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. 

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