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, they 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.
