Firbank's Inclinations and the nouveau roman

SHAUN McCARTHY

Firbank’s Inclinations and the nouueau romm

Ronald Firbank’s mature novels - if we ignore, that is to say, both the precocious Odette d ‘Antreuernes and the giggle of protest with which he would have rejected so ultimately unamiable a concept as that of maturity - amount to no more than ten very slim volumes, all of which were published between 1915 and 1926. Of these I shall mention (because I choose to; it is difficult to judge Firbank’s novels on any terms other than those of personal preference) Inclinations, the main object of this present study, published in 1916; Caprice (1917) and Vdmouth (1919); The Flower Beneuth The Foot (1923) and The Eccentricities of Cardinal pirelli, his last work (1926). These few books, despite their unimpressive bulk and even more unimpressive sales figures, none the less sufficed to establish their author as one of the principal cult figures of the Decadent Twenties; as the orchestral conductor Herbert von Karajan has been unkindly described as ‘a sort of musical Malcolm Sargent’, so by the same token seems Firbank then to have been regarded as a kind of aesthetic Michael Arlen, devoid, however, of the ingredient of great popular success. Pretty much ignored throughout the Second World War, his work underwent a ‘revival’ of a tiresomely familiar kind in the early ’SOs, partly through the championing of Edmund Wilson’ but chiefly in consequence of the West End production of a highly-praised musical review based on his novel Vdmouth. Penguin published this novel, together with two other titles, as a moderate- sized paperback in 1961: Ill-at-ease in death (as most certainly he would have been alive) to anything so inherently wgar as critical acclaim, Firbank sided swiftly back into a decent obscurity and has occupied over the past few years something very like the position he occupied at the time of his demise in 1926 - which was accomplished, Lord Bemers says, ‘in as strange and aloof a fashion as that in which he had lived’.’ He has, in other words, become once again the idol of a small and not particularly vociferous clique, sharing thus the fate of his contemporaries ‘Saki’ and Domford Yates!

‘A narrow man and restless - writhing like a basket of serpents’! The Firbank legend has always depended as much upon his calculated oddities of behaviour, his engaging displays of a whim of iron, as on his literary achievement, this to the point where much of the best Firbank criticism has been forced willy-nilly into the guise of biography and memoir. In this category Miriam Benkovitz’s full-length study Rot& Firbonk must obviously be placed; and if my intention here is in some small way to redress the balance, my initial debt to Miss Benkovitz’s very perceptive commentary is considerable.

Firbank and the nouveau roman 65

Of Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot , Benkovitz has observed :

. . . CItl is not a love story, but as usual with Firbank’s novels a commentary on a number of things: courts, England and the English, human passion, the religious life. The comment is not explicit. It is made by technique, that is, by a manipulation of setting, characten and situations so that, in a sense, they perform technically as do the images of poetry. Wallace Stevens in The Necesmy Angel spoke of an imag in poetry as a ‘restatement of the subject of the image in terms of an attitude’. In Tbe Rower it is not the characters or their setting which perform the function of images; it is their relationships and shifts in relationship, 8s well as the expeaations these e to use and disappoint. That is to say, Firbank’s comment depends on contraries. . . Firbank was accustomed to comment technically rather than specifically. By such means in most of his fiction he had remarked on the trqedy and tragicomedy of humanity’s transgressions in the name of religion. But it is a more developed method in The Flower Beneuth the Foot, so that the remarkable ending is only one aspect of a statement remarkably controlled by technique. . .‘

The meaning here given to the term ‘technique’ must seem to parallel closely that given it by Mark Schorer some twenty-five years ago in an essay granting the expression a new and a considerable importance:

. . . Technique is the means by which the writer’s experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend to it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and finally of evaluating it. And surely it follows that certain techniques are sharper tools than others, and will discover more ; that the writer capable of the most exacting sautiny of his subject matter will produce works with the most satisfying content, works with thickness and resonance, works which reverberate, works with maximum & . . .’

Schorer’s object here was to arbitrate the Wells-James controversy and emphatically in favour of the latter; the question of whether technique, in this very broad sense, may serve as a vital evaluative principle is one that the novels of Firbank - who is most certainly, as Benkovitz claims, a ‘technician’ - raise in a most interesting form. His experiences and observations, she suggests,

. . . were useless without intellectual socuS and artistic fonn. The intellectual focus came from the kind of education and experience he had. It was a part of his grow@ up. The artistic form was another matter. Fiiank shared with other writers of the early twentieth century - Joyce, Pound, Ford, Woolf, Eliot, al l giants by cornparisan - the struggle for a form by which he could convey the inner reality of what he talked about. Firbank needed a means to impart at one level his amwment and, at another, his dismay with the human scene at a time of cultural and social upheaval of cataclysmic proportions. He rcplired this form only after hesitant and amplex &tic decisions. . .’

It is, of course, ‘amusement and . . . dismay’ that many writers of the post-war period - e.g. Huxley, Waugh, West and Fitzgerald - seek chiefly to

66 Critical Quurterly, vol. 20, no. 2

convey; and since with these writers also ‘the comment is not explicit’, we may not be surprised to find the techniques developed by Firbank prefiguring, to some extent, their own. To speak of Firbank’s ‘intellectual focus’ as being ‘a part of his growing up’ may seem over-obvious; Benkovitz adds depth to the mrmnent, however, by quoting at length from a very early and unpublished Firbank novel, composed, apparently in 1896, when the author was ten years old.

. . . We returned last week, Lila said & have been staying with some friends of Lady Bonchester’s in Wales. Wales is charming said Mrs Keston, squesing her dog who was making violent overtuers to Lila’s retrever who was laying peaceabiley on the mat. I’ve just been over to the Swintons with a message from my husband. May I penwade you to come & have lunch with me Miss Rivers, I’m all alone! Lila hesitated I am afraid - she began. You will come? said Mrs Keston perswasifley I am so dreadfully dull, Harry (duding to her husband) has gone rabbit shooting & wont be back until seven. So Lila consented, & sent word by a village child, to Lady Bonchester spying that she would not be back till after lunch, the dog she left wih the post mistress until she returned. Mrs Keston swept out of the post office after sending a telegram & Lila followed not sorry to have at last some thing to do. Mrs Keston talked nonsence the whole time, hardly giving Lila time to answer they passed up the drive to the house, it was a lovely old place sairounded by a park filed with beautiful trees, which was in full sight of the sea. They went into the diniig room, Mts Keston put the dog in its basket, tited her hair before-a mirror, langwidly sat down k calved a chicken. She asked the butler when the master would be home, & then began chatering away to Lila. .?

The attendant shades of Mr salteena and of Ethel Monticue do not prevent Benkovitz from perceiving in this first novel ‘the nudeus of Firbank’s fiction, characters isolated in self-absorption’;’O in fact one might go a great deal further. In an excellent introduction to the Collected Edition of Firbank’s works, Ernest Jones notes his permanent concern with ‘a society devoted to the pursuit of fashion and the preservation of impeccable surfaces.’” The ‘langwid’ Mrs Keston, who ‘talked nOzlSence the whole time’, is an archetypal Firbankian character; Jones, indeed, notes also that ‘the language of his characters is private, often that of aristocrats who no longer trouble much to communicate with the outer world, but who can rely on one another (and by inference on the reader) for complete comprehension’. *

If this indeed is the author’s inference, it might in justice have been added that the reader’s receptivity is tested by him very thoroughly; comprehension of Firbank’s @ar method of expression is as difficultly attainable as the comprehension of that of Joyce and Eliot - indeed Jones’ comment might be applied with an equal exactness to the language of Prufrock, different super- ficially though this may be from Firbank’s ecstatic irrationality. In Firbank’s novels the women do, very precisely, come and go, talking of Michelangelo:

Firbank and the nouveuu roman 67

‘Tobecontinuallybeautiful,likeyou,dear.’herhostesssaid. ‘HowIwishImuld.. . .’ ‘Yet I date my old age,’ Lady Parvula replied, ‘from the day I took the lift first at the

UffiZi!’

‘You dear angel.” ‘Effie overdoes her hospitality I somehow think. Placing rouge in all the bedrooms.

‘Who is there downstairs?’ ‘Such gold-wigged Botticellis - playing bridge. They’ve sent me up to look for

‘For me?’ ‘To watch them.’ ‘I won’t. Because where would be the good?’”

I grow old. . . . I grow old. . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers. and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. . . .”

Even in Mr Fairmile’s room, poor boy! ’

you.’

The peculiarly encapsulated world of Firbank has all the characteristics of what a thermodynamicist would call a high-entropy state within a closed system,“ an equilibrium of exhaustion; it presents us with the apotheosis of ‘tastefulness’, the resolution of the conflict of the natural and the artificial (as we have so far studied it) in terms of the unconditional triumph of the latter. The consistency with which emotion is ~ansposed by the author into affectation is altogether remarkable. Yet here, as also with Eliot, the suppressed or exhausted element of the equation is noteable by uirtue of its absence; just as Hemingway’s celebration of the ‘natural’ man - reaching alertly for his revolver at the sound of the word culture - constantly suggests a paradoxical underlying sensitivity, so do Firbank’s creatures of artifice - like Years’s ‘golden handiwork’ - constantly suggest the deeper ‘human complexities of mire or blood’. It is certainly no coincidence that Firbank’s early novels, like Pncfock and like Connolly’s later invocation of the classically-ordered mode of existence in The Unquiet &me, are products of a time of war and of unprecedented human stress.

As for the bmks that were written during the war itself, the best of them were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and tried not to notice that the war was happenmg. Mr E. M. F m e r has described how in 1917 he read ‘Prufrodr’ and others of Eliot’s early poems and how it hearted him at such a time to get hold of poems that were ‘@ocent d public-spiritedness’ :

They sang of private disgust and difMene, and of people who seemed genuine because they were unattractive or weak . . . . Here was a protest, and a feeble one,

68 Critical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2

and the more con@ for being feeble . . . . He who could turn aside to complain of lpdies and drawing-rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage. . . ?l

Forster’s comment is ‘well said’, as h e l l remarks, and true; yet misses the point that pnr/ock, as much as the poetry of Wilfred Owen, is ‘about’ the war - because the poetry is not in the war but ‘in the pity’, and more precisely - to pursue the apparent paradox - in the pity inherent in the absence of pity, in the withering of the emotions and of the moral conscience that accompanies the lengthening of the casualty lists. Firbank’s characters are absolutely pitiless - ‘absolutely’, in something very like its philosophical sense; pity is a disturbing element, is hence in ‘bad taste’. The egocentricity of the Firbankian character-structures is something virtually new in English literature; in the find breakdown of the communications process, communion becomes impossible. All that is left is ‘conversation’.

Inclinations reveals a nigh-total independence from virtually all previously- established techniques of narrative rhetoric. It is divided - apparently quite arbitrarily - into two sections. In the first, Mabel Collins visits Greece with her friend Geraldine (Gerald) O’Brookomore; there she meets and marries Count Pastorelli, to the great disappointment of Gerald (who had hoped to establish with Mabel a Lesbian relationship). There is an unexplained shooting accident in which an actress, Miss Arne, is killed by a Ivlrs Arbanel. In the second section, Mabel and her baby daughter are with her mother and her sister Daisy in their family home, which is being sold up ; they converse. That, in terms of summary, is all.

The novel, moreover, is typical of Firbank’s work in general in its manner of touching upon symbolic usages employed by later writers without pursuing - indeed deliberately neglecting, as it seems, to pursue - their symbolic implications. Initially, for example, an excursion appears to be proposed into E. M. Forster country, with Greece an acceptable substitute for the Italy of A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread and with Gerald O’Brookomore - yet another ‘lady writer’ - combining certain of the distinctive qualities of Miss Lavish and of Miss Bartlett :

‘Believe me, I’d deal with the manager without the least compunaion.’ ‘You’d complain?’ ‘I’d demand to change my toom. . . .’

amd an exact equivalent to Lucy’s momentous carriage-trip into the country is again proposed -

‘. . . I hate to sight-see. However, tomorrow, I’m told I must. Mr Arbanel has engaged an open coach. . . . But, as I said to him, it would no longer be a coach. It would be a wagon. . . .’


‘YOU should take a cab and drive to Eleusis. . . . On Sunday, I believe, it’s the only

Mrs Arbanel looked bored. . . . l9

thing to do.’

- but, and characteristically, never takes place. Miss Arne’s accidental death may remind us both of the incident of the

stabbing in A Room with u View and - in its utter inconsequence - of the death of Grace in Those Barren L a v e s ; the technique of authorial disassocia- tion, of abstinence from all emotional involvement, clearly prefigures Huxley but is taken to a greater extreme.

‘Oh, it’s awful, it’s hideous!’ Miss Collins broke out. . . . ‘Today I feel turned forty! This has made an old woman of me. Oh, goodgratious!’

In her silver hat crowned with black scotch roses drawn down dose PCT~BS her eyes she might perhaps have been taken for more.

‘Mr Arbanel, poor man, seems almost to be broken. Vina’s vulgar violence, he said, disgusts me more than I can ever say - and when her maid went to her door, she said, “Go away! I’m Proserpine.’”

‘Oh. . . . If anyone had fold me, Gerald, that I’d become acquainted with a bride-murderess. . . I should never have believed it.’

‘What do they intend to do?’ ‘Decamp - if they’re wise.’ ‘When I saw her in her black dress, Gerald!’ ‘It was a pure accident - naturally, she said, when questioned.’ ‘One tries to believe it was.’ ‘She would wave her gun about so. I was in terrors all the time!’ ‘I suppose there was an inquest?’ Miss Collins said. ‘I really couldn’t say. . . : ‘I should like to have been at it.’ ‘One longs for the country now - to get away. . . . ’ *O

It might be said that, as Joyce dislocates syntax and Eliot imagery, so does Firbank seek to dislocate conuersution to a similar purpose - that of persuading the reader to re-create that nine-tenths of the iceberg of social custom and behaviour that lies beneath the surface of the spoken language. Of course there is nothing new in the intention, as such; indeed, this aim may be accounted fundamental in most literary dialogue; what is unusual is for the device to usurp the structural roles of plot characterisation and background and to thus h o m e the cornerstone of a novelist’s technique. It will be proper here to stress, however, the importance of conversation in the literature and the social ethos of the period immediately following the First World War; Pryce-Jones speaks of the eagerness of the decade to approximate ‘all art to conversation’, and V. S. Pritchett has noted as a tendency of the period ‘the pursuit of conversation as disinterested enquiry as well as for its own sake’?’ The relevance of the ‘party scene’ so characteristic of the novels of the ’20s and ’30s to this theme will be evident, nor should we forget, in this connection,


the snatches of ‘conversation’ that break in so abruptly, and to the contemporary reader so surprisingly, upon the lyric intensity of The Waste Jhd.

The brief reference we have made in our summary to the impending sale of Mabel Collins’s family home may have suggested that, in the second Section, the impending loss of the house has some thematic importance, indirectly stated; comparable, perhaps, to that of the house in Chekhov’s The Chewy Orchard or to the implied fate of Shaw’s He.artbre.uk House.22 Yet here again, any such potential symbolic values are so little stressed as to seem quite inapplicable; the tone of Firbankian conversation does not resemble in the slightest that created by Chekhov or Shaw and is such as to seem to preclude any such an interpretation. It has a quality well conveyed, as it seems to me, by Robbe-Grillet :

Les conversations se &odaient i vi&, comme si les phrases ne signifiaient rien, ne devaient rien sipfier, de toute manitire. Et la phrase commenk restait tout ’a coup en suspens, comme fig& par le gel. . . . Mais pour reprendre ensuite, sans doute, au mihe @t, ou ailleurs. $a n’avait pas d’importane. C’6taient toujour~ les m2mes conversations qui revenaient, les m h e s voix absentes, Les serviteurs etaient muets. Les jeux m e n t silencieux, naturellement. C’etait un lieu de repos, on n’y traitait a u y affaire, on n’y tramait pas de complot, on n’y parlait jamais de quoi ce fGt qui put kreiUer les passions. . . . 23 Conversations take place in a void, as if the phrases were empty of meaning, or anyway shoukd be empty of meaning. And sentences, once commenced, are left hanging in the air as though frozen . . . to be continued later, no doubt, at the point where they left off, or somewhere else. It dwsn’t much matter. It’s always the same conversations that are resumed, the same absent voices. The servants are mute.’ The games are played in silence, naturally. It’s a restful place, no business is going on, no schemes are being worked out, nothing is ever said that might or should awaken passions. . . .

And the ‘conversations’ in L’Annie dernihre 2 Marienbad, though devoid of the Firbankian breathlessness and sparkle, represent a very similar going- through of motions by totally self-absorbed and passionless beings:

M: A : M:

M: A : M: A : M: A : M:

Je frappais. . . . Vous n’entendiez pas? Mais si. Je vous ai r6pondu d’entrer. Ah bien. . . . Vous n’avez pas du le dire tres haut. (Vne silence. Il regarde la photo.)

Qu’est-ce que c’est que m e photographie? Vou le voyez. . . une vielle photographie de moi. Oui. (Un temps.) De quand dntet-elle? Je ne sais pas. . . . De 1’m& dernik? Ah. (Un temps.) Qui l’aurait donc prise? Je ne sais pas. . . . Frank pht-etre. . . . L’ann€e demi€re, Frank n’etait pas id.

(une silence.)

Firbank and the nouueuu roman 71

A : Eh bien, a n’&t peut-etre pas ici. . . . C’&t peut-etre ‘a Frederiksbad. . . , Ou

M: Oui. . . . sans doute. (Un temps.) Qu’ava-vous fait de votre ap&-midi? A : Ken.. . . J’ailu.;. . M: Je vous ai cherchee. . . . Vous &a dans le parc? A : Non, dans le salon vert . . . pr& de la salle de musique. M: Ah bien. . . . J’y suis pa& pourtant. (Une silence.) A : Vous aviez quelque chose ‘a me dire? M: Non. . . .24

bien c’ a ait quelqu’un d’auue. (Un temps.)

This is certainly a rather studied and solemn exercise in non-communication ; Firbank’s touch in comparison is feather-light :

‘Tell me about the Marriage State. Is it what you expected it to be?’ The Countess threw up her eyes. ‘I didn’t expect anything,’ she said. ‘Let me look at you wedding-ring, Mabel, may I? Only for a minute.’ ‘What do you want it for?’ ‘I won’t eat it.’ ‘There’s nothing very novel in a wedding-ring. Wait till you see my peruls.’ ‘Where are they?’ ‘With my otkr jewels.’ ‘I should like to borrow some.’ ‘I dare say.’ ‘Do you know of anyone likely to suit me?’ ‘A lover?’ ‘Nobody, Mab . . .’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘. . . Mabsey?’ ‘Oh, have pafience.’ ‘It’s a pity the Bovon boys are so rabbity - they’re for ever with their noses down

The Countess fluttered her eyelids. ‘How are the dear ferrets?’ she asked. ‘All right.’ ‘And the farm?’ ‘All right.’ ‘Any changes?’ ‘Only in the house. Olga and Minnie have gone. Olga said she was gld to go. She

‘Is Queen as queer as ever?’ ‘queerer.’ ‘Impossible.’ ‘He and Mrs Prixon don’t get on. What Spicer endures st meals - talk about

Nathalie k a u t e has suggested, in an important essay, that

a hole. ’

said nodung would induce her to stop.’

silence! And next week there’ll be a fnsh footman. . .’”

. . . Les romanciers brhavioristes, qui x servrnt -t de dialogues seltis de


b k e s indications ou de b e t s commentaires, poussent dangereusement le roman sur le domaine du thdtre, ou il ne peut que se trouver en ‘at d’i&orit6. Et, r enonp t auxmoyensdont seuIIeromandispose, ik renoncent ice qui fait de lui un art i part, pour ne pas dire un art tout court. . . .*’ Behaviourist novelists, who make abundant use of dialogue backed by brief indications or discreet commentary, are pushing the novel clangmusly close to the domain of the theatre, where it must find itself in a condition of inferiority. And, renouncing those rhetorical means that only the novel enpys, they tenounce that which makes of the novel a separate art form - not to say an art form ;ouf court. . . .

and it may well seem possible to indict Firbank on precisely these grounds. Sarraute, however, is unstinting in her admiration for Ivy Compton-Burnett:’ whose novels - like Firbank’s - consist largely of highly formalised dialogue and whose characters match Firbank’s in their relentless and unpitying self- absorption; ‘The novels are temfying because of the studied calm with which the facts about human cruelty and selfishness are revealed. . . . Miss Burnett deals in closed societies, families whose mutual tormentings are covered by the most polite and conventional outward behaviour. . . . It is a dark vision of life, conveyed through the medium of delicate and witty entertainment’.” The same is true of Firbank, though such a presentation would certainly seem to him over-emphatic; it is of the essence of the Firbankian approach that, in the last resort, u n‘uuuit pus d’importunce. It seems to me likely that Robbe-

small family and marital groups in an atmosphere of ‘studied calm’:O would mgnise in Firbank a kindred genius.

It is curious to note, in this connection, that whereas the novels of Compton- Burnett - though written in the ’20s and ’30s - relate historically to the turn of the century and the period of lo belle ; p o p e , the total lack of reference in Firbank’s work to all contemporary event makes them peculiarly dateless ; it is doubtful whether, in the last resort, the world of Inclinations is any less fantastic than those of Bruue New WorM and 1984 - novels where the basic antithesis of the natural and the artificial is emphasised, and to some extent also vdgarised, through the creation of hypothetical social constructions in which, however, certain aspects of the contemporary social complex are clearly mgnisable. In these novels, however, it is the sexual relationship that constitutes a citadel of natural behaviour (a symbolic association maintained and elaborated, in a more naturalistic field, by Lawrence, Hemingway and their successors); in Firbank’s novels, however, sex also is completely artificialised and seems to constitute little more than a set of ground-rules for an elaborate literary game. While it is true that Firbank’s stylistic - his intense aestheticism and overtly homosexual thematic - links him closely to Wilde and the Decadents, and while it is true that this superficial element made him a cult-

Wet and d esnais, who likewise seek to establish the ‘mutual tormentings’ of


figure in the late ’20s - ‘the flowery language, the decadence, thefin-de-sikle naughtiness - it was delicious’” - and no doubt to some extent today, Forster is obviously and utterly wrong to dismiss him in much the same t e r n as does Mannin - ‘literary affectation, of course’:

. . . There is nothing up to date in him. He i s j n de O d e , as it used to be called; he belongs to the nineties and the Yellow Book; his mind inherits the furnim and his prose the cadences of Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill. . . . What charms US in him is his taste, his choice of words, the rhythm both of his narrative and of his conversations, his wit and - in his later work - an opulence as of gathered h i t and enamelled skies. . . .33

This may be what charms Forster in Firbank, but it is not what charms Sarraute in Compton-Burnett; if Firbank was not up to date in 1929, when Forster wrote this essay, he would seem to have become so since.

We return, as of necessity, to Schorer’s concept of novelistic technique and to Benkovitz’s insistence on Firbank as techniaan. ‘It is not the characters or their setting which perform the function of images; it is their relationships and shifts in relationship’1‘ This is of course also a very precise description of the chief characteristic of the novels of Iris Murdoch, the most accomplished of present-day technicians - if we may continue to use the word in this sense - and the counterpart in Britain, as it seems to me, of the practitioners of the noweuu roman. The title and theme of her first novel, Under the Net (1954), are established through the formal mirror-inversion device of the writer- narrator reading what he has earlier written:

If by expressing a theory you mean that someone else could make a theory about what YOU do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net. . . ?

The implications of this somewhat Wittgensteinian pronouncement (and we will hardly need reminding that Murdoch is a professional philosopher and the author of a brilliant study of the work of Sartre) in the context of works of fiction would seem to be that narrative should constitute a sequence of unrelated situations rather than the kind of entity which is normally suggested by the words ‘plot’ or ‘story’, and that moreover such sequence-situations may then be inter-relatable uniquely as sets ; the term nuwutive will resemble the Wittgensteinian usage of the term game, in that it will imply an analogy between various activity-groups that share, in fact, no one common factor?‘ To ‘plot’ a novel in the traditional sense, however, is to relate it to a certain preconceived theory of abstraction, a recognised behaviour-pattern that will


facilitate - in so far as the reader accepts such a pattern - prediction and retrodiction with respect to temporally separate elements; and this Murdoch suggests is undesirable, since all such theorising represents ‘flight’ from reality.” Hence Murdoch provides a philosophical basis for that distinctively contemporary form of the novel - the nouveuu roman, precisely - where narrative pattern seems analagous to musical development rather than to conventional ‘story-telling’ and where the activities of the characters are as meaningless, or as meaningful, as those of dancers; they perform ‘a dance to the music of time’, ‘with their goat-feet tread the antic hay’. Richards perceives in the development of this device the essence of Eliot’s poetic achievement, while referring to that achievement - significantly here - as one of ‘technique’ :

If it were desired to label in three words the most characteristic feature of Mr Eliot’s technique, this might be done by calling his poetry a ‘music of ideas’. The ideas are of all kinds: abstract and concrete, general and particular; and, like the musician’s phrasg, they are arranged, not that they may tell us something, but that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude and produce a peculiar liberation of the will. They are there to be responded to, not to be pondered or worked out. . . .”

In view of the final admonition, a dreadful irony may be attached to the readiness displayed by so many to ‘make a theory about’ what Eliot did in The Waste Land - ‘of course that is true and uninteresting’. Murdoch’s comment reflects the distrust that so many modern writers have felt, not so much for the traditional forms of the art they practise as for the ways in which such traditional forms are traditionally interpreted.

Nothing is more paralysing that a sense of historical perspective, especially in literary matters. At a certain point perhaps one ought simply to stop reflecting. I had contrived in fact to stop myself just short of the point at which it would have become dear to me that the present age was not one in which it was possible to write a novel. . . .”

From such a viewpoint as this, it seems that the importance of Firbank’s work must be considered seminal. Firbank, too, gives the impression of having ‘stopped himself short’ of precisely this same point; his novels show, as we have said, no ‘sense of historical perspective’ whatever; they exist very evidently as disco~ected series of random incidents to which no discernible ethic or ‘theory’ can convincingly be attached, and where a symbolic association is implicit Firbank is, as again we have said, almost ostentatious in his rejection of it. ‘On n ‘y traitait aucune afaire, on n ’y tramait pas de complot, on n ‘y parkait jamais de quoi ce fat quipllt eveiller les pusions. . . .”’ The total effect of his work is to raise, in a very odd way, the fundamental question of temporality in fiction; and when I say ‘in an odd way’, I mean that the


question is not raised - as in L’Annke derniere h Matienbad, in Urysses and in Hamlet - deliberately, as a theme for artistic exploration, but by accident. At least, this appears to be the case. It would seem that the disproportionate development of a minor element in novelistic structure - in Firbank’s novels, formal dialogue - forces a re-examination of the validity of the structure as a whole, and this compulsion can itself be employed rhetorically; Robbe- Grillet, for example, in La Iulousie outrageously overdevelops the minor narrative element of physical desqiption at the cost of all others, exactly reversing, we may say, the roles given by Firbank to description of this kind and to did~gue;~’ this enables him to achieve some remarkable and, I think, unique temporal effects - a dislocation of narrative time, as conventionally in fiction understood.

Firbank does not and is not concerned to achieve this kind of a rhetorical dislocation; the effect is rather of a suspension of almost all causal analysis on the part of the author occasioning a suspension, on the reader’s part, of the predictive faculty as customarily brought to bear on works of fiction; the relationships described by Firbank ‘are there to be responded to, not to be pondered or worked out’. I am not saying, in some circumlocutory way, that one does not read Firbank for the story - at least, not simply that. Harold Nicolson may have showed considerable intuitive acumen when, in his Lumbert Orme‘’ - a remarkably accurate reconstruction, from all accounts, of Firbank’s personality and character - he described Orme as a poet rather than a prose-writer, and a poet, moreover, of a distinctly Eliotese derivation; and Benkovitz, in the passage opening this present essay, also suggests the Firbankian technique to resemble, in some respects, that of the poet; it is these judgments, in effect, that I am echoing in saying that if Eliot introduces into poetry certain of the rhetorical devices formerly appropriate to the novel,” Firbank’s work introduces to narrative prose some of the techniques appropriate to modem poetry. It requires, hence, a more substantial effort at imaginative interpretation than has been commonly accorded it. It may seem evidently to be the case that the conversational fragments shored up by Firbank against the ruins enclose a smaller and less significant area than that surrounded by the prodigious erections of Joyce, Yeats and Eliot, nor is the creative achievement, such as it is, buttressed and explained by a developed critical philosophy; no theory supports it. But this, as Murdoch suggests, is, if not Firbank’s strength, at least the source of his extraordinary originality. ‘The movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth’. If one may admit the paradox, the claim made is not a modest one.

76 Critical Quarterb, vol. 20, no, 2

Notes 1

1

3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

His article A Revival o / R d firbank eppeared in the New Yorker for December loth, 1949, and was republished in Classics and Commerchh (1951). The other titles included were ,prancing Nigger and The Eccentricities of Cmdinal Pirelli. See Lord B e r n ’ contribution to I. K. Fletcher’s Ronald Firbank: A Memoir (1930), p. 148. F i r b d , although a Catholic, WBS in fact buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. Who were, strangely enough, cousins. Holt Marvell, cited by Fletcher, op. cit., p. 67. Mariam J. Benkovitz, Ronald firbank (1970), pp. 208-9. Mark Schorer, ‘Technique as discwery’, F m s of Modern fiction, ed. O’Connor (1948), pp. 9-10. Benlrovitz, op. cit., p. 5. Firbank, Lila, cited by hkovitz, of. cit., pp. 16-17. Benkovitz, op. cit., p. 18. Jones, Introduction to Firbank, Thee Novels (1949), p. xvii.

Firbank, Valmouth: Five Novels, p. 25. Firbank, Inclinations: Thee Novels, p. 206. Eliot, Coltected Poems, p. 15. See A. S. Eddington, The Nature ofthe Physical World (1928), pp. 69 ff. George Orwell, ‘Insii the whale’, Collected Essays, Jourrsalism and Letters, vol. 1,

Firbank, op. cit., p. 228. Op. cit., p. 233. Op. cit., pp. 264-5. Both references are cited by Meckier; see his Aldous Huxley: Satire and slructure,

hbkshed in 1919. RokGrillet, L’AnnSe dernibe Matienbad (1961), pp. 98-9. RobbeGrillet, op. cit., p. 143. Firbank, op. cit., pp. 2%-7. ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’, L’Ere du Soupton (1956), pp. 79-124. Op. cit.. p. 113. See op. cit., p. 119-22. David Daiches, The Besent Age (1958), p. 117. The classic elegance of the chateau in L’Annk dernidre clearly counterparts the ‘dtBwing-toom’ of Eliot, Firbank and Fmter. Other directon, not of the so-called nouvelle vague, have employed this rhetorical device, e.g. Malle in Les Amants and Doniol-Valcmze in L’Epu a la bouche. Ethel Mannin, Young in the Twenties (1971), p. 92. Mannin, loc. Cit. E. M. Fmter, ‘Ronald Firbank’, Abinger Harvest, p. 132. BenLwitz, op. cit., p. 208, asearliercited. Murdach, Under the Net, p. 81. See WittgenStein, Philosophical Inuestigrrrions (1%3). 1.66, p. 31e. ‘Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. . . . What is common to them all? . . . If you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities,

LOC. cit., p. xiv.

p. 574.

p. 25.

77

relationships, and a whole series of them at that. . . . We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and Criss-crossing: Sometimes o v d similprities, somaimes similarities of detail. . . .’ The Right fim the Enchmter is indeed the title of Murdoch’s second novel; the allusions are not only SheUeyan. but Wittgensteinian also; the ‘enchanter’ is langunge. Op. cit., 1.109, p. 47e; ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelli- gence by means of language.’ The idea that narrative, as such, is unsusceptible to categorical definition evolves naturally from Wittgenstein’s view of language - ‘We see that what we call “xntence” and “language” has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is the family of structures more or less related to one another’ (op. cit., 1.108, p. 46e). We evade thus, of course, the difficulty of having to decide whether structures as various as those of Rarsekrs, The Golden Ass, The Unfortunate Traveller, Tristram s h a d y and - for that matter - Inclinations are to be acmunted novelistic. I. A. Richards, finc@les ofLiteraty Crituism (1926)’ p. 293. Murdoch, op. cit., p. 19. Robbe-Grillet, L’Anne‘e &mi& ;Mmienbad, p. 99, earlier cited. In Raymond Roussel’s L Vue, an early novel written in alexandrines, several hundred verses pufportedly describe the label on a bottle of mineral water; I have not read this novel, nor do I intend to, but see M a w A d o , review of Locus Solus. Revista de Occidente, 101-2 (August-September 1971), p. 375. ‘Varios criticos han &dado la repticion narrativa de 10s l ibm rousselianas, que Cuentan dos veces la misma escena por distinta via.’ See NicoLwn, ‘Lambert Orme’, in Some People (1927). ‘Appropriate’ through usage; not in any categorical sense. I do not wish to imply that rhetorical devices may be accounted spedic to one, or to the other, or to any literary form.

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Firbank's Inclinations and the nouveau roman

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