GAEL ELTON MAYO (1923-92) was born in Sydney, the youngest daughter of pioneering industrial psychologist, Emeritus Professor Elton Mayo, and Scottish-gened Australian beauty, Dorothea McConnel. She lived in America as a child, where her father had a Life Chair for research at Harvard and was an influential cult figure. Aged eight, Gael was sent by her parents to England with her older sister, for a European education. She was studying for a degree at the Sorbonne when she met a Russian émigré whom she married just before the outbreak of war. Gael was seventeen.
Getting her stateless husband out of France became a mission. They were caught in the Exodus — their son was born during the bombardment of Bordeaux. After near death from puerperal fever, hiding with peasants, being shot at by German soldiers, they reached Free France — only to find they were not free. Eventually, they arrived in New York by way of Spain and Argentina. Their marriage fell apart. Gael remarried. She modelled briefly and was assistant editor of Popular Publications & Ken White (later Esquire). In 1944 Doubleday published her first novel, Honeymoon in Hell, based on her wartime experiences. But it is in her autobiography, The Mad Mosaic (1983), that her wartime escape is truly told.
Gael returned to post-war Europe. She wrote a column in Madrid for the Spanish American Courier, then worked for Picture Post and as writer-researcher for Magnum Photographers in Paris, with Robert Capa, David Seymour and Henri Cartier Bresson. She wrote 'Generation X' with Cartier Bresson in England (later changed to 'Youth of the World' by Holiday Magazine), and in 1955 was hired on a permanent basis to handle public relations for Seymour in Rome, but he was killed reporting Suez. She went on to collaborate with London photographer Baron, arranging and writing his Paris profiles of Anouilh, Abbé Pierre, Mendez France amongst others. Her career was disrupted when her husband kidnapped their daughter and took her with him to another country.
Gael's painting was encouraged by Moïse Kisling, who did a portrait of her (now in a private collection in Japan). She had eight exhibitions in London, Paris, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Melbourne, and in 1969 was listed in The Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (Hutchinson). Gael also designed dress material for Leonard et Cie bought by Balenciaga and Carven, and wrote songs (lyrics and music) which she sang on British TV and in a film made at Elstree Studios. Four novels were published in the 1960s: The Devil and the Fool, Nobody's Nothing, Last Seen Near Trafalgar, It's Locked In With You.
She worked with her third husband, a French aristocrat beset by Balzacian legal disputes, to restore his crumbling family Chateau in the Jura - recounted in her memoir The End Of A Dream. The couple separated and Gael moved to England with their little daughter, then back to France, to Provence, about which she also wrote in The End Of A Dream. They were reunited in the 1980s and planned to live together, but he suddenly died. For the last twenty years of her life, Gael — 'An invincible beauty' Observer — fought a virulent cancer of the head and neck, 'the spook', enduring operation after operation to keep it at bay, about which she wrote in a second volume of autobiography, Living With Beelzebub. It was published just before she died.
THE TIMES - Gael Elton Mayo's three volumes of autobiography are among the best of our time. For all their own charm and grace, these books have a classical hold on that marriage between love and death which is the right stuff for literature. They will survive.
THE MAD MOSAIC
'On June 1940, while evacuation from Dunkirk was taking place in the north, my son was born at Cauderan near Bordeaux; we were part of the exodus which was surging down the roads to the south throughout June, at times under bombs from Italian planes.' So begins Gael Elton Mayo 's remarkable autobiography. Shot at by the Germans whilst escaping with her baby son and stateless Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York only to return to war-ravaged Europe. Later a journalist, painter and novelist, she describes how Magnum photographers was started by Robert Capa and David Seymour, (both subsequently killed in Vietnam and Suez respectively), and her time working with Henri Cartier-Bresson in England. She tells of marriages and bereavement; of Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s; of how chaotic events and finally, cancer, changed the course of her life. Gael brings to life worlds and people long gone — the stuff movies are made of.
DAVID NIVEN - Fascinating! What a period! What a life! But, above all — what courage!
ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS & BOOKMEN - I have never read an autobiography like this one. I was hooked after the first half-dozen pages. A mixture of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland, it is a tale of survival and hope
ROSEMARY DINNAGE, SUNDAY TIMES - Gael writes with affection and gusto and always without blame, happily oblivious of the feminist overkill that could be derived from her story
THE TIMES - The Mad Mosaic has about it something of the disturbing impermanence of life depicted in the film Casablanca
ALASTAIR FORBES, SPECTATOR - A compulsively readable, and often deeply moving account, of a life led in a rather crazy cat's cradle criss-cross between America and Europe
GLASGOW SUNDAY STANDARD - Few refugee stories outside the Auschwitz range have the peculiar poignancy of Gael Elton Mayo's
Autobiography. Quartet Books 1983 HB 240pp illus £9.95 ISBN 07043 23605 PB 1984 £3.95 ISBN 07043 34593
LIVING WITH BEELZEBUB
'When my spook draws very near, and penetrates further into the house than just the hallway, he takes on an identity. He becomes a person I can almost see; at these times he is Beelzebub.' In this further volume of autobiography, Gael writes of coping with the cancer of the head and neck that finally killed her. Her almost surreal descriptions of cancer ward(s) are interspersed with memories of the people and places of her past. A free spirit, she loved life and truly lived it, reflecting a life of courage and resilience in the face of tragedy and turbulence.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT - Living With Beelzebub is full of delight. It demonstrates courage, energy and humour in the face of pain and fear, and it does so with a real writer's touch. It deserves to last
GREY GOWRIE, DAILY TELEGRAPH - A real contribution to the literature of illness, a brave end to her vivacious autobiography The Mad Mosaic
JANET WATTS, OBSERVER - The writer Gael Elton Mayo has had almost too interesting a life. She is a survivor who plays to win
Autobiography. Quartet Books 1992 HB 148pp £12.95 ISBN 07043 70263 Sakuhinsha, Japan 2003 Translated by Koichiro Mochida 228pp ISBN 4878935812
THE END OF A DREAM
Gael writes about two homes she loved and lost in two very different regions of France — the Franche-Comté and Provence — in this magical travel-memoir.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR - Beautifully done — a marvellous, subtle knack of catching atmosphere and landscape, an ear for the spoken word that evokes half Balzac, half Alain Fournier … I loved it
ROBERT KEE - A moving personal evocation of a world we are losing — an inspiration for that in which we find ourselves
LESLEY BLANCH - A beautiful book … such writing, such thinking, such feeling — a true understanding, seldom encountered today, of abiding France
SPECTATOR - Gael Elton Mayo has a visual quality of writing and is a perceptive sociologist. There is comedy a well as nostalgia. Her exceptionally good photographs illustrate the book. This satire of modern mores ends up like a Proustian meditation on Time. Perhaps The End Of A Dream should also be read as a Temps Retrouvé
ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS - Gael Elton Mayo speaks of two unique regions of France with her magical voice that first enchanted me in The Mad Mosaic ... The fierce independence of the Jura, the moody mountain in Provence, the vivid pictures of people, animals, wine, food, flowers — even the mistral — made me feel nostalgic about places I had never seen
Memoir. André Deutsch 1987 HB 148pp illus £8.95 ISBN 0233 981489 Quartet Books 1993 PB illus £7.95 ISBN 07043 01954 1996 Berlin Verlag Translated by Stefanie Schaffer de Vries 223pp ISBN 38270 01897 Misuzu Shobo, Japan 1997 Translated by Koichiro Mochida 236pp
THE DEVIL AND THE FOOL
'Olivia walked along the Avenue Matignon hating her husband. Fallen chestnut blossoms made a threadbare carpet which she looked at vehemently. She would have liked to love him, which was probably why she hated.'
LIVERPOOL DAILY POST - Miss Mayo's novel is Sagan without the puppy-fat; very feminine yet as controlled, as muscular as a Hemingway. It's an intelligent story of a marriage gone wrong and the wife's attempt to free herself from her Sicilian husband Giovanni. An offbeat novel, the whole thing has pace and chic, is palpable and real
NEWS OF THE WORLD - Controversial, for it's partly concerned with the love affair of a black man and a white girl
Fiction. André Deutsch 1960 HB 182pp. World Distributors Ltd PB 1962 160pp
NOBODY'S NOTHING
Set in Paris, Mallorca and Madrid, this novel tells the story of two women, Veronica and Liza, and of a group of young painters who become their friends; and of the tug of war between old world conventions and modernity.
THE BULLETIN - These novels [by Denton Welch, Saul Bellow, Gael Mayo] are emotional and Gael Mayo's appealed to me the most ... She invades Sagan territory with a story of younger women and older men and lots of l'amour. She is a much better writer than Sagan, and if there is any justice she should make a mint of money ... The 'nobody's nothing' is at first Liza, an English-born painter in Paris, called 'the cat girl' because she mixes yet remains apart, until the day she meets an impoverished man with a ruined castle and marriage. Liza's love falters only once, when she sacrifices her baby. Her man Louis found the right words at one of those moments which can be the end, or a new beginning. She was more fortunate than the novel's final nobody's nothing, Veronica, French American, whose first man Colin always failed to recognise such crucial moments, and whose second man Pio was a Spaniard with rigid ideas which constricted and finally killed their association. You can read the book as a story. Or as an examination of modern woman failing to find a man who can compromise satisfactorily between freedom and imprisonment for her. Or as a study of French and Spanish attitudes. It has many levels. The style is broad and powerful.
Fiction. Barrie and Rockliff 1963 HB 224pp
LAST SEEN NEAR TRAFALGAR
A young woman is torn between two men and their worlds: Manuel in his tiny Andalusian village near Trafalgar, and Michael in a remote Exmoor valley. Ultimately she has to choose between wildness and security; between traditional or modern ways of life.
COUNTRYMAN - Gael Mayo reiterates the tentative and delicate world of Elizabeth Bowen. She challenges progress and sticks out for the old values. Last Seen Near Trafalagar is an extremely civilised version of the story about the girl who has to choose between the country boy who stays at home and the country boy who goes to town. The first, Michael, represents continuity, permanence — and limitation. His rival is Manuel, a handsome Spaniard in whom pragmatism and imagination, greed and generosity are all mixed up
WESTERN MAIL - There is a sensitive clarity about her writing which reminds one of Katherine Mansfield
Fiction. Barrie and Rockliff 1965 HB 192pp
IT'S LOCKED IN WITH YOU
A young woman, Iris, is left alone in her husband's dilapidated family home when he goes away on business. As she works to restore the chateau with a couple living nearby, strange noises and sightings interrupt their progress. Then a murder is committed in the village. And Iris discovers an English bank robber hiding in the attic.
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH A beautifully written piece which builds up tension in atmosphere and in the psychological make up of the main character, a young singer left alone in the crumbling family chateau belonging to her French husband. Alone, but not alone: for the ‘Presences’ of long dead ancestors are credibly and eerily real. Miss Mayo is skilled in the art of suspense, delicate in the selection of words that create drama without melodrama
CATHOLIC HERALD Miss Mayo is a clever and competent writer
Fiction. Hutchinson 1968, HB 156pp Albin Michel 1969 HB
UNDERTOW
Tim has grown up close to nature in wild, remote countryside with his mother. His absent father forces them from their dilapidated but blissful country home and they move to London, where Tim has to compete for attention with his mother's new lovers. He ends up in borstal.
LESLEY BLANCH - Untamed yet domestic, as if Pan comes in from the wilds to cook an omelette. Gael Elton Mayo has an indefinable quality like no other writer
LITERARY REVIEW - Limpid ... moving as well as beautiful. Full of poignant word-pictures and situations. It is a pleasure to emerge from fiction emotionally strengthened
SUNDAY TIMES - A magnetic and poignant story in refreshingly good prose
HILARY MANTEL, DAILY TELEGRAPH - Remarkable for its imaginative use of language, for its delicacy, sadness and restraint
Fiction Quartet Books HB 1989 136pp ISBN 07043 27244 PB 1989 ISBN 07043 01598
A MAN IN A PANTHER SKIN
The life of Prince Dimitri Djordjadze: a Georgian prince of anachronistically aristocratic ethos, a born fighter who had to flee the Bolsheviks, a penniless émigré who made and lost several fortunes, a Don Juan who idealised women, an equestrian genius and top bloodstock breeder who became a racing driver. He went everywhere and knew everyone in the haut monde. This is an arresting portrait of a striking man and a vanished world.
Biography. Kensal Press 1985 HB illus 120pp
Banner image credit: Alcala, Spain — exhibited at Gael Elton Mayo's first exhibition of paintings held in 1956 at The Arthur Jeffress Gallery, Davies Street, London. Copyright © the Estate of Gael Elton Mayo. All rights reserved
