John Collier (fiction writer)

John Henry Noyes Collier (3 May 1901 – 6 April 1980) was a British-born writer and screenwriter best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in ''The New Yorker'' from the 1930s to the 1950s. Most were collected in ''The John Collier Reader'' (Knopf, 1972); earlier collections include a 1951 volume, '' Fancies and Goodnights'', which won the International Fantasy Award and remains in print. Individual stories are frequently anthologized in fantasy collections. John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Wyndham Lewis, and Paul Theroux. He appears to have given few interviews in his life; those include conversations with biographer Betty Richardson, Tom Milne, and Max Wilk.

Life

Born in London in 1901, John Collier was the son of John George and Emily Mary Noyes Collier. He had one sister, Kathleen Mars Collier. His father, John George Collier, was one of seventeen children, and could not afford formal education; he worked as a clerk. Nor could John George afford schooling for his son beyond prep school; John Collier and Kathleen were educated at home. He was privately educated by his uncle Vincent Collier, a novelist.The Editors of Time Life: "Editors' Preface", ''Fancies and Goodnights'', pages viv-xii. Time Life Books, 1965. Biographer Betty Richardson wrote:

When, at the age of 18 or 19, Collier was asked by his father what he had chosen as a vocation, his reply was, "I want to be a poet." His father indulged him; over the course of the next ten years Collier lived on an allowance of two pounds a week plus whatever he could pick up by writing book reviews and acting as a cultural correspondent for a Japanese newspaper. During this time, being not overly burdened by any financial responsibilities, he developed a penchant for games of chance, conversation in cafes and visits to picture galleries.Editor: jacket blurb, ''Defy the Foul Fiend'', back cover. Penguin Books UK, 1948. He never attended university.Hoyle, Fred: "Time ''Reading Program Introduction''", ''Fancies and Goodnights'', page xv-xix. Time Life Books, 1965

He was married to early silent film actress Shirley Palmer in 1936; they were divorced. His second marriage in 1945 was to New York actress Beth Kay (Margaret Elizabeth Eke). They divorced a decade later. His third wife was Harriet Hess Collier, who survived him; they had one son, John G. S. Collier, born in Nice, France, on May 18, 1958.

Career

Poetry

He began writing poetry at age nineteen, and was first published in 1920.

For ten years Collier attempted to reconcile intensely visual experience opened to him by the Sitwells and the modern painters with the more austere preoccupations of those classical authors who were fashionable in the 1920s. He felt that his poetry was unsuccessful, however; he was not able to make his two selves (whom he oddly described as the "archaic, uncouth, and even barbarous" Olsen and the "hysterically self-conscious dandy" Valentine) speak with one voice.

Being an admirer of James Joyce, Collier found a solution in Joyce's ''Ulysses''. "On going for my next lesson to ''Ulysses'', that city of modern prose," he wrote, "I was struck by the great number of magnificent passages in which words are used as they are used in poetry, and in which the emotion which is originally aesthetic, and the emotion which has its origin in intellect, are fused in higher proportions of extreme forms than I had believed was possible." The few poems he wrote during this time were afterwards published in a volume under the title ''Gemini''.

Fiction

While he had written some short stories during the period in which he was trying to find success as a poet, his career did not take shape until the publication of ''His Monkey Wife'' in 1930. It enjoyed a certain small popularity and critical approval that helped to sell his short stories. Biographer Richardson explained the literary context for the book:

As a private joke, Collier wrote a decidedly cool four-page review of ''His Monkey Wife'', describing it as an attempt "to combine the qualities of the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel," and concluding with the following appraisal of the talents of its author: "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humor is too hysterical, too greedy, and too crude." Paul Theroux, ''Sunrise with Seamonsters''. Houghton Mifflin Books (1986): 303. Author Peter Straub has done the same with fake, negative reviews, in admiration of Collier.

His second novel, ''Tom's A-Cold: A Tale'' (1933) was grim, depicting a barbaric and dystopian future England; it is mentioned in Joshua Glenn's essay "The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels of Pre- Golden Age SF (1904-33)." Richardson calls it "part of a tradition of apocalyptic literature that began in the 1870s" including ''The War of the Worlds'': "Usually, this literature shows an England destroyed by alien forces, but in Collier's novel, set in Hampshire in 1995, England has been destroyed by its own vices—greed, laziness, and an overwhelming bureaucracy crippled by its own committees and red tape." John Clute wrote,

The title refers to a line spoken by Edgar in ''King Lear''; the outcast Edgar (the son of a fictional Gloucester) pretends to be a madman named Tom o' Bedlam and says to the deranged King, who is wandering on the windy heath, "Tom's a-cold."

His last novel, ''Defy the Foul Fiend; or, The Misadventures of a Heart'', another title taken from the same speech in ''King Lear'' as ''Tom's A-Cold'', was published in 1934.

He received the Edgar Award in 1952 for the short story collection ''Fancies and Goodnights'', which also won the International Fantasy Award in 1952.

Writing style

David Langford described Collier as "best known for his highly polished, often bitterly flippant magazine stories... isbest stories are touched with poetry and real wit, sometimes reminiscent of Saki's. There are moments of outrageous Grand Guignol; the occasional sexual naughtiness is far beyond Thorne Smith in sophistication." Langford praises Collier's "smiling misanthropy." Similarly, Christopher Fowler wrote in ''The Independent'', "His simple, sharp style brought his tales colourfully to life" and described Collier's fiction as "sardonic." John Clute wrote, "He was known mainly for his sophisticated though sometimes rather precious short stories, generally featuring acerbic snap endings; many of these stories have strong elements of fantasy..." E. F. Bleiler also admired Collier's writing, describing Collier as ""One of the modern masters of the short story and certainly the preeminent writer of short fantasies." and stating that ''The Devil and All'' was "one of the great fantasy collections".

Other media

In the succeeding years, Collier traveled between England, France and Hollywood. He continued to write short stories, but as time went on, he would turn his attention more and more towards writing screenplays.

Max Wilk, who interviewed Collier for his book ''Schmucks with Underwoods'', tells how, during the 1930s, Collier left the home he owned in England, Wilcote Manor, and traveled to France, where he lived briefly at Antibes and Cassis. The story of how Collier wound up going to Hollywood has been mistold sometimes, but Collier told Wilk that in Cassis,

The film ''Sylvia Scarlett'' starred Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne, and Edmund Gwenn; it was the comic story of a widower, his daughter Sylvia who disguises herself as a boy, and a con man; Collier's collaborators on the script were Gladys Unger and Mortimer Offner. Wilk writes that the film was considered bizarre at the time, but decades later, it enjoys a cult following.

Collier landed in Hollywood on May 16, 1935, but, he told Wilk, after ''Sylvia Scarlett'' he returned to England. There, he spent a year working on '' Elephant Boy'' for director Zoltan Korda.

Collier suggested a way to make the footage cohere into a story and to make "a star out of that little boy, Sabu." After these two unorthodox starts to screenwriting, Collier was on his way to a new writing career.

Screenplays

Collier returned to Hollywood, where he wrote prolifically for film and television. He contributed notably to the screenplays of '' The African Queen'' along with James Agee and John Huston, ''The War Lord'', ''I Am A Camera'' (adapted from ''The Berlin Stories'' and remade later as ''Cabaret''), '' Her Cardboard Lover'', '' Deception'' and ''Roseanna McCoy''.

* '' Sylvia Scarlett'' (1935)
* '' Elephant Boy'' (1937)
* '' Her Cardboard Lover'' (1942)
* '' Deception'' (1946)
* ''Roseanna McCoy'' (1949)
* '' The African Queen'' (1951) (uncredited)
* ''The Story of Three Loves'' (1953) (Collier wrote two of three segments: "The Jealous Lover" and "Equilibrium")
* ''I Am A Camera'' (1955)
* ''The War Lord'' (1965)

Teleplays

* ''The Man in the Royal Suite'' — Adapted by Collier from a novel by Edgar Wallace for '' The Four Just Men'', April 27, 1960 (Season 1, Episode 27).
* ''I Spy'' — Adapted by Collier from the play by John Mortimer (of ''Rumpole of the Bailey'' fame) for '' Alfred Hitchcock Presents'', December 5, 1961 (Season 7, Episode 9), starring Kay Walsh and Eric Barker.
* ''Maria'' — Written for '' Alfred Hitchcock Presents'', October 24, 1961 (Season 7, Episode 3), starring Norman Lloyd and Nita Talbot.
* ''The Magic Shop'' — Adapted by Collier and James Parish from the 1903 story by H. G. Wells

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