Monday, September 10, 2007

She only wants to play valses..

I spent some of my holiday (re-)reading Firbank - I acquired the complete novels when the local library sold them off - camp? ever so slightly! Another graduate of Trinity Hall - also as Anthony Powell has it - 'he was interred in the doctrinally inappropriate, but romantically incomparable Protestant cemetery' (in Rome). And I was taken by this piece:
She only wants to play valses!
"She hardly sounds to be ambitious"
"It depends; measured by Scriabin's Quasi-Valse, or the Valse in A flat major, she may have quite intricate idylls..."
Mrs. Thoroughfare simmered. "I do so love his Étrangeté"

having recently worked on some Scriabin - who was only very recently dead when Valmouth was written (1919).
In the latest bout I read 'Caprice', 'Valmouth', 'The Flower beneath the Foot' and 'Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli' - a samey after four but wonderfully frivolous and interesting biographical sketch is here..
Some years later, when Siegfried Sassoon pressed him for his views on literature and art, the only thing Firbank could find to say was, “I adore italics, don’t you?”.


Way, way back in a frivolous mood I used a Firbank quote as a .sig
The blessed St Bathilde who by dint of skipping changed sex and became a man

.. Valmouth

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