Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was a British novelist. He was born in London January 17, 1886; and died in Rome May 21, 1926.

Son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MP Sir Thomas Firbank, Firbank 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 had published his first book, Odette d'Antrevernes, in 1905 before going up to Cambridge. From then, from The Artificial Princess (1915) to Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1920) he published a series of novels peopled with the most remarkable characters - a king with the air of a tired pastry-cook, a choirboy with the vaguely distraught air of a kitten that has seen visions, a musician with a voice like cheap scent, several young gentlemen of great and insolent beauty, and an extraordinarily large number of clergymen.

His longest novel, Vainglory (1915) was the first that would develop a sustained reputation. Not his most readable work, it nevertheless contains many of the witty, slightly 'camp' phrases which Firbank admirers quote to each other: 'When I try to do arithmetic clouds come down upon me like they do in Tannhäuser'. 'There was a pause - just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.' 'The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.'

Inclinations (1916), takes place mainly in Greece, where Mabel Collins, 15, is traveling with her female chaperone, Miss O'Brookomore; Mabel elopes with an Italian conte, but the plot is of minor importance, the book's interest - as with all Firbank's work - lying in the dialogue.

Valmouth (1918), perhaps Firbank's masterpiece and his best-known book, is based on the activities 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 plot, such as it is, is concerned with the attempts of two elderly ladies, Mrs Hustpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House, Captain Dick 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 by Sandy Wilson gave the novel some mildly scandalous popularity in the 1960s. It has several times been revived and recorded on CD.

In The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923), the setting is an imaginary country which may be assumed to be 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, alternatively entitled Prancing Nigger (1925) was especially successful in America. The scene is laid in a West Indian republic (compounded of Cuba and Haiti). A family of blacks, socially ambitious, 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 nakedly chasing a choirboy around the aisles.

Firbank's one play, The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), has been compared to William Congreve, but is rarely produced; Dame Edith Evans, perhaps the greatest English actress of her time, played the part in a radio production in 1964. The dialogue is highly characteristic: as, Princess Zoubaroff: '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.'

Some critics dismissed, and still dismiss his novels as slight, but they have been championed by a large number of English novelists including E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Simon Raven, and in 1961 the poet W. H. Auden in a radio broadcast praised him highly. The result was that opinion eventually shifted and the books came to be seen as innovative comic novels.

Ronald Firbank died of lung disease while in Rome. He left among his manuscripts the first few characteristic chapters of a novel set in New York, The New Rythum ^*, published in 1962 after a sale of many of his manuscripts and letters.

His Complete Short Stories were published in a single volume in 1990 (ed. Stephen Moore), and his Complete Plays in 1991 in a volume containing The Princess Zoubaroff, The Mauve Tower and A Disciple from the Country.

For biography, see:

• Jocelyn Brooke, Ronald Firbank, London, Arthur Barker, 1951
• an essay in Osbert Sitwell, Noble Essences, London, MacMillan, 1950
• Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist (1973) is an eccentric biography; a new one is needed.

English novelists | 1886 births | 1926 deaths | Alumni of Trinity Hall, Cambridge | List of Roman Catholic converts

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