Among the last things Firbank did was to revise the manuscript of Vainglory (first published in 1915) for its American publication by Brentano’s in 1925. This edition – reflecting the author’s last wishes – should be seen as definitive. However, most subsequent volumes of Firbank have not used it. In particular, as Robert Murray Davis pointed out, the text of the novel in The Complete Ronald Firbank (1961) was not only based on the 1915 UK edition but also contained numerous errors.1 This 2012 edition of Vainglory is, then, the first not only to be based on the 1925 Brentano’s text, but also to record each of the substantial changes Firbank made (see Appendix 1). I have used my discretion in not recording every minor correction to spelling or punctuation, but have endeavoured to note every instance in which a word, phrase or sentence has been altered. When preparing the revised edition, incidentally, Firbank initially sought revenge on Sacheverell Sitwell for playing a practical joke upon him in Rome, by changing the name ‘Winsome’ (Brookes) to ‘Sacheverell’ throughout. He then thought better of it.
Inclinations (first published in 1916) poses a different problem. We have no edition with which the author was satisfied. In 1916, Firbank was being pressed by Grant Richards – first, for a manuscript, and then for proof corrections – a process which preoccupied him heavily, twice over, chiefly because of printers’ supposed amendments to his very particular punctuation, to which he objected: ‘They have dressed me out in armour – far too much. By changing the punctuation all “goes”. Since one never attempted to be classic … I feel like “a waiter” in evening-dress!’ A strike put paid to any further changes, though Firbank had doubts about the novel’s ending, as well as about certain phrases and aspects of the book’s layout and design.2 Though no other edition would be published in Firbank’s lifetime, he had come to believe in 1925 that Brentano’s (US) would take the book, and began revisions. The Inclinations which formed part of the definitive edition of The Works of Ronald Firbank by Duckworth in 1929 – paid for by a donation Firbank made to the Society of Authors – accommodated just one change, but it was substantial: a totally revised version of Part II, Chapter IV, the ‘dinner party’ chapter. Awkwardly, this was placed abutting the original version, before the narrative resumes with Chapter V. In the present edition, for transparency and ease of reading, this revised version has been adopted in the main novel text, with the original 1916 chapter included as Appendix 2.
The case of Caprice (1917) is simple. For once, author and publisher were agreed on the textual presentation. A dispute arose only out of Richards’s well-meaning description of the novel as ‘like nothing else on earth’. For some reason, both Firbank and his mother took this amiss.3 In 1925, Firbank apparently wrote a new Preface to the novel to stimulate interest in New York. But Brentano’s decided to pass on it, and the preface has never been located.
1. Robert Murray Davis, ‘The Text of Firbank’s Vainglory’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 63 (1969), pp. 36–41.
2. Quoted in Miriam J. Benkovitz, A Bibliography of Ronald Firbank, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 11; see further, pp. 9–12.
3. Ibid., pp. 14–16.