The Artificial Princess

by Ronald Firbank, Coleridge Kennard (Introduction)

The Artificial Princess is the best possible introduction to the novels of Ronald Firbank. His earliest completed novel, it is not long - indeed it can almost be read, in Firbank’s words, during ‘a pause just long enough for an Angel to pass, flying slowly.’ The setting is an eccentric Ruritanian court, presided over by a King with one glass eye (‘I never know which is looking at me,’ the Queen would sometimes complain’) a Queen with large hands, ‘like a gladiator’, and a Princess described as a Minx. It is not a wealthy Court: ‘Tomorrow,’ the Queen says, ‘we will begin our economies. The Court shall have rabbits for dinner. So good for them. . . . The King stared into the hollow of the Moon, murmuring ‘rabbit’ in a deranged voice, as if it were a plot, or the name of a poison.’ If that begins to amuse you, there is a lot more of it.
The novel was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s Salome – but the connection with the Biblical story is remote – when Jokaanan appears, for instance, he is an unexpected figure: ‘The saint wore a gardenia in his buttonhole, and his hair – a dusky gold – seemed decidedly waved.’ He ‘would look like a Donatello in his bath.’
Firbank’s style is entirely his own; in later novels it becomes even more characteristic of his extraordinary personality, and is unquestionably easy reading only for his admirers. But The Artificial Princess is sheer pleasure from first to last: as the critic Jocelyn Brooke put it, ‘As a specimen of all that is most delicate and witty in Ronald Firbank [it] could scarcely be surpassed; the perverse humour, the fantastic characters, the sly innuendo which characterize all Firbank's work, are already present'.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

British novelist Ronald Firbank was born in London, the son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MP Sir Thomas Firbank. He went to Uppingham School, and then on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He converted to Catholicism in 1907. In 1909 he left Cambridge, without completing a degree.
Living off his inheritance he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. Ronald Firbank died of lung disease while in Rome.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firbank is a dazzling writer but this is not his most fascinating work - it is wonderfully frothy and fun but it seems to me to be trying too hard - is a pastiche of Wild? Well I think Firbank is too unique to accuse him of pastiche, but the Wildean touches or debts are too heavy to miss and they range from 'Salome' to 'The Sphinx Without a Secret' and the last is perhaps most pertinent - there is no point to this little jue d'espirit, and though I am not a great believer in the necessity of literature having a point, there are limits to when the glitter of the surface just appears as gilt on gingerbread and not very tasty gingerbread at that.

Maybe I can only take Firbank in small doses, I read this within a few days of 'The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pereli' and I think it was too soon, Firbank is a very rich author and appreciating him en masse my be the difference between relishing an individual piece of rococo frippery and standing in the Green Room in Dresden castle with thousands of bejewelled trinkets surrounding and drowning out all senses.

It may also be that the very setting, a small court of an equally small kingdom comparable, to me, with those of Munich, Dresden or Stuttgart, does not conjure up anything but images of tedium, all those images of pre WWI monarchs in their ridiculous uniforms and trappings all of which reflected nothing, supported nothing, were in aid of nothing except the pointless performance of monarchy that had ceased to have any meaning or purpose. Rather like a recent coronation in a country were most people now have the most tenuous grasp of the difference between the coronation of their head of state and the crowning of a winner on reality tv. Courts and their flummery are dull institutions.

So for me this work is not one I cannot live without, I am not even sure it really deserves four stars, but then it doesn't deserve less, it is beyond judgements like that. It just is rather like a peacock, beautiful, pointless, lovely to encounter but rather annoying after awhile but after a break you will be happy to see it again.

[Jim Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just in case you think the Decadent Movement in Literature ended with the arrest of Oscar Wilde in 1895, the works of Ronald Firbank are there to disabuse you of that notion. Written in the 1920's and 30’s, Firbank’s novels are naughty, superficial and supremely ridiculous. The Artificial Princess barely has a plot, but uses Wilde’s play Salome as a starting point. Lists of exotic plants, fashionable painters and images from a Hapsburg-like court are worked into something akin to what Huysmans might write if he were a flaming queen instead of a tortured aesthete.

[Jacob Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A pause just long enough for an Angel to pass, flying slowly."

[sch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Porcelain delicate, but oddly perverse. Chapter 1 may try your patience.

[Reading in THE COMPLETE RONALD FIRBANK, Duckworth 1961]