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

Tea, from And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker (1939)

12 June 20183 May 2018

British tea ads

Wine costs so much a bottle, ready made. When you have once got over the effort of hospitality (if it is an effort) there is nothing to do but open the bottle and wait. But tea is different, especially tea among the poor. Sometimes it is an effort in itself to go and draw the water for it. Then there’s the teapot, and the cups, and the wondering how much or how little you can put in the teapot, the urging of the fire to boil the water; even the washing-up afterwards.

And when the tea is ready, there’s the terrible gratitude you feel towards the heat of it pouring down your poverty-cold mouth. It makes your whole frame fill with ambition to fight the beastliness of the world. And it is no false ambition. It gives you a fresh start without leaving a subtle injury behind. Also, you are filled with a more powerful and tenderer gratitude to the ones who make it for you. They know how you are feeling at the moment. Tea, like death, is a great leveller.

From And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker (1939)

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker (1939)

7 January 202430 April 2018

If And So Did I were to be published afresh today as the work of a woman in her late thirties with a number of well-received short story collections behind her, I have no doubt that it would be quite successful in its sales and critical reception. Thanks to Wild, Eat, Pray, Love, The Argonauts, The Liar’s Club, and dozens of other books, the world is ready–indeed, seems insatiable–for memoirs written by women with strong and distinctive voices.

Instead, when it was published in early 1939 in an England finding itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and dread, it received from an anonymous reviewer in The Spectator one of the most ruthless drubbings ever seen in print:

And So Did I (Jonathan Cape, 7s. 6d.) is a dangerous attempt to make new ground. It consists, apparently, in damp comments and scrappy reminiscences written at odd moments during her life in Yorkshire, and huddled together inconsequently into a full-size book. The result, from a conventional literary point of view, is worthless. Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has a certain talent for economical description; but her thoughts and feelings are dull. That she should find Ouspensky vain and pretentious, or admit that her own marriage was sordid, does not distinguish her intellect any more than her emotions. But presumably And So Did I is an attempt to exploit the personality of the author, even at the expense of deliberate literary faults…. Surely Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has been a little rash to attempt without artifice what, even had she used the greatest art, was likely to have failed.

Malachi Whitaker (Marjorie Whitaker) This reviewer seemed to want Malachi Whitaker (the pen name adopted by the Yorkshire writer Marjorie Whitaker) to take her voice and personality and retreat to the silence and domestic matters that were a proper Englishwoman’s concerns. And if this was, in fact, his intent, then he should have been pleased with the results. Whitaker stopped writing almost entirely. She published just two more stories in the next ten years and, aside from the 1949 Selected Stories compiled from her previous four collections, never published another book. She died in 1976, noted in just a few brief obituaries. And thus was another fine woman writer effectively stifled.

Yet it’s hard to believe that Whitaker’s silence in print signified the stifling of her own spirit, for And So Did I is in its way one of the most original and vibrant spiritual autobiographies ever written. Whitaker took her title from a line in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “And a thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did I.” But it’s useful to read the lines that preceded it:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

Early in the book, Whitaker writes, “For at last, I have time to take up my long-abandoned search for God and the Truth,” and this search is the thread that weaves, sometimes overtly but most of the time indirect and subtly, throughout this seemingly haphazard collage of memories and observations.

For Whitaker, the world of the spirit is never quite tangible. She envies Saul for the revelation that came to him on the road to Damascus: “Yes, lucky, lucky Saul, to have all responsibility taken from him! All that was left for him was to do as he was told, then he could be sure of eternal salvation.” No voice speaks to her from the clouds. Instead,

I can only sigh and pass on, because the Hound of Heaven and me seem to keep about the same distance apart, both lolloping along with our tongues out, downhill, and stopping at the same time for meals and so forth. I have never even felt his warm breath at my shoulder.

Church is no use in her search:

If I could find God in a church, I should be glad. But I cannot. I go often to sit in churches, both here and abroad, to think about faith and piety, and to be sorry that I possess neither. Now and then I see a good and lovely face, but it is mostly on a very old woman; and it makes me think there might be some consolation in age.
Perhaps I have no deep feelings at all, in the religious sense. I am glad to see young creatures, and leaves, and patterned beetles and snowflakes, and to savour the taste of each season. But life itself is difficult, full of unfinished ends and unfinished thoughts. I once went into Cologne Cathedral just as a service was starting, and saw a beautiful coloured show. The faces around me were moved by some deep feeling; and I stood, alone, frowningly curious but quite cold.

The abstractions of God, heaven, and eternal life can never quite compete with the intensity of the things and people she encounters every day. Her daughter pulling herself up by the back of the typewriter as Whitaker sits trying to write at it. A box of fresh peaches from a friend. A delicious meal at her sister’s, with new potatoes and mint, grilled plaice with parsley sauce, and a rice pudding cooked five hours in a slow oven. But she pulls against these temptations:

There is one part of me which greatly wants to be a good cook, but I suppress it. It is a kind of road to ruin. If I went along that road, I should look for God and the truth no more. My mind would be intent on flavours and sauces. I should have a garden full of herbs, and a quantity of fat friends. No, I’ll do it when I have to, but I will not make cooking my reason for being on earth.

Words are another temptation: “Reading flows in and out of my like breath,” she writes, a phrase I’d easily adopt as a motto. “It is something to keep my mind alive, as oxygen and–I have forgotten what else–keeps alive my body.” The books she reads populate her thoughts every bit as much as the people in her life. And the people, particularly her husband and their two adopted children, constantly draw her mind away from its attempts to escape to a more ethereal level:

Where am I? Here is my adopted son, reading the evening paper, one knee up and one knee down, his fair hair darkened on this side which is away from the light of evening. He has twisted round and shown me a hole in the seat of his trousers with an expression of great surprise. It is the first of what I suppose will be many. Baby is by now fast asleep in her cot. My husband is in London. So I suppose I should look at the living moment and find it doleful, but I don’t want to. There is a fire, and that is such good company.

Malachi Whitaker herself is such good company that whether or not one is in sympathy with her efforts to escape the mundane, And So Did I is never less than vivid and amiable. “I like to read what other people have written,” she writes, “in the hope that I can get a glimpse of the garden enclosed, through a tiny peephole”:

For I do believe that everybody owns the equivalent of a garden; a place inside themselves that they know has something really good in it; something from which they can give. But the flowers have a habit of turning to the rankest weeds during the transfer.

One can only conclude that for The Spectator’s reviewer, And So Did I turned to rankest weeds during the transfer–which undoubtedly was his fault and not Whitaker’s. As Philip Hensher has written, “Malachi Whitaker is not like other authors…. [I]t is inexplicable how English letters failed to find a place for a writer of such verve, colour, range and power.” “Life has been perfect in parts,” she writes at the end of And So Did I. And for my life, reading this book was one of those parts.

In 1984 Carcanet Press, a fine U.K. independent now based in Manchester, published a collection of Whitaker’s stories, The Crystal Fountain, edited by Joan Hart, another Yorkshire woman and writer of short stories, and followed it in 1987 with And So Did I. Paladin reissued it in paperback in 1990–the last time it was in print. However, with the recent release by Persephone Books of The Journey Home and Other Stories, edited by Hensher, there is a chance that And So Did I might see the light of day again.

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

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker London: Jonathan Cape, 1939 Manchester: Carcanet, 1987 London: Paladin, 1990

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

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker
London: Jonathan Cape, 1939
Manchester: Carcanet, 1987
London: Paladin, 1990