Ronald Firbank
Encyclopedia
Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank (17 January 1886 – 21 May 1926) was a British novelist.
Sir Thomas Firbank
. He went to Uppingham School
, and then on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge
. He converted to Catholicism in 1907. In 1909 he left Cambridge without completing a degree.
Living off his inheritance, he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. He died of lung disease in Rome, aged 40.
Inclinations (1916) is set mainly in Greece, where the fifteen-year-old Mabel Collins is travelling with her chaperone, Miss O'Brookomore. Mabel elopes with an Italian conte, but the plot is of minor importance and the interest, as with all Firbank's work, lies in the dialogue. His next novel Caprice followed in 1917.
Valmouth
(1918) is based on the lives of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England; most of the inhabitants are centenarians, and some are older ("the last time I went to the play...was with Charles the Second and Louise de Querouaille, to see Betterton play Shylock.") The inconsequential plot is concerned with the attempts of two elderly ladies, Mrs Hurstpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House, Captain Dick Thoroughfare. Captain Thoroughfare, who is engaged to a black woman, Niri-Esther, is loved frantically by Thetis Tooke, a farmer's daughter, but prefers his 'chum', Jack Whorwood, to both of them. Meanwhile Mrs Yajnavalkya, a black masseuse, manages an alliance between the centenarian Lady Parvula de Panzoust and David Tooke, Thetis's brother. A musical comedy of 1958 by Sandy Wilson
gave the novel some popularity in the 1960s. It has been revived several times and recorded on CD.
Santal (1921) describes an Arab boy's search for God.
In The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923), the setting is an imaginary country somewhere in the Balkans
. The characters include the King and Queen, sundry high-born ladies about the Court, and the usual attendant chorus of priests and nuns.
Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), retitled at the suggestion of the American publisher Prancing Nigger but published in Britain under the author's original title, was especially successful in America. It is set in a Caribbean republic (compounded of Cuba and Haiti). A socially ambitious black family move from their rural home to the capital, and the story is concerned with their attempts, which prove mainly abortive, to 'get into society'.
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) begins with the Cardinal christening a dog in his cathedral ('And thus being cleansed and purified, I do call thee "Crack"!') and ends with His Eminence dying of a heart attack while chasing, naked, a choirboy
around the aisles.
Firbank's play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920) has been compared to William Congreve, but is rarely produced. Dame Edith Evans
, perhaps the greatest British actress of her time, played the title part in a radio production in 1964. The dialogue is highly characteristic: for example, Princess Zoubaroff says: "I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the world as high as I would wish... They irritate me invariably. I should like to shake Switzerland."
Firbank's Complete Short Stories were published in a single volume in 1990 edited by Steven Moore, and his Complete Plays in 1991 in a volume containing The Princess Zoubaroff, The Mauve Tower and A Disciple from the Country.
Ronald Firbank left among his manuscripts the first few characteristic chapters of a novel set in New York, The New Rythum (sic), published in 1962 after a sale of many of his manuscripts and letters.
, Evelyn Waugh
, Alan Hollinghurst
and Simon Raven
. The poet W. H. Auden
praised him highly in a radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in June 1961 (the text of the broadcast was published in The Listener of 8 June 1961). Susan Sontag
named his novels as part of "the canon of camp
" in her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'".
In her 1973 critical biography, Prancing Novelist, Brigid Brophy
examines Firbank's cult of Oscar Wilde
.
Steven Moore records Firbank's critical reception up to 1995 in his Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials (Dalkey Archive Press, 1996).
Biography
Ronald Firbank was born in London, the son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MPMember of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...
Sir Thomas Firbank
Thomas Firbank (MP)
Sir Thomas Firbank was a British Conservative Party politician.He lived at St Julians, Newport, and was High Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1891. At the general election in July 1885, he was elected as the Member of Parliament for Hull East...
. He went to Uppingham School
Uppingham School
Uppingham School is a co-educational independent school of the English public school tradition, situated in the small town of Uppingham in Rutland, England...
, and then on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Trinity Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the fifth-oldest college of the university, having been founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.- Foundation :...
. He converted to Catholicism in 1907. In 1909 he left Cambridge without completing a degree.
Living off his inheritance, he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. He died of lung disease in Rome, aged 40.
Work
He published his first book, the short story "Odette d'Antrevernes", in 1905 before going up to Cambridge. He then produced a series of novels, from The Artificial Princess (written in 1915, published posthumously in 1934) and Vainglory (1915, his longest work) to Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926, also posthumous).Inclinations (1916) is set mainly in Greece, where the fifteen-year-old Mabel Collins is travelling with her chaperone, Miss O'Brookomore. Mabel elopes with an Italian conte, but the plot is of minor importance and the interest, as with all Firbank's work, lies in the dialogue. His next novel Caprice followed in 1917.
Valmouth
Valmouth
thumb|1st edition Cover by [[Augustus John]] Valmouth is a 1919 novel by British author Ronald Firbank. Valmouth is an imaginary English spa resort that attracts centenarians owing to its famed pure air...
(1918) is based on the lives of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England; most of the inhabitants are centenarians, and some are older ("the last time I went to the play...was with Charles the Second and Louise de Querouaille, to see Betterton play Shylock.") The inconsequential plot is concerned with the attempts of two elderly ladies, Mrs Hurstpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House, Captain Dick Thoroughfare. Captain Thoroughfare, who is engaged to a black woman, Niri-Esther, is loved frantically by Thetis Tooke, a farmer's daughter, but prefers his 'chum', Jack Whorwood, to both of them. Meanwhile Mrs Yajnavalkya, a black masseuse, manages an alliance between the centenarian Lady Parvula de Panzoust and David Tooke, Thetis's brother. A musical comedy of 1958 by Sandy Wilson
Sandy Wilson
Sandy Wilson is an English composer and lyricist, best known for his musical The Boy Friend .-Biography:Wilson was born Alexander Galbraith Wilson in Sale, Greater Manchester, and was educated at Harrow School and Oriel College, Oxford. During the war he served in the Royal Ordnance Corps in Great...
gave the novel some popularity in the 1960s. It has been revived several times and recorded on CD.
Santal (1921) describes an Arab boy's search for God.
In The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923), the setting is an imaginary country somewhere in the Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
. The characters include the King and Queen, sundry high-born ladies about the Court, and the usual attendant chorus of priests and nuns.
Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), retitled at the suggestion of the American publisher Prancing Nigger but published in Britain under the author's original title, was especially successful in America. It is set in a Caribbean republic (compounded of Cuba and Haiti). A socially ambitious black family move from their rural home to the capital, and the story is concerned with their attempts, which prove mainly abortive, to 'get into society'.
Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) begins with the Cardinal christening a dog in his cathedral ('And thus being cleansed and purified, I do call thee "Crack"!') and ends with His Eminence dying of a heart attack while chasing, naked, a choirboy
Choirboy
A choirboy is a boy member of a choir, also known as a treble.As a derisive slang term, it refers to a do-gooder or someone who is morally upright, in the same sense that "Boy Scout" refers to someone who is considered honorable or conscientious.- History :The use of choirboys in Christian...
around the aisles.
Firbank's play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920) has been compared to William Congreve, but is rarely produced. Dame Edith Evans
Edith Evans
Dame Edith Mary Evans, DBE was a British actress. She was known for her work on the British stage. She also appeared in a number of films, for which she received three Academy Award nominations, plus a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award.Evans was particularly effective at portraying haughty...
, perhaps the greatest British actress of her time, played the title part in a radio production in 1964. The dialogue is highly characteristic: for example, Princess Zoubaroff says: "I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the world as high as I would wish... They irritate me invariably. I should like to shake Switzerland."
Firbank's Complete Short Stories were published in a single volume in 1990 edited by Steven Moore, and his Complete Plays in 1991 in a volume containing The Princess Zoubaroff, The Mauve Tower and A Disciple from the Country.
Ronald Firbank left among his manuscripts the first few characteristic chapters of a novel set in New York, The New Rythum (sic), published in 1962 after a sale of many of his manuscripts and letters.
Critical reception
His novels have been championed by many English novelists including E. M. ForsterE. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
, Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
, Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst is a British novelist, and winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.-Biography:Hollinghurst was born on 26 May 1954 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the only child of James Hollinghurst, a bank manager, and his wife, Elizabeth...
and Simon Raven
Simon Raven
Simon Arthur Noël Raven was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence...
. The poet W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
praised him highly in a radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in June 1961 (the text of the broadcast was published in The Listener of 8 June 1961). Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
named his novels as part of "the canon of camp
Camp (style)
Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its taste and ironic value. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as being "cheesy"...
" in her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'".
In her 1973 critical biography, Prancing Novelist, Brigid Brophy
Brigid Brophy
Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey was an English writer. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J...
examines Firbank's cult of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
.
Steven Moore records Firbank's critical reception up to 1995 in his Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials (Dalkey Archive Press, 1996).
Critical studies
- Jocelyn Brooke, Ronald Firbank, London, Arthur Barker, 1951
- An essay in Osbert SitwellOsbert SitwellSir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, 5th Baronet, was an English writer. His elder sister was Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell and his younger brother was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell; like them he devoted his life to art and literature....
, Noble Essences, London, MacMillan, 1950 - Derek Parker, The Man with Red Nails: Ronald Firbank, in Books and Company, London, 1999
- Alan Hollinghurst, 'The shy, steely Ronald Firbank', edited version of the third of the 2006 Lord Northcliffe Lectures given at University College, London, October 2006, in Times Literary Supplement, November.
- Mervyn Horder (ed.), Ronald Firbank: memoirs and critiques, London, Duckworth, 1977.
- Miriam J. Benkovitz, Ronald Firbank: a Biography, London and New York, 1970.
- Brigid BrophyBrigid BrophyBrigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey was an English writer. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J...
, Prancing Novelist: a Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank, London and New York, 1973.
Bibliographic studies
- S. Moore, Ronald Firbank An Annotated Bibliography of Scondary Materials, 1905–1995 (1996)
- M.J. Benkovitz, A Bibliography Of Ronald Firbank Second Edition (1982)
External links
- Ronald Firbank on glbtq.comGlbtq.comglbtq.com is an online encyclopedia that presents detailed biographies of notable gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. It was named one of the "Best Free Reference Web Sites" in 2005 by the American Library Association....
- TLS review at http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2454703,00.html
- Sorrow in Sunlight text at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700911.txt