John Collier: A Little Happiness on Account

I don’t read John Collier after 4 p.m. But I guess the surprise is that I read him before 4 p.m. I don’t like creepy: never read Lovecraft, or Philip Dick, wouldn’t let a Steven King in the house. Collier is creepy enough that I wouldn’t want him to disrupt a pleasant evening any more than I would a double chocolate chip latte.

Yet for a sunny morning when the blood is up, there is no better way to start the day. In small doses, of course, like other such high-intensity delights. At hand I have the NYRB reprint of Fancies and Goodnights: by my count, there are 50 of them which, accounting for other distractions, ought to enough to keep you going for a couple of months.

[I am also the proud owner of a copy of a screenplay that Collier wrote as a treatment of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Whatever possessed him to undertake this perverse folly is quite beyond me; maybe he needed a new sofa.]

So the appeal is real enough, but I’m also oddly curious to figure out just why it is there: as I say, I don’t like creepy. I assume part of it is just the good writing, but it is good writing in a distinctive context. Consider:

This cloaked double figure, this walking embrace of life and death, this beautiful nightmare under its carapace of cotton cloud, now ran noiselessly, staggering a little, up the light spirals of fretted iron, over the flying bridges, now to be seen rounding some high gallery, now swallowed by darkness, now seen higher, still mounting like a spider, till at last it reached the uppermost corridors, and the sanctuary of the little store-room.*

Okay, I grant this has a bit of the flavor of the copybook about it, but would it help to know that the subject is a department store mannequin, with whom the hero is in love, desperately and beyond all reason, just like the idiot Snopes boy in Faulkner’s The Hamlet who has fallen in love with the cow?

Indeed I’d say this story (“Special Delivery”) is about as representative of Collier stories as you are likely to get. His heroes are often little men with big, if sometimes bizarre, dreams, comical to those who observe, even if tragic to those who suffer. It’s only a mild stretch, channeling Nabokov on Russian literature, that they crawled out from under Gogol’s Overcoat.

Maybe this genre is timeless. But I suspect there is also something about Collier that is very much of a nostalgia trip: they speak loudly to me of period before and just after World War II (it says here that F&G was first published in 1951)—a treacherous and unstable time, full of small men with more imagination than they could easily manage. “After all,” says a character (in “If Youth Knew If Age Could”) “a young man is entitled to a little happiness on account.”

Indeed. A little happiness on account. I ask you, is that to much to desire? Ah, right. Maybe that is exactly what makes them so creepy.

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*John Collier, “Special Delivery,” in Fancies and Goodnights 233-54, 238 (NYRB Paperback ed. 2003).