Arthur Calder-Marshall

Arthur Calder-Marshall

Arthur Calder-Marshall (19 August 1908 – 17 April 1992) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist, and biographer.

Life and career

Arthur Calder-Marshall

Calder-Marshall was born in Wallington, Surrey, the son of Alice (Poole) and Arthur Grotjan Marshall (later Calder-Marshall; 1875 –1958), a civil engineer. The elder Arthur was grandson of the Scottish sculptor William Calder Marshall (1813–1894). William Calder Marshall's father William Marshall (1780–1859), a goldsmith and jeweller, had married Annie, daughter of merchant William Calder, D.L., Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1810–11, by his wife Agnes, a daughter of landed gentleman Hugh Dalrymple. The Marshall family were Episcopalian goldsmiths from Perthshire; the Calder family were merchants.

In his youth, Calder-Marshall lived with his family in Steyning, where he made friends with Victor Neuberg, the poet and associate of Aleister Crowley. His 1951 memoir The Magic of My Youth includes extensive anecdotes re: Neuberg (nicknamed "Vickybird"), Crowley himself, and other Crowley associates such as Raoul Loveday and Betty May.

A short, unhappy stint teaching English at Denstone College, Staffordshire, 1931–33, inspired his novel Dead Centre. In the 1930s, Calder-Marshall adopted strong left-wing views. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and was also a member of the London-based left-wing Writers and Readers Group which also included Randall Swingler, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mulk Raj Anand, Maurice Richardson and Rose Macaulay.

In 1937, Calder-Marshall wrote scripts for MGM although none appears to have been filmed.

Calder-Marshall's fiction and non-fiction covered a wide range of subjects. He himself remarked, "I have never written two books on the same subject or with the same object."

In the 1960s, Calder-Marshall took on commissioned work which included a novelisation of the Dirk Bogarde film Victim. He has additionally been proposed as the author of The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½ a children's novel about British spy James Bond's nephew, published under the pseudonym R. D. Mascott.

With his wife, documentary screenplay-writer Ara (born Violet Nancy Sales), he was the father of the actress Anna Calder-Marshall and the grandfather of the actor Tom Burke. He and his wife visited the English novelist Malcolm Lowry in Mexico and attested to his chronic alcoholism-fuelled creative processes in an interview they gave which was included in the 1976 documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry.

Media adaptations

Arthur Calder-Marshall

Orson Welles adapted The Way to Santiago in 1941 for RKO. However Welles's troubles with the studio meant that no film was made.

James Mason purchased the film rights to Occasion of Glory, intending to make this project his directorial debut. Mason hired Christopher Isherwood to write the script.

Additional sources

Arthur Calder-Marshall

• The Reader's Companion to Twentieth-Century Writers, Frank Kermode, Peter Parker eds. (London: Fourth Estate, 1995), page 126 • Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, volume 72, Gale. • St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, David Pringle, (St. James Press, 1998) • Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: Volume 2, R. Reginald, Douglas Menville, Mary A. Burgess (Wildside Press LLC, 2010), pp. 840–1