The Flower Beneath The Foot: Being A Record Of The Early Life Of St. Laura De Nazianzi (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
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.
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".
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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.
—Scott
