True valour seen
Alastair Forbes
LIVING WITH BEELZEBUB by Gael Elton Mayo Quartet, £12.95, pp. 146 THE MAD MOSAIC by Gad Elton Mayo Quartet, £3.95, pp. 238 My review in these pages a decade ago of Gael Elton Mayo's first and, as I deemed it, 'compulsively readable and often deeply moving' venture into autobiography, The Mad Mosaic, appeared under the heading 'A Brave Jill-of-all- Trades', an apt enough description in truth of its most unusual Australian-born but in its best sense wholly European author, whose life as a painter, novelist, song- writer and mother has comprised such an extraordinary patchwork of experiences, human, artistic and, alas, physical. With so many contemporary books suffering, on their impatient publishers' orders, swift and ignominious shredding, it is good to discover that Naim Attallah has kept her Mosaic in print and to see, amongst the paperbacks on bookshop tables, the sweet, touching young face of the author on the cover, just above best-seller David Niven's spontaneous tribute to the last book he was able to read before losing his lonely battle with Motor Neurone Disease: 'What a life! But, above all, what courage!' In its Epilogue, she had touched on 'the incredible stress of the unwritten part of this book'. Now, in Living with Beelzebub, she has told us something of the reverse of the medals her earlier readers and review- ers had awarded her.
Secrete enough adrenalin for a few minutes or perhaps sometimes as ;ouch as an hour or two and an MC, a DSO or even a VC may come your way. But there is no Honours List for those who must screw their courage to a lifelong sticking place. 'Fearless' is an adjective' ill-suited to the truly brave for whom F. D. R.' s facile Depression-time slogan, 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' has a hollow ring. True valour lies in enduring fear, in living with fear and in overcoming it enough to go on living one's life. On her very first page, surely right in not sparing her readers, Gael Mayo takes us into the Royal Marsden (curious postwar euphemism) Hospital and writes, 'entering the hallway I think, everyone in here has cancer . . . and upstairs, in the Head and Neck Ward (now, as she mercifully discovered when Beelzebub's invading metastases finally sent her back there to take her last breath just a week ago), continues:
Unless you can be of help don't visit. What solace can be given to someone who has lost an ear, an eye, half their face? Mutilation is a horror show. Other parts of the body are hid- den. The anguish of losing a breast may be as great but there is still dignity, but when dam- age to the head denies expression to the face or the vocal chords, the soul is in prison try- ing to get out, to communicate the way it did before, to say; 'This is really me' and this is a form of torture . . . The idea of an operation the outcome of which is unknown brings ter- ror. I am terrified ... Cancer is not an enemy that can be confronted face to face, it is a sneak that comes up from behind . . . For 20 years I have lived with a spook, at some times closer to me than at others; right now he is close ... My surgeon shook me by saying that my type of adenocarcinoma is really a killer ... I should be dead.
Instead, in the last 20 years she survived operation after operation to keep the sneak at bay, many times with the prayer on her lips as she went under 'Let me come out still looking like me', once emerging to hear her great friend, the writer Lesley Blanch, remark 'You were beautiful, darling, but you're still a beautiful wreck!' And no operation succeeded in even so much as scarring the extraordinarily youthful outlook she brought to everything she said, either in slurred speech or clearest writing.
I wish, though, she had been able even further to develop an important subject she has only tentatively opened up, after point- ing out how her spook had thriven on the stressful events of her life. These had, in fact, begun long before he had struck his first body-blow. For besides beauty, inside and out, she was born with a special gift for happiness that was early put to severe test when, as the result of an almost incredibly aberrational act by her charming and highly cultivated parents (her mother a third- generation Scottish-gened Australian beauty, brought up on endless cattle- ranching acres, her father, a pioneering industrial psychologist with a Chair at Harvard where he became a cult figure) who exiled her from an idyllic Massachusetts childhood and had her transported to distant convict settlement in English boarding schools and uncertain holiday arrangements with distant rela- tions. This otherwise civilised couple chose in the 20th century to abdicate parental responsibility in a manner seldom seen in their class since the 18th century, though, being who she was, her spurned love for them was never to fail. But when, at 45 years of age, cancer was diagnosed, her first thought, apart from the pictures still to paint and the books and songs still to write, was for the daughter of her third marriage to an extraordinary and alarmingly un: predictable Frenchman, a Franche-Comte chkelain who was also a senior civil servant in Paris, Georges de Chamberet, well described by his often awed compatri- ots as line force de la nature'. The unbroken and heart-warming love and friendship between these two women over nearly three decades was the chiefest of her answered prayers as they moved like nomadic Bedouins from house to house, with their books, paintings, rugs, family fur- niture and so on providing continuity. She writes that, to the Fee Carabosse who hissed over her cradle, 'You'll never have a home!' she had simply answered, 'I'll make one wherever I go'. And so it has gone and continued to go in the pretty flat high over Brompton Square where she made her last long stand. Even after the sudden death of her hus- band, she felt 'vibes' of hatred which spread their poison over family affairs. The unforgiving first wife, a Balzacian horror from Beziers, had managed, some things being, pace Sterne's Sentimental Journey, emphatically not better ordered in France, to block his divorce for a whole quarter century and then managed to block the inheritance of his wife and daughter. Without having become Manichean about life, where, like cats in the dark if not in the adage, so much is simply grey, I have long since joined Iris Murdoch in exclaim: ing 'My Goodness!' and 'Thank Goodness! instead of, as once, 'My God!' and 'Thank God!' I also agree with that most amiable of philosophers when she says that 'good- ness involves courage'. I have myself, I am sorry to say, seen some of the ravages of hatred and some of the harm that is done to men, women and especially children by the 'vibes' of those who quite simply become addicted to It Such an addict ought long since to have been admitted to Farm Place, 'Promises' or any other of the increasing number of insti- tutions where, by the Minnesota Method, dependants on Heroin, Cocaine, Alcohol and other poisons are treated and now often cured. But the worst of these addic- tions is certainly the Hate which filled her. Gael Mayo well named her carcinoma- wielding spook Beelzebub. Only her own goodness and loving kindness and courage held him at bay so admirably long, permit- ting her to recount so well her heroic tale, into which, however, her indomitable cheerfulness could not be kept from continually breaking.
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