Paul (William) Gallico | Biography

Paul Gallico, journalist and writer of novels, short stories, children's books, biographies, and screenplays, is remembered as a storyteller in the romantic manner who eschewed realism to create striking and improbable characters (some human, some animal) who rise above the ordinary through their persistence, ingenuity, and extraordinary resourcefulness. In the course of a long and prolific career (he wrote more than forty books and hundreds of stories), he developed and retained a large popular following.

Paul William Gallico's early years follow a familiar pattern. The son of immigrant, but not uncultured parents (his father, Paolo Gallico, a native of Trieste, was a concert pianist and later taught piano and musical composition), the young Gallico was educated in the New York City schools and worked at various jobs, including gym instructor, translator, and longshoreman, to earn his way through Columbia College of Columbia University, from which--after time out for service as a navy gunner in World War I--he graduated in 1921. Like many of his fellow writers he would later do a stint as a war correspondent in World War II.

He was typical of his generation also in finding an outlet for his energies and, more important, his heroes, in sports. A big, physically active man, he took part in athletics of all kinds (a year before his death, he was still serving as a fencing master to the French army), and this participation in physical competition provided him with the sense of conflict and the metaphor of the individual-against-the-odds which marks much of his writing. The fiction he began writing during the 1920s, published mainly in pulp magazines and in newspapers, deals often with sports.

After college, he took a job with the National Board of Motion Picture Review, but the pattern reasserted itself when Gallico went into newspaper work with the New York Daily News and slipped naturally from movie reviewing into sports reporting, serving as sports editor and columnist from 1924 to 1936. In these years, he started the Golden Gloves boxing tournament for matched amateurs; he wrote exposes of sham amateurism, Jim Crow barriers, and fake wrestling. Out of these years would come his biography of Lou Gehrig (1942) and the screenplay for Pride of the Yankees (1942). By combining his own athletic skills with his writer's sense, he hit upon a tactic which has since been profitably imitated by others: he boxed a round with Jack Dempsey, faced Dizzy Dean's fast ball, skied an Olympic course, swam against Johnny Weismuller--and then wrote firsthand accounts which gave readers the feel, as well as the bare reportage, of championship competition.

But at the same time, he had been publishing short stories in such magazines as Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, perfecting the techniques of "slick" fiction intended for the general reader--swift movement, clear conflict, concentration upon a single interesting character, and an eye for the significant detail. His long apprenticeship to professional writing paid off. In 1936 Gallico was able to retire from full-time newspaper work to devote himself to free-lance writing and the good life. He traveled widely and after 1950 made his home abroad--in London first, then in Liechtenstein, and finally in Monaco. But wherever he lived, he wrote: he would average a book a year for the remainder of his life.

Two characters of his creation captured the popular imagination in a special way. Hiram Holiday ( The Adventures of Hiram Holiday, 1939), a meek and unobtrusive proofreader who finds himself caught up in romance and intrigue while vacationing in a Europe being swept into the chaos of war, captured the critics and the public alike. The Adventures of Hiram Holiday would wind up a television series starring Wally Cox. Likewise, the London charwoman whose persistence carries her to Paris in pursuit of the Dior dress that has always been her dream (Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, 1958) came back by popular demand in sequels which brought her to New York, Moscow, and British politics. At the juvenile level, Jean-Pierre the pig, Thomasina the cat, Scruffy the Barbary ape, and Matilda the kangaroo had their followings.

Two of Gallico's "serious" books, both of them immensely popular, demonstrate this writer's characteristic strengths and weaknesses: The Snow Goose (1941) and The Poseidon Adventure (1969). The former, barely a novella (in book form it is slightly over fifty pages long), involves the hopeless love of a hunchback for a beautiful girl, and the near-preternatural devotion of a snow goose which flies over the hunchback's boat as he helps heroically in the British evacuation at Dunkirk. The subject suggests the pit of pathos into which Gallico threatens to plunge his reader. Indeed, only the story's brevity and Gallico's skill at playing it against a sharply realistic background prevent this bold romance from sliding into utter sentimentality. The reader's disbelief is suspended, and, though the critics were uneasy in the presence of the book's appeal, the ordinary readers made The Snow Goose a best-seller.

The Poseidon Adventure , in contrast, is a full-length book of the Grand Hotel or Noah's Ark sort: a compendium of life, a microcosm exposed at a moment of great and unexpected danger, in this case the capsizing of a great cruise ship which sinks slowly and upside down, forcing a group of passengers to choose between despairing resignation and heroic struggle to stay alive. (The book helped spawn a rash of "disaster" books and films, most of them inferior to Gallico's work because they are contrived and imitative, straining for effects which came naturally to him.) Gallico's lifelong admiration of the athlete plays its part, for ex-athletes are among the heroes. Belle Rosen, the fat Jewish wife who is able to muster her old swimming skills to save the group at a crucial moment, and Buzz Scott, football-star-decathlon-champ-turned-minister who by example and exhortation will not let his party despair and die--these are characters drawn from the imagination and the memory of a man for whom life is a vital game in which the qualities of the athlete-hero pay off.

It is typical of nearly everything Gallico wrote in his serious vein that the story itself should be gripping, told economically against a detailed and realistic background, reportorially correct. It is typical that the incidents flout realism, that his characters attitudinize too much, and that his minor figures are mere caricatures and stereotypes. It is typical also that Gallico's personal and professional philosophy scorns naturalism and negative emphasis but instead engages the reader on the level of sentiment, inviting him to see himself in situations which overwhelm some but which bring out extraordinary grace and character in rather ordinary people.

Gallico probably will hold no high rank with contemporary critics who seek virtues other than those he displays. But Gallico saw himself as a competent professional writer and entertainer, following the not-dishonorable calling of storyteller. Given the limitations and the unquestionable skills implicit in these terms, Paul Gallico has his respectable place.