The Flower Beneath the Foot: Being a Record of the Early Life of St. Laura de Nazianzi

by Ronald Firbank

With an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst

At the fantastical court of King Willie and Her Dreaminess the Queen of Pisuerga, maid of honour Laura de Nazianzi and His Weariness Prince Yousef whisper promises to each other in the palace gardens. But Laura is destined for disappointment. The King and Queen have plans for a royal wedding for their Prince, and the young woman in their sights is none other than Princess Elsie of England. The court is all aflutter . . .

First published in 1923, Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath the Foot is a flamboyant court satire and lyrical tour de force of innuendo and eccentricity. Read by many as a subversive celebration of homosexuality, this is a classic of modernist literature from a stylist like no other.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Classics, British Literature, Gay, Novels, LGBT

177 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1923

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Flower Beneath the Foot is a modernistic fairy tale of manners…

Neither her Gaudiness the Mistress of the Robes, or her Dreaminess the Queen were feeling quite themselves. In the Palace all was speculation. Would they be able to attend the Fêtes in honour of King Jotifa, and Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land of Dates? – Court opinion seemed largely divided.

The opening lines set the exotic style of narration right away.
There where is court, there is a prince…

Handsome to tears, his face, even as a child, had lacked innocence. His was of that magnolia order of colouring, set off by pleasantly untamed eyes, and teeth like flawless pearls.

And there is an object of his passion…

Laura Lita Carmen Etoile de Nazianzi was more piquant perhaps than pretty. A dozen tiny moles were scattered about her face, while on either side of her delicate nose, a large grey eye surveyed the world with a pensive critical glance.

Ronald Firbank mercilessly satirizes every aspect of high society: haughtiness, superciliousness, pretence, gaudy tastes, ambitiousness and superficiality.
On learning about unfaithfulness of her prince charming, Laura decides to find a refuge in the Convent of the Flaming-Hood…

‘When those we rely on wound and betray us, to whom should we turn but Thee?’ she breathed, addressing a crucifix, in ivory, contrived by love, that was a miracle of wonder.

High society life is like pink candyfloss – one bites a mouthful and finds nothing but sweetish vacuum… But the void calls.

[Dickon Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

God bless Picador for putting out this new edition of 'Flower' in 2018, with a new introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. The last serious outing for the novel was as part of Hollinghurst's 'Three Novels' for Penguin Classics in 2000, and that fell out of print soon afterwards. The US New Directions anthology, 'Five Novels', has stayed in print since the 1980s, but it sadly uses the Duckworth versions of the texts, in which Firbank's unique style of grammar and punctuation are 'corrected'. It's like a gallery tidying up Tracey Emin's bed. Hollinghurst's involvement means that this edition, as with Richard Canning's edition of Vainglory / Inclinations/ Caprice (Penguin Classics, 2012), is closer to Firbank's vision.

So this is THE great novel of camp modernism. It's camp as in a style of knowing exaggeration - which in the 1920s was one way of getting queerness under the radar (while Forster's realist novel Maurice had to wait until after 1967). That's the obvious aspect. But it's also modernist in the sense of striving to do new things to the novel form, taking its campness into the realm of the experimental, with passages of fragments and ellipses. It favours an ambience, a glittering hermetic world, a queer 'safe space' even, over realist plots, and 'logbooks of events', as Angela Carter once put it.

In the 1980s Ms Carter wrote an experimental one-hour radio play about Firbank, 'A Self-Made Man'. If you 'get' Carter (sorry), and early Evelyn Waugh, some aspects of Muriel Spark (the parts that led to 'The Driver's Seat' becoming a surreal film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol), and much of Joe Orton (especially his prose), you'll 'get' the idea of 1920s literary camp. It's not quite the same as Sontagian 1960s camp; it's more, well, modernist. Indeed, if you 'get' the camp modernist side of Woolf's Orlando, eg the transformation scene, and the CaMo bits of Barnes's Nightwood that still seem to baffle a lot of readers, you'll 'get' Firbank.

Firbank's novels are an acquired taste, but once acquired they can give the reader a new way of understanding the role of camp in culture. And they're also enormous fun.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the New York Times Book Review of October 18, 1925 comes closest to hitting the nail on the head when it describes Ronald Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923) as ‘intricate, amiably grotesque buffoonery’. Set at the fantastical court of King Willie and Her Dreaminess the Queen of Pisuerga, this is an absurd and yet poignant tale of love, disillusionment, and debauch on the eve of a royal wedding told in the tittering tones of high camp humour, ‘a blinding melody of chattering eccentrics and postures not always free from vulgarity’.

  Like most of Firbank’s witty nonsense, this svelte novel is fast-moving and airy; it evaporates before your eyes. On first reading it, you may make out only vague murmurs about a young woman’s hopes for marriage being dashed. What will capture your attention, though, is Firbank’s pithy descriptions of his characters, cast in pale purple prose that absolutely sashays across the page: ‘With a slight sigh Mademoiselle Laura de Nazianzi took up the posture of a Dying Intellectual’. At night she prays, ‘Oh! help me, heaven to be decorative and to do right!’ Ann-Jules, the Heir Presumptive, ‘has such strength! One could niche an idol in his dear, dinted chin’. King Willie has ‘the air of a tired pastry-cook’. And as for Sister Irene from the Order of the Flaming-Hood: ‘Keen, meagre, and perhaps slightly malicious, hers was a curiously pinched face – like a cold violet’.

  This foppish book is heavily laced with bizarre descriptions of dress and interior decoration – ‘saccharine bits of wispy fluff ’, as Michael Dirda, reviewer for the Washington Post, puts it – but its dialogue, pared down to bare essentials, is an abrupt, almost lyrical tour de force of compression, silliness, and double entendre. In the end, it is all quite frivolous and almost too swish; but it makes a delicious sweet to nibble on between more earnest reads.

[Siv30 · Rating 4 out of 5]

לסקירה מפורטת בעברית, קישור לבלוג שלי -

https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/הפרח...

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

The chief pleasure derived from reading Firbank's novels is allowing oneself to be enveloped by the dreamy, lyrical and absurdist prose awhile not worrying about plot, character, psychological interaction, moral messages and suchlike. Firbank was a weird type of musician. His melodies are offbeat, peculiar and heavy with an impossible nostalgia, and they create their own background and fade into it over time, like the piano pieces of a slightly more jazzy Sorabji. Very occasionally a muscular note breaks through, or an openly satiric one, but soon enough all returns to daydream and filigree fancy, shimmering vistas and sighing dialogues and cryptic improprieties.

While reading this, I found myself wondering how much of an influence Firbank was on Michael Moorcock's "Dancers at the End of Time" books. The names of the characters have a similar comedic ludicrousness about them. In this novel, for instance, there is Lord Intriguer, Sir Somebody Something, Lionel Limpness, Lord Tiredstock, Mrs Chillywater, Madame Wetme, the Queen of Dateland, and many others with equally unlikely cognomens. I asked Moorcock this question and the answer was "some influence".

Firbank's novels are generally light hearted but occasionally the lyrical absurdism can get a little dark. It's hard to work out if his best prose is over-precious or deceitfully strong, reactionary or radical, baroque or avant-garde. A most unusual writer! He was especially good at doing crowd scenes in which everyone is talking at the same time.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange book, apparently an influence on Waugh's Black Mischief, but as far from Waugh as you can get in some ways. It's as if one of ER Eddisson's post-Ouroboros ponderances about archetypes and exemplars afoot in Zimimavia were to be taken over by Wilde, brought back down to earth and made stranger, funnier, more subversive and more resonant in the process. I almost wrote that it is like the novel Huysmans' Des Esseintes would write, but Firbank was both more knowing and more self-aware than that tragicomic

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an odd and relatively obscure book that some might find tedious—the plot doesn’t move too quickly, and narrative is not so much the point of the exercise, anyway: Firbank’s forte is establishing tone and aesthetic sensibility, and what a scandalously witty tone and over-the-top aesthetic sensibility he has! I was unaware such writing existed in England in the 1920s. I read this unusual novel in a collected edition of five Firbank novels (procured at a library rejects sale), and it lacked the subtitle listed here on Goodreads—so to be honest, I had no idea one point of the story was to help me reflect on the early life of a would-be saint, until, perhaps, the closing lines. That detail, however, didn’t keep me from relishing the self-indulgent way the author creates a fairy tale world where, as omniscient narrator, he can linger over any description that pleases him personally; ridicule stereotypes of the upper classes, their servants, and clergy; and make a game out of naming people, places, or occupations. Given the Modernist perception that the author replaces the priest, and must serve the Deity his passions drive him to create, it would appear Firbank, like Emily Dickinson in this respect, wrote from a singularly distinctive worldview in a style that would bewilder many around him. He could care less what the critics thought, and most in his day panned him.

Certainly the influence of Oscar Wilde can be found here, both in the penchant for fairy tales and the wry sense of humor. Osbert Sitwell wrote the Introduction to my volume, and I recognized his name because a small dog named after him gets eaten by a coyote in the opening chapters of T.C. Boyle’s 1995 novel, The Tortilla Curtain. Sitwell’s introduction confirms what a peculiar fellow Firbank was. I am of a mind that innovations often come from those with such strong minded alternative ways of looking at the world. I probably didn’t learn much from reading this book, but it was a diversion that made me grin several times—and that, alone, can sometimes be just what you need.

[Alex Sarll]

"Neither her Gaudiness the Mistress of the Robes, or her Dreaminess the Queen were feeling quite themselves." That's the opening sentence, and about as punchy as this gets. Even speaking as a fan of stuff like Noel Coward, South Wind and the arch circumlocutions of James Branch Cabell, there's a part of me which finds Firbank simply too, too much. But every now and then, I want a story about absolutely nothing – a ludicrous confection of spun sugar and impossible glass filigrees, animated almost entirely by bitchiness and that barely veiled gayness at which a certain stratum of British exquisites used to excel. I wouldn't quite call Firbank the anti-Hemingway, when clearly that's Djuna Barnes, but hey, it never hurts to have a number of back-up anti-Hemingways to hand, does it? The section where Firbank's characters complain about Firbank's other novels, without the least hint that they know they're in one, is particularly precious. Sure, a lot of the time it's witty without actually being funny ("I remember the average curate at home as something between a eunuch and a snigger"), but there are times when that sensation of butterflies dancing around you, a scented and sun-dappled sigh, will suffice.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction to this edition offers comparisons to Wodehouse and Waugh, though Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett come to mind as well - give the characters a sufficient length of dialog and they'll hang themselves without much assistance from the omniscient narrator. Firbank's style is much more florid than either and consequently a bit more "fun".
Three generations removed from an illiterate miner, with a family fortune recently made in railways, Firbank had the fascination of the recently arrived with the aristocracy and their ways and the archetypal homosexual aesthete's unsparing eye.
Specifically, the royal family of some vaguely central European country entertains visiting monarchs from the Near East and also from England. This allows for a range of national stereotypes and various stripes of social climbing, as well as good deal of bed-hopping. The family casually pressures their indolent son to marry the princess who is his English counterpart, despite his current affair (one of a long string, it seems) with a local noblewoman. In turn her only recourse is to enter a monastery and eventually become some sort of saint in later years (literally mentioned in a footnote), making this an almost farcical "life".

[Monika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Przepyszna delicyjka, dla tych co lubią kamp, pastisz i kicz.
Absolutnie przegięta, zmanierowana i przestylizowana książka. Autor jest zaliczany do przedstawicieli kampu właśnie, o czym dowiedziałam się w trakcie czytania tej książki (bo szukałam "co ja właśnie czytam?") a nie że taka mądra jestem. Na fali tego przeczytałam potem jeszcze Zapiski o kampie Susan Sontag, dla szerszego kontekstu.
Ale o czy ja tak właściwie mówię?
Mamy tu dwór królewski - z królową, Jej Marzycielskością i królem Wilusiem i księciem, Jego Znużonością.
Na dworze, jak to na dworze - intrygi, ploteczki, związki. No i tu wszystko dzieje się w warstwie językowej, można się śmiać w głos z tych wszystkich przeinaczeń, omdlewajacych westchnień, tęsknych pozerkiwań i apatycznych szeptów.
Nie dla wszystkich ta lektura, ale jak ktoś lubi takie smaczki to będzie zachwycony!

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't quite 'get' this one, found it a bit difficult to follow the plot. Descriptions of characters were good though, and I appreciate it's innovation for the period it was written.

[Josh Bennie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not for me. I curse whoever recommended this to me.

[The Usual · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who in fiction could write a book like this? The Iron Orchid, perhaps (lounging on a pall of varicoloured velvet under a matching sky), Saki’s Reginald (in a deckchair on a perfect Summer’s day), or perhaps Doctor Prunesquallor (automatically, whilst wielding a scalpel with consummate skill). It is, at its best, a book for dandies and butterflies, a pose of exaggerated and artificial elegance that must have been exhausting to maintain, and at its worst a bit of a mess. It almost feels like some sentences were laboured over for hours, and the rest fell together by accident. There’s barely anything in the way of plot, but some of the writing is gorgeous – almost like an ADHD version of Peake. Oh, and it’s very, very silly in places.

This is an actual quote:

“.............! .............? .......! ..... !!!”

But then, so is this:

“The bitter odour of the oleander flowers outside oppressed the breathless air and filled the room as with a faint funereal music. So still a day. Tending the drooping sun-saturated flowers, a gardener with long ivory arms alone seemed animate.”

Of course it could be – because for something so light, so superficial, it’s still a highly concentrated piece of writing – that my perception of its variable quality has more to do with my wandering attention-span than anything Firbank was doing.

On balance it’s a lovely thing.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lightweight humorous farce which serves well to clear the mind between deeper reads. There's a small emotional tweak at the end, but otherwise this well-crafted novel enters the mind effortlessly, amusingly passes through it without disturbance, and is forgotten without a trace soon after starting another book. That's Firbank in a nutshell—it took a certain artistry to write books that work the way his do.

[Bettie]

Evan Morgan in Fiction: ‘The Flower Beneath the Foot’ by Ronald Firbank @RonnieFirbank

Evan in his power, glory & absurdity as Welshman, Hon. Eddie Monteith son of Lord Intriguer of Intriquer House, who joins an archaeological expedition to Sodom.

Book jacket by C R W Nevinson

[Andy Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this little book that bubbled with phrases & words & countesses & marquis. An interesting writer & an odd but worthwhile book.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK, it may just be that I don't really enjoy "humorous" novels. But I did not enjoy reading Firbank 40 years ago. And, going back to him after all these years, I still don't. Read as part of the New Directions "Five Novels by..." collection, that I now read in a review in Goodreads, has been edited to make his prose "clearer". Amazing that ND has kept this in print all these decades (1961). It is of interest that this as a stand alone, and the collection, have only about 175 reviews/gradings here on Goodreads. Perhaps the "King of High Camp" has fallen out of favor?
It is DATED! While he makes fun of high society, royalty, social climbing and colonialism, he also makes fun of minorities, ethnic groups, and flamboyant gays. If your idea of "humor" is ethnic, or the use of "funny" names, you might enjoy this more than I did.
Called "surrealistic" by those who enjoy his writing, his plots are a complete mess. More characters in 90 pp than most 500 page novels have. And most of them come and go quickly - only to have some of them turn up briefly later, and leaves the reader wondering, "Now who was that?" But yeah, the plot and stories are just all over the place. Not surprised to read that he often wrote his novels on postcards in hotel rooms. What you could fit on a postcard is often about how long he stays with any one idea for the story.
By the end I was gazing over his florid prose, which added little or nothing to the story.
Oddly the New Directions edition does not include that an editor was used. Nor does it include the subtitle to this novel. 3 of the 5 "novels" in that collection are more like novellas - about 50 pp each. I am not sure I will get to any of them. 2 out of 5 = it was OK. There were a few smiles in here, but over-all, it was a tedious 90 page read. If it had been any longer I would have put the book down and quit.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up because it was referenced in a Vita Sackville-West biography. It is a silly story based somewhat on the elite of England in the 1930s. Queen Dreariness, Sir Someone, Lady Somebody, Lady Wetme all make appearances in the story. Vita appears in one section as Lady Chillywater who, not to confuse anyone is married to a diplomat named Harold. It is brought up that she writes only under her name and not her husband's name. I am assuming that this may have been entertaining at the time, or for someone familiar with the English elites of that period. The humor, history, and satire was lost on me.

[Ygraine]

reminded me so viscerally of the emails me & my friend used to write each other aged ? maybe twelve, or thirteen ? absurd & silly & slightly horrible little gossipy emails that we wrote in various Modes, nonsense poems & fairy tales & surreal short stories, always using Deeply Unsubtle Aliases, always mostly incomprehensible & only particularly funny to the two of us. anyway, i think this book would have been More Fun if ronald was my friend, and this was sent to me as a sequence of emails about people we both knew.

[Jascha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is entertaining if you read it in passages, but not something to read back to back, despite being rather short. There are about as many characters as there are pages and most of what's in the story is not physically in the text.

While the whole book as an experimental exploration of camp and language is interesting, I'd consider it more art than entertainment.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half of the satire definitely went over my head, and the salacious parts were not salacious enough for my 2020 eyes, but this book was still enjoyable and enlightening. The ridiculous names, dialogue and general snarkiness were great, like a meaner and more absurd Gorey. Hopefully one day when I get to grad school there will be a Firbank class I can audit to learn everything I missed.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...................?!?!?!?!?"

[Melanie Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather too many characters, but wonderful descriptions and humour - with a bit of tragedy thrown in!

[Marceli.Szpak.]

Polecajka Fiszkowa kartoteka

[sch · Rating 5 out of 5]

After VALMOUTH (which was rather dull) and THE PRINCESS ZOUBAROFF (which was uninteresting *and* icky), THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT is a welcome return to Firbank's earlier style. But it's a return only to the strengths of those novels. Firbank had a lengthy apprenticeship - 5 self-published novellas in 5 years - but THE FLOWER is purely and consistently hilarious.

The sovereign family of this Ruritania (Pisuerga, somewhere in Europe) is comprised of her Dreaminess the Queen, her consort King William, his Weariness the Prince Yousef, and the younger prince Olaf, his Naughtiness. The honorifics capture the whimsy of the story. Nothing very important seems to be happening, but the subtitle (not included in all editions) should be noted in order to appreciate the last chapter. Be warned: along the way there's a great deal of (funny) camp.

[Read in THE COMPLETE RONALD FIRBANK, Duckworth 1961]

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bonkers, but oh so droll. At times it reminded me of the more absurdist side of Flann O'Brien. It might be what Edward Gorey would write if he were a novelist, or perhaps John Lennon....

[Eden]

This was my first encounter with Firbank despite longtime familiarity with his name thanks to the devotion borne him by Alan Hollinghurst, for whom I carry a large measure of devotion in my turn. One might think this connection ought to guarantee an affinity for Firbank on my part, but unfortunately this book was assigned reading and the constraints of my academic schedule forced me to speed through The Flower Beneath the Foot in too little time to fully absorb it. I was dazzled but confused and left with a distinct feeling that Firbank is much, much cleverer than he seems at a first glance and that I missed much of his intention. I look forward to a future opportunity to test this hypothesis via further reading of Firbank's work.