Anyone out there conversant with the life and works of Weird Tales (and Harvard) alumnus Henry S. Whitehead? As part of the Lovecraft essay I'm attempting (very lazily) to write, I've had to deal with various overlaps between Lovecraft and Whitehead, and the various references to Whitehead and Ralph Adams Cram in HPL's stories. As a consequence, I've had to read four or five Whitehead tales, and in each I was struck by the marked homoerotic aspects of his stories. This can't simply be my imagination, since I do not see gayness in every book I read. Have any other critics come to a similar conclusion? I've done a google-search using keywords to see if any critical articles on this topic come up, but none have. I'd hate to be repeating someone else's efforts.

Consider for a moment that R. H. Barlow, who was Gay, knew Whitehead before he began to correspond with Lovecraft, and wrote the only memoir we have of the man. Yet Barlow is curiously retiscent about his personal memories of the man. I have been told by one researcher who has traveled to Dunedin, FL that Whitehead had homosexual relationships with several of his younger parishners. However, this researcher, whom I am not at liberty to name, does have a tendency to see Gays everywhere--think the early Mr. Garrison on "South Park." This would be an interesting essay, I think.
And yes, I've noticed some homoerotic imagery in the stories.
OTOH, I really like Whitehead's stories, and consider him to be one of the few WT contributors with a real claim to literary merit (besides the Big Three, of course, I also rank Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury in the first rank, up there with Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, and Hodgson).

Scott

I've not read anything by him. What items are generally available, and where? I may have to use ILL to get hold of them, but I am curiosity itself now.

voleboy Wrote:
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> I've not read anything by him. What items are
> generally available, and where? I may have to use
> ILL to get hold of them, but I am curiosity itself
> now.

I've only read one of his stories, the Lovecraft-revised "The Trap", but that was pretty good. I don't know anything about collections of his stories (although I seem to remember that they were published by Arkham House, and I think there was a bibliography in the SSWFT, but I may be wrong).

Anyway, Ash-Tree Press is supposed to publish the collected Whitehead stories in the future.

Scott Connors Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Consider for a moment that R. H. Barlow, who was
> Gay, knew Whitehead before he began to correspond
> with Lovecraft, and wrote the only memoir we have
> of the man. Yet Barlow is curiously retiscent
> about his personal memories of the man. I have
> been told by one researcher who has traveled to
> Dunedin, FL that Whitehead had homosexual
> relationships with several of his younger
> parishners. However, this researcher, whom I am
> not at liberty to name, does have a tendency to
> see Gays everywhere--think the early Mr. Garrison
> on "South Park." This would be an interesting
> essay, I think.
> And yes, I've noticed some homoerotic imagery in
> the stories.
> OTOH, I really like Whitehead's stories, and
> consider him to be one of the few WT contributors
> with a real claim to literary merit (besides the
> Big Three, of course, I also rank Manly Wade
> Wellman, Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury in the
> first rank, up there with Machen, Blackwood, M. R.
> James, and Hodgson).
>
> Scott


Yeah, that was the impression I got from reading between the lines of Whitehead’s obituary (“C. J. Fletcher [whom Lovecraft describes “as a bright little ’cracker’”], has been living with Dr. Whitehead, who enjoys the companionship of young boys. He has had local boys spend several months with him, and has had boys from the north visit him for a number of weeks… […] … One of Dr. Whitehead’s activities was the taking of young boys on trips to the Virgin islands, tutoring them during the several months period”) as well as from reading between the lines of E. Hoffmann’s Price’s anecdote Whitehead in Book of the Dead, where for no reason Price speaks of “fandom” being “buggered through its oilskins, and with a marlin spike!” --certainly an odd and incongruous allusion. I actually live near Dunedin, but have had no luck with Whitehead’s Good Shepherd Church, which is a bit odd; usually institutions are happy to help with research inquiries.

I haven’t been able to find an affordable copy of Whitehead’s voodoo stories yet, on which his reputation largely rests; the stories I’ve read have all been in anthologies. They certainly are strange: cold, unemotional, restrained, elitist. And with the same pro-colonial and pro-Britannia orientation as Lovecraft.

I will admit that it has been quite a long time since I read much of Whitehead's work, but I don't recall being particularly struck by this aspect (any more than with a great deal of "classic" horror in the late Victorian-early Edwardian mode, which is what struck me most about his work. One thing to bear in mind is that such visits between older male mentors and younger males was by no means uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and may bear quite different interpretations. While it may indeed be valid in this case, I fear we too often view other times and other customs through the tunnel vision of our own cultural beliefs (and biases), and that it's always good to pull back and look not only for supporting evidence but at the cultural milieu and any contrary evidence, before drawing any conclusions.

As for the most readily available: The two collections I'm aware of are Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (Arkham House, 1944; reprinted by Neville Spearman 1974)which was also later published as a 2-vol. paperback set by Mayflower: Jumbee and Other Voodoo Tales, and The Black Beast and Other Voodoo Tales (1976); and West India Lights (Arkham House, 1946), for which there have been no reprints, as far as I'm aware. This latter also contains "Bothon" which, according to Joshi (Sixty Years of Arkham House, p. 36) "is apparently based upon a plot synopsis supplied by Lovecraft". I have seen arguments that it was not actually written by Whitehead, but by Derleth -- however, I've not kept up with the controversy on that one, and this may have since been disproved.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 15 May 07 | 04:06PM by jdworth.

Ash-Tree Press will be issuing a three volume set of Whitehead's collected stories, including several that were not included in either of the Arkham House collections, sometime in the near future.
Gavin, if you're not too far from Dunedin, you might check out the newspaper files in the public library. There is probably a lot of information to be found there.
Best,
Scott

"This can't simply be my imagination"?

In reading West India Lights last summer I didn't notice any such "aspects."
You gays, er, guys, are pathetic.

jkh

I am not Gay, but I do see some homoerotic features in HSW's stories. This might be colored by my own knowledge that Whitehead was in fact Gay. I don't think that it is a major issue with his work, it can certainly be read without reference to his sexual orientation, but it is there. The fact that Whitehead was homosexual does not mean his work isn't of merit, any more than it would affect our estimation of A. C. or E. F. Benson's work, or M. R. James for that matter. It is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion: how did his orientation affect his work?
Best,
Scott

You don't know that HSW was gay. You infer this from an admittedly unreliable source, Barlow's supposed reticence (?), and your own speculative reading of 2 or 3 sentences in the stories. Does a homosexual proposition in a narrative poem strongly suggest Emil Petaja was gay? Randy Everts' early research on W. makes no mention of it. Certainly it's topical, but such conclusiveness is inappropriate given the paucity of information available. I read a bio of Howard ----, the Philo Vance novelist who deliberately destroyed all his personal papers, and the result was ultimately reiterative and unsatisfying. S.T. Joshi quibbled with Mike Ashley's reluctance to psychoanalyze Algernon Blackwood; I say kudos to Ashley. There is more of Griswold than of Ingram in your remarks.
Whatever Whitehead's sexual proclivities were, it does not have much bearing on his work, which is highly distinguished in the quality of its realism from that of his Weird Tales contemporaries. In the use of dialogue particularly he excels them all. And what is this "right up there with Machen" nonsense, Scott? You know darn well Leiber and Bradbury don't rate with Arthur and A.B.!
Now I'll get back to William S. Burroughs' TARZAN.

jkh

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
> as well as
> from reading between the lines of E. Hoffmann’s
> Price’s anecdote Whitehead in Book of the Dead,
> where for no reason Price speaks of “fandom”
> being “buggered through its oilskins, and with a
> marlin spike!” --certainly an odd and
> incongruous allusion.

Look at the context: That's just Price's charmingly vulgar way of saying "fandom could go to hell." Price had just got a female acquaintance of Whitehead's to write a memoir of Whitehead for the benefit of fandom, when he (quite inappropriately and less than diplomatically) let slip the gossip that he got from August Derleth, about said female acquaintance having been Whitehead's mistress, whereupon he could kiss the memoir good-bye. Not only was fandom screwed, it was "buggered through its oilskins, and with a marlin spike".

It's neither odd nor incongruous in Price's style. You'll find other examples of Price's colourful use of language in the rest of the book.

However, I don't think you're wrong; I just think that this off-hand remark is no support of the thesis.

Scott Connors Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > Gavin, if you're not too far from Dunedin,
> you might check out the newspaper files in the
> public library. There is probably a lot of
> information to be found there.
> Best,
> Scott

Yeah, I checked the Dunedin Public Library; they are (unfortunately) mainly a media center now (i.e., with a focus on computers rather than books), and with no old papers at all, not even on microfiche. I found Whitehead's obit. in the crumbling files of the Dunedin Historical Society, and it literally fell apart in my hands as I turned the pages, but they had no other information on Whitehead at all; I actually ended up photocopying all my papers about Whitehead for the Historical Society, and having them placed in their collection! I have a feeling more information might be found in Clearwater, but its a rather wild town; I don't get out there much.

Kipling Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "This can't simply be my imagination"?
>
> In reading West India Lights last summer I
> didn't notice any such "aspects."
> You gays, er, guys, are pathetic.

Right. And you probably think that Joel Schumacher’s “Batman Forever” has no homosexual subtext, too. And Michelangelo’s “David” was done as a gift for his girlfriend.

JD Worth Wrote:
--------------------------------------------------------
>I will admit that it has been quite a long time
>since I read much of Whitehead's work, but I don't
> recall being particularly struck by this aspect
> (any more than with a great deal of "classic" horror
>in the late Victorian-early Edwardian mode, which is what
>struck me most about his work. One thing to bear in mind
>is that such visits between older male mentors and younger
>males was by no means uncommon in the nineteenth and early
>twentieth centuries, and may bear quite different interpretations.

The question is not whether Whitehead’s relationship with his protégés was physical, but whether there is a homoerotic content to his stories. I was only interested in his personal life insofar as it confirms my own homoerotic interpretation. The difference between Whitehead and someone like M. R. James, is that Whitehead’s stories, at least the ones I have seen, seem to have a strongly homoerotic undercurrent, whereas those of M. R. James do not.

In “Across the Gulf” (1926), for example, the protagonist, a middle aged “successful lawyer” named Carrington whose logical mind rebels against the possibility of the supernatural which he has inherited from his deceased Scottish mother (WEINBERG 2), has been living alone in his mother’s house after her death, and working himself to the point of a nervous breakdown, overworking his mind and unworking his body. (Whitehead puts it this way: “Carrington…was apprized by certain mental and physical indications which his physician interpreted vigorously, that he must take at least the whole summer off and devote himself to recuperation.”) Exceedingly nervous and strained, he decides to spend the summer at a boy’s camp run by his cousin, a “middle-aged, retired clergyman” (WEINBERG 3) and an “inelastic” and “spinsterish” magazine writer, who, like Whitehead himself, “retained a developed pastoral instinct which he could no longer satisfy in the management of a parish”, and who, consequently, “compromised the matter by establishing a summer camp for boys in his still desirable Adirondacks”. Like Carrington, too, Rev. MacDonald is still reeling from the blow of the death of a young male friend and financial advisor, Thomas Starkey, who after a six-year association and “exile” in the wilderness has finally succumbed to what Whitehead terms the “White Plague” of tuberculosis. Previously a “nervous wreck”, at the boy’s camp Carrington soon feels like a new man. (WEINBERG 3) (Lovecraft would earlier invoke much the same plot point in his collaborative short story “The Man of Stone” (1923), Lovecraft’s narrator being dragged to see some strange sculptures in the wilderness amid “the upper Adirondacks” (HM 201) by his friend, Ben Hayden, who, the narrator says, “had been his closest acquaintance for years, and our Damon and Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all times”. Hayden, Lovecraft reveals, had been apprised by yet another friend, “Henry Jackson”, “’about some devilish queer conditions up there‘”, Jackson having discovered some “bizarre sculpture” in the woods while out hunting --this “Jackson” being, like Whitehead’s “White Plague” sufferer Thomas Starkey, a “lunger” (HM 211) who, says Hayden, “was up in a shack beyond Lake Placid for that beastly spot in his lung”. (HM 200)

Aside from the an apparition of his Scottish mother, who helps to save Carrington from a death from a mouthful of poisonous mushrooms, the characters are exclusively male: including the boy, “young Crocker”, who accidentally gives Carrington the poison mushrooms, and who Carrington likes to the extent of granting him special privileges, in the form of sending him on an errand “out of bounds” of the camp. Whether this description of the boy as “young Crocker” is a prefiguration of the later C. J. Fletcher, who, as Lovecraft observed, was a “little Cracker”, and who would seem to reflect Whitehead’s predilections, I don’t know. Certainly, it would seem that Lovecraft would have picked up this affectionate designation of Fletcher as such from Whitehead himself, “cracker” being a local Florida usage, deriving from the sound of the “cracking” whips of the rustic ranch herders who migrated into Florida from Georgia, and not something someone from Rhode Island would typically say.

Whitehead’s “The Napier Limousine” (1933), meanwhile, is a tale in which the three main themes are Imperialism, Anglicanism and blackmail ---the two latter topics being ones which, as Douglass Shand-Tucci has shown in his study of the Anglo-Catholic Ralph Adams Cram has shown, were of great moment to gay elements in the High Anglican sect of the Episcopal church in the early twentieth century. As in “Across the Gulf”, above, where the narrator, Carrington, is saved from certain death via poison due to the intervention of the ghost of his mother, so too in “The Napier Limousine” does the supernatural element in this story involve a maternal female spirit, returned from the realms of the dead to save her adopted son, “a handsome young fellow of about twenty five” (WHITEHEAD 114) named Harry Dacre, who is being blackmailed due to his supposed sexless dalliance with a female nighthall entertainer. Indeed, aside from this wraith, who herself is described by Whitehead as being “a true aristocrat”, “one born to command” (118), and who during her life was intimately connected with “the counsels of a great Empire”, the only other female figure in the story is a middle-aged nurse of a wealthy family (her baby carriage is “glistening” and “custom built” [108]), who is reduced to hysteria by the sight of the narrator and his friend stepping out from the ghost’s limousine, her terrified mouth hanging open “like a Greek tragic mask” (109), and who is humored by the policeman to whom she tells her story, “The policeman”, Whitehead writes, “a respectable-looking middle aged man, probably accustomed to the vagaries of nursemaids, and doubtless with womenfolk of his own”, doing his best to reassure her, before shrugging and continuing on his patrol. (112)

Aside from these two women, the story is entirely homo-social, Canevin and his friend Rand having first met “at a small men’s dinner at St. John’s”(110), where Canevin had learned that Rand was considered the world’s foremost authority on “magical beliefs and practices and the occult among native peoples”, and where the two had talked “too late and too continuously for courtesy to one’s host, even at a men’s dinner”. This familiarity continues even afterwards, when, at the beginning of the narrative, the two of them, after meeting accidentally outside the narrator’s tailor’s shop at Jermyn Street, and learning that they are each heading “in the same direction”, begin “to walk along together, arm in arm”, toward St. Paul’s Cathedral (111) ---the very heart of English Anglicanism and where, significantly , they both encounter the wraith of the story.

The narrative of “The Napier Limousine” is firmly set at the center of the most elite strata of English society; the principal “action” of the narrative takes place at “No. 12, Portman Terrace ---one of an ultra-conservative long row of solid family mansions in London’s residential West End”; the narrator, Gerald Canevin, and his close friend, “James Rand, Earl of Carruth”, occult expert and “Chief of the British Government’s Secret Service” in India (WHITEHEAD 108), first meeting at a gathering at “Sir John Scott”’s house, the home of the head of Scotland Yard (110). At the climax to the tale, arch-Imperialist Rand, who, as Whitehead repeatedly reiterates, “had held the Indian Empire together resolutely for twenty years--” (119), threatens the “Oriental” villain by suggesting that he will kill him on the spot, and then have the whole matter covered up by “Downing Street”. (116)

The ghost herself, Lady Mary Grosvernor, one of the founders of the Red Cross during WWI, is represented by Whitehead, even from beyond the grave, as a symbol of that supposed “perfection” which both Whitehead and Lovecraft found in the British Imperial order (both the narrator and his friend doff their hats in respect when they first meet her [111]). For Whitehead, it is inconceivable that her footman, even after death, “should be remiss in his duties”. (109) Her “beautifully-kept“, “custom-built” car, meanwhile, the story’s eponymous and “old fashioned“ (110) “Napier limousine”, in which Lady Grosvernor and her aged footman were both killed by a stray German bomb years before, is described as “soundless”, stopping before Dacre’s mansion with “a jarless poise like the alighting of a poised hawk.” (108) The footman, meanwhile, salutes the protagonist “very smartly” before “snapping into his seat beside the chauffeur“, coming into position “like a ramrod, his arms folded before him with stiff precision” (111), while from the driving of the chauffeur, which “is a very model of accuracy and sound form”, it is very plain, the narrator observes, “that the unknown elderly lady was very well and promptly served.” Dacre’s butler, meanwhile, prepares the narrator’s scotch and soda “with admirable professional deftness”. (119)

The elderly Mary Grosvernor herself, meanwhile, is described by the narrator as speaking “in a very beautiful, softly modulated voice, in which was to be clearly discerned that unmistakable tone of a class born to rule through many generations: a tone of the utmost graciousness, but nevertheless attuned to command”. (111) Rand, meanwhile, for his part, is described to the narrator as having “been almost continuously away from England now for more than a score of years, serving the Empire in innumerable strange corners of its far-flung extent, but chiefly in India”, the head of Scotland Yard observing that “‘It is unquestionably due to Lord Carruth’s remarkable abilities that the Indian Empire is now intact.’” Later, young Dacre tells Rand that he’d “believe anything” that Rand “chose to say, sir, like the Gospel itself”. (119)

It soon transpires that the late Lady Grosvernor has returned from the dead, and transported the narrator and Rand to the home of her adoptive son, Harry Dacre, in order to save the English gentleman from blackmail at the hand of a dubious “Oriental” gentleman, who is somehow involved in the London music hall and entertainment industries. As in Lovecraft’s earlier short story “Arthur Jermyn”, in which Sir Philip Jermyn “ran away with a vulgar dancer”, Dacre has become involved, as Canevin puts it, in “‘…one of those infatuation affairs….A woman. She turns out to be mixed up, somehow, with Goddard, the impresario, or whatever he is’” (113) ---although here, unlike in Lovecraft, Whitehead is true to his homo-social context, Dacre stating quite plainly that “As a matter of plain fact, there has been, really, nothing ---nothing, that is, seriously to trouble one’s conscience’” between himself and the dancer (114) (i.e., there has been no sex between them). Here, the dancer, interestingly, is called “The Princess Lillia of the Gaieties” ---this “Lillia” being yet another variation, perhaps, of the “Lilith” terminology we have been noting elsewhere, in the works of Lovecraft--- this “Lillia” working with someone known variously as “Leighton Goddard” , “Wertheimer”, “Abdulla Khan ben Majpat”, and who is described by Rand as being “A
very clever person in the heavy-blackmail line”, though “his real game is deeper, and blacker” (113) ---i.e., the undermining of the English Imperialistic system itself.

Interestingly, and in echo of his collaboration, elsewhere, with Lovecraft, i.e. “The Trap”, with its subdued homoerotic imagery, Canevin refers to Goddard’s blackmail scheme as “a trap” (113). The setter of this “trap”, meanwhile, Whitehead describes in sinister, Eastern terms, there being, Whitehead writes:

“…a suggestion of richness about him, sartorial richness, an aura of something oriental which came into that Anglo-Saxon room with him. One could not put a finger on anything wrong in his really impeccable appearance. Bond Street was written upon his perfect morning coat; but I would have guessed, I think, almost instinctively, that his name was not really Goddard, even if no one had suggested that to me. He glanced about the room, very much self-possessed, and with an air almost proprietary, out of shining, sloe-black eyes set in a face of vaguely Asiatic cast: a suggestion of olive under the pale skin of the night-club habitué; a certain undue height of the cheekbones.” (115)

Rand soon reveals that Goddard, with his smouldering, suspicious, oriental eyes, is really ”a Turk” who acted as “a German spy during the War”, Rand pulling a gun on the Turkish intruder then punching him in the chin, so that he “slithered to the floor” (116), afterwards setting him free with “a few crisply spoken words of warning.” (117) In short, Rand has accomplished, in young Harry Dacre’s library/study, in microcosm what he had earlier managed to do with regard to England’s “Indian Dominions” in macrocosm; i.e. the reassertion of inflexible English control over those who would blackmail the elite with purported and sordid, and, to Whitehead at least, groundless notions of sexual contamination ---Dacre’s relationship with the “Princess Lallia” being, Dacre assures us, purely sexless. For Whitehead, England’s domination of the “Third World” was, in theory at least, as businesslike as it was bloodless and sexless. The story finally ends with Rand resuming the thread first picked up when the narrator and Rand encountered Lady Mary Gorsvernor outside St. Paul’s cathedral in London, Rand telling Dacre, “I want to clear up in your mind, forever, the truth of what the religion we hold in common ---the religion of our ancient Anglican Church here in England--- teaches us about the souls in paradise…’” (120)

An entirely different vision of English Colonialism can be found in yet another occult story, written right around the same time, by the female English occultist Dion Fortune, entitled “Recalled”. Here, a Colonel Anthony Eustace and his wife, Evelyn, both “social luminaries” whose lives revolve around native-art exhibitions and vacations in Kent for golf, come to occult psychiatrist Dr. Taverner for help. Col. Eustace, like the six foot four Lord Carruth in Whitehead‘s tale, above, is tall and “bronzed by tropical suns”, while his wife is, Fortune writes, “one of those women who make one proud of one’s race, slender, graceful, with the controlled fire of a thoroughbred, the fruit of many generations of refining shelter and worthy pride.“ (FORTUNE 158) In contrast with the firm, resolute Lord Carruth in Whitehead‘s story, above, however, Col. Eustace is depicted as a stunted, unemotional, underdeveloped, and unenlightened being, being described by Taverner’s assistant, Dr. Rhodes, as one of the last remnants of “a type of administrator of empire who is fast dying out.” (FORTUNE 159) Both Eustace and his wife, it turns out, are being haunted by the nightly image of “a native woman in dark blue draperies with gold sequins dangling on her forehead and many bracelets on her arms” (160), a “distressed” and “excited” Indian female who turns out to be the ghost of Huneefa, a fifteen-year-old native girl whose identity Eustace has been hiding from his wife. As Eustace later awkwardly explains it to Taverner, alone:

“I think from her description, that what she saw was a vision of a woman I kept for some time when I was stationed on the Border, and who made a good deal of fuss when I sent her away, as they sometimes do. I have often heard that if a man enters into --er-- relations with a native woman, they have an uncanny knack of laying hold of your soul by their heathen jiggery-spookery. I never believed it, laughed at it, in fact, when I saw another fellow bothered in the same way.” (163)

As his wife lies dying, Col. Eustace further reveals that Huneefa was pregnant with his child and, “a Eurasian brat” being “more than he could endure” (165), he sent her away with a sizeable sum of money, the girl, however, returning it and committing suicide. When Mrs. Eustace learns the truth, there follows this dialogue between husband and wife:

“‘You mustn’t take it so to heart, dear,’ said the man at her side brokenly. ‘Everybody does it out there. They have to. It’s the climate. Nobody thinks anything of it.’
‘I do,’ said the voice that came from so far off. ‘And so would all women if they knew. Men are wise not to tell. Women wouldn’t stand it.’
‘But it wasn’t one of our women, dear.’
‘But it was a woman, and I am a woman, and it seems to hurt me because it hurts womanhood. I can’t put it plainly, but I feel it, I feel it as a hurt to all that is best in me.’
‘What are you to do with men out on frontiers?’ said the man desperately. ‘It is the penalty of empire.’
‘It is the curse of empire,’ came the far-away voice. ‘No wonder they hate us. I always wondered why it is that we can never, never make friends of them. It is because we outrage their womankind. There are some things that are never forgiven.’” (168)

It soon transpires that Eustace’s unborn child had been “a Mahatma”, a “lofty soul” who was destined to “reconcile east and West”, the story ending with Col. Eustace’s wife agreeing to give birth to Huneefa’s unborn Reconciler of East and West. Like Lord Carruth in Whitehead’s story, above, Col. Eustace succeeds to a baronet’s title and becomes a Lord, as well as attainting a lofty position in the Government of India, but due to his wife’s giving birth to “a nigger” (thus; FORTUNE 169), his wife Evelyn is prohibited from taking part in the normal social activities of her position. His wife, however, angelic and holy, finds her child “wonderful”, while Lord Eustace, although still uncomprehending, is not unaffectionate towards the child, and is even, Dr. Taverner hints, heading upward in the course of his spiritual evolution. (161) “Never make the mistake of confusing unripe fruit with bad fruit,” Taverner sagely cautions his assistant Rhodes.

Comparing this tale with Whitehead’s, above, yields a number of contrasts, not the least of which is the apparently unmarried status of Lord Carruth, vs. the married one of Lord Eustace. Whereas Whitehead’s Lord Carruth uses his occult knowledge and “remarkable abilities” to maintain control in India, Dr. Taverner uses his similar knowledge and powers to enlighten a stunted and narrow-minded English colonial administrator. And whereas Whitehead‘s concern is the constant maintenance of firm “control” on the part of Lord Carruth, whose expression, when he pulls a gun on the “oriental”, is one of “rigid determination and complete, utter self-confidence” (WHITEHEAD 116), in Dion Fortune’s story, Lord Eustace’s tone is one of brokenness and “desperation”, speaking embarrassedly about the “penalty of Empire”, and the sexual desperation of “men out on frontiers” (FORTUNE 167) --Lord Eustace appealing to Dr. Taverner in terms which, in this case, at least, one thinks Lord Carruth could have no quarrel, “Good Lord…what is one to do with a woman?” (168)

In Whitehead‘s weirdly homoerotic “The Trap“, the middle section of which was apparently written entirely by H. P. Lovecraft, we have yet another a tale of a middle aged-bachelor and a young adolescent boy, this time a school boy named Robert Grandison, who goes missing, an apparent runaway or a victim of a kidnapping . In this story, Whitehead’s narrator is “staying half as a guest and half as a tutor at the private school of my old friend Browne” (HM 380), and where he occupies “two rooms and a hallway” by himself, furnishing it with “an old rosewood console which had belonged to my great-grandmother” and upon which he sets an old mirror which he had found in the Virgin Islands “in an old outbuilding of an abandoned state-house in Santa Cruz.” Suffering from cold (a Lovecraftian interpolation?), the narrator chooses to tutor the boys in his rooms, where one of them, a “fifteen-year-old” named “Robert Grandison” decides to remain, and, like narcissus, studies the narrator’s mirror, fascinated by a flaw, or some “corrugations” in the glass. Touching the glass, Grandison’s “muscular action in turning” away causes him to cut his finger on the corrugations, Grandison stating embarrassedly and “shamefacedly” that “‘It-- I --felt --well, as though it were pulling my finger into it. Seems-- er-- perfectly foolish, sir, but --well-- it was the most peculiar sensation.’” (HM 301-82)

After the “fascinated” Grandison departs, the narrator makes his own experiments with the glass, and touching the glass he “grasped an impression of quite distinct suction” [emphasis Whitehead’s], which caused “A kind of chill” to run "suddenly up and down my backbone”. Recalling “the rather wistful expression of Robert Grandison when the gong called him to class” and remembering how he had "looked back over his shoulder as he walked obediently out into the hallway”, the narrator “resolved that he should be included” in his investigation of the mirror. With the intent of “picking Robert up for a session with the mirror” (HM 383), the narrator is “astonished and pained to find him absent”, the boy remaining missing even as the school breaks up for Christmas holiday.

The narrator then begins to have strange dreams and nightly visitations from Grandison (HM 389), in which a “hardly recognizable” Grandison, “strangely transformed to a boy of a dull greenish dark-blue color” is “trying desperately to communicate” with him (HM 384), the narrator seeing Grandison “as though at some distance, yet queerly enough he seemed at the same time to be just beside me.” (HM 385) Soon, the narrator realizes the connection between Grandison’s disappearance, and the “whorl-like contours” of the mirror, whose “apparent illusions of suction had later exerted such a disquieting fascination on both Robert and me.” (HM 385-86) Somehow, due to this “suction”, the narrator realizes, “in some outrageous fashion Robert Grandison had passed out of our ken into the glass and was there immured, waiting for release.” [emphasis Whitehead’s] Whitehead then goes on to describe Grandison’s penetration and entry into the mirror in terms alternately and disturbingly suggestive of fellatio, sodomy, and orgasmic release:

“Finding me out and knowing that I would not mind, he [Grandison] had come into my living room and gone straight to the mirror… …Then, quite suddenly, there had come to him an overpowering urge to place his hand upon this whorl-center. Almost reluctantly, against his better judgment, he had done so; and upon making the contact had felt at once the strange, almost painful suction which had perplexed him that morning. Immediately thereafter --quite without warning, but with a wrench which seemed to twist and tear every bone and muscle in his body and to bulge and press and cut at every nerve-- he had been abruptly drawn through and found himself inside.

“Once through, the excruciatingly painful stress upon his entire system was suddenly released. He felt, he said, as though he had just been born --a feeling that made itself evident every time he tried to do anything; walk, stoop, turn his head, or utter speech. Everything about his body seemed a misfit.” (HM 386-87) [emphasis Whitehead’s]

The later portion of the story, in which Grandison’s emergence into an inverted and reversed reality is delineated, would appear to be the work of Lovecraft --although the overarching metaphor of inversion and reversal, which would appear to have originated with Whitehead, would still have relevance for our homoerotic interpretation. Within the mirror, created by a 17th-century Danish sorcerer named Axel Holm, , there is a “reversal” which affects “perspective and coloration”, Grandison’s natural “pinkish-buff” turning a “greenish-blue”. (HM 387) “Desperately trying to devise a method for Robert’s release” (HM 294), the narrator hits upon the expedient of removing the whorls from the glass at the exact opposite of the hour at which Grandison entered. Overpowered by a “dusty odor” (HM 395) (apparently another Lovecraftian interpolation), the narrator faints, only to awaken “lying on the Bokhara rug with my legs held unaccountably up in the air”, the young Grandison “holding my legs aloft to bring the blood back to my head”. (HM 396) Realizing he has freed Grandison, the narrator is seized with a feeling of “triumph”, while Grandison,

“at last yielding to the sustained strain which he had borne through all those terrible eleven days, suddenly broke down like a little child and began to weep hysterically in great, stifling, dry sobs.

“I picked him up and placed him gently on my davenport, threw a rug over him, sat down by his side, and put a calming hand on his forehead.”

Two days later, after Grandison’s disappearance has been explained under the cover of a lie devised by the narrator, Robert, “greatly improved in strength and appearance was placing a log on my living room fire”, when the narrator notices “a certain awkwardness in his motions and was struck by a persistent idea.” (HM 398-99) “Without alarming him”, the narrator asks Grandison to “unbutton his coat” so that he can “listen to his cardiac action.” --at which point he discovers that Grandison’s internal organs have all been reversed, his heart “beating on his right side.” [emphasis Whitehead’s/Lovecraft’s]. (Lovecraft uses this idea elsewhere in his story “The Mound”, where a WWI veteran named Ed Clay, returns from the mound with “a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph” on his forehead, --both testimonials to his trials at the hands of the decadent subterranean society of Tsath.)

Admitting that the tutor-pupil relationship is not always homosexual, erotic, or physical, certainly the imagery and dynamics of this story suggest, if not a conscious, then at least an unconscious homoeroticism on the part of its main originator (i.e. Whitehead).

Whitehead’s story “No Eye Witness” (1932), however, is perhaps the most significant, both in terms of the homoerotic aspects of Whitehead’s works, as well as in the context of my study of Lovecraft’s use of the pagan werewolf, where it serves as an interesting contrast. Equally autobiographical, this story concerns the middle-aged Everard Simon and his older father. Like Whitehead and his aged father “The younger Simon---he was thirty seven, his father getting toward seventy” (WEINBERG 370), both live together after the death of the father’s wife. Like Whitehead himself, the fictional Everard Simon shows a marked affinity for the tropics, specifically the West Indies, “St. Thomas or Martinique”, where he spends every winter, Everard Simon spending every summer, meanwhile, as we would expect, at “his summer camp in the Adirondaks.” A travel writer, the only “problem” in this arrangement for Everard Simon is “the long ride in the subway necessitated by his dropping in to his New York club every day.” (WEINBERG 371) Suggestively, and as in Lovecraft’s own works of “mundane“ (i.e. non-cosmic) horror, the first note of discord in this lycanthropic tale is here heralded by a reference to the “subway”, particularly the annoyance of rush hour, when, just as for Lovecraft, the “columns” and “crowds” are particularly irksome ---although in Whitehead’s case, at least in this instance, there is no hint of racism in its usage. As Stefan Dziemianowicz notes in his entry on Whitehead in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, however, in Whitehead’s voodoo stories “sexual intimacy between whites and blacks opens the door to a host of supernatural reprisals. This idea gets pushed to the extreme in ‘Williamson‘, a sympathetic portrait of a man whose mixed animal and human heritage arouses instinctive loathing in everyone he meets.” (PRINGLE 640)

Like Lovecraft, too, as in such stories as “The Street” and “He”, Whitehead is conscious of the once-rural and rustic aspect of the Flastbush area surrounding Simon’s father’s apartment, his “frame house standing lonely and dwarfed in its own grounds among the towering apartment houses”, the house “like a lost child in a preoccupied crowd of adults whose business caused them to look over the child’s head” ---although here, again, this nostalgia is free of any taint or hint of xenophobic paranoia. It does, however, presage the later pagan rusticity with which Whitehead infuses his story, the werewolf being associated with the pagan fecundity of nature and animality which lies in the past, just beneath the surface of the city--- a pagan animality which is not without, for Whitehead, a certain homoeroticism. (Note, too, the singular feeling for children which this metaphor of Whitehead’s, likening the building to “a lost child”, suggests.) After a long subway ride, Simon disembarks, the pagan atmosphere immediately being denoted by “a deep breath of the fresh, sweet outdoor air” (WEINBERG 372), infused with “a spicy odor of wet leaves about it somehow” which contrasts with the “somewhat stuffy air of the subway“”. This infusion of pagan “odors” is simultaneously accompanied, suggestively, by a sudden darkness, allowing for a view of the stars and the moon ---the streetlight system suddenly missing, suggesting a reemergence into the primal past.

Simon suddenly notices that “Great trees stood all about him” (WEINBERG 373), and from which comes, predictably, as in Lovecraft’s association of Hellenic pastoralism with song in “The Crawling Chaos” and elsewhere, “a joyous song in a manly bass, slightly muffled by the wood of the thick trees.” Entirely too entranced by this, Simon listens “eagerly”, “intently”, and distinguishing, as he does so, various Bacchanalian and Elizabethan words, such as “merry”, “heart”, and “repine” ---words which would not have been out of place in Love craft’s “drinking song” in “The Tomb” --associated there, however, with growing decay and deterioration. Significantly, too, it is at this point that Whitehead’s protagonist notes that it “seemed entirely natural to be here” , while at the same time he notes the sudden incongruity between his pagan surroundings and his modern dress and other belongings. Whitehead chooses to express this incongruity in a rather startling way ---i.e. with a reference to a female figure in a drawing by arch-decadent Aubrey Beardsley--- Simon suddenly remembering “with a smile that strange drawing of Aubrey Beardsley’s, of a lady playing an upright cottage pianoforte in the midst of a field of daisies!” (Lovecraft will likewise invoke the work of Beardsley in Medusa’s Coil” with reference the hair of Madame de Russy’s as resembling that of “some Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsley”, possessing an “unholy vitality” suggestive of a “Medusa or Berenice” (HM 172) --Lovecraft often using “Oriental” as a circumlocution for “Jews” and “Judaism” (qv. “Hypnos”, his essay “Cats and Dogs”, etc.) In Malcolm Easton’s biography of Aubrey Beardsley, Aubrey and the Dying Lady (1972), Malcolm Easton will write, in his chapter, “A Flutter of Frilled Things”, of the “the artist’s ambiguous delineation of sex”, of Aubrey’s proclaiming “from the housetops his interest in the hermaphrodite” (126), and how one is “struck by the persistence of gender confusion in Aubrey’s work”. (128)

As Whitehead’s protagonist rather earnestly listens, the voice of the singer ---who is obviously, Whitehead writes, “as the fresh voice indicated”, “a young man”, gradually approaches, hidden behind a “screening array of tree boles”. Revealingly, however, and just as the young man is about to appear, the singer pauses “in the middle of a note”, the sudden and “primeval silence” which follows being disturbed by “a huge timber wolf” which “burst through the underbrush” toward the singer. Already, we can discern several themes which parallel those in the works of Love craft ---the pagan vegetation, the young male singer, the reference to Beardsley ---although Whitehead’s paganism is by no means as tortured, caricatured, inverted as Lovecraft’s. Decadence, there is, yes, but the incongruity of the woman in the Beardsley drawing is representative only of the protagonist’s modern maladjustment to a rustic setting. Wolves, there are, too, in this pagan wood of “primeval silence”, just as in Lovecraft’s works ---but here, the wolf is opposed by the equal figure, in the form of the young pagan man who sings of “merriness” in a “manly bass”, and not of a Richard Upton Pickman who is on the going downhill on a fast toboggan track of “reverse evolution”. This is a wood of healthy adjustment to homosocial if not homosexual orientation, and a natural fulfillment of homoerotic physical desire.

“Startled into frigid immobility” and watching as if “petrified” ---both possibly images, whether consciously or unconsciously, of erection, Whitehead’s narrator hears the man make a quick “‘heh’”, and then watches “fascinated” as a battle ensues between young man and wolf:

“…the two figures, man and wolf, came into plain sight; the singer, for so Simon thought of him, a tall, robust fellow, in fringed deerskin, slashing desperately with a hunting knife, the beast crouching low, snapping with a tearing motion of a great punishing jaw. Short-breathed ‘heh’s’ came from the man, as he parried dexterously the lashing snaps of the wicked jaws.”

Somewhat predictably, given our homoerotic suppositions, the “young woodsman” suddenly drops his knife and “reached for the great pistol which depended from his belt in a rough leather holster. There was a blinding flash, and the wolf slithered down, its legs giving under it”. (WEINBERG 374) The whole scene, in fact, reads like a repressed or sublimated depiction of a homosexual assignation, with the “blinding flash” of the “great pistol” representative of the moment of orgasm, accompanied as it is by a look of “horrified wonderment on the face of the young woodsman” as he drops his “pistol on the damp ground”. This reading of the text is seemingly confirmed by the “eldritch change passing over the beast”, coincident with the marked diminution of male sexual desire during the refractory period after ejaculation, the young man watching
“fascinated” and “round-eyed” as “the hair of the great paws dissolve, the jaws shorten and shrink, the lithe body buckle and heave strangely.” Simon closes his eyes, and reopens them to see the wolf has now changed into the “body of a man, lying prone across the tree roots, a pool of blood” mingling with the earth and tree roots.

Released somehow from his own “strange spell of quiescence”, Simon suddenly flees the scene. As in Lovecraft’s works, the moon plays a pivotal, if equally unexplained, role, seeming to “increase in size, to give a more brilliant light” “above the trees”, while the trees themselves grow “pale” and vanish, replaced by the streetlights of Simon’s Flatbush neighborhood. Stopping at the local drugstore, where he had intended to buy cigarettes before his strange experience, Simon finds the entrance blocked by a crowd; a “young man” nearby informing him that someone was shot and killed in that very drugstore, as part of some gangland killing. Simon retires that night, musing on the apparent coincidence between this shooting and his own “imaginary” experience, associating his seeming hallucination with the (pagan) “trees”. (WEINBERG 376) The next morning, Simon learns from the newspaper that the criminal killed was known as “‘Jerry the Wolf’, a notorious gangster with a long prison record”. Putting on his shoes, meanwhile, Simon notices that his shoes are “caked with black mold, precisely like the mold from the wood paths about his Adirondak camp.”

Taking the subway to see a fellow Harvardian who now works in the D.A.’s office ---and who is, suggestively, named “Forrest”--- Simon inquires as to the background of “Jerry the Wolf”. As in Dion Fortune’s lycanthropic story “Blood-Lust”, in which the werewolf is revealed to be a Hungarian parasite, Forrest replies:

“‘That’s a very queer thing, Simon. Such a name is not, really, uncommon. There was that fellow, Goddard, you remember. They called him ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’ There was that fiction criminal known as ‘The Lone Wolf.’ There have been plenty of ‘wolves’ among criminal ‘monikers’. But this fellow, Jerry Goraffsky, was a Hungarian, really. He was called ‘The Wolf’, queerly enough, because there were those in his gang who believed he was one of those birds who could change himself into a wolf! It’s a queer combination, isn’t it? ---for a New York gangster!’
“‘Yes’, said Everard Simon, ‘it is, very queer, when you come to think of it…’” (WEINBERG 376-77)

Forrest goes on to state that “‘That isn’t the only queer aspect of this case however---’” a statement with which this critic also quite agrees--- Simon’s friend revealing that the bullet used to kill Jerry the Wolf is an antique, “the kind of ball Fennimore Cooper’s people used ---’Deerslayer!’ It would take a young cannon to throw that thing.’” (WEINBERG 377) Who the “young cannon” was that inspired this strange homoerotic fantasy, I do not know, whether he was imaginary or actual. But that it was intimately connected with that communion with nature which Whitehead experienced as part of his work with boy’s camps, and whose mould coated his protagonist’s shoes as far away from the Adirondaks as Flatbush, New York, cannot be doubted.

Martinus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Look at the context: That's just Price's
> charmingly vulgar way of saying "fandom could go
> to hell." Price had just got a female acquaintance
> of Whitehead's to write a memoir of Whitehead for
> the benefit of fandom, when he (quite
> inappropriately and less than diplomatically) let
> slip the gossip that he got from August Derleth,
> about said female acquaintance having been
> Whitehead's mistress, whereupon he could kiss the
> memoir good-bye. Not only was fandom screwed, it
> was "buggered through its oilskins, and with a
> marlin spike".

Price‘s story is fascinating, firstly for illustrating the curiosity which apparently surrounded Whitehead’s private life, specifically his sexuality, in sci-fi fandom, but also for Price’s final comment. Certainly, one would expect a woman from Whitehead’s elite and lofty social strata to be offended at some rumors of a liaison, no matter if they were true or untrue, but Price specifically goes on to call “Madame de Margny” Whitehead’s “un-mistress”, as if he specifically knows that it is NOT true, before going on to invoke the images of “buggery”, “oilskins” --a type of clothing specifically worn by sailors ---and not only buggery, but sodomy “with a marlin spike” --the marlin spike being a sailor’s tool, as well as a sailor’s name for a tropic bird (the Phaethon). One thinks that Price was having a rather elaborate joke at fandom's expense with this reference to “buggery“ and “sailors” in association with Whitehead‘s private life, and that, as Price himself put it, Whitehead was “one who knew what he was talking about, particularly when he wrote of the Virgin Islands.”



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 19 May 07 | 09:05PM by Gavin Callaghan.

I first became interested in Whitehead through the numerous connections I noticed between the works of Lovecraft and Ralph Adams Cram, the neo-gothic architect (and former decadent) of Boston, who was apparently a close friend of Whitehead. Both Lovecraft and Cram were interested in the figure of Hypnos, Lovecraft invoking the figure of “Hypnos” in a short story of that same name, dedicated to Samuel Loveman, with Ralph Adams Cram writing his 1895 (sometimes homoerotically-themed) horror story collection “Spirits Black and White” --a title which evidently derives from the fact that “Hypnos”, aka Sleep, and the “beloved” of Apollo and the Muses (LETCHFORD 87), was considered the brother of Death, aka “Mors” or “Thanatos”, and, according to Smith’s _Classical Dictionary_, the two were often represented by later Greek artists under the pleasant aspect of slumbering youths, and were represented on the chest of Cypselus as small boys, one black, one white. (457) Lovecraft would later speak of Cram’s “The Dead Valley“, writing that it “achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror” --this despite the fact of the stories being set in Europe, being based, as Douglass Shand-Tucci writes in volume one of his mammoth Cram biography Boston Bohemia, upon an actual (and absinthe-soaked) tour which Cram took in 1887 of Italian churches, and during which, at Midnight Mass in Rome, he experienced his religious conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Cram was also the author of am anonymous limited-edition book entitled “The Decadent; or, The Gospel of Inaction” (1893), (and which, Shand-Tucci suggests, was based upon his stays at millionaire photographer and pederast Frederick Holland Day’s mansion outside of Boston), Cram later dismissing “Black Spirits and White” as “a youthful indiscretion” (SHAND-TUCCI 62), and later discreetly omitting both “The Decadent” and “Black Spirits and White” from his list of works. (378)

Lovecraft was evidently introduced to Cram’s weird fiction by Whitehead, Lovecraft’s later writing that “Cram‘s Dead Valley is great stuff, & makes me desperately wish I could get hold of his other weird stuff. Whitehead knows Cram personally, & says that the latter himself has no copy of his own book of spectral phantasies, now rare & unobtainable” (SLIII 15), although Lovecraft’s interest in (and entrée to) the Cram-Whitehead circle would undoubtedly have been facilitated by Lovecraft’s own experiences with Cram-associate Louisa Imogen Guiney, with whom Lovecraft’s family had briefly roomed when he was a child.

Lovecraft’s later mellowing towards Anglo-Catholicism undoubtedly came from Whitehead, Lovecraft writing “…many of the orthodoxies (especially Anglicanism) have acquired a civilized mellowness which redeems them from the blind plebian insanity of camp-meeting gospel. Why, you ought to hear me argue with the Rev. Henry St. Clair Whitehead, orthodox, high-church Anglo-Catholic…and some boy, I’ll say!” (SL III 401), and later observing of Whitehead that, “Though rector of the local Church of the Good Shepherd, he has nothing of the musty cleric about him; but dresses in sport clothes, swears like a he-man on occasion, & is an utter stranger to bigotry or priggishness of any sort.” (375) Whitehead, for his part, writes scathingly, in his short story “The Napier Limousine”, of “those rather narrow, puritanical old hoddy-doddies” in England, are “so consciously upright” that they “positively” creak “with piety” when they get up or sit down. (WHITEHEAD 113) (Lovecraft had earlier, in his correspondence with Long, poo-pooed Long’s incipient dabblings in “the aesthetic aspects of Roman or Anglo-Catholicism”. [DREAMER 64]) As Douglas Shand-Tucci writes, there was long a strong counter-cultural and avant-garde substratum to High-Church Anglicanism, “Anglo-Catholicism in its earliest days” being “found by the Anglo-American establishment to be not just unpleasant but utterly contemptible” (SHAND-TUCCI 181), being symbolic, not only of a counter-cultural reaction to the standard values of Victorian industrialization, and this within an implicit homo-erotic context (182), but also of the same “incipient modernism” which later gave birth to such Anglo-Catholic writers as T. S. Eliot. (193)

In “The Thing on the Doorstep” --the centerpiece of which is the Damon and Pythias-like friendship of the narrator with his young decadent protégé, Edward Pickman Derby-- Lovecraft will make his narrator a combination of Whitehead and Cram, Lovecraft writing: “I had been through Harvard [Whitehead], had studied in a Boston architect’s office [Cram], had married [Cram], and had finally returned to Arkham to practice my profession --settling in the family homestead on Saltonstall Street since my father had moved to Florida for his health [Whitehead]”. This mirrors Whitehead’s own obituary, which states that Whitehead’s father, like Upton‘s father, “had been an invalid for a number of years, having come to Dunedin for the purpose of attempting to restore his health” (Dunedin Times, 1), while, according to Lovecraft, Whitehead’s father lived with Whitehead in Florida (SL III 115)

In “Pickman’s Model”, Lovecraft alludes to the underground and bestial “dark gods of inner earth” in a context not unrelated to that Bohemian Bostonian milieu of Ralph Adams Cram, when Lovecraft refers to “One disgusting canvas” of Pickman’s, which “seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with anti-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the ground,” (DH 27) Lovecraft here making the Beacon Hill district --a section which Douglas Shand-Tucci in his biography of Ralph Adams Cram links with Boston’s nascent gay, aesthetic, Anglo-Catholic, and occult-spiritualist subcultures, with the decadent infiltration of Boston --a center of bestial degeneration and cannibalistic decay. According to Shand-Tucci, Cram, during the early launching of his career as an art critic for the Boston Evening Transcript-- lived on Pinckney Street on Beacon Hill, where “in the 1880’s and 1890’s Boston’s Bohemia was…strongly centered” (BB 206), and whose mysterious streets, dead ends, and courtyards, suggests Shand-Tucci, later played a role in the development of the nascent and equally elusive gay aesthetic. Shand-Tucci writes,

“Even Pinckney’s architecture has always been characteristically hidden and queer; George Weston has pointed out that of Beacon Hill’s ‘many dark and mysterious tunnels’ (the result of overbuilding) quite the ‘most interesting [are] to be found on Pinckney Street. In fact, the lodging house in the 1890’s that Cram resided in longest on Pinckney, 67, is located exactly across from ‘the hidden house of Beacon Hill’, as 74 ½ is often called because the house is completely hidden by later buildings and can be reached only by a long tunnel from the street that leads to a brick courtyard guarded by an iron gate…. …(Also close by Cram’s lodging house, furthermore, was 40 Pinckney, the mysterious abode during Cram’s day of Leonora Piper, a medium known not only to Cram--who attended her séances--but also to William James and Arthur Conan Doyle, both of whom aided and abetted Piper’s international reputation.)” (BB 26)

In “Pickman’s Model”, interestingly, in the context of the medieval witch-cult in relation to Pickman‘s hideously realistic way of painting bestial faces, Lovecraft references the “medieval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Sant-Michel”, the latter of which is also referenced by New England Classicist and nascent Anglo -Catholic Henry Adams in his landmark “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres“, --the introduction to which’s first public publication in 1913 was written by Cram. In his aesthetics essay “Heritage or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms” (1935), written two years before his death, Lovecraft will contrast the works of Modernists, whom Lovecraft calls “decadent madmen”, with “the Athenians who conceived the Parthenon, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, and the Olympian Zeus” (MISC 192), Lovecraft then going on in the same breath to echo High Church aesthetes like Ralph Adams Cram and Henry Adams by speaking highly of “the medieval Nordics who conceived the cathedrals of Chartres and Lincoln.”

In his collaborative story “Out of the Aeons”, Lovecraft will further invoke the figure of Cram (in the context of Pickman), by placing Curator Pickman’s Boston Cabot Museum of Archeology, “in the heart of Boston‘s exclusive Beacon Hill district --in Mt. Vernon Street, near Joy-- housed in a former private mansion with an added wing in the rear, and was a source of pride to its austere neighbors.” (HM 266) Lovecraft will further strengthen this identification by locating the “hall of mummies”, in which the mysterious mummy from Mu is placed, as being “on the western side of the original mansion (which was designed by Bulfinch and erected in 1819)” (HM 266) ---a description which would strongly seem to suggest that this was the Nichols residence, located at 55 Mount Vernon street and designed by Charles Bulfinch, just above Louisburg Square, and where, according to Douglass Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram first lived upon arriving in Boston in the early 1880’s. (SHAND-TUCCI 18) Lovecraft here, as elsewhere, is apparently inserting information relevant to the life of Ralph Adams Cram into his stories, probably on information provided by Henry S. Whitehead.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 19 May 07 | 08:52PM by Gavin Callaghan.

While this is an interesting thread, I should like to put a bit in for the usage police:
It is one of the great misfortunes of recent language that the ignorant media, and the psychology industry have been allowed to introduce terms into the language that do not remotely either mean what they want them to mean, or are just improper:
A. -- impact, for example, commonly used now to mean "affect", is not a verb.
But will no doubt become one in the dictionary as it acquieces to improper public use - "The failure of the bond issue impacted the city council" -- meaning that they all need an enema? No doubt the city council may be "full of it" --
B. - Homophobia and Homoerotic - invented in the pseudo-shrink arena and capitalizing upon the public use of "homo" as a pejorative, these words bear no reasonable relation to the usage. "Homo", the Greek prefix found in Homogenous, and Homogenized means "things that are the same all the time" -
Homophobia (and in this my colleague and fellow philologist in Germany, Dr. John Robertson first proposed the analysis) means "fear of boredom" -- a teenage ailment no doubt? - Homoerotic --- boring sex?

The term that would mean what is intended is "Arsenkoitaphobia" - fear of men who emulate koitus -- Homoerotic would have to be something like "Arsenkoitic".

"Arsen" is a Koine term that goes beyond Anthropos (generic) and Andros (male in the sense of "manliness").

It is unfortunate that there are those who think that creating a pseudo technical term for an imagined psychological attitude is a useful thing to do and provides authority and ownership, when it merely produces a convenient term as filled with scalding animosity as may be projected by its opposite number. I have no illusions that simple good sense will get rid of bad usage, nor that members of the same species will come to their collective senses and stop ill-using each other. These comments are generic and in no way are they a reflection of this generally interesting set of discussions, merely an observation on the state of English - and the long term effects of the loss of Latin and Greek from the schools -- "behold, even the very elect are deceived" --
much affection to all

Kipling Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You don't know that HSW was gay. [...] Randy
> Everts' early research on W. makes no mention of
> it.

No, John, but his recent researches do. A couple of years ago Randy visited Dunedin and claims to have interviewed a number of men with whom Whitehead had relations when they were younger. This is what he told me at the time. Maybe some day he'll write it up, but I'm not holding my breath. He occasionally drops statements about this in his EOD contributions.
Are you serious about Petaja? I hate to break this to you, but he lived on Castro Street in San Francisco. He was well known in Bay Area fan circles for being Gay.
Frankly I don't care if Whitehead were homosexual or not, like you it doesn't affect my enjoyment of his stories. The question was asked, and I answered it to the best of my knowledge. That's all.
The reference to Griswold was most unkind, since I do not care for attempts to psychoanalyze a writer from his work. On the other hand, there is a thriving literary school devoted to Gender and Ethnic Studies, and discussions of HSW's orientation might well fit therein.
Regarding the relative merits of Machen and Leiber: let's just say that I have a larger first rank than you. I dislike comparisons of which writer is greater, since each writer has different strengths and weaknesses. Which is better: Machen's "The Lost Club" or Leiber's "Smoke Ghost?" See how comparisons can rapidly become less than useful? I think of them more as belonging to the same cohort. Certainly if I were to edit an anthology of the best writers in the field, I'd have Bradbury next to Blackwood, Benson besides Wellman, etc. You get the idea.
Best,
Scott

Calonlan wrote:

> B. - Homophobia and Homoerotic - invented in the
> pseudo-shrink arena and capitalizing upon the
> public use of "homo" as a pejorative, these words
> bear no reasonable relation to the usage. "Homo",
> the Greek prefix found in Homogenous, and
> Homogenized means "things that are the same all
> the time" -
> Homophobia (and in this my colleague and fellow
> philologist in Germany, Dr. John Robertson first
> proposed the analysis) means "fear of boredom" --

Certainly something that invariably threatens when members of the Gay community settle down to their favourite subject: themselves.

> a teenage ailment no doubt?

Well, self-obsession is characteristic of teens.

> - Homoerotic ---
> boring sex?

Erm.

> The term that would mean what is intended is
> "Arsenkoitaphobia" - fear of men who emulate
> koitus -- Homoerotic would have to be something
> like "Arsenkoitic".

That wouldn't cover lesbians. Arsenokoit- is better translated as something like "man-bedder". I don't mind homoerotic so much, but homophobia is very tendentious.

> "Arsen" is a Koine term that goes beyond Anthropos
> (generic) and Andros (male in the sense of
> "manliness").
>
> It is unfortunate that there are those who think
> that creating a pseudo technical term for an
> imagined psychological attitude is a useful thing
> to do and provides authority and ownership,

You're obviously a homophobe then: into re-education camp with you!

> when
> it merely produces a convenient term as filled
> with scalding animosity as may be projected by its
> opposite number. I have no illusions that simple
> good sense will get rid of bad usage, nor that
> members of the same species will come to their
> collective senses and stop ill-using each other.
> These comments are generic and in no way are they
> a reflection of this generally interesting set of
> discussions, merely an observation on the state of
> English - and the long term effects of the loss of
> Latin and Greek from the schools -- "behold, even
> the very elect are deceived" --
> much affection to all

Actually Phil, I can't be a homophobe since I've never been bored long enough to develop a pathological fear of boredom.

To cover the Lesbian community (an excellent idea in itself), one might get away with anthropo-- the point however is moot.

The verbal root "koitai" in it's most ancient root infers in this kind of combination (plural also) the sense of "emulation" - so, while man-bedder would be a pretty good translation, it doesn't quite do it full justice, though, thinking in the terms of the tribe of the importance of re-populating the group, it is an unproductive activity -- you might know that Onan's sin was not just failing to produce offspring for his dead brother, put wasting "seed" -- In the ancient mind whether wheat, barley, corn or human, seed was both sacred, and not to be idly cast aside -- remember the king's fertility affected the whole land, cattle, crops, and people.

Scott: I was serious about textual evidence not being conclusive, in Petaja's case or anyone else's.
It suggests a deviant condition, but not "strongly," as I repeat.
You seem to go along with the statements and suggstions of Everts and Callaghan in this regard; I remain sceptical. Sorry if the reference to Griswold struck you as unkind, but like the "Science vrs. Religion" mythologies concocted by post-Darwin opportunists, Griswold knew he couldn't fabricate everything, so he used the words of other liars, too. Why do you credit Everts's supposed recent sources, who, you presume, have lived to tell the tale 75 years later? Who, in 21st century Dunedin, would remember or care to disparage the memory of Dr. Whitehead in this way? And for that matter, who said you were gay? The source you are crediting, right? I merely point out that no convincing evidence has been presented. At least we agree that it doesn't detract from his work-- unless words like "homo-social" don't make you gag, choke, and heave.

jkh

Scott: By coincidence I was just about to get to Leiber's "Smoke Ghost" again in the anthology of Fantasy & Science Fiction I'm using for a course next Fall on
fantasy in American fiction. You may have seen it- it includes CAS's "City of the Singing Flame" and HPL's "Colour Out of Space"? Anyway, as much as I love Leiber's best, such as Our Lady of Darkness, to me most of his work is on the level
of The Second Book of Fritz Leiber: versatile, excellent style, often brilliant in conception, but not stamped with the genius I ascribe to Machen and Blackwood. Sure, they wrote tediously like all authors great and small do, but their best
stands out more than anything the second-tier artists did.

jkh

Doug Anderson has just reminded me that while Barlow had planned a Florida visit in 1932, he did not actually set foot in that state until 1933, after HSW's death. Therefore they never met. Oops. Sorry....

Scott

Gavin:

I'd be very interested to see a transcription of the Whitehead obit from the Dunedin newspaper. I've done a lot of digging on Whitehead, the results of which will be in the biographical Intro to the second of the three Ash Tree volumes of The Collected Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. (The first volume is due out in August.)

I can add a bunch of little things to your comments, and point you to things like Sean Donnelly's article "Whitehead in Florida" in Fantasy Commentator, no. 49 (Fall 1996),which gives a brief account of some twenty-one pieces from the Dundedin Times that mention Whitehead, and the article reproduces photographs of Whitehead's last home (1871 Pasadena Ave) and The Church of the Good Shepherd.

Doug

Disregard.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 14 Apr 08 | 08:29AM by Scott Connors.

Dear friends,
Your friendly neighborhood philologist writing: off the subject but relevant to good usage --

I have consulted with a number of colleagues worldwide, who, like myself were students of
Robert Graves, JRR Tolkien, and a good friend and collegue of John Ciardi (author of browser's dictionary et al):

The words "homophobia" and "Homoerotic" have been foisted on the public by the ignorance (nearly universal) of the psychology community who imagine that if they invent a term, it means they "own" the diagnosis and (worse) understand it.

As many of you would recognize, though the general public does not, the prefix "homo" is not the latin for "man" but the greek which we use in "Homogenized", "homogenous" etc. Obviously one does not use a Latin prefix with a Greek root. The correct translation I and all my colleagues agree is
"Fear of boredom" -- that is the fear of things being the same all the time. Homoerotic therefore must mean "boring sex", in my experience a near impossibility. Now those who think "singularity of nature" is an appropriate definition to tie the words to homosexuality are in error, because fear in that sense would incompass all things that are the same - all black ants, all yellow flowers - whatever - Let's start a small movement to correct the matter - if you must have a greek term, it would be "arsenkoitaphobia" or "arsenkoiterotic" -- In the Greek of the Koine' "arsen" is the term specifically for men (and unfortunately has a slightly pejorative edge to it in the ancient writings implying 'lower class') emulating coitus. The term, without the phobia, is common in the writing of the ancient Greeks - no one either "feared" or "hated" such folk - attitudes ranged from endorsement to condemnation depending on the writer.

An artist friend of mine recently wrote to me that "Life is what happens when you are planning other things". In the same way, I think, language is what happens while the academics are compiling their dictionaries! I think historically it can be shown that definitions are based on usage, and not the other way around. True, slang produces some horrible mutations- but it can also produce great beauty. I for one am glad we are now speaking English, for instance, and not Old English, and that Shakespeare had the opporunity to write in a hybrid, impure tongue.

>>"boring sex", in my experience a near impossibility

I think there are some "women of the night" out there who might have a different view of this.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 1 Sep 08 | 05:17PM by Gavin Callaghan.

"I think historically it can be shown that definitions are based on usage, and not the other way around."

You are mistaken. Prescriptive dictionaries have existed since at least the time of Dr. Johnson (who was hardly an "academic" in the sense you mean, by the way). You are obviously a descriptivist, though, and therefore would like to ignore that inconvenient fact. Merely because prescription is in disfavor now is no excuse for doing so, though, in my view.

By the way, enlisting Shakespeare on the side of the vulgum pecus is an interesting forensic maneuver, but an unconvincing one. Shakespeare had a classical education in rhetoric, meaning that he knew the tropes from aporia to zeugma, and which obviously was of help in manipulating his "hybrid, impure language" to best advantage.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2 Sep 08 | 05:28PM by Kyberean.

deleted and moved; sorry



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 4 Sep 08 | 08:25AM by Kyberean.

I am shocked to read this thread. I have no recollection of anyone suggesting that Whitehead was queer. There is no whisper of such a thing in Ruber's awful book, ARKHAM'S MASTERs OF HORROR, where one wou'd expect to find it. I used to own the first of two British pb reprintings of JUMBEE AND OTHER UNCANNY TALES, and it was one of my all-time favourite collections. Jessica Salmonson had a copy of the Arkham House edition for sale, but always refus'd to sell it to me because she found it such a racist book. I finally found a copy at a convention, with a xerox dj, but wasn't certain that I wanted to spend $150 on it--then my good pal came up to me later in the convention and placed the purchas'd book in my hand. I was struck by the fact that my beloved brother Barlow had written the introduction. JUMBEE remains one of my favourite collections of weird fiction, the stories are strange and superbly written. I do not find traces of the racism that so appall'd Jessica. I am now inspir'd to read it once more and see if I can detect any queerness. I wonder if I can find an affordable edition of WEST INDIA LIGHTS -- although I must be cautious with me purse, as just yesterday I order'd Centipede's amazing CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WEIRD TALES CIRCLE, whut hath haunted me since I thumb'd through it at WFC.....

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.

Wilum: While I would agree that there are certainly racist elements -- sometimes quite strong ones -- in several of Whitehead's tales, I also find that there is a strong streak of sympathy for the same people in many instances (albeit it is usually of a rather paternalistic sort). At any rate, I find it much less offensive than other "popular" writings of the period often tended to be. I also find Whitehead's work quite interesting, if occasionally a bit too cool to realize the full potential of its scenarios or incidents. Nonetheless, it is generally quite erudite, written in a style which adds to the air of verisimilitude, and remains, I think, some of the best short work which has been done on such subjects; and several of the tale do tend to linger in my mind many years after I first read them.

I bought the first volume of the three proposed by Ash-Tree; I can only hope that the others see print in the not-too-distant future, as I really would like to have all the man's fiction at my disposal.

I will only add that some of the items in West India Lights I found to be rather disappointing -- not nearly as memorable or well-developed as those in Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales; though you may find "Williamson" to be of interest, especially in connection with HPL's "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family"....

Yes -- I just reread "Cassius," and I see the strong racialism of the story. I suppose that by "racist" I always think of foaming-at-the-mouth hatred, which I have witnessed too many times and been subjected to because of my modicum of Jewish heritage. With Whitehead it feels more -- these blacks are a separate race, a singular people with alien ways. There are echoes, too, of white man mental/emotional superiority that I never noticed before, being swept away, I guess, by the weird power of the fiction. I love the idea that Whitehead was a sister -- another of Lovecraft's buddies who was queer. That's fabulous! Makes me want to edit a new Arkham House anthology -- ARKHAM'S QUEER MASTERS OF HORROR, or some such thing. I could include all the people who have been hinted of being tainted by this superb perversion, Wandrei, HPL, Loveman, Barlow, and that Queen Supreme, my wondrous soul-sister Augie D!

"I'm a little girl."
--H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.

wilum pugmire Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Makes me
> want to edit a new Arkham House anthology --
> ARKHAM'S QUEER MASTERS OF HORROR, or some such
> thing. I could include all the people who have
> been hinted of being tainted by this superb
> perversion, Wandrei, HPL, Loveman, Barlow, and
> that Queen Supreme, my wondrous soul-sister Augie
> D!

With a dust jacket by Emil Petaja's boyfriend, Hannes Bok!!!

Ssshhh.... subtextual racism AND homosexuality... you'll get our old pal Gavin Callaghan all excited, maybe to the point of cardiac arrest, if he sees this!

I am not acquainted with "women of the night", however literature on the subject suggests you may be right - I am referring of course to my own 44 year career in an unsullied marriage - the only problem now is that sex tends to be "pre-medicated" - oh dear, I feel a limerick coming on...

Absquatch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Ssshhh.... subtextual racism AND homosexuality...
> you'll get our old pal Gavin Callaghan all
> excited, maybe to the point of cardiac arrest, if
> he sees this!

?

There are plenty of racist writers. Some of them very talented. It's not a question of scolding such writers, and neither is it a question of whitewashing the fact. It is simply a matter of recognizing them- and rebutting them, if one so chooses.

Douglas A. Anderson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Gavin:
>
> I'd be very interested to see a transcription of
> the Whitehead obit from the Dunedin newspaper.

Did I ever do this? My memory is very poor: I can't recall posting this (or not posting this.) At risk of repeating msyelf, here's the obit. Words I was unsure of (the left hand edge of the column was deteriorating, and did not photocopy well) are in brackets. Words I was unsure of, have a question mark behind them:

Dunedin Times, Florida, Friday, November 25, 1932. No. 48.
(Page 1)
Dr. Henry S. Whitehead Passes Away
Funeral of Noted Author And Clergyman to be Friday

The death of Dr. Henry S. Whitehead, rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Episcopal, Dunedin, and noted author took place Wednesday morning at 6:06 at his home in Dunedin Isles, after an illness of several days.

The immediate cause of his decrease was a cerebral hemorrhage, according to the attendant physicians. Dr. Whitehead had been an invalid for a number of years, having come to Dunedin for the purpose of attempting to restore his health.

The author was taken ill Saturday, when he had a fainting spell. His father, Henry H. Whitehead of St. Petersburg, came Monday, and was with his son to the last.

Funeral services will be held Friday afternoon at the St. Petersburg First Episcopal Church, of which he held the pastorship for a short time this summer. Bishop John B. Wing, a close friend of the deceased pastor, and head of the South Florida Diocese, will officiate, assisted by the rector of the church, the Rev. Evan Edwards. Many people, including the members of the church here, plan to attend the services.

Dr. Whitehead resided in his home in Dunedin Isles, which he purchased some months ago for a permanent residence. He came to Dunedin in October 1929, and he made his home here since that [time?]. C. J. Fletcher has been living with Dr. Whitehead, who enjoy[ed] the companionship of boys. He [has] had several local boys spend several months with him, and has [also?] had boys from the north visit [him] for a number of weeks.

Whitehead has been active [in civic] life, having been called upon to give addresses before many different gatherings. He has been [one of] the benefactors of the [Junior?] High School, going to the [school?] [e]ach Thursday to give the [students?] short talks on various subjects and giving a number of volumes of reference works for the [school] library. He addressed the graduating class of the Junior High School in June.

The writer’s last public appearance was when he spoke to an audience of colored people and white persons at Jubilee song services at the colored Methodist church here. He spoke before a large group in the city park the night before the general election, speaking on the subject of prohibition, and urging the election of Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of his close friends.

Dr. Whitehead was born 50 years ago in Elizabeth, N. J. He was a graduate of Harvard University and Berkley Divinity School, and held degrees of Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Divinity.

The doctor held the pastorate of the Church of St. Mary of the Virgin in New York City, and other charges in New England. While at Bridgeport, Maine, Dr. Whitehead secured and directed the building of the Trinity Episcopal Church there. This is one of the finest and largest churches in New England.

For a number of years, Dr. Whitehead was Archdeacon of the Virgin islands, and it was while he [resided] in this portion of the West Indies, that he gained a wealth of experience with the natives and their customs. In fact, Dr. Whitehead was regarded as being one of the best informed present-day authorities on the geography, customs, and life of the West Indian negro. In his room, the author had hanging the document showing that he was elected a Fellow of the National Geographic Society in recognition of his research.

One of Dr. Whitehead’s activities was the taking of young boys

(Continued on page 4)

DR. HENRY S. WHITEHEAD
PASSES AWAY WEDNESDAY

(Continued from Page 1)

on trips to the Virgin Islands, tutoring them during the several months period.

The West Indies and the superstitions of the natives were often the subjects of his stories, which were published frequently in Adventure, Weird Tales and other magazines. “The Passing of a God,” which came out in Weird Tales, was adjudged the Best American Short Story for 1931 by the O. Henry Memorial Committee. The same story was selected as the best American short story in the British Empire Anthology, which included the story with others by authors from all nations.

Dr. Whitehead began his literary career in 1905, when his first short story was accepted; since that time over 400 stories and articles written by him have been published.

The author was widely traveled, having visited every European country except Russia. He was acquainted with a great many famous personages; his rooms containing many pictures of friends known to history, and cartoons drawn especially for the doctor bear the autographs of noted artists. President-elect Roosevelt was one of Dr. Whitehead’s Harvard classmates, and it was planned to have the youngest son of the next president visit here within a few weeks. [/end quote/]

From History of the Good Shepherd Church, p. 21:

“It was certainly a winter chapel in 1929-31 with the Reverend H. S. Whitehead Ph.D., in charge. Father Whitehead reports: ‘During this period when the Church was closed most of the people who were permanent residents joined the Presbyterians. The aspect of permanency is the chief desideratum for the future of the local Church in Dunedin. Many would come back if the Church were open for the full year, or for nine or ten months. Also there are others who would join is if permanency were assured with a suitable priest in charge. The church in season is comfortably filled.’” [/end quote/]

The twice-mentioned association of FDR w/ Whitehead, above, is interesting in this whole “gay” context, since I’ve twice come across associations of FDR with homosexuality. In Mariani’s biography of poet Hart Crane, for example, Crane is quoted as making a 1920 reference to FDR as our “‘new VICE-president, Franklin Roosevelt’, whose name an scandalous example already ’scented the air of Washington’.” (MARIANI 71) Crane had been sent to Washington D.C. by his wealthy father, where he soon became enmeshed of the U.S. government’s gay subculture. (Mariani misidentifies H.P. Lovecraft, interestingly, as a Cleveland resident.)

Roger Austin’s biography of pederastic aesthete Charles Warren Stoddard, too, mentions FDR in a similar connection, John Crowley‘s into‘ speaking of a “1919 and 1920 scandal over homosexual activities at the United States Naval training Station in Newport, Rhode Island, in which incident the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and several other prominent figures had been caught up.” (CROWLEY xii) But perhaps this possibly trumped-up incident merely fed into Hart Crane's later rumor-mongering.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 22 Mar 10 | 05:12PM by Gavin Callaghan.