The Man Who Wrote The Blue Lagoon: Stacpoole's Pastoral Center

.*" The Man Who Wrote The Blue Lagoon: Stacpoole's Pastoral Center Richard F. Hardin The University of Kansas VIEWERS' GUIDES usually give one star to the 1980 Brooke Shields movie The Blue Lagoon. The story behind it deserves more stars and more attention, in part for its sheer longevity and popularity on stage, screen, and printed page. The Anglo-Irish author, Henry DeVere Stacpoole (1863-1951), had achieved some fame before this Pacific romance, but when it appeared in 1908 its immediate success must have surprised him and his dour publisher, T. Fisher Unwin. The book saw twenty-four printings in thirteen years, held the stage of the Prince of Wales Theatre for nine months in 1920-1921, and became a silent film in 1923, hailed by Variety as "one of the best pictures ever made by a British company." Stacpoole went onto write several sequels, eventually collected in The Blue Lagoon Omnibus, whereupon there were plans for another film in 1938 starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. In 1949 Jean Simmons and Donald Houston, more decently clad than Shields and Christopher Atkins in the 1980 film, appeared in a technicolor version.1 Stacpoole's success was no fluke. Although educated as a physician, he was a popular author of light, but sometimes serious, reading, alive to the varied currents of his long active lifetime. As a boy in Warwick Crescent, London, he lived two doors down from Robert Browning, who resembled "a prosperous business man—banker for choice—in his top hat and frock coat, which seemed his only wear, and with a neatly-rolled umbrella, carried in the crook of his arm, ferrule up, after the fashion of a sabre."2 In his eighties, within weeks of Hiroshima, he wrote a paean to atomic energy called "The Language of Radiation,"3 showing himself as one of the generation who, like his friend H. G. Wells or like Bertrand 205 ELT 39:2 1996 Russell in Mysticism and Logic, could wax lyrical about anything scientific. Nature was but one of many subjects in the fiction-mill of this prolific author. Already by 1920 he had written 46 books, many of which saw multiple printings. His books of the 1890s had met with little success, but his luck began changing with Fanny Lambert (at least five printings 1905-1914) and Crimson Azaleas (several printings, 1907-1914, on both sides of the Atlantic). The first of these novels is a romantic comedy about a seemingly scatterbrained young woman and her Wodehouselike suitors; the second, a sea-adventure in which an orphaned girl from a Japanese island is adopted by two rough sailors. The differences in tone and setting typify Stacpoole's wide range as a popular writer. In the very year of Blue Lagoon, during which he also published two other novels, Patsy and The Reavers, he brought out a mystery novel, The Cottage on the Fells (also called Murder on the Fell), often reprinted into the 1950s. The Man Who Lost Himself (1918), about a British lord and an American who exchange identities, became an American silent film, then, in 1933, a French farce by Yvan Noé.4 Drums of War, a romantic adventure story set in mid-nineteenth-century France, saw at least seven printings from 1910 to 1928. Two books of poetry also appeared: Poems and Ballads (1910) and The North Sea and Other Poems (1915), then, in 1920, a translation of Sappho. Even the ninth decade of his life saw no abating of his pen: during the 1940s came two wartime books, Oxford Goes to War and An American at Oxford, followed by two volumes of autobiography, while Hutchison published his last novel, Harley Street (promptly translated into French) and The Story of My Village. Stacpoole's books fill almost eight columns in The British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books, and the list of editions, translations, and reprints, if not of titles, could be much expanded. Reviews of Stacpoole's books usually fall short of idolatry, but his resiliency and his scattering of gems among the paste encourage at least a second look after a half-century of critical silence.5 Like many popular writers, he tried...