The Viking Press Advertisement for The Dark Chamber

The Viking Press paid for this full page advertisement for The Dark Chamber in Publishers' Weekly for the July 30th 1927 issue, about two weeks before the book was to be published.  It shows their special support for both Cline and his novel.

Gretchen Mount Reviews The Dark Chamber

Gretchen Mount

I have so far been unable to source this review to its original appearance.  What I have is a four-page typed transcript, made by Cline, and headed "Gretchen Mount: for Detroit Free Press." It probably dates from around September 1927, for The Dark Chamber was published on August 15th, 1927. It is possible that the review was sent in advance to Cline by his old Detroit friend Gretchen Mount (1882-1931), who reviewed regularly for the Detroit Free Press [see here for a previous blog entry about her and her husband, Dick Mount]. Perhaps this review was never published, but it's worth resurrecting here for its insights into Cline's novel by an old friend. In making his transcription, Cline omitted a quotation and a synopsis of the novel, the former marked by [quote], the later by ellipses. I present the review here as Cline recorded it.

Here again (The Dark Chamber) speaks the author of God Head, who, in the opinion of some of us who genuinely admire his gifts, strayed a bit in his second novel. Of course, he is still speaking to a specialized audience—he is not likely ever to be a best seller—but this time his audience is a bit more diverse.

For instance, those who enjoy the Poe of “The Fall of the House of Usher” will find here the same terror and fascination; those who enjoy Huysmans will find here the same so-called decadent cataloguing of emotions translated into sound, odor and sight; those who enjoy Garnet’s Lady into Fox will find here the same fantasy, the same weird intermingling of animal and physical, beast and spirit; those who enjoy Conan Doyle (with especial reference to “The Hound of the Baskervilles”) will find here the same suspense and uncanniness; those who have delved into psychoanalysis, or self-hypnosis, or any other of those cults and beliefs which deal with the subconscious, will find here much material, both intentional and unintentional, upon which to exercise their favorite philosophy.

But above all, those who love a beautiful prose style; those who love phrases and words for their own loveliness, will find here a sensitiveness and a poetical verbal facility which rise above the macabre content of the novel to sing themselves to music and to the natural elements. For music and that thing we vaguely call “nature” have always been mingled in Leonard Cline's personal enthusiasms. The music of the spheres is continuously intelligible to him, and in this book the stars and the trees and the wind are no less important factors than the human characters. Even the opening paragraph bows to the powers of darkness:

[quote]

And at the end the dead body of Richard Pride, lying in defeat beside that dog whose name was death, is no more grisly than the “nest of ferns, crawling, vermiform,” upon which they lay in that “closet of damp shadow.”

Inasmuch as the relator of this grim tale is one Oscar Fitz­alan, a musician whose magnum opus is to be a ballet of the worlds, music is also present on every page—in every tree and hill and rivulet, in every wind that blows and every star that shines.

I am afraid that so far as this book is concerned, I shall have to confess that my vision of the town is a bit obscured by the houses. The haunting beauty of the individual paragraphs and phrases dwarfs for me the importance of the tale. Leonard Cline's prose, in this instance, as in God Head, makes me feel that I do not care what he says so long as he says it the way he does. But, briefly, the story is this:

 ….

In the end Richard Pride is dead with a gaping rent in his throat where the great tusk of the dog Death had ripped in. Miriam Pride is in her grave, and into the soft new loam above her a violet and a broken rock have been crushed carelessly by the spades of the diggers. Wilfred Hough has been found swinging from his chandelier, a black moth fluttering in circles about his dead face. Mordance Hall is looted, empty and leaking; its walls are dank with fungus and mildew; scurrying rats and looping snakes play about its broken floors. And the door of Richard Pride’s secret study is open—“open on those stacks where shelf on shelf were stored the moments of his life—the wind harrying them and sowing amidst them the seeds of mustiness and rot.”

Only Fitzalan and Janet escaped the virulence of this madness. And as I write that I have the feeling that Janet died, too, in those moments after her return and that her supposed depart­ure with her lover under the wings of Helion was only the wish-­fulfillment of a dream in his disordered brain. But that really does not matter.

What does matter is that Leonard Cline has done beautiful work in this tale of terror and death. He has succeeded in implant­ing in his reader’s mind with the first paragraph a sinister apprehension of evil which is never lifted until the end. The whole book feels like a stinking sinkhole with white slimy worms crawling in and out; and if that is, as I take it, the in­tention of horror stories, the goal is certainly achieved. And it is achieved with sentences so beautiful you want to read them aloud to someone; in images and similes so apt that you resolve to remember them forever, and with a sensitivity to scene and sound which arrest your progress in order that you may look once more with the author's eyes or hear once more with his ears.

No one in America today is writing more beautiful prose than Leonard Cline, and if his audience is limited it is because unhappily appreciators of beautiful prose are not so numerous as lovers of sentimentality.

Three Cline Poems from Newspapers

From one of Cline's scrapbooks, here are three poems.  The contents of this particular scrapbook dates from around 1915 to 1921, when Cline lived and worked in Detroit.  Two of the clippings are of short poems.  Here is "Wounded" from The Detroit News, 4 June 1920.

And here is "Memorial" from The Detroit News, 13 June 1920.

And finally, here is an undated clipping of one of my favorites of Cline's poetry, "Mass in the Valley." This poem is known to have appeared in The Midland for June-August 1924 (and later in After-Walker), but this clipping, presumably from The Detroit News, would date it probably to some time in 1921. Click on the image to make it larger.

Richard ("Dick") Mount

Dick Mount, who was mentioned in this blog's previous entry about Leonard Cline's son, was a friend and fellow newspaperman in Detroit.  He was more properly Charles Richard Mount (1883-1971), though he didn't use his first name, and signed his work as by "Richard Mount."  Around the time Cline knew him, he was married to the former Gretchen Crockett Mosshart (1882-1931), whose first husband had died in the influenza epidemic in 1918. Gretchen Mount also worked in newspapers, and many of her book reviews appeared in The Detroit Free Press.  Like Cline, Richard Mount published poetry in The Detroit News and fiction in The Smart Set.

At the publication of After-Walker: The Poems of Leonard Cline, a year and a half after Cline's death, Mount published the following review/memoir.

Posthumous Work of Leonard Cline Inspires Host of Tender Memories

Outside the moon is shining serenely in the sky and remote constellations creep slowly into the east. Inside there is a thin book of poems—rather surprisingly bound in lavender—and the ghost of a friend talking to me as he used to talk. And as I turn the leaves of the lavender book I hear, on some pages, only a waif of his voice, and on others, full-bodied, the old tones come back for me and for a moment my friend is alive again in the room.

For After-Walker is that posthumous books of his poems Leonard Cline’s friends never expected to see. It was rumored, yes: but what are rumors of the dead in this skeptical world? Books of poems aren’t published for profit—they are published for love, and it is generally assumed that poets who have not made a great reputation carry the verses they made and loved with them into their graves. So, now that he is dead, one may ask: for what love are these verses published? The answer to that is, of course, that they are published for love of Leonard. The poems are not, if the truth must be told, universal enough to be tremendously important. But the man was an original, a playboy with whom (as he laments in his “Bacchanale Solo”) nobody would play; a minor poet, a lover of faded musics, a master of truly important prose style, a gentle, lovable stray from the age of the trouveres, who lived feverishly as if with some tragic foreknowledge that his life was to be brief.

And with what authentic accents you come back to haunt me, charming hellion!

“I held my bottle firmly between my knees

And deplored the passing of Dionysus.

And I lamented that all the night

Was empty of flute music . . .”

Wine, women, song, Arcturus and Bach and street cars, hillsides and automobiles honking on the roads!

But I must take up the heavy business of reporting on your poems. How does one begin to do that for friends whose ears are clogged with dust, stopped alike to praise or blame?

It is hard, of course, for me to judge these poems objectively—to me, at least, they are not the echoant verses of a dead minor poet, embalmed in lavender. They are too personal to their author for that, which is both their strength and their weakness. They were his escape from a reality frequently too distressing to him and his interpretations of the events that had overwhelmed him. The title poem, “After-Walker,” comes straight from that Connecticut prison where he spent a year (though it seems a sort of atrocious myth now to think that gentle soul in prison) and he was his own “Mad Jacob.”

Indeed, rereading these verses tonight recalls Plato’s splendid figure of the man in chains who, unable to turn his head, faces the conjuror’s curtain, while behind him, on a raised roadway between the sun and the curtain, the activities of the world pass, throwing their shadows on the screen. Like that man in chains, I see the reflection of Leonard’s life, fantastic and distorted, thrown on the screen of his words. I see the reflection of events that were preposterous and sad, rational and embarrassing and gay—the varied chances of a life lived insecurely but, somehow, lived completely.

But will these be as significant to one not his familiar? It is not for me to say. They have the slightness of poetry that arises solely from the emotional moments of the poet’s own life; but beauty is its own importance and they are beautiful. The realities behind them are merely hinted in a paradox of evasion; but if they are not “strong” they have the strength of expressing entirely how one man reacted to his prison, the universe. They are neither philosophical nor metaphysical, but Leonard Cline was a fine poet for all that. He had a fancy that contracted space: Vega was his sun and Abydos was just around the corner. He had an imagination that negated time: Babylon was a teeming city to him still and Louhi, “that old crone,” whined in his chimney. Words were things to him and intuitions more actual than facts: nature was his reality and our civilization was his only myth.

Insofar as After-Walker represents the poet’s own selection, it is at his best. Of those added by other hands only “Snake” (a superb narrative bit) and “Tenebrae” justify inclusion. The occasional verse they have included is just occasional verse and the sonnet on St. Francis is more than indifferent. After all, Leonard pious was Pan in gaiters, Dionysus at a masquerade with the ends of his collar buttoned back. One misses, moreover, in this collection, two of his very finest pieces—one in its lightness and the other in its masterly narrative—to perish uncaptured fugitives, fled into faded ink and forgotten. But, alas, we shall probably never see them again. For both his here and now are timeless today and he himself is one with “yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.” So if none of these rescued verses quite equals the poetry of his prose Godhead (and which of his contemporaries has written a more beautiful novel?) what does it matter? We can only bid him adieu. But if he cried no “Vale!” back to us, we cannot let him go in silence. Let us repeat for him words his lips formed in happier days:

“I have strung stars upon my nubbin horns,

My little hooves are washed in moonlight,

My face is rinsed in roses;

And I call to them

And they do not answer. . . .”

From The Detroit Free Press, 29 June 1930.

Cline's Son: Leonard Lanson Cline III

Louise with her two children 1922

Cline's son was Leonard Lanson Cline III, born in Detroit, Michigan, on 21 November 1916.  As Cline had done for his daughter, so did he also write a poem for his son, probably in 1921, just before the family moved to Baltimore.  The poem reads in part:

Gemini: Castor

That night Dick* came, and first you heard him play,
Did Beauty speak that night, and did you hear?
We saw you falter in your mimic fray,
Let fall your toys, and turn your eyes away,
Enchanted, yet abashed, and venture near;

We saw you stand, and saw your spirit rise
As winged to strange new heights, a little boy
With towsled yellow hair and wondering eyes,
And in them what a trouble of surprise,
What rapture of inexplicable joy! 

After his parent's divorce in 1924, young Leonard occasionally sent his father some poems he had written.  His father responded to one of these with a poem of his own, later printed in After-Walker (1930) as "Variation on a Theme of My Son's."

In January 1929, young Leonard's father died. In March, his maternal grandfather Thomas Smurthwaite died in Manistee, Michigan. Louise and the children went to Manistee to grieve and to recuperate. But young Leonard contracted spinal meningitis and died in Manistee on 25 July 1929, aged twelve. Louise and Mary Louise felt that their entire world had been shattered. 


* Dick was Dick Mount, a family friend and fellow newspaperman in Detroit. 

Cline's Daughter: Mary Louise Cline

Self-portrait, 1941*

Cline and his wife had two children.  The first-born, a daughter, was named Mary Louise Cline, after her mother (who was known familiarly by her second name Louise).  Their daughter was always known by both names, "Mary Louise." She was born in Manistee, Michigan, on 6 September 1914.  She grew up in Detroit until around 1922, when the family moved to Baltimore.  She studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and became an artist.  Over the years she exhibited her paintings and drawings at area shows. In 1940 she married J. Henry Jarrett (1906-1978); they had one son and one daughter. She died at her home in Alexandria, Virginia, on 11 August 1995 at the age of 80. 

Mary Louise was very close with her father, who wrote a poem dedicated to her in February 1920 entitled "Gemini: Pollux." The second part of this poem appeared in a newspaper as "For My Daughter" (see it at right; click on the image to make it larger). It prophetically pictures Mary Louise remembering her father after his death.

The inspiration for Cline's short story about a young girl called "Mekku" (in The Midland, February 1927) is easily discerned by anyone who knew his daughter.  In December 1927 Cline asked Mary Louise, then age thirteen, to be one of his literary executors. She and her mother arranged for the posthumous publication of a volume Cline's poems, After-Walker (1930), which also includes the poem "For My Daughter."

I knew Mary Louise for the last six years of her life. None of my work on her father would have been possible without her friendship and generous cooperation.

Mary Louise, around 1990

* Used by permission of the Estate of Mary Louise Jarrett.

Cline's Sister: Betty Wierengo

Cline had only one sibling, a sister, Elizabeth Forsyth Cline (known in adulthood as Betty), who was born two years before him, on 22 June 1891.  She attended Wellesley College for a year (1909-1910), and the University of Michigan for a year (1911-1912).

Betty Wierengo in 1927

She married John Leslie Wierengo (1886-1945) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 29 May 1912.  They settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and had three sons. Her husband ran a local advertising firm.

In September 1927 she stood by her brother when he was brought to trial for first degree murder in Connecticut.

She organized the Michigan Unit of the American Cancer Society, and led that group from 1930 to 1941. She held a national post from 1942 to 1952.  Later she became a real estate agent. Betty Wierengo died in Grand Rapids on 1 December 1966.

Cline's Second Wife: Katharine Gridley

Katharine Gridley in 1927

Cline knew Katharine Doolittle Gridley (1895-1947) in the 1910s and early 1920s when he was on the staff of the Detroit News.  Katharine was soon living in New York, with her common-law husband Holger Cahill (1887-1960), but around 1923 they separated and Katherine paired up with Cline. (Cline's first wife divorced him for adultery in 1924.)  Katharine and Leonard were eventually married in Stamford, Connecticut, on 9 November 1926, but their relationship was frequently difficult. After Cline was charged with first degree murder in the shooting death of a friend visiting the Cline house in Willimantic, Connecticut, in the summer of 1927, Katharine deserted Cline and they were divorced in 1928.

Katharine worked as an artist, and as a newspaper illustrator and occasional writer. Cline's first novel, God Head (1925), is dedicated to her, and a sketch of Cline by Katharine (reproduced at right) appears alongside a review by Professor Warren Bower of the University of Michigan of God Head in The Lansing State Journal c. 19 March 1926.

After leaving Cline, Katharine returned to the Detroit area, where many members of her family lived, and in the 1930s she married a man surnamed Brown, but this marriage did not last. Katharine moved back to New York, where on 11 July 1942 she married a man named Daniel McMahon. Katharine was widowed before her death in Detroit at the age of 51 on 17 January 1947.

Cline's First Wife: Louise Smurthwaite

Louise Cline in 1927

Cline's first wife was born Mary Louise Smurthwaite (1893-1980), but she was always known familiarly as Louise. Cline seems to have met her in Ann Arbor, in the early 1910s, when Cline and at least one of Louise's sisters were students at the University of Michigan.  Louise was perhaps a student there as well, but apparently only for a short time (her name does not appear in the contemporary University of Michigan registers). She and Cline were married in her native town of Manistee, Michigan on 28 October 1913.  They had one daughter and one son.

In March 1922 Cline joined the staff of The Baltimore Sun, and the family moved to Maryland. In 1924 Louise divorced Cline on the charge of adultery.  In Baltimore Louise became a radio singer at WBAL, and originated a popular annual Christmas carol program at a local department store. She taught singing at the Peabody Conservatory's Preparatory School for forty-four years.

Hazelton Spencer

She and Cline reconciled in 1928, and they planned to remarry, but Cline died suddenly in January 1929. Around 1932 or 1933, Louise became the second wife of the literary scholar Hazelton Spencer (1893-1944), who had been educated at Boston University (A.B. 1915) and Harvard University (A.M. 1920; Ph.D. 1923). Hazelton began to teach English at Johns Hopkins University in 1927 and became a Professor of English there in 1937. He authored books on Shakespeare, and edited The Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay (1931) and Elizabethan Plays (1933). 

Louise Spencer died at the age of 87 in Alexandria, Virginia, in May 1980.

Ask Me Another! The Answers

Here are the answers to the quiz presented in the previous blog-post of 7 May:

Leonard Cline in Ask Me Another! The Question Book

The Viking Press was founded in 1925, and Leonard Cline's first novel God Head was on their first list of six publications. At that time, Simon & Schuster (founded in 1924) was having great success with crossword puzzle books.  Publishers were of course looking for other books offering similar types of entertainment. So in February 1927 Viking Press published a question book, compiled by Justin Spafford and Lucien Esty.  It consists of some thirty general quizzes and another ten special quizzes, on specific topics (e.g., The Arts, American History, The Bible, and Sports, etc.). The answers are printed at the back of the book.  One of the gimmicks involved was the fact that each quiz was taken by someone well-known in some way, and their overall scores were published along with the quiz they had taken. Participants include: Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley (who also wrote a Preface to the book), along with a lot of names I don't recognize more than ninety years after the book debuted. And I see one name that is relevant here: Leonard Cline.

The book was a quick success.  In March 1927, one month after publication, the book achieved a ninth printing.  A follow-up volume came out later the same year, but it was much less successful.

Leonard Cline participated in General Quiz Number Nineteen.  He scored a 70 out of a possible 100 points (with fifty questions per quiz, two points were awarded for each correct answer).  I'll copy the quiz below. One wonders which are the fifteen questions that Cline missed?  The answers will appear in a follow-up blog post.

If This Be Treason: a Book Page on Murder

Cline's literary column. "If This Be Treason," ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from around 25 October 1924 through 21 February 1925. The dates come from the clippings kept by Cline in his scrapbook.  What is apparently the final column is a book page about murder. Sadly and ironically, Cline notes in it that "the history of the courts reveal few cases in which a literary man has been successfully prosecuted for a killing." In September 1927, about two and a half years after this column was published, Cline found himself on trial for first degree murder.  I reprint the entire column below.  It begins with a poem by Cline's friend Witter Bynner.

Murder

By Witter Bynner

Once of all my friends and cronies

First was my own heart and best;

But aggrieved my heart rebuked me,

And I broke it in my breast.

Now my body laughs and offers

Any sum I bid it lend;

And I borrow and I borrow—

And I spend and I spend.

—From Grenstone Poems

**

With Arsenic and Ax

Surely one needs make no apology in bringing out a murder number of a books page. It has one of the chief diversions of humankind, ever since Cain, in a fit of peeve hardly consonant with the relative serenity of his times, perpetrated his utterly inartistic slaughter of Abel. Without it Euripides would have been a dull fellow, Shakespeare no more than a comedian of sorts. Edgar Allan Poe the dingy genius of an editorial office. Why, the very history of the Habiri, as recounted from Genesis on, would be a wallow of pollyanna. Indeed, it is quite impossible to imagine this best of all possible worlds without the thing.

And our interest in murder still continues. To be sure, the uplift from time to time turns gnashing on the matter and exerts its influence to stamp the practice out. Nevertheless, every now and then one of us has a going-out, and the rest of us hustle breathlessly to view, vicariously through the press if not actually in person, the corpse. Indeed, there is coming to be, among the more cultured, a greater and greater delight in every new slaying of actually aesthetic qualities. The murderers are feted and banqueted at the most exclusive cafes.

In a studio in one of Greenwich Village’s most noisome and exclusive alleys, a year ago, a Murder Club was organized. Among those present were a professor of psychology in one of our great universities, an organist and pianist of repute, a sculptress, two poets and two business men. It was decided that on the night of every murder in New York City, the club would dine. As guests of honor would be invited the newspaper men who had covered the murder and the murderer herself; it was expected, however, that now and then it would be impossible to get in touch with the lady. At the conclusion, the murderer and the reporters would be asked to describe the deed, and the evening would end with a general discussion of it from aesthetic and psychological points of view.

Eventually the club collapsed, some of the members becoming tired of boarding together.

**

Brightly did McNaught’s Monthly start the new year, in its January number, with a charming essay on our present subject by Charles B. Driscoll, in which he declares: “There are two kinds of murder, the grave and the gay. The former should be suppressed.” As a fine example of the gay murder, which Mr. Driscoll so eloquently defends, he gives the following:

“There was a barber with an artist’s soul, residing in one of our large Western cities. A customer requested a shave, but insisted on talking back. The talkative shavee had not been going long when he expressed the opinion, if I can recall it correctly, that Calvin Coolidge is nothing less than another Abraham Lincoln and Moses, combined in one super-character. The barber with the soul cut a warning gash athwart the customer’s left cheek, and lapsed into comparative silence. The rash patient continued to converse. He said that Judge Landis is a gentleman, a jurist unexcelled, and a stickler for clean baseball. The barber could endure no more. He cut the victim’s windpipe neatly in two, between the predicate end and the object. Placing the razor carefully upon the remains, he went into the street and summoned a policeman.”

Mr. Driscoll deplores, as must we all, that so sensitive a spirit is now reduced to shaving his fellow convicts in a state penitentiary. It would also seem hardly fair to the other convicts. But then, such treatment cannot have been encouraging: harsh criticism worried Keats almost to death. The dejected fellow today in all probability would not retort with even a half-inch slick on the chin to the most preposterous affirmation by a loquacious customer. Helpless in his chair, one doubtless could asseverate even that Theodore Dreiser is the greatest thinker in contemporary letters, without fearing more chastisement than perhaps the loss of an ear-lobe.

**

Mr. Driscoll’s is but one literary voice raised in protest against too broad a censorship of dirk and pistol. Are we to assume that other literary ladies and gentlemen agree with the uplift? No, no, no; that is incredible. Rather let us conclude that, with their bludgeons as with their booze, they indulge in quiet, feeling that the homicide laws are no more effectual to constrain them than are the prohibitionist.

In the cellar of Henry Mencken, for instance, there is unquestionably much more to be found than empty bottles. Search of the place might disclose a very catacombs, an array of grinning skulls, each one with a gaping wound left by his vorpal pen. Doubtless, too, they are labeled; this was a critic, this a soprano, this the author of a novel in which the hero slew the villain just as he was about to steal a kiss from the lilylike heroine. Else why do critics disappear so frequently, drop out of sight and leave no trace behind them but the miasma of their opinions?

And there is Ben Hecht. Rumors too persistent to be denied indicate that from a secret door in his study Ben Hecht issues forth upon the streets of Chicago every night, armed with hatchet and lantern. Never is he content until he has treed a Winkelberg*, and though as yet there is no bounty on their skins Mr. Hecht never allows them to escape the dogs.

Then history of the courts reveals few cases in which a literary man has been successfully prosecuted for a killing. But let us not conclude on merely such evidence that they all eschew arsenic and the ax. Why, even myself. . . . But those were, after all, matters of slight importance.

**

A curious side-light on the matter of murder is afforded by the latest volume published by Simon and Schuster, The Celebrities Cross-Word Puzzle Book. Fifty notables of art, politics and finance were asked each to contribute a puzzle. They did so, apparently quite without realizing that to the psychoanalyst, scrutinizing the particular words that forced themselves out from the subconscious upon the printed page, each contributor was making a complete revelation of himself. To be sure, here was a hundred-word test quite similar in effect to that of the psychological laboratory.

On this theory one studies with huge delight the puzzle composed by little Miss Ann Pennington, How graciously harmless she appears indeed on the Follies stage! But now, fill in the squares of her diagram. No. 21 Horizontal is defined as “whip,” and turns out to be “lash.” No. 24 Horizontal is defined as “cut, as with a sword,” and turns out to be “slash.” No. 4 Vertical is defined as “grind the teeth,” and turns out to be “gnash.” No. 5 Vertical is defined as “heedless,” and turns out to be “rash.” No. 39 Vertical is defined as “blood,” and turns out to be “gore.” No. 50 Vertical is defined as “raves” and turns out to be “rants.”

I hesitate still to congratulate Miss Pennington; her appearance is so completely disarming. But this puzzle of hers may indicate to the shrewd psychologist that, should a committee of rash censors happen to call on Miss Pennington, ranting and raving, she herself might slash into them with whip and sword, gnashing her white teeth.

**

Only, no murder ever should be committed with gnashing of teeth. It is undignified, to say the least, to allow one’s temper to get beyond one’s control. It shows lack of breeding, lack of philosophic equanimity; and in such a condition one is likely to mar the artistic effect. If a man is going to commit murder let him do so with an obvious joi de vivre, genteelly, delicately, with a flow in his button-hole. To any murderer such as this I offer an eager hand of approval.

* Winkelberg: the Babbitt of Mr. Hecht’s Humpty Dumpty.

Cline on the Kalevala

In a 1925 essay on "The Lineage of God Head," Cline noted that "seven years ago, as music critic for the Detroit News, I had occasion to prepare in advance a description of the Second Symphony of Sibelius. To understand that music one must know something about the folk-lore of Suomi. I read the Kalevala, I conned the ancient songs as they have been collected by Merikanto and other composers.  Next door to me lived a Finnish family. Sometimes in the evening there would be company in that house and the men and women would sing together, long nostalgic ballads, many of them in queer pentuple rhythm, stamping the time with their heels." Cline's interest in the Kalevala, in in Finnish things in general, was a major influence on his first novel, God Head (1925). 

On 16 July 1924, he published a column in the New York World on Finnish things. I copy it in full below.

Kullervo and Others

Once every four years, at the time of the Olympic Games, we are called upon by patronizing sport writers to mark with surprise the achievements of “that plucky little country,” Finland, whose athletes give the best of our own populous nation a real tussle for the laurels. But who shouts for Finland when Saarinen, the architect, comes to the United States and takes second place in the Chicago Tribune competition with a design more beautiful and certainly far more distinctive in its beauty than any other submitted? Who bespeaks our surprised attention when Selim Palmgren, the pianist, comes to the United States and introduces us to a group of songs, some by himself and some by Sibelius, Merikanto and others of his contemporaries, that are among the loveliest we have ever heard?

Lest Finland come to be known only as a nation of javelin-hurlers and long-winded runners, somebody should point out the achievements of that country in other lines. One should point out, for instance, that not only its hard-muscled athletes but every single person in that country—little children, frail mothers and maids, even feeble old men and tremulous women quavering through the last pale years of life—goes through, day after day, the ordeal of talking in Finnish. After that, why should one be surprised at anything the Finns accomplish?

Many will remember for a day, while it is still fresh, the name of Alben Stenroos, the forty-year-old Marathon champion. While the impulse endures, they might get the Kalevala, the ancient Finnish epic. Here is a book of most delightful stories and of a quality refreshingly different, if one is not too sensitive to stand the monotonous rhythms. The color of the book is peregrine and rich: the sun is always silver in the Kalevala and it is the moon that is gold. And the characters of the Kalevala are as different from the elegant divinities of the Mediterranean myths as is the sun of Suomi from ours.

At least one tremendous figure strides through the Kalevala: Kullervo, the youth born with every physical and mental endowment, who never in all the enterprises he undertakes is successful; there is nothing quite like him in literature, I believe.

It is quite characteristic that in these ancient Finnish legends a favorite method of wonder-working is by song. Lemminkainen, arriving at the island of loverless maidens, sings himself up a most marvelous estate, from mountain ash trees and cuckoos to a row of pots filled with ale. Väinämöinen too is a mighty singer, and there is a picture of him strumming his great kantele, with all the birds and beasts come to listen, and all the men and girls and the very trees dancing for gladness.

One afternoon I bought a Finnish grammar and a dictionary and a reading book and started in to master the language. Not until then did I really appreciate the Kalevala. Not that it contains so much strange, cold beauty, but that it was written at all. I came at last on the lamp that illumines the entire people of Finland. Plucky? God wot, they are positively foolhardy. Men that can speak that tongue can do anything else they have a mind to.

I am considering a project to have Finnish replace Greek in the school curriculum. It will serve the torturer’s purpose even a little better; and, then, it will be so seldom forgotten after the young people leave school. It will have been, you see, so seldom learned.

During the first four years of Finnish, in high school, the students will study how to decline nouns in the singular, in all the sixteen cases, During the second four years, in college, the students will learn how to decline nouns in the plural. This is formed, very furtively, by putting an “i” as near the middle of the noun as possible. But oh, what that ordinarily innocuous “i” does to a Finnish noun! It takes the sturdy, self-reliant, honest noun and twists it into a vulgar, strutting libel of its former self.

There are forty-six rules by which this change is accomplished, and by diligent effort the student will be able to memorize the last of these by commencement day. After graduating, having learned how to decline his nouns, the student of Finnish can while away the years of his adulthood and putter around through all his senility learning how to pronounce them.

It is unquestionably one of the most beautiful languages in Europe. It has few consonants, but those it does have it pronounces jealously. It has many vowels, with all the soft sounds of French, and a manner of clinging caressingly for a fraction of a second to a doubled vowel. But it combines these vowels in a way that defies the most lissom tongue, Consider the word for night—“Yö.” The first letter is pronounced like the French “u” and the second like the French “eu.” Try pronouncing them—as a dipthong.

Many are the charms of the Finnish language. It has, for instance, no such word as our “not.” When I first discovered that fact, my elation knew no bounds, and I was on the point of getting a passport at once for Finland; but I discovered that after all there is a way to say no in Finnish. It is a very laborious process however; and while I have abandoned for the time being my plan to join Finland, I find the language a very helpful one in times of temptation.

Most charming of all is the haunting, the ineffably tender, expression “korpikuusen kyyneleitä.” Finland, you must know, is a Prohibition country. It has developed, even as our own, a vigorous industry in the production of illicit liquor; and, as do all Prohibition peoples, it has given this liquor a name most movingly beautiful. We call ours “moonshine.” The Finns call theirs “korpikuusen kyyneleitä,” which means “tears of the pine tree that weeps in the swampy wilderness.”

It is, so to speak, in Finland, tears, women and song on occasions of that kind. Chiefly song. I purchased at one time in a most interesting shop in Harlem, where there is a numerous settlement of Finns, a book of their national songs—ancient ones, vestiges of the old days when the runes of the Kalevala were sung during the long winter nights, and the more recent ones, up to the present composers. There are some five hundred songs in the book. I asked the amiable young woman who keeps the shop to mark in the back of the book those songs which every Finn would know by heart. She was very kind and took a pencil and marked 176 of them.

In an Olympic festival of music it is possible Finland might take a place higher than we, although we do manage to beat her up in sports.

Leonard Cline

If anyone knows the identity of the book of national Finnish songs that Cline mentions in the final paragraph, please let me know. 

Cline and Huysmans Part 3 of 3

On Wednesday, 16 April 1924, Heywood Broun gave a part of his regular column "It Seems to Me" over to Leonard Cline, who thereby got to voice his views on what happened with La Bas and his review of it.  I copy the complete Cline part below.

“La Bas,” writes Leonard Cline, “has been relegated there, it would seem, and all because of a review that was written, according to the best evidence, by myself. Stallings could swear to the signature, and the cashier might confront me with a voucher, if I tried to deny it. Yet, if the facts were not so indisputable, I’d never believe that words of mine should go on the oriflamme of a Sumner crusade.

“Ten years from now, when I creep stealthily by night to consult a psychoanalyst, he will try desperately to find out why I should always be swallowing poison and shooting myself and laying hold of third-rails. He won’t succeed until he uncovers, deep in my subconscious, the horrid memory of the fact that once, in the year 1924, Mr. Sumner spoke of a book review by me as ‘good’ and ‘clean.’

“I shall be cured possibly, in the end, but I think of what I shall suffer during the decade! Imagine waking every night, perspiring with dread, from a nightmare in which Mr. Sumner comes by my bed and thanks me and calls me good and clean!

“Lest the clergy take me up and canonize me, as they have St. William H. Anderson, I beg to explain. The introduction of my review of La Bas originally was a violent declaration of a belief of mine that, smut or sedition, people should have the right of free speech. It’s a queer and suspicionable notion, I know, and most people won’t hold with me; but somehow I can’t help cherishing it. Then I admitted that if free speech on lickerish themes is going to corrupt people, well they ought to have the right to be corrupted. This was the head of the review, and Stallings lopped it off in order to fit the corpse into the ditch. God pity him, he must have heard it cry!

“Well, in concluding, I pointed out that Huysmans doubtless wrote La Bas with a purpose as austerely moral as that which actuated funny old Hosea. If my recollection doesn’t fail me, this paragraph also suffered the knife.

“So there the review was, head and tail gone. Mr. Sumner picked up the neck of it for a swan. ’Fore God, it was born a viper.

“Don’t think I want to apologize for the review. I did point out that La Bas carries the heaviest load of mustiness and filth that I’ve ever found between covers. That happens to be the truth; and I conceive that one function of the reviewer is to tell what is in the book. And if Mr. Sumner wants to make that his shibboleth, and if as a result Albert and Charles Boni lose money, I don’t consider myself at fault. My hope in writing this communication is to avoid being pointed out by my fellows in the present, and having pilgrims visit my tombstone in the future, as a friend of Mr. Sumner’s.

“Mr. Broun, Mr. Broun, he might even call on me!”

Cline and Huysmans Part 2 of 3

After Cline's review of La Bas appeared on 30 March 1924, the publisher received an invitation to appear in the office of the District Attorney to defend the book. A complaint had been lodged by John S. Sumner (1869-1971), who was then the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an arch-conservative organization that had successfully prosecuted and removed from sale books like The Genius by Theodore Dreiser in 1916, and failed to remove from sale Jurgen by James Branch Cabell in 1919.

On Friday, 11 April 1924, an article in the New York World noted that La Bas had been withdrawn by the publisher, after the threat of prosecution.  Albert and Charles Boni were a new publishing firm, having been founded in 1923. 

On Saturday, 12 April 1924, New York World columnist Heywood Broun gave literary editor Laurence Stallings much of his column to describe what happened.  I quote the Stallings portion here in full.

“Before you begin the assault on the censors,” writes Laurence Stallings. “may I confess partial responsibility for the suppression of La Bas? It was reviewed for the Sunday page by Leonard Cline, who stated that Huysmans work, while a terrific piece of demonology, was certainly not a book for smut-hunters. Charles Boni, its publisher, knew that The Sunday World was carrying a review, and feared that Sumner would seize upon the book if the work was reported as Cline had done. The review, of course, was run anyway. Just as Boni feared, Sumner got it, and cited to District Attorney Banton that a good, clean paper had adjudged La Bas, however indirectly, as worthy of the reformer’s hire. Boni’s fears were realized in full, and he sent the plates to Sumner’s society.

“I think the case interesting enough to be stated in full. Boni had two books he was fearful for. You know, of course, that it was once proposed that Sumner pass on manuscripts and save the publisher the expense of printing books Sumner doesn’t like, and that he declined. So Boni had no alternative but print the books, or discard the manuscripts without a trial. Other publishers had rejected La Bas. He printed them. Havelock Ellis, in his Affirmations, admires them both. I cite Ellis, because in so far as I know he is the fairest, most wind-swept mind in the profession.

“The first book was de Selincourt’s One Little Boy. This study of adolescence found critics as widely removed as Margaret Sanger and the Y.M.C.A. calling it important. Boni was safe. He published La Bas and was on the mat in the District Attorney’s office before three weeks was out. Nearly 2,500 copies (the first edition) were sold. Wednesday he sent the remaining thirty-seven copies and the plates to Sumner’s society.

“I hold no brief for the Boni brothers. They quit rather than fight. Yet they may not be censured particularly for having elected to lie down. Young publishers with little capital, they stood to lose everything by a fight. When Sumner hits a book it is done through District Attorney Banton’s office. The publisher is invited to call with his attorney. The D.A. cites the passages and asks the lawyer if he believes his client has a chance under the penal section, with the book in question before a jury of twelve men.

“The Boni house would have lost the La Bas fight in all probability. Also, a great many bookshops would have discriminated against other publications on their list. In other words, they would not fight, because a fight would have cost them something.

“Few publishers will stand up and test a book before a jury. Give Seltzer credit for artistic nerve, and mark down Knopf for having eaten crow last fall when Floyd Dell’s Janet March was withdrawn. Knopf even declined to tell me that it had been withdrawn and Banton asked that it be given no publicity.

“It seems to me that the public might as well know that there is a definite censorship operating against it effectively in the person on Sumner, and with whatever strong financial influences there may be to back him. Perhaps there is no use shouting either for or against a Clean Books Bill. It would all resolve into one arbiter of literary elegance, who probably should be another such well-intentioned man with a financial security. The situation would be unchanged whatever laws were operating. As usual, the poor man either cannot or will not fight for his rights, and the well-off man is sufficiently solvent to disregard the many laws regulating his reading and drinking.

“Perhaps all statuses supervising the publication of books should be wiped off the board. I object and confess to an illiberality precisely that of Sumner’s. The difference is only an artistic one. Thus the only book law which I should call just would be one empowering me to assume the functions and arrogances just now embodied in Sumner, I would not hesitate to sweep away juvenile pornography written by hired men for country boys to read in the hay-loft, myself fanatical enough to forbid them the literary delights I myself once knew. Even here would be the typical reform attitude, despite an artistic intention. My plan would insist that little boys who found themselves unable to stave off puberty might be forced to read Havelock Ellis and others as equally fascinating about the most fascinating phase of human existence. . . . Thus I confess that no new book law will work; and I am damned if I can think of anything better than Sumner or myself.”

Cline and Huysmans Part 1 of 3

The New York World, in the 1920s, was perhaps the premier newspaper in New York City. Leonard Cline was on its staff from around May 1923 through August 1924, though he nearly lost his job in May 1924 after he'd gone on a drinking spree. James W. Barrett, the City Editor of the New York World, remembered Cline in 1931 as a "wonderfully good reporter when sober." Besides his work as a reporter, Cline also contributed book reviews and poems (the latter, to Franklin P. Adams's column, "The Conning Tower"). One of his book reviews caused quite a stir.  This was his review of a new translation of La Bas by Joris Karl Huysmans, published by Albert and Charles Boni under the title Down There. I copy below the full review, which appeared in the issue for Sunday, 30 March 1924.  In two subsequent blogposts I will detail the subsequent banning of the book, and Cline's reaction to it.

La Bas, in Translation, a Story of Utter Demoniacal Content and Terror

We hasten to say—before the howl of protest arises—that it is perfectly proper for Joris Karl Huysmans's novel, La Bas, to be published, in spite of the fact that packed between its covers is the heaviest load of mustiness we have ever found in a book.

La Bas comes before us now in an excellent translation by Keene Wallis, under the title Down There, with the imprint of Albert and Charles Boni. A curious commentary on the American idea of what is proper is made in Mr. Wallis's elisions. He has omitted translating some passages in the original, episodes in which may be perceived an element of pleasure. But episodes that are written in a vein of sheer horror, although they are much more foul than the others he has included. Well, of course, he had to keep the foulness of La Bas, or the whole work would lose its cleaning.

It is a novel of demonology, together with sex inversions and perversions that accompany devil-worship.

Durtal, a writer himself, disgusted with ordinary life, is impelled in the direction of religion, but applying logic to the fundamental bases of Christianity he finds himself diverted into a macabre bypath. Indeed it is serious what result a reasonable interpretation of the Christian myth entails. If the vicarious atonement of Jesus was necessary to the salvation of mankind, then must not Jesus be adored as the agent that brought it about? The path that leads to the old Gnostic and other heresies one is very likely to choose by mistake for the main highway of truth, if one wanders far in Christianity.

Durtal, curious albeit revolted, goes down from the hilltop into Gehinnom.

There are two complementary stories unfolding contrapuntally in La Bas. One of them is the story of Durtal's adventures in contemporaneous devil-worship, He hears about incubi and succubi, about black masses said with consecrated wafers, about poisons and charms and incredible carnalities, about Canon Docre, who had the image of Jesus tattooed on the soles of his feet so that he could profane it with every step. He meets Hyacinthe Chantelouve, and in the end she takes him to a black mass in the ruinous chapel of an abandoned Ursuline convent, at which, in a hysteria of abominations, Canon Docre officiates.

The other story is the history of Gilles de Rais, a Breton nobleman of the middle ages, which Durtal is writing. Gille de Rais was wealthy, accomplished, courageous; he fought with Jeanne d'Arc and seemed ascending to the heights of glory. But, back from the wars, he is seduced by the alcheny and astrology of the time. He invites famous thaumaturges of Europe to his castle, and there they carry on their experiments, invoking the devil. Finally they drift into orgies and prey on the children of the region. Hundreds are slain. Gilles becomes demented, and is finally apprehended, tried and burned at the the stake, but not before the reader is taken with him on that horrible raving flight through the foest of Tiffauges.

Surely nobody will be led to immoral devices by La Bas: it is too hideous for that. The amateur of lickerish literature will not find any amusement in it. It is superbly written, but a too sensitive person would find his enjoyment of the craftsmanship of Huysmans blighted by the obscenity.

Joris Karl Huysmans hated the world and humanity. Arthur Symons pictures him at the very time he was writing La Bas as possessed by “an almost ecstatic hatred,” as wearing “an amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility.” Yet at the end Huysmans, without repudiating his earlier works, embraced the Roman Catholic faith. There was a desquamation of the old loathing, the fever that tormented him subsided, and thenceforth he could look with charity on life.

Leonard Lanson Cline

Leonard Cline's Newspaper Work

Cline c. 1922, on the Baltimore Sun

Cline worked on many newspapers during his short life, beginning during his college days in Ann Arbor at the Michigan Daily.  After he left college, he had short stints on several Michigan newspapers, including the Bay City Tribune, and the Ypsilanti Daily Ypsilantian-Press. He settled in Detroit and was on the staff of the Detroit Journal for 1915 and most of 1916. By December 1916, he had landed at the Detroit News, where he would stay until early 1922, when he took a job offered to him by H.L. Mencken on the Baltimore Sun.  He lasted in Baltimore for about a year, and then ascended to the New York World, where he stayed for something over one year. Next came a prized position on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he had his own column, titled "If This Be Treason--." That lasted from about October 1924 through February 1925, after which he contributed free-lance articles to the Chicago Herald & Examiner, and the New York Herald Tribune. His final newspaper work was on the Chicago Daily News from around November 1925 through circa April 1926. 

Much of his newspaper work was as a reporter, but his book reviews, poems, and literary columns, for the Detroit News, the New York World, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the books section of the New York Herald Tribune, are of especial interest. Future entries on this blog will cover a wide range of his newspaper work.

Leonard Cline's play: Simon Magus

Cline wrote, or co-wrote, five plays, none of which have ever been published. Two were produced; three were not. Versions of three of the plays survive; two apparently do not.  One of those that does not survive is Cline's first, a one-act play titled "Simon Magus," which was produced in Detroit on Tuesday, June 1st, 1920.  (This is the same play that Cline tried unsuccessfully to get Maurice Browne to produce at the Little Theatre in Chicago in 1918. It was then titled "The Lord and the Lady.")

Here is a scan of the playbill for the 1920 performance, and along with it the review by Marjorie McKeown that appeared in the Detroit News on the next day, 2 June 1920.  This review gives a summary of the play, and represents all we know about this interesting early work. (Click on the scans to enlarge them.)

Stirling Bowen

One of Cline's friends at the Detroit News in the late teens was Stirling Bowen (1895-1955), the son of Wilber P. Bowen (1863-1929), Head of the Department of Physical Education at the Normal School in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and his first wife, Helen M. ("Nellie") Stirling (1866-1895), who died about six weeks after the boy was born. Stirling also had four half-sisters from his father's second marriage.

Stirling Bowen married Gene Beasley (1895-1975) in Detroit in 1915.  They had two sons and one daughter. He contributed verse to the Detroit News and to The Liberator and other magazines.  He published a small booklet An Appeal to the Nation's Courage (1922) protesting the imprisonment of John Pancer, the organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World. But his most significant publication was his only book, Wishbone (1930), a collection of three rather bleak novellas, deriving in ways from Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. (The book was retitled Triad when published in England in 1931.)

He worked on the Detroit News in teens and early twenties, then in Chicago, before moving to New York, where he was for several years the drama critic on The Wall Street Journal. Later he was editor of The Cancer Bulletin.

He was divorced from his first wife in 1945, and two months later married Natalie Mihailova, ten years his junior, who survived him on his death in New York on 11 February 1955 at the age of sixty. 

Song for a Fool by Leonard Cline

Here's the last of Cline's six poems that he published in The Liberator.  "Song for a Fool" is the only one that is expressly political (witness the use of "red" in the penultimate line).  It appeared in the October 1920 issue. (It was not included in Cline's collection After-Walker, published in 1930. To see all six poems click on the tag "The Liberator".  Only two--"Bach" and "Vega"--were collected in After-Walker.)

Society of the Painted Window: Marjorie Hope Nicolson

Form the Smith College Archives

Two further members of the Society of the Painted Window were Clyde W[allace] Nicolson (1892-1977) and his sister Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894-1981).  Clyde was one year ahead of his sister, in the Class of 1913, while she was in Cline's Class of 1914.  Clyde also studied at the Michigan College of Mines (B.S. 1916), and served in W.W.I, before going to work in industry at the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company in Ishpeming, Michigan.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, on the other hand, had a long and highly distinguished career in academia, getting her Ph.D. at Yale (1920), and teaching at a number of colleges.  She served as Dean of Smith College from 1929-1941, declining in 1939 to become its President. In 1941 she became a full Professor at Columbia University, gaining in 1954 a Chair which  she held until her retirement in 1962.  She authored and edited over a dozen books, of which I will here call attention to only one, her study of the development of the imaginary voyage in literature from Lucien through the modern era of Verne, H.G. Wells, and C.S. Lewis, Voyages to the Moon (1948).

A more detailed account of Nicolson's career can be found here.

On the Roof by Leonard Cline

Another one of Cline's poems that didn't make it into After-Walker was "On the Roof," which was published in the March 1918 issue of The Liberator.  (I suspect "laugs" in line 6 of stanza 3 is a typo for "laughs.")

Cline's Mother

From a profile in Recreation, August 1896

Jessie Forsyth was the fifth of six children of Oscar Fitzalan Forsyth (1827-1901), a hardware merchant, and his wife Elizabeth M. [born Mary Elizabeth] Beardsley (1825-1891), who were married in Brockport, New York, on 19 October 1849.  They settled in Michigan, first in Flint and then in 1874 in Bay City. Of their six children, two died in infancy, and of the four remaining children, there were three daughters and one son. The Forsyth family was proud to be related, though distantly, to the Civil War  General George Alexander Forsyth (1837-1915), known as "Sandy" Forsyth.

Jessie Forsyth, born in Flint on 16 February 1865, and her two older sisters, Kate Forsyth (1850-1937) and Zaidee (over the years her name was also spelt Sadie or Sade) Forsyth (1852-1932) were also members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Kate and Zaidee never married. 

Jessie attended Helmuth College in London, Ontario, and the Detroit Training School of Elocution and English Literature, graduating in 1887. She taught for the year 1887-1888 at the College of the Sisters of Bethany in Topeka, Kansas, before returning to Bay City.  She married Leonard Lanson Cline (1858-1904) at the Forsyth family home in Bay City on 22 January 1890.  Her two children were Elizabeth Forsyth Cline (1891-1966) and Leonard Lanson Cline, Jr. (1893-1929). In the early 1890s the Cline family moved to Detroit.

After her husband's death in 1904, Jessie moved her family to Ann Arbor, where she ran a boarding house close to the University of Michigan. In 1913, after both her children quit the university (Elizabeth, after two years; and Leonard, after three years), Jessie sold out and moved to California, where she remarried at least once.  Her spinster sisters followed her out to California.  She died as Jessie F. Harte in Los Angeles on 12 April 1939.

Beginning in the 1890s, Jessie wrote and published occasional articles, stories, and poems, sometimes anonymously, sometimes signed as by Jessie F. Cline or Jessie Forsyth Cline, and sometimes under an unrecorded masculine pseudonym.  Her work appeared in magazines such as Recreation, Kate Field's Washington, and Werner's Magazine.  Her writings also appeared in various newspapers, including the Detroit News-Tribune. 

Cline's Father

Leonard Cline's father was born Levi Lanson Cline in Malahide Township, Elgin County, Ontario, on 7 February 1858. He was the second child of David Hiram Cline (1827-1921), a farmer,  and Emily Bradley (1836-1887), who were married near Aylmer, Ontario, on 1 January 1855.  He had one older brother, four younger brothers, and four younger sisters.

Leonard Cline Sr. probably c. 1890

Around 1873 he moved to Bay City, Michigan, where he changed his name to Leonard Lanson Cline.  He was active in the Michigan Press for the rest of his life, as founder of The Bay City Times, and in management at other newspapers.  He mostly worked in advertising.

He married Jessie Forsyth Cline (1865-1939) in Bay City on 22 January 1890.  They had two children, Elizabeth Forsyth Cline (1891-1966), and Leonard Lanson Cline, Jr., (1893-1929).

In the early 1890s he moved with his family to Detroit, establishing a popular trade paper advertising agency. In February 1902 he was attacked with severe brain fever, and he never really recovered from it, though he went to New Mexico for the winter of 1903-04 with the hope that the climate and ranch life would restore his health.  He returned to Detroit in May 1904, but succumbed on 10 October 1904. His death certificate notes that he died of a "paretic seizure (four days) occurring in the course of General Paresis."

Leonard Cline's The Cult Murders

Cline wrote three pseudonymous novels for the pulp magazine.  All three are thrillers.  Cline didn't think much of them, having tossed them off very quickly in the aim of getting money to pay the fine that went along with his manslaughter plea and jail time, and to be able to keep his rural Connecticut home. Yet as pulp thrillers the three novels do have attractions. The first of these three, The Cult Murders, has just been reprinted.  Copies are available at Amazon US trade paperback and  Kindle ebook, at Amazon UK trade paperback and Kindle ebook, and at other Amazon sites. 

The Cult Murders concerns a Devil worshiping cult set up to fleece rich women of their fortunes. Originally serialized in 1928, this is the first publication in book form.