John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights

It will be seen that a situation had developed in which almost anything that either of them did would be certain to offend the other.
-- John Collier, Youth From Vienna

I hadn't thought much about John Collier recently -- though I did read the extraordinary His Monkey Wife (1930) some years ago and had been rather impressed with it.  I was reading the third volume of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles recently (I wrote about it on May 8) and there was a reference to a TV film that Welles did for Desilu in 1958 based on Collier's short story Youth From Vienna; it was a pilot for an anthology series that never happened, the network considered Welles too much of a risk.  It is a film that I hope to see one day, but meanwhile we have the extraordinary story that is collected in Collier's Fancies and Goodnights (Doubleday, 1951).  I want to mention first of all that Collier has a very precise vocabulary, unafraid to use words or even foreign expressions, such as meretricious, valetudinarian, raison d'etre that are correct and appropriate; he also has a very mordant sensibility that combines elements of horror with those of personal and political conflict.

In Youth From Vienna a scientist comes back from studying in Europe for three years to find that his girlfriend is to marry another man.  He gives them his blessing and as a present gives them a vial of a liquid he developed that will allow a person to live for two-hundred years. But there's only enough for one more person (he and his teacher have both taken it) and it's up to them how they want to use it.  Things never quite turn out how one might expect, however, in a John Collier story.  The other story that Welles had hoped to use in his cancelled series was Collier's Green Thoughts, a story about a man-eating orchid that some consider the basis for Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors, 1960, though it is much wittier than Corman's low-budget and poetic film.