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Post-Impressionists’ (1910–11) were key here, though Firbank fantasized about owning a Matisse. 33 Still, he hesitated before putting his ideas into practice:
He talked so much of writing, but he never seemed to write. He was so taken up with attractive theories – the affinity between prose narrative and Impressionist painting and the ineluctable brightness of
le mot juste
– that his friends, in the midst of discussion, agreement and disagreement, would smile dubiously when he mentioned his own work. 34
    The period 1911–13, then, was one of gestation – that vital moment prior to clarification of means and ends that, for many artists, must precede a creative outpouring. Once unblocked, Firbank was intensely productive for eleven years.
    In January 1913, he wrote to his mother of his plans for a Venetian novel, which would rely on ‘intrigue’ rather than causation. 35 It is significant that Firbank saw his card-shuffling specifically as a way of creating something ‘intriguing’, but also, more importantly, as something which lacked the conventions of the Victorian novel. When Andrew, Winsome Brookes’s ‘mignon’ in
Vainglory
, gets depressed, he describes it as ‘a sort of Dickensey-feeling coming on’ ( p. 42 ). Firbank had observed, perhaps from Wilde’s example in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890), that it was easy for a novel to become trapped in a set of ethics that may not have been intended by its author. In
Vainglory
, Mrs Asp alludes to the sense that non-heterosexual relations had not been openly recorded in Western culture by describing a novel without a plot: ‘It’s about two women who live all alone’ ( p. 19 ). Once Firbank perceived that narrative teleology itself enshrined sexually and romantically normative precepts, his instincts were simply to fend off the insidious opportunities for closure, instead proceeding by whim, wit, sleight of hand and apparent chance.
    The Venice project did not come off. In 1904 Joey, his elder brother, had died and then in 1913 Bertie, his younger brother, died. Firbank was now the only man in the family; the only one living capable of running the family estate in Wales, even from a distance. He had little choice: his younger sister Heather and beloved (but emotionally dependent) mother, ‘Baba’, showed no signs of numeracy, and his and Heather’s allowances depended upon the estate. Firbank determined, nevertheless, to act stoically in the face of Bertie’s death. He wrote to a friend from London:
Here am I resting from the labours of my book until Monday, when I return to Bath again. I came to town for the Russian Ballet, but my brother’s sudden death has, (or ought) to deprive mine eyes of that sublime spectacle! However, I’m not conventional very & who knows what I may’nt do!! 36
    It seems likely the book was
Vainglory.
The tragedy may even have catalysed Firbank into serious work on it. Out of desperation, perhaps, he mined previously published stories and unfinished writings, reusing what he could. The material Firbank was exhuming was anything up to six years old, though one extract – from a juvenile poem, ‘The Wind & the Roses’ (1902–3) – was more than a decade old. He recycled character names for
Vainglory
in particular, but sometimes also traits, titles, even whole sentences.
    The framing plot, too, was recycled. It is essentially that of ‘A Study in Opal’ (1907–8), though Mrs Shamefoot replaces the Bishop’s widow in that tale. Shamefoot is where we should begin the search for innovation. She was, as Nancy Cunard noted, his first ‘sweet-sad or yearning’ character. 37 The accent very much fits the mood of an author in mourning; in other respects, the ‘self-entranced’ and ‘self-centred’ Shamefoot is a self-portrait ( p. 10 ). Her quest to capture herself in a stained-glass window of her own design – thus enshrined in perpetuity – is another projection of Firbank’s impatient determination to become