The
popular sentimental novelist Ethel Firebrace was the humorous creation of the short-story writer Malachi Whitaker and her friend Gay Taylor, author
of No Goodness in the Worm
(1930).
Their satirical The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937) recounts
in a deadpan fashion her career and describes her books. Some chapter titles
will give the flavour: ‘Trailing Clouds of Glory’; ‘Growing Pains’;
‘Quodlington’; ‘Will Life Never Begin?’; ‘Love and Marriage’, ‘My Great
War’, ‘My Psychic Experiences’ and ‘Dear Abroad’.
'Books
are in my blood’ proclaims the first sentence. She is, of course, the
grand-daughter of William George Firebrace, whose poems were printed by the
local newspaper the Blandacre Mercury ‘for free’, and the daughter of a
stationer with a circulating library. Small wonder she went on to embrace
literature.
Her
first book was Jennifer’s Secret. ‘As page followed page, I saw that it
was good, and my heart leapt forward to the day when I would be acclaimed one
our foremost novelists’, not least by the Blandacre Mercury. It draws,
naturally, on her own youth and ideals, so misunderstood by others. ‘The many
lovely descriptions of the countryside were drawn from the environs of Little
Beadling,’ the author confides, ‘but whence I drew my heartrending pictures of Love
in Haste, the best chapter of all in my opinion, I will leave my readers to
guess’.
Her
second novel was Clothed in White Samite, but sales were disappointing,
so she changed tack with Ecstasy’s Debit: 'though innocence was rewarded
and guilt punished in the end, I put forth rather more than all I knew of the
latter’; and ‘it turned out to be the most astounding financial success of my
career’.
She
takes a house in St John’s Wood, which was ‘tall and thin, with Gothic
windows’, sharing it with Frieda Prawns, whose Joy Poems ‘were known in
every household’. Here, Ethel composed The Flaming Crucifix and Hearts
of Glass, two novels which ‘gladdened the life’ of her publisher. Folded
Wings, her hastily-written ‘first peace novel’ after the Great War, is
‘now, alas, completely forgotten’. It is the story of a wounded airman who
falls in love with a ‘young clerk in the Ministry of Pensions (still at the
date unabsorbed by the Ministry of Health)’.
The
writer’s life was not always easy. Her His for an Hour was difficult to
write, because the house had been invaded by fleas and she continually had to
leave the writing to plunge into a bath, while Prickly Pear was composed
during matrimonial difficulties on a holiday in Spain. She became so wrapped up
in writing Tinsel Paradise (about a ‘shy chorus-girl’), as the guest of
her friends the de Groundsells at their house “Yranac” in Gloucestershire, that
when she was eventually asked to leave, she found she had stayed three and a
half months! One of her ‘most serious
and deeply felt novels’, Gerald’s Gethsemane, was greeted by a vulgar
critic with the words ‘Go it Ethel!”
It must not be supposed Ethel only lauds
her own books. A contemporary writer she admires is also mentioned: Mr
Driffield Dimes, ‘whose Woe to Ye, Pharisees! and God Bless our Home
have each reached their ninetieth thousand’. He is, Ethel tells us, ‘a young
man after my own heart. To tread delicately between the devil and the deep blue
sea without soiling one’s hands is indeed an art’. Alas, she has ‘twice in the
last few months just missed meeting’ him. She also admires the ‘two or three
booklets of poems’ sent to her by Alwyn Grummit (‘known to his intimates as
“Winnie”’), under the pen-name Geeston Auk Alwyn, and issued from 7a Beetle
Grove, and, with his permission, quotes two for us, ‘Apostolic Succession’ and
‘A Thanksgiving Dinner’.
But Mrs Firebrace has her standards. She
deprecates the work of Colin Billhook, the author of Pillow Stuffed With
Tansy, since he toyed with the affections of her friend Frieda Prawns. She
is dismayed to find Mr Adrian Horsley’s Ludo is not about the game, ‘that
blameless pastime’ but about licence between the sexes, while in Gateway to
Music ‘he dares to leave two people of opposite sexes in a bath together’.
Generously, though, she allows that his Senseless in Sparta has ‘the
first, faint stop of that organ whose vox humana is so thrillingly known
to us deeper souled lovers of humanity’. (He is not of course to be confused
with Mr Aldous Huxley, the author of Limbo and Eyeless in Gaza.)
Mr Beth Gelert Tydvil, the author of
novels ‘so heavy that they can hardly be held in the hand’, has issued his Apologies
of a Carnalist, which she feels is too self-indulgent, though his
philosophy, she notes, is not so very far from her own, of smiling through
adversity. Mr Matthew Owen Tydfil’s work she finds odd because of his familiar
way with God, while Festiniog Tydvil’s work is, she concedes, funnier than
either of his brothers. The three must surely be close acquaintances of the
Powys brothers.
Tempting though it is, we must not, alas,
dwell any further in Mrs Firebrace’s luminous aura, but suffice to say she
shares many other literary hints and tips about now forgotten authors of her
passing acquaintance. Let us leave her at the Villa Petrarca, between Florence
and Fiesole, lent to her by an American admirer, where, ‘in peace and comfort’,
she is writing her twenty-first novel, Hail the Dark Cypress!
Malachi Whitaker’s own unusual autobiography, And So Did I (1939), takes its title from
Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: ‘And a thousand thousand slimy
things/Lived on; and so did I.’ The
daughter of a West Yorkshire bookbinder, she read everything she could, and also
eagerly explored the countryside. She
published several volumes of short stories in the interwar period. One critic
described her stories as 'like a piece of fog cut out and preserved'.
They are often a strange mixture of bleak and sordid detail
about hard lives and careless cruelty but with brief episodes of visionary
experience. The Times Literary Supplement complained of her insistence 'on
grotesque details, on ugly occupations, on repulsive physical characteristics,
on the mean behaviour of young men to girls and the hostility that dwells in
homes' (TLS, 10 Nov 1932).
Her story 'X', in Honeymoon (1934),
her fourth collection, was described as ‘one of her most unusual and disturbing
stories, which economically interweaves madness, incest, vampirism, and
fratricide.' The Autobiography, however, shows a different side to her imagination, sportive, inventive and zestful. She seems to have stopped writing (or at least publishing)
altogether in her mid-Forties.
(Mark Valentine)
