Francis King

This article is about the British novelist and literary critic. For the occult writer, see Francis X. King .

Francis Henry King CBE FRSL (born March 4, 1923 in Adelboden , Canton of Bern , Switzerland ; † July 3, 2011 ) was a British writer and literary critic who worked for the British Council in four countries and during his over sixty years of versatility As a writer , he wrote more than 30 novels , many of which were semi- autobiographical , as well as literary critic for many years and theater critic for the weekly newspaper The Sunday Telegraph for ten years .

Life

Studies and early works

King was born in Switzerland while his father, who had tuberculosis and died in 1936, was a former employee of the police in British India and later of the secret service . He spent the first years of his life with his family in India before moving to boarding school at Shrewsbury School in 1931 . After finishing school he began in 1941 to study at Balliol College of Oxford University . Due to the events of World War II , he became involved in pacifism from 1942 and refused to do military service . He was then sent to a small-scale farm in Essex for alternative service, and in his spare time there began writing poetry , which the poet John Lehmann published in the short-term Z magazine . He also started drafting his first novel.

This debut novel , entitled To the Dark Tower , like his other early works, reflected the loneliness in his own life and was published in 1946 by the newly founded publishing house Home and Van Thal, which was written by the mother of future Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home and the playwright William Douglas- Home , as well as was directed by Bertie Van Thal. King published two more novels with Home and Van Thal before the publisher had to file for bankruptcy. His works often recorded his own experiences, such as growing up in India in India in Never Again (1947).

After the end of the Second World War, he studied literature at the University of Oxford , where he made long-term friends with Angus Wilson , Charles Percy Snow and JR Ackerley , who King employed as a book critic for the cultural newspaper The Listener , which he edited while still a student . In his memoir My Sister and Myself (1982), Ackerley paid tribute to him for his book reviews.

Work for the British Council

Since his writing activities could not secure a living, King was in 1949 employee of the British Council, a non-profit organization that promotes international relations. First he worked for the British Council in Florence , then in Saloniki , Athens and Helsinki . For his book The Dividing Stream published in 1951 , he was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award . As in later novels, he used places and landscapes he had traveled to as the setting for the action, such as Florence or Corfu in The Dark Glasses (1954), while The Widow (1957) described his experiences during the Second World War in London.

In 1959 he was transferred to Japan by the British Council , where he was regional representative in Kyoto . While there, he maintained contact with countless British authors, but felt at the same time hindered in his own writing and development. At the same time, he improved his financial circumstances by working as an English language teacher and visiting lecturers at Japanese universities . In Kyoto, he began a long relationship with a student whom he originally hired as his resident driver of his Cadillac , and who later became his first steady companion, a relationship he believed was fundamental to his own happiness.

On the other hand, his stay in Japan had a major impact on his subsequent work, with The Custom House (1961), with his understanding of the complexity of Japanese society, being regarded as his most successful novel. For his short story The Japanese Umbrella (1964) he was awarded the "New Zealand Post Katherine Mansfield Prize" for short stories.

The friendships with guest authors he had gained by working for the British Council were of benefit to him on his return to Great Britain in 1966, where he soon became a respected person in literary circles. In addition, he was president and vice-president of PEN -Zentrums in England and temporarily president of the International PEN Center and chairman of the writers union Society of Authors . In 1968 he was able to publish the short story collection The Brighton Belle with financial support from the Arts Council . In addition, after his return from Japan he was literary advisor to the two publishing houses Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Macdonald.

A Domestic Novel Litigation and Aftermath

King suffered in particular from a protracted legal battle over his 1970 novel A Domestic Novel about unrequited same-sex love, which, although it did not result in a lawsuit , attempted high costs. At the time, King lived in Brighton , where a neighbor, former lower house MPs of the Labor Party Tom Skeffington-Lodge, participated in an included politicians before posting a copy of the novel read and offense. While King called this character 'Dame Winifred Harcourt', Skeffington-Lodge described the character as a little camouflaged portrait of him. King used a scene taken directly from the life of Skeffington-Lodge, and thought that due to the change in character to a female person, there would be legal certainty.

This tinge of naivety became apparent when King drafted a defense letter to Skeffington-Lodge, who in turn sought advice from Baron Hailsham , a former Conservative Party politician and practicing barrister . With this move, King was advised not to take the dispute to court and to withdraw the novel a few days before its intended publication. But that did not end the matter. King made a major overhaul of A Domestic Novel - like many of his works "imbued with homosexuality", as one critic noted, and saw King himself as the novel that "came closest to what he wanted to say." The novel has been reprinted over the past forty years since it was first published and was ultimately nominated for the 2010 book list of works that never received the Booker Prize .

In his book A Game of Patience (1974) he again presented autobiographical experiences, this time about life in the country during the Second World War. In 1976 he joked that he was not one of the top authors commercially:

“I never wanted to be identified with just one type of fiction. This probably affected my public esteem; the public tends to like the novelists who write the same novel over and over. "

'Perhaps this has harmed me in popular esteem; the public tends to like its novelists to write the same novel over and over again. '

In addition, he saw the lack of commercial success of his works in his "profound and resigned pessimism towards the world", while others saw this in the melancholy of his works.

King used the experience gained with A Domestic Novel in other books such as The Action (1978), a book about a neurotic woman who files a lawsuit against an author alleged to have defamed her. His literary friends also included EM Forster , about whom King wrote EM Forster and His World in 1978 , but also authors such as Ivy Compton-Burnett and Olivia Manning , whose literary administrator he became.

Also in 1978 he succeeded Frank Marcus as a theater and drama critic for the weekly newspaper The Sunday Telegraph and held this position for ten years until 1988, when he had to undergo an operation for a malignant colon tumor. Nevertheless, he continued his literary activity and continued to write novels. In 1979 he was honored with the Officer's Cross of the Order of the British Empire for his services to English literature , before he became Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1985 .

In his autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993) he processed the experiences from A Domestic Novel . At this time it was possible to write openly about his own same-sex relationships, whereas in 1956, before the so-called " Wolfenden Report " , he asked his employer, the British Council, for permission to publish The Firewalkers , which he regarded as a memoir despite its fictional content and under the pseudonym Frank Cauldwell.

Most recently, the two novels The Nick of Time (2003) and Cold Snap (2010) appeared.

Web links

• THE GUARDIAN: Francis King obituary: Novelist, reviewer and drama critic whose fiction was tinged with melancholy (July 3, 2011)