Life & Letters | 4 July 2009

‘I think there would be something wrong with a middle-aged man who could take pleasure in Firbank’. That, more or less, was Evelyn Waugh’s judgement in the interview he accorded the Paris Review in the mid-Fifties. (I say ‘more or less’ because I can’t lay my hands on that volume of the interviews, but if the words are not exact, the sense is). Yet Firbank had, as he admitted , influenced him when young, along with Hemingway, who had also, as Waugh observed, developed ‘the technical discoveries upon which Ronald Firbank so negligently stumbled’.

That quotation, unlike perhaps my first one, is accurate, for it is taken from an  admiring essay on Firbank’s work which Waugh wrote in 1929. He had reservations even then: ‘His coy naughtiness about birches and pretty boys will bore most people with its repetition’; and he admitted that ‘even among critics of culture and intelligence there will, no doubt, always be many to whom his work will remain essentially repugnant’. Nevertheless ‘condemnation of him implies . . . distaste for a wide and vigorous tendency in modern fiction’.

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Though the young Waugh may himself have delighted in the naughtiness that such critics found repugnant, for his own homosexual phase was not long behind him, it was probably the simpering frivolity of Firbank’s treatment of sex which came to irritate him in middle age. But his chief interest in 1929 was in what he called Firbank’s ‘technical peculiarities’, which had enabled him to find a solution to ‘the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction’. He had achieved ‘a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form.’ His later novels were ‘almost devoid of any attributions of cause to effect; there is the barest minimum of direct description; his compositions are built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances’.