John Henry Noyes Collier (3 May 1901 – 6 April 1980) was a British-American author and screenwriter. He was best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1950s, often featuring macabre, fantastic or sardonic themes and twist endings. Many 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. He became an American citizen in December 1941.
John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Harlan Ellison, 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 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 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 (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 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."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) depicted 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."
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 David Langford described Collier as "best known for his highly polished, often bitterly flippant magazine stories... [His] 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".Bleiler, E.F, The Guide To Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983 (p. 117)
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.
Awards Poetry award granted by the Paris literary magazine This Quarter for his poetry collection Gemini. International Fantasy Award for Fiction (1952) for Fancies and Goodnights (1951). Edgar Award for Best Short Story (1952) for Fancies and Goodnights (1951).
Death On 6 April 1980, four weeks before his 79th birthday, Collier died of a stroke in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. 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
Bibliography
Novels His Monkey Wife: or Married to a Chimp (1930; currently in print, ) No Traveller Returns (a chapbook, 1931) Tom's A-Cold: A Tale (1933) (published in the U.S. as Full Circle) Defy the Foul Fiend; or, The Misadventures of a Heart (1934)
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 (7 October 1939). (Grams erroneously cites a later publication, the 13 December 1939 issue of The Tattler [sic, for The Tatler].Martin Grams, Jr. and Patrik Wikstrom (2001). The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. OTR Publishing, 135. ) This story has been dramatised many times: once for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, three times for the Suspense radio series (Peter Lorre portrayed the main character in the first broadcast in 1943; the 1948 and 1956 broadcasts both starred Herbert Marshall), as well as once for an episode of Tales of the Unexpected. "Bottle Party" – A jinn (genie) 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.