Dornford Yates - His Writings

His Writings

Mercer originally wrote short stories for the monthly magazines. His first known published work, Temporary Insanity, appeared in Punch in May 1910 – this is the first known occasion of his use of his pen name – and his second, Like A Tale That is Told appeared in the Red Magazine in July 1910. The first known Berry story to be published, Babes in the Wood, appeared in Pearsons Magazine in September 1910. None of these early stories was ever included in his books. Many of his works began as stories in the Windsor Magazine, before being collected in book form. Between September 1911 and September 1939 he had 123 stories published in the Windsor, and after it closed, the Strand Magazine carried three of his stories in 1940 and 1941.

His first story for the Windsor Magazine was Busy Bees, in September 1911, and this and fourteen subsequent stories from that publication up to the July 1914 issue were republished in book form as The Brother of Daphne, in 1914. Some of the stories were edited for the book, to eliminate events, such as marriage, for the leading characters – which suggests that, originally, he had not planned on using the same characters for a story series. The narrator – later identified as "Boy Pleydell" — marries in Babes in the Wood and possibly in Busy Bees, which became The Busy Beers, a chapter in The Brother of Daphne, with the end of the story altered to remove the hint of marriage.

His second book, The Courts of Idleness, was published in 1920, containing material written before, during, and after the Great War. It was divided into three sections. In Book I Yates introduced a new set of characters similar to, but separate from, Berry & Co, in four stories that had appeared in the Windsor between December 1914 and March 1915, and a final story from the Windsor of June 1919 in which the male characters are killed off in Salonika, during the Great War. The Interlude has a story entitled And The Other Left, from the November 1914 Windsor, which is set on the Western Front with a unique set of characters. Book II returns to the Berry characters, with two pre-war stories from the August and September 1914 Windsor, and three post-war stories from the issues of July, August and September 1919. The book’s final story, Nemesis, was written for, and rejected by, Punch; subsequently, it appeared in the Windsor in November 1919, with the main character named "Jeremy"; for the book he became "Berry". Nemesis was written to the Punch length, and so is much shorter than most of the other stories in The Courts of Idleness.

The Berry books are semi-autobiographical, humorous romances, often in short story form, and, in particular, feature Bertram "Berry" Pleydell ("of White Ladies, in the County of Hampshire") and his family – his wife and cousin, Daphne, her brother, Boy Pleydell (the narrator), and their cousins Jonathan "Jonah" Mansel, and his sister, Jill. Collectively, they are "Berry & Co." Although all five appear in Babes in the Wood, their precise relationships are unstated, and Berry and Daphne are referred to as second cousins as late as Jonah & Co; later stories feature a simple family tree, showing them to be first cousins descended from two brothers and a sister.

"Berry & Co." capture the English upper classes of the Edwardian era, still self-assured, but affected by changing social attitudes and the decline of their fortunes. As in many of Yates’ books, grand houses, powerful motor cars, and foreign travel feature prominently in the Berry stories. In the 1950s, C.W. Mercer wrote two books of fictionalized memoirs, As Berry and I were Saying and B-Berry and I Look Back, written as conversations between Berry and his family. They contain many anecdotes about his experiences as a lawyer, but are, in the main, an elegy for a passed upper-class way of life.

The Chandos books, starting with Blind Corner, in 1927, marked a sea change in style and content, being thrillers set mainly in Continental Europe (often in Carinthia, Austria), wherein the hero–narrator, Richard Chandos, and colleagues, including George Hanbury and Jonathan Mansel (who also featured in the Berry books), tackle criminals, protect the innocent, romance beautiful ladies, and hunt for treasure. It is the Chandos novels to which Alan Bennett especially refers in naming Dornford Yates in the play Forty Years On (1972): "Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature." Yates also wrote other thrillers in the same style, but with different characters.

Besides the two genres in which he specialised, some of Yates' novels do not easily fall into either the humorous or the thriller category.

Anthony Lyveden was Dornford Yates’s first novel, telling the story of an impoverished ex-officer; it ends in a cliff-hanger. Originally, it was published in monthly instalments in the Windsor Magazine,

Valerie French, the sequel to Anthony Lyveden features mostly the same cast. At the start of the book Lyveden is suffering amnesia, and cannot recall the events of the previous book, leading to romantic complications.

The Stolen March is a fantasy set in a lost realm, between Spain and France, where travellers encounter characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. A planned sequel, The Tempered Wind, is referred to in the quasi-autobiography, B-Berry and I Look Back, where Yates mentions abandoning the book as it failed to "take charge".

This Publican features a scheming woman and her hen-pecked husband. Some critics have suggested that the portrayal of the villainess represented a thinly-veiled attack on Mercer's first wife; however it is difficult to believe that the weak-willed husband is intended as a self-portrait.

Lower than Vermin (the title derives from Socialist politician Aneurin Bevan’s description of members of the Conservative party) is a novel in which Mercer defends his views on social class, and criticises the path Britain was following under the post-war Labour government.

Ne'er-Do-Well is a murder story narrated by Richard Chandos, with whom the investigating policeman is staying; it features a visiting Jonathan Mansel.

Wife Apparent attempts to portray "Dornford Yates’s" type of people in a 1950s setting; given that they remain essentially Edwardian in outlook, this novel is only partly successful.