Caryl Brahms

Doris Caroline Abrahams (8 December 1901 – 5 December 1982), commonly known by the pseudonym Caryl Brahms, was an English critic, novelist, and journalist specialising in the theatre and ballet.

She also wrote film, radio and television scripts.

As a student at London's Royal Academy of Music, Brahms was dissatisfied with her own skill as a pianist, and left without graduating.

She contributed light verse, and later stories for satirical cartoons, to the London paper The Evening Standard in the late 1920s.

Towards the end of the 1920s, finding it difficult to keep up the supply of new stories for Low's cartoon series, Brahms enlisted the help of a Russian friend, S.J. Simon, whom she had met at a hostel when they were both students.

The partnership was successful, and Brahms and Simon began to write comic thrillers in collaboration.

The first, A Bullet in the Ballet, had its genesis in a frivolous fantasy spun by the collaborators when Brahms was deputising for Arnold Haskell as dance critic of The Daily Telegraph.

Brahms proposed a murder mystery set in the ballet world with Haskell as the corpse.

Simon took the suggestion as a joke, but Brahms insisted that they press ahead with the plot (although Haskell was not a victim in the finished work).

In 1926, the artist David Low began to draw a series of satirical cartoons for the Evening Standard, featuring a small dog named "Mussolini" (later shortened to "Musso", after protests from the Italian embassy).

Brahms was engaged to write the stories for the cartoons.

She recruited a friend, S.J. Simon, to help her with the cartoon stories, and, in the 1930s and 40s, they collaborated on a series of comic novels, some with a balletic background and others set in various periods of English history.

At the same time as her collaboration with Simon, Brahms was a ballet critic, writing for papers including The Daily Telegraph.

Later, her interest in ballet waned, and she concentrated on reviewing plays.

In 1930, Brahms published a volume of poems for children, The Moon on My Left, illustrated by Anna Zinkeisen.

The Times Literary Supplement judged the verses to be in the tradition of A. A. Milne, "but the disciple's gift is too frequently spoiled by her lack of control. She uses too many capital letters, and too many exclamation marks, too many round O's in long chains, and she is too facetious".

The reviewer quoted with approval an extract from one of her poems, a child's thoughts by candlelight:

This was followed the next year by a second volume, Sung Before Six, published under a different pen-name, Oliver Linden.

The sexual entanglements, both straight and gay, of the members of the Ballet Stroganoff are depicted with a cheerful matter-of-factness unusual in the 1930s.

Murray commented, "True, a certain number of the laughs are invited for a moral subject that people used not to mention with such spade-like explicitness, if at all."

In The Observer, "Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers) commented on the "sexual reminiscences of infinite variety" and called the novel "a delicious little satire" but "not a book for the old girl".

She reverted to her more familiar pseudonym for a third volume, Curiouser and Curiouser, published in 1932.

Before the novel was complete, Brahms published her first prose book, Footnotes to the Ballet (1936), a symposium edited (or as the title page read "assembled") by Brahms, with contributors including Haskell, Constant Lambert, Alexandre Benois, Anthony Asquith and Lydia Sokolova.

The book was well received; the anonymous Times Literary Supplement (TLS) reviewer singled out Brahms's own contributions for particular praise.

The reception of A Bullet in the Ballet the following year was even warmer.

In the TLS, David Murray wrote that the book provoked "continuous laughter. … Old Stroganoff with his troubles, artistic, amorous and financial, his shiftiness, and his perpetual anxiety about the visit of the great veteran of ballet-designers – 'if 'e come', is a vital creation. ... The book stands out for shockingness and merriment."

The book introduced the phlegmatic Inspector Adam Quill and the excitable members of Vladimir Stroganoff's ballet company, who later reappeared in three more books between 1938 and 1945.

Some thought that Stroganoff was based on the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, but Brahms pointed out that Diaghilev appears briefly in the novels in his own right, and she said of Stroganoff, "Suddenly he was there. I used to have the impression that he wrote us, rather than that we wrote him."

After Simon's sudden death in 1948, Brahms wrote solo for some years but, in the 1950s, she established a second long-running collaboration with the writer and broadcaster Ned Sherrin, which lasted for the rest of her life.

Together they wrote plays and musicals for the stage and television, and published both fiction and non-fiction books.

Brahms was born in Croydon, Surrey.

Her parents were Henry Clarence Abrahams, a jeweller, and his wife, Pearl née Levi, a member of a Sephardic Jewish family who had come to Britain from the Ottoman Empire a generation earlier.

She was educated at Minerva College, Leicestershire and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she left before graduating.

Her biographer Ned Sherrin wrote, "already an embryo critic, she did not care to listen to the noise she made when playing the piano."

While at the Academy, Brahms wrote light verse for the student magazine.

The London newspaper, the Evening Standard began to print some of her verses.

Brahms adopted her pen-name so that her parents should not learn of her activities: they envisaged "a more domestic future" for her than journalism.

The name "Caryl" was also usefully ambiguous as regards gender.

In the 1980s, Michael Billington praised the writing: "a power of language of which Wodehouse would not have been ashamed. As a description of a domineering Russian mother put down by her ballerina daughter, you could hardly better: 'She backed away like a defeated steamroller.'"

The book was a best-seller in the UK, and was published in an American edition by Doubleday.