Literary Lives
John Collier
His Monkey Wife: or Married to a Chimp, (1930; Oxford University Press paperback, 1983)
Gemini (poems, 1931)
No Traveller Returns (1931)
Green Thoughts (stories, 1932)
Tom’s A Cold (published in the US as Full Circle, 1933)
Defy the Foul Fiend: or The Misadventures of a Heart (Knopf, 1934)
Presenting Moonshine (stories, 1941)
The Touch of Nutmeg (stories, 1943)
Fancies and Goodnights (stories, 1951; Time-Life Books, 1980)
Pictures in the Fire (stories, 1958)
The John Collier Reader (stories, Knopf, 1972, also published as The Best of John Collier, 1975, omitting His Monkey Wife)
Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (1973)
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To know the life of the Anglo-American writer John Collier (his middle names, never used, were Henry Noyes), you have to look really hard, and all over. His papers, at the University of Texas, comprise only 5 boxes covering 2.1 linear feet, yet cover 56 years (“The Personal Papers series is minuscule compared to the Works series” and includes “a very small amount of outgoing correspondence to John Beevers (1), Louis Golding (2), and Alannah Harper (3)”).
Born to a comfortable family in London May 3, 1901, Collier could read at three. His formal education ended with kindergarten; thereafter his uncle, an erstwhile novelist, tutored him. At 18 he announced he wanted to be a poet, and his father let him try, putting him on an allowance of two pounds a week for the next ten years. On the side Collier published occasional pieces and acted as cultural correspondent for a Japanese newspaper. “During this time,” as a 1948 book jacket blurb had it, “being not overly burdened by any financial responsibilities, he developed a penchant for games of chance, conversation in cafes, and visits to picture galleries.”
Reviewing his second novel in 1933, Time summed up Collier in his salad days “famed in London’s artistic Chelsea district for wearing a beret before berets were worn. Literarily, as well as sartorially, precocious, his youthful lispings appeared in such odd numbers as This Quarter, Paris-published exiles’ magazine, and a London broadsheet called The Barricade. His smart anthological edition of John Aubrey, 17th Century scandalmonger (The Scandal & Credulities of John Aubrey), the keenly quiet satire of His Monkey Wife got Author Collier a wider audience than London’s Chelsea or Paris’s Left Bank. Short, merry, bumpkinesque, John Collier lives in the still undevastated Hampshire countryside…”
Apparently well connected, he fell in with Viscountess Rhondda’s set and was poetry editor of her magazine Time and Tide into the ‘30s. (4)
Collier made his name- a bit scandalously, with the publication of a 1930 novel, His Monkey Wife. By 1935- having seen barely a dozen movies in his life- Collier had a contract with RKO, starting with the screenplay- passed on by Evelyn Waugh- for the George Cukor/Katherine Hepburn project Sylvia Scarlett (5).
Turner Classic Movies writer Frank Miller says. “Keeping close to the spirit of (Compton) MacKenzie's novel, he crafted a rambling screenplay that veered between comedy and tragedy freely in a manner that would anticipate the youth-oriented road films of the '60s and '70s. He also explored the sexual ramifications of Hepburn's cross-dressing, including a scene in which an amorous maid (Dennie Moore) tries to seduce her and an otherwise heterosexual artist (Brian Aherne) finds himself falling for the ‘young man.’
“But after taking a chance on the untried author, Cukor panicked and brought in two established screenwriters to tone down some of Collier's more outrageous ideas. Where Collier had started the film with Hepburn already pretending to be a boy, they added a sentimental prologue in which, while mourning her mother's death, she cuts off her hair to initiate the masquerade. They also created a new ending, tying together all of the film's plots in the final, rather confusing, 15 minutes. Years later, the director would admit that he would have had a better film had he stuck with Collier's original adaptation.”
He continued writing for film into the 1960s, with credits ranging from Her Cardboard Lover (1942)- Norma Shearer’s last movie and another Cukor bomb; Deception (1946)-a Bette Davis/Paul Henried weeper; Roseanna McCoy (IMDB calls it a big-budget Sam Goldwyn transplant of Romeo and Juliet to the Ozarks; ‘John Collier concocted a quirky screenplay with eccentric details of mountain magic, as well as some droll humor at the expense of the rustics [‘Don't talk with your knife in your mouth!’]); The African Queen (having pitched C.S. Forester’s novel to Jack Warner, he wrote the first, uncredited, script, 1951); I Am A Camera (1955); and 1965’s Charlton Heston medieval epic, The War Lord (7).
Collier saw the possibilities of television for the adaptation of the growing body of short stories he published, mostly in The New Yorker. His first TV script broadcast in 1946; the revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran one as late as 1987.
Collier made a good living between his stories, movies and television; in 1955 he moved to a house in Provence and spent years working on a never-produced film treatment of Paradise Lost.
John Collier died of a stroke in Pacific Palisades, California April 6, 1980, age 78. Another wife, Harriet, survived. His champion, Anthony Burgess, wrote in The Times, “His talent was large but mostly disregarded in his native country. It is proper to compare it with that of Saki, wit whom he shared a quiet capacity for horror masked mostly by an urbanity and an elegance of style very beguiling but not well appreciated in the post-Hemingway era…Though not a writer of the very first rank, he possessed considerable literary skill and a rare capacity to entertain. Modest, disinclined to self-publicity, somewhat cynical, he was satisfied to make a living with his pen and expected literary extinction. Such extinction would be ill-deserved. He needs to be rediscovered.”
………
John Collier’s stories are, indeed, like those of Saki. In plotting and construction- and in the light, frivolous tone- at once timeless and slightly dated- they share a debt to P.G. Wodehouse. I believe there’s more than a bit of Ronald Firbank in Collier’s stories, too. They are wicked, but not salacious.
Take 1939’s “Bottle Party,” for instance. Franklin Fletcher, 35, “dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forego the tiger-skins.”
He decided, suitably louche women being thin on the ground, that he must take up a hobby. Prowling an antique shop, he bought a bottle alleged to hold a genie the proprietor said had delivered Cleopatra on a tiger-skin.
“ ‘What was she like?’ cried Frank.
“ ‘All right,’ said the old man, ‘if you like that sort of thing. I got bored with it.’
Franklin bought the bottle for a fiver, took it home and released the jinn. He ordered up a palace with a surfeit of tiger-skins and a harem. Soon sated, he grew bored, calling up Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Queen Guinevere, and all the beauties of history. The old shopkeeper had already been there, every time.
Meanwhile, the jinn, growing fond of freedom of movement, conjured up a coquette who lured Franklin into the bottle, then dashed out to embrace the brawny arms of the phantasm. He whooshed the bottle through time and space and back to the shelf in the dusty old store.
In “Fallen Star” a gross and shiftless devil kidnaps an angel to his beachcombers’ shack in the Pleiades and puts her to work: ‘You’ll cook the dinner and tend the still and make the bed…’
“ ‘The bed?’ said she. ‘I’ll make my own bed. As to yours…’
“…I said bed. It’s singular, that is, and it’d be a lot more singular if it were plural.’ With that, he laughed fit to split his sides.”
But the winsome young angel was unmoved, and the devil resorted to an expedient. He sent her to Earth as a girl of nineteen or twenty, and, certain she’d fall prey to sin, “Your body, soul, virtue and all are mine at seven years’ purchase."
Found wandering in a New York Park missing both memory and raiment, the angel ended up delivered to, and falling for, a handsome young hospital psychiatrist. “We will draw a veil over the scene that followed,” Collier writes, “for the secrets of the psychoanalytic couch are as those of the confessional, only more interesting.” The devil started marking off his seven-year wait.
With but weeks to go, the angel, now the ideal mother and wife, confessed all to her husband, who launched a snare to catch the fiend. “ ‘Let go of my wrist!’ said the devil, trying to pull himself free, for these old, gross, and sensual devils are like scared and sullen children when a psychoanalyst gets hold of them.”
Seizing on the extreme suggestibility of demons, the good doctor spent the summer in analysis with the devil, lovingly and comically recounted. By the time the course of treatment concludes, he is a slimmed down, tail-less well tailored chap who “shortly afterwards became engaged to a Mrs. Schlager, a widow who had also been a troublesome patient in her time. He became a friend of the family, if one who went on a bit about his case “but this is very usual in those who have benefitted from analysis. In the end, he went on to Wall Street, where he did so extremely well that he was soon able to endow a superb clinic for the young psychoanalyst.”
Married life has its hazards in Collier’s universe, too. Mr. and Mrs. Scrivener, the couple in “Three Bears Cottage,” lived a meticulous, highly observant life. One day he noticed she had taken the more nutritious brown egg for her breakfast, giving him the white. It was smaller, too. Silent aggrievement swelled in his breast. He brought home two mushrooms for another meal, one poisonous, the other not. She decided to serve him the larger one (“But what a very odd shape! I mean, of course, for a mushroom”), which immediately set to delivering its deadly contents.
“You b___!” he cried, exhorting her to summon a medico.
“ ‘I forgive you for trying to poison me,’ said Ella. ‘But I cannot forget that awful name you called me just now. No, Henry, a lady dog cannot run for a doctor. I shall go no further than to that powerfully built young woodcutter who is chopping away at an elm tree down the hollow. He has often whistled at me when I passed him, like an oriole in full song. I shall ask him what he thinks of a man who calls his wife such a name, and what he thinks of a man who brings home a thing like that to his wife. And I have no doubt at all he will tell me.”
In “Over Insurance,” young marrieds Alice and Irwin are so in love they spend nearly all their funds on insurance for each other. Thus impoverished, and consequently discontent, each, independently, resolves to poison the other. Quaffing their mutually poisoned coffees, they realize their fate and sprint for the door. “The poison, however, acted extremely quickly on their weakened constitutions. Even as they scuffled for precedence, they fell prone upon the doormat, and the postman came and covered them with bills.”
“ ‘Not a soul,” she answered her husband’s question. ‘Aren’t you finished with that old job yet?’
“ ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take it all up again,’ said the Doctor. ‘Come down here, my dear, and I’ll show you.’”
“Green Thoughts” became Little Shop of Horrors. In “Evening Primrose” a sensitive, young poet resolves to live secretly in a department store, turning his back on the world and only coming out at night, only to find the store dummies come to life in a society every bit as bad as the real world; the story was made into a television musical by Stephen Sondheim.
Beguiling- and horrifying- as the stories are, His Monkey Wife, published when Collier was 29, is probably his monument. Alfred Fatigay- the name itself is a pun- is just that: a small, weary man whose life tends to be directed by others. Emily, his astonishingly well read chimp (on the ship to England passengers want to give her nuts and have her do tricks, while she wants to talk with them about Joseph Conrad’s literary conception of the sea. But they can’t tell, and she can’t talk. Paul Theroux, in his foreword to the OUP edition, says, “One of the funniest scenes in the novel also depends on a literary classic for its effect. This occurs when Emily brandishes a knife and a copy of Murders in the Rue Morgue in Amy’s face, just before the wedding ceremony.”
Theroux notes that when he interviewed Collier’s widow, she showed him a “sniffy review” Collier wrote of His Monkey Wife fifty years earlier, then put in a drawer. It bears the joky, Vile Bodies style he affected in 1930, but still offers a nice summing up of his approach to writing: “He seems to dislike almost everything,” Collier wrote of himself, “and everything in life, and to love everything and everybody as soon as they have been transmuted into a comedy which is sardonic and unjust.”
Or as he put it near the end of his happy life of travel, sailing, roses and writing, "I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer."
Notes (1) UK writer and semi-repentant libertine, 1911-1975. The University of Texas, which holds his papers, drily notes, “Restless as a boy, he led a small gang that engaged in delinquent behavior and petty theft. His youthful hysteria and arrogance continued through his time at Queens College, Cambridge, where he took an M.A. in English with first class honors in 1933.
“Beevers married Marjorie Pollard in 1934. He published his first book, World Without Faith, a defense of free thought over structured ideology, the following year. Beevers also began his journalism career at this time with stints on several newspapers. He worked exclusively for the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1941 to 1969.
“John Beevers embraced revolutionary Communism in the 1930s, but converted to Roman Catholicism sometime in the 1940s. Although nominally a Catholic, Beevers had an ambiguous relationship to the church. While he admired its theology and the lives of Catholic saints, Beevers’s critical and lascivious nature prevented him from fully committing to the faith, particularly in its moral elements.”
Failing at poetry and fiction, he published fifteen books on Marian apparitions, the lives of saints, and translations of Catholic theological works.
(2) UK novelist, 1895-1958. Noted interpreter of Jewish life in Britain.
(3) A bright young thing of the 1920s.
(4) Welsh suffragette and literary editor, 1882-1958. She and her father survived the sinking of the Lusitania. Succeeding to her father’s peerage, she fought to be seated in the House of Lords for 35 years. The House finally relented just after her death. She published an influential literary magazine, Time and Tide, from 1920 until her death; it ceased publication in 1977.
(5) In 1976 he told Sight & Sound he went to Hollywood because he’d fallen in love with a fishing boat near Marseilles and wrote Sylvia Scarlett so he could buy it.
(6) 1908-2000. Hans J. Wollstein describes her as “A blond leading lady of low-budget melodramas of the late '20s, Chicago-born Shirley Palmer also played supporting roles in more upscale surroundings, such as Sam Goldwyn's Ronald Colman-Vilma Banky vehicle The Magic Flame (1927), in which she played the unfaithful wife of a nobleman. She was much more visible in potboilers, however, appearing opposite action hero Charles Hutchison in The Winning Wallop (1926), and as the leading lady of The Eagle of the Night, a ten-chapter serial co-starring stunt pilot Frank Clarke. Retiring from the screen in 1934, Palmer later became the wife of television writer John Collier.”
(7) From imdb.com, some vintage Collier lines from The War Lord:
Draco: This place has the dimensions of heresy.
Chrysagon: [of Bronwyn] She has a calm face.
Draco: So has a cow.
Priest: Well, now, fertility. Some say it's pagan. But who's not pagan in some matters?
Draco: True, true! I love the speech of scholars.
Priest: These young folks here think of nothing but frolic. "Desist!" I tell them, but they will go a-wantoning. So, lest the Devil take them, I preach them a text from holy writ. "Increase and multiply," I say. "Replenish the earth." And oh! How they obey me.
Copyright 2007, Lindsay Thompson. All rights reserved.
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