The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

The diurnal part of Kennaston's life was largely devoted to writing The Tinctured Veil -- that amazing performance which he subsequently gave to a bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in the old round.

But this is not -- save by way of an occasional parenthesis -- a chronicle of Felix Kennaston's doings in the flesh. You may find all that in Mr. Froser's Biography. Flippant, inefficient and moody, Felix Kennaston was not in the flesh particularly engaging; and in writing this record it is necessary to keep his fat corporeal personality in the background as much as may be possible, lest it should cause you, as it so often induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing more.