I think these days most authors using pseudonyms are comfortable for their various personas to be public.
Amberlake, like Richard Manton and others of the golden years-- they'd likely be in their 70s or 80s if still alive.
Generally I have the impression that there was a kind of literary underground-- if you look at writers like Martin Pyx and P.N. Dedeaux -- these are very sophisticated and literate men or women. A number of the putative identifications have been to literary critics and the like, and that makes sense. Many of these writers seem to have been in communication with Barney Rosset, who'd published Henry Miller, Anais Nin and perhaps most famously D.H Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover"
One of the things I particularly appreciate about these writers is that they often seem to be writing in winking reference to something else, an in joke that's very hard to unravel, tantalizing. Richard Manton, for example, has a kind of obsession with certain stories of schoolgirls committed to white slavery, and it always seems he's referring to something, but what?
Cyrian Amberlake is similarly erudite, consider the opening to "The Domino Queen"
"In the first weeks of June, Auvergne reclaims from the twentieth century most of its antique, rugged character. The last skiers have gone, the first spa-takers are only just arriving. Spring here was quick and vital, all over, so it seemed, in a few days of May. The cattle are afield, browsing in the tender new grass. The couzes are still swollen, white and turbulent with meltwater. Only one lone fisherman stands in hip-high waders in a sky-blue pool below Lac Pavin, his wicker creel slung from his hip, his battered woollen hat pulled low over his eyes. He will catch nothing today, or tomorrow; he is here for the solitude, the silence, at once tranquil and electric with the potency of the infant summer."
-- this is not your routine stroke book material. First of all-- I think he's actually been there, if not he got his money's worth out of a Guide Michelin. Like a number of these writers, he chooses a reasonably unusual present tense (e.g. "Only one lone fisherman stands") to create kind of set piece, notice how he polishes it off with a shift to the future tense ("He will catch nothing today, or tomorrow; he is here for the solitude"). These tenses almost sound like its been translated from French (no sign that it was, but this kind of thing is more common in French) . . . he's having some fun.
Similar artistry here:
"She reads, it may be, a slim novel by Marguerite Duras. She reads about Hélène Lagonelle . . . who has no memory, whose body is the most beautiful of all the things given by God. Her breasts are as white as flour, says the narrator, and she walks naked and innocent through the dormitory, carrying them before her like a gift. The woman smiles, and almost unconsciously runs her hand over her own breasts, which are large and loll outwards across her narrow chest, flattened by their own weight."
Again, that's nice stuff-- observation of the girl, what she's reading, what what she's reading might say, and then how it makes her feel. That's no small beer.
(and Margaret Duras is a real writer-- this bit is referring to her book "The Lover", published in 1984, which won the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.)
Of course tyros and posers can quote like anyone else, college students can leave breadcrumb trails of their self appointed cleverness; but this doesn't feel like that. This feels "smart" in a Tom Stoppard sort of way, someone who knows their way around literature and is having some good dirty fun.
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