Firbank, Ronald. “Valmouth”. Valmouth and Other Stories (1919). Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996.

Driven by dialogue, this novella tells the story of Valmouth, a resort town where the air is fine enough that most of its citizens live to be 100 or more (the town patron lived to 105). In the midst of them all is the “Oriental” woman Mrs. Yajñavalkya, who is a whiz at massage and the healing of bodily ailments, and who is able with these powers to traverse the classes of the citizenry at Valmouth. She tries to set the Lady Parvula up with the object of her obsessions: the virile young shepherd David Tooke. What we eventually come to find out from Mrs. Y is that David “has abjured [. . .] de female sex” (68), and by story’s end the two remain alone.

Gender and sexual queering happens in subtle little ways throughout this novella, much of it I imagine in the many lines of Latin its characters like to utter in brief asides. One needs in order to understand this story’s bends and shifts a full fluency not only in Latin and French but also in Greek and Roman myth. Firbank’s steeping of his narrative in the baroqueness of antiquity is de rigueur for queer writers of his time, but it doesn’t help his work last. I mean, World War I was going on at the time of his writing, and this is where he throws his best efforts?

From the introduction and the back-cover copy, what people seem to love most about Firbank is his florid style, and this, yes, I’ll grant him any day. He cracks up his sentences’ syntaxes in such a way that they seem always on the verge of falling apart. See, for instance, such lines as “Miss Tooke turned yearningly her head” (10), and “Mrs Hurstpierpoint extended toward her guest a hand that was not (as Lady Parvula confided afterwards to the Lady Lucy Saunter) too scrupulously clean” (23-24), and even the exquisite, “Here and there, an orchard, in silhouette, showed all in black blossom against an extravagant sky” (6). Even when he goes overboard (“The sky was empurpled towards the west” [70]) I admire the attempt.

I think of it as a queer syntax, a discretely queer style. The best way I can explain or try to justify this is that it’s a syntax I’ve been in my own writing of late working deliberately toward. It’s more than a matter of juggling one’s clauses in the name either of disrupting the passive reader’s syntactic expectations, or of asserting every time no matter what words and phrases come one’s way on the vitality of the periodic sentence. It’s...well, here, from my journal:

I want to stick with this voice, this kind of convoluted syntax that allows its sentences to roll onward and onward down the page putting in with a kind of recklessness these appositives here and there and mixing up the order of words as a means I guess of finding within a sentence a kind of innate tension between enough detail and too much, or between relevant details and needless digression. Also a tension between a stuttering kind of insecurity and an assertive, Hemingwayan/Steinian commaless strength.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’ve been worrying about in the MS Word file I open up most mornings before the morning’s writing gets commenced. No, it’s not helping me actually to produce a full completed manuscript any time soon. Like the high-school loner who designs album covers, T-shirts, and tour routes for the band of his whose music he hasn’t yet bothered to write, I am a dilettante.