Paul Gallico - Mature Career As A Fiction Writer

Mature Career As A Fiction Writer

In the late 1930s, he abandoned sports writing for fiction, first writing an essay about this decision entitled "Farewell to Sport" (published in an anthology of his sports writing, also titled Farewell to Sport (1938)), and became an extremely successful writer of short stories for magazines, many appearing in the then-premier fiction outlet, The Saturday Evening Post. Many of his novels, including The Snow Goose, are expanded versions of his magazine stories.

Gallico once told New York Magazine "I'm a rotten novelist. I'm not even literary. I just like to tell stories and all my books tell stories.... If I had lived 2,000 years ago I'd be going around to caves, and I'd say, 'Can I come in? I'm hungry. I'd like some supper. In exchange, I'll tell you a story. Once upon a time there were two apes.' And I'd tell them a story about two cavemen."

In 1939 Gallico published "The Adventures of Hiram Holliday", now better known for its later TV adaptation. It depicts the adventures of a modern American knight-errant visiting Europe on the verge of WWII and waging a single-handed, quixiotic struggle against the Nazis in various countries. Gallico's Austrian background is evident in the book's strong Habsburg Monarchist theme (the protagonist saves an Austrian Princess, wins her love and takes charge of her young son - who, the book hints, is fated to become the new Habsburg Emperor once the Nazis are driven out of Austria).

The Snow Goose was published in 1941 in The Saturday Evening Post and won the O. Henry Award for short stories in 1941. Critic Robert van Gelder called it "perhaps the most sentimental story that ever has achieved the dignity of a Borzoi imprint. It is a timeless legend that makes use of every timeless appeal that could be crowded into it." A public library puts it on a list of "tearjerkers." Gallico made no apologies, saying that in the contest between sentiment and "slime", "sentiment remains so far out in front, as it always has and always will among ordinary humans that the calamity-howlers and porn merchants have to increase the decibels of their lamentations, the hideousness of their violence and the mountainous piles of their filth to keep in the race at all."

His short story, "The Man Who Hated People" was reworked into his book Love of Seven Dolls, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning motion picture Lili (1953), and later staged as a musical, Carnival! (1961). The film Lili is a poignant, whimsical fairy tale, the story of an orphaned waif, a naïve young woman whose fate is thrown in with that of a traveling carnival and its performers, a lothario magician and an embittered puppeteer. The versions while differing, share a core theme surrounding the girl and the puppeteer. The puppeteer, communicating with Lili through his puppets as a surrogate voice, develops a vehicle whereby each of them can freely express their inner pain and anguished emotions.

In the 1950s, Gallico spent time in Liechtenstein, where he wrote Ludmila, the retelling of a local legend.

His novel Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (1958) was a bestseller, and became the first of four books about the lovable charwoman, 'Mrs. 'Arris'. Negotiations for film rights began as early as 1960, when he was resident in Salcombe, on the South Devon Coast, though it was not produced until a TV movie with Angela Lansbury in 1992.

During his time in Salcombe, Gallico serialised an account of the sinking of the MV Princess Victoria, the ferry which plied between Larne and Stranraer, an event which caused the death of every woman and child on board. It was his habit, at this time, to wander in his garden dictating to his assistant, Mel Menzies, who would then type up the manuscript in the evening, ready for inclusion in the newspaper.

The Silent Miaow (1964) purports to be a guide written by a cat, "translated from the feline", on how to obtain, captivate, and dominate a human family. Illustrated with photographs by Suzanne Szasz, it is considered a classic by cat lovers. Other Gallico cat books include Jennie (1950) (American title The Abandoned), Thomasina: The Cat Who Thought She Was God (1957), filmed in 1964 by the Walt Disney Studios as The Three Lives of Thomasina (which was very popular in the former USSR in the early 1990s, inspiring the Russian remake Bezumnaya Lori), and Honorable Cat (1972), a book of poetry and essays about cats.

Gallico's 1969 book The Poseidon Adventure, about a group of passengers attempting to escape from a capsized ocean liner, attracted little attention at the time. The New York Times gave it a one-paragraph review, noting that "Mr. Gallico collects a Grand Hotel full of shipboard dossiers. These interlocking histories may be damp with sentimentality as well as brine—but the author's skill as a storyteller invests them with enough suspense to last the desperate journey." In contrast, Irwin Allen's motion picture adaptation of Gallico's book was instantly recognized as a great movie of its kind. In his article "What makes 'Poseidon' Fun?", reviewer Vincent Canby coined the term "ark movie" for the genre including Airport, The High and the Mighty, A Night to Remember, and Titanic (the 1953 movie). He wrote that "the Poseidon Adventure puts the Ark Movie back where God intended it to be, in the water. Not flying around in the air on one engine or with a hole in its side." The movie was enormously successful, spawned a whole decade of disaster films, and is a cult classic today.

In his New York Times obituary, Molly Ivins said that "to say that Mr. Gallico was prolific hardly begins to describe his output." He wrote 41 books and numerous short stories, twenty theatrical movies, twelve TV movies, and had a TV series based on his Hiram Holliday short stories.