Literary Work
His work was well known for its wit; often quoted is this line from his play, Housemaster: "What do you mean, funny? Funny-peculiar or funny ha-ha?" From the same play, two characteristic Hay lines, from masters' reports on their pupils:
- ‘He can translate English into a Greek not spoken in Greece, and Greek into an English not spoken anywhere, with equal facility’
- ‘Despite his natural levity he habitually gravitates towards the bottom.’
The First Hundred Thousand (1915) is his best-known work, and is marked by the same sharp sense of humor as his other work: "War is hell, and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time."
All In It K(1) Carries On: A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand (1917) and Carrying On (1917) were also popular books of his. Other works include Tilly of Bloomsbury 1919, The Right Stuff, The Crimson Cocoanut, A Man's Man, A Safety Match, and Happy-Go-Lucky.
In 1928 Beith adapted P. G. Wodehouse's novel A Damsel in Distress as a play. In 1929 Wodehouse helped to adapt Beith's Story Baa Baa Black Sheep for the stage and in 1930 they again collaborated on the dramatisation of Wodehouse's Leave it to Psmith.
Beith served as technical advisor for Cecil B. DeMille's silent film The Little American (1917), starring Mary Pickford. He was responsible for screenplays or dialogue of fifteen films, including Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and Secret Agent (1936).
He died at Petersfield, Hampshire, on 22 September 1952.
Read more about this topic: John Hay Beith
Famous quotes containing the words literary work, literary and/or work:
“There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.”
—Paul Horgan (b. 1904)
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Bless you, of course you’re keeping me from work,
But the thing of it is, I need to be kept.
There’s work enough to do there’s always that;
But behind’s behind. The worst that you can do
Is set me back a little more behind.
I shan’t catch up in this world, anyway.
I’d rather you’d not go unless you must.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)