Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was towards the end of my business career that The Kingdom of Twilight appeared, and an early result was that I learned of the existence in Belfast of a very minor echo of the Dublin literary and dramatic movement. The Ulster Literary Theatre had been founded, and had produced two plays-The Reformers, by David Parkhill, and Brian of Banba, by Bulmer Hobson. The experiment was written up in the columns of The Whig by [J.W.] Good, and in another paper, The Evening Telegraph, by Rathcol (W. B. Reynolds). Moreover, in imitation of Yeats’s magazine Samhain, a literary quarterly called Ulad had been Started, under the joint editorship of Reynolds and Parkhill, and it was from the former that I received a note asking me to call upon him.

This is the second volume of Belfast-born writer Forrest Reid’s autobiography, published in 1940, fourteen years after Apostate, the first volume. I did not find Private Road as interesting; a lot of it is about the back-story behind each of Reid’s novels (more than a dozen at that stage), and as I haven’t read any of them, I did not learn much. There are however some interesting chapters about his education, at Inst and then at Christ’s, Cambridge, and about the rather small circle of literary enthusiasts in Belfast in the early 1900s; and there’s also a rather moving chapter about his love for his dogs and cats (in that order).

Reid does not seem to have had a long-term romantic partner, though it’s fairly clear what was going on with his series of male house-mates; there are a few women in the narrative (and I’m glad to see that he stayed in touch with his nurse Emma) but it’s mostly a story of men talking to men. Or not talking – an early dramatic moment is his friendship with Henry James, cut short when James apparently was mortally offended by Reid’s dedication to him of his very gay second novel, The Garden God.

I think that if I were going to make a serious effort to get into Reid’s fiction, and the circles he moved in, this would be a really interesting book, and I wonder if someone enterprising might produce an annotated version; but unlike with Apostate, I am not particularly interested in taking that on myself.

You can get Private Road here.