[In the following essay, Burgess surveys Collier's literary career.]

Ask the average Englishman about Milton, and he will say it is the name of a patent antiseptic. This is true, though not exclusively. Ask him about John Collier, and he will say that it is the name of a chain men's outfitters, probably adding the television jingle “John Collier, John Collier, the window to watch.” There is a nice irony about the fact that the real or immortal John Collier—writer, not tailor—is the last man in the world whose window is to be watched. He eschews fame and has a horror of publicity. He is probably happy enough to know that people regard The African Queen as a film with a great script, without being particularly interested in who wrote it, and that the novel His Monkey Wife keeps finding a new batch of delighted readers every decade or so, readers too intrigued by the theme and the style to be curious about the author. The situation in America as regards Collier is much the same as in Britain, except that here he cannot be confused with a tailoring firm. Some of his stories must worry Americans who chance upon them. They show a large familiarity with America and even use with ease various kinds of American spoken idiom; yet they seem to be written by a very English Englishman, quaint, precise, bookish, fantastic—the sort of man who might keep to his country estate or college rooms and shudder at the prospect of engaging the New World. And yet John Collier has spent a long time working for that newest sector of the New World, Hollywood, and is a master of the script-writer's craft. Read his short stories and you will see all the script-writer's virtues—intense economy, characterization through speech, the sharp camera-eye of observation. You will also find literature, grace, allusiveness, erudition, the artist as well as the craftsman.

People who read Irving Wallace and Irving Stone and the other Irvings may not be expected to read Collier, but scholars who write about Edith Wharton and E. M. Forster may also be expected to neglect him. Take it further: histories of Anglo-American fiction rarely, even at their most comprehensive, find room for him, but the same may be said of other imaginative writers who share some of his qualities—Saki, for instance, and Mervyn Peake, and the royal physician who wrote the anonymous comic masterpiece Augustus Carp Esq. (what a treat is coming to Americans when some publisher decides to reprint it). To write tales about hell under the floorboards, the devil as a film producer, men kept in bottles, a man who marries a chimpanzee is a sure way to miss the attentions of the “serious” chronicler of fiction. The puritanism of the scholarly tradition leads Oxford dons to produce detective stories pseudonymously but to refuse to write “seriously” about the form (T. S. Eliot always promised to produce a considered thesis on the genre, but—because of shame or decorum or lack of time or something—the promise was not fulfilled). It also exhibits pudeur in the presence of fantasy, especially when it has no evident didactic purpose. Gulliver's Travels is all right, but the works of Carroll and Lear are for the depth psychologist rather than the literary historian.

John Collier is essentially a fantasist, but not of the romantic order that purveys Gothick, both paleo- and neo-, and science fiction. He makes literature out of the intrusion of fantasy, or quiet horror, into a real world closely observed, not out of the creation of a parallel world (windy, bosky, and machicolated; steely and computerized; hobbitish). In His Monkey Wife it is the world of the 1920's, whose properties shine through a classical and allusive prose that belongs to a more elegant age:

The snow's a lady … and, like the rest of her sex, though delightful in her fall (to those who enjoy her), once she has fallen her effect is depressing, particularly in Piccadilly. A heavy blizzard had begun at noon, and continued for a couple of hours, during which time it was whisked and beaten by wheels and feet and sweepers into a kind of stale and ghastly sundae, edging, like Stygian spume, the banks of the stream of black and glassy traffic, which creaked along as slowly and uncouthly as a river of broken ice.

Though we may be said to have sundaes still with us (though not, since the passing of a highly moral Act of Parliament, fallen ladies in Piccadilly), we no longer have the referent of the following “metaphysical” image:

For the heart is, in a sense, like the Prince of Wales; we would not have it cut in stone, yet how pathetic it is, when, as at Wembley, we see it modeled in butter.

This refers to the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, at which the then Prince of Wales, late the Duke of Windsor, was indeed sculpted fullsize in butter by New Zealand dairy exhibitors. Reading His Monkey Wife in the 1970's, we experience the agreeable literary piquancy of seeming to be in three historical periods at the same time—that of the prose, that of the imagery, that of a story which is as potent now as when it was first written, for it is pure myth.

Why write a full-length novel about a chimpanzee that falls in love with, and eventually marries, an undistinguished colonial schoolmaster? Osbert Sitwell enthused many years ago—on the occasion of a reprint—about the deep symbolism: man needs to face his atavistic self, to be refreshed (the hero's name is Fatigay) through contact with the animal world, and so on. This will do well enough; indeed, anything will do, from cartoon charm to Swiftian satire, but we always end up with a chimp falling in love with a man. And we literally end up with this:

Under her long and scanty hair, he caught glimpses of a plum-blue skin. Into the depths of those all-dark lustrous eyes, his spirit slid with no sound of splash. She uttered a few low words, rapidly, in her native tongue. The candle, guttering beside the bed, was strangled in the grasp of a prehensile foot, and darkness received, like a ripple in velvet, the final happy sigh.

Though Sir Osbert saw here (and who will not say legitimately?) man's soul returning to the anarchic night whence it came, there is something else, forbidden by the eyeshades of decorum—a man copulating with a monkey. There is what is sometimes called wickedness in Collier—a quality different from salacity. There is also the logic of the metaphysical conceit (there are enough references to Donne in the book, beginning with the very first sentence, to prepare us for this), which does not balk, as the cartoon fantasy does, at the inescapable conclusion, though it leaves everything to the imagination. The Collierian melodic line deliberately seduces us into accepting reality through the agency of a “double take.” It happens, for instance, at the end of the story called “Bottle Party,” where the hero is glassed and corked and put on sale:

In the end, some sailors happened to drift into the shop, and, hearing this bottle contained the most beautiful girl in the world, they bought it up by general subscription of the fo'c'sle. When they unstoppered him at sea, and found it was only poor Frank, their disappointment knew no bounds, and they used him with the utmost barbarity.

That final word covers a great deal, but Collier the scriptman, the visual conceptor, undoubtedly has a number of specific images in mind. Or just one.

An appreciation of many of Collier's effects depends on one's own erudition. In His Monkey Wife, Emily the chimp visits the London Zoo, where she encounters an old acquaintance of the jungle, another chimp called Henry:

“Well, Emily!” he muttered. “Have you too come to haunt me? I know I was wrong to throw that banana skin, and, it's true enough, I meant to do worse still. I determined that, if I could get you on the rebound, so to speak, that day you ran away from the schoolmaster, I'd take it out of you for daring to love anyone but me. But I was punished, Emily, and I'm being punished still. When I was in the very act of making up to you, a leopard sprang on me—no doubt you saw it—and I felt his red-hot teeth and claws, and then all was dark, and I awoke to find myself in the hands of friends, who bore me here—to Hell! Sweet Em, what shall become of Henry, being in Hell forever?”

It is probable that, apart from being able to recognize the Doctor Faustus quotation at the end, one needs to be equipped with a knowledge of the history of English fictional dialogue to enjoy this fully. Collier seems to echo, in rhythm as well as idiom, a tradition of speech that could be courtly, melodramatic, colloquial, biblical. His animals know it best. But when his human characters in the short stories seem to speak a respectable enough American, there is always somehow a touch of the bookish, as though Collier is deliberately echoing a Punch joke about Americans from the 1850's:

“I'd have given her the world,” said he. “And I would yet. But she's gotta see reason. I'll make her listen to me somehow. Let me get her within reach of my arms, that's all! Landlord, I'll have a bottle of this hooch up in my room, I reckon. I gotta do a bit of thinking. Good night, pal. I'm no company. She's roused up the old caveman in me, that's how it is. I'm not claiming to be any sort of sheik, but this little Irish wonder lady's gotta learn she can't make a monkey of a straight-forward American businessman. Good night!”

The inversion (“said he”) reinforces the slight but flavorsome archaism.

Collier ransacks traditions, but he does not himself seem to belong to any tradition (any more than does Mervyn Peake). His Monkey Wife and Defy the Foul Fiend do not exemplify any direction in the course of the novel form, and the short stories suggest fable, or grand guignol, more than the naturalistic irony of the conte. All this means that he does not play a part in the development of a literature, although he is himself very “literary.” It has been regarded by some critics as a sure sign of slightness, the badge of the inconsiderable, for a writer to make some of his effects out of his reading (like the school of essayists that followed Lamb). Add to this an almost exclusive concern with horror and fantasy, and you seem to have a double cause for overlooking Collier. But the interests of the literary critic-historian and of the cultivated fancier of good writing so often fail to meet. One could pursue somewhere, not here, the theory that the books that mean most in the average literature lifetime are not the collected works of Scott, George Eliot, Balzac, Trollope, Zola, Hardy, and other “makers” of the novel, but the unclassifiable “sports”—Gargantua, Vathek, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Les Illuminations, Alice, Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, Diary of a Nobody, Cardinal Pirelli, The Unquiet Grave, Titus Groan, His Monkey Wife. If Collier had produced many more full-length works of fiction, then critic-historians would be able to look for patterns and find him a legitimate scholarly niche. As it is, he is chiefly a creator of very wayward miniatures, and all that can be done with these is to enjoy them. In this volume you have most of his stories, as also a part of Defy the Foul Fiend, which stands easily on its own, and of course His Monkey Wife. Whatever this volume has cost or is going to cost you, it is, believe me, a great bargain.