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Nicholas Monsarrat (1910-1979) |
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Nicholas Monsarrat is chiefly remembered for The Cruel Sea (1951), an international bestseller about the battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War. The 500-page and 200,000 word novel was awarded the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. Until then, Monsarrat had already published several books, fiction and non-fiction, but had made only £1 647 out of them. "He loved the sea, though not blindly: it was the cynical, self-contemptuous love of a man for a mistress whom he distrusts profoundly but cannot do without." (from The Cruel Sea) Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat was born in Liverpool, the son
of Keith Waldegrave Monsarrat, an eminent surgeon, and Ada Marguerite,
the daughter of Sir John Turney, a prosperous tradesman. Because his
mother preferred the spelling Montserrat, it was incorrectly registred
at his birth. The discrepancy between spellings was to embrass him for
decades. To escape from the strict upbringing and rules of his mother,
Monsarrat took up sailing as a hobby in his youth. He was educated at
Winshester, where he spent five
frustrating years, and Trinity College, Cambridge. For Monsarrat,
Cambridge was a "golden age of privilege allied to laziness, a
dreamlike progress". After graduating in law in 1931, Monsarrat worked
two years in Nottingham. Bored with the solicitor's office routine, he
moved to London, and began a new career as a freelance writer.
Monsarrat's first novel was Think of Tomorrow (1934). He wrote
also a play, The Visitor,
about a poor young socialist
playwright, starring Greer Garson and Louis Borell. "Mr. Monsarrat's
play is better in design than in execution," said the W.A. Darlington.
"Still, his characters do provide Mr. Borell and Miss Garson with parts
in which they can be attractive and alive. (A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer
Garson by Michael Troyan, 1999, p. 49) In addition
Monsarrat contributed to the Yachting World and London
Week.
His first book to receive significant critical acclaim was the largely
autobiographical This Is the Schoolroom (1939). It was
published three days before the outbreak of WWII. As a young man, Monsarrat participated in left-wing politics. "We were like the young of all the world, since the world began," he recalled in his autobiography, Life Is a Four-Letter Word (1966-1970). "Everything was wrong: things could not go on like this; the universe was rightly doomed; war was on the way; freedom was denied, greed and lust for power still ruled our lives shamelessly." However, he never joined the Communist Party, and after visiting Spain on the eve of the Civil War, he began to grow disillusioned with Socialism. In 1939, four days after the outbreak of World War II, Monsarrat married Eileen Rowland. They had one son. During the war, Monsarrat sailed on more than a hundred long and short convoys in the North Atlantic and wrote four nonfiction works. He served in 1940-41 on HMS Campanula, a corvette, and then on HMS Guillemot. In 1943, was appointed Commaning Officer of HMS Shearwater, a sloop. After the war, Monsarrat worked in Johannesburg, South Africa,
as the director on Britain's information office. Later he said, that it was like the
Navy, but the ranks were vague, and
there were no uniforms, except the civil uniform
of service. In a memo from 1946, Monsarrat outlined a plan for a full
black-white parnership and warned that South Africa is heading "for a
political repression of the worst sort, and ultimate disaster". (Life is a Four-letter
Word: Volume II: Breaking Out by Nicholas Monsarrat, 1966, p.
248) The Cruel Sea, Monsarrat's most famous novel, was
published in 1951 by Cassell in London and Alfred Knopf in New York.
(The year of its appearance also saw the publication of Herman Wouk's
The Caine Mutiny.) This work has been called "the
definitive British account of the Battle of the Atlantic". ('Monsarrat's Corvettes
and the Battle of the Atlantic' by Jonathan Rayner, in Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century
British and American War Literature, edited by Adam Piette and
Mark Rawlinson, 2012, p. 380) Alongside with Alistair
MacLean's H.M.S. Ulysses (1955), they marked the new
beginning in sea war stories, in which ships and the sea play a major
role. The story was about two British ships, H.M.S. Compass Rose,
a tiny corvette which is eventually torpedoed, and H.M.S. Saltash,
a frigate, and their crews. "The only heroines are the ships,"
Monsarrat wrote in his foreword, "and the only villain the cruel sea
itself." As a reply, Denys Rayner stated in his memoir, Escort: the battle of the Atlantic
(1955), that "I do not write of the sea, which has no personality of
its own and does not change. The sea is neither cruel or kind."
Monsarrat's ex-commanding officer in HMS Guillemot, Sam Lombart-Hobson, presented his view in A Sailor's War (1984):
"Monsarrat's epic story of the U-boat war certainly describes . . .
every ocean crossing [as] a relentless struggle against the cruellest
of cruel seas. In actual fact, taken over the whole period, the great
majority of convoys got through without interference or mention; and
the Atlantic, more often than not, is agreeably kind." (The Veterans' Tale: British Military Memoirs of the Second World War by Frances Houghton, 2019, p. 99) The film version of the book, which was shot in the middle of summer in the English Channel, was relatively faithful to the original story, although the important brothel scenes were omitted. Eric Ambler was nominated for the Best Screenplay Academy Award. Jack Hawkins, who played the experienced officer, the Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander George Eastwood Ericson, suffered from sea-sickness during the storm scenes. Donald Sinden was cast in the role of the first lieutenant Keith Lockhart, the author's alter ego. Compass Rose in the movie was actually The Coreopsis from Malta, formely used by the Greek navy, and Saltash was a Royal Navy vessel, the frigate Porchester Castle. In 1952, Monsarrart married Philippa Crosby, a South African journalist; they had two sons. Following the succes of The Cruel Sea, Monsarrat could have afforded to give up his job and his £2,200 a year government salary, but it was not until working three years as the director of the United Kingdom Information Office in Ottawa, he retired from government service in 1956 to devote himself entirely to writing. Monsarrat's next novel after The Cruel Sea was The Story of Esther Costello (1953), often characterized as an upside-down story of Helen Keller. In Hollywood, the director Samuel Fuller wrote in 1955 a script based on the book, but eventually the film version, directed by David Miller and starring Joan Crawford, Rossano Brazzi, and Hather Sears, was produced in 1957 by Columbia Pictures. The central character is a deaf, dumb, and blind Irish girl, named Esther, who is destroyed by her closest friends. Esther's disabilities have a psychological origin – she was traumatized in early childhood by the loss of her parents in an explosion. In his author's note Monsarrat stated that the book is "the story of a monstruous fraud in philantrophy," and emphasized that it is wholly fictional. However, it was banned in South Africa, where Keller traveled on a fund-rising tour in 1951. Possibly Monsarrat saw her at that time. The rapid dismantling of the British Empire after 1945 produced a flood of novels, which examined the end of colonial reign. The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956), which Monsarrat wrote in Canada, and its sequel, Richer Than All His Tribe (1968), were set in an imaginary island called Pharamaul, a British Protectorate off the south-west coast of Africa. The outbreak of violent conflict ("the Mau-Mau uprising") is described in bloody detail. Monsarrat concluded that Britain rule had been beneficial to the colonies and much of Africa was "far from ready for emancipation". This was not seriously challenged by critics: "Mr. Monsarrat's praise of the Colonial service is rendered worthless through lack of sensitivity in his characters, and failure to endow their speech with significance or wit", said one reviewer. Monsarrat's second marriage dissolved in 1961. He then married Ann Griffiths, a journalist. During the last period of his life, Monsarrat lived on the mediterranean island of Gozo, Malta, which he described in the historical novel The Kappillan of Malta (1973). In 1973, he was made Chevalier of the Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem. Monsarrat died of cander on August 7, 1979, in London. By his own wish, Monsarrat was buried at sea, off the English coast. It was the projected three-volume novel The Master Mariner, about the British naval history from the Armada to modern day nuclear-powered tankers, that Monsarrat considered his major work. Matthew Lawe, the protagonist, is a Flying Duchman figure and like Conrad's Lord Jim, he haunted by a single act of cowardice. Monsarrat finished only the first volume, Running Proud (1978), which covered the period from Francis Drake to Samuel Pepys. The second, Darken Ship (1981), appeared after his death. For further reading: Life Is a Four-Letter Word: Breaking In by Nicholas Monsarrat (1966); Life Is a Four-Letter Word: Breaking Out by Nicholas Monsarrat (1970); '"Who will do the Work?" The Loss of Empire in British Popular Fiction after the Second World War' by Donald Lammers, The Centennial Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 1978); 'Introduction' by Ann Monsarrat, in The Master Mariner: Book 2: Darken Ship by Nicholas Monsarrat (1980); The Cruel Sea Retold: A New Look at Nicholas Monsarrat's Epic Story of a World War 2 Convoy by Bernard Edwards (2008); 'Monsarrat's Corvettes and the Battle of the Atlantic' by Jonathan Rayner, in Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (2012); A Study Guide for Nicholas Monsarrat's "The Cruel Sea" by Gale, Cengage Learning (2016) Selected works:
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