Monday 21 May 2018

Buried Twice: Ronald Firbank

On this day in 1926, Ronald Firbank's fragile health, broken down by years of heavy drinking and smoking of tobacco and hashish, finally gave out, and he died, of lung disease, alone in a hotel room in Rome. He was just 40.
  The only person in the city who knew him was Lord Berners, the eccentric composer and writer, who hastily arranged a funeral ceremony with a Reverend Rugg (who had been an associate of the notorious Frederick Rolfe, 'Baron Corvo', in Venice). Unfortunately Berners didn't know that Firbank had converted to Catholicism, so the body was interred in the Protestant cemetery, and later had to be exhumed and reburied, 'far away from his country', in the Campo Verano cemetery.
  'Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?' as Sir Thomas Browne put it.

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