pencil portrait by Augustus John (1915)
C. W. Beaumont on Firbank
Firbank was never easy to know. He had friends, probably fell in love at least once, but seems temperamentally to have found intimacy very difficult. Because he was so eccentric and so conspicuous, people tended to remember him, his tall slender, immaculately dressed figure, his extraordinary undulating walk, his use, at various times in his life, of not necessarily discreet make-up. Even his friends, as the composer Lord Berners, who was one of them, admitted, could feel embarrassed by him. The Charing Cross Road bookseller C. W. Beaumont gave this acount of his appearance:
His hands were white and very well kept, the nails long and polished, and what was unusual in a man is that they were stained a deep carmine. I might mention that before my wife and I learned his name we always spoke of him as “the man with the red nails”.
[ . . .] All his joints seemed to be loosely attached, like those of a marionette, and his movements in fact closely resembled those of a marionette, the
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controlling threads of which had been slackened. In short he was a decidedly limp specimen of mankind.
[ . . .] His tastes in literature were rather “ninetyish” . . . His stock question on entering [the shop] was: “Have you anything in my line today; you know, something vague, something dreamy, something restful?” . . . all the books he liked he termed “restful”. Even a study in the baroque such as Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser he would term “restful”, although the normal male would doubtless consider such a work, on the contrary, disturbing.
-----from Alan Hollinghurst "Ronald Firbank"
(revision of the third of Lord Northcliffe's Lectures
given at University College, London, October 2006)
