Leonard Strong


Leonard Alfred George Strong was a popular English novelist, critic, historian, and poet, and published under the name L. A. G. Strong. He served as a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 to 1958.

Life

Poet and novelist, born at Compton Gifford, of Irish parents, and was proud of his Irish heritage. As a youth, he considered being a comedian and took lessons in singing. He was educated at Brighton College and earned a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, as what was known as an Open Classical Scholar. There he came under the influence of W. B. Yeats, about whom Strong wrote fairly extensively; they met first in autumn 1919. Their friendship lasted for twenty years.
He taught at an Oxford preparatory school, before becoming a full-time writer in 1930. His first two volumes of poetry were Dublin Days and The Lowery Road, and his career as a novelist was launched with Dewer Rides.
Later he formed a literary partnership with an Irish friend, John Francis Swaine, paying Swaine a percentage of royalties for five novels and numerous short stories, published between c.1930 and 1953, which were attributed to Strong. These included the Sea Wall, The Bay, and Trevannion. Swaine’s short stories described the thoughts and experiences of an Irish character, Mr Mangan, a fictional version of Swaine himself. Strong wrote many works of non‐fiction and an autobiography of his early years, Green Memory. He gained a wide interest in literature and wrote about many important contemporary authors, including James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Millington Synge, and John Masefield.
He worked as an Assistant Master at Summer Fields, a boys' boarding preparatory school on the outskirts of Oxford, from 1917 to 1919 and from 1920 to 1930, and as a Visiting Tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. One of his pupils was a son of Reginald McKenna. He was a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 until his death. For many years he was a governor of his old school, Brighton College. Strong's autobiography, Green Memory, published after his death, described his family, his earliest years, his school-days, and his friendships at Wadham College; among them were Yeats and George Moore.
Following his death in Guildford, Surrey, a memorial service was held for him at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 3 October 1958.
His cousin was the nurse Emily MacManus; he wrote the foreword for her autobiography, Fifty Years Of Nursing - Matron of Guy's.
Strong was a versatile and prolific writer of more than 20 novels, as well as of short stories, plays, children's books, poems, biography, criticism, and film scripts.
His oeuvre includes mystery novels, featuring Detective-Inspector McKay of Scotland Yard, and horror fiction. Many of his adventure and romance novels were set in Scotland or the West of England. The classic short story "Breakdown", a tale about a married man who has the perfect plan to murder his mistress, and which has a twist ending, has been reprinted often; it was a favorite of Boris Karloff. His supernatural stories were often reprinted, as well. Strong was interested in the paranormal, as his haunted house and other horror stories attest, and believed he had seen ghosts and witnessed psychic phenomena.
One of his earliest writings, A Defence of Ignorance, was the first book sold by Captain Louis Henry Cohn, the founder of House of Books, which specialized in first editions of contemporary writers. Cohn was a New York book collector who of necessity became a bookseller due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and he had Strong's manuscript, a six-page essay, in his collection. Cohn published 200 signed copies of the title, priced at $2.00 each.
Some of Strong's poems were set to music by Arthur Bliss. His Selected Poems appeared in 1931, and The Body's Imperfection: Collected Poems in 1957. He also edited anthologies of poetry, sometimes in collaboration with Cecil Day-Lewis.
His 1932 novel The Brothers was filmed in 1947 by the Scottish director David MacDonald; it starred Patricia Roc. One reviewer commented, "In a break from tradition, the film substitutes the novel's unhappy ending with an even unhappier one." Strong collaborated on or contributed to such filmscripts as Haunted Honeymoon, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, and Happy Ever After.

Verse

Kirkus Reviews asserted in 1935, "L. A. G. Strong can be counted on for a nostalgic picture of the call of the wild, and spins a good yarn as well." Garrett Mattingly, in The Saturday Review, praises Strong's "clean, muscular prose" and the "astonishing variety of mood and incident" in a review of The Seven Arms, saying that he "treats material which has become familiar, almost conventional, in the literature of the Celtic renascence with a freshness and power which makes it seem completely new and completely his own.... He has been possessed by his material, and he has, in turn, completely possessed and mastered it."
Strong enjoyed describing countrysides. He often dramatized the beginning and flourishing of romance between young people. For these reasons, among others, his fiction writing was sometimes considered sentimental. This was a quality popular among readers, though not always among those critics who embraced Modernist attitudes, which could be contemptuous of popular literature and which was a forceful influence at the time. For example, a reviewer of an early novel, The Jealous Ghost, the "story of an American who goes to visit for the first time his English cousins in the West Highland house where his ancestors had lived," judges that Strong's "feeling for 'the land' seems to be that of a tourist whose sensibilities are fluttered by views and sunsets," but who also concluded that in his talent "lies the possibility of a delicate comedy akin to that of Jane Austen or Henry James." Mattingly shows hostility to sentimentalism twice in his review of The Seven Arms, declaring of the heroine, "the splendor of her legend is a romantic figure out of a romantic time but a figure too robust for sentimental tenderness, too vital to be the focus of nostalgic revery" and adding that she is drawn "with sympathy and understanding but without sentimentality or exaggeration." Richard Cordell, reviewing The Open Sky, likewise calls it "an exciting, unsentimental adventure."
However, a critic who did care for this quality in Strong's fiction wrote of the 1931 collection The English Captain and Other Stories that "there is nothing ingenious or fanciful in his writing—which means that the emotion is always preferred before the form, not the form before the emotion; and that, I fear, is uncommon enough in the short stories of today. There is one piece in particular—Mr. Kennedy in Charge—which contains the virtues of all the rest; delicate perception of character, tenderness, vigour, and a sublimation of brute pain. It is a stupendous piece of imaginative writing."
Reviewing The Buckross Ring and Other Stories of the Strange and Supernatural, Mario Guslandi writes, "at his best, Strong has an uncanny ability to create gentle, vivid and fascinating stories bound to leave the reader enchanted." Ian McMillan of the Yorkshire Post called the stories "odd and genuinely chilling."