[In the following essay, Milne explores Collier's writing and films based on his stories.]

‘If thou be'st born to strange sights and if you don't mind picking your way through the untidy tropics of this, the globe, and this, the heart, in order to behold them, come with me into the highly coloured Bargain Basement Toy Bazaar of the Upper Congo. You shall return to England shortly.’

—John Collier, His Monkey Wife

After languishing in limbo since its appearance at the London Festival three years ago, James B. Harris' Some Call It Loving has just re-emerged as the other half of a London sexploitation double bill: a strange but perhaps not entirely inappropriate apotheosis for a film that assumes the persona of the Dream Factory to demonstrate the innocence of corruption as well as the corruptibility of innocence.

At the end of the film, determined to preserve the Sleeping Beauty he has rescued from a carnival and fallen chastely in love with from being contaminated by his own world-weary depravity, the hero salvages her purity—thereby restoring it, however, to the defilement of the sideshow, where admirers may try to wake her for a dollar a kiss—by re-administering the drug that kept her asleep. The John Collier story on which the film is based reaches a similar conclusion, but for simpler, sharper and altogether less metaphysical reasons.

Waiting patiently for his ideal to awaken after he has rescued her from captivity, the hero, an Englishman of means adequate to his simple but exquisitely cultivated tastes who has brought back this prize from a trip to America, at last sees his fragile beauty stir, bringing instant disillusion. ‘“How do you do?” said Edward. “At least … I mean to say … I expect you wonder where you are.” “Where I am, and how I goddam well got here,” said his lovely guest, sitting up on the bed. She rubbed her brow, obviously trying hard to remember. “I must have passed right out,” she said. And then, pointing at him accusingly: “And you look like a son of a bitch who'd take advantage of me.”’

Time was, if you remember, when Borges was not yet a cult writer, celebrated by mysterious references in films like Paris Nous Appartient and Les Carabiniers, largely ignored until, around the time of Performance, Borges was published or republished and at last read. So too, in a rather different way, with John Collier, whose sizeable body of novels and short stories remained out of print and forgotten but whose name was kept tantalisingly alive by a series of distinguished adaptors. Hitchcock included two of his stories, ‘Back for Christmas’ and ‘Wet Saturday’, both personally directed, in his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Orson Welles, also for TV, adapted the story ‘Youth from Vienna’ as Fountain of Youth (see Joseph McBride's article in Sight and Sound, Winter 1971/72). Sandy Wilson made a charming musical out of Collier's equally charming first novel, His Monkey Wife (published in 1930). Stephen Sondheim, no less, did the music for a TV version of ‘Evening Primrose’, a pleasing fancy about a wraith-like tribe living in voluntary seclusion from the pressures of life in a New York department store, not unlike Giraudoux' Madwoman of Chaillot but given a note of chill horror by the presence of the Dark Men, a similar but unmentionably sinister (cannibalistic?) tribe who have chosen to live in a funeral parlour and who are called in to deal with interlopers. And of course, in relatively recent cinema history, there was Collier's name among the credits for Franklin Schaffner's The War Lord, presumably accounting for the weird aura of magic and myth that infused a Hollywood historical romance.

Recently, a small oasis in the literary desert has appeared with the publication of The John Collier Reader,¹ an anthology containing forty-seven short stories, the whole of His Monkey Wife and, disappointingly, only two chapters of Defy the Foul Fiend (to my mind Collier's best novel, published in 1934 and certainly something of a key to him as both man and writer). Received with general enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the doubts normally reserved by reviewers for writers devoted to fantasy, this anthology has focused due attention on a writer described by Eric Korn in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a phenomenon, perhaps a cult, on his way to becoming an industry.’ Published with no bibliographical information whatsoever, and with an introduction by Anthony Burgess that is critically perceptive but of little help informationally (and indeed introduces a new mystery by recalling that of Collier's connection with The African Queen), this volume has left most reviewers enthusing over John Collier (b. 1901, poet, novelist, short story writer and scriptwriter) but echoing New Yorker editor Harold Ross' celebrated ‘Who he?’

JOHN COLLIER: ‘I started off as a poet, kept going by a small allowance from my father, who was extremely poor. I helped keep him that way for nearly ten years, and finally managed to write a novel, His Monkey Wife, which was kindly received, and it led to my writing a good many short stories for the New Yorker.

‘I went to live in Cassis, a delightful little seaport near Marseilles. While there I fell in love with a sturdy fishing boat which was up for sale. At a low price, too, but more than I could beg or borrow. So I was walking around the port, casting languishing glances in that direction, when a nice little girl rode up on a bicycle and gave me a telegram. It was from my agent. Would I go to Hollywood on a two month writing job for wages that seemed to me princely, and which would buy the boat. I was off like a shot.

‘That was for Sylvia Scarlett … to join a couple of other writers on the screenplay. Unfortunately it didn't turn out as well as was hoped. It had all the elements of a really good film. Based on a lively book, a first-rate cast, and in Cukor an outstandingly brilliant director. Unfortunately, again, not a good script. In the main, my fault. It happened that I was abysmally ignorant of the cinema; I'd seen scarcely a dozen films in my life. I couldn't have had a better guide than Cukor, but I wasn't in the mood to learn. Frivolous and pigheaded at the same time: a combination not unknown among the lesser literary lights in England in the Thirties. What must have made it all the sadder for Cukor is that he'd asked for Evelyn Waugh. And I turned up instead … some confusion in the front office. …’

Sylvia Scarlett (1935), though a flop at the time, is now of course something of a cult classic. In On Cukor, Gavin Lambert and Cukor discuss the film rather at cross purposes, with the interviewer wondering why ‘there was such a terrific controversy over something very charming and very lightweight … a simple, mildly eccentric tale of a girl who disguises herself as a boy to help out her dear old father, who's a thief and a con man, and both men and women fall in love with him/her,’ while Cukor isn't too sure whether or not he had thought it daring at the time. ‘But then we got John Collier for the script, and he was a daring kind of writer, so I suppose I must have been thinking in that way.’

The common ground that Cukor and Lambert never quite reach is that Collier at his most characteristic is simultaneously disarming and daring, producing the effect that Anthony Burgess calls his wickedness, illustrating the point by quoting the closing lines of His Monkey Wife: a lyric celebration of romance finally consummated in which Collier delicately resurrects the fact, long buried under a filigree of emotional arabesques, that the happy Isolde melting into her Tristan's arms is, nevertheless, a chimpanzee. ‘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 a 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.’

Wryly commenting on the experience of Sylvia Scarlett, Cukor notes that ‘the picture did something to me. It slowed me up. I wasn't going to be so goddamned daring after that.’ Collier, like so many writers who tangled with the Hollywood machine, from Fitzgerald to Nathanael West, found the experience a rich source for satire. His most barbed story is ‘Pictures in the Fire’, a morality brilliantly worked out in strict movie terms, in which a writer who sells his soul to the Devil (in town to become a movie mogul and revolutionise Hollywood) for a tempting contract, wins it back by encouraging the latter's casting-couch sweetie to play the ever more outrageously demanding star. Everything is dipped in vintage Hollywood vitriol, from artistic humiliation (‘But,’ said she, ‘do you think I ought to be seen about with a writer?’) to private revenge in the scriptwriter's rewrite of Romeo and Juliet: ‘O.K. We'll modernise it. The Capulet apartment is in a New York skyscraper. Romeo's a young G-Man, from Harvard, but disguised as a Yale man in order to outwit the gangsters. Capulet's Harvard, you see. It builds for a reconciliation, a happy ending. Romeo's keen on mountain climbing; that builds up for the balcony scene. On a skyscraper, you see. Only his name's not Romeo. It's Don.’

Nevertheless, Collier remained in Hollywood, receiving screen credit for a very mixed bag of films and obviously developing a kind of quizzical affection for the place. His attitude is reflected, probably much more accurately than in ‘Pictures in the Fire’, by the brilliantly funny but oddly affecting story ‘Gavin O'Leary’, about a flea who becomes smitten with the charms of movie queen Blynda Blythe after sampling the blood of a star-struck poet in a cinema. Itch-hiking the three thousand miles from Vermont to Hollywood, he negotiates the delicate problem of making his heroine's acquaintance by becoming her co-star in a doss-house sequence where the actress is to be subjected to total naturalism and real fleas. From there, becoming a star himself and taking up residence in mutual admiration with a narcissistic leading man, Gavin's story (leading to his final regeneration) is an hallucinating tangle of realism and fantasy viewed through the extravagant distorting mirrors of the Dream Factory: ‘It was not long before ugly rumours were in circulation concerning the flea star. People whispered of his fantastic costumes, his violet evening suits, his epicene underwear, his scent-spray shower-bath, and of strange parties at his bijou house in Bel Air. A trade paper, naming no names, pointed out that if individuals of a certain stripe were considered bad security risks by the State Department, they must be even more of a danger in the most influential of all American industries. It seemed only a matter of time before Gavin would be the centre of an open scandal, and his pictures picketed by the guardians of our morals.’

‘I was extremely lucky in the friends I made and in some of the jobs I was given. Not all of them, of course. Maybe half were impossible. There's a deplorable propensity in the film industry there, here and everywhere, to latch on to basic material which has an inbuilt hopelessness. It's up to a writer to have nothing to do with such stuff. There were times when I was too timid or too greedy to turn my back on an offer, and I very justly got stuck. Some of the other jobs were as good as I could make them. When at last I learned a bit.

‘I was given an excellent chance after Sylvia Scarlett. Charles Laughton, then at his peak with Captain Bligh, had a great desire to play a London bobby. Thalberg hired me to write an original story and screenplay. It was one of the great plums, fallen into my mouth. But it happened that while I was still fumbling with the first draft, Laughton left for England to do Rembrandt for Korda. And at the same time Korda offered me Elephant Boy with Flaherty directing. Thalberg, who could be magnificently kind, allowed me to take a leave of absence. But, while I was still in England, poor Thalberg died. And, as with earlier potentates, his slaves were given the job of escorting him to the next world, on a one-way ticket. In my case, the next world was India.

‘I had presented myself at the studio for Elephant Boy and was politely asked to wait a little. Bob Flaherty had been in India for eighteen months past, and would soon be coming home. He had been delayed a while owing to the fact that they'd sent him off to India to make a film on the Kipling story without giving him a script. After all, a script has an end, often the best part of it. Without a script, Flaherty could not reach that end. He therefore continued to make the most superb photographs of India, of the most ravishing temples, the most heavenly skies and particularly the most elephantine elephants, some of which were going to the right; others to the left; others seeming to charge directly at the audience. It was said that there were three hundred thousand feet of these superb photographs, and Alexander Korda cried out in mortal pain.

‘I diffidently suggested that it might more or less save the situation if we got the child Sabu over from India and if we devised some brief and simple scenes, in which he might utter a few words, and perhaps be intercut against an advancing elephant bent on destruction and, holding up his hand like a juvenile traffic cop, soon be connected with one of the shots of a hinder view—there were a great many to choose from—and he would thus appear to have saved the village. “Mr. Collier, you ask twenty-nine impossibilities.”

‘So we went off to the Hungaria Restaurant, and scribbles were made on the interior parts of Player's cigarette packets. I think the exteriors carried no sort of warning. Anyway, a sort of jury-script was tacked together, much in the way that shipwrecked sailors rig out their rafts with whatever petticoats and spars may be bobbing around. Sabu was sent for, and arrived. In the interval the engaging little imp had exercised his constitutional right to grow into a plump and amiable lubber at least twenty pounds heavier and twelve inches taller than the diminutive pixie he had been when Flaherty first photographed him with his gigantic charge, Kala Nag. In the whole eighteen months the slow-living pachyderm had not grown an inch. There was a scene where he had to lift Sabu high in the air with his trunk. I dreaded a visit from an inspector of the R.S.P.C.A.

‘My long education as a scriptwriter may have begun to pay off, I think, about ten years later when I read C. S. Forrester's The African Queen. I wrote an enthusiastic note to Jack Warner, and persuaded him to buy the novel and to let me write the screenplay. All that was necessary was to transpose the book into the conventional script form. But when I had done the first draft, Warner, who had neglected to read the book, was told that it was concerned with two people all alone on a little riverboat, and that it would cost nearly three million dollars to make. Some ill-disposed person whispered to him that the script had been written with Bette Davis in mind, and that she was disposed to play the part. I'm told that he was reminded also that Miss Davis had the right to pre-empt the feminine lead in any property produced by the studio. Choler prompted him to get rid of me, an impulse he responded to with such alacrity that Reason had not the time to get a word in edgeways. When at last its small still voice could make itself heard, it advised him to get rid of the script also, lest Miss Davis exercise her right. So he sold it to me for a song, and I sold it to Sam Spiegel for the equivalent of a grand opera, and he passed it on to John Huston, who made an immensely popular film out of it.

‘I did only the first draft, but the end was different. Since you ask, my version did not contain the marriage scene. You'll remember that Allnut and Rose have lashed two cylinders full of explosive to the bows of the Queen, thus transforming her into a super torpedo. They lie hidden in the reeds until the German gunboat comes along in the gathering darkness. Then they set out to ram her and blow her and the Queen and themselves out of the water. But a wind has sprung up and the open lake has waves on it, and they ship so much water that before they reach the gunboat the poor old Queen sinks by the stern, leaving them floundering in three feet of water. The makeshift torpedoes are sticking up just level with the surface. Rose and Allnut attract the German's attention with shouts in English. The gunboat trains a searchlight on them and steams inshore in pursuit, lured on to a course which is going to bring it right down upon the waiting torpedoes. Rose and Allnut renew their shouts to keep it following. A machine gun opens up. They are likely to be cut to pieces. At that moment the gunboat goes up in a sheet of flame and the lake is clear for the British.

‘Rose and Allnut struggle to the beach and fall on the warm soil, dead beat. When they wake, the sun is just rising. For mile after mile to the south, the lake shore is scalloped with beaches leading down to the open country now held by the British. They walk on down and the shore birds rise in front of them as they go. A happy end? Bet your life it was. I had a very comfortable percentage, and, believe it or not, I was paid every penny that was due to me.’

Of his own screenwriting efforts, at least up to the aborted African Queen, Collier has little that is complimentary to say: ‘I suspect that what I wrote was far too wordy and far too literary; and most of those highly polished MGM pictures were too full of glossy magazine thinking.’ One might perhaps cite as an example the line in Deception—pianist Bette Davis torn between composer Hollenius (Claude Rains) and cellist Novak (Paul Henreid)—pounced upon by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg (writing in Hollywood in the Forties) to support a description of Collier's script as ‘very pretentious’. The cellist, asked in an interview which living composers should be admired, replies: ‘Let's see. Stravinsky when I think of the present. Richard Strauss when I think of the past. And of course Hollenius, who combines the rhythm of today with the melody of yesterday.’ In point of fact, the only thing wrong with the line is that it is used within the context of a glossy magazine, romantic tosh view of art and artists.

As a writer, Collier has a quality all his own. At its root is a certain gentlemanly, world-weary cynicism, allied to an eighteenth century elegance of wit and a metaphysical's fondness for whimsical conceits: ‘Lord Ollebeare had a face like a coat of arms. His nose might have been a fist, clenched and mailed, gules. In fact, he was one of those men you sometimes see in the street. His moustaches were two dolphins argent, his eyes two étoiles azur. He had also an inalienable two hundred a year, paid weekly, a top bed-sitting-room with a good toasting fire to it, six Norman names, a ruined house, a wild park, and one large and barren farm. … Twenty-odd years ago, for we must hark back a little, he had had less nose, more money, much credit, and the best suite in Albany. There he had a charming cook, on whom, in the most careless fashion imaginable, he begot the hero of this story.’

What follows (this is the beginning of Defy the Foul Fiend), combining the manner of Sterne with that of Diderot, is the sentimental education of the well-born byblow in the ways of a world teetering on the verge of vulgar modernity. Like the hero of Ford Madox Ford's Tietjens tetralogy, young Willoughby Ollebeare is a Tory so pure that he is also the perfect radical; and when his heart is doubly broken by the pretty girl and the native land he simultaneously falls in love with, the twin reconciliations are a Pyrrhic victory in which Willoughby is left to face solitude as the last English country squire: ‘Taking two people, of equal generosity of spirit, each of a courageous and sincere intelligence, each of that order which ardently desires to live, and is scornful of living without a faith, it is more likely than not that the woman will be a Liberal, and it is quite certain that she will be all the more so, if the man happens to be a Tory. He on his part will view all progressive notions with increasing distrust, as his reactionary programme forces his wife to raise them as the standard of her independence.’

‘Well, I was certainly influenced by Sterne, and by Smollett and Fielding, who were my greatest pleasure as a boy. Later, as I became more and more involved in field sports and taproom company, I found that the racy, slangy style of Surtees provided me with all the lingo I needed to express the narrowness of my views and the intensity of my pleasures. After half a lifetime, I still blush when I remember the enjoyment I felt in slaughtering harmless beasts and birds. How one could have lived so stupidly and yet in a perpetual intoxication with the most vivid beauty is something I shall everlastingly wonder at. I might wonder even more at some of the opinions I held in those days, but of those the less said the better.’

Around that time (1933, in fact), Collier wrote a sort of declaration of faith: ‘I cannot see much good in the world or much likelihood of good. There seems to me a definite bias in human nature towards ill, towards the immediate convenience, the ugly, the cheap … I rub my hands and say “Hurry up, you foulers of a good world, and destroy yourselves faster.”’ The cynical disenchantment expressed here informs most of Collier's writing, but governs only the more conventional short stories, including the two selected by Hitchcock: diabolical murder plots conceived by resentful husbands and spiteful wives who observe the utmost social aplomb in the niceties of their strategy, and who are suavely brought to book by neat O. Henry twists, whether internal (both husband and wife execute the same successful plan simultaneously in ‘Over Insurance’) or external (the dead and buried wife in ‘Back for Christmas’ had previously arranged repairs to the cellar as a surprise for her husband). Mildred Natwick, blithely chirruping ‘What seems to be the trouble, Captain?’ as she stumbles upon Edmund Gwenn dragging a corpse about by the heels in The Trouble with Harry, is so quintessentially a Collier character that it is surprising as well as sad that Hitchcock—not to say Hollywood—never made more use of Collier as scriptwriter or source.

But Collier, of course, could be much subtler and more disorientating. The magnificent ‘Are You Too Late or Was I Too Early?’, conceived entirely as a subjective narrative, is the haunting love story of a man for the mysterious ghostly woman who appears, tantalisingly, in his flat as a Crusoe footprint, a breath dimming the mirror, a scented breeze in passing, until an overheard telephone conversation takes us through another looking-glass: ‘I heard, in a full opening of the sense, the delicate intake of her breath, the very sound of the parting of her lips. She was about to speak again. Each syllable was as clear as a bell. She said, “Oh, it's perfect. It's so quiet for Harry's work. Guess how we were lucky enough to get it! The previous tenant was found dead in his chair, and they actually say it's haunted.”’

The nightmares of the imagination discovered by Poe are never very far away in Collier's stories, where a sculptor seeking success as a ventriloquist creates a dummy so lifelike that it assumes his life (‘Spring Fever’); a lovelorn young man conceives the notion of having himself stuffed and placed in his beloved's presence as an eternal reproach (‘Squirrels Have Bright Eyes’); a stuffy father ordering his small son to banish an imaginary playmate called Mr. Beelzy is himself mysteriously consumed (‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’). In these stories, however, Collier invariably sets out from reality: from the psychological inadequacies and emotional disturbances that lead to strange fancies. The Devil, for instance, might be said to have taken a hand at the end of ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’; more particularly, however, the child has simply turned at last on the father determined to mould him into a replica of his pedestrian self. While the sculptor-ventriloquist is merely the victim of the reductio ad absurdum outcome of his self-imposed, stubbornly blinkered and Sisyphean task of persuading a society fed on Brancusi, Lipchitz and Brzeska that representation is the only purpose and justification of art.

Despite the profusion of devils in his work, Hell, for Collier, is essentially of our own making. Yet even as he excoriates the world for its follies, Collier is clearly increasingly preoccupied by—and sympathetic to—the human predicament expressed by his collection of lonely castaways yearning for a little romance, a little tenderness and a little understanding. Oddly, but again not inappropriately, the man who hungered for the world to destroy itself more rapidly, and spent his days killing harmless beasts and birds, covertly expresses his new concern by way of the amazing collection of animals who proliferate in his stories, sometimes as mute (or not so mute) witnesses to human destructiveness, but more often as surrogates for the unrealised aspirations.

One of his most haunting stories is ‘The Steel Cat’, about a man who evolves an idea for a Heath Robinson mousetrap after saving a mouse from drowning in his bath. Proudly aided by the rescued mouse, now his friend and still unable to swim, the inventor demonstrates his invention to a tycoon in the hope of a lucrative contract. His interest taken less by the Steel Cat than by the demonstration mouse, the tycoon nibbles and insists on signing an immediate contract; meanwhile, as the distraught inventor hesitates to risk a fortune by interrupting the busy tycoon's tight schedule, his friend slowly drowns. And somehow this death of a mouse reverberates with the clear bell-notes of tragedy. The richer and riper Collier revealed in such stories spent most of Hollywood's blacklist years in Mexico City: not exactly blacklisted, more a voluntary exile in a place he loved from what he calls ‘a sort of greylisting’.

‘There were reasons for this greylisting. Some were comic reasons. One is that I had a distinguished namesake in John Collier, the Commissioner for Indian Affairs, and he made several speeches at an organisation which Roosevelt had asked should be set up to get writers to do things for the war effort in 1944-45, and which continued afterwards with some strong political coloration. Whatever he did, I got the credit or debit for, and I expect he got some from me. I went to dine with Henry Wallace when he was running for President. Also, I was strongly on the side of the ‘Communists’ who were attacked, the first ones to be singled out. Several of them were personal friends. I was a sympathiser, let's say, with nine-tenths of their ideas, but I wasn't very much involved until the persecutions began, which made me rather hot under the collar, and I was concerned with getting some facts out to papers round the world.’

It was Henry Cornelius, ignoring the blacklist, who brought Collier back to England to script I Am a Camera, a film which Collier now agrees would have been much better had he approached Isherwood's stories from the narrative standpoint adopted by Welles in Fountain of Youth, and which he had himself envisaged at around the same time for an abortive TV project: a collection of his own stories to be presented by Robert Morley as dreams of his in which he would be interlocutor, sometimes star, and sometimes an obscure character. Since then Collier has written two scripts, one realised and one not.

‘I certainly wasn't responsible for everything in The War Lord, but it was I who tried to introduce what you call the magical-Druidical element. Leslie Stevens' play was set much later, in the thirteenth century, I think. I put it back to the eleventh century. The invasion of the Low Countries by the Catholic Church was late, and at that time the inhabitants were still following, more or less, the old neolithic, animistic religion. What interested me was the effect on the invader of this primitive element. In those days, of course, one was thinking of the fate of the little lieutenant in Indo-China, a Frenchman stuck up in North Vietnam with his platoon, holding a losing outpost. I thought it might be interesting to make a parallel.

‘I admit that I felt very bothered when I found that the script had been changed into someone's quite extraordinary idea of what a successful costume picture should be. Another unfortunate writer became involved, quite a respectable one, Millard Kaufman. It seems that someone else put in all sorts of atrocities like “I hate your knightly guts” etc. At the time, I felt somewhat aggrieved at Charlton Heston for having failed to prevent the spoilage, but later I realised that it was exactly the sort of thing I should have expected.’

Collier's other script, published in 1973 as Milton's Paradise Lost: A Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind, is a vast and visionary attempt not simply to stage Milton, but to interpret his account of the fall of Lucifer in subversive terms that delve further into the nebulous zones explored in The War Lord. In the preface to the script, for instance, Collier notes the anomaly whereby Satan and his followers are doomed to torture without end, yet soon contrive to extricate themselves, restored to their former personal glory and purpose, from the lake of hellfire. ‘Luckily Milton, after setting down this explanation [the prisoner was paroled in order that he might commit fresh crimes and incur a yet heavier sentence], shows us, without naming it, a more likely and a more tolerable one. He shows us the effects of a force that originated in Hell and that has been used on earth, in Heaven's despite, throughout the ages. Frazer could have named it; it is magic. See how Pandemonium, that fairy palace, rose out of the sulphurous, burned-out soil: It rose like an exhalation, with the sound of dulcet symphonies, and voices sweet. What better demonstration could we have of the operation of the magic power? And what better formula than Satan's other great dictum, more profound than the first: The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’

Opening new perspectives and inviting new techniques by its deployment of this Luciferian formula, Collier's Paradise Lost screenplay still awaits a director.

‘No, the Paradise Lost screenplay wasn't exactly a commission. I had the idea of doing it, scribbled a few pages saying how I saw it, and sent them off to Howard Houseman, who is a great agent and a great arranger. He at once interested a producer, Martin Poll, who sent me a letter full of promises, some of which were kept. I got an advance of some sort and got busy. When it was finished, the producer was unable to raise the backing that he had hoped for. I got it back from him after a while, and now I have it.

‘All sorts of enthusiastic people have advanced it in various quarters. At one time I thought that Fellini had agreed to do it; United Artists were willing to make the picture if he would do it. But although I believe, from the reports I got at second hand, he liked the general theme very much, he found there was a difficulty with the English language. Also, he was apparently in love with a Casanova project he had on hand. Since then I've not been able to find the sort of director whom I'd hoped would do it. It's been shown to four or five who might have handled it very well, but none of them were quite willing to go out on a limb for it. Why should they? Usually the ten million dollars has been the obstacle, though laboratory technicians assure me that electronic advances mean that there is no real need for such a vast budget.

‘Recently, things have been thickening up concerning a possible production as a theatre piece. Extraordinary things can be done in theatres without immense cost, as long as one doesn't try to have real water in the canals or real fire in Hell. Old-fashioned classical realism and high polish would ruin the thing anyway. I think that the theme of Paradise Lost is singularly suited to attract the wide audience, and especially the young audience, of today. It is quasi-religious, quasi-scientific, and deeply humanistic, being the thrilling story, with which we can all identify, of how innocent, vegetarian, Proconsul or Pithecanthropus was caught up in the guerrilla war waged by Satan against the authoritarian dictatorship which orders the universe, and how he emerged as moral and immoral, curious, inspired, murderous and suffering Man.

‘What I should like to offer them is a big, rough, ostensibly slapdash production, dazzling with light effects, deafening with sound and sometimes enchanting with music, and above all bursting with energy so that it breaks out of the conventional frame of proscenium and footlights and often out of the frame of conventional dramatic form. Imagination rather than money is the solvent to my problem. But so few people have enough of either.’

Note

1. Souvenir Press, 1975. £5.00.