The Centenary of Ronald Firbank's 'Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli': A Guest Post by John Howard

Ronald Firbank’s biographer Miriam Benkovitz declared that ‘No one in the history of English letters has been more dedicated to the literary vocation than Ronald Firbank. Until his ninth novel was published in 1924, he had got back not “one farthing piece” for all his work, and even then he received less than a thousand dollars’ (Ronald Firbank, 1969). Benkovitz did not speculate on the earnings, if any, that would have accrued to Firbank for his tenth novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, which was first published one hundred years ago in July 1926. Benkovitz had reached the final page of her biography. Time and space had run out, for Firbank had died, aged forty, six weeks before. This centenary of an appearance is also that of a departure.

Of anecdotes concerning the eccentricities of Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank there seems no end. Benkovitz described how Firbank would saunter through London’s streets, ‘skirting Covent Garden to void the “massacre of flowers” and holding a handkerchief before his eyes when he passed a butcher’s shop’. In Charing Cross Road he would examine the books in the bins in front of the shops. H would frequently visit Cyril Beaumont’s bookshop and ask: “Have you anything in my line today; you know, something vague, something dreamy, something restful?” Did Firbank perhaps have his own novels in mind? The description could fit – but it is far from entirely accurate. Benkovitz considered Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli to be, in its way, ‘a masterpiece of morality and technique’. While it carried Firbank’s ‘deepest and most mature convictions, it is in fact a wholly imaginative creation inspired by the “rose coloured palace” of the Archbishop of Seville and the “giddy flight” of the “Giralda-tower”. She also wondered whether in his ‘compulsion to seem wicked, a feeling which recurred throughout his life, might not Firbank have presented in Pirelli a perverse apotheosis of himself and then, as he was almost ready to do with his own artificial temperament, stripped the Cardinal of his gaudy trappings?’

In the great cathedral of the Andalucian city of Clemenza, Cardinal Archbishop Don Alvaro Pirelli conducts a baptism – of the Duquesa DunEden’s new pet, a police-dog puppy called Crack. Pirelli’s latest eccentricity has not gone unnoticed – or unreported. There have been many previous ‘frolics’ and the ‘consequences of cutting too dashing a figure’. Perhaps the Pope will be asked to decide the fate of the figure responsible for the ‘scandals of Clemenza’… In the vast cathedral sacristy the Secretary of the Chapter, Don Moscosco, ‘a burly little man, a sound judge of women and bulls’, sits at his bureau and holds court ‘with tactful courtesy, at the disposal of anyone soliciting information as to “vacant dates,” or “hours available,” for some impromptu function.’ The sacristy serves as the place where information – gossip – is received and exchanged amid the backbiting.

In Rome Pope Tertius II, ‘out-of-doorish, as Neapolitans usually are’ strolls in his garden, contemplating the possibility of having to condemn or even unfrock Pirelli: ‘a snarl, a growl, a bark, a yelp, coming from the font, would be quite enough…’ In the ‘decaying monastery of the Desierto’ Pirelli is on retreat, ‘idly considering his Defence. “Apologia, no; merely a defence”’. Chicklet, a favoured young acolyte from the cathedral, is with him ‘serving both at Mass and table’. Lingering after dinner, Pirelli imagines that ‘the great Theresa herself would flit in from the garden […] seeking, it was supposed, a lost sheet of the manuscript of her Way of Perfection.’ After drinking bumper after bumper of wine he begs her to teach him (once again?) that Way.

In his palace Pirelli prepares to leave for Rome. While packing he muses on the punishment he has given Chicklet for chasing mice in the cathedral: ‘It must have been love that made me do it.’ The Cardinal, ‘his sensitiveness hurt by the lad’s disdain and frivolity’ had locked him into the cathedral in the dark, with the mice. Deciding to relax his punishment, Pirelli goes to release the boy. Their verbal fencing becomes a game, accompanying pursuit and evasion. No innocent, Chicklet keeps out of reach until dawn is near, when he escapes from the church. The chase ended and now alone, ‘dispossessed of everything but his fabulous mitre, the Primate was nude and elementary now as Adam himself’. Pirelli collapses before a painting of Christ’s crucifixion. Unknown to him, he had been observed by Madame Poco, his faithful housekeeper: ‘It looked as though his Eminence was far beyond Rome already.’ She coils her chaplet about him: ‘“It’s wonderful what us bits of women do with a string of beads, but they don’t go far with a gentleman”’.

Firbank was a cardinal of camp and snobbery whose ‘wholly imaginative creation’ in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli crafted a succession of set pieces or sketches, highly pictorial and brightly coloured, into a slim novel. Each scene is enacted within what is, effectively, a stage set where everything is bathed in heat, sunshine, or moonlight. All are packed with sensual detail, snatched incident, and dialogue at a slant. Even if there is ‘no story’ there are happenings – a gradual progression. Events, one thing after another hazily and partly revealed, lead to the surely inevitable conclusion. The narrative flows, switching scenes and characters as a dream does. In terms of dream it holds together and coheres – but purely on its own terms. To expect anything else in a Firbank novel is to look in the wrong direction.

Perhaps part of the explanation lies in the way Firbank wrote. Often on the move, he kept notebooks which he filled with single words, odd phrases and sentences, and cartoonish drawings. He would then select, assemble, and expand these into a string of pearl-like episodes – his new book. Firbank conceived Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli while staying in Seville, made notes in Lisbon, and wrote it in Rome. During that time his beloved mother died, and he suffered a ‘psychic and physical collapse’ – yet he continued to write. Ronald Firbank proved that nothing could prevent him from remaining true to his literary vocation. At the end there was a man alone, naked before death and his God – and a brutally funny novel.

(John Howard)

 

Charades: A Jane Austen Rarity Revived

Withnail Books of Penrith, renowned for their chapbooks of literary rarities, have just announced a facsimile edition of Charades, Written a hundred years ago by Jane Austen and Her Family, originally published in 1895. 

This charming collection of riddles devised by the family for their own amusement and that of guests includes an introduction, family tree, illustrations, and the solutions to the charades: all except one, where the solution was unaccountably missing from the Austen family papers, allowing readers to make their own guess. 

The A5 booklet, printed on silk paper stock, comes with a hand-numbered print of the famous silhouette of 'L'amiable Jane' by an unknown artist, reproduced in the same size as the original in the National Portrait Gallery. This new edition is limited to 250 numbered copies, and Withnail's issues tend to go out of print pretty quickly. 
 

The Centenary of 'The Dancing Floor' by John Buchan: A Guest Post by John Howard

First published one hundred years ago in July 1926, The Dancing Floor by John Buchan was the third book in which his recurring character Edward Leithen played a prominent role. A man with a strong work ethic and social conscience, Leithen always seeks to do the right thing by his friends, those for whom he has responsibility, and his country. He is a high-flyer who excels at his profession and in the skills of sportsmanship. A barrister and politician, Leithen moves through the corridors of power and the London clubs and country house gatherings of the Establishment. Although part of a small and exclusive society where everyone knows each other or can be acquainted at one move – as are several of Buchan’s other recurring characters – he is not limited by it. Leithen is an assiduous networker: his professional career and wartime experiences enable him to know people from a wide range of backgrounds and all social classes.

Returning from a shooting holiday, Sir Edward Leithen sits back and tells a story. The Dancing Floor is a retrospective adventure, unfolded in secure and relaxed surroundings that contrast greatly with the immediacy of the risky and often violent events recounted. It all begins in January 1913, when Leithen takes his nephew Charles to dinner and a ball. He notices one of the other guests, a man who seems ‘so completely detached, so clothed with his own atmosphere’. This is Vernon Milburne, one of Charles’ friends.

For his Easter vacation Leithen takes a walking tour in Westmorland. Spraining his ankle, he finds help at nearby Severns Hall – the home of Vernon Milburne. They become good friends. Eventually Milburne tells Leithen about his recurring dream of a room with a door that led to a ‘second room just like the first one; he knew nothing about it except that opposite the entrance another door led out of it. Beyond was a third chamber, and so on interminably. […] He thought of it as a great snake of masonry, winding up hill and down dale away to the fells or the sea. […] Yes, but there WAS an end. Somewhere far away in one of the rooms was a terror waiting on him, or, as he feared, coming towards him.’

Milburne’s dream recurs annually, around Easter. When he had been fifteen he had fixed its date as the night of the first Monday in April, and had realised that were twelve rooms – and so years – left. Milburne, a staunch Calvinist, explains that it is ‘foreordained by God. No caprice of our own can alter the eternal plan. Now, why shouldn’t some inkling of this plan be given us now and then – not knowledge, but just an inkling that we may be ready? […] It is a reminder that I must be waiting with girt loins and a lit lamp when the call comes.’

The following spring Leithen takes a holiday in the Aegean on his friend Lord Lamancha’s yacht. Milburne was invited too, as Leithen wanted them together on the first Monday of April. While the yacht shelters off an island, they hear a ‘human voice, sweet and high and infinitely remote, a voice as fugitive as a scent or a colour’. It is the Spring Song, which ‘has probably been going on here since the beginning of time.’

War intervenes. November 1918 finds Leithen and Milburne convalescing – in neighbouring beds. Milburne has continued to dream – there are just two years left. At a ball, Milburne meets Koré Arabin, who turns out to be the granddaughter of the first English owner of Plakos – the island where they had heard the Spring Song. The family has a dark reputation, and Milburne is both attracted and revolted by her.

Further circumstance and coincidence ensure that Leithen, Milburne, and Koré come together on Plakos. The spring rite is to be celebrated at the Dancing Floor – but Koré will be in danger. The islanders ‘have suffered, and they blame their sufferings on the Arabins, till they have made a monstrous legend of it.’ A medieval account of the spring festival is unambiguous: ‘The boy and the girl had to die before the Gods could be re-born. You see, it was a last resource – not an annual rite, but one reserved for a desperate need.’

Milburne’s call had come. The story switches to his account, narrated by Leithen at second-hand. Determined to play her part, Koré had rejected with scorn Milburne’s offer to take her from Plakos. He decided to pass himself off as an islander returned from the wars so he could go onto the Dancing Floor and win the race to possess the goddess. ‘These peasants are keyed up to a tremendous expectation. A belief has come to life, a belief far older than Christianity. They expect salvation from the coming of two Gods, a youth and a maiden. If their hope is disappointed, they will be worse madmen than before. To-morrow night nothing will go out from this place, unless it be Gods.’ Milburne and his helpers resolve to ‘give them their Gods.’

Observing from a vantage point, Leithen sees how the festival ends: ‘I do not think that Koré and Vernon saw anything – they had their own inward vision. I do not know what the people saw in the presences that moved out of the darkness above them. […] The people of Plakos had gone after strange gods, but it was only for a short season that they could shake themselves free from the bonds of a creed which they had held for a thousand years. The resurgence of ancient faiths had obscured but had not destroyed the religion into which they had been born. Their spells had been too successful. They had raised the Devil and now fled from him in the blindest terror. […] The priest of Kynaetho would presently have his fill of stricken penitents.’

Buchan took time through much preparation and a leisurely build-up to bring the story to its climax. This does not matter, as there are so many good things along the way. The Dancing Floor is intelligent, thinking person’s adventure: suspense and action are mixed, smoothly, with theological stances and Classical learning and allusion. They exist for each other and never slow the pace. Buchan was a Calvinist, a cradle Protestant who had a fascination for paganism – especially the ‘old religion’ that darkly endured into the present day of modern civilisation. Partitions are thin and fragile. The rapturous descriptions of landscape and light, the colours of spring, were in his nature – as seemingly were the Nature mysteries. For John Buchan the sacred and divine are to be met with caution: there are also survivals and revivals. When the Gods come – whatever they are – be prepared. 

(John Howard) 

 

Rockwell Kent's THE JEWEL: A ROMANCE OF FAIRYLAND

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) worked in many areas as an artist, and is probably best-remembered as a painter and illustrator. Among the many books he illustrated were Beowulf (1932), translated by William Ellery Leonard; The Canterbury Tales (1934), in modern English by J.U. Nicolson; and The Saga of Gisli (1936), translated by Ralph Allen.  Oddly, the one item by which I remember Kent best is the colophon for a publishing firm founded in 1925 by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer, who had planned to call their new firm Half Moon Press, using explorer Henry Hudson's ship (the Halve Maen, i.e., the Half Moon) as the symbol.  But Kent's design was of a Viking ship, and thus the Viking Press was born. 

Ten years after Kent's death it was discovered that he had written and illustrated a small book, The Jewel: A Romance of Fairyland, for an extramarital lover. The story was finally published in 1990 in a slip-cased form (limited to 500 copies) by The Baxter Society of Portland, Maine. The Kent facsimile story is in hardcover, and a Companion Booklet to the Facsimile Edition, edited by Eliot H. Stanley, accompanied it in trade paperback. I kept a review of the book for decades before I finally acquired a copy at a moderate  price.  

Kent's tale is reproduced in his own handwriting, with half a dozen small illustrations throughout the thirteen page story. It was presented as a book to Hildegarde Hirsch on 6 November 1917. The story tells of a prince who in youth had questioned God and was thereafter doomed to be alone until he might find love in the heart of a woman. Much later, in a far land, he meets a beautiful young girl. He shows her a crystal globe in which she can see the lovely land from which he came. They plan to move there, and as they save up, they watch a tiny house growing within the globe. But the maiden has doubts, and wants to use their savings to buy a jewel. After the crystal globe is shattered, the wreckage becomes a jewel. The maiden looks radiant wearing the jewel, and becomes self-absorbed. The prince's madness returns to him. The jewel is thus named Broken Faith. The means for undoing the effects of the jewel, we are told, will come in another tale. 

But there was no further tale, and the affair soon ended, as the tale had foreshadowed, leaving a wistful melancholy for the reader, as well as a sadness that Kent wrote no other fiction. 

A New Issue of Biblio-Curiosa

I look forward to every new issue of Chris Mikul's Biblio-Curiosa.  The most recent, no. 12, came out two years ago, and now no. 13 is newly published. 

It has especially interesting contents, but one particularly sad piece is a memoir of Sandy Robertson (1952-2025), a rock journalist (and author of The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook from 1988) who had a great interest in horror fiction, especially obscure and forgotten titles.  I didn't know Sandy well, but he was a reader (and occasional commentator) of Wormwoodiana for many years, and we exchanged occasional emails.  I'd noticed recently that I hadn't heard from him in over a year, and now I know why. Sandy was diagnosed with tonsil cancer in 2023, and died in April 2025. I saw no mentions of his passing online, so Chris Mikul's reminiscence was new to me, and added much to my knowledge of Sandy. R.I.P. 

Another article of immediate interest is the review of the first English translation of Hanns Heinz Ewers's Fundvogel (1928), which concerns a woman, Andrea, having a sex change operation to become Andreas. Most of the plot, however, is melodrama, and Mikul notes that it is "Ewers's weakest novel" though it remain "an interesting and enjoyably strange piece of work." 

Mikul also delves deeply into the 1801 volume, Tales of Terror, often mis-attributed to Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of The Monk (1797). Mikul helpfully reproduces (in color, no less) some of the elegant and grotesque illustrations from the book.

The articles, with the opening page numbers, include: 

p. 2, "The Storm of London" (1904) by F. Dickberry [pseud. of Fernande Blaze de Bury]
8,  “Fundvogel" (1928; trans. 2025) by Hanns Heinz Ewers 
13, “Tales of Terror" (1801) 
20, “A Kiss of Fire” (1988) by Masako Togawa 
23, “A Time Before Genesis” (1986) by Les Dawson 
30, “The Master Beast” (1907) by Horace W.C. Newte and “The Red Fury: Britain Under Bolshevism” (1919) by Horace Newte 
36, “The Unloveliness of Love-Lockes” (1628) by William Prynne 
40, Remembering Sandy Robertson by Chris Mikul 

As usual, inquiries/orders to the author/publisher: chris<dot>mikul88<at>gmail<dot>com.

The Guide: A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work by Arthur Machen

 

Darkly Bright Press's new Arthur Machen collection, The Guide, is a 260+ page compilation of "eighty-two works originally published across twenty-seven periodicals and spanning nearly three decades," to quote from editor Christopher Tompkins's "A Brief Introduction."  It is subtitled "A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work"--for "rare" we can read it to mean as uncollected from periodicals, and for "unknown" we note that eighteen items are recent discoveries, and not referenced in the standard Bibliography of Arthur Machen (1965) by Adrian Goldstone and Wesley D. Sweetser. 

The titular essay, "The Guide," is one of the previously unknown pieces, and it appears second in the new volume, following "Thou Shalt Not Eat", a polemic against the "pompous twaddle written by . . . scientific people about meat and drink." "The Guide" (from The Daily News, 1918) is a curious rumination upon a country man's view of the city, and the city man's view of the country, both needing a kind of guide. 

And from there we find many disparate but interesting essays, reviews, etc. Some favorites include Machen's essays on some nineteenth-century literary figures from The Daily Herald in the 1920s. (Machen confesses:  "I do not like Balzac. I know that this is heresy according to the Church of Letters. I have made my confession; I am ready for the faggots and the stake.")  For The Morning Post in 1930 he wrote on the "Literary Merit of the Bible" ("It is noble vision, noble in expression."). There is a 1933 review of a volume by Richard Middleton. There are two reviews of Edgar Jepson's Memories of a Victorian (1933), and a review of Jepson's follow-up, Memories of an Edwardian (1937). The volume closes with a number of Machen's letters, including some 1936 exchanges on "folk memory" with Lord Raglan, after Machen had reviewed his book The Hero in John O'London's Weekly. .

I still have much to read in this volume, and I look forward to it. One may not always agree with Machen, but one revels in his ability with words. 

In an appendix there is an example of the shifting title and wordage of a tale from Machen's Ornaments in Jade, known variously as "Nature" or "The Splendid Holiday" or "Romance in Gwent: A Fantasia".  In another appendix is a short piece of "Notes on Arthur Machen's ''Sanfarian'" by Michael Fogus ("Sanfarian" conveniently appears earlier in the volume.)

Published in June in a limited edition hardcover, there are still some copies remaining, but if interested act one should soon to avoid disappointment.  Ordering details are available at the Darkly Bright Press website, here.  

The Centenary of 'The Connoisseur and Other Stories' by Walter de la Mare

When I began to collect supernatural fiction in my late teens, I turned first to Billingham’s, the second-hand bookshop in the town centre which had been established in the Thirties in Towcester, an old Roman town ten miles west along Watling Street. Now in the county town, Northampton, they had an old-fashioned shop in St Giles Street.

Here I found, among other things, some Machen in the slim green volumes of the New Adelphi Library, and two short story collections by Walter de la Mare, The Riddle in royal blue binding, and The Connoisseur in sand coloured cloth, both with gilt titles. These soon became favourites. I found the stories beguiling and elusive, and I learned that tales did not have to be emphatic or dramatic: they could be atmospheric, they could conjure reverie.

The Connoisseur and Other Stories celebrates its centenary this month. According to his biographer Theresa Whistler in her 1993 study, the book ‘got a more mixed welcome than the general favour’ his new work usually received: ‘Many people found the title-story far too obscure, and the tales in general too elaborate.’ However, for his Best Stories selection (1942), de la Mare himself chose ‘Missing’ and ‘All Hallows’ from this volume.

The first story, ‘Mr Kempe’, has a framing device—a meeting in a pub—which introduces the main narrator, who then takes over the story. The initial first person narrator then becomes mostly a listener, with occasional brief interjections. This is someone else’s story. The effect is to give a sense of a certain distance, and also of ambiguity: how much of the story is reallly being told?

The pub narrator, walking in lonely cliffside country, seeks directions from Mr Kempe, a reclusive retired cleric who seems to have been sent askew by his meditations on the soul: does it exist or not? This obsession has led him to a rather grim, not to say grotesque, interest in the accidental victims of the precipitous path leading to his house. Thus far, this is a study in morbid psychology. But there is an ironic, almost throwaway remark by the pub storyteller, which implies a definite spectral aspect: the place was thronging with spirits, he notes, to which his host seemed oblivious. Thus, this is a story about ghosts, but they are simply just there, in the background, like the trees and the stones and the glimmering sea. Perhaps the implication is that our instincts and impressions are better than our intellect for experiencing the otherworldly.

The title story is in some ways uncharacteristic of de la Mare in that, although it starts in the exquisite London rooms of the aesthetical title character, who is about to receive an unavoidable visitor, it then moves into several scenes of an exotic Eastern realm, embracing concepts of reincarnation and fate. It is beautifully composed and rather like a mingling of tales by Algernon Blackwood and Lord Dunsany.

In two other stories, we listen to monologues by characters who have been oppressed by a sense of the dinginess of the mortal lot, and by despair at what appears to be an actively hostile universe. One, in ‘The Wharf’, is a mother on her own by the kitchen fire reflecting on an episode of serious illness which included a disturbing dream of angelic type figures shovelling a pile of men’s souls. A farmer’s wild flowers on a dung heap, and his matter-of-fact response to them, help her to reinterpret the vision. In ‘Disillusion’, a weary author explains to a doctor why he is low in spirits while at last admitting that his work at least still sustains him. These are brooding pieces about characters like Mr Kempe who have become obsessed but who unlike him may have a way out.   

Wanderers, strangers and listeners feature in several of the other stories in the volume. The second story, ‘Missing’, has a similar framing device to ‘Mr Kempe’ but here the venue is a frowsty café on a hot day. As before, the initial first person narrator gives way to a stranger he meets, who tells a long story. Here, de la Mare is adept at depicting the spell cast by the hard heat, the dreariness and desolation of the city streets and the café itself. The story was based, de la Mare noted, on a real encounter with a stranger in a tea shop.  Forrest Reid, in his 1929 study of his friend’s work, thought this story ‘among Mr. de la Mare’s masterpieces’ whose ‘sinister quality springs largely from its reticence.’ He ranked it with ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ ‘for sheer suggestiveness’. 

‘All Hallows’, perhaps the most notable story here, has another character wandering on cliffside paths, until he comes unexpectedly on the cathedral of the title. De la Mare said the story was inspired by a description of St David’s, Pembrokeshire, though he had never in fact visited it. That cathedral is not actually on the coast but is not far inland, and it is a grand edifice for the small village where it is situated. When de la Mare did later visit he admitted to being slightly disappointed by the setting, though delighted to be mistaken himself for a cleric. 

Here, the narrator learns from a talkative verger (there are few other kinds in fiction) of dark presences in the church which seem to be pursuing a subtle and gradual spiritual assault on its structure. We are never quite sure how to take his story, whether it stems from the mind of a lonely eccentric, as in ‘Mr Kempe’, and may be all the result of morbid fancy, of if there is indeed some shadowy power at work.

The essence of de la Mare’s stories of this type, which includes examples in other volumes, such as ‘The Creatures' and ‘The Vats’, seems to be that not only is the landscape itself stranger than we might think, but so are some of its inhabitants. Wherever we go, he seems to say, we might encounter the peculiar and the uncanny, famously, in ‘Crewe’, even in the waiting room of a busy railway station. We think we walk in one world but there is another far stranger alongside it. In The Connoisseur and Other Stories he explores this theme with particular subtlety and ambiguity.

(Mark Valentine)