The Centenary of 'Notes for a New Mythology' by Haniel Long

It was during my work on Leonard Cline that I first encountered the name of Haniel Long. (According to Long himself, his first name was pronounced Han-eye-el, with the accent on the second syllable.) Long was born in 1888 in in Burma (now Myanmar) of Methodist Missionary parents, who returned with him to the US in 1890. Settling in Pittsburgh, they later moved to Duluth and then to Minneapolis. Long was educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University (Class of 1910), where he studied English literature. He married in 1913, and taught at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for many years. For health reasons he spent 1924-25 in New Mexico, where he settled permanently in 1929. He died in October 1956, subsequent to surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  

Long and Cline were in touch by 1922, and they met in New York in 1923, as Long was heading on a trip to Paris. They kept in touch occasionally over the next few years.  A mutual friend was the poet Witter Bynner (whom Cline had met in 1918), and all three were contributors to the Midland magazine, edited by John T. Frederick out of Iowa, and to the Laughing Horse, edited by Spud Johnson in New Mexico.

Long’s writings are neglected today, though six of his poems appear in the Library of America volume American Poetry: The Twentieth Century Volume One (2000). Long’s books include poetry collections, Poems (1920); Atlantides (1931); Grist Mill (1946); and two posthumous collections, If He Can Make Her So (1968); and My Seasons (1977). 

Long’s prose works include Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935); Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), a historical novella about a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, retitled in 1944 as The Power Within Us; Walt Whitman and the Springs of Courage (1938); Malinche (Doña Marina) (1939), a fictional account of the controversial native woman that Cortes took as his consort in the early sixteenth-century; Piñon Country (1941); Children, Students and a Few Adults (1942), illustrated by his wife Alice Lavinia Long;  French Soldier: Home from Being a War Prisoner (1942); and A Letter to Saint Augustine: After Re-reading his Confessions (1950). A final novel Spring Returns, appeared posthumously in 1958, with a preface by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. 

In a letter to Cline of 17 November 1924, Long noted that he was “collecting my short stories” and asked Cline for a blurb to send off with the manuscript. Long apparently had difficulties placing the book, for it took two years to come out. The Bookfellows, a literary society founded in 1919 in Chicago, published the book; it was printed in September 1926 by the Torch Press of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in an edition of 435 numbered and signed copies. They were bound and published on November 2nd, making today the book’s centenary. 

Notes for a New Mythology was Long’s second book. It collects twelve stories and two poems (most previously published in periodicals), along with an introductory “To the Reader Who Reads Prefaces” and a concluding note “To the Reader Who Reads Postscripts.”  The former gives Long’s intentions as to what he was attempting with his stories.  Several quotations are apt:

All poets and story-tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are all engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, re-assembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own. Outr living poets and writers are creating a spiritual world for us which shall be as wide and as deep as their mingled consciousness can make it. (p. 13)

Fantastic is a word of many applications, it is true; undoubtedly the fantastic tale in its purest form invites the reader to look on a play in which the actors are not flesh and blood all the time, but sometimes symbols and portents. (p. 14) 

I am a lover of the gods. There are people who say that the gods are dead; but the gods I love are not dead. There are people who say there will never be any more gods.  No doubt they speak for themselves; so as far as I am concerned, whenever I need a new god or a new goddess I create one. . . . I want all the gods: at least, I want the chance to investigate the private life and family circumstances of any god in danger of being forgotten. (p. 15)

It remains to be proved that gods, like nightingales, have geographical limits. Because I live in Pittsburgh, must I relinquish the Greek gods? I see no reason why I should not house in my own mind as I please whichever of those white forms I choose to, even though am only a man and not a museum. Aphrodite and Psyche may not be good enough for the critics, but they are for me. (pp. 15-16)

I want to re-possess all the gods I love; I want to see them in an American landscape. We have been anxious of late that American writers should be aware of their landscape, of the particular flora that covers it, of the particular birds which visit its flowers and trees. (p. 16-17)

Do Long’s tales achieve any of these goals?  With qualifications, they do. Yet the end results do not completely conform to what twenty-first century (or even twentieth century) readers might expect from stories of the fantastic. First is the matter of the writing style. Long’s tales are not like fairy tales, and not simpler narratives.  Also, then manage to mix into the tales aspects of modern business life that might seem antithetical to a fantasy story. For example, in “The Professor of Dreams” (perhaps the best story in the volume) a college administrator bemoans that his school has never produced a poet.  Enter Dr. Greenlaw, who encounters considerable trouble while trying to teach his students about things other than profits. Eventually Greenlaw succeeds with the administrator’s son. Dr. Greenlaw is revealed to be a satyr. In “The City of Chameleons” the new director of the city’s symphony orchestra is suspected of being Dionysos himself, and the performance of his wildly imaginative composition causes fits in the established business class. “The Great Lodge” deals with a late eighteenth century manuscript which tells of a beautiful and eternally young native girl who beguiles three generations of men. “How Pittsburgh Returned to the Jungle” tells of the successful ploy of a businessman to increase the profit of his business by adding an unnoticed clause to a local law. It has its desired effect, and much more. Themes of music and love pervade the stories, often with unexpected results. 

Long’s book Pittsburgh Memoranda is a kind of partial and personal follow-up to Notes for a New Mythology, in that Long has made a collection of memoirs and memorabilia that are buttressed by his own experiences in understanding the social and industrial background of the town and how it relates to himself as a poet and idealist.  

Long’s works are eclectic and a reader is rewarded by paying close attention. 

'Thirteen O'Clock Club' by Cardinal Cox

 

Thirteen O’Clock Club by Cardinal Cox is the latest publication from the Peterborough poet, with a particular interest for readers of supernatural fiction. The pamphlet draws on his work as poet in residence for The Dracula Society, and was produced to coincide with a joint visit to Peterborough this year by members of that society and A Ghostly Company.

The thirteen verses draw on themes from writers in the field of uncanny literature who also have links to Peterborough. Each poem is accompanied by an erudite footnote giving fascinating information. Charles Dickens, for example, complained that on Peterborough station he was given “a petrified bun of enormous antiquity”: evidently aspersions on railway catering have a long history.  

Here may be found also poems about M.R. James’ ‘Lost Hearts’, local parson E.G. Swain’s The Stoneground Ghost Tales, John Gordon’s Fenland mysteries such as The House on the Brink, and the work of the once quite popular J.D. Beresford, born in nearby Caistor. This piece, ‘Lecture’, adroitly captures the interwar interest in the possibilities suggested by radio waves, with the idea that perhaps waves from our memories and imagination might also survive: Beresford was deeply interested in both psychic research and Theosophy.

A contemporary author whose work I did not know, Anthony Oldknow, is also evoked in ‘Necromancers’ Guild Miracle Play’. Other pieces reflect images from folklore and film.

Cardinal Cox’s verse is written most often with the resonant qualities of traditional verse, including rhyme and regular rhythm, and sometimes in more free verse form, but in all cases with an evocative vocabulary and the use of lingering images. The collection certainly gives a strong sense of the uncanny history and literature of the Fenland cathedral city.

Thirteen O’Clock Club is available in the UK while stocks last in return for an SAE sent to: 58 Pennington, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough, PE2 5RB, or by emailing cardinalcox1[at]yahoo.co.uk

(Mark Valentine)

'The Cone' at Ice Floe Press

The rather raffish town of Wells-next-the-Sea, North Norfolk, is always worth a visit for The Old Station Books & Pottery, which sells an unusual selection of second-hand books, curios and ceramics. We once found ourselves locked in here as the proprietor did not realise we were still wandering around its many nooks, and had closed up for the evening. Fortunately, a hand-bell at the foot of the stairs summoned him from his upper quarters, though there are worse fates than an enforced sojourn in a second-hand bookshop. 

The bookshop once had for sale in a glass case a copy of Through Beatnik Eyeballs (1961) by R.A. Norton, depicting a bearded guitarist and a girl in a min-skirt. I must admit this was tempting, especially as it included a ‘complete glossary for squares’. I suspect there could be nothing squarer than my own liking for second-hand bookshops, tea shops, walled gardens and ancient monuments, so this might have been highly educational, but it is a collectible book, especially among what I believe are known as hep dudes, and it was priced accordingly.

There was a further mysterious second-hand bookshop in the town. Carousels of crumpled holiday paperbacks could be discerned through the window, and miscellaneous correspondence scattered on the doormat, but it was seldom found open. It did once display a rather sunned Len Deighton first edition, though this might, of course, have been a clandestine signal to an espionage contact. At any rate, it has now closed.

However, Wells proved to have other arcane attractions. In my story ‘The Prospero Machine’ I wrote about seaside fortune-telling machines, and we chanced upon one just like these at the entrance to an arcade: Zoltar, an exotic mannequin in the garb of a sultan, with tarot cards spread out in front of him. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he demands, ‘I am a magic gypsy’:  and, in return for £1 (it would once have been a penny) he issues a card with your ‘fortune’ on it.

It was while perambulating through Wells that I also had an encounter with a giant upturned plastic ice cream cone. This unexpected apparition made me wonder about a slightly alternative world where the cone has become the subject of rumours and legends.

The result was a brief one paragraph prose fiction, and associated image, and ‘The Cone’ has just been published at Ice Floe Press,  a website journal based in Canada and edited by Robert Frede Kentor, Moira J Saucer and colleagues. Their Autumn 2026 running issue has the theme of ‘Dis/enchantments/Anomie/Spectacle’ and includes a selection of multi-media, visual and literary work.

(Mark Valentine)

 

A Men Only Magazine Anthology, April 1936 -- July 1963: The Best Writing from Its Initial Years

 

Earlier this year, I published a notice of Chris Harte's newest magazine history and bibliography (read it here). This was on the UK magazine Men Only, which ran from 1936 to 1963. Just out is the associated anthology, A Men Only Magazine Anthology (Sports History Publishing, ISBN 9781898010241), containing over one hundred of the best writings from the magazine. 

Notable authors include Negley Farson (a US newspaperman who married Bram Stoker's niece), Maurice Richardson, Alec Waugh, Andre Maurois, Winston Churchill, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Anthony Lejeune (a friend of Arthur Machen), among others. Of the other writers I notice Denys Baker from 1956-1958--this is the writer who later became known as Denys Val Baker. And I see one piece by Arthur Mills, who wrote many books, including one volume with fantasy short stories. Mills was the husband of Lady Dorothy Mills, notable explorer and author, from 1916 to 1933, when Lady Dorothy divorced him for infidelity. There are many authors unfamiliar to me. 

For other Wormwoodiana articles on Chris Harte's books, use the find function on your browser to search his name on this page, which will turn up, via the Labels function, that there are seven previous such articles. The Labels function at this blog (at the lower right of this page) serves as a kind of index. Click on the link and you will get all seven articles. 

The Centenary of 'Harmer John' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

For some three decades Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was a popular and prolific author who was capable of writing (if not publishing) at least one novel per year. These were substantial books, with heft not only in weight but scope and intention: products of a man who loved the work of Victorian novelists skilled in the creation of wide worlds to be entered and explored at leisure, settings teeming with characters and incident that reflected society – even as they could also lean towards its darker and more sensational aspects. Walpole would throw himself into his own novels with an engagingly childlike enthusiasm, writing swiftly and fluently with a reliability that enabled his books to be announced and published with an almost clockwork regularity. However, there was one novel that did not follow this established routine: Harmer John, first published one hundred years ago in October 1926.

In his biography Hugh Walpole (1952), Rupert Hart-Davis described how Walpole began his new novel at the end of 1922 but had almost immediately to put it aside for work on another novel that he could have complete and published in a magazine and in book form before the more complex and reflective Harmer John could have been ready. (The ‘extra’ novel, written over a few weeks, was The Old Ladies, which became the second of the ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of Polchester, preceding Harmer John, the third.)

Problems over scheduling were not the only reason for Walpole’s atypical delay in finishing Harmer John. In 1920 he had attended a concert and heard the young Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior (1890-1973), who was ‘the joy of the evening […] quite superb. Just the voice for me’ (Hugh Walpole 197). The two men met – and Walpole embarked on one of his most important and intense voyages of friendship, one which survived, despite initial discomfiture when Melchior remarried, until Walpole’s death. It was during that period of emotional and time-consuming distraction that Harmer John was written; it was perhaps out of relief as much as gratitude that Walpole dedicated it to Melchior, under the name he always used for him, ‘David’.

Subtitled ‘An Unworldly Story’, Harmer John is the account of the Dane Hjalmar Johanson’s time in Polchester from his arrival during a storm in December 1906 to his sudden and violent departure less than a year later. It dramatizes the conflict between the unworldly and the world, narrated in hindsight from 1926 by an unnamed native of the town who later reveals himself to have met and helped Johanson at the time. Characteristically, Walpole did not only show Polchester as a community consisting of people, but broadened his gaze to also take in and involve their setting: the streets and buildings of the town with its great cathedral, under all kinds of weather and effects of sunshine and moonlight.

Johanson was an innocent and rather naïve young man when he found refuge at Mrs Penethen’s boarding house. Handsome and with a superb body, a qualified instructor in gymnastics and masseur – ‘personal trainer’ – Johanson set himself up in business. Polchester quickly seemed to catch his enthusiasm and embrace him, accepting, on the surface at least, the novelty of his foreignness even as it stumbled over his name and adopted him as ‘Harmer John’. Johanson wanted to be friends with everyone, no matter who they were – and expected the same in return. He saw the best in everyone and always tried to do the right thing: to do what he thought was right. From that basis Walpole worked out and depicted the consequences of such an attitude – especially when held by a visitor, an immigrant – in a small, isolated, rather conservative community.

Book I, ‘His Arrival’ portrays Johanson’s ambition to transform Polchester and improve its people. He will have ‘a school for sculptors and artists and painters and make this town beautiful, keeping the old lovely things and making new things in tune with them’ (66). Things seem to be going well for the new inhabitant, yet he is unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that in his drive to make his mark he has also made enemies – including the unscrupulous and driven Samuel Hogg, owner of most of the property in Seatown, Polchester’s small but shamefully nasty and repulsive slum district.

It is Seatown, rather than Polchester, that would determine Johanson’s fate. Angered by what he had heard, he goes exploring for himself and enters a house lived in by a woman nursing her dying child. Perhaps thinking him the doctor, she allows him to stroke the girl’s forehead. ‘Over all the house there stood silence. For a long time his hand moved, then, the child gently sleeping, he took her and laid her gently in the bed’ (206). Soon rumours that Johanson had healed her start to spread; and from that time Hogg takes for himself the role of ensuring that Johanson’s plans come to nothing and will lead to his departure. Johanson’s developing relationship with Polchester, and several of its key citizens, is elaborated in Book II, ‘Of How He Stayed With Us’. Setbacks occur and relationships turn sour due to misunderstanding and intransigence. To his friends Johanson still ‘has the divine gift of tenderness and compassion’ – but for all his desire to ensure the best for Seatown, he still fails to realise that many of its inhabitants hate him (350ff).

In Book III, ‘How He Left Us’, despite the escalating gossip and misinformation about him, Johanson does not lessen his ambitions for change (422f). Johanson’s visit to a dying woman in Seatown and her death while there, gives Hogg and his associates an opportunity not to be missed. The incited riot is a fine example of one of the outbursts of violence and physical expressions of hatred and abuse that occur throughout Walpole’s work, as if he had been saving and impounding them for release at climactic moments. Left for dead, Johanson is thrown into the river: but his body is never found. Years later rumours still persist that ‘Harmer John’ did not die – and might return.

The date of Johanson’s death is given as 7 October: as well as the date of a fictional death, was it also that of a real birth? Walpole’s dedication to ‘David’ also included the date ‘October 7th, 1920’. Was this the date, a fortnight or so after Walpole first saw him, that he considered the inauguration of his deep friendship with Lauritz Melchior, another handsome blond Dane? Walpole always maintained a special fondness for Harmer John, one of his most ‘intensely personal books, into which he felt he had put more of himself than he had bestowed on any of his others’ (Hugh Walpole 358f). Friendship is never wasted.

(John Howard)