Free Florence by David Leavitt Page B

perhaps his own) he changed the boy to a girl, thus giving Compton McKenzie the opportunity to quip, ‘They all turn to little girls in the end.’
    Ronald Firbank’s personal eccentricities have subsumed, for many readers, the genuine interest of his work. To the painter Duncan Grant, he was ‘an elegant grasshopper in white kid gloves and boots’; to Carl Van Vechten, his friend and champion, an ‘Aubrey Beardsley in a Rolls-Royce’, a ‘Jean Cocteau at the Savoy’. Even Firbank took part in the cult of his own persona, complaining in a letter to Van Vechten that reviews made him feel ‘quite like a bottle of prohibition whiskey, & not at all like the Veuve Cliquot (1886), special cuvée’ that he knew himself to be.
    In Noble Essences, Osbert Sitwell recalls that ‘during the April and May when [Firbank] was living in a villa that had formerly belongedto the Swiss painter Böcklin, situated outside Florence’, Sitwell and his brother Sachaverell would often encounter him in the Via Torna-buoni, ‘staggering under a load of flowers he had bought, and craning round in a wild and helpless way for a cab to carry him home …’ Flowers figure prominently as well in Acton’s description of the meeting between Firbank and Reggie Turner, who disliked him intensely. ‘Though Firbank led an isolated life,’ Acton continues,
maintaining no more than a jerky acquaintance with a few choice relics of the ‘nineties who did not know what to make of him, nobody has conveyed the aroma of Florentine gossip better than he. He endeared himself to the waiters at Betti’s by his handsome tips. Having carefully ordered fruit that was out of season, he would sit and contemplate it like an El Greco Saint in ecstasy. Muscat grapes in mid-winter he would dangle against the light, eyeing the clusters caressingly as he sipped glass after glass of wine. At the food he merely picked and jabbed as if it repelled him.
    In short, Firbank was the perfect avatar of fin de siécle decadence, just as the style that he perfected – distinguished by a self-reflexive archness that echoes the barbed intercourse of Florence – represents the most extreme manifestation of the movement that Wilde (and to a lesser extent Beardsley) had initiated several decades earlier. Nor is the association between Firbank and Wilde merely literary. During his youth, Firbank managed to maintain longstanding friendships both with Lord Alfred Douglas and with Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland, whose twenty-first birthday party he attended, as did Henry James. (Later, according to his biographer, Miriam Benkowitz, ‘Firbank snubbed [Holland] for his pleasure at a series of lawsuits which Douglas lost.’) By employing the Wildean voice, which was also the voice of café chat at Doney’s, Firbank was able to subvert not only Anglo-Florentine self-promotion, but English attitudes generally.
    Of all his novels, the one that shows the strongest Florentine influence is The Flower Beneath the Foot, most of which he wrote while renting the Villa I Lecci at 15 Via Benedeto di Maiano in Fiesole. ‘How differentmy book would have been had I gone to Vienna,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘for of course one’s surroundings tell. Probably it would have been more brilliant & flippant, but not so good as the steady work I hope to do here.’ He saw his own style in the novel as being ‘vulgar, cynical & “horrid”, but of course beautiful here & there for those that can see’. Such writing as his own, he felt, must bring ‘discomfort to fools, since it is aggressive, witty & unrelenting’.
    It will come as no surprise that The Flower Beneath the Foot is a roman-à - clef. To the habitués of the fictitious Pisuerga, where the novel takes place, Firbank prepared a kind of cheat sheet, which he sent to his mother:
‘Princess Elsie’ = Princess Mary. ‘Mrs Chilley-water’ = Mrs Harold Nicolson. ‘Eddy’ = Evan Morgan – & of course ‘King Geo’ & ‘Queen Glory’ are the