His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp
Cover
His Monkey Wife
or Married to a Chimp
by
John Collier
Publishing Information
His Monkey Wife
Or Married to a Chimp
by John Collier
© Copyright 1930 by John Collier
Copyrights renewed 1958 by John Collier
epub digital edition Copyright 2012 by eNet Press Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published by eNet Press Inc.
16580 Maple Circle, Lake Oswego OR 97034
Digitized in the United States of America in 2012
Revised 201208
www.enetpress.com
Cover designed by Eric Savage; www.savagecreative.com
ISBN 978-1-61886-505-2
Author Information
John Henry Noyes Collier was a British born (3 May 1901 – 1980) brilliant author and screenplay writer who became most known for his short stories. Many of these stories appeared in the New Yorker from the 1930’s to the 1950’s and were collected in a 1951 volume, Fancies and Goodnights. This volume won the International Fantasy Award.
Collier was married to early film actress Shirley Palmer. His second marriage in 1942 was to New York actress Beth Kay (Margaret Elizabeth Eke). They divorced a decade later. He had one child, a son, from his third marriage.
Poetry to novels and short stories
Privately educated by his uncle, Vincent Collier, a novelist, Collier initially wanted to be a poet. It was not until the publication of His Monkey Wife in 1930 that his career began to take shape.
Collier’s perfectly constructed stories are unique in style showing an acerbic wit. The stories are believable, though sometimes unbelievable, fantasies which capture unexpected endings. What makes Collier’s writing such fun is that it is memorable. You may not remember the title or author but you’ll remember ‘the story about the people who lived in the department store’ (Evening Primrose) or ‘the story in which the famous beauties that the man magically summons all say, ‘Here I am on a tiger-skin again’ (Bottle Party).
Other media
Collier traveled between Hollywood, England and France for he had moved to Hollywood in 1935. He continued writing short stories, but turned his attention more and more towards writing screenplays.
He wrote prolifically for film and television, contributing notably to the screenplays of The African Queen along with James Agee and John Huston, The Elephant Boy, The War Lord, I am a Camera (adapted from The Berlin Stories and remade as Cabaret), Sylvia Scarlett, Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy. He also received the Edgar Award in 1952 for the short story collection Fancies and Goodnights. His short story Evening Primrose was the subject 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.
Death
In 1980 John Collier died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California. Towards 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.”
Bibliography
Novels
1930 His Monkey Wife: or Married to a Chimp
1931 No Traveller Returns
1933 Tom’s a Cold (published in the U.S. as Full Circle)
1934 Defy the Foul Fiend: or The Misadventures of a Heart
Short Story Collections
1932 Green Thoughts
1934 The Devil and All
1941 Presenting Moonshine
1943 The Touch of Nutmeg: and More Unlikely Stories
1951 Fancies and Goodnights
1958 Pictures in the Fire
1961 Of Demons and Darkness
1972 The John Collier Reader
1975 The Best of John Collier
Other Works
1931 Gemini Poetry collections
1931 The Scandal and Credulities of John Aubrey
1973 Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind. An adaptation from Milton that was never produced as a film. Collier changed the format slightly to make it more readable in book form.
1973 Sleeping Beauty: This short story was used as the basis for James B. Harris’ 1973 fantasy film. Some Call It Loving AKA Dream Castle
Introduction
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.
Tennyson
Moonshine: All that I have to say, is, to
tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the
man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush;
and this dog, my dog.
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
Chapter l
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 colored Bargain Basement Toy Bazaar of the Upper Congo. You shall return to England very shortly.
The tall trees on the edge of the clearing have here and there, it seems, lifted their skirts of scrub, giving us the same sickening drop from our expectations as shop window ladies do, when their dresses are opened at back or placket, and we shall see only wire and emptiness. So dead are these vistas into the dark jungle, that if there emerged from them, into the sun’s spotlight at their entrance, one of those sights we still absurdly expect; an elephant, say, with a leopard hanging as banderillo from his slaty shoulder, but sliding down, leaving red tracks grooved in that slatiness, sliding down to be crushed of course, we should feel that it was just a turn, Great Xmas Treat, materialized from some dressing-room-like pocket in space, and not native to those scaffoldings and canvas backs with hanging ropes and sterile floor and darkness. There are birds, naturally, of all sizes and qualities. Their penetrating whistles and clockwork screech and chatter add to the illusion, whichever it is.
This path leads straight to the bungalow of Mr. Fatigay. You see, he has introduced some English plants into his garden. His is the only white man’s house in Boboma, and this is just as well. The large man, with his round schoolboy jacket and his honest puzzled eye, appears to greater advantage alone here among the infant blacks, to whom it is his vocation to bring literacy and light, than he would if there were other white men about, whose coarser codes he might too readily take on. But that is the way with most of us.
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