Biography
Early life
Edward Hyams was born in Stamford Hill, London, on 30 September 1910, to Arthur (Isaac) Hyams and Annie Dollie Leitson Hyams.[4] Arthur Hyams (b. 19 June 1881) was a "well-known London advertising agent",[5] "of the Borough Billposting Company, London"[6] Annie was born April 1884.
Hyams attend the University College School in London as a child, then went to the Lycée Jaccard boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland and Lausanne University.[4]
Hyams spent his early adulthood (1929-1933) as a factory worker,[7] among other jobs, including in newspapers.[4] In 1933, Hyams and Hilda Mary Aylett, then 28, married.[4] The two had met at work, served in World War II, and both identified as "Cockney".[7][4]
Literary career and military service
Hyams published his first novel, The Wings of the Morning in 1939.[7] Over the next two years he published two more novels, A Time to Cast Away in 1940 and To Sea in a Bowl in 1941. He continued to write novels and short fiction for the rest of his life.
In the 1930s, Hyams was a pacifist and a member of the Peace Pledge Union, but abandoned pacifism upon the outbreak of the Second World War.[8] Hyams joined the Royal Air Force (1939-1941) but was disqualified from being a pilot because of his poor eyesight.[7] Hyams then applied for a transfer to the Royal Navy, which was granted; he spent the rest of the war in the Navy, 1941-1946, promoted to lieutenant.[7][9] Hyams and Hilda were demobilized in 1947, and settled in Molash, in Kent, England.
Gardening and viticulture
In Molash, the couple took up gardening, restoring a three-acre cottage garen property. He wrote about this time in his memoir, From the Waste Land, describing the transformation of his home, "Nut Tree Cottages", into a prosperous market garden. Hyams stayed in Molash until 1960, while becoming an increasingly avid horticulturalist.
During this time, Hyams also developed a serious interest in viticulture, and in 1960 moved to south Devon, to re-establish grape vineyards in England.[4][10] He published The Grape Vine in England in 1949, and edited a volume on English viticulture in 1953, Vineyards in England. In 1965 Hyams published Dionysus: A Social History of the Wine Vine, combining his passions for social history and viticulture, and arguing for hybrid viticulture.
Hyams' most famous work was Soil and Civilisation (1952), a history of farming which advocated organic farming and came out against mechanised agriculture.[11] Soil and Civilisation has been described as an early example of "environmental literature".[12] It also included a favourable depiction of the Incas.
From 1959 to 1974 he penned the gardening column for the Illustrated London News.
He was consulted by the government of Iran when the National Botanic Garden in Tehran was being built.
One of Hyams' last works, published posthumously in 1979, was The Story of England's Flora.
Fiction, literary, and translation work
Hyams' fiction included science fiction, ghost stories, often satirical, and often with a clear political bent.
His novels included The Astrologer (1950) a satirical science fiction novel about an ecological disaster,[11] and Gentian Violet (1953), a satire in which the hero managed to get elected to Parliament as both Conservative and Labour without being discovered.
Hyams began submitting short fiction to the BBC Third Programme and the New Statesman in the 1950s; after they were accepted, he became a regular contributor to both.[7]
Hyams' literary output also encompassed literary essays, and numerous translations from French of many works of fiction and scholarship. (He won the Scott-Moncreiff Prize in 1964 for his translation of Joan of Arc By Herself and Her Witnesses by the French historian Régine Pernoud.[7] His translations of work by Roger Peyrefitte and Zoé Oldenbourg were also notable, as were his translations of a history of the Marquis de Lafayette and Chopin.
Hyams' work was praised by both Anthony Burgess and Ronald Bryden, the latter describing Hyams as "the most exasperatingly gifted writer in England".[7]
Politics and social/political writings
Hyams remained political his entire life. An anarchist,[2] Hyams was concerned in particular with the politics of land and agriculture, including the effects of the enclosures of the commons); as such, he has been influential in eco-anarchist thought, and indeed, much of his scholarship anticipated later thinking about the influence of agriculture on civilization. He wrote a biography of anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
In the 1950s and 1960s he broadened his travels, ultimately leading to publication of The Last of the Incas (1963) and a 1969 survey of botanic gardens worldwide (Great Botanical Gardens of the World).
Hyams was also interested in the role of violence, writing several studies on assassination, revolution, and the uses of terrorism and assassination for political ends. This included his 1974 book Terrorists and Terrorism, which included chapters on Sergey Nechayev and Avraham Stern.
He was involved with the New Statesman for many years, editing a history of the publication and an anthology of selected works from the journal. Hyams also edited a historical anthology of articles from the New Statesman magazine, New Statesmanship.[13]
Hyams maintained active relations with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[4]
Later personal life and death
In 1967, Edward and Hilda's marriage ended.[4] Hyams moved to Brampton in Suffolk in 1970, establishing a third garden on the property of an old Victorian school (described in An Englishman's Garden (1967)) In 1973, Hyams married Mary Patricia Bacon, divorced from Edward Bacon, an editor at the Illustrated London News. He died only two years later, 25 November 1975, at the age of 65, in Besançon, Doubs, France.[4] In his life he had written more than ninety books, broadly ranging across history, ecology, gardening, politics, and fiction, but interconnected by his radical politics and passions.
United Kingdom
Royal Air Force
Royal Navy