Collis, Maurice (1889 – 1973). Archive for his six works of fiction. London, 1937 to 1970, including holograph manuscripts, corrected typescripts, corrected proofs, and other materials. Materials generally in good to fine condition. Housed in one banker's box, 1.5 linear feet.

Maurice Collis circa 1960-61, likely working on his final novel, The three kings. Note the map of Israel at right. Portrait by Ida Kar, National Portrait Gallery, London.

A native of Dublin, Collis was educated at Rugby and Oxford. He joined the Indian Civil Service in Myanmar in 1912, and soon found that his sympathies were entirely with the Burmese population rather than the empire he served. As a District Magistrate in Rangoon he ruled regularly against British Army officers. Demoted to a position on the distant Mergui Archipelago, his enchantment with southeast Asian culture – and his dissatisfaction with imperial power – only deepened. “Banishment to Myeik inadvertently did Collis a good turn,” notes Irish poet Joseph Woods; it was there that the civil servant found his voice as a writer.

George Orwell, another veteran of the Burmese service, wrote that Collis’s honesty “makes one wish that politics nearer home could be conducted in an equally decent spirit.” In 1922 Collis had published a volume of poetry influenced by his countrymen George Russell (AE) and James Stephens. Returning to London in 1934, he turned his talents to writing and produced a number of books including biography, history, travelogues and autobiography.

Collis also wrote six works of fiction, all of which are represented in this manuscript archive. His entire literary estate was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1980 and acquired by the bookseller and collector George Locke. He kept the fiction for himself and sold off the non-fiction through Bloomsbury Auctions to various dealers; most of it eventually made it to Trinity College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland.

Eudora Welty offered fulsome praise for Collis’s writing, which “is as strategically put together and as fantastically simple as a fairy tale; and it affects us, quite aside from the scholarship of Mr. Collis, with that true belief we gave fairy tales when children.”  His novels vary widely from Buddhist thrillers (The dark door) to romans à clef (Sanda Mala) to retellings of history and myth (She was a queen), but all are extensions of his deep admiration for Burmese culture.

Draft manuscripts and proofs for Collis's most famous novel are included in the archive.

Collis’s novels reflect of his anti-imperialist sentiments and sympathies for Irish nationalism – the latter stemming from both from his childhood in Ireland and from the Sinn Féin pamphlets that were widely circulated in Burma in the 1930s. His most famous novel – several draft of which are included in this archive – is the extraordinary Quest for Sita (1946), a retelling of an episode from the Ramayana framed by a tale of struggle and resilience in present-day Burma. The critic Rob Maslen draws explicit parallels between the novel and The crock of gold (1912), the fabulist classic by James Stephens (who was friends with both Collis and Mervyn Peake, who illustrated Quest for Sita). Both Collis and Stephens sought “to get the old stories into widespread circulation among populations that did not know them, and thus to lend those stories a symbolic and political reach they would not otherwise have had,” notes Maslen. And both Quest for Sita and The crock of gold end with triumphant visions of independence.

The archive also includes Collis’s intriguing final fiction. Begun in the 1950s and published in 1970, The three gods is a tale of religious change. But for this novel he abandoned the familiar precincts of Buddhist Myanmar. Doubtless influenced by his World War I service in Palestine and his friendship with the Jewish artist Siegfried Solomon Alweiss (1901–1973), known to all as Alva, The three gods is set in the court of Queen Jezebel in ancient Israel. Told in a rapid series of short vignettes, the book may have influenced the fantasist Terry Pratchett, who reviewed the novel for the Bucks Free Press.

Included with Collis’s manuscripts are proofs of Quest for Sita and She was a queen, and annotated proofs of twelve illustrations executed by the Canadian artist Cawthra Mulock for Collis’s novel, The mystery of dead lovers (1951). The illustrations are in the style of Mervyn Peake’s drawing for Quest for Sita. The latter was likely too deeply immersed in his own writing at the time – Gormenghast was published in 1950 and Mr. Pye in 1953 – and Mulock made an able substitute.

With extensive corrections throughout, Maurice Collis’s manuscripts offer rich insight into his processes of composition, and they include material evidently cut from the published texts. Collis’s compelling work has only recently begun to attract the scholarly attention it so richly deserves. This archive will serve as an essential resource for all future research on this intriguing novelist.

Selected References

• Collis, Maurice. Diaries 1949-1969, ed. Louise Collis. Heinemann, 1976.
• Frontier Myanmar. Maurice Collis: Colonial Burma’s forgotten author. Coconuts yangon, 25 January 2016. https://coconuts.co/yangon/lifestyle/maurice-collis-colonial-burmas-forgotten-author/.
• Locke, George. Spectrum of Fantasy (London, 1980-2002) 3:160-61.
• Maslen, Rob. Maurice Collis and Mervyn Peake, Quest for Sita (1946). Part 1: Text and Part 2: Drawings. The City of Lost Books, July 2020.
• Nováková, Dagmar. Maurice Collis and his novels on Burma, Journal of the Burma Research Society XLII, ii, December 1959.
• Orwell, George. Review of Trials in Burma by Maurice Collis. 9 March 1938. Orwell Foundation.
• Pratchett, Terry. After thirty-six long years the Burmese still remember him [review of The three gods by Maurice Collis], Mid-Week Free Press, 27 May 1970, p. 8.
• Snell, James. The mythical Burma of Maurice Collis. Englesberg Ideas, 15 August 2023.
• Welty, Eudora. The great Buddha [review of The land of the great image by Maurice Collis], New York Times, 29 August 1943.