Nordhoff, Charles Bernard 1887-1947

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NORDHOFF, Charles Bernard 1887-1947

PERSONAL: Born February 1, 1887 in London, England; died of a heart attack April 11, 1947, in CA; father a correspondent for the New York Times; married Vahime Tua Tearae Smidt, 1920 (divorced); married Laura Whiley, 1941; children: (first marriage) seven; (with Tahitian mistress) three. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1909.

CAREER: Novelist, short story writer, essayist, and historian. Worked on a Sugar plantation in Mexico, 1909-11; Tile and Fine Brick Company, California, secretary and treasurer, 1911-16. Military service: Enlisted in the French Ambulance Corps in 1916; later joined the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Flying Corps; transferred to the United States Air Service after the United States entered World War I, where he served as a lieutenant.

WRITINGS:

The Fledgling, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1919.

The Pearl Lagoon, Atlantic Monthly Press (Boston, MA), 1924.

Pícaro, Harper (New York, NY), 1924.

The Derelict: Further Adventures of Charles Selden and His Native Friends in the South Seas, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1928.

with james norman hall

(Editor) The Lafayette Flying Corps, 2 vols., Houghton, Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1920.

Faery Lands of the South Seas, Harper (New York, NY), 1921.

Falcons of France A Tale of Youth and the Air, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1929.

The Island Wreck, Methuen (London, England), 1929.

Mutiny on the Bounty, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1932, published as Mutiny! Chapman & Hall (London, England), 1933.

Men against the Sea, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1934.

Pitcairn's Island, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1934.

The Hurricane, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1936.

The Dark River, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1938.

No More Gas, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1940.

Botany Bay, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1941.

Men without Country, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1942.

The High Barbaree, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1945.

Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

ADAPTATIONS: Mutiny on the Bounty was adapted for film in 1935, in 1962, and, as The Bounty, in 1984; Men without Country was filmed as Passage to Marseilles; The Hurricane was filmed in 1937 and 1979; No More Gas as The Turtles of Tahiti in 1942; High Barbaree in 1947; and Botany Bay in 1952.

SIDELIGHTS: A biographical essay on Charles Bernard Nordhoff cannot be written without immediately mentioning James Norman Hall, Nordhoff's writing partner of nearly thirty years. Though Nordhoff did in fact author several books, articles, and essays on his own, he is most well known and acclaimed for his collaboration with Hall on their legendary trilogy: Mutiny on the Bounty, Men against the Sea, and Pitcairn's Island. In Romance and Historical Writers Joan McGrath called the duo's efforts "a landmark work of fiction in which a sordid mutiny against authority in the person of a petty tyrant won for both captain and mutineers alike a place in the annals of courage, endurance, and adventure." The American reading public wholeheartedly embraced the abounding themes of courage, greed, and man against nature. Hollywood immortalized Mutiny on the Bounty in a film version in 1935, again in 1962, and yet again as The Bounty in 1984, making the incredible account of a nearly forgotten true story accessible to millions more people than had already read the books. McGrath called the trilogy "the result of a coming together of well-matched talents perfectly suited to the subject matter; their bold, distinctly masculine style of prose was exactly right for the story they had to tell."

Nordhoff's was born in London in 1887 to American parents. He spent his childhood on ranchlands owned by his parents in both California and Mexico. Apparently intellectually gifted, he was accepted by Harvard University and graduated with a B.A. in 1909. After working on a sugar plantation in Mexico for two years and then for five years in California as secretary and treasurer for a company that manufactured tile and bricks, Nordhoff decided to join the French Ambulance Corps in 1916. He later joined the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Flying Corps, but after the United States entered World War I he transferred to the U.S. Air Service, in which he served in the capacity of lieutenant. It was his mother who launched his writing career, as she is responsible for sending Nordhoff's descriptive accounts of his ambulance driving and piloting experiences to the Atlantic Monthly. These letters home appealed to the public as true-life war tales, and coincidentally appeared with wartime essays written by Hall. The letters were gathered in whole and were published as The Fledgling.

By 1918 both Nordhoff and Hall were decorated pilots and published writers. The two men were introduced that year and asked to collaborate on an official history of the Lafayette Flying Corps, of which they had both been members. This collaboration was published in 1920, and by its end the men decided they were through with civilization. They solicited Harper's magazine for a cash advance in exchange for a proposed series of articles on the South Seas, and they sailed to Papeete, Tahiti. The articles became the essay collection Faery Lands of the South Seas, which was published in 1921. According to the essayist in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, "the men later recalled that their initial meeting was uncongenial, promising nothing of the close friendship that was to follow."

Obviously, the writing team eventually discovered that they in fact had quite a lot in common, and were thrilled at the ease of their mutual efforts and the complementary strengths of their writing habits. McGrath describes Nordhoff as "ambitious, sceptical, handsome" and Hall as "more of the plain, homespun dependable sort," and the two consequently "created what neither could accomplish on their own." In the 1920s Nordhoff was approached by his publisher to write a sequel to an adventure novel he had written for children, and he invited Hall to share the assignment. The result, Falcons of France: A Tale of Youth and the Air, was a commercial success, and compelled the authors to consider their next project. Both had been consistently intrigued by one of the island's favorite stories about a mutiny that happened aboard a British ship in 1789. Strangely, only two attempts had been made to recount the amazing tale—a factual account by Sir John Barrow published in 1831 and a fictionalized children's book that was published in 1845. They amassed as much research as possible, pouring through mutineers' diaries, accounts recorded by the ship's infamous Captain Bligh, interviews with the only surviving mutineer and transcripts of the eventual trial. The ambitious men spent the next three years sorting through their research, ordering the stories, recreating events to the best of their abilities, and editing each others' work. The result is described in Twentieth-Century as "one of the most finely integrated collaborative efforts in literature."

In Mutiny on the Bounty, the authors tell the tale through Captain Roger Byam, who was a lowly midshipmen under Captain Bligh. The New York Times hailed the result, proclaiming: "The book is a superb achievement in its genre. It is truly romantic—not sentimental. The writing is remarkable in its fidelity to eighteenth-century flavor and refreshing in its charm and beauty. . . . The story marches from chapter to chapter with never a let-down. Here is what the historical novel should be—a bit of history brought to life in a book." E. F. Edgett of the Boston Transcript wrote that Nordhoff and Hall "have made it not merely a tale of the sea; they have made it a tale of life itself, of the varying aspects of good and bad in humanity." The authors were applauded for their creative restraint and literary discipline in the face of such an incredulous historical event.

Similar compliments were bestowed upon Nordhoff and Hall for their fine work on the second book in the trilogy, Men against the Sea. It is the story of Captain Bligh and the eighteen men who sailed with him in an open boat, traveling 3,600 miles from the Friendly Islands in the South Pacific to the Dutch colony of Timor in the East Indies. The Boston Transcript reviewer stated: "Of the manner in which the tale is told too much cannot be said in praise. . . . On every page it bears evidence of its truth; in every word it has the actual semblance of events that have happened." The review in the Nation celebrated the work for paying homage to pioneering seaman, citing that the book "reveals . . . the hardships seamen were forced to undergo not many generations back. It reveals, too, what heights of courage and fortitude men can reach when the demand is put upon them. . . . As for the sea, its say has been said in this new masterpiece." Amazingly, Men against the Sea was written in only two months, during which time the authors stopped work on what would be their next novel, Pitcairn's Island.

The final installment of the trilogy, Pitcairn's Island, received favorable reviews despite the fact that the authors had to utilize conflicting accounts and incomplete information. Archie Binns wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature: "Where they had to guess and reconstruct they guessed and reconstructed well. . . . Out of the available sources—sometimes sketchy and sometimes luxuriant with divergent ac counts—they have built a plausible, three-dimensional human story of great depth and terror and beauty."

Nordhoff and Hall ultimately collaborated on six more novels, most of which faired well, arguably in large part because of their solid reputation. Nordhoff's productivity tapered off as a result of marital problems and his abusive relationship with alcohol. He eventually abandoned his island paradise—as well as four children from his first marriage and three children from a relationship with his Tahitian mistress—and moved back to California with two of his daughters, and he remarried. Nordhoff was ill for most of the decade before he died of a heart attack in 1947. Although the end of his life was plagued by pain and frustration, Nordhoff will always be remembered for his contribution to some of the most famous and celebrated sea adventure stories of all time.