[Below, White favorably compares Brophy's "silliness" in Palace without Chairs to Ronald Firbank's literary style, but concludes that "the book doesn't work."]

Through the sturdy homespun of English fiction runs a single thread of silver silliness. It is a filament drawn from an art that may seem snobbish and arch but that in fact affects attitudes only for the sake of the imagination. For that reason it must not be regarded as satire, for the foolish, delicate creatures it pokes fun at have, alas, never existed save in the tented gossamer daydreams of a few writers. I'm thinking of a tradition that begins with Pope's Rape of the Lock and extends through Thomas Love Peacock, Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and Henry Green and that ends, implausibly enough, in America with W. M. Spackman and his splendid, recently published An Armful of Warm Girl. The distinguishing characteristics of the style of sublime silliness are its atmosphere of innocent romance and gorgeous effects, its tight design and economy of expression played off against an almost total absence of content. There is also, usually, a coiled, edgy quality to the writing, as though the author were trying to transcribe a humor that eludes language.

Brigid Brophy is an intelligent admirer of the tradition and has written an enormous biography of Ronald Firbank, Prancing Novelist. Her new novel, Palace Without Chairs, exhibits the stigmata of her devotion. She has adopted many of Firbank's mannerisms, including: his scraps of unassigned dialogue overheard at parties; his use of droll place names and proper names; his affectionate regard for elegant Art Deco natives; his insertion of shockingly mondaine slang into stuffy contexts; his raillery against the church (Firbank is the inventor of Catholic Camp); his appreciation of the teasing and sumptuous amorality of nature; his deadpan reports of human sexual ambiguity; even his habit of composing one-sentence paragraphs. Like Firbank, Miss Brophy throws seemingly ordinary words into unsettling italics or between insinuating quotation marks until the familiar begins to seem alien. And like Firbank she observes the ways in which the serious moments are invariably undermined by trivial, irrelevant thoughts.

In fact, Palace Without Chairs can be read as a homage to Firbank's 1923 novella, The Flower Beneath the Foot. Both books are set in fairytale kingdoms that maintain pretensions to power and culture but have actually gone to seed. In both books the tutor to the royal children is a bogus Englishwoman (in Firbank she is a Cockney teaching her charges to drop their h's; in Brophy, a woman who speaks English well enough but learned it not in England, as she claims, but in her native Beirut and Alexandria). In both books the ludicrousness of protocol is lampooned, and in both the anachronism inherent in modern monarchy is sent up. In both there are alfresco scenes of lesbian love. And in both the plot meanders quirkily along, stopping often for attractive but gratuitous tableaux.

These resemblances, however, do not detract from the originality of Miss Brophy's fable. Her story is quite her own. The long-suffering King of Evarchia is ailing, and the officials are concerned about the succession. The Crown Prince renounces his claim to the throne. The son next in line is assassinated by a madman. Soon the other sons meet grotesque ends and the heir becomes an amiable lesbian daughter. But she, too, refuses her historic role—and the kingdom is seized by an unappetizing military dictator. A full fleet of secondary characters—Communists, gossip columnists, minor nobility—are skillfully traffic-directed down the narrative lanes.

Interesting as all this may sound, the book doesn't work. The style of silliness is not suited to Miss Brophy's true concerns. Disguised by the ornaments of her technique are her passionately held convictions against the double-talk of Communism, the cruelty of most people toward animals, the eerie heartlessness of fascism, and society's mistreatment of writers. In themselves, of course, these convictions are laudable, but they are not well served by whimsy. What has happened is that the style belittles the content and the content torpedoes the style. I am not saying that these are illegitimate subjects for fiction, much less for comic fiction. What I am asserting is that Brigid Brophy's fey mannerisms betray her message and her message sinks her showy technique; what should be all restless chatoyancy becomes a fixed light blinking code.

Worse, Miss Brophy's writing, looked at line by line, does not compare well with her mentor's. In Firbank every sentence is shapely, terse and surprising, whereas Miss Brophy is quite capable of writing: "Almost every village contained some recently built but already tumble-down structure, its grandiose nameplate surviving intact, as if to exacerbate the sore, though its roof had probably fallen in and its walls had succumbed to an invasion of bougainvillea and wild hydrangeas, that had been set up, on mainland capital and initiative, as a co-operative, intended to provide the Islanders with employment and incentive, and that had failed." Obviously she has no ear and only an impressionistic sense of grammar.

Brigid Brophy would, in my opinion, be better served by the straightforward, sometimes lackluster but always dignified manner of, say, Doris Lessing, whose prose merely delivers her thoughts. Silliness, it seems, is the province not of philosophers but of inspired artists.