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3 More Novels: Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice
Three More Novels is a series of animated tableaux filled with beautiful, eccentric women pursuing pleasure in the most wicked, perverse, irresponsible ways, written by an extraordinary Englishman who dared to be as original in his books as he was in his life. So cleverly and wittily are the stories told that we sense we belong in the charmed café society of post-1918 Britain, and life seems, as Ernest Jones says in his critical introduction, "a Nirvana in which homosexuals are the ultimate chic and in which... almost everyone turns out to be at least bi-sexual." In Vainglory , Mrs. Shamefoot, who "almost compels a tear," embraces the quest for a cathedral stained-glass window "that should be a miracle of violet glass." In Inclinations, Miss Brookomore, filled with longing for her companion, the "sunny" Miss Mabel Collins, travels to Greece where Mabel, rather treacherously, acquires a husband and baby. And in Caprice , Miss Sinquier flees her rural parents and the comfort of her black slippers ("all over little pearls with filigree butterflies that trembled above her toes") to pursue an acting career in bohemian London. To quote Mrs. Shamefoot describing a novelist clearly meant to be “He has such a strange, peculiar style. His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way. If one should by chance turn about it’s usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace. Only occasionally his figures care to beckon. And they seldom really touch." Originally published in 1951, Three More Novels by Ronald Firbank is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook.
431 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1915
About the author
Ronald Firbank
45 books57 followersBritish novelist Ronald Firbank was born in London, the son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MP 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. Ronald Firbank died of lung disease while in Rome.
Living off his inheritance he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. Ronald Firbank died of lung disease while in Rome.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 15, 2015
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
--Vainglory
--Inclinations
--Caprice
Appendix 1: Variants in the 1915 Edition of 'Vainglory'
Appendix 2: Part II, Chapter IV, of the 1916 Edition of 'Inclinations'
Appendix 3: 'Ronald Firbank' (1936) by E. M. Forster
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
--Vainglory
--Inclinations
--Caprice
Appendix 1: Variants in the 1915 Edition of 'Vainglory'
Appendix 2: Part II, Chapter IV, of the 1916 Edition of 'Inclinations'
Appendix 3: 'Ronald Firbank' (1936) by E. M. Forster
July 23, 2009
Reading Ronald Firbank, a good writer once told me, was like opening up a jewel box. Gazing over it's sundry contents - which, if I am to elaborate- would be of uncommon assortment and wonder! Precious stones of clashing colours, possibly on christian relics inset, tiny golden Byzantine feet charms, Ancient Greek (Sappho's maid's broach?) bits, Renaissance Venetian death-lace, a tarnish cow-bell, etc., etc., etc! The Firbank wavelength is about the pleasure and the that exact moment of reading - nothing adds up or comes together in the end out of all that has been spilled in the course of these short novels. No character is really too defined, each of them are almost interchangeable vehicles for whips of amazing dialogue. Mistake this not as vacant writing - it is not! Taken as a whole it may seem like total surface, but each line, when almost on it's own, bubbles with a strange giddy-making profundity. A page of Firbank equals a pile of Proust.
April 25, 2018
I'd recommend this collection of early novels only to established Firbank fans. While 'Caprice', published in 1917 is tight and fairly engrossing, if not prime Firbank, 'Vainglory (1915) and 'Inclinations' (1916) read almost like juvenilia, with the first especially tedious and surprisingly lead-footed.
Read
October 30, 2018 “Isn’t Mr Firbank delightful?”
“You mean the new rector of Chipping Woodwork?”
“No, I mean the novelist. Well, perhaps, possibly, one should nominate him a fictionist instead.”
“What is your exquisite reason?”
“He does not write ‘novels’ as such—at least not sequenced narratives with plot and character evolution through the facing of their conflicts.”
“What does he write?”
“Exquisite observation, in a class with Wilde and Proust.”
“I’m afraid I am familiar with neither.”
“Prithee allow me to pastichate.”
The Duchess rotated her cranium.
“He can’t tolerate a ptarmigan,” she commented.
“My darling, it is not even on the menu.”
“Once my little offspring was driving with me on the Rio Ca Di Dio, when we saw a ptarmigan glancing out of a gravesite. Oh, such a beauty! So I commanded the footman to stop and demanded that he go capture and kill the bird. He retrieved it for me. . . And a few hours later we had a fine partridge stock boiling . . . Ugo had it all . . . . But hardly had he swallowed it when he was stricken by the most violent spasms. At which point he whirled on me and charged me with trying to do what some Renaissance wives had allegedly done. Ach! He was so angry. He was as angry as anger. . . So no ptarmigan.
“Gabbiani, peut-etre?”
“In huile d’olive; garnished; comme Mussolini.”
“And to follow?”
“What he really craves is a bagel.”
“Cheese?”
“Of course. And he loves savoury. Zucchini. . . And soufflé....
“No fear.”
“Enfin—“
“Truffle oil!”
“And encore—“
“Encore,” Lady Tom Collins’ voice swelled as if by divine impulse, “then croquettes—a la Bolognese.”
The End.
I hope this is abundantly clear.
“You mean the new rector of Chipping Woodwork?”
“No, I mean the novelist. Well, perhaps, possibly, one should nominate him a fictionist instead.”
“What is your exquisite reason?”
“He does not write ‘novels’ as such—at least not sequenced narratives with plot and character evolution through the facing of their conflicts.”
“What does he write?”
“Exquisite observation, in a class with Wilde and Proust.”
“I’m afraid I am familiar with neither.”
“Prithee allow me to pastichate.”
The Duchess rotated her cranium.
“He can’t tolerate a ptarmigan,” she commented.
“My darling, it is not even on the menu.”
“Once my little offspring was driving with me on the Rio Ca Di Dio, when we saw a ptarmigan glancing out of a gravesite. Oh, such a beauty! So I commanded the footman to stop and demanded that he go capture and kill the bird. He retrieved it for me. . . And a few hours later we had a fine partridge stock boiling . . . Ugo had it all . . . . But hardly had he swallowed it when he was stricken by the most violent spasms. At which point he whirled on me and charged me with trying to do what some Renaissance wives had allegedly done. Ach! He was so angry. He was as angry as anger. . . So no ptarmigan.
“Gabbiani, peut-etre?”
“In huile d’olive; garnished; comme Mussolini.”
“And to follow?”
“What he really craves is a bagel.”
“Cheese?”
“Of course. And he loves savoury. Zucchini. . . And soufflé....
“No fear.”
“Enfin—“
“Truffle oil!”
“And encore—“
“Encore,” Lady Tom Collins’ voice swelled as if by divine impulse, “then croquettes—a la Bolognese.”
The End.
I hope this is abundantly clear.
August 3, 2010
Uncommon writer - builds plot and characters through conversation. Offers a spectacularly vivid picture of the English upper class: their mannerisms, fripperies and eccentricities. And a hero and model for the intellectual gay man both then and now (nb Stephen Fry's Moab is My Washpot) and influenced Waugh and Forster amongst others. Modernist, pre-Woolf and Joyce. I enjoyed these stories the most of all his novels as they were easy to read and relatively easy to follow. And funny, in a savage, satirical way.
June 5, 2022
Firbank's first 3 novels. What a strange, rarefied world he creates, with his own inimitable style. At their most Firbankian, these are like half-overhearing a bunch of upper class types chatting and gossiping, catching the odd bon mots and catty comments, half comprehending their strange obsessions and arcane social rituals. Most of his characters are women, and the impression one gets is of a small male child having listened in and later written down the chat he'd heard but not understood whilst sheltering beneath his mother's coattails. That said, there's a great proliferation of double entendres along the way, so the final feeling one gets is of reading an unfinished collaboration between Virginia Woolf and Talbot Rothwell.
The plots barely exist. Vainglory tells of a London society dame who goes to a town in the provinces, determined to have a memorial window (to herself) installed in the cathedral. This gambit at immortality is told in a way which emphasizes the ephemeral nature of her set. Voices float, and we're not always clear who is speaking, but they all speak in the same affected manner and all come across as profoundly unserious people, as if a deep thought had never troubled one of them. It's hard to know whether Firbank was just having fun with, making tribute to, or launching a scathing attack on a class of people. The descriptive writing gives a sensual impression of the locations, the ornaments and furniture floating by as if in a dream, which is what life is on the purely sensual level.
Inclinations is very similar, with a slight plot around a certain Miss Collins' possibly inappropriate friendship with a woman biographer who drags her to Greece, from which she is rescued by a marriage to an Italian count. He promptly neglects her, and the second part details (with a bit more descriptive prose than the first part, which is entirely dialogic) her life waiting for her husband to show. It cuts off rather randomly with him arriving back home, which portends... who knows? There's a shooting in the Athens section, although I wasn't quite sure who got shot, and Firbank shows no interest in identifying the killer.
Caprice is more conventional, with its Trelawny of the 'Wells'-type tale (of a wealthy runaway Anglican Dean's daughter determined to set herself up on the London stage) forever threatening to turn into one of those lurid sagas of a young lass seduced by craven types; it never does. The London theatre scene is shown to be gossipy and facile, full of folk on the make or those who've bought their fame, with art the last thing on the players' minds. Another random ending has her dying in some kind of backstage accident (perhaps she fell into the well?).
They're certainly intriguing stylistically, with occasional lines which leap out as witty or even profound aphorisms. There are plenty of hints at sexual depravity, and some characters are clearly homosexual. Although written during WW1, that conflagration doesn't register on the writer at all.
The plots barely exist. Vainglory tells of a London society dame who goes to a town in the provinces, determined to have a memorial window (to herself) installed in the cathedral. This gambit at immortality is told in a way which emphasizes the ephemeral nature of her set. Voices float, and we're not always clear who is speaking, but they all speak in the same affected manner and all come across as profoundly unserious people, as if a deep thought had never troubled one of them. It's hard to know whether Firbank was just having fun with, making tribute to, or launching a scathing attack on a class of people. The descriptive writing gives a sensual impression of the locations, the ornaments and furniture floating by as if in a dream, which is what life is on the purely sensual level.
Inclinations is very similar, with a slight plot around a certain Miss Collins' possibly inappropriate friendship with a woman biographer who drags her to Greece, from which she is rescued by a marriage to an Italian count. He promptly neglects her, and the second part details (with a bit more descriptive prose than the first part, which is entirely dialogic) her life waiting for her husband to show. It cuts off rather randomly with him arriving back home, which portends... who knows? There's a shooting in the Athens section, although I wasn't quite sure who got shot, and Firbank shows no interest in identifying the killer.
Caprice is more conventional, with its Trelawny of the 'Wells'-type tale (of a wealthy runaway Anglican Dean's daughter determined to set herself up on the London stage) forever threatening to turn into one of those lurid sagas of a young lass seduced by craven types; it never does. The London theatre scene is shown to be gossipy and facile, full of folk on the make or those who've bought their fame, with art the last thing on the players' minds. Another random ending has her dying in some kind of backstage accident (perhaps she fell into the well?).
They're certainly intriguing stylistically, with occasional lines which leap out as witty or even profound aphorisms. There are plenty of hints at sexual depravity, and some characters are clearly homosexual. Although written during WW1, that conflagration doesn't register on the writer at all.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
gave-up-entirely
February 16, 2023Too clever and too much dialogue for my poor addled mind. Couldn't get into the style or follow what was going on. Apparently Angela Carter loved Firbank and it was on her recommendation that I tried him. [Charles Gray voice:] However.
Skimmed these three novels. Some lovely words and phrases, but could make neither heads nor tails of them all together. For some reason I'm reminded of collages by Henry Darger or Richard Hamilton (except those more or less make sense).
Skimmed these three novels. Some lovely words and phrases, but could make neither heads nor tails of them all together. For some reason I'm reminded of collages by Henry Darger or Richard Hamilton (except those more or less make sense).
Read
July 17, 2023DNF@50%. Too mundane, it was like an old fashioned version of The Real Housewives
April 1, 2016
What amount of stars do I have to give it in order to convey that while I didn't exactly like it, I also definitely didn't Not like it?
The thing about Firbank is that I don't understand what the thing about Firbank is. I wanted to like him; in fact I wanted to Love him. I wanted to love him because everything I've read about the man himself made me wish I'd been alive back then to have a chat with him, maybe lift his spirits a bit in the process, I wanted to love him because he was at least to some extent influenced by Oscar Wilde - whom I happen to admire immensely - and because, while reading Vainglory, I found underneath all the seemingly nonsensical rubble bits and piece of absolute brilliance. Last but not least, I wanted to like him because Richard Canning's introduction to this book probably deserves some sort of literary award on its own; it's always a pleasure to witness someone speaking candidly and passionately about what they love, and Mr. Canning admires Firbank's oeuvre with such unabashed intensity it makes one wish they could feel the same way.
I sense there's so much potential in this one tiny novel; I feel almost guilty for not being able to unearth it all in one read. I plan on re-reading this book again in the hopefully not-so-distant future, and I trust that Firbank's writing is an acquired taste, and that once my taste buds get used to the novelty of it all, they'll find themselves craving more.
Also, I want my own window.
The thing about Firbank is that I don't understand what the thing about Firbank is. I wanted to like him; in fact I wanted to Love him. I wanted to love him because everything I've read about the man himself made me wish I'd been alive back then to have a chat with him, maybe lift his spirits a bit in the process, I wanted to love him because he was at least to some extent influenced by Oscar Wilde - whom I happen to admire immensely - and because, while reading Vainglory, I found underneath all the seemingly nonsensical rubble bits and piece of absolute brilliance. Last but not least, I wanted to like him because Richard Canning's introduction to this book probably deserves some sort of literary award on its own; it's always a pleasure to witness someone speaking candidly and passionately about what they love, and Mr. Canning admires Firbank's oeuvre with such unabashed intensity it makes one wish they could feel the same way.
I sense there's so much potential in this one tiny novel; I feel almost guilty for not being able to unearth it all in one read. I plan on re-reading this book again in the hopefully not-so-distant future, and I trust that Firbank's writing is an acquired taste, and that once my taste buds get used to the novelty of it all, they'll find themselves craving more.
Also, I want my own window.
February 7, 2015
Another book bought for me by my supervisor, though it had been previously recommended to me by certain extracted quotes that made it seem an appealing read, as well as by mentions of it in The Swimming-Pool Library. But I really struggled with the writing. I feel like I only half-heard anything and kept losing my attentiveness, which is what all the characters are doing to each other when anyone talks but which is also something I don't really go in for when I'm reading. And the back says that Auden and Forster and Waugh adored Firbank and sets it up as if to not like his work is to be a fake Forster fan or something, which I rather resent. Greg wanted to buy me Valmouth, I think, or The Flower Beneath the Foot: Being a Record of the Early Life of St. Laura de Nazianzi, but they couldn't be found.
Maybe I was reading it all wrong, but it was simply something I couldn't properly enjoy however much I tried.
Maybe I was reading it all wrong, but it was simply something I couldn't properly enjoy however much I tried.
February 27, 2013
[Reading in THE COMPLETE RONALD FIRBANK, Duckworth 1961]
So many characters, and at least to a 21c American, so much obscurity.
If we must find a plot, it is Mrs Shamefoot's wrangling for a commemorative stained glass window in the Anglican cathedral at Ashringford.
According to Anthony Powell's Introduction, "Mr Harvester" is Firbank himself. See pp 82, 89, 199
A few representative lines:
"Somehow, some people are so utterly of this world that one cannot conceive of them being grafted into any other." (146)
“Nobody denies her her taste in flowers,” Mrs Pontypool exclaimed. “Though from her dress one wouldn’t perhaps take her to be a Christian.” (160)
"I'd give such *worlds* to be a widow," Miss Pontypool declared. (166)
So many characters, and at least to a 21c American, so much obscurity.
If we must find a plot, it is Mrs Shamefoot's wrangling for a commemorative stained glass window in the Anglican cathedral at Ashringford.
According to Anthony Powell's Introduction, "Mr Harvester" is Firbank himself. See pp 82, 89, 199
A few representative lines:
"Somehow, some people are so utterly of this world that one cannot conceive of them being grafted into any other." (146)
“Nobody denies her her taste in flowers,” Mrs Pontypool exclaimed. “Though from her dress one wouldn’t perhaps take her to be a Christian.” (160)
"I'd give such *worlds* to be a widow," Miss Pontypool declared. (166)
October 27, 2013
It started badly for me in mid-conversation between two characters, taking quite a few paragraphs to unfold and make sense of what is going on in the story (actually very little). This is one of my least-favorite literary devices, but what really didn't work for me as a reader is a lack of cultural and historical context.
American English is my second language and I found myself at sea trying to figure out many little bits and pieces which I'm sure are supposed to be funny but made no sense whatsoever. I am sure it must be charming for native British readers but from an outsider point of view it reminds me of, say, a Mannerist derivative little master whose work might be significant for a historian studying the period, but doesn't transcend its social milieu for later viewers/readers.
American English is my second language and I found myself at sea trying to figure out many little bits and pieces which I'm sure are supposed to be funny but made no sense whatsoever. I am sure it must be charming for native British readers but from an outsider point of view it reminds me of, say, a Mannerist derivative little master whose work might be significant for a historian studying the period, but doesn't transcend its social milieu for later viewers/readers.
August 4, 2007
What to make of Ronald Firbank? I still don't know. Perhaps that's his charm. Be prepared for an onslaught of almost (but not quite) purple prose and improbable flights of fancy. There's no one else like him.
August 6, 2007
Purple and lavendar are to mild of words to describe Firbank, yet it's hard not to appreciate the charms of this sometimes too precious author.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews