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.