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)
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