The Neglected Books Page

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

1 April 20231 April 2023

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961): By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.; Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.; Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.
• Quail in Aspic (1962): By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton; Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.; This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.
• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981): By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.; Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:; Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.
• Lord Bellinger (1911): By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.; Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.; I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.
• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961): By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.; Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.; Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.
• I Think I Remember (1927): By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall; A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”; There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.
• Water on the Brain (1933): By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie; Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).
• The Way Up (1972): By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).; The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.
• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937): By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.; The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.; And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”; As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.
• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp: By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.; Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.
• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940): By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.; Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:; Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker (1937)

11 May 2019

In The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, Malachi Whitaker and Gay Taylor offered the world a feminine match for H. H. Bashford’s really good man, Augustus Carp, Esq. Lost now to literary history, Ethel Firebrace was prolific novelist of the early 20th century, churning out dozens and dozens of works such as Clothed in White Samite, Ecstacy’s Debit, His for an Hour, and the thrilling wartime romance, An Airman for Averil. Firebrace followed in the footsteps of such industrious Victorian women writers as Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton. In fact, I half suspect that Whitaker and Taylor, who probably met at one of Charles Lahr’s literary evenings in London in the late 1920s, had skimmed Linton’s My Literary Life, which is one of the snippiest memoirs ever published.

I must caution, however, that unlike Augustus Carp, whose righteousness in all things stems from his utter blindness to the world around him, Ethel Firebrace maintains her moral superiority from her firm understanding that she is simply better than everyone else. It is not selfishness that prevents her from helping others but simply “a nature too finely tuned.” Unfortunately, though her family early recognized that little Ethel was too busy “thinking of higher things,” they failed to spare her “the sight of their toil-worn hands, dust-laden hair, and brows which bore the wrinkled imprint of perpetual household budgeting.” Consequently, “being a very sensitive child, this left a deeper mark upon me than they realised.”

Indeed, for Ethel, the world is divided between the sensitive and the insensitive — there being far too few of the former and far, far too many of the latter. When she marries and gives birth, she vows “at whatever cost, never to let this event repeat itself during my married life” and finds it difficult to forgive her daughter “the eternity of torture she had caused me.” How was it that women before her were able to bear so many children? “Cast-iron insensitiveness,” of course.

Fortunately for the reading public, however, Ethel found the inner strength to steel herself against her baby’s cries of hunger and other ill-considered attempts to distract her and focus on her great gift: writing. Starting with Jessica’s Secret, she works diligently at the coalface, wearing out four typewriters along the way, generating, by her own count, over five million words. By the time she begins her autobiography, she can state with confidence that “I do not think there can be many, well versed in book-lore, who are unacquainted with at least one of the works of Ethel Firebrace.” I feel some shame in admitting that until I read this book, I was one of the unenlightened minority.

For her many gifts to literature, she has received countless in return from her admirers, including “a leopard-skin rug, a transparent nightdress, twenty pounds of quince jelly, what turned out to be a very sick monkey, a fountain-pen, and a set of alleged performing fleas.” Beside the talents that God bestowed upon her, she attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. She suggests that the literary world can be divided infallibly between the garglers and the non-garglers. The non-garglers such as Mr. Aldous Huxley are destined to “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”

Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace is easily one of the rarest books I’ve featured on this site. There are just two copies available for sale — one for $600+ and one for almost $900. I was able to read it thanks to my British Library and a quick stop through London last month. It was hard to keep quiet at some points while reading it: while not quite as fine-tuned as Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace absolutely deserves rediscovery as a perfect little comic gem. In a fictional heaven somewhere, Ethel Firebrace and Augustus Carp, Esq. live together in sympathy, both confident in their superiority of character and intellect if slightly disappointed that the rest of existence will never fully appreciate their brilliance. Such is the cross the truly great must bear.

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker
London: The Cresset Press, 1937

No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor (1930)

31 March 20225 March 2019

I’ve been interested in reading No Goodness in the Worm ever since I read A Prison, A Paradise, the memoir in which Gay Taylor, writing under the pseudonym of Loran Hurnscot (compiled from what she saw as her two worst sins, sloth and rancour), recalled her obsession and affair with A. E. Coppard and the decades-long process of moving beyond it. Unfortunately, the book very rare and priced accordingly (the cheaper of the two copies currently available goes for $400). However, I stumbled across a copy for the relatively low price of about $100 last month and sprung for it.

I think it helps to read No Goodness in the Worm having A Prison, A Paradise in mind, because it reveals the extent to which Taylor was able to achieve a perspective on her experience through fiction that took her a much longer time to gain for herself in real life.

The story at the heart of both books starts with the marriage of Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall in 1920. “Both of us got a bad bargain,” Gay Taylor later wrote in A Prison, A Paradise. She hated housework, cooking, and most of the conventional “wifely duties.” He suffered from tuberculosis and a penchant for business ventures he had no ability to run. Their wedding night was a disaster. “Hell, the first night, is what a woman never forgives,” she later wrote. He went off to his mother’s house. She returned to the flat she shared with her friends Bee Blackburn and Pran Pyper.

Yet a few months later, all four decided to move to a village in Berkshire and founded, using Hal Taylor’s remaining savings, the Golden Cockerel Press with the questionable business model of publishing books of poetry and short stories “that could not expect to command great popularity or wide sales.” Combined with Hal Taylor’s ill health and the utter lack of experience on the part of all four, the press quickly headed for failure.

At the same time, the marriage was headed for failure as well. Taylor later summed up her husband’s attitude as, “Since happiness is not for me, it’s unbearable to me that anyone should have it.” Fortunately for the press but not the marriage, in stepped A. E. Coppard, a man of considerable charm and practical skills. He managed the press well enough to keep it alive until qualified hands came to the rescue. And he seduced Taylor.

For Taylor, it was a head-over-heels passion, one that consumed her body and soul and overruled any concerns about propriety. She and Coppard escaped to live in a little love nest some miles from the press. While caring for her husband as an ailing and frustrated man, she had no patience for his self-pity and half-hearted attempts to control her. She described his appeal as: “For heaven’s sake go back to being unhappy, and that will give me peace.” Unfortunately, Coppard proved a mixed blessing himself. “He goes itching after almost every woman he sees — he’s a miniature Frank Harris,” an acquaintance later told her.

In real life, Hal Taylor found escape from his misery by dying in March 1925. Taylor went on and off with Coppard for longer, until finally abandoning him after several years and several short-lived reconciliations. When she wrote No Goodness in the Worm, therefore, she had just a few years’ distance from the experience, and it’s easy for anyone who knows something of the story to find the parallels between the fiction and its source. Valentine in the novel is Gay; Humphrey, the husband, is Hal; Coppard is Francis Merryweather, although his skill is furniture making rather than writing; and Sikey and Jane are Taylor’s friends Bee and Pran. (Taylor came up with different names for all of them in A Prison, A Paradise as well.) Taylor changed a number of the practical aspects of the story: Humphrey’s only illness is emotional; the foursome and Francis/Coppard aren’t engaged in any business together, thriving or not.

Husband and wife are still miserable, though. “It’s an odd thing to find out that you’re married to your worst enemy,” Valentine tells her Sikey early in the book. The marriage “had never been a properly adult relation, a mature interchange between man and woman;” instead, she describes it as “a mutual propping association.” And when the impish and charming Francis comes into her life, “a golden haze” comes over Valentine’s “mental landscape,” and “some dimly prophetic part of her mind recognized that it would not life, nor Francis Merryweather be perceived as other human beings perceived him, until the whole drama of their relationship was nearing its close.” Humphrey’s response is only slightly less dysfunctional than Hal Taylor’s: “You’re free to have your little affairs; I’m not a slave-owner. But I won’t be let down in front of everybody and I won’t allow you to let me down.”

The outcome of this affair is, of course, predictable, foretold by the old verse apochryphally credited to William James:

Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous

Valentine wants Francis, Francis only, Francis wholly, and Francis wants … oh, what’s this? This looks fun. “To anyone with a spark of sense, life is simply the opportunity for exquisite sensation,” he tells Valentine. Such is not the foundation of a stable or lost-lasting relationship. In the end, Valentine suffers intensely, suffers to the point of attempting suicide. Though she survives, she sees her future as one of long, slow, difficult recovery. And Francis gets married, has more affairs, sells lots of custom-made furniture, and disappears off into a golden haze.

Ironically, the most interesting relationships in the book are not between men and women but between Valentine and her friends. As the TLS reviewer put it, “The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing.” Sikey is an independent-minded social scientist who treats going to bed with men as one step above laboratory experiments. Jane is more grounded, yet she also rejects convention, marrying a dying man to give his young daughter a step-mother and home.

Valentine’s real tragedy, it seems to me, is that she allows herself to forget how much she has going for herself compared to men. Indeed, it’s hard not to find some pretty powerful parallels to the state of women and men today:

It was a commonplace between them that since the war men had become almost unendurable; they were spoilt, bored, irresponsible; virtue had gone out of them…. [T]he twentieth century or war (they were never sure which) had given them a world of half-men to grow up among, half-men who mechanically aped emotions, or who, unable to bring contentment to one woman, would appease their own impotence or vanity by sniffing around among half a dozen or more, or who clung to breasts and skirts in the prolonged infantility of grown men unable to face the world that they had made.

It’s not surprising that some contemporary reviewers (see Frances Lamont Robbins below) took exception to this viewpoint. Despite the emergence of a whole generation of remarkable women writers and artists after the First World War, not everyone was prepared to see the sexual tables turn so completely. What is surprising is how many reviewers accepted and welcomed this perspective. Gay Taylor clearly revealed a need to reconsider the balance of power between men and women, and it’s sad that so little has changed in the 80 years since No Goodness in the Worm was written.

Other Reviews

Frances Lamont Robbins, in The Outlook, January 21, 1931

Things must be looking black for the men in England. There feminism is an anti-male movement. (Here it is only indirectly so.) If English feminism has a literature, this novel must represent its lowest point; for it is one of the rankest pieces of nonsense that this patient reviewer ever read. Such incredible, such dreadful men; indeed there is no goodness in these worms! And, by natural sequence, such incredible, dreadful women, too…. The writer of this novel has considerable feeling for rich words, and some narrative skill. But we do not think she meant her novel to be funny–unless she is a man.

Bernadine J. Scherman, in The Saturday Review of Literature, February 21, 1931

It is a great satisfaction–after reading the dozens of contrived and artificial novels that are dumped on the public every month—to come across at last a novel that reveals a soul. The author of No Goodness in the Worm may have had no such lofty purpose, but unconsciously or otherwise, she has achieved it…. Though the author never states a thesis, and writes her novel only as a personal story, still the impression remains that this is indeed the state of mind of most thinking English women of thirty or so.

After all the proportion of women to men in England before the war was about three t« one, and since then of course far greater. Women have had to become economically independent, and to this end, better educated and far more emancipated from families and tradition than before; while the flower of their own generation of men has been killed off. It is an abnormal state of affairs apparently affecting many of the younger English writers, and certainly admirably reflected in this first novel of Miss Taylor.

Guy Holt, in The Bookman, February 1931

… [I]n far too many years of haphazard reading I have not previously encountered just the point of view which Miss Taylor so ably expresses. I have read books written in bitterness against man; I have read books which were the product of defiance, or contempt, or pathological frigidity, but this springs from none of these. It is simply the work of one who, through her. characters, views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable. And that, I take it, is score one for the novel of 1931.

Marjorie Grant Cook, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1930

A sensitive and comely piece of work. No Goodness in the Worm is a first novel of exciting quality: one of those uncommon books whose first page is a good through which the reader enters a little world of other people’s lives and is lost for the time to his own….

When it comes to love scenes this writer thinks sometimes, unconsciously, in the phrases of Lawrence. For the rest she very definitely writes her own book, and the justice and wit of her expressions are constantly stimulating…. The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing. A book that grows in strength as it nears its end makes a second novel by the same hand something to look forward to.

No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930

A Prison, A Paradise, by Loran Hurnscot (Gay Taylor) (1958)

11 May 201912 March 2016

Depending on one’s perspective, A Prison, A Paradise is one remarkable book or two remarkable books in one cover. The first half, “The Summer Birdcage,” is the diary of a woman caught up in a mad, bad love triangle that nearly destroyed two of the three principals; the second, “The Tilted Spiral,” the diary of a woman consumed in a quest for a spiritual love that could overcome her earthly concerns. The first book competes with Alison Waley’s A Half of Two Lives, discussed here last year, as an account of a passion pursued about twenty exits past all reason; the second has been compared with Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. And together, they tell the story of a woman who, as Kathleen Raine put it in her introduction, “followed the unfashionable vocation of living her thoughts.”

In A Prison, A Paradise, the names have been changed to protect the guilty. “Loran Hurnscot,” an anagram of “Sloth and Rancour” — which she saw as her principal sins — was Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall, who was known Gay Taylor after she married Harold Midgeley Taylor (referred to as Hubert Tindal in the book), an idealistic and tubercular aesthete whose failed enterprises included the Golden Cockerel Press, which became one of the premier British art presses after it was bought by Robert Gibbings in 1924. In Taylor’s largely untrained hands, however, it was strictly an amateur affair. A. E. Coppard later wrote of the Golden Cockerel edition of his first collection of stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me that, “the type was poor, the paper bad, the leaves fell out, the cover collapsed….”

Coppard (referred to as Barney) was also, as it happened, the third corner of the triangle. Barely capable of taking care of themselves, Gay and Harold convinced themselves that they shared enough interests to justify getting married. As Loran/Gay put it in her Afterword to “The Summer Birdcage,” “I married in the eighth proposition of Euclid.” Unable to perform as a sexual partner, Harold encouraged Gay to take Coppard as a lover. Then, when she did, he became insanely jealous … while also becoming increasingly dependent upon her as his illness grew worse. Gay fell madly in love with Coppard, running off to sleep with him in the fields, to dance naked in the rain, and to generally rub salt into Hubert/Harold’s wounds. To compound problems, Coppard (already married) was a philanderer.

Within a year of starting the affair, Loran/Gay was writing, “I live with him [Coppard] in superficial happiness, but with a grief of heart, a loss of self-respect, that doesn’t end.” She began to see that the only way to keep Coppard’s interest was to constantly keep him wondering: “He loves me best when he is loved least.” “There’s something sub-human about Barny … that will eventually destroy our relation.” At the same time, she was “deeply convinced” that Hu/Harold “only wants me near him so as to have something weaker than himself to bully.” Still, all three remained entwined in their own miserable, self-destructive web until finally Loran/Gay found herself abandoned by both men. Harold died, leaving her just £50, and Coppard carried on with other women. Looking back on the affair, Loran/Gay would conclude that “the central sin was that no one loved anyone.”

Volume Two, “The Tilted Spiral,” picks up over a decade later. Loran/Gay is barely surviving, living in cheap flats in London and taking whatever work came to hand. Having given up on romantic love, she is desperately seeking salvation if unclear on how to find it. She went to endless lectures by P. D. Ouspensky. She studied Buddhism. She studied Swedenbourg. She read Thomas Merton. She scoured astrological charts, and developed an intricate system by which to record her moods:

Towards the end of the war I started to keep a mood chart, just to see whether I was turning into a melancholy gloomy character: I classified the mental states by colours, of which there were ten divisions, based on the spectrum but ending in dark blue and black. It was kept in a book of squared paper, and I put down my “temperature” as T. B. cases do, twice a day. Perhaps, as I have often held, the observed thing changes. But to my surprise the general level was far higher than I’d supposed; there were weeks and even months that could be called happy and equable; the descents were rare and rapidly recovered from. I kept it for two or three years and then laid it aside.

Much of this part the book is a record of Loran/Gay’s encounters with different belief systems, in each of which she initially finds something attractive and satisfying, only to grow disenchanted — often more with the personalities involved (Ouspensky) or the dogmatic constraints (“even the cloister is now like the Civil Service,” she writes of one Christian retreat). Yet she also managed to find joy. While living in a particularly dingy rooming house, at one point, she wrote that, “Almost immediately, heavenly bliss flooded me, and even in my wretched room, the Beloved was there. The flow of divine love was almost overwhelming, and tears of adoration and sorrow stood in my eyes.”

In the end, Loran/Gay came to believe that the only spiritual guide she could truly trust was herself. “There has always been a fastidiousness in Loran Hurnscot that rejects all that rings false in human behavior, or in religious cant,” Raine remarks in her introduction, and the days recorded in “The Tilted Spiral” had as many moments of disgust and disillusionment as they did of serenity.

“You must understand,” Loran/Gay once said to Raine, “all I have is my life.” And A Prison, A Paradise ranks with Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman as an account of a woman following Polonius’ injunction, “To thine own self be true,” to such an extent that friendships, creature comforts, and the conventions of society could all be sacrificed in the interest of self-discovery. And yet, it’s also sensual, acerbic, and even, on occasion, funny, as in this encounter with a census-taker:

“Let me see — are you a housewife?” “No, I am not a housewife.”
“Well, are you employed?” “No, I am not employed.”
“Self-employed, perhaps?” “No, at present I am not self-employed.”
“Well, then, you must be unemployed.” “No, I’m not unemployed either.”
He began to look sweaty and anxious. “I’ve got to put you down as something,” he said.
“Haven’t you any other categories,” I suggested.
“Only incapacitated.”
“Then put me down as incapacitated,” I said firmly. “I’ve been looking for that word for years.”

Elizabeth Russell Taylor tells more of the story of Loran Hurnscot/Gay Taylor in this London Magazine piece from May 2014. A Prison, A Paradise was also #319 in the lot of books from Marilyn Monroe’s library that was auctioned off by Christies in 1999. Gay Taylor died of pancreatic cancer in 1970.

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker London: The Cresset Press, 1937

Other Reviews

No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930

A Prison, A Paradise, by Loran Hurnscot (Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall Taylor) London: Victor Gollancz, 1958 New York: The Viking Press, 1958

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker
London: The Cresset Press, 1937

No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930

A Prison, A Paradise, by Loran Hurnscot (Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall Taylor)
London: Victor Gollancz, 1958
New York: The Viking Press, 1958