Robert Hichens

Artist Info

Robert HichensSpeldhurst, England, 1864 - 1950, Zurich Switzerland

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50035072

Hichens, Robert Smythe (1864–1950), writer, was born on 14 November 1864 at the rectory, Speldhurst, Kent, the eldest of the five children of the Revd Frederick Harrison Hichens and Abigail Elizabeth, née Smythe. His father's family was from Northamptonshire and his grandfather founded the firm of Hichens and Harrison. His mother was from co. Westmeath, Ireland, but grew up in Pau, France, where she met her husband. Hichens was at Hurstleigh School in Tunbridge Wells before attending Clifton College after the family moved to Bristol. While at Clifton College, Hichens found that he had talent for both music and writing. His family moving to Kent in 1884, Hichens took the opportunity to move to London and attend the Royal College of Music. He had some minor success as a lyricist but soon realized that he ‘was not highly gifted in a musical sense’ (Hichens, 30). In 1886 he published The Coastguard's Secret, written when he was seventeen years old. In 1888 he asked his father to secure him a place at the London School of Journalism, where he found favour with its director, David Anderson. After a year he left and began to contribute to various periodicals including Mistress and Maid and the Pall Mall Magazine.

In 1893 Hichens became seriously ill and nearly died of peritonitis. Upon recovering, he travelled to Egypt to complete his convalescence. Meeting Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde while there, he became intrigued with the notion of the aesthete. His time in Egypt was spent writing The Green Carnation, which was published anonymously by Heinemann in 1894 and was an immediate success, indeed ‘un succès de scandale’ (Hichens, 71). Labelled ‘the finest Satire of the Nineties’ (Weintraub, 1), The Green Carnation satirizes the aesthete and contains a fictionalized portrait of Oscar Wilde. Although Hichens found that ‘a certain amount of unpleasantness was caused to [him] by the many criticisms of well-known living people’ (Hichens, 74) the novel assured him a place in the highest literary circles and he was friendly with the likes of Max Beerbohm, Marie Corelli, and Henry James.

Returning to London, Hichens continued his journalistic endeavours and succeeded George Bernard Shaw as music critic of the London World. He also wrote several plays, including Becky Sharp written, in collaboration with Cosmo Gordon-Lennox, for Marie Tempest. Several novels and short stories published before the First World War stand out as excellent, including An Imaginative Man (1895), The Londoners: an Absurdity (1898), and ‘How Love Came to Professor Guildea’ (Tongues of Conscience, 1900). The Londoners consolidated his position as a satirist as Edwardian society was alternately shocked, thrilled, and intrigued.

Eventually giving up journalism in order to travel abroad and write, Hichens returned again and again to Egypt and north Africa. These locales provided him with the seemingly exotic settings for his romances. The Slave: a Romance (1900), The Woman with the Fan (1904), and The Barbary Sheep (1909) all bear testament to his interest in the Near East. However, it was The Garden of Allah (1905) which provided him with his greatest success. The romance between a socialite seeking solace in the desert and a Trappist monk who has left his monastery was an instant success. Hichens also wrote several travel narratives about Egypt and the Near East, including The Spell of Egypt (1910) and The Holy Land (1913).

During the First World War, Hichens was a member of the special constabulary in Tankerton and London. It was at this time that he became friendly with the Swiss novelist John Knittel. For the next twenty-five years Hichens lived in numerous locales with Knittel, his wife Frances, and their children. Rather than returning to England permanently, Hichens and the Knittels divided their time between Africa, the French riviera, and Switzerland.

Several novels by Hichens were dramatized for stage and screen. The Garden of Allah was filmed three times, the best-known being the 1936 film starring Marlene Dietrich and Basil Rathbone (directed by Richard Boleslawski). As well, in 1947, Alfred Hitchcock directed Gregory Peck and Charles Laughton in the adaptation of Hichens's courtroom thriller The Paradine Case.

During the Second World War Hichens lived in Zürich and wrote his autobiography, entitled Yesterday (1947). It is an entertaining and self-critical narrative. He had an excellent ear for conversation and much of the book is spent describing encounters with diverse high-ranking members of both social and literary circles. Although the aristocratic name-dropping becomes repetitive, the self-deprecating descriptions are amusing. His acquaintance, whether it was in passing or a long friendship, with such notables as Sarah Bernhardt, Howard Carter, W. Somerset Maugham, and Elizabeth von Arnim is wittily depicted. He was a great admirer of André Gide and thought him ‘one of the most remarkable of living writers’ (Hichens, 155).

Hichens never married. He was a professional writer, writing quickly and with little fuss when a piece was required. He died in hospital at Zürich on 20 July 1950.

M. R. Bellasis, rev. Stacy Gillis

Sources

R. Hichens, Yesterday (1947) · The Times (22 July 1950) · www.indiana.edu/~victoria [Victorianist discussion e-list] · S. Weintraub, introduction, in R. Hichens, The green carnation (1970)