Featherpate of Folly

FEATHERPATE OF FOLLY G. C. HADDOW ... You ask me who Have written just as I'd have liked to do. I stop to listen and the names I hear Are those of Firbank, Potter, Carroll, Lear. w. H. AUDEN, "Letter to Lord Byron" I Nane respect at least the novels of Ronald Firbank resemble Paradise Lost. They are likely to be appreciated only by a small, select audience; though had Firbank wished to call upon some heavenly power to find him such an audience, he would probably have invoked not Urania but one of the many saints of his own invention, St. Automona di Meris or the Blessed St. Elizabeth Bathilde "who, by dint of skipping, changed her sex at the age of forty and became a man." It would be idle, however, to maintain that Milton and Firbank have much else in common. Milton writes of Good and Evil and holds strong opinions about them. Firbank is unaware of their existence. There is plenty of naughtiness in his stories, "making light of sacred things" and bawdy innuendo, but moral judgment and righteous indignation are conspicuously absent. One would no more think of looking for a serious purpose in Valmouth than in Peter Rabbit. When W. H. Auden said that the authors whom he would most have wished to write like were Firbank, Potter, Carroll, Lear, he put Firbank in the right company as an inspired writer of nonsense . Milton, of course, occasionally deviates into nonsense, especially in dealing with angels; but Firbank never deviates into sense, and rarely into dulness. The son of a wealthy Member of Parliament and the grandson of a large railway contractor who had begun his career in the mining pits of Durham, Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was born in London in 1886. He was a delicate child and seems to have been pampered and indulged by his parents, especially by his mother to whom he was devoted and to whom he retained a lifelong attachment of such a nature as to preclude normal emotional and sexual development . At fourteen he was sent to Uppingham, but he was withdrawn from the school at the end of his second term, fortunately in time to escape having the nonsense knocked out of him. After several years of private tuition, during which he paid extended visits to France and Spain, he went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he entertained his friends lavishly and was converted to Catholicism. He did no work and sat for no examinations. When he left Cambridge, he 191 Vol. XXIV. no. 2, Jan., 1955 192 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY lived for awhile with his mother in London, his father having died the previous year. As a fashionable young man about town he attended the theatres and the Russian ballet, which he adored, became a well-known figure at the Cafe Royal, and collected rare editions of Wilde and Beardsley. Never robust in health, he made long sojourns in Mediterranean climates, Italy, Spain, North Africa, and the Near East, from which he would return to London for the season, announcing his arrival in the social columns of the Morning Post. The outbreak of war in 1914 put an end to his travels and, indeed, to the only kind of life that he had ever known or could cope with. A year later he had settled in Oxford and become a recluse. Deprived of his outside interests and thrown in upon himself, Firbank now began seriously to cultivate his talent as a writer. When immediately after the war he returned to London and society, he had produced four slender volumes and gained a modest, limited celebrity. He resumed his old habits, wrote a play which was never performed, lived for some time at Versailles, and made a voyage to the West Indies. During his last years, which were saddened by the death of his mother and shadowed by ill health, he lived mostly in Italy. He wrote three more novels, the last appearing posthumously, before his death at Rome in his fortieth year. An absurd, lonely, rather pathetic figure, Firbank never learned to take anything seriously except his love for his mother and his art...