Vega

Vega

To. T.S.

These winter evenings it is far

Down in the west, the steadfast star;

And late at night so low it lies

The houses hide it from my eyes

As I go down the lonely street,

The white snow creaking under my feet.

But summer nights when I explore

A moon-drenched field, a star-washed shore,

It marks the zenith in the sky,

Our great blue steadfast star; and I

Remember how that August night

We stood together in its light.

How on the table, when the sun

Was down and all the chores were done,

You opened out the map, and we

All gathered round the lamp to see

Your great gnarled finger slow devise

The constellations on the skies;

How we went groping up the hill

That rose behind the house, until

Upon the top we stood amazed

By all the splendid skies, and gazed

And found at last at Lyra's peak

The steadfast star we planned to seek

All this and more my memory fills:

The yellow dunes, the deep green hills,

The sound the midnight breezes make,

And far across the gleaming lake 

The glory of the morning view;

But most of all I think of you.

Father and friend, whom all men find

Faithful, indulgent and most kind;

Whose rugged patriarchal strength

Years have not sapped in all their length:

Of all the goodness that you are,

My token is our steadfast star. 

The above text is taken from After-Walker (1930). The poem was first published in the December 1920 issue of The Liberator, where the dedicatee is named in full: Thomas Smurthwaite, Cline's father-in-law. Smurthwaite (1850-1929) and his wife Lu had a large family, and lived in a house above southern shore of Portage Lake, several miles north of Manistee, which is on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

Leonard Cline and Loyola College, Montreal

Leonard Cline matriculated as a freshman at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the fall of 1910. He was 17 and a half years old. Before that he had attended Loyola College in Montreal (at the time an eight-year classical school). He presumably graduated in the spring or early summer of 1910, but how long was he there? The mentions of Loyola in his papers are few.

In the summer of 1925, Cline wrote: "More than two decades ago--I am now 32--I became an oblate of the Order of the Holy Cross, Episcopalian, A few years later I was converted to the Roman Catholic church and went to a Jesuit college in Montreal."

In other places, Cline refers specifically to Loyola, so it is certainly the Jesuit college in Montreal to which he refers. More than "two decades ago" would be before the summer of 1905, so 1904 can serve as an estimate for Cline becoming Episcopalian (so presumably before Cline's father's death on 10 October 1904). Cline would have turned 11 in May 1904. "A few years later" would seem to mean 1906 for his conversion to Catholicism.  It seems unlikely that Cline attended Loyola before 1906. So if he attended Loyola for four years, the dating would be 1906-1910.

I have accessed a few detailed resources on Loyola College: Loyola and Montreal: A History (1962) by T.P. Slattery; and From "Le Petit collège de bois" to 7272 Sherbrooke St. West: A Brief History of Loyola High School, Montreal (2012), by Joseph B. Gavin, S.J. Sadly there is nothing in them about Cline.

Loyola College was founded in 1896. For decades it was mostly referred to as Loyola College, though it was both a boys high school and a college. It opened on St. Catherine Street, at the intersection with Bleury Street, in downtown Montreal on September 2, 1896, and after a fire less than a year and a half later it moved several blocks west to 68 Drummond Street (near the intersection with St. Catherine Street), where it operated from February 1898 though June 1916. In 1900, Loyola had purchased the Decary Farm (renamed Loyola Farm), comprising some fifty acres to the west of Montreal. Buildings were commenced at Loyola Farm in 1913, and the school moved there from Drummond Street in 1916. Loyola College remains at that location to this day.  

Cline's tenure at Loyola College was entirely while the school was located on Drummond Street. Sadly, few photographs of that location appear in the books I have been able to consult.  The enrollment at Loyola College in 1910-11--the year after Cline left--was 45 students in the Faculty of Arts (the Faculty of Science did not begin until 1943-44, and the Faculty of Commerce in 1948-49); thus 45 students was the total college enrollment. The total College and High School enrollment for 1910-11 was 259 students, so Cline, having left Loyola the year before, probably would have numbered among some two hundred high school students (numbers from Slattery, p. 284). 

One of Cline's classmates became very important to Loyola history: Francis ("Frank") M. Breslin (1893-1977), who attended Loyola high school and college between 1906/07 and 1913. Though he taught at Loyola from 1916-1918, and again in 1921-1922, his studies took him elsewhere for several years. He was ordained in August 1926, and came back to Loyola in 1930, teaching (Latin, Greek, English and French) and running the library (from 1942 until 1969), and then he worked in the bursar's office until 1975. Obituaries note that Breslin kept faithfully the Loyola Diary as well as a complete personal diary, and a black book in which he kept up-to-date accounts of his friends, former students and their addresses. (I wonder where these are now?)

How close were Cline and Breslin?  I wish I knew more, for the only evidence of their friendship in Cline's papers is a long, warm passage from November 1927 in Cline's hand which Cline had copied to retain. Cline's papers are very fragmentary, so the lack of other correspondence is not indicative of anything.

Also, from the Cline archive, there is an annotated photograph which I can't fully explain. Cline appears to be about eight years old in it, holding two dogs,and the annotation reads "AS A CHILD YE ED WAS QUITE AN EXPERT WITH THE HOUNDS". The photograph is small (about 2-and-a-quarter inches square), printed in blue (why blue?) and with red ink. I know of no instance where Cline was the editor of anything to which he might have included a photo of himself as a young boy.  Was this instance in some way related to Loyola?  Was there a yearbook or some student magazine that Cline might have edited as a teenager? I simply don't know.

Fear Not Love

This poem first appeared in Scribner's Magazine, for January 1926.  It was reprinted in After-Walker (1930).

Fear Not Love . . .

 

Were they vain that roof and door,

Tower and temple built their town,

Laughing, vaunting neither war,

Flood nor fire should cast it down?

Though time strew their stone again,

That was Babylon. Were they vain?

 

And they two that flower and stem

Growing vowed no law or creed,

King or god should sunder them:

Though time sunder them indeed,

Were they frustrate? They that are

Heloise and Abelard. 

Fear not love and fail not strive.

Icarus even is alive.

Haunted House

Leonard Cline's posthumous poetry collection After-Walker (1930) was submitted to the publisher a few years earlier under the title Haunted House. (For more, see here.)  Here is what would have been the title poem of the proposed collection. 

Haunted House

 

Laugh you will and it's laugh you may,

And sure it's a moonstruck tale to tell;

But the farmhouse stands there even today

And the crooked tree and the crumbling well,

All as they were the night I woke,

Sprawled on the grass, when the old house spoke.

 

"Evening, brother," the old house said

With a spidery chuckle and half a wink.

"There don't seem anything in your head;

You're about as empty as me, I'd think."

And I with a chuckle and half a grin

Said, "Evening, brother, and how've you been?"

 

"Tol'able, tol'able, can't complain,"

The old house answered. "And now it's May.

Only people give me a pain

And I wish you'd tell them to keep away. 

Tell them that the agent lied

When he said I wasn't occupied." 

 

And "Yes," said I, "when I was coming

Up the road and I saw the moon

Slip in the back door. She was humming

A sort of keening, a sort of tune.

And down in the village they say, too, 

There's a ghost that walks in you." 

 

"That's my Celia, that's my dear,"

The old house sighed. 

"A bride she went away from here

But the song of her stayed here my bride;

And here till I moulder and rot there'll be 

Nobody else will live in me. 

 

"Nobody else forever and all," 

The old house whispered, and said no more.

But I heard a keening, a sort of call,

And the moon came out of the broken door,

Came where I lay by the crooked tree

And leaned a moment over me.

 

Laugh you will and it's laugh you may,

And sure it's a moonstruck tale I've told;

But there's the farmhouse empty and gray

And the crumbling well and the crooked old

Crab-apple tree, as when I departed

Silent that night, haunted-hearted. 

And "Do me a favor before you go," 

The old house chuckled. "That sign FOR RENT,

Will you print the word NOT on it? . . . So,

Many thanks, brother." And as I went

I heard the old house: "Good-night, brother.

Can't we see some more of each other?"

Leonard Cline Reviews CHALK FACE (1924) by Waldo Frank

Cline's review of Waldo Frank's odd novel Chalk Face appeared on the book page at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, while Cline was on the staff there, on 18 October 1924. 

Waldo Frank Essays Modern Ghost Story

There is a sense of madness and at the same time a drug-like ecstasy always in the strange style of Waldo Frank. His sentences come twisted in baroque convolutions, with ellipses that have the effect of suspending one in the folds of mist. His mental processes, too, are almost convulsed; his associations are strained and chaotic and lead to traumatic metaphors. Ordinarilly, as in Rehab, one can hardly follow the story because one is absorbed in the style; but when, in Chalk Face, he attempts horror, style and matter are in agreement.

Chalk Face is a striking book. Here is a ghoulish thesis: that  a man by the creative force of his own passions can create a “larval man,” a monster with hands material enough to plunge a blade and yet with body spiritual enough to “plane” horribly through the air “like a bird of prey”; and that this man will go about through streets and corridors to do murder. “Chalk Face” is such a man, a modernist ghost.

On this foundation is built the chronicle of the struggle of Dr. John Mark. Two inexplicable murders, each of them calculated to further his own interest, throw him, already tortured mentally by a baffled love, into morbid brooding. On the suspicion that the murderer is something psychic, Mark determines to pursue him by psychic means, He shuts himself in his rooms, he denies himself tobacco or stimulants, he eats frugally of vegetables and fruit and he compels his feeling brain to thrust out the body into whatever spiritual plane of existence there may be. It is a curious chapter. Just so do theosophists discipline themselves to expect the hallucinations that surely must follow. And so, in the end, Mark confronts the murderer.

Of the stock articifes of the writer of horror stories, Waldo Frank uses several with success. There is gripping suspense after that interview of Mark’s with Mrs. Landsdowne, the clairvoyant, when she recoils from him, terror-smitten, and whispers, “What are you doing now?” The setting for the final episode with Chalk Face, the dreary ploughed field sloping to the slime of a lime kiln, is as grewsome as Poe’s dank tarn of Auber.

Chalk Face will serve at least as an introduction for Waldo Frank into the company of the really great writers of horror who are publishing these days. It is hardly as original a conception as the revolt of the beasts in Arthur Machen’s The Terror, or as that furtive thing of the Canadian wilderness in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo.” But it is certainly an achievement , and will find an interested audience, particularly among students of psychology. (Boni & Liveright.)

I read Chalk Face several years ago  Here is the main thrust of my review, which is more critical than Cline’s. It appears in my collection Late Reviews (2018):

I found it irritating and long-winded, with a central idea that might have been interesting if handled very differently. It is the first person narrative of one Dr. John Mark, who is writing his story in order to escape from his own “eternal Twilight” and to “dwell once more in the innocent world of men: in the world where the sun is luminous because the night is black, where life seems good because death is real.” This novel is filled with page after page of this kind of blather.

John Mark is a self-absorbed bore who pines after the woman of his dreams, Mildred Fayn. When he divulges his love to Mildred, she tells him of another suitor for her hand, Philip LaMotte, who is subsequently found dead, stabbed by a white-faced man. John Mark’s wealthy parents refuse to give him money to wed Mildred, and then they die in an auto accident, after which it is discovered that a chalk-faced man has interfered with the repair of their vehicle at the car shop. What this leads up to is that John Mark is so ambitious that his own will has embodied itself and killed off the people who would stand in the way of what his intellect wants. Mark slowly learns this, and then tells Mildred, who rejects him and believes him to be insane.

What makes this novel even more confusing is that most of it is written in an annoying present tense, though in many places it slips back and forth clumsily between the present and the past. This could possibly have been an interesting novel, but it is crippled by the style in which it is written, and the form in which the author chose to tell it. (p. 71)