English science-fiction writer, who gained fame with his catastrophe novels The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), and The Chrysalids (1955). The central theme in Wyndham’s major works is the struggle for survival in extreme situations. His heroes are often ordinary people, who try to sustain civilized values, when the normal social system has collapsed. The famous American writer Stephen King has called Wyndham “perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced”.
“The way I came to miss the end of the world - well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years - was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. It might just as easily have been the week before that-in which case I´d not be writing now: I´d not be here at all.” (from The Day of the Triffids)
John Wyndham was born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in the village of Knowle, in Warwickshire. His father, George Beynon Harris, was a barrister. Gertrude Parkes, Wyndham’s mother, was the daughter of an ironmaster. Untill 1911, he lived in Edgbaston, Birmingham. When Wyndham was eight, his parents separated. Wyndham and his brother, Vivian Beynon Harris, who also became a writer, moved with their mother from place to place. However, their childhood was not unhappy; “we loved our mother and each other and we were as close as it is possible for a family to be,” recalled Vivian Beynon Harris later.
Wyndham attended several private preparatory schools. He left in 1921 Bedales School in Petersfield, Hampshire, and then studied farming. He also read for the Bar and tried advertising, before turning to writing in 1925. Living mostly on a small allowance from his parents, Wyndham poured out stories. However, it was not until 1929, when rejection slips stopped coming. Inspired by the magazine Amazing Stories, he wrote from 1930 to 1939 almost exclusively for the American pulp magazines. Among his early works was ‘Words to Barter’, which appeared in Wonder Stories in 1931. His short stories from this period, signed as John Beynon Harris, were assembled as Wanderers of Time (1973). The title story originally appeared in Wonder Stories and was reprinted as a separate pamphlet. ‘The Lost Machine’ (1932), one of Wyndham’s most anthologized works, which was published first in Amazing Stories, is a predecessor to Isaac Asimov’s robot tales. Its narrator is a machine from Mars, lost on the third planet, the earth. “I know what it is to be an intelligent machine in a world of madness,” the visitor concludes before dissolving itself.
Wyndham’s first novel, The Secret People (1935), appeared in a serialized from in the English magazine Passing Show, and then as a book under the pseudonym John Beynon. Set in the Sahara, where part of the desert has been flooded, the story tells of hero and heroine, who find in subterranean caves a race of pigmies. The “submerged nation” theme was derived from Wells’s famous novel The Time Machine (1895). Another Wells’ novel which influenced Wyndham was War of the Worlds (1898). Planet Plane (1936), Wyndham’s second serial, was a space opera about the first flight to Mars, where the Martians are a dying species. Foul Play Suspected (1935) differed from his other works - it was a detective story.
Before World War II, Wyndham wrote as John Beynon and John Beynon Harris - Wyndham used several differed pseudonyms, most of which he derived from his own name. Some of his science fiction adventures and juveniles appeared also in British magazines. The war interrupted Wyndham’s career. He wrote poetry and translated some French plays, but the science fiction market collapsed, when both science-fiction fans and writers were called up. From 1940 to 1943 Wyndham worked in censorship, and in 1944 he participated in the Invasion of Normandy. Wyndham was a corporal cipher operator in the Royal Signal Corps.
The dropping of the atom bomb, the beginning of the Cold War, and fears of Communism and nuclear war brought new seriousness into science fiction. After the war Wyndham’s career as a writer was for a few years in a dead end. At the exclusive Penn Club in Beford Place, Wyndham met the publisher (Sir) John Lusty, who advised him on his next novel. It was The Day of the Triffids, which was immediately hailed as the “most terrifying as well as the best-written science fiction novel of the year, or for several years.” The book was translated into numerous languages, among others into Finnish, and adapted into screen in 1963. Before published in hard-cover form in England, the story appeared in serialized form in the American magazine Colliers Weekly.
The Day of the Triffids revised and updated the theme of disaster. In the story, a rain of meteors, mysterious “green flashes”, have caused mass blindness on earth. Triffids, mobile carnivorous plants, on average 7 feet high, emerge from an agricultural experiment, and take advantage of a world struck blind. A small group of people try to cope with the deadly vegetables. The chief protagonist is Bill Masen, a horticulturist and triffid expert. He still has his sight, because he was in a hospital and was blindfolded during a treatment. With his newly acquired family, he tires to avoid being enslaved by the blind. In the Isle of Wright, their haven, they hope to establish a new society. According to an anecdote, Wyndham overheard in a pub two gardeners discussing their weeds. One said: “There’s one by my tool shed - a great monster. In reckon it’s a triffid!” After the publication of the book, the word ‘triffid’ has come to mean almost any kind of imaginary hostile and dangerous plant. Wyndham’s species refers to the three roots, on which the plants move.
Steve Sekely’s film version from 1963 was written by the blacklisted scenarist Bernard Gordon, who did not get screen credit. Gordon ended his script on a positive note of humanity. “For me,” he said in an interview, “the problem of the book… was that the story meandered through many episodes and never came to a meaningful end.” William Faulkner’s speech to the Nobel Committee gave Gordon a clue how finish the picture with the saying, “since life on earth arose from the sea, it would be that same broth of seawater that saves life on earth as we know it. And with the help of a bit of seawater, man would eventually triumph even over the triffids.” (from Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklistby Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, 1999)
Although Wyndham did not invent the English disaster novel, he reestablished the genre and examined its themes and possibilities with the fresness of a pioneer. Wyndham’s down-to-earth attitude made his stories so believable, that he was marketed in the UK as a mainstream writer. Wyndham himself never loved the term ’science fiction’. Starting from a fantastic premise, he logically developed situations, in which the effects of his idea are set against a comfortable English background. The tone of his stories is calm and practical. His style led one reviewer to describe him as “the Trollope of science fiction”. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove have characterized him as the “master of the cosy catastrophe.” As a number of other Cold War writers, Wyndham constantly contrasted individualism and collectivism. Thus the end of the civilization can come in the form colonies of telepathic children, who do not have individual spirits, or spiders start to cooperate, hunt in packs, or quasi-intelligent plants threaten the very existence of mankind.
Wyndham wrote his most memorable novels in the 1950s. The Kraken Wakes (1953) repeated the formula of The Day of the Triffids, but this time the civilization is threatened by invaders from space, who melt down the polar ice caps. The aliens live at the bottom of the oceans. Eventually its is discovered, that they can be killed with the help of ultrasound probes. Wyndham’s protagonist, who narraters the story with a kind of stoic humor, is more an observer than participant of the events. The Chrysalids (1955) was set in the future world, devastated by nuclear war. Survivors in puritanical communities kill all mutants, human and non-human. Through the fate of novel’s young protagonist, David Storm, Wyndham exemplifies the conflict between official truths and personal, inner beliefs. David has a limited form of telepathy, which he tries to hide, but at home he is surrounded by a series of plagues: ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN; KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; IN PURITY OUR SALVATION; BLESSED IS THE NORM, and WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) set the theme of disaster inside families - world peace is not threatened by aliens but children. In a small English village aliens mysterious impregnate the entire female population. Their golden-eyed children are superior beings, and create a moral dilemma: on the other hand, the authorities want to liquidate them because they will eventually extinguish human culture, but on the other hand, “it is our culture that gives us scruples about the ruthless liquidation of unarmed minorities”. The story was filmed in the 1960s twice. Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1963) was faithful to Wyndham’s work. In 1995 the American director John Carpenter made his own version, starring Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, and Linda Kozlowski. The settings of the purely Hollywood production were far from the English village of Midwich. Ralph Thomas’s film Quest for Love (1971), starring Tom Bell, Joan Collins and Denholm Elliott, changed Wyndham’s setting, essentially the 1950s, to the 1960s. The film was based on the short story ‘Random Quest’ (1961).
The Web (1979) depicted the beginning of a world take-over by spiders. In the characters of Walter Tirrie, “persistent setter-right of the world” and Lord Foxfield, a millionaire idealist, Wynham also mocked those who want to build an Utopian society, believing that mankind is the mightiest species in the creation. “Most of the conflict in the world reflects the conflict in our minds as we strive to move forward while the brakes of false doctrines, superstitions, obsolete standards, and misconceived ambitions are always at work on us. These checks are build-in, we cannot free ourselves from them, but we can loosen them for others. If we provide the right conditions, as free from contaminations as possible, there is hope that in a generation, or in two or more generations, they may cease to bind.” Lord Foxfield’s Enlightened State Project on the South Pacific island of Tanakuatua is stopped by spiders. And again, behind the disaster is human foolishness, a nuclear test and a mutation caused by the radioactive contamination. Wyndham’s work owes much to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), but its conservative arguments reflected the political change in the United Kingdom - The Web appeared in the same year, when Margaret Thatcher was appointed prime minister.
Wyndham lived a quiet life in a country house near Petersfield. In 1963 he married Grace Wilson, a teacher and a member of the Penn Club, whom he had met already in the 1930s. They had no children. Wyndham disliked personal publicity, saying: “My life has been practically devoid of interest to anyone but myself - though I have quite enjoyed it, of course, in those moments when I did not seem to have been sent to occupy a largely lunatic world.” John Wyndham died on March 11, 1969, in Petersfield. Decades after his death, his books still appeared regularly on school syllabuses in the UK.
For further reading: World Authors 1950-1970, ed. by John Wakeman (1975); The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by Peter Nicholls (1979); Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, ed. by Curtis C. Smith (1986); John Wyndham, Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe by Phil Stephensen-Payne (1989); The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (1993); ‘ ‘A stiff upper lip and trembling lower one’: John Wyndham on screen’ by Andy Sawyer, in British Science Fiction Cinema, ed. by I.Q. Hunter (1999); Trillion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss & David Wingrove (2001); Literary Lives, ed. by John Sutherland (2002)
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Estonian-born Finnish writer, prominent playwright, Marxist, who had a successful career in business. Outside Finland Wuolijoki is known because of her association with Bertolt Brecht. Her famous literary friends included Maxim Gorky. Wuolijoki was a personality of many contradictions, a mild feminist but radical in politics, a cosmopolitan intellectual who had a pronounced admiration for old-fashioned country people. After Aleksis Kivi and William Shakespeare she has been Finland’s most often performed dramatic writer.
“LOVIISA: Mutta minä tiedän mitä rakkaus on. Rakkaus on sitä, ettei ajattele omaa elämäänsä, vaan ainoastaan toisen onnea. (from Niskavuoren nuori emäntä, 1940)
Hella Wuolijoki was born Ella Murrik in Valga, Estonia. Her father, Ernst Murrik, worked as a teacher and run also a bookshop. Kadri Kogamägi, Wuolijoki’s mother, was a farmer’s daughter. At home the family spoke German, but in the wake of national awakening Estonian was used in conversation. Wuolijoki received secondary education in Tartu and continued her studies at the University of Helsinki, receiving her M.A. in 1908. While still at school she published writings in Estonian periodicals. In 1907 she married Sulo Wuolijoki (1881-1957), a member of parliament, and took Finnish nationality. The marriage was dissolved in 1923.
At the university she considered an academic career but the general strike of 1905 awaked her political consciousness and turned her into a socialist. In her autobiography YLIOPISTOVUODET HELSINGISSÄ (1945) she wrote: “We did not know what was to come, but it could only be something better, because the entire basis and rulers of life were changing. The people had taken power into their own hands - and surely it would know what to do with it and how to proceed after all humanity had had to suffer. I stood with Hannes on Observatory Hill, and we looked down at the city and the harbour, where the weak light of a candle flickered here and there, and the masts and chimneys were outlined against the sky. And we believed in life and in the power of the people.” (trans. by David McDuff, from Helsinki: a literary companion, 2000) From the 1910s she became an active businesswoman, and worked as the director of Carelia Timber co, and Aunuksen puuliike from 1923 to 1931. After the Finnish Civil War (1917-18) Wuolijoki’s apartment and estate at Marlebäck in southern Finland was a meeting place for leftist intellectuals and politicians. From 1931 to 1938 she was chairman of the board of Suomen Nafta, an oil company.
In 1912 her first play, TALULAPSET (The Children of the House), written in Estonian, was accepted by theatres in both Estonia and Finland, but the performances were forbidden by czarist authorities. At the age of 45 she devoted herself to writing and published her works in Finnish. In the 1930s she wrote several plays, among them MINISTERI JA KOMMUNISTI (1932) and LAKI JA JÄRJESTYS (1933, Law and Order), set in Helsinki during the 1918 Civil War. The male lead of Law and Order asked to be released from his role. He did not accept the main idea of the play, as he saw it, that the Reds entered the war because of ideology, whereas the whites were required by the law to do so.
SENATOR (Putting the last papers into his briefcase) I presume that we are the last White woman and White man in this building.
MARIA That may be true for the man but the woman is not a White.
SENATOR What is the woman then?
MARIA Not white, or blue, or red, or green. Only a human being.
(from Law and Order)
Wuolijoki had remained neutral during the war, but both of these early plays provoked polemic in the right-wing press for their leftist sympathies. To continue with dramas she took a pseudonym, Juhani Tervapää, and began a series of plays about a rural family, the people of Niskavuori, which gained a huge popularity.
When the German writer Bertolt Brecht’s arrived in Finland in 1940, he settled as a guest at Marlebäck, Wuolijoki’s mansion. From Finland Brecht continued to Moscow and to the United States. Wuolijoki co-authored with him the play HERR PUNTILA UND SEIN KNECHT MATTI in 1940, which Brecht continued to develop. The play premiered in Zürich in 1948; in Finland it was seen first time in 1965. Partly the character of Puntila was inspired by the cousin of Wuolijoki’s husband. Puntila is a rich farmer, who is generous and kind when drunk, and selfish when sober. Puntila tries to arrange a marriage between his daughter Eva and a diplomat. The plan fails and Puntila then deices that his chauffeur and drinking companion Matti marries Eva. Matti is not happy about the idea and when Eva fails his test, Matti leaves Puntila and joins his working-class comrades.Wuolijoki had written in the 1930s another play from the same material, SAHANPURUPRINSESSA. Brecht’s work is considered superior to it.
During WW II Wuolijoki was involved in secret, unofficial diplomatic negotiations for peace with the Soviet Union after a visit from a Russian parachutist, Kerttu Nuorteva. She was arrested, charged with treason, and condemned to death - a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. Before she was released, Wuolijoki spent the time productively and wrote parts of her memoirs. Wuolijoki had good personal connections in European left-wing circles - her sister was the wife of Palme Dutt, the British Communist leader. She was a confidante of Boris Yartsev, a Soviet diplomat, and she also knew Mme Alexandra Kollontay, one of the legendary figures of the Bolshevik Revolution. Wuolijoki met Kollontay during the Winter War (1939-40) in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel and helped to start Finnish-Soviet peace negotiations. “If Hella Wuolijoki in those days was taking part in real life in a plot more exciting and complex than any she had devised for her plays, she was also playing opposite a character more original and colorful than any of the feminist heroines she had created for the stage.” (Max Jakobson in Finland Survived, 1984) Decades later the film director Matti Kassila planned to make a film about Wuolijoki and the Russian spy, but the author’s daughter, Vappu Tuomioja, an influential politician, did not approve the idea. Instead Kassila made the sixth Niskavuori movie.
After the war years Wuolijoki joined the Finnish Communist Party and was elected in 1946 to the parliament. Between the years 1945 and 1949 she was the director of the Finnish Broadcasting Company. During this period, called “the years of danger” because of the fear of a Communist takeover, Wuolijoki opened doors to leftist journalists and also started radio’s political discussion programs. However, in general the broadcast policy did not undergo a radical change from conservative to radical. Especially close to Wuolijoki’s heart was concert music. Acting against the tastes of the general public, she banned Hiski Salomaa’s most popular song, the rowdy ‘Lännen lokari’. Works by Gogol, Ibsen, O’Neill, Gorky, and Brech were adapted for the radio. Wuolijoki herself composed 29 episodes of the series The Workman’s Family, created as a counterpoint to The Suominen Family.
Wuolijoki wrote 16 plays. Of these JUURAKON HULDA (1937), written as Juhani Tervapää, was the basis for the Oscar-winning romantic comedy The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), in which a frank maid (Loretta Young) upsets the life of a ambitious politician (Joseph Cotten). In the television series, produced by Screen Gems (1963-66), Inger Stevens played the title role. The Finish film version, directed by Valentin Vaala and starring Tauno Palo and Irma Seikkula, was made in 1937. Paramount bought the rights of the play in the same year. Wuolijoki’s pseudonym is often spelled in the English-speaking world “Juhni Tervataa”, among others in Leonard Maltin’s famous Movie and Video Guide.
Wuolijoki’s best known work is the family saga Niskavuori. It includes five plays under the titles NISKAVUOREN NAISET, NISKAVUOREN LEIPÄ, NISKAVUOREN NUORI EMÄNTÄ, NISKAVUOREN HETA and ENTÄS NYT, NISKAVUORI? The series depicts the country house Niskavuori and its struggle of power between old, strong women and the new generations, from the 1880s to the 1940s. Loviisa, one of the central characters, is a strong-minded woman, who controls Niskavuori. Her son Aarne has left his wife Martta for a schoolteacher, Ilona, but returns then to take care of the farm. However, Niskavuori’s fate rests on the power of its wise women.
“VANHAEMÄNTÄ: Kuule nyt, näillä työväen palkoilla on mahdotonta pitää Niskavuorta koossa.
JUHANI: Mutta miksi sen pitäisi pysyä koossa?
VANHAEMÄNTÄ: Jumala asetti meidät kerran tänne Niskavuorelle ja opetti Raamatussa, miten täällä pitää elää.” (from Entäs nyt, Niskavuori, 1953)
Hella Wuolijoki died on February 2, 1954 in Helsinki. Her Niskavuori plays have remained popular in Finnish theatres, and were successfully adapted into screen. The first play in the series, NISKAVUOREN NAISET, was performed in London in 1937 under the title Women of Property.
For further reading: Kaikessa mukana: Hella Wuolijoki ja hänen näytelmänsä by Pirkko Koski (2000); Finland: A Cultural Encyclopedia, ed. by Olli Alho (1997); Portraits of Courage; Plays by Finnish Women, ed. by S.E. Wilmer (1997); Sulo, Hella ja Vappuli by Vappu Tuomioja (1997); Kansallisgalleria: suuret suomalaiset, vol. 3, ed. by Allan Tiitta et al. (1996), Teatterista valkokankaalle by Jukka Ammondt (1986); McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, vol. 5, ed. by Stanley Hochman (1984); ‘Wuolijoki’s and Bertolt Brecht’s Politization of the Volksstück’ by M. Deschner, in Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, ed. by H. Heinen and B.N. Weber, (1980); Niskavuoren talosta Juurakon torppaan by Jukka Ammondt (1980); ‘Hella Wuolijoki: A Woman of Contrasts’ by Pekka Lounela, in Books From Finland (1979); Uuno Kailaasta Aila Meriluotoon, ed. by Toivo Pekkanen and Reino Rauanheimo (1947) - Huom.: Hella Wuolijoesta on virolainen kirjailija ja tutkija Oskar Kruus julkaissut 1999 elämäkertateoksen. Hän pitää teoksessaan Wuolijokea ‘virolaissuomalaisena yhteiskirjailijana’ Aino Kallaksen tavoin. - See also: Olavi Paavolainen, director of Theatre Department of Finnish Broadcasting company (1947-1964), Wuolijoki’s friend.
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