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.)