The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose work was path-breaking, and influence enduring. Each plaque that goes up is the result, first and foremost, of advocacy by a member of the public, and after that of strong support from the deciding panel, on which I sat for six years. We ended up each time rejecting the majority of the proposals, and it was a happy day for me, an almost unexpected breakthrough, when Firbank was proposed five years ago, and the panel readily accepted him. Acceptance has not always been his lot.

Why does he merit this honour? I think for three reasons: his own remarkable work, his literary influence, and something more diffuse but equally important, his defining presence as a queer icon. Firbank wrote seven radically original novels and one full-length play. His first novel, Vainglory, published in 1915, is the first true modernist novel in English, and the most original since Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 150 years earlier. Plot is largely suppressed and what remains is glimpsed obliquely through a montage of fragments of talk and passages of lyrical description; the effect is both aesthetically dazzling and unnervingly like life, action caught in cinematic jump cuts and conversation sampled as if by a roving microphone.

Firbank was a master of omission. ‘I think nothing,’ he wrote, ‘of filing 50 pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.’