His Monkey Wife | Paul Dry Books, Inc.
In the author's own words: "This is a strange book…an emotional melodrama, complete with a Medusa villainess, an honest simpleton of a hero, and an angelic if only anthropoid heroine, all functioning in the two dimensional world of the old Lyceum poster or the primitive fresco…where an angel may outsize a church, and where a man may marry a monkey on a foggy day." —from John Collier's "A Looking Glass"
When Alfred Fatigay returns to his native London, he brings along his trustworthy pet chimpanzee Emily who, unbeknownst to Fatigay, has become civilized: literate, literary—and in love with Fatigay himself. After Emily meets Alfred's fiancée Amy Flint, a 1920's "modern woman," she sets out to save her beloved from Amy's cold grip. "Emily is the perfect outside observer," writes Eva Brann in her introduction, "because she is an African in Europe, a female in a man's world, a servant to liberated sophisticates, and above all an old-fashioned creature in a modern world."
John Collier (1901-1980) was born in Britain, but spent much of his life in the U.S., where he wrote screenplays for Hollywood (The African Queen, Sylvia Scarlet, and I Am a Camera among them) and short stories for the New Yorker and other magazines. He was also a poet, editor, and reviewer.
Every other summer or so I reread His Monkey Wife by John Collier and urge others to do so, too. The stumbling block has been that the book has been out of print for years. I, of course, am far too wise in the ways of the world to lend anyone my own copy. ('Never lend books,' advised Anatole France, 'for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those that other people have lent me.') So, I am happy to report that Collier's work has just returned to print thanks to Paul Dry Books.