom Firbank has closer affinities of temperament and point of view: where Proust, at just the same time, was expanding the novel to unprecedented length to do justice to his narrator’s complex world and his complex consciousness of it, Firbank had arrived at an aesthetic which required almost everything to be omitted. Where Proust, a fellow observer of upper-class society and sexual ambivalence, worked by the endlessly exploratory and comprehensive sentence, the immense paragraph, the ceaselessly dilated book, Firbank laboured to reduce – not merely to condense but to design by elimination. “I am all design – once I get going”, he wrote. “I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.” He constructed in fragments, juxtaposed without any cushioning or explanatory narrative tissue. Both Proust and Firbank loved describing parties, but where Proust’s parties are occasions for infinitely fine analysis and profound digression, Firbank’s are an abstract mosaic of impressions, in which human intercourse is enacted as a kind of coruscating nonsense. One of his most striking inventions was the depiction of a party as a montage of unrelated fragments, picked up as if by a roving microphone: “Her dull white face seems to have no connection with her chestnut hair!” “ . . . with him to Palestine last spring. Oh, dear me, I thought I should have died in Joppa!” “You mix them with olives and a drop of cognac.” [. . . .] “The only genuine one was Jane.” “. . . poison.” “. . . fuss . . . .” “My husband was always shy. He is shy of everybody. He even runs away from me!”.
Hollinghurst’s essay appeared in the November 15, 2006 issue of the TLS.
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2 Responses to “The shy, steely Ronald Firbank”
I haven’t read him. For some reason I always confuse him with Alan Sillitoe. (Is the protagonist of “Long-Distance Runner” named Firbank, maybe?) More than once I looked at a Spanish translation of a Firbank novel about a priest (I think), which was on the shelf at my little neighborhood used bookstore in El Paso, but I never bought and read it. Was I wrong?
A Spanish translation of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli? Were you wrong not to buy it? ¡Ai, Raúl!
You might first try reading Firbank in English. You might like him; you might not. Most folks do not, and even for those of us who do, I suspect that a little goes a good long way. But I’d encourage you to take a look at Valmouth or The Flower Beneath the Foot or Sorrow in Sunlight (original title: Prancing Nigger). One could make a case for Firbank’s novels as the twentieth-century’s purest examples of style trumping substance.
And he (Ronald Firbank) is about as far from Alan Sillitoe as I can possibly imagine.
(You know, vis-à-vis your question about the surname “Firbank”, I’ve never read Long-Distance Runner — though I did narrate this recording of Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. ["Some explicit descriptions of . Strong language."])