John Collier (fiction writer)


John Henry Noyes Collier 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 '50s. Many were collected in The John Collier Reader ; 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. 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. He never attended university.
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. 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 18 May 1958.

Career

Poetry

He began writing poetry at the age of 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 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 afterward 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." Author Peter Straub has done the same with fake, negative reviews, in admiration of Collier.
His second novel, Tom's A-Cold: A Tale depicted a barbaric and dystopian future England; it is mentioned in Joshua Glenn's essay "The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels of Pre-Golden [Age of Science Fiction|Golden Age SF]." 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."
His final 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

described Collier as "best known for his highly polished, often bitterly flippant magazine stories... best 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 (film)|The African Queen] along with James Agee and John Huston, The War Lord, I Am a Camera, Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy.

Awards

  • Poetry award granted by the Paris literary magazine This Quarter for his poetry collection Gemini.
  • International Fantasy Award for Fiction for Fancies and Goodnights.
  • Edgar Award for Best Short Story for Fancies and Goodnights.

    Death

Collier died of a stroke on 6 April 1980, in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California. Near the end of his life, he wrote, "I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer."

Collections of Collier's papers

  • The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin's papers "represent his transition from a poet to writer of novels, short stories, and screenplays. The bulk of the papers are manuscripts covering several genres, although a substantial amount of correspondence is also included."
  • University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections
  • Colliers' son, John G. S. Collier

    Novels

  • His Monkey Wife: or Married to a Chimp
  • No Traveller Returns
  • Tom's A-Cold: A Tale
  • ''Defy the Foul Fiend; or, The Misadventures of a Heart''

    Short fiction

Selected short stories

  • "Another American Tragedy" - A man mutilates himself in order to murder an aged rich relative and impersonate him, to change the will in his own favor—only to discover he isn't the only one who wants the old man dead.
  • "Back for Christmas" - A man plots a foolproof way to murder his wife, but the murder is exposed because of an unexpected gift she left for him to find. Originally published in The New Yorker. This story has been dramatised many times: once for Hitchcock Presents">Alfred Hitchcock">Hitchcock Presents, three times for the Suspense radio series, as well as once for an episode of Tales of the Unexpected.
  • "Bottle Party" - A jinn tricks a man into taking his place in the bottle.
  • "Cancel All I Said" - A couple's young daughter takes a screen test. The couple's lives are torn apart by the studio head's spoken offer to make the child a star.
  • "The Chaser" - A young man buying a genuine love potion cannot understand why the seller sells love potions for a dollar, but also offers a colorless, tasteless, undetectable poison at a much, much higher price.
  • "Evening Primrose" - Probably his most famous; about people who live in a department store, hiding during the day and coming out at night. Betty Richardson wrote that the store is "the Valhalla, of course, of a consumer society... populated by acquisitive people who pose as mannequins by daylight; by night, they emerge to grab what they want": "Happy to sacrifice all human emotions—love, pity, integrity—for the sake of consumer goods, these denizens have their own pecking order and police. The primary duty of the latter is to suppress any rebellion against this materialistic society." The story was read by Vincent Price and recorded on an LP record by Caedmon Audio in 1980. The story also served as the inspiration for the 1984 music video "Prime Time" by the British progressive rock band The Alan Parsons Project.
  • "Interpretation of a Dream" - A man experiences disturbing and serial dreams of falling from the thirty-ninth story of the skyscraper in which he works, passing one story every night. In his dreams, he looks through the window and makes detailed and veridical observations of the real-life inhabitants as he passes.
  • "Over Insurance" - A loving couple puts nine-tenths of their money into life insurance and becomes so impoverished as a result that each spouse decides to poison the other, unaware that the other has made the same decision.
  • "Special Delivery" - A man falls in love with a department-store mannequin. This was later adapted for an episode of the 1960s TV series Journey to the Unknown, retitled "Eve", which starred Dennis Waterman and Carol Lynley.
  • "The Steel Cat" - An inventor uses his pet mouse to demonstrate his better mousetrap to an insensitive prospect who insists on seeing the mouse actually die.
  • "Three Bears Cottage" - A man tries unsuccessfully to poison his wife with a mushroom as retaliation for serving him a smaller egg than the one she served herself.
  • "Thus I Refute Beelzy" - An odiously rational father is confounded by the imagination of his small son.
  • "The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It" - A man tried for murder and acquitted for lack of motive tells his story to sympathetic friends.
  • "Wet Saturday" - Stuck indoors on a rainy Saturday, a family must deal with a problem. The problem turns out to be murder, and how to frame an innocent visitor for the crime. Dramatised in the Suspense radio series broadcast on 24 June 1942 and 16 December 1943 featuring Charles Laughton, and as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents broadcast on 30 September 1956. The episode was actually directed by Hitchcock himself. It was also later adapted for Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected.
  • "Youth from Vienna" - A couple, whose careers depend on youth, are forced to deal with a gift of a single dose of rejuvenating medicine that cannot be divided or shared. This story was the basis for The [Fountain of Youth (film)|The Fountain of Youth], a 1956 TV pilot for a proposed anthology series, produced by Desilu and written, directed, and hosted by Orson Welles.

    Collections

  • Green Thoughts
  • The Devil and All
  • Variations on a Theme
  • Presenting Moonshine
  • The Touch of Nutmeg, and More Unlikely Stories
  • Fancies and Goodnights
  • Pictures in the Fire
  • The John Collier Reader
  • ''The Best of John Collier''

    Poetry

Collections

Collier's short story "Evening Primrose" was the basis of a 1966 television musical by Stephen Sondheim, and it was also adapted for the radio series Escape and by BBC Radio. Several of his stories, including "Back for Christmas", "Wet Saturday" and "De Mortuis", were adapted for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The short story "Green Thoughts" may have inspired Little Shop of Horrors.