By Peter Ruber
James Francis Dwyer
(April 22, 1874 - November 11, 1952)
In the opening chapter of his autobiography (Leg-Irons on Wings, Melbourne, Australia: Georgian House, 1949), James Francis Dwyer recalls his frantic flight in 1940 halfway across France, then through Spain and Portugal. He was pursued by German agents determined to arrest him for the anti-Nazi propaganda articles he had written for various French and British newspapers. After he stole out of Pau, France, where he had lived for some twenty years, he and his wife managed to secure passage on a steamship headed for New York, with a thousand other refugees escaping from the violent prelude to World War II. He was sixty-six years of age, and one of the most prolific short story writers of his era.
Dwyer’s first order of business in New York was to acquaint himself with editors he had known only through correspondence. At the top of his list was Abraham Merritt (better known to fantasy readers as A. Merritt), editor of The American Weekly, The Hearst Company-owned Sunday supplement that appeared in many newspapers across the country and had a circulation of more than seven million.
Merritt made a strong bid to have Dwyer write his autobiography for The American Weekly and name his own price. He showed him an unsigned note he had received from a reader pointing out that in his youth Dwyer had been incarcerated in Gouldburn Gaol, outside Sidney, Australia, on a forgery charge in 1899 when he was the assistant postmaster of the Oxford Street branch He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for having stolen a small sum of money to pay off a gambling debt, but paroled after serving three years.
To maintain his grip on sanity during long periods of isolation, Dwyer began to write and study text books in order to improve his limited education, which had been interrupted at age fourteen because he had to go to work and help support his family. Paper and pencils were forbidden, but a guard he befriended sneaked them into his cell and removed them just before pending inspections from the warden. Later, when he began to write poems and stories to fill his days, the same guard sent them to a local newspaper that published them under his initials.
Dwyer was released in 1902 and put on parole for the remainder of his seven-year sentence. Impressed by Dwyer’s writing, the sentencing judge wrote letters to the publishers of various newspapers and encouraged them to hire the young man. It was a useless effort, because no one would hire an ex-convict no matter how strong the recommendation. But the publishers were not opposed to buying his freelance articles, stories and poems, and that was how he earned his living for the next four years.
Dwyer’s autobiography devotes more than one hundred pages to his incarceration and the surrounding years. Curiously, they often lack dates and names. For instance, he never mentions his wife until after his parole ends in 1906 and he is allowed to leave the country. He married Selina Cassandra Stewart on November 7, 1893, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and she bore him a son and daughter. We never learn their names either. Nor does Dwyer mention his family after he arrived in London, where he eked out a living as a story writer, still unable to find steady employment because of his prison record.
Somehow Dwyer managed to accumulate enough funds in 1907 to book passage on a passenger liner a step above a cattle boat and, with hundreds of other immigrants, sailed for the United States. It was his last hope for escaping his past and making a career from his writings. He was 33.
He held a succession of jobs in New York while he wrote nightly for the city’s newspapers and magazines. He lucked out with Black Cat, his first steady market, for which he cranked out scores of tales under his own name and various pseudonyms, sometimes filling entire issues with his work. Within several years his writing attracted the attention of editors of all the popular pulp and slick fiction magazines, in addition to a growing list of newspapers. He developed a long list of markets, including Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, The Cavalier, Collier’s, Short Stories, Woman’s Home Companion, and many overseas markets. A number of his serial adventures set in the South Pacific were published in book form, and he had acquired an agent named (Catherine) Galbraith Welch, who helped his pen become one of the most prolific and well paid during the decade following 1910.
Toward the end of 1919, tired of traveling, his wife wanted to return to Australia, but Dwyer would not hear of it. She went to Reno, Nevada, filed for a divorce, and sailed for Australia with her children. On December 30, 1919, Dwyer married his agent, Galbraith Welch. She sold her business to her office manager Carl Brandt, hence the formation of Brandt & Brandt Ltd., a well-known literary agency for most of the 20th century, and the Dwyers moved to Nice, France and the Riviera.
To pay for their planned travels across Europe, the Mid-East and Africa, and his secretary, they launched a private subscription travel newsletter about their destinations. This coincided with a series of monthly stories Dwyer planned to write for Popular magazine featuring adventurer Robert Henry Blake, known as the “Texan Wasp.” After four years of relentless traveling, the Dwyers built a home in the Pyrenees mountain range above the village of Pau, where they planned to remain for the rest of their lives. The solitude around Pau would prove to be a haven for most writers, but Dwyer’s restlessness kept him traveling for months at a time throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s to obscure corners of Asia and Africa. His wife had a penchant for sociological research and used those trips to advantage, writing a half-dozen popular histories.
As the war in Europe began to erupt violently, and the Dwyers were forced to leave Pau for the next five years, their local friends and neighbors removed as many of his books and literary papers as they could. They buried them in their homes for Dwyer’s future return. It was an act of generosity that overwhelmed Dwyer when he returned to Pau and discovered his life’s literary endeavors had not gone up in flames.
Much of Dwyer’s autobiography is devoted to worldly travels, and the lack of detail about his writing and literary acquaintances is disappointing. The same could be said of the autobiographies written by Achmed Abdullah, Bill Adams, Edison Marshall and others. It would be a formidable task to dig into Dwyer’s past and unearth the details of his life. Except for a scattering of letters here and there, no substantial Dwyer archives exist in any university library here or abroad. Even his literary career in the accompanying bibliography is sadly lacking for the same reason.
By his admission to A. Merritt, he sold more than 1,000 stories, many of which are buried in French and British magazines and newspapers. He wrote only 13 books, counting his autobiography, and the majority was based on his magazine serials. The possible financial gain from books in those days was a fraction of what a proficient storyteller like Dwyer could earn from selling a single story to one of the popular magazines. When he was at the top of his form, Dwyer often resold stories to other magazines or licensed them to anthologies. One memorable tale that instantly comes to mind is “A Jungle Graduate,” which crops up many times over three decades following its original magazine publication, even after appearing in his own early story collection, Breath of the Jungle (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1915).
He had the Irishman’s gift of effortlessly spinning tales, as did fellow craftsmen like J. Allan Dunn, H. Bedford-Jones and Beatrice Grimshaw, all of whom mixed legend with fantasy and adventure when writing stories set in the South Seas. Oddly, though, only Dunn and Grimshaw based theirs on personal knowledge acquired while island hopping in that vast ocean region. Bedford-Jones acquired his from reading; Dwyer, one suspects, learned more about the islands from engaging conversations with seamen visiting Sydney. Being largely unexplored, the South Seas stimulated a writer’s imagination and made the mingling of fact and fiction an acceptable storytelling technique.
Although Merritt dogged Dwyer for several years about writing his autobiography for American Weekly, he evaded the offer. When he did write it, in 1948, at the age of 74, it was sold only to an Australian publisher. There was no American or British publication. One senses this was deliberate.
Copyright 2003 by Peter Ruber
LINKS:
A bibliography-in-progress is available elsewhere on The Pulp Rack. Click here to view that listing.
The PulpGen site offers a story by Dwyer from the May 1941 issue of Blue Book, "Hag Gold." Click here to visit that site and read the story.
The Blackmask Online site offers a Dwyer novel, The White Waterfall, for download. Click here to visit.
Posted by ds at May 5, 2004 01:57 PM
