The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace

  

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)