The Best-Sellers of James Hilton

Old people, or at least older people, people like me, have a certain sheaf of things we tend to bang on about: the ignorance and ingratitude of the young, the decline in standards, reading, spelling, manners, culture in general, and so on. If we write books we are sometimes faced with the problem of what happens to a piece of writing (a novel perhaps) when it becomes a piece of seeing (a film or a television series). Of course you can always say no, but that doesn’t seem to happen often because of vanity, natural curiosity and (of course) money, that magic dust that can be turned so easily into things we want.

There is a rule we want to enunciate, we writers, that good books make bad films and conversely that bad books … It isn’t true as a rule, but it often is true.

Good books are often long. Proust—a television series in a hundred parts? Yes, there has been something, but in a much shorter compass. I haven’t seen it; the general verdict is not favourable. Ulysses starring Milo O’Shea was surprisingly good; numerous films of Dickens, some good (Great Expectations), some bad and some set to music. What about a film of Thomas Mann? Of course there has been. Death in Venice with Dirk Bogarde, lots of Mahler and that primping Swedish boy; and pretty well everything else (except Joseph and his Brothers, so far).

Characters tend to be simplified, flattened out. Descriptive passages become a single shot. Film and television often vulgarise, so it helps if the novel is vulgar in the first place. John Braine’s Room at the Top does splendidly, but the original film of Lucky Jim is a disaster, in spite of the lovely Sharon Acker.

One of the things I am trying to discover in writing this piece is how much truth there is in the opinion that good novels make bad films because a film cannot represent the richness of a novel when it has only a couple of hours to do so. James Hilton’s novels are not bad exactly but they do have a certain thinness, sketchiness, and Goodbye Mr Chips started life as a 3000-word short story and even in its expanded version is scarcely more than a novella.

James Hilton was born in 1900 and died of liver cancer in 1954. It was quite a short life, like that of Dickens. Like that of Balzac, come to that. And neither Elizabeth Gaskell nor George Eliot lived very long either, never mind the Brontes. Hilton is rather a Victorian figure in other respects too.

He wrote a lot. He wrote nineteen novels and three non-fiction works, one of which was a biography of the Duke of Edinburgh. I’d quite like to read that. Of course he hardly approaches Balzac, who died at fifty and produced ninety-nine novels, or Dickens, who died at fifty-seven and wrote twenty-three novels, some of them very long indeed, besides editing a magazine and producing screeds of journalism.

Continuing the Dickensian theme, Hilton began early. He wrote Catherine Herself when he was only twenty, and went on producing steadily, a book every year or so, but there the comparison breaks down. He was not a best-seller at first by any means and had to wait till 1934 when Goodbye Mr Chips was first published in the British Weekly (who had asked for a 3000-word short story and got 17,500 words instead) and then in the Atlantic Magazine. Two months later it was published as a book in the USA and two months after that in the UK.

This first real success caused Lost Horizon, perhaps his most famous book, to win the Hawthornden Prize, and from then on all his novels were best-sellers, though often rather sniffed at by the literary establishment.

He was English and had had a very English education. He went to The Leys public school in Cambridge and then read English and History at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He did not move to California until 1938, when he wrote a good deal for Hollywood, most famously the screenplay for Mrs Miniver, a wartime melodrama starring Greer Garson as a typical British housewife (though a pretty rich one; her husband, played by Walter Pidgeon, is a “successful architect” which in films generally means big bucks). It was made by William Wyler in 1941 when the USA was still officially neutral and is credited with changing American opinion, though maybe Pearl Harbor had something to do with that as well. Nowadays it is often considered among America’s forty best films. Hilton was very successful in having his books turned into films. Eight of them suffered this pleasant fate, Goodbye Mr Chips four times.

He must have got quite rich, but he seems to have remained a quiet, unassuming man to the last, though rather prodigal of wives (he had three).

The novels I have read are interesting, though not unputdownable, and not one of them seems a natural for the screen, partly because he likes that Conradian framing device which distances everything and rather precludes suspense. And for the same reason there is a lack of pace. Films thrive on pace. Many of the most enjoyable have very little else.

Let us look in more detail at Goodbye Mr Chips, which was startlingly successful on publication. Why was this? Men said the school was exactly like the one they had experienced themselves and said further that they remembered a master exactly like Chippins. I remember teachers of English at my school who influenced me very much but none of them was like Mr Chippins. And the school seems to me entirely unlike the realities of school life as it ever was, or could be. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the novel represents what people would wish were true, that a schoolteacher could give his whole life to a school, be a kind of secular saint, never get bored or fed up with the little bastards.

I am irresistibly reminded of Angel, the novelist in Elizabeth Taylor’s book of the same name. Angelica Deverall is a wildly successful author, unlike her progenitor. Here is what Hilary Mantel writes in her introduction:

She [Angelica] writes the book she wants to read herself. Her mind is passionate and commonplace, quick and shallow, and so she fulfils a perennial demand that readers make, to be “taken out of themselves”, to be “transported”. From book to book Angel does not learn, nor could you learn from her books. She switches her settings … but she doesn’t change her formula.

Formula is the word. Every novelist finds a formula. More and more their books resemble each other more than they resemble the world outside. This can be unconscious, as in the case of Hardy. The boy who hangs his brothers and sisters and then himself leaves a note, “Done because we are too menny”, is like nothing in real life, but he is very like the life inside Hardy’s novels.

Sometimes this can be fully conscious, as in the case of P.G. Wodehouse. He confides that his novels began as pictures of an upper class just before the Great War but once he got into his stride and found his voice, they were like nothing except themselves. A Jeeves novel of 1930 and a Jeeves novel of 1960 are pretty well interchangeable, except for the eruption of occasional trade unionists or Labour politicians.

Let us digress for a moment and talk about visual art, in particular that of Turner. As he gets better and better, so his pictures become more and more abstract, less and less like the world outside his window—even when he is representing the burning of the House of Commons—more and more like the world inside his head. Most of us think that is a good thing. Certainly I do. And let us talk too about music. Mahler says one of his great models is Mozart. Mozart! His music is like Mozart’s in no particular, except inside Mahler’s head.

I am not saying that Hilton is like Angelica. He is much more intelligent and much better educated. But his books are not very like life, but very like his other books. And they are just the kind of books that make a successful Hollywood film. Why is this? Let us look at Goodbye Mr Chips again. The character was originally, and very memorably, played by Robert Donat, who won an Oscar for growing very old so well. The best, in my opinion, of his later versions was that of Peter O’Toole, a very actorish sort of actor, if I may put it that way.

For we are in the realm of make-believe. Whatever the world may actually be like, it is not what we get from Hilton. Of course there are films that show things as they uncomfortably are. But generally they do not make money, or not as much money.

Hilton’s most famous novel, Lost Horizon, was written in 1933 and made into a film in 1937 with Ronald Colman. I mentioned Conrad before. The opening is a dead steal from Heart of Darkness, with four men, good friends from way back, smoking and talking about a fifth, the brilliant Conway, who does not make his own entrance until the next chapter. What is Conway like? He is like this:

He was tall, deeply bronzed, with brown, short-cropped hair and slate-blue eyes. He was inclined to look severe and brooding until he laughed and then (but it happened not so very often) he looked boyish.

Boyish! And he has a DSO. We are in the territory of Richard Hannay, not to say Biggles (who has a DSO as well). We are in the territory of the Hero. And now Conrad is cast aside and the novel picks up the pace (remember what I said about pace?). There are four of them in the plane with the pilot. There is Mallison, who hero-worships Conway, Miss Brinklow (the eternal woman) and Barnard, a cigar-smoking American millionaire on the run, though we do not know this yet. And they are all kidnapped by the pilot, who takes them to Tibet, to a lamasery in Shangri-La.

There is an echo here of a G.K. Chesterton story, with a fairytale setting, “The Paradise of Thieves”, from The Wisdom of Father Brown. This also has a banker on the run, though this one lacks the sang-froid of Barnard and commits suicide by jumping over a cliff. Chesterton is, of course, the archetypal writer of stories and novels which bear no resemblance to dull reality. They are peopled with stock characters, brightly-coloured like the cardboard people in his toy theatre. I think I am right in saying there are no homosexual people in his oeuvre, though he must have known, or at least known about, plenty.

An aside here. A real Mr Chips might have had homosexual feelings towards the young boys he taught, but any thought of this is firmly squashed. He married the girl he loved, the girl of his dreams, Greer Garson of course, and she died, you see.

Random Harvest is another book made (rapidly) into a film. Many were, but Random Harvest is the only other one I have read. The film stars Ronald Colman and Greer Garson (again) and makes a lot of changes. It would have to, given Hilton’s propensity for moving sideways into a story where one chap tells another chap and so on. I think I like the film better than the book. It goes at a hell of a lick and, anyway, I like Ronald Colman, a most under-rated actor. Greer Garson reminds me a bit too much of Grace Kelly, who I never warmed to.

Should you read the books? Yes, I think so. Start with Goodbye Mr Chips (nice and short) and continue with Lost Horizon and then Random Harvest, stopping if you feel bored. As for the rest, why not? I haven’t read them but I might.

As for the films, watch at least one of the Mr Chips ones, the version with Robert Donat, and maybe the one with Peter O’Toole. And watch the Ronald Colman films.