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Who goes to a talk about a largely forgotten writer and finds themselves tearful? Me, it turns out. I’m not a great weeper – except when watching Anne of Green Gables – and rarely shed a tear in the theatre. It was not pathos or tragedy that made me blub in the centenary symposium on Ronald Firbank, convened at London’s Warburg Institute by Kate Hext of Exeter University. It was shock that did it: the surprise of being brought so vividly and suddenly into the ambit of a writer who created a fresh, fractured, dazzling world.
Firbank, who largely funded his own publication and died aged 40 in 1926, is divisive. In 1929 Evelyn Waugh spoke excitedly of “the tiny bright feathers” of his prose; 30 years later he tweedily announced: “I can’t abide him.” Angela Carter wrote a play about him. For Alan Hollinghurst he is central to “English Modernism and queer culture”.
In a keynote speech, the author of The Swimming-Pool Library described his introduction to Firbank’s work by the literary critic John Bayley. Hollinghurst was writing an MLitt thesis considering how, when homosexuality was held to be a criminal offence, gay 20th-century writers both concealed and expressed sexuality in their work. Firbank did not scowl directly at the subject, but his novels signal difference. He told his stories in fragmentary scenes rather than unwinding a plot. He drew on conversations between his mother and sister for dialogue which scampered across the surface of secrets. He featured lesbians (not banned like same-sex male lovers); his vocabulary was orchidaceous. A glittering surface is a cover for subversion. To discover Firbank, Hollinghurst explained, you have also to discover a new way of reading.
That was evident from an unannounced reading of Firbank’s rarely-outed play The Princess Zoubaroff. Written in 1920, it is set in Florence, infused with hibiscus and oleander. There is “a peacock or two”, a groom who immediately after his wedding peels off from his bride to go roaming with a pal, and a nanny called Mrs Mangrove. The much-married princess of the title (she carries three miniatures of her husbands on each wrist) sets up an all-female quasi-religious establishment, pied-pipering women with a canny eye on their costumes.
The flounce and glimmer of Firbank’s prose was all the more evident delivered in the restrained interior of the Warburg Institute. Firbank’s princess is so Muriel Spark: part-abbess, part Miss Jean Brodie, dropping graceful barbs. The sudden separation of newlyweds and the languid snarling is very Noël Coward. Lines of lamenting dialogue might have dripped straight from the mouths of the young things in Waugh’s Vile Bodies, published 10 years later. The women abandoned by their hubbies bear the loss easily: “It’s far too hot to wear a ring!” one explains. “Oh, don’t ask me, please, to wear another thing more! Not even a sneer.”
Miranda Richardson imitated the cry of a baby with such exactness that people looked round for the nappy-wearer (whose father wants to pack him off immediately to boarding school). It was a treat, too, to hear Liza Sadovy’s very funny suffragist: “I think we’ve slept together once… at the opera.” I’d not before seen Timothy O’Hara – expansive as a rococo Italian youth – on stage but will look forward to doing so again.
The occasion brought back two memories. The first a general one: of how a rehearsed play-reading can be at once stimulating and relaxing. The other was of another neglected novelist. Brigid Brophy, the subject of a talk by her biographer Michael Caines, was a strong advocate of Firbank, about whom she wrote the book Prancing Novelist; the title echoes an unprintable title of Firbank’s own. She wrote regularly for the London Review of Books when I was working there, cogently, fiercely, often about Public Lending Right; often about animal rights. She, together with Maureen Duffy, whose death was announced last week, helped to get legislation changed, and she transformed Hollinghurst’s life. In 1981 he found her LRB essay about animals “unanswerable” and has not eaten meat since.
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