The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (1923)

The feeling with this novel is that it is the apotheosis. The absolutely typifying central point may have been reached. Another striking thing about it is the realisation of how much of it is Firbank's own work. I am used to thinking of him as the assembler of shards, a builder of puzzles made of many little pieces. But in fact most of the grand swing of this is in his own words, or so it seems. Set in the mythical Mediterraneo-Arabic tiny nation of Pisuerga, in its camply overdone royal court, this is the story of Laura de Nazianzi's doomed private passion for Prince Yousef, and about the visit of the king and queen of a neighbouring nation, The Land of Dates. Full of hints of decadence, overstated heatedness and tendencies toward hissing confession and the pull of the cloister, Firbank serves up a feast of orientalist, colonialist, aestheticist hues. It never happened, but one can imagine the illustrated edition, with full colour plates and exquisite gold tooling on the cover. His liking for an oddly turned sentence is in full spate in this - with a particular penchant for what might be called interpolative qualifying - little tippings-in between commas in a larger clause(!), which lend an unmistakable rhythm: "Propped high by many bolsters, in a vast blue canopied bed, the Archduchess lay staring laconically at a diminutive model of a flight of steps, leading to what appeared to be intended, perhaps, as a Hall of Attent, off which opened quite a lot of little doors, most of which bore the word: "Engaged."" Many are simpler, with short one-word furtherings like that 'perhaps' which fulfil the Firbankian cloudy swish-of-the-hand intent perfectly. The fact that these assemblages are reasonably clearly all his own is the most important one. He was not only a magpie of the oddness of Edwardian high conversation, he was also a phenomenal stylist in his own right.

Commonplace Book

'Death. He had never seen it. As he saw it now, he thought that he had never beheld anything so incontestably real as its irrevocable stillness. Here was finality; here was defeat beyond repair. In the face of this judgment no revolt was possible. Only acceptance was possible. The last word in life's argument had been spoken by an adversary for long remote, forgotten; an adversary who had remained ironically dumb before the babble, knowing that in his own time, with one word, he could produce the irrefutable answer. There was something positively satisfying in the faultlessness of the conclusion. He had not thought that death would be like this. Not cruel, not ugly, not beautiful, not terrifying - merely unanswerable...'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part II, Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'"...the great inevitable is perhaps the least intolerable of all human sorrows. There is, after all, a certain kindliness in the fate which lays the obligation of sheer necessity upon our courage."'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part II, Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'"You'd not think now by the look of her she had been at Girton!" Mrs. Bedley remarked.

"Once a Girton girl always a Girton girl, Mrs. Bedley."

"It seems a curate drove her to it...."

"I'm scarcely astonished. Looking back, I remember the average curate at home as something between a eunuch and a snigger."

from The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'Forbidden in youth by parents and tutors alike the joys of paddling under pain of chastisement, the Archduchess Elizabeth appeared to find a zest in doing so now. Attended by a chosen lady-in-waiting (as a rule the dowager Marchioness of Lallah Miranda), she liked to slip off to one of the numerous basins or natural grottos in the castle gardens, where she would pass whole hours in wading blissfully about. Whilst paddling, it was her wont to run over those refrains from the vaudevilles and operas (with their many shakes and rippling cadenzi) in favour in her day, interspersed at intervals by such cries as: "Pull up your skirt, Marquise, it's dragging a little, my friend, below the knees..." or, "A shark, a shark!" which was her way of designating anything that had fins, from a carp to a minnow.'

from The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (Chapter II)

Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (1900)

This is the sequel to the author's previous novel The School for Saints, and forms the last part of the life story of a fictional Disraeli-era MP. It is also a notably conservative Catholic piece, and a long way from the author's start in literature as a wit of the early 1890s. In this second part we are primarily in London, where Orange and his beloved Brigit have returned after their continent-wide explorations and intrigues of the previous book. The story is mainly concerned with the eponymous lead man and a group of his intimates, as they realise that they each either love someone else, or are betrothed where they shouldn't be. They are all investigating their options at the prime of life and where they should be led by them. Unfortunately I think too much of the book is taken up with these wonderings - it has a static feeling for long periods. But against that can be laid the author's still aphorismic style - she has a great facility for drawing up and out of a particularity she has created in the plot, and discussing it in poetic and philosophic terms, honing in on a rich and complete statement of exactly what counts in the matter. More's the pity that this aptitude is not directed into humour as it formerly was. The only other concern would be that two of the main characters end up, almost unconvincingly, in holy orders. Orange becomes a monsignor and deserts British politics altogether, and Sara de Treverell, who loved him knowing she couldn't have him because his heart was Brigit's, gets herself to a nunnery. Meanwhile Brigit's very odd course through this history is completed as an accomplished stage actress! Perhaps I'm really trying to say that I don't quite believe in the psychology. It's still a quietly elegant book.

Commonplace Book

'...An island! land that had slipped the leash of continents, forsworn solidarity, cut adrift from security and prudence! One could readily believe that they made part of the divine, the universal discontent, that rare element, dynamic, life-giving, that here and there was to be met about the world, always fragmentary, yet always full and illuminating, even as the fragments of beauty.'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part I, Chapter IV)