Friday 19 October 2012

Commander-1: The Life and Death of Author Peter George, alias Peter Bryant / Bryan Peters, co-writer of Dr. Strangelove; inc. Bibliography

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.


Last week I posted a review of a 1961 Cold War spy thriller by British author Bryan Peters, The Big H, noting that although it was Peters' second novel under that moniker, he published a number of other novels both prior to and following it under different names, including his own: Peter George. During the course of my research for that post, something about George struck a chord with me. Though he only left a relatively small body of work – he took his own life in 1966 at the age of forty-two,[1] which, that being my current age, and George's birthday being a day after mine, I guess on a subliminal level might have been part of the reason I became so interested in him – his influence has extended far and wide, primarily through his best-known novel, Two Hours to Doom (1958), alias Red Alert. Written under another nom de plume, Peter Bryant, it was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the screenplay of which George co-wrote (with Kubrick and Terry Southern).


George – born Peter Bryan George in Treorchy, Wales on 26 March, 1924 – published nine novels in his lifetime (insofar as I've been able to establish; the bibliography at the bottom of this post is as complete as I can make it), including crime fiction, at least one P.I. mystery – Cool Murder, 1958 – and a short series of spy novelsHong Kong Kill (also 1958) and the aforementioned The Big H. What's remarkable is that, of those nine novels, nearly half are preoccupied to a greater or lesser degree with nuclear conflict, whether it be The Big H – which, although ostensibly about heroin smuggling, actually has the threat of atomic war at its heart – or George's 1963 novelisation of his own screenplay for Dr. Strangelove. But it's the book that capped his career which is perhaps the most apposite as regards his life and, seemingly, his death: a long-out-of-print novel which I firmly believe is an overlooked post-apocalyptic classic, up there with the similarly realistic landmark dystopian likes of Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006).


Published by Heinemann in the UK in 1965 under a stark, photographic dust jacket designed by Paul Castell – the symbolic flower on the front of which predates by twenty years the more famous black flower from Troy Kennedy Martin's equally brilliant, also nuclear-themed Edge of Darkness Commander-1 is a bleak, unforgiving account of atomic war and its aftermath. An opening chapter set on Christmas Eve, 1965 juxtaposes a joyous shopping trip in New York with vignettes of interracial murder and rape in Johannesburg, Tibet and New York itself, along with glimpses of nuclear arsenals, climaxing with a blinding light in the sky. Subsequently, a flashback begins a subplot which reappears intermittently throughout the novel, relating the Chinese plan which instigates the conflagration; and then the action switches to the war room deep beneath the Pentagon, where the confusion of nuclear conflict unfolds in calm, and consequently horrific, fashion.

Thereafter, for a while at least, the novel takes the form of a journal, written by James Geraghty, the commander of an unarmed U.S. Navy nuclear submarine, on board which, along with the crew, are three men and three women – the "guinea pigs". Kept in isolation, the guinea pigs are the focus of an experiment to assess how human beings will cope with deep space travel and colonisation, the aim being to deposit them on a desert island. Despite the fact that the war has very likely brought humanity to the brink of extinction, and against the advice of one of the doctors overseeing the experiment, Geraghty elects to persist with it, and from here on out the story alternates between Geraghty's tale and that of the guinea pigs.


Right from the beginning of Commander-1 there are clues that the novel was written swiftly and out of a genuine belief that nuclear annihilation was imminent. The first of the Chinese interludes references both the ousting of Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev on 14 October, 1964 and China's inaugural nuclear weapons test, which took place on 16 October, 1964; given that Commander-1 was published in 1965, it seems clear that George was deeply concerned about these developments and was urgently driven to address them in his fiction. The shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis also looms large over the novel, and is referenced repeatedly; as recently as the 1980s, when I was a teenager, the threat and fear of nuclear war was very real, so it's easy for me to imagine how much more immediate that threat and fear must have felt to George in the 1960s, post-Cuban Missile Crisis, post-Chinese atomic weapons testing.

George weaves fact into fiction throughout the novel. He makes references to real life non-fiction works on the likelihood of nuclear war (and, obliquely, to his own Two Hours to Doom/Dr. Strangelove), while in a long conversation on the island the guinea pigs discuss the likely, scientifically deduced outcome of an all-out MAD nuclear exchange, bringing in bacteriological warfare to boot (there's a mention of Porton, near Salisbury). He even references real people in the narrative, such as the strategists Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling – the latter in fact a friend of George's.[2] That some of his fictional characters, including one or two of the guinea pigs, aren't terribly well-developed and are sometimes deployed as little more than mouthpieces to impart facts is, to my mind, the novel's only major flaw, and given what George is trying to achieve, forgivable.

As grim as all this is, however, astonishingly, the book becomes even grimmer as it draws to a close. George details the establishment of a quasi-fascistic system of government for the scant few survivors of the war, complete with drug-induced brainwashing and indoctrination and a nascent eugenics programme. This is driven by Commander Geraghty, a grotesquely compelling creation who will, ultimately, come to lend the novel its title. At the story's end there is at least a tiny glimmer of light, but even that is cruelly extinguished in the final two sentences.


Peter George died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at his home in St Leonards – not far from where I live in Lewes – on 1 June, 1966;[3] his wife found him slumped in a chair with a discharged double-barreled shotgun between his knees.[4] It was reported at the time that he had been unwell and depressed;[5] later, the author Brian Aldiss, an acquaintance of George's, wrote that George "was a victim of the Demon Alcohol", that "He would start with a sip of whisky and wake up a fortnight later in a Glaswegian gutter, poor guy."[6] But Aldiss also stated that George was "suffering fear and pain about the threat of nuclear war", to the extent that it was believed by some that at the time of his death he was writing yet another book on the subject.[7]

That conjectured unfinished novel remains unpublished,* but Commander-1 certainly bears out Aldiss's hypothesis in its overwhelming sense of despair, hopelessness, and anger. But more than that, one event in particular in the novel acts as a chilling portent of George's fate. After finding his partner, Jane, dead of an overdose, one of the guinea pigs, Bill Evans – a man born, like George himself, in Treorchy – commits suicide by shooting himself in the head. Bill's haste to do the deed before he can be stopped presages the way George must have been similarly conscious of taking his own life before his wife could find him, but what's even more appalling is the way George describes the gruesome results – "the bloody pieces of bone and flesh and brain" that Bill's fellow guinea pigs, John and Arnie, have to bury, and this preceding passage: 

When they saw what was left of Bill's head they turned away. When they had recovered a little, but still not looking at the bodies, Arnie said, 'How did he do it?'

'Through the mouth,' John said. 'Oh my sweet Christ, though the mouth.'

The hurt and grief George's wife and three children must have felt at both his death and the manner of his demise is difficult to comprehend, especially in light of the fact that the Armageddon he dreaded never came to pass; but for me, this episode demonstrates not only how terrible, and terribly affecting, suicide is, but how powerful fiction in general, and Commander-1 in particular, can be.**


George was evidently – and justly – proud of Commander-1. He dedicated the book to Stanley Kubrick, and sent copies to his friends, as the author's bookplate affixed to the front endpaper of the Heinemann first edition I acquired shows:


The shame of it is that Commander-1 has been out of print for forty years, the last editions being Dell and Pan paperbacks in 1966. Doubtless there are many fine novels that over the decades have fallen through the cracks in our collective memory and slipped quietly out of print; indeed finding and spotlighting some of those books could be said to be the purpose of Existential Ennui. My hope, then, in writing this post, is that these words go some way towards rescuing one righteous, impassioned, often ferocious novel from semi-obscurity and raising it to its rightful position as a key work not only in Peter George's slight but fascinating canon, but in the wider pantheon of post-apocalyptic fiction.

. . . . .


PETER GEORGE BIBLIOGRAPHY

As Peter George
Come Blonde, Came Murder (T. V. Boardman, 1952)
Pattern of Death (T. V. Boardman, 1954)
Cool Murder (T. V. Boardman, 1958); later reissued in paperback under Bryan Peters alias (Mayflower, 1965)
The Final Steal (T. V. Boardman, 1962)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Corgi/Transworld, 1963): novelisation of George's own screenplay/original story
Commander-1 (Heinemann, 1965)

As Peter Bryant
Two Hours to Doom (T. V. Boardman, 1958); published as Red Alert in US (Ace, 1958), later retitled as such in UK

As Bryan Peters
Hong Kong Kill (T. V. Boardman, 1958)
The Big H (T. V. Boardman, 1961)

According to this thread on the Golden Age Mysteries message board, Allen J. Hubin's Crime Fiction IV also credits Sons of Nippon, a 1961 war novel by Brian Peters – "i" instead of "y" in first name – to Peter George. However, George's son, David, told me that Sons of Nippon was not written by his father.

__________

[1] Some reports, including those at the time of his death, put his age at forty-one; see Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, P. D. Smith, 2007; Associated Press, Yuma Daily Sun, Austin Daily Herald et al, 2 June, 1966
[2] Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays, Thomas C. Schelling, 2006
[3] Yuma Daily Sun, 2 June, 1966
[4] Waterloo Daily Courier, 2 June, 1966
[5] AP, 2 June, 1966
[6] "Kubrick – the Writer", Brian Aldiss, The Observer, 14 March, 1999
[7] Smith, 2007

Note: It appears that at one point Peter George's son had a website, on which was some memorabilia about his father (there's a broken link from George's Wikipedia page). Should Mr. George's son happen to read this post, I'd welcome any corrections, thoughts or additional information he might be willing to provide. 

* Addendum 1: Some months after I posted this essay, Peter George's son, David, did indeed contact me. Among other additional insights, which I hope to share at some point, David noted that there was no 'unfinished novel'; Commander-1 was Peter George's final work. Its original title was Nucleus of Survivors, leading to the belief in some quarters that George was working on another book bearing that title.

** Addendum 2: A year on from this essay's post date I was emailed by Madeline Weston, who was secretary to Tom "T.V." Boardman, not only the publisher of many of Peter George's books but his close friend too. Madeline still remembers "the morning [Boardman] came into the office severely shaken at the news of Peter's suicide. Peter had phoned him I think the evening before telling him he was going to take his life and there was nothing Tom could do to dissuade him." Shortly after that call George committed suicide. Madeline added: "The impression I got from my boss, Tom, was that Peter's time in the RAF had involved being in a job where he was one of those near the 'red button' that could start a nuclear attack, and I think this affected him greatly." My thanks to Madeline for these insights, and for granting me permission to publish them.

14 comments:

  1. Fascinating, Nick--and haunting. I wonder, if somebody could have convinced him that nuclear war was not imminent--that the Cold War would end, that the Great Powers would find some limited measure of conciliation (though we're hardly just one big happy family now), would he have pulled himself back from the brink?

    Or would he have just figured we were delaying the inevitable?

    Hard for us to remember now just what it was like then (well, I wasn't even around for the worst of it). It was a sort of ever-present nightmare, that created some amazing art (like that makes up for anything). The Japanese, understandably, were even more obsessed with it (and perhaps any island nation would be, given the limited space available--harder to delude yourself you can get away). Akira Kurosawa made one of his most powerful films about a man obsessed with nuclear war--"I Live in Fear." His penultimate film, "Rhapsody in August" is about a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb and her family. There are moments in it that chill the blood.

    The more sensitive among us may pay the penalty for their psychic vulnerability to imminent destruction, but I like to think of them as canaries in the coalmine. And we should never forget them. Never. For our own sakes, more than theirs.

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  2. one typo; you state the year of birth as 1942. It should be 1924.

    good piece.

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  3. Anonymous: Thanks for catching that. Now amended.

    Chris: Hard to say that if Peter George could have somehow been convinced that his fears wouldn't be realised he'd have made a different choice. According to Brian Aldiss and others, alcoholism and depression seem to have been big factors in his suicide, but whether those were in turn the result of his terror of nuclear war, I'm not able to ascertain.

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  4. Suicide is affected by many factors, some of them seemingly counterintuitive. For example, I read a book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where a very troubling statistic was cited--when sectarian violence went down, the suicide rate went up.

    Reminds me of a story I heard about a jumper on the George Washington Bridge, which you will recall is in my neighborhood--suicide attempts, successful and otherwise, are a very frequent occurrence on that structure, though the media rarely reports on them, for fear of inspiring more attempts.

    Anyway, this guy had gotten out on the pedestrian walkway a ways, then climbed up into the bridge structure, prefatory to jumping.

    A police officer happened by, and saw him up there. Thinking quickly, he unholstered his pistol, pointed it at the man, and yelled "STOP OR I'LL SHOOT!"

    The guy climbed down and went off with the cop like a lamb.

    That story is more Donald Westlake than Peter George, obviously. Takes all kinds.

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  5. I've always thought a primary factor with those who become seriously depressed and consider suicide is a propensity to stare the absurdities of life unflinchingly in the eye without self-delusion as a buffer.

    I've had serious bouts of depression in my life and even now am in therapy once a week for anxiety/depression issues and have learned a certain ability to trick yourself into seeing the more positive aspects of life is essential to one's coping with life. So I have little tricks and gimmicks to change my focus on what, most times, I consider a pretty shitty world.

    That and my absurdist sense of humor has kept me afloat.

    I wasn't even alive for most of the Cold War Nuclear insanity but it falls into my absurdist POV that a bunch of upright primates with the distinction of opposible thumbs could eventually concoct weaponry suffecient to render a once-lush, fertile planet unliveable. If one looks at it from that perspective, it's almost darkly humorous.

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  6. Really appreciate this post. Having just watched Dr Strangelove for the the first time, I found it quite tragic that Peter George (a.k.a. Peter Bryant) took his own life due to fears of nuclear holocaust. Your addendum from Madeline Weston helps point out a potential reason for George's fascination/obsession with nuclear war. I have never seen that fact posted anywhere (nor the full bibliography), so many thanks for helping me unravel some of this mystery.

    Three other questions I am trying to answer: the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb which now seems highly ironic in light of how George's life ended. Do you happen to know if that subtitle came from Stanley Kubrick? I have assumed it was not from Peter George.

    Also, how did the switch to the satirical in the film affect Peter George?

    Finally, have you found any articles about Kubrick's response to George's suicide?

    Your post was very enlightening, and thanks for any other insights!

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  7. Thanks for the questions, Eric. To be frank I don't know the answer to any of them, although I'm fairly certain the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove wouldn't have come from George, and since George penned the novelisation, he mustn't have been too badly affected by the tone of the film. But I imagine the best person to answer your questions would be David George, Peter's son; I'll drop him a line and see what I can find out.

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  8. I have some answers from David George for you, Eric, if you happen to be reading.

    On the subtitle, David tells me there's a photo of Kubrick doodling re the title in the Taschen Stanley Kubrick Archives book, and that there are refs to Peter George in that photo.

    On how Peter was affected by the switch to satirical, David says that Peter was on-board and writing with Kubrick when the plot became more comic, and that Terry Southern added some later lines and Peter Sellers improvised some; according to David, Peter George was not upset about the film becoming comic before or after its release, and that there are plenty of other sources who can confirm that.

    Finally, David says that there were contacts with the George family after Peter's death; he doesn't think he has anything himself (or if he does, it's not immediately obvious) but that there may be something in the Kubrick archive.

    Hope that helps!

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  9. Nick, I'm fascinated by Peter George's progression from pulp writer to apocalyptic visionary. I've been trying to dig up anything about his early life but I can't find a thing. I know he was in the RAF until after Red Alert was published, but what else? Was he involved in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or any other anti-nuclear politics? I'd love to hear anything you might know.

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  10. I believe there will be more information forthcoming on Peter George, Jorge – George's son is working with a writer to bring us the full story, although I've no idea when that might be. I'll be sure to post an update when I hear more.

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  11. Hi Nick,

    Great piece! I was wondering if you could help me contact David George, Peter George's son. I work in the entertainment industry and I've been trying to track him down to no avail. There is an interesting development opportunity that I'd like to discuss with him- and who knows, maybe it will lead to an entirely new article for you!

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  12. I lately acquired the Dell paperback (U.S. edition), drawing from a dim recollection of the hardcover while working in a public library so very long ago. It's in my queue, as is Mick Broderick's "Reconstructing Strangelove: Inside Stanley Kubrick's 'Nightmare Comedy'. I'd in fact read Red Alert.

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  13. Excellent article and excellent commenting as well. I am re-watching Dr. Strangelove, and wanted to know more about the source of the tale, and so came across your blog. June 1966, and I wonder what contemporary happenings were occurring around then that could have knocked Mr. George over the edge, as it were. Alcohol could do it alone, I suppose, but with George's seeming sensitivity to the dark side of mankind, there could be more. I'll try to do some research on my own.
    Thanks again for a great meditation on life, death and holocaust.

    Carol Binkley

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  14. A fascinating study of a really interesting writer.

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