Bates, Herbert Ernest (Flying Officer X) (1905-1974) novelist, short story writer

H. E. Bates was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire, England, to Albert Ernest Bates, who ran a shoemaking shop and later worked in a factory, and Lucy Elizabeth Lucas. Bates had little interest in school until a teacher inspired him to pursue literature. He was accepted at Cambridge, but for financial reasons he was unable to attend. He started writing fiction in the early 1920s while working at a variety of jobs, including newspaper reporting.

Bates’s first novel, The Two Sisters (1926), depicts the empty lives of two sisters who are each courted by the same man promising to rescue them from their tyrannical father. Bates attained critical and popular success with his fourth novel, The Fallow Land (1932), which describes the difficult existence of a woman who has to run a farm and raise her sons while coping with her husband’s alcoholism.

During World War II, Bates joined the Royal Air Force and wrote several morale-boosting short stories and novels under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X.” The best known of these works, Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), describes the efforts of downed British flyers trying to escape from occupied France.

Following the war, Bates wrote The Purple Plain (1947), The Jacaranda Tree (1949), and The Scarlet Sword (1950), a trilogy about British outposts in the Far East. Bates biographer Dennis Vannatta wrote that “[t]he virtue of The Scarlet Sword is its single-mindedness. It evokes the violent world of rape, murder, and torture that marked the Indian partition with a relentlessness that forces the reader to keep turning the pages.”

After 1950, Bates had more success with short fiction than with novels. He wrote about one of his most popular characters in Sugar for the Horse (1957), a comedic collection about the lovable English farmer Uncle Silas. Bates describes him as short and thick-built, with “some gay, devilish spark of audacity which made him attractive to the ladies.” Silas also likes to drink: “‘God strike me if I tell a lie,’ he used to say, ‘but I’ve drunk enough beer, me boyo, to float the fleet and a drop over.’”

The comedy stories in The Darling Buds of May (1958) introduced Bates’s popular Pop Larkin character, a freelance junk dealer and entrepreneur. Dennis Vannatta holds that Bates’s greatest talent was in capturing the heart and soul of a locale and its people: “The farmers and poachers and passionate women and violent young men, the fields and meadows that he captures with a painter’s skill are the best guarantee . . . that Bates’s fiction will live on.”

Other Works by H. E. Bates:
- Elephant’s Nest in a Rhubarb Tree and Other Stories. New York: New Directions, 1988.
- A Month by the Lake and Other Stories. New York: New Directions, 1987.

A Work about H. E. Bates:
- Vannatta, Dennis. H. E. Bates. Boston: Twayne, 1983.