Leonard Cline's After-Walker

Cline submitted a volume of his poems to the Viking Press in 1927.  It was titled Haunted House, and it was evidently in the works when Cline died unexpectedly in January 1929.  The publication was deferred in the hopes of finding additional poems.  Six, including Cline's long poem "After-Walker," were added to the collection and it was published in May 1930.  The illustration on the cover, by Ilse Bischoff (1903-1990), who illustrated her own books like The Wonderful Poodle (1953), along with another dozen written by others, had clearly been commissioned when the book was titled Haunted House.

Ralph Waldo Snow

Ralph Waldo Snow was the pen-name of Ralph Waldo Schneelock (1904-1929), the son of Walter Edward Schneelock (1875-1959), a hardware salesman of German descent, and his first wife Laura Josephine Russell (1879-1909).  The "schnee" element in the surname means "snow." Ralph was the third of five children.  He had two older brothers and two younger sisters, as well as some step-siblings after his father remarried following the death of his mother. As Snow he contributed poetry to newspapers and magazine, and in the 1920s made his home in Milford, Connecticut.

In 1927 Snow solicited contributions from Cline for his planned anthology of poets living in Connecticut.  In December 1927, Snow accepted two of the poems Cline had submitted, and noted that if space had permitted he would also have used the others. 

Snow's friend Elmer Davenport Keith (1888-1965; a Yale-Oxford man who had been associated with Harvard University Press) had purchased the Quinnipiack Press of New Haven, and his first publications were to be a volume by Snow and the anthology.

Passage to Paradise and Other Poems by Ralph Waldo Snow was published in May 1928, and Snow sent a copy to Cline, then serving his sentence in the Tolland Jail. Cline sent a slightly critical yet overall appreciative letter in response. 

The Connecticut Poetry Anthology, compiled and edited by Snow, was published in September 1928. It includes poems by fifty-one authors, including Snow and Cline, as well as Robert Hillyer, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Clinton Scollard, Genevieve Taggard, Mark Van Doren, and Amos Niven Wilder, brother of novelist Thornton Wilder. Cline's two poems were "Tenebrae," which had appeared in The Nation on 15 February 1928, and "Mass in the Valley," reprinted from The Midland, June-August 1924.  Both were reprinted in Cline's posthumous poetry collection, After-Walker (1930).

A brief obituary notes that Snow was a bank clerk and a poet, who had been living on a farm for several months in an effort to improve his health.  He died on 23 November 1929, and was buried in New Haven.

The Dark Chamber: Translations

Despite Cline having died in 1929, the copyright on The Dark Chamber (and most of Cline's other books) remains valid in the United States for 95 years after the year in which the book was initially published.  Three translations of The Dark Chamber have appeared.  The first was a translation into German (Almersbach: Festa, November 2001, translated by Andreas Diesel, with an afterword by Malte S. Sembten); the second was a translation into Spanish (Madrid: Valdemar, February 2002, translated by Santiago Garcia, with no ancillary material); the third translation was into Italian (Chieti: Solfanelli, October 2012, translated and with an introduction by Fabrizio Sandrelli).

German 2001

Spanish 2002

Italian 2012

The Dark Chamber: Reprints

The 1927 first edition of The Dark Chamber had only one printing. The book has been reprinted three times since in paperback.  The cover artists for the first two are uncredited (if anyone recognizes who the artists are, please let me know!), while Daniel Govar did the cover for the Cold Spring Press edition, which also has extra material, including an introduction by myself (covering, among other topics, the influence of the book on H.P. Lovecraft's circle) and as an afterword a reprint of Cline's 1927 essay "Logogaedaly" on literary style and word choice. I am hopeful that the book can be reprinted soon.

Popular Library edition, undated but October 1972

Pinnacle Books, June 1983

Cold Spring Press, September 2005

Leonard Cline's Third Novel: The Dark Chamber (1927)

The Dark Chamber was published the Viking Press in August 1927, while Cline was in jail in Tolland, Connecticut, bound over for a trial set to begin in September on the charge of first degree murder. In May 1927, during a drunken quarrel Cline had shot a visiting friend, Wilfred Irwin, who died hours later.  The press made much of the fact that one character who dies in The Dark Chamber is also named Wilfred, but the truth is that the book had been written and revised before the May shooting.  The dust-wrapper art was by Clifford [Colton] Pyle (1894-1955), a stylized art-deco image that fits well with the prose of the story.  Pyle also did the dust-wrapper and interior decorations for Donald Douglas's The Black Douglas (1927), and was the author of two books, Leathercraft as a Hobby (1940) and Etching Principles and Methods (1941).

Cline's novel was popular with H.P. Lovecraft's circle, with Lovecraft himself calling it "an absolutely magnificent work of art" and writing of it to Clark Ashton Smith, "God, but I'd give three-fourths of my soul to be able to write a book like that." See the publisher's blurb on the rear of the dust-wrapper below.

Rear of dust-wrapper

The front of the binding

Cover by Clifford Pyle

Society of The Painted Window: Martin Feinstein

One of Cline's associates in The Society of the Painted Window was Martin Feinstein (1892-1931), the son of a New York tailor and his wife who had emigrated from Russia. He attended the College of William and Mary, and the University of Michigan.  He served in France for one year in World War I, and later joined the staff of The Menorah Journal.  His first book was In Memoriam and Other Poems, published by Thomas Selzer in November 1922.  The title poem won The Nation's poetry prize for 1922.  Feinstein's one novel, The Drums of Panic, appeared from Macy-Masius in August 1927. He contributed to The Midland, The Menorah Journal, and other magazines. Feinstein died in Brooklyn at the age of 39. 

 

Bach by Leonard Cline

Cline's poem "Bach" appeared in the February 1921 issue of The Liberator. In a 1925 article on "The Lineage of God Head," detailing what went into the making of his first novel, Cline noted his earlier poem "Bach":

In a time of great personal distress I found comfort in the fugues of Bach on the piano and the fugues of eternity on the skies. I bought texts on astronomy and watched Arcturus give way to Vega as mistress of the night and flaming Mars hunt Venus down in the west.  The first result of that experience was a poem called "Bach" which was printed in The Liberator. And into God Head went Wain and Swan, Polaris and the Pleiades, and all the tragic eventualities of the heavens.

Leonard Cline's Second Novel: Listen, Moon! (1926)

Cline's second novel, Listen, Moon! was published by the Viking Press on August 7th, 1926.  It was reprinted in the same month.The spine and front cover of the dust-wrapper appears below. The dust-wrapper art is signed Politzer, which refers to Irving Politzer (1898-1971), who began designing dust-wrappers in 1924 and built a successful book promotion company. Three examples of Politzer's other dust-wrappers are below the Cline dust-wrapper, and an advertisement from Publishers' Weekly, 3 December 1927.

The Society of the Painted Window

Cline, with a copy of The Painted Window, 1913

Leonard Cline studied at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate from the fall of 1910 through the spring of 1913.  The Society of the Painted Window started publishing a literary magazine in March 1912, and The Painted Window lasted ten issues.  Cline began contributing in the third issue (June 1912), and he published stories and poems all the remaining issues. By the sixth issue (November 1912), Cline's name was added to the Members List, and soon after this he became editor of the magazine. 

The below page from the 1913 Michiganensian (the University of Michigan yearbook, published in May 1913) gives the names of the members of the Society of the Painted Window.  

A good number of the people involved in the Society of the Painted Window went on to have distinguished careers.  These will be covered in future posts.

Leonard Cline's First Novel: God Head (1925)

Leonard Cline's first novel was on the first list of six books published by the newly-founded Viking Press of New York for the latter half of 1925. Cline's book was the fourth on the list, and it appeared on October 10th, 1925.  The spine and front cover of the dust-wrapper appears below. The art is signed K.S, but I do not know who that was.

For publication in England, the novel was retitled Ahead the Thunder, and Jarrolds published it in November 1927. The spine and front cover of the dust-wrapper appears below.  The art is signed K.R.T., referring to K[enneth] Romney Towndrow (1900-1953), an art historian, critic, painter and occasional writer (e,g., The Works of Alfred Stevens, 1951), who gorgeously illustrated with eight art-deco colored plates The Secret Mountain and Other Tales (Faber and Gwyer, 1926) by Kenneth Morris, another favorite book of mine.

Cline's First Book: Poems (1914)

Leonard Cline's first book was a collection of poems published by the Poet Lore Company of Boston on September 21, 1914. The book had been contracted with the Poet Lore Company on March 9, 1914. Cline paid them $300 to publish the book, and thereafter he would be paid 40%  of the gross proceeds received from the sale of the book.  Poems was dedicated to his wife, Mary Louise (Smurthwaite) Cline, known as Louise, whom he had married in October 1913. Their first child, a daughter named Mary Louise Cline (always known as Mary Louise), was born on September 6th, 1914.

The Poet Lore Company, and its associated Gorham Press, was then run by Richard Gorham Badger (1877-1937). It was mostly known for the magazine titled Poet Lore, to which Cline also contributed in  1917-1919.

If Poems was issued with a dust-wrapper, I have never seen it.  Here is the simple yet elegant cover of the book.

Vega by Leonard Cline

Thomas Smurthwaite

The short poem "Vega" appeared in the December 1920 issue of The Liberator. It is dedicated to Thomas Smurthwaite (1850-1929), who was Cline's father-in-law, the mother of Cline's wife Louise Smurthwaite, whom he married in Manistee, Michigan, in October 1913. Thomas Smurthwaite was born in Toronto, but came to Michigan in 1865 and settled in Manistee in 1886, where he was an attorney and, for a time in the late 1890s, the mayor. The Smurthwaite house and hills, referred to in the poem, were on 160 acres purchased in 1895 for a summer home, located north of Manistee proper, at a high point on the south side of Portage Lake.