FLASHMAN FLIES THE JOLLY ROGER
George MacDonald Fraser’s piratical first novel discovered after his death
Captain in Calico George MacDonald Fraser Mysterious Press
When George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the Flashman series of novels, died in 2008, he left — among other things — a wife, three children, a library of more than 10,000 books and a fireproof safe, locked.
There was a bit of trouble opening the safe but they cracked it in the end, and inside they discovered two thick cardboard folders — one blue, one green — containing 326 sheets of yellowing paper on which was typed, in old-fashioned Courier, their father’s first, unpublished novel, written in 1959: Captain in Calico, a piratical romp based on the life of “Calico Jack” Rackham.
More than 50 years since Captain in Calico was quietly put away, do the now-grown children remember anything of their father writing it?
His daughter, Caro, now a novelist, was six in 1959. “Long after we’d been put to bed, I could hear him typing in the small hours, and smell the smoke from his cigarettes,” she remembers. Fraser was not a quick typist, but her brothers, Nick and Simon, say the sound of the typewriter was comforting.
Fraser worked on The Glasgow Herald, later rising to become deputy editor, and he saw little of his children, except on weekends. Simon recalls: “He would come and tell us bedtime stories, by the light of the electric fire, and as often as not they’d be about pirates, whom he’d always loved.”
Life in Glasgow was modest — they lived in a small house and Fraser wrote at the kitchen table. His wife, Kathleen, made good use of what money they had, and later she came to run the business side of Fraser’s career. The children remember their parents as an “incredibly tight unit.” Fraser’s Who’s Who entry lists his recreations as: “Snooker. Talking to Wife. History. Singing.”
Kathleen was always the first reader of everything he wrote, and was the only person for whom he would change a word. It was she who provided the impetus for his success. One holiday in the Lake District, Fraser broke his arm saving Nick, his youngest child, from falling down a waterfall.
I am not sure whether Fraser was the sort of man to believe in karma, but this accident led, indirectly, to the start of a hugely successful literary career. While he was off work with his arm immobilized, Fraser got out the old typewriter and began bashing away again, his literary ambitions resurrected after a 10year hiatus. This book was Flashman, and it was his wife Kathleen who told him to persevere with it: “You don’t know the riches you’re sitting on,” she told him.
And this time, he got it right. Flashman was published in 1969, a decade after Captain in Calico had been set aside. It made ripples on both sides of the Atlantic: One U.S. reviewer thought Captain Flashman’s Afghan memoir was genuine — “The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers”, while P.G. Wodehouse became a champion.
Success happened upon the family very suddenly. His son Simon recalls: Fraser and his wife were on holiday in the Isle of Man when the film rights to the first Flashman sold, “and he rang us from a phone box and just said: ‘Pack up the house, we can’t come back.’?
Those were the days of eye-watering income tax, when “anyone with any money was being taxed until the pips squeaked.” So the children left Glasgow, where they had grown up, and moved to the Isle of Man (although Simon, who was already studying law at the university, and Nick, who was boarding at Glasgow Academy, stayed behind).
After 1969, Fraser never lived on the mainland again. While his home became the Isle of Man, he spent much of his time in Hollywood, working on film scripts for Hollywood: first The Three Musketeers, a starry adaptation with Charlton Heston and Oliver Reed; later, a treatment of his own novel Royal Flash and the Bond film Octopussy.
His output was prodigious throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, with a novel one year and a film the next, or perhaps some instalment in the McAuslan series (comic adventures based on his career in the British Army). The children claim his dedication came from his years at The Glasgow Herald. Even in his final illness, when his old school in Carlisle called to ask if he would contribute something to a history of the place, Fraser roused himself to ask: “How many words and when do they want them by?”
In 1983, he managed to return to his favourite subject with his novel The Pyrates, a loose and comic treatment of the genre (the Fraser children can’t help but imagine it influenced the playful Pirates of the Caribbean movies). Captain in Calico, however, remained firmly in the safe, along with the rejection letters the manuscript had gathered in 1959.
When Captain in Calico was written, it may already have seemed slightly old-fashioned, harking back to writers that Fraser had enjoyed as a child, such as Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950), author of The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood and other archetypical swashbucklers. There may have been other reasons, too. The rejection letters are witheringly stern, comically so. Perhaps the best came from a literary agent, who wrote: “It is a pity that the story is quite useless,” then went on to suggest that Fraser make his motto multum in parvo, which means “Much in Little.”
Fraser did follow that cutting advice, but turned it on its head. He took the character Flashman from a small part in Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, where he appears as a bully. Fraser set Harry Paget Flashman centre stage in his own life, and sent the Victorian cad off on his many adventures.
The Fraser children are very clear that Captain in Calico is not vintage George MacDonald Fraser: “We don’t want anyone to be deceived into thinking it is,” says Caro Fraser. “The publication has come about because we had to sell all those books in my father’s library, and we went through my father’s favourite bookshop, Heywood Hill, in Mayfair, who wanted something original like a pamphlet he had written, to help publicize the sale. So we thought, what about the first chapter of this book he’d written. Would that do? And Heywood Hill said, ‘Are you crazy? You’ve got an unpublished novel by George MacDonald Fraser?’ And the ball just kept rolling from there.”
But why did Fraser keep it in this fireproof safe, along with the rejection notes of the earlier draft? “I think he had faith in its virtues,” Nick says. “That there was enough in it to be of interest to readers of his later works, even if just as a curiosity. I don’t think it would be published today if it weren’t for that.”
And it does seem this was a novel Fraser liked, since he kept it with such care, while his other papers were kept in storage boxes elsewhere. Whenever he finished a Flashman novel, he would put the manuscript in a box, close the lid, send it off and never think about it again. I ask his children whether they thought their father liked Flashman as a character. They betray a trace of ambivalence. He was grateful to Flashman, it seems, and fond of him in a sense, but it also appears he would not necessarily have liked him in person. In 1983, when the Flashman novels were chosen as a specialist round on the quiz show Mastermind, Fraser watched the show at home and got two of the questions wrong himself.
None of the three children are especially anxious about the critical reception their father’s first novel will receive, since they are under no illusion, and seek to cast no illusion about the merits of Captain in Calico. Although this is the second version that Fraser cut heavily, from about 160,000 words to a more manageable 70,000, it still lacks the full roundedness of his later novels.
Yet there are enough marvellous Fraser touches to make Captain in Calico a real pleasure: the arcane insults, the bosomy redheaded piratess Anne Bonny, the swordfights, the colourful dialogue phonetically rendered. Fraser devotees will find themselves smiling at the inklings of the devil-may-care attitude that came to characterize Flashman himself.
He would come and tell us bedtime stories, by the light of the electric fire, and as often as not they’d be about pirates, whom he’d always loved.