I knew Sherriff best as a screenwriter, one of Britain's best - his credits included several James Whale films as well as a number of Kordas (The Four Feathers, That Hamilton Woman) and post-war classics (The Dam Busters, Odd Man Out). He was best known in his life time for the play Journey's End, the writing and production(s) of which takes up over half this book. It is a brilliant play - it doesn't preach and the characters have become types but when you read it, it hits home because it is so real. Its accuracy and lack of affectation really captured the public's fancy.
Sherriff is very upfront and open about his trials and tribulations of the play - the writing process, difficulties in getting it mounted. The stories do have a lot of "I'd almost given up hope and was prepared to chuck it in but then the phone rang" quality, which gets wearying after a while, but it seems no doubt the play struck a real chord. The writer is less open when it comes to himself - he seems to be an only child, who went to a so-so public school and to work for the insurance firm his father worked at, a job which bored him to death so much the war was a releif (apart from a few "bad times in France" - this from the writer of Journey's End!), then back to insurance. His recreation was rowing and he honed his writing ability putting on shows to raise money for his rowing club, which eventually led him to try his luck with Journey's End.
Sheriff never mentions a girlfriend, wife, or partner - he and his mother was very close, she went with him everywhere. He had plenty of acquaintances through rowing but seemingly no really close friends. I read a biography of Whale where someone referred to him as sexless. I found this touching - a lonely figure in many ways, who when he had the money went to study at Oxford, and bought an archeological dig site for a hobby; who enjoyed rowing and cricket and wanted an Oxford Blue more than anything, who did most of his writing at night time.
Sherriff never repeated the success of Journey's End but that was flukishly large. To his credit he kept at his craft and enjoyed a number of successes - screenwriting, as mentioned, but also other plays such as Miss Mabel and some novels. He enjoyed a long Indian summer in the 50s but suffered from the Angry New Man movement of the end of that decade. A BFI book on The Dambusters offers some invaluable insights into Sherriff's writing - said he was best when the nature of the piece had a natural climax otherwise his writing tended to waffle a bit.
The book is written in Sherriff's bright, unpretentious style - it is slightly hollow at the centre (he is a bit too reserved - the no romance of any kind thing is a bit weird as is the closeness to mother, its like a Hitchcock character), and I would have liked to have had more on the screenplays (Odd Man Out and Quartet are both dealt with in a sentence, a bit quick for two classics) and for all the pages on Journey's End the plays there is little on Sherriff's actual war service - this is a writer who needs a biography.
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