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.

Leonard Cline's The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales

I contacted Cline's daughter, Mary Louise Jarrett, in 1989, and then my research into Cline's life and works truly began. The first fruit of this research was the booklet, The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales, published by Necronomicon Press in June 1992.  It includes Cline's pseudonymous weird tales (his pseudonym revealed publicly for the first time), written to make money while he was in jail. The booklet contains five stories, three of which were published as by "Alan Forsyth"--a shortening of Cline's maternal grandfather's name, Oscar Fitzalan Forsyth.  Two stories are published therein for the first time.

The main person behind Necronomicon Press was Marc Michaud, who had also happened to have been the editor at Pinnacle Books in 1983 responsible for the reprint of The Dark Chamber. Neither Cline's daughter nor myself saw the cover of The Lady of Frozen Death until it was published. Our dismay is hard to express adequately. The art is by Jason Eckhardt, who has done much fine work, but the presentation (color, artwork, and banner title) was so disappointing to both myself and Cline's daughter that it ceased any other Cline projects for Necronomicon Press.

Society of the Painted Window: Peter Fagan

Peter Fagan

Another of Cline's associates in the Society of the Painted Window at the University of Michigan was Peter Fagan, who is remembered today as a shadowy figure in the life of Helen Keller (1880-1968), the well-known deaf and blind humanitarian, for he was the man she loved and tried to marry, after a brief courtship in later half of 1916. The relationship was ended by Keller's family and her teacher, Helen Sullivan. In most of the literature on Keller there is very little correct information about Peter Fagan.

He was born in Holly, Michigan, on 8 December 1890, the son of William H. Fagan (1864-1958) and his wife Agnes Ann Haddon (1866-1964), who were married in 1888.  Peter was the oldest of four children; he had two younger sisters and a younger brother.

Fagan attended the University of Michigan from 1908 through 1912, though his name also appears on the masthead of The Painted Window in 1913. After leaving the University of Michigan without graduating, Fagan did some newspaper work for the Boston Herald and other newspapers. He also worked as press secretary for Helen Keller, before returning to Michigan where he worked on the further newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, and the Detroit Times. In his obituary in the Detroit News Fagan was described as a "militant labor newspaper publisher and spokesman for the dissatisfied" who had a career of "brilliant political reporting."

On his draft registration card (of June 5, 1917) he listed "religious and conscientious objections" to the draft, and signed it under protest. Around 1919, he married Sarah ("Sadie") Robinson (1894-1984), who had also attended the University of Michigan.  They had four daughters. The first was Ruth (1920-1954), who became the poet Maxwell Bodenheim's third wife in 1952. Both she and Bodenheim were murdered in February 1954 (the killer claimed he ought to get a medal, for he had  killed two communists).  The other daughters include Mary (Fagan) Bates (1922-2008) who taught in the art department at Colorado State University; Ann Fagan Ginger (b. 1925), lawyer, author and civil rights activist; and Jean Fagan Yellin (b. 1930), historian and Distinguished Professor Emerita at Pace University.

After his marriage, Fagan settled in East Lansing, Michigan. In 1934 he was appointed secretary of the Michigan Public Utilities Commission by the Michigan governor.  In 1936 he founded a union newspaper, the News of Lansing, which ceased publishing in 1942. Peter Fagan died after a brief illness at the St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing on 16 September 1946 at the age of 55.

Cline's Translations

Having devoted the previous post to Cline's translation of The Honorable Picnic (1927) by Thomas Raucat, I thought I'd discuss briefly Cline's two other major translations, both from the Spanish. (Cline translated a number of poems into English, and I will cover these at some point in the future.)

Cline translated Platero y Yo (1916) by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. Platero y Yo is Jiménez's most famous work. It gives a portrait of life in the remote Spanish town of Mogeur, Spain, as the author speaks with his silver-grey burro, Platero. Cline translated it around 1922, and circulated the manuscript but it was never published and the manuscript is lost. In the 1930s, Eloise Roach fell in love with Platero y Yo, and also translated it, but similarly found no interested publisher.  Her translation, as Platero and I, finally appeared in 1957, the year after Jiménez won the Nobel Prize.

In 1928, while serving time in the Tolland, Connecticut, Jail, Cline translated La Lámpara Maravillosa (1916) by Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936). It is a book spiritual exercises about Valle-Inclán's aesthetics.  Cline's translation was turned down by the Viking Press, Covici-Friede, John Day Company, and Harcourt Brace & Company,  and on 28 December 1928, just over two weeks before Cline died, his agent Bernice Baumgarten of Brandt & Brandt reported that they didn't think there was anything more to do with it, and were setting it aside. The translation, which Cline titled The Magic Lamp,  remains unpublished, but a copy of the manuscript survives.  The first published translation into English of La Lámpara Maravillosa was made by Robert Lima and it appeared in 1986 as The Lamp of Marvels.

Here is a copy of the title page of the translation Cline sent to his ex-wife Louise, to whom he was to be remarried, on 28 October 1928 (click on the image to make it larger):

Cline's Most Successful Book

Cline's most successful book was a work-for-hire translation that he did for his publisher, the Viking Press, of a pseudonymous French novel L'Honorable Partie de Campagne (1924), by Thomas Raucat. Cline's translation appeared as The Honorable Picnic, published in June 1927, with a reprint in July. The British edition, as The Honourable Picnic, appeared from John Lane The Bodley Head in 1928, and was reprinted in 1931 and 1936. 

The novel is comprised of a prologue with eight chapters, each from the perspective of a different character, thus giving a breadth of insight into the various actions and motivations. The story is simple: a European man sees a beautiful Japanese girl at an amusement park in Tokyo, and he invites her and her companion to spend a day with him in the country. His Japanese friends attempt to save him from the ignominy of prolonged female society and the situation becomes increasingly complicated. This bald summary does no justice to the elegance of the work. It is witty and poignant and entrancing, and Cline's translation works well in English.

The humor extends to the author's pseudonym, Thomas Raucat, which when pronounced in French and heard in Japanese becomes "tomorô ka" which is a familiar shortened form of a Japanese phrase meaning "let's spend the night."  The real author was Roger Poidatz (1894-1976), a Frenchman who resided in Japan for several years.

The book was reprinted in paperback by Modern Age Books in 1937, and the Viking Press did a new hardcover edition in 1955 that had two printings.  Meanwhile, the Charles Tuttle Company began printing it in 1954 (cover design by Masakazu Kuwata), and it stayed in print through the mid 1980s. Early Tuttle printings were in hardcover, while the eighth (1972) and ninth (1983) were done as mass-market sized paperbacks, but on higher quality paper.  A regular mass market edition came from Curtis Books in 1972.

Here follows a gallery of the various editions.  The art is uncredited on all but one edition.

The Viking Press, 1927

John Lane The Bodley Head 1928

Modern Age Books 1937

Charles Tuttle 1954, art by Masakazu Kuwata

Viking Press, 1955

Curtis Books, 1972

Charles Tuttle, 1983

Requiem by Leonard Cline

One of Cline's poems that didn't make it into After-Walker was "Requiem," which appeared in The Liberator in March 1920. It is essentially predictive of Cline's later life, for in his dark hours of anguish in jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter, Cline turned back to religion, and turned back to his ex-wife Louise.