Category: gay history

George Platt Lynes: “José Martinez”

George Platt Lynes, “José ‘Pete’ Martinez”, 1937, Photo Shoot at Lynes’s Studio, Vintage Silver Prints, Private Collections

Born in Mexico in March of 1913, José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga was a ballet dancer who in the early 1940s danced with both the American Ballet Caravan and the Ballet Society, precursor ensembles of the New York City Ballet. 

José Martinez at a very young age moved with his family to Houston, Texas. After graduating high school, he relocated to New York City where he studied at the School of American Ballet founded in 1934 by Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg and George Balanchine. Martinez eventually gained a full scholarship and, upon graduation, was invited to join The Ballet Caravan, a touring company founded by Lincoln Kirstein to provide off-season employment to American ballet dancers. Martinez gradually became involved with the group’s creative process and provided ideas and librettos for ballets. 

Martinez eventually began an intimate relationship with Lincoln Kirstein; they lived together in a Greenwich Village townhouse at St. Luke’s Place. After Kirstein married graphic artist Fidelma Cadmus, the younger sister of artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma moved into the apartment for the first year of the marriage. This triangular romantic relationship was similar to that of their friends, Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening. 

José Martinez performed with the Ballet Caravan in the 1941 “Pastorela”, a one-act ballet choreographed by Lew Christensen and dancer José Fernandez, that toured Latin America with great reviews. The work included music by Paul Bowles and traditional songs orchestrated by Blas Galindo with words by Rafael Alvarez. Martinez tried in 1942 to enlist in the Army but was denied. He moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania and began work at a Jewish refugee hostel where writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he had met through Kirstein in 1939, was already employed. From Isherwood’s diaries, it is known that their relationship, except for one sexual encounter in August of 1942, was platonic. 

José Martinez and Christopher Isherwood traveled together several times to New York City to visit the Fidelma and Lincoln Kirstein. They both left Haverford in September of 1942 and went their separate ways. Their friendship, however, continued and they met several times in California and New York after the war years. Called up for service during the Second World War, Martinez was trained at Norfolk, Virginia, and served in the United State Army in northern France until 1945.

As a member of the Ballet Society, Martinez toured the United States with visits in both large and smaller cities. The Society’s repertoire was very different from those trained by Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the Ballets Russes. Martinez danced in the original cast of George Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments” in which he performed the first Theme with Beatrice Tompkins in the 1946 performance tour. He also originated and danced the role of the minister in dancer and choreographer William Dollar’s 1947 “Highland Fling”. 

In late 1947, José Martinez suffered a knee injury which forced an end to his performances. Hesitant about the next part of his life, he drifted for a year before beginning life as a dance teacher in Norfolk, Virginia. Over the next two decades, Martinez founded dance studios in Ohio and California where he continued to teach ballet until his retirement in the mid-1960s. José Martinez-Berlanga died at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California on the twenty-fourth of June in 1997 at the age of eight-four. 

Notes: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening would spend the summers from the late 1930s to the early 1950s on Fire Island where they painted and took photographs. This collaborative artistic endeavor became known as the PaJaMa collective, taken from the first two letters of their names. Artist George Tooker would later join the collective during the period of 1944 to 1949 when he was in a relationship with Paul Cadmus.

Many friends would often visit the group on Fire Island, among whom were ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, artist Bernard Perlin and photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes became acquainted with José Martinez through this group of friends and would also photograph him. Although Martinez appeared in many of the pre-war photographs, Lynes’s studio portraits of Martinez wearing the straw hat are the best known. 

The Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society has an  article entitled “The Fire Island Muses of George Platt Lynes & the PaJaMa Collective” by Brian Ferrari on its site located at: https://www.pineshistory.org/the-archives/fire-island-muses

Top Insert Image: William Caskey, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Print

Second and Bottom Image: Photographers Unknown, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Prints, Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society

Peter Hujar

The Photography of Peter Hujar

Born in Trenton, New Jersey in October of 1934, Peter Hujar was an American photographer known for his black and white portraits. Only marginally known during his lifetime, he has since been recognized as one of the major American photographers in the late twentieth-century. 

Peter Hujar never met his father, who abandoned his mother Rose Murphy during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents in the rural landscape of Ewing Township. Hujar remained with his grandparents until his grandmother’s death in 1946. After which, Hujar lived with his mother and her second husband in New York City; however, the household situation was difficult. He left the home in 1950 at the age of sixteen to live independently. 

In 1953, Hujar entered Manhattan’s School of Industrial Design, later named the High School of Art and Design, where he expressed an interest in photography. Encouraged by his teacher, poet Daisy Aldan, Hujar became a photographic apprentice at a commercial studio where he mastered the technical processes of photography. Four years later, his photographic work had reached museum quality. In 1958, Hujar was able to accompany realist painter and watercolorist Joseph Raffael on study trip to Italy. 

Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Peter Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, this time with painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to study and photograph the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. These images would later be featured in Hujar’s 1975 “Portraits in Life and Death” published with a written introduction by writer and critic Susan Sontag. Upon his return to New York City in 1964, Hujar became the chief assistant to commercial photographer Harold Krieger, widely known for his innovative advertising work and celebrity portraits. 

In the mid-1960s, Hujar met Andy Warhol and posed for four of Warhol’s short, silent black and white film portraits, the “Screen Shots” series. Four hundred and seventy-two of these three-minute films depicting New York’s cultural figures are known to have survived. In 1967, Hujar was selected as one of the photographers in a master class led by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. The quality of Hujar’s classwork led to assignments from Harper’s Bazaar and other publications; through this class, he met photographers Diane Arbus and Alexey Brodovitch. 

In 1967, Peter Hujar made the decision, at great financial sacrifice, to leave the commercial world and pursue his own photography that would reflect his true personal identity. Hujar and his lover at that time, political activist Jim Fouratt, witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York’s West Village. An influential artist and activist of the gay liberation movement, Hujar, although not actively involved with the Gay Liberation Front, shot the group photo that was used on many of its posters. In 1973, he settled into a loft above the East Village’s Eden Theater on Second Avenue where he resided for the rest of his life. 

Throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hujar traveled in the art world of lower Manhattan shooting portraits of noted actors and writers including William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, drag queen actor Divine, Susan Sontag, and Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti. He visited and shot photos at the area’s bars and also the abandoned West Side piers on the Hudson River, a gathering spot for artists and the gay community. In early 1981, Hujar met filmmaker and artist David Wojnarowicz who had become one of the prolific members of the avant-garde artists who used mixed media, graffiti and street art. After a brief period as Hujar’s lover, Wojnarowicz became his protégé and remained closely linked to him for the remainder of Hujar’s life. 

Peter Hujar was a consummate technician and master of the darkroom who produce images that, though stripped of excess, were highly emotional. His photography covered a wide range of subjects, including abandoned and ruined buildings, cityscapes, animals, portraits, still life, and nudes. Due to his connection with the sitter, Hujar excelled in portrait work and was able to achieve an intimate and honest pose for the camera that caught his sitter’s idiosyncrasies and inner feelings. He never used props in his portraits and focused entirely on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot. 

Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January of 1987. Ten months later at the age of fifty-three, he died at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center on the twenty-fifth of November. Hujar’s funeral was held at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village; he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In his lifetime, Hujar had few substantial solo exhibitions and attracted little notice by the press. His only major show in his lifetime was a 1986 exhibition of seventy photographs curated by Sur Rodney Sur of New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery. 

Peter Hujar willed his entire artistic estate to novelist and historian Stephen Koch, a longtime friend. Since 1987, Koch has worked to place Hujar’s work in its rightful position in twentieth-century art. Photography curator Joel Smith assembled a collection of one hundred and sixty-four images from Peter Hujar’s work for a 2018 retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Hujar’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and is housed in such public collection as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Peter Hujar Archive which is located at: https://peterhujararchive.com

An exhibition of Paul Hujar’s work is currently being held at the Ukrainian Museum, 222 East 6th Street, New York City until the 1st of September, 2024. Article: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-hujar-rialto-ukrainian-museum-2490813

An excellent 2018 article by the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl, entitled “The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar”, can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-bohemian-rhapsody-of-peter-hujar

New York’s Pace Gallery has an online conversation moderated by the gallery’s curatorial director Oliver Shultz, entitled “Cruising Utopia”, that coincided with its 2020 exhibition of Hujar’s intimate photographs of queer culture: https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/conversation-on-peter-hujar-video/

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Self Portrait Jumping (1)”, 1974, Gelatin Silver Print, 63.2 x 58.1 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Second Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Christopher Street Pier #3”, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Third Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “The Shareef Twins”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Fourth Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Gary Schneider in Contortion #1”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed”, 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver: “Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned”

Photographers Unknown, Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned

take me outside to the place we both knew so well
when i’d hold your hand while walking barefoot
even though the soil was littered with bindis
but i preferred the earth to know who i was
from the taste of my blood and the way it filled with grains of sand
than to have to speak my name in a language it could never understand
with a voice i was still discovering

take me to the mountain we would go to sit
and watch the stars fall past the edge of the earth
like they were always destined to do
let me think of the people i used to know when i was small
and remember the things i forgot about them
the pieces of gold that captured my heart into loving them
and the ways they hurt me that saw me quickly let them go

take me to the ocean where my heart once drowned
as people in barely-there swimsuits watched me stand
in waves that broke on the shoreline
as my bones shattered beneath the forceful hands of the sun
and all its reasons for keeping the world alive in a chorus of separate songs
let me dance in the sand one more time
while you take photographs of the footprints i leave behind
so i can remember their rhythm long after i’ve left them

take me to the tree outside the home where i grew up
and i’ll carve my name into its bark
beside the one i made at nine years old
i’ll climb its branches and stretch my arms out so
i’m taller than the leaves
and higher than the light that bleeds over them
i’ll feel the greatness of everything you’ve given me
the power of all i am
and i’ll know this to be a journey of infinite steps
that encase golden prayers in the face of a western wind
trusting i’ll be going home and knowing i’ll never be coming back

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver, the light that bleeds, more than these bones, 2023, Magabala Books, Broome, Australia

A descendant of the Bardi Jawi people of the Kimberley region of north-Western Australia, Bebe Backhouse-Oliver is a poet, writer, illustrator and leader of diverse community projects. His work embraces issues of love, loss, identity, sense of country, and both Aboriginal and gay existence. Oliver has for many years maintained his home in Naarm, the traditional Central Kulin Nation name for the specific area now known as Greater Melbourne.

In addition to studies in classical piano and composition, Bebe Oliver began writing at an early age,. His initial work was creative stories and, later, poetry and memoir-based journal-format stories. These written works served as an outlet for all the challenges he experienced as a young Aboriginal boy with a suppressed identity. Oliver’s first published work was a 2018 story he submitted for entry in author Anita Heiss’s biographical anthology entitled “Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia”.

Oliver relocated to Melbourne to study at the Victorian College of the Arts. After returning from a period of travel overseas, he became established as a producer and director of theater, festivals, and public art projects across Australia, New Zealand, France and Belgium. A leading designer of projects for diverse communities, Oliver is a co-chairperson of Melbourne’s biannual Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival; he is also a Board Director of the publishing house Magabala Books. Through his senior leadership positions, Oliver has fostered many opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to showcase their work, thus allowing Traditional Culture to publicly thrive. 

In March of 2023, Magabala Books published “More Than These Bones”, Oliver’s debut collection of poems that details his journal through both heartbreak and self-discovery. Each poem is set in a different location and, often accompanied by a photograph or drawing, adds another dimension to his life story. Oliver’s writing is also featured in the anthology “Nangamay Mana Djurali”, a collection of voices from the Australian black queer community. Edited by Alison Whittaker and Steven Lindsay Ross, the anthology shows the diverse perspectives of life experienced by Aboriginal queer people in contemporary Australia. 

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver’s website is located at: https://www.bebeoliver.com

Notes:  Bebe Backhouse reflects on his identity as a young Aboriginal man growing up in a predominantly Aboriginal community in Western Australia in his essay “It’s not over” located at the SCRIBD site: https://www.scribd.com/document/1008830568/BebeBackhouse

Magabala Books is Australia’s leading Indigenous publisher. Committed to nurturing the talent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytellers, the publishing house offers awards, creative grants and scholarships. Magabala Books also sponsors cultural projects including audio-visual installations, recordings of elders’ stories, and developing the book illustration skills of Kimberley Aboriginal artists. The Magabala Books website is located at: https://magabala.com.au

Dmitri Bouchène

The Artwork of Dmitri Bouchène

Born in St. Tropez, France at the Villa of General Allard in April of 1893, Dmitri Dmitriévitch Bouchène was a Russian painter and theatrical costume and set designer who worked in both the Russian Federation and France. In 1947, he became a naturalized citizen of France where he remained for the rest of his life. 

Dmitri Bouchène was a descendant of a French Huguenot family. His  great-grandfather had relocated from France to Catherine the Great’s Russia in 1685 due to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes which effectively expelled the Huguenots from France. After the death of his mother in 1895, Bouchène was raised by his aunts in St. Petersburg. He attended the Second Imperial Gymnasium and evening classes at the art school established by the Society for Encouragement and Promotion of Arts. It was at the Imperial Gymnasium that Bouchène met fellow  student Sergey Rostislavovich Ernst, with whom he would remain a loving partner for the rest of his life. 

Through a personal recommendation from Russian painter Nicolas Roerich to French painter Maurice Denis who was teaching at the Académie Ranson in Paris, Bouchène was able to attend the academy and study at Denis’s workshop. There he met and received lessons on intuitive painting from Henri Matisse. After returning to St. Petersburg in 1913, Bouchène resumed his studies in history and philology, the study of language in oral and written historical sources. From 1915 to 1917, he continued his drawing studies at the Society for the Promotion of Arts. 

Dmitri Bouchène, through the sponsorship of painter and theatrical designer Alexandre Benois, became part of the staff at the Hermitage Museum where he curated the department of porcelain, silver and jewels until 1925. A member of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group since 1917, Bouchène was invited by Benois, under appointment by art critic Sergei Diaghilev, to participate in the group’s exhibitions at St. Petersburg’s Anichkov Palace. Bouchène entered paintings in the Mir Iskusatva exhibitions of 1918, 1922, and 1924.

Bouchène’s style of painting incorporated the motifs and methods of Catalan modernist painter Antoni Gaudí and Venetian painter Giovanni Canal. He executed easel paintings of still lifes and landscapes as well as set and scene designs for the theater. Bouchène also created graphic work for publishers, including bookplates for Akvilon Publishing in Petrograd. He participated in Russian landscape exhibitions, the 1922 First State Independent Art Exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie van Diemen, bookplate art exhibitions in Petrograd and Kazan, and the 1924 Russian Art Exhibition held at New York.

In 1925, Dmitri Bouchène asked for a leave of absence from the Hermitage Museum to travel with Sergey Ernst to Paris for a three month study program of art history. Permission was granted and they left Russia by way of the Estonian city of Tallinn, never to return. While exploring Paris, Ernst purchased a Delacroix painting he found at a low cost in a Parisian flea market; the resale of this work enabled them to buy a home. In 1926, Bouchène began his career in France with costume designs for prima ballerina Ann Pavlova.

In 1930 following this success, Bouchène began work as a costume and set designer for the Paris Opéra and Teatro alla Scala. He also created interior decor for Paris-based Maison Jansen and haute couture work for such fashion designers as Lucien Lelong and Nina Ricci. During the Second World War, both Bouchène and Ernst took an active part in the French Resistance. Bouchène continued his painting and design work after the war; Ernst established himself as an art critic and historian with three published monographs on noted Russian Silver Age artists: Zinaida Serebriakova, Alexandre Benois and Nicolas Roerich.  

Dmitri Bouchène was deeply affected by the 1980 death of his longtime partner Sergey Ernst. He had considered Ernst and theatrical designer Alexandrer Benois as the two pillars that supported his life. Ernst was interred in a tomb located in the thirteenth division of the Montparnesse Cemetery in Paris. Bouchène died, thirteen years later, in February of 1993 at the age of ninety-nine. He was buried in the Montparnesse tomb alongside Sergey Ernst. Their tomb was inscribed with the words “What a Joy / You have Arrived” in honor of their long lives together.

In 1947, Bouchène’s friend, the art collector Frederik Johannes Lugt, established the Fondation Custodia at the eighteenth-century Hotel Turgot in Paris; this foundation is the custodian of Bouchène’s archives. Numerous private collection hold Bouchène’s paintings and graphic works.

The Dmitri Bouchène website, established by Pascal Davy-Bouchène, is located at: https://dimitri-bouchene.com

Tope Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dmitri Bouchène in His Studio”, 1960, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, Costume Design for Claudio Monteverdi’s Opera “l’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea)“, 1953, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper, 33 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, “Flowers Against the Blue Background”, Gouache on Paper on Canvas, 105 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, Costume Design for Leoš Janáček’s 1954 Opera “Z Mrtvého Domu (House of the Dead)”, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper, 32 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Yves Paradis

The Photography of Yves Paradis

Born in Brittany in 1955, Yves Paradis is a French photographer known for his softly rendered black and white photographs which presented an idealized, timeless vision of gay life that differed from the prevailing gay photography of the period. During the 1980s, his work appeared regularly in the most popular gay periodicals of Europe.

The son of a farming family, Yves Paradis spent his formative years in rural France. He was introduced to photography at the age of thirteen by one of his teachers who recognized his struggles with writing. Given a space in the family’s attic by his father for a studio and dark room, Paradis was able to experiment with different techniques and develop his own images. His first photographs were portraits of his friends taken on holidays and, later, fellow soldiers during his national service in the army.

Paradis worked during the 1970s as a photojournalist with a focus on reportage-styled images of current events. Although he still experimented with homoerotic compositions, Paradis did not at this time considered art photography an option for a career. In 1979, France’s first commercially published gay magazine, “Gai Pied”, began its publication. Founded by journalist and activist Jean Le Bitouz, the magazine derived its title from a multilayered French pun that came from the word “guêpier”, meaning hornet’s nest. Paradis submitted a series of photographs he had taken of two soldiers kissing on an army tank; these images were accepted and published as a spread in the magazine.

Beginning in the 1980s, Yves Paradis worked regularly with “Gai Pied” and other European gay publications. His work featured images of sexually attractive men, not necessarily physically perfect, portrayed in realistic and romantic settings. Paradis did not champion the bar and club scene but rather found models through the gay press and random visits to the French provinces. In 1991, the first collection of Paradis’s photography, “Jois de Vivre (Joy of Life)” was published in London by Aubrey Walter. Soon after the volume’s publication, Paradis stopped photographing images and concentrated on individually printing his compositions. In 1998, a second edition of “Jois de Vivre” was published by Éditions Aubrey Walter, GMP Publications.

After a thirty-year hiatus, Paradis produced a new series of photographs in 2021, a collection that continued his original sense of design and disposition. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the National Museum of Wales and the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, United Kingdom. Individual works by Paradis are available through East London’s Henry Miller Fine Art as well as auction house Barbarossa Maison de Ventes, both which are focused on masculine art.

Notes: The Gay Men’s Press, founded in 1979 by Aubrey Walter, David Fernback and Richard Dipple, was the forerunner and the source for the Editions Aubrey Walter imprint which published Yves Paradis first collection of photographs. A short history of the GMP can be found at: https://gmppubs.wordpress.com/a-short-history-of-gay-mens-press/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Yves Paradis”, Portrait for Henry Miller Fine Art

Second Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Jean-Paul et l’Acropole”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Henry Miller Fine Art

Bottom Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Le Jeune Homme aux Pied Nus”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

John Horne Burns: “That City in the Middle of the Sea”

Photographers Unknown, That City in the Middle of the Sea

Hal walked around the Galleria. He stuck his hands into his pockets, swaggered a little, and tried to smile at everyone. Often his smiles were returned. But he didn’t follow them up. His was the disinterested smile of God the Father surveying the world after the sixth day. And Hal had never seen so many soldiers whose free time hung like a weight on their backs, as their packs had hung in combat. They sat at the outside tables of the bars and drank vermouth. They wore shoulder patches of three divisions. Their faces were seamy or gentle or questioning or settled or blank. No other people in the Galleria Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.

After looking in all the shop windows and all the posters and traversing both sides of the X-shaped pavement that bisected the Galleria, Hal sat down at one of the tables. He knew that he was in the tiniest yet the greatest city of the world. But it hadn’t the fixed pattern of a small town. It was a commune of August, 1944, and its population changed every day. These people who came to the Galleria to stand and drink and shop and look and question were set apart from the rest of the modern world. They were outside the formula of mothers and wives and creeds. The Galleria Umberto was like that city in the middle of the sea that rises every hundred years to dry itself m the sun.

John Horne Burns, The Gallery, Excerpt: Third Portrait (Hal), 1948, Harper & Brothers, New York

Born at Andover, Massachusetts in October of 1916, John Horne Burns was an American writer who, in his short life, published three works of which the best known was the 1947 best-seller “The Gallery”, An author whose first publication was well-received by critics, Burns  and his work eventually became largely forgotten.

The eldest of seven children of an upper middle-class Irish Catholic family, John Horne Burns was educated at St. Augustine’s School by the Sisters of Norte Dame and later at the Phillips Academy where he studied music. At Harvard University, Burns studied and became fluent in French, German and Italian; he also wrote several fictional works, none of which were published. Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude. After his graduation, he became a teacher at the Loomis School, a private boarding and day preparatory school in Windsor, Connecticut.

Although opposed to America’s decision to enter World War II, Burns was drafted as a private into the United States Army in 1942. He attended the Adjutant General’s School in Washington D.C. and received a commission as Second Lieutenant. Sent overseas in 1943, Burns served as a military intelligence officer in the cities of Casablanca and Algiers. Later transferred to Italy, he spent a year and a half censoring mail sent by prisoners of war. Burns lived during this period of service near the Galleria Umberto I, a partially destroyed shopping arcade frequented by soldiers, prostitutes and beggars. This galleria would provide the setting for his first novel. Burns was discharged from military service in 1946, at which time he returned to his teaching position at Loomis School. 

A man of both isolationist tendencies and an intense competitive nature, John Burns completed his first novel “The Gallery” in 1946 while teaching at the Loomis School. Published in 1947, the novel is composed of nine portraits of local women and soldiers interspersed with eight recollections narrated by an anonymous American soldier. Issues raised in the novel include economic and social inequities, homosexual experiences in the military, the impact of the Allied occupation on the population of Naples, and the assertion of individuality within the war effort. “The Gallery”, an unconventionally structured literary work, received high praise from critics and such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Edmund Wilson, and Gore Vidal.  

Burns became a man sought for his views on literature and would occasionally write a complimentary review. However, he became well-known for his strong, often caustic, reviews of both his peers and more established writers including such prominent men as Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener. In 1949, Burns published his second novel, the satirical “Lucifer with a Book” that was based on his life experiences at the Loomis boarding school. He expected better reviews than those received by his first novel; however, the critical response to this work was dismal. 

Disheartened by the reviews, John Burns returned in 1950 to Italy where, designated a famous author by the local paper, he settled in Florence’s Hotel Excelsior, a famous expatriate gathering place along the Arno River. Burns wrote and published his third novel, the 1952 “A Cry of Children”. In this novel, he told the story of a man with a brilliant career as a concert pianist who is led by his mistress into a bohemian world of vice and depravity, only to be redeemed later by the very things he left behind. Although Burns’s third work also received uniformly negative reviews, some critics still thought that Burns was a writer of future distinction.

While working on a fourth novel, Burns supported himself by writing an article on the city of Florence for the American travel magazine “Holiday”. He eventually gained a reputation in Florence as a person who drank to excess and complained of rivals, critics and both friends and enemies. At the end of July in 1953, the publishing firm Harper & Brothers rejected Burns’s fourth book “The Stranger’s Guise”. In August while sailing with his Italian boyfriend just south off the port city of Livorno, Burns had a seizure. Five days later on the eleventh of August, he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of thirty-six. 

Tom Burns, John’s younger brother, hired a well-connected American lawyer in Rome to investigate Burns’s death; however, nothing suspicious was found. Originally interred in Italy, John Burns’s body was later exhumed by his family and buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. His short stories, poems, articles, photographs, and novels, including his final unpublished “The Stranger’s Guise”, are housed in the collections of the Boston University.

Notes: Writer Jerry Portwood has an interview with essayist David Margolick, author of “Dreadful”, a biography on the life of John Horne Burns, at the online July issue of Out magazine: https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2013/07/18/john-horne-burns-gay-icon-david-margolick-gallery-military

The Lambda Literary also has a 2013 interview with author David Margolick that covers  John Burns’s life and legacy: https://lambdaliterary.org/2013/07/david-margolick-john-horne-burns-and-the-dreadful-life/

A dissertation by Mark Travis Bassett entitled “John Horne Burns: Toward a Critical Biography” can be read as a free PDF download from MOspace, an online thesis extension of the University of Missouri: https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/35623

An online version of John Horne Burns’s 1948 “The Gallery” can be read for free at the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.168101/page/n5/mode/2up

For those interested, author David Margolick’s 2014 biography on John Burns, “Dreadful”, was published by Other Press and is available as both an ebook and paperback through various retailers.

Přemysl Koblic

The Photography of Přemysl Koblic

Born in July of 1892 in Prague, Přemysl Koblic was a Czech avant-garde photographer and educator whose theoretical findings and photographic practices significantly influenced the development of photography in Czechoslovakia. In addition to his experiments in photographic chemistry, Koblic promoted the emergence of new black and white photographic materials with such firms as Foma, Ako, and Neobrom.. 

The son of a chemical engineer, Přemysl Koblic began his studies in 1911 at Prague’s Czech Technical University; however, his education was  interrupted by the onset of World War I. After basic training, Koblic was sent at the end of 1915 to the Isonzo Front in Slovenia where he served as an army photographer with the 91st Infantry Regiment. Koblic finished his military service in the summer of 1918 and returned to his studies at the Czech Technical University. He graduated in 1919 and initially worked as an assistant at the university’s sugar-manufacturing department. Two years later, he became an administrator at Czechoslovakia’s Patent Office, where he managed patents covering photography, prints and food until 1935. 

Přemysl Koblic, who used his own small-format cameras, was a lifelong experimenter. He published his first technical texts prior to the First World War and, by 1920, was already a member of the Amateur Photographers’ Club in the Prague neighborhood of Královské Vinohrady. Among its members were such notable photographers as Alois Zych, Robert A. Šimon, Augustin Myška, František Oliveriusand, and Stanislav Krofta who joined upon his return from the United States. In 1923, Koblic joined a rival Prague photographic club that was later known as the Nekázanka. 

While post-war photographic work in Czechoslovakia during the early 1920s tended to create beautiful images, Koblic was interested in photographing the civilians of Prague during their daily work routines, the wait for trains, and travel through the bustling city streets. He felt that the essence of photography was found in the depiction of movement, life and activity. For him, the presentation of personal movement in the city, surrounded by its shapes, colors, lights and tones, was the highest form of photography as it depicted man in his own creation. Koblic was a pioneer in photography of the modern city, a theme that was further developed by others in the early 1940s.

When the country was affected by an economic crisis in the early 1930s, Přemysl Koblic collaborated with the Brno Film-Photo group of the Left Front which was led by economic theorist Lubomir Linhart. However, his work differed from the emerging photojournalism of the Communist periodicals that often published anonymous images by photo reporters. In the 1930s, Koblic published two books, the 1937 “Fotografování Vidí Svêt (Photography Sees the World)” and “Zvêtšování (Enlarging)” in 1938. Both of these volumes contained perfectly arranged photo appendices and samples of recent photographic work.

In 1936, Koblic became editor-in-chief of “Fotoografický Obzor (Photographic Horizon)” magazine and compiled the 1937 almanac edition for “Československá Fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography)”. He also closely collaborated with “Fotografie” magazine led by photographer and theorist Karel Hermann, a long-time friend. Koblic shared his photographic discoveries in numerous articles and through courses and lectures at local photo clubs and public venues. His photographic work and the technology he used greatly influenced the generation of magazine photographers in the late 1930s, including such artists as Josef Voříšek and Jan Lukas, as well as those of the later 1950s. 

For his entire life, Přemysl Koblic was connected with the Vršovice section of Prague; he converted his apartment on Ruskâ Street into an experimental photographic and chemical laboratory. Although he focused on other Prague locations, he depicted Vršovice in all its seasons and published many of these photographs equipped with texts. Koblic’s photographs were unique in their spontaneity; he could, without any hesitation, effortlessly shoot his subject within a second. Beginning in the 1930s, Koblic worked with a motion blur that gave a unique dynamic to his photographs. The most famous and frequently published of these works was the series done in 1948 at the Sokol Festival, entitled “Čtvrtá Dimense (The Fourth Dimemsion)”, for which he used a wide-angle camera. 

In the early 1950s, Koblic became involved in the Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Photography and the “Nova Fontografie (New Photography)” magazine that began publication in 1950 and promoted socialist realism in Czech photography. His photographs were quite distinctive from the average productions of that period. Although Koblic tried to comply with magazine’s desire for images with a socialist presence, his life-long interest in the documentary depiction of reality, including social relations, continued to be prevalent in his work.

Perceived by the general public as a clerk with a hard-earned status, Přemysl Koblic was involved in many hobbies and obsessions. His involvement in photographic chemistry led to the creation of the developer Pextral which became a standard for many years. He also constructed a series of photographic apparatuses including the Pohotovka, a prompt device. Koblic was interested in the chemistry aspect of the food industry and patented a process for yogurt production. He researched natural medications, made astronomical observations, and studied early European linguistics. All these interests, added to his homosexual orientation, made Koblic an eccentric figure for his time. 

Přemysl Koblic died in Prague in November of 1955 at the age of sixty-three. Due to the efforts of Czech photographer and historian Rudolph Skopec, the Moravian Gallery in Brno acquired part of Koblic’s work and Prague’s National Technical Museum became the guardian of a substantial collection of Koblic’s positive and negative images. 

Notes: For the research on this article, I am indebted to authors Jan Mlčoch, Pavla Vrbová, and Romana Kmochová for their informative articles on the photographic history of Czechoslovakia and Přemysl Koblic’s life and work. Their introductory article and “Prague in Pictures by Přemysl Koblic” are located at: https://eshop.ntm.cz/static/_dokumenty/1/6/2/8/8/00350_premysl_koblic-aj_m21_ukazka.pdf

An 2017 article on Czech Avant-Garde photography by Mariana Holá can be found on the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism located at: https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/photography

Top Insert Image: Jan Beran, “Přemysl Koblic”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, 30 x 32.8 cm, Moravská Galerie

Second Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Praha-Vršpvoce Depot”, circa 1930s, Vintage Print

Third Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “View of a Village from Above”, 1939, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “The Jewish Cemetery”, 1930-1939, Vintage Print, 29 x 39 cm, Moravská Galerie 

Bottom Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Prague Street Scene”, 1946, Vintage Print, Moravská Galerie

Sir Francis Cyril Rose

The Artwork of Sir Francis Cyril Rose

Born at the grand English estate of Moor Park, Hertfordshire in September of 1909, Sir Francis Cyril Rose, 4th Baronet of the Montreal Roses, was an English painter who received strong support throughout the 1930s from his patron, American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein. Although he created many works of art, Rose’s artistic output was as erratic as his lifestyle was audacious and extravagant. Despite Stein’s endeavors to generate a sustained interest in his work, Francis Rose remained one of the more obscure artists of his generation.

Descended from Spanish nobility, Francis Rose inherited his British baronetcy while still a child. He received his initial education from the Jesuits at Beaumont College in Old Windsor, Berkshire, as well as lessons from private tutors abroad. In 1926 at the age of seventeen, Rose relocated to Paris where he resided as an expatriate until 1936. He studied under avant-garde painter and typographic artist Francis Picabia, an early figure in the Dada Movement, and Spanish muralist and theater set designer Josep Maria Sert.

In 1930, Rose had his first exhibition, alongside Salvador Dali, at the Paris  gallery of modern art patron Marie Cuttoli. By this time, he had already designed costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, some of which were in collaboration with artist Christopher Wood. Rose would design theater sets and costumes again in 1939 for Lord Berners’s ballet production “Cupid and Psyche” at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater. During the 1930s, he spent several years studying Chinese poetry and art in China; he later traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa with his future wife, Frederica Dorothy Carrington. 

While traveling in France in his early twenties, Francis Rose became a close acquaintance of author Gertrude Stein who helped launch his painting career by commissioning several of his works, including a portrait of herself, for her own art collection. Stein had discovered Rose’s paintings in a Parisian gallery in the late 1920s and eventually bought one hundred-thirty of his works. Through Stein’s support, Rose was able to exhibit his work in Paris, London and New York. He  also created illustrations for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, a publication by Stein’s lifetime partner, Alice Babette Toklas. Although the friendship between the three personalities wavered at times, Alice Toklas asked Rose to design Gertrude Stein’s grave site memorial.

In 1938, Rose completed what is considered one of his most successful paintings, “L’Ensemble”, an oil on canvas mural that depicted his circle of friends which included Jean Cocteau, Gloria Stein,  Alice Toklas, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev and Natalie Barney, among others. This mural was exhibited in the following year at the  Petit Palais Musée des Beauz Arts in Paris. Called to military service at the beginning of World War II, Rose served as a disciplinary sergeant in the Royal Air Force. In 1942, Francis Rose exhibited his work at the “Imaginative Art Since the War” exhibition held in London’s Leicester Galleries; this exhibition was organized by Frederica Dorothy Carrington, one of two daughters to Sir Frederick Carrington.

Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington were married in 1942; however, as Rose was a noted homosexual, the marriage eventually ended. By 1954, Carrington had permanently settled, without Rose, on the Corsican island of Ajaccio; their divorce was finalized in 1966. Carrington became one of the twentieth-century’s leading scholars on the island’s culture and history. In 1971, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in the next year, a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Carrington became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1938, Rose gave an American stockbroker the power of attorney to manage his fortune; however, this stockbroker was involved in, and later convicted of, an embezzlement scheme. Rose lost most of his fortune and was nearly destitute by the end of the second World War. He spent his final years in a state of poverty, helped financially by friends foremost among whom was photographer Cecil Beaton. In an attempt to achieve some financial success, Rose published a memoir in 1961 entitled “Saying Life: The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose”. This memoir discussed both his exploits, many which had factual issues, and his associations with the famous and artistic personalities of the time. “Saying Life”, however. was not the financial success that he needed. 

Sir Francis Cyril Rose died in London on the nineteenth of November in 1979 at the age of seventy. He had exhibited in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s with major retrospective in London and Brighton in 1966. Another third retrospective of Rose’s work was given at London’s England & Co in 1988. In addition to private collections, his work is included in London’s England & Co Gallery, the Stein-Tolkas Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Notes:  The Nick Harvill Libraries has a biographical article with quotes entitled “Lord Chaos: The Life of Sir Francis Rose” at:  https://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/blog/lord-chaos-the-life-of-sir-francis-rose

Time Magazine has an archive review of Sir Francis Roses’s July 1949 exhibition of new work at London’s Gimpel Fils Gallery. The review is located at;   https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888553,00.html

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose”, Date Unknown, Bromide Print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Second Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose”, 1939, Bromide Print, 24 x 23.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Third Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Emma Tollemache and Sir Francis Rose”, 9 December 1947, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Emma Tollemache (née Manasseh) wrote the poetry collection “In the Light”. A limited edition of 250 copies with illustrations by Sir Francis Rose was published by Marlowe Galleries.

Wilfred Owen: “The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought”

Photographers Unknown, The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday’s Mail: the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
“For,” said the paper, “when this war is done
The men’s first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
It being certain war has just begun.
Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,–
The sons we offered might regret they died
If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
We must be solidly indemnified.
Though all be worthy Victory which all bought.
We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
Who kept this nation in integrity.”
Nation?–The half-limbed readers did not chafe
But smiled at one another curiously
Like secret men who know their secret safe.
(This is the thing they know and never speak,
That England one by one had fled to France
Not many elsewhere now save under France).
Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,
And people in whose voice real feeling rings
Say: How they smile! They’re happy now, poor things.

Wilfred Owen, “Smile, Smile, Smile”, Poems, 1920, Chatto and Windus, London

Born on the eighteenth of March in 1893 at the Oswestry villa Plas Wilmot, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was an English soldier and one of the leading poets during the First World War. His poetry, in contrast to the patriotic verses of earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke, focused on the horrors of war, its tenches, the traumatic sufferings, and the deaths. 

The eldest of four children to Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw, Wilfred Owen was born at the comfortable home of his grandfather Edward Shaw. After Shaw’s death and the sale of his home in early 1897, Thomas Owen relocated the family several times due to his employment as a railway stationmaster before settling in Shrewsbury in 1907. Wilfred Owen received his initial education at the Birkenhead Institute and then, for his last two years, at Shrewsbury’s Wyle Cop School. 

Raised as an evangelical Anglican of the Church of England, Owen was a devout believer in his youth, in part due to his strong relationship with his mother. He discovered poetry in 1904 and was early influenced by the Bible and the English Romantic poets, particularly the works of William Wordsworth and John Keats. In 1911, Owen passed his matriculation exam at the Wyle Cop School; however, he did not achieve the first-class honors necessary for a scholarship to a university. 

In return for free lodging, Wilfred Owen became a lay assistant to the Vicar of the village of Dunsden from September of 1911 to February of 1913. This support enabled him to attend classes in botany at the University of Reading and, with later endorsement from the head of its English Department, receive free lessons in Old English. In 1913, Owen obtained the position of a private English and French tutor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France; his experience at the school led to private tutorage for a local French family. Through this family, Owen met the French satirical poet and essayist Laurent Tailhade with whom he would maintain frequent correspondence. 

At the outset of war between France and Germany in August of 1914, Owen considered his options and made the decision to enlist in the British war effort. He felt that military life afforded him the opportunity to leave the confines of study and develop a sense of honor and bravery, in essence it was a reconciliation of his impulse to art and action. After recovering from diphtheria, Owen returned to England in the autumn of 1915 and enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles, an officers’ training camp. On the twenty-ninth of December in 1916, Second Lieutenant Owen of the 2nd Manchester Regiment and his men left London aboard ship for France and the Western Front, . 

Beginning in January of 1917, Wilfred Owen spent almost four months with his regiment in various sections of the front line. On the second of May, Owen returned home with a diagnosis of shell shock that made him unfit to lead troops. By June, Owen was being treated at Craiglockhart Hospital located just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. It was during period that he emerged as a true poet with a burst of creative energy that lasted several months. Owen edited “Hydra”, the hospital journal, and wrote such poems as “The Sentry”, “The Show”, and “Dulce et Decorum Est”. 

After one month at the hospital, Owen met his fellow patient, the well-published poet Siegfried Sassoon who had been serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in France. Owen regularly began showing his poetry to Sassoon who introduced him to other writers and poets in Edinburgh’s artistic circles including Sassoon’s close friend, poet and fellow Fusilier Robert Graves. Convinced that the war ought to be ended, Owen had by this time found his creative stimulus in a compassionate identification with both the wounded and the soldiers still in combat..

Discharged and judged fit for light regimental duties, Wilfred Owen spent the winter in North Yorkshire and was later posted in March of 1918 to the Northern Command Depot in Ripon where he composed a number of poems including “Futility” and “Strange Meeting”. In spite of a strong desire to remain in England to protest the continuation of the war, Owen returned to his comrades in the French trenches at the end of August. On the first of October in 1918, he led units of the 2nd Manchester Regiment to storm enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt in northern France. Owen was awarded the Military Cross for his courage and leadership in these battles.

On the fourth of November while leading his men on a crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal, Wilfred Owen was shot and killed. His body was buried in a corner of the Communal Cemetery of Ors, between two of his men, W. E. Privates Duckworth and H. Topping. One week later, the Armistice became official and World War I was ended. The War Department telegram announcing Owen’s death reached his parents in Shrewsbury on Armistice Day as the town’s bells were ringing. After the war’s end, Siegfried Sassoon had waited in vain for word from Owen, only to be told of his death several months later.

Having personally experienced the horrors of war, Wilfred Owen was keenly  aware of the fragile balance between the days spent mending fears and the remembered war experiences that occurred during sleep. His own dreams seemed to undo whatever progress was made each day, a fact he believed that was shared by many of his fellow soldiers. For Owen, his writing depended on the honesty of describing his own war experiences. He felt his duty as a writer was to educate the public to the true nature of combat and its endless, unforgiving ramifications.

Notes:  Wilfred Owen only published five poems before his death; these appeared in critically acclaimed literary journals during the first half of 1918. Although he had started preparing his first poetry collection for publication, he was killed in battle before he finished the work. “Poems” was published posthumously, with an introduction by Sassoon, in December of 1920. 

The Poetry Foundation has an extensive biography on Wilfred Owen which includes  twelve poems and related articles. This article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen

On the Warfare History Network site, writer and historian Philip Burton Morris has an interesting article entitled “WWI Author: The Writings of Wilfred Owen” which discusses Owen’s life and poetry during the war years. The article is located at: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-writings-of-wilfred-owen/ 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfred Owen’s Last Portrait, August 1918”, 1931 Reprint, The English Faculty Library, Oxford University, The Wilfred Own Literary Estate

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Manchester Regiment Officers, Wilfred Owen (Center), circa 1915-1918, Detail, Gelatin Silver Print, Warfare History Network

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfred Owen”, 1915-1918, Vintage Photo, English Faculty Library, Oxford University, Wilfred Owen Literary Estate

Julien Green: “A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing”

Photographers Unknown, A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing

Paris est une ville dont on pourrait parler au pluriel, comme les Grecs l’a fait avec Athène. Car il y a beaucoup de Paris et celui des touristes n’a qu’une relation superficielle avec celui des Parisiens. Un étranger qui traverse Paris dans en voiture ou en autobus et qui va d’un musée à l’autre n’a aucune idée de ce monde qu’il ne voit pas, bien qu’il soit dans elle.

Personne ne peut affirmer de connaître bien une ville s’il n’a pas perdu son temps dans elle. L’âme d’une grande ville ne laisse pas se comprendre légèrement. Pour qu’on se familiarise vraiment avec elle, on doit dans elle, on a dû s’ennuyer et pâtir un peu dans elle. Bien sûr, chacun peut s’acheter un guide de la ville et constater que tous les monuments indiqués sont là. Mais, à l’intérieur de la frontière de Paris, une ville qui est accessible autant dure que Tombouctou l’était autrefois se cache. 

Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing.

Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was. 

Julien Green, Paris, 1987, Illustrator: Jean William Hanoteau, Publisher: Les Bibliophiles du Palais, Paris 

Born in Paris in September of 1900, Julien Hartridge Green was an American writer who spent most of his life in France. Over a seventy-year career as an author, he wrote novels,  essays, several plays, a journal written daily from 1919 to 1998, and a four-volume autobiography. In 1971, Green had the honor of being the first non-French national to be elected a member of the Académie Françoise. He had been awarded the Académie’s grand prize for literature in the previous year.

Julien Green was the youngest of seven children born to American parents Edward Green, a native of Virginia, and Mary Adelaide Hartridge from Savannah, Georgia. The family had emigrated and settled in Paris seven years before his birth. Raised in a traditional Protestant home, Green received his education in French schools including the city’s distinguished Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. After his mother’s death in 1914, he became a Roman Catholic two years later. 

After sitting for the French baccalaureate in 1917, Green served as an underage volunteer ambulance driver during the first World War, initially for the American Field Service and then for the American Red Cross. He entered the French Army in 1918 and served in an artillery unit until the end of the war. At the invitation of his uncle Walter Hartridge, Green studied from 1919 to 1922 at the University of Virginia, his first direct contact with the United States and its Southern culture. 

Julien Green returned to France in 1922 and began his career as a writer. His first published work in French was a critique entitled “Pamphlet Contre les Catholiques de France”, written under the name of Théophile Delaporte. In 1926, Green published his first novel “Mont-Cinère (Avarice House)” through philosopher and publisher Jacques Maritain who later published Green’s 1927 novel “Adrienne Mesurat (The Closed Garden)”. Until his death in 1973, Maritain remained a loyal friend, supporter and regular correspondent to Green

In the early 1930s, Green returned to the United States and began work on a novel set in the American South during the 1800s, an effort he abandoned after learning that Margaret Mitchell was nearing publication on her 1936 “Gone with the Wind”. Green’s Southern epic would be a three-volume saga written in France. The first volume “Les Pays Lointains (The Distant Lands, Dixie I)” was published in 1987. “Les Étoiles du Sud (The Stars of the South, Dixie II)” was published two years later. Both of these were reprinted in English in 1991 and 1993, respectively. The third volume of the saga, “Dixie (Dixie III)”, was published in both French and English in 1995.

In 1938, Julien Green began the publication of journals that provided a chronicle of his personal, literary and religious life as well as the atmosphere and events in the French capital. He extensively edited each of the journals to suppress accounts of his and others’ sexual adventures as well as the opinions he had expressed candidly to others. Of the nineteen volumes in the series, only two were published before the German invasion in 1940. Publication resumed after the war with volume three, “Devant la Porte Sombre (1940-1943)”, in 1946. The final volume, “Le Grand Large du Soir (1997-1998)”, was published in 2006.

After France’s surrender in July of 1940, Green fled Paris for the city of Pau in southwest France near the Spanish border. He was able to obtain visas for himself and his long-time partner, journalist Robert de Saint-Jean, for passage to Portugal from which they sailed on the 15th of July to New York City. After a brief stay with a cousin in Baltimore, Green was mobilized in 1942 by the United States Office of War Information to serve as a French-speaking broadcaster for the Voice of America. While in New York, he wrote his first English work, the  1942 memoir “Memories of Happy Days” and gave lectures at both Mills and Goucher colleges. Green also translated two works by French poet and essayist Charles Péguy into English and wrote articles for periodicals. 

After his return to Paris in late September of 1945, Julien Green continued the editing and publication of his journals. In the next fifteen years, he published four major novels: the 1947 “Si J’Étais Vous (If I Were You)”; the 1951 ““Moïre” set in Charlottesville, Virginia; the 1956 “Le Malfaiteur (The Transgressor)”; and the 1960 “Chaque Homme dans sa Nuit (Each in His Own Darkness)”, a novel of a young Catholic troubled by homosexual urges. Between 1963 and 1974, Green published four volumes of memoirs that had been written before his published journals. In the third volume of this set, the 1966 “Terre Lointaine (Love in America)”, Green described how he became aware of his homosexuality while at the University of Virginia. These four memoirs were reissued in 1985 under the title “Jeunes Années”. 

Julien Hartridge Green died in Paris on the thirteenth of August in 1996, shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday. His remains were entombed in a chapel designed for him at St. Egid Church in Klagenfurt, Austria. After his death, Green’s adopted adult son, novelist and playwright Éric Jourdan, served as executor of Green’s estate. Controversy surrounded Jourdan’s attempts to control and censor Green’s publications. After Jourdan’s death in 2015, his executor Tristan Gervais de Lafond supported the publication of an uncensored edition of Green’s journals; the first volume of this set was published in 2019.

Notes: Julien Green had been for many years the companion of author and journalist Robert de Saint-Jean whom he met in November of 1924. They lived together in an intimate and physical open  relationship for most of the inter-war years. Green and Saint-Jean frequented Paris’s popular gay clubs, traveled together in the 1920s and 1930s through Europe, Tunisia, and the  United States, and spent months together in London during the mid-1930s. For his body of work, Robert de Saint-Jean received in 1984 France’s literary award, the Prix Marcel Proust. He died in Paris at the age of eight-five in January of 1987.

The National Endowment for the Humanities’s online magazine “Humanities” has a feature article entitled “Julien Green: The End of a World”, written by NEH research fellow Francis-Noël Thomas. This article on Green’s life in Paris can be found at: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/julyaugust/feature/julien-green-the-end-world

A complete list of Julien Green’s hundred seventy-two published works can be found at the GoodReads site located at: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/36431.Julien_Green

Top Insert Image: George Hoyningen-Huene, “Julien Green”, 1930, Gelatin Silver Print, Vanity Fair 

Second Insert Image: Julien Green, “Journal (1928-1939)”, January 1958, Limited Edition, Volume Nine of Ten, Publisher Librairie Plon, Paris

Third Insert Image: Carl van Vechten, “Julien Green”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Julien Green, “Les Pays Lointains”, 1987, Publisher Éditions de Seuil, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Julien Green”, circa 1971, Gelatin Silver Print

Frank Sargeson: “It Was Well On Into Autumn”

Photographers Unknown, It Was Well On Into Autumn

Nobody lived on the island. There were a few holiday baches but they were empty now that it was well on into the autumn. Nor from this end could you see any landing places, and with the wind blowing up more and more it wasn’t too pleasant to watch the sea running up the rocks. And Fred had to spend a bit of time manoeuvring around before he found his reef.

It was several hundred yards out with deep water all round, and it seemed to be quite flat. If the sea had been calm it might have been covered to a depth of about a foot with the tide as it was. But with the sea chopping across it wasn’t exactly an easy matter to stand there. At one moment the water was down past your knees, and the next moment you had to steady yourself while it came up round your thighs. And it was uncanny to stand there, because with the deep water all around you seemed to have discovered a way of standing up out in the sea.

Anyhow, Fred took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and his trousers as far as they’d go, and then he hopped out and got Ken to do the same and keep hold of the dinghy. Then he steadied himself and began dipping his hands down and pulling up mussels and throwing them back into the dinghy, and he worked at a mad pace as though he hadn’t a moment to lose. It seemed only a minute or so before he was quite out of breath.

It’s tough work, he said. You can see what a weak joker I am.

I’ll give you a spell, Ken said, only keep hold of the boat.

Well, Fred held the dinghy, and by the way he was breathing and the look of his face you’d have thought he was going to die. But Ken had other matters to think about, he was steadying himself and dipping his hands down more than a yard away, and Fred managed to pull himself together and shove off the dinghy and hop in. And if you’d been sitting in the stern as he pulled away you’d have seen that he had his eyes shut. Nor did he open them except when he took a look ahead to see where he was going, and with the cotton-wool in his ears it was difficult for him to hear.

Frank Sargeson, Excerpt from A Great Day, 1940, A Man and His Wife, Christchurch, New Zealand

Born in the New Zealand city of Hamilton in March of 1903, Frank Sargeson was a novelist and short story writer. One of New Zealand’s greatest literary innovators, he broke from colonial literary traditions and developed a style that expressed the rhythms of his native country’s speech and experience.

Born Norris Frank Davey, Frank Sargeson was the son of prosperous businessman Edwin Davey and his wife Rachel, both committed Methodists. He had a secure early life but later regarded it as limited in scope. Sargeson attended Hamilton High School and enrolled in 1921 as an extramural law student at Aukland University College. He worked in the offices of solicitors during the day and studied law in the evenings. Sargeson also stayed for a period at the Ōkahukura sheep farm of his uncle Oakley Sargeson. 

After an argument with his mother in 1925, Sargeson relocated to Aukland to continue his studies; he received his qualification as a solicitor in 1926. Sargeson left New Zealand at the beginning of 1927 and spent two years in Europe where he  explored London’s museums and theaters as well as the countrysides of England, France, Italy and Switzerland. While abroad, Sargeson  made a failed attempt at a novel and had his first homosexual relationship in London.

Upon his return to New Zealand in 1928, Frank Sargeson took the position of clerk in the Public Trust Office at Wellington and concentrated on writing short stories.. A series of homosexual encounters in 1929 led to his arrest and a two-year suspended sentence on the condition that he live with his uncle at the Ōkahukura farm. For eighteen months, Sargeson worked on the farm and wrote continuously. By May of 1930, he had successfully published an article on his European travels in the New Zealand Herald and completed his first novel, though it was rejected by several publishers.

In May of 1931, Sargeson took permanent residence at his parents’ well-worn beach cottage (bach) in Takapuna, a northern suburb of Aukland. He adapted the pseudonym of Frank Sargeson at this time to distance himself from his earlier conviction and as a tribute to his uncle. Sargeson never obtained employment as a solicitor and ultimately relied on homegrown food to sustain himself as he experimented with his writing. Registered as unemployed to be eligible for relief , he sheltered people who were struggled financially or lived on the fringes of society. On of these was Harry Hastings Doyle, a suspended horse trainer ten years his senior, who became his life-partner. Doyle lived at the cottage for extended periods over a span of thirty years, the last being his illness from 1967 until his death in 1971.

Although he had published one story and several articles in Aukland newspapers, Frank Sargeson considered the publishing of the fictional, five-hundred word “Conversations with My Uncle” in a July 1935 issue of the weekly magazine “Tomorrow” to be his first success in the literary world. In 1936, publisher Robert Lowry’s newly established Unicorn Press printed Sargeson’s first book, “Conversations with My Uncle and Other Sketches”. The short stories in this collection displayed the features that would characterize Sargeson’s style: austere, minimalist narration and characters as well as the use of everyday New Zealand spoken English.  

By 1940, Sargeson had established a significant reputation as a New Zealand writer with the publishing of more than forty stories. In the same year, his story “The Making of a New Zealander” won a prize at a New Zealand centennial competition and “A Man and His Wife”, his second short story collection, was published by Caxton Press. Sargeson’s writing had also reached the international market and appeared in journals and anthologies in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. His 1943 novella “That Summer” dealt with the dynamics of male friendship in the isolated New Zealand environment and, as in much of his fiction, contained implicit homoerotic elements. 

In 1946, Frank Sargeson formally changed his birthname to Frank Sargeson so his father could transfer ownership of the Takapuna cottage and its property to him. In the same year, New Zealand’s Internal Affairs changed his benefit allowance into a literary pension which continued until his eligibility for an old-age pension; this extra income allowd him to finance  a new cottage. His friend George Haydn, a Hungarian who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1939 to escape the Nazi invasion, designed a simple, economical dwelling and, with the help of his partner George Rollett, built the new cottage at cost. 

In the 1950s, Sargeson published the 1954 novella “I for One”, two stories and a short autobiographical essay. The majority of his time was spent writing plays, two of which,”The Cradle and the Egg” and “A Time for Sowing”, were staged in Aukland and later published in 1964 as “Wrestling with the Angel”. Sargeson had a burst of creative energy in the 1960s. His novel “Memoirs of a Peon”, based on the sexual adventures of a friend, was published in 1965, “The Hangover” in 1967, and his “Joy of the Worm” in 1969.

After the death of long-time partner Harry Doyle, Frank Sargeson published several collections of earlier works, among which were the 1972 “Man of England Now” which included the novella “A Game of Hide and Seek”,  and the 1973 “The Stories of Frank Sargeson”. Sargeson also chronicled his life in a set of three memoirs: “Once Is Enough” in 1973, the 1975 “More Than Enough”, and “Never Enough: Places and People Mainly” in 1977. These autobiographies were published in 1981 as a single volume entitled “Sargeson”. 

By 1980, Sargeson’s health had begun to decline. He was suffering from diabetes and congestive heart failure; he also had a mild stroke shortly before his seventy-seventh birthday. The onset of prostate cancer and senile dementia added to his deterioration. Frank Sargeson was admitted to the North Shore Hospital in December of 1981 and died there on the first of March in 1982. The Frank Sargeson Trust was formed to preserve his Tukapuna home as a museum and maintain a literary fellowship. Sargeson’s ashes were spread under a loquat tree in the newly renovated property’s garden in June of 1990.

Notes: The Frank Sargeson Trust website, which contains a chronological biography of Sargeson as well as the history of his Takapuna house, can be found at: https://franksargeson.nz

The essay introduction to Sargeson’s 1964 “Collected Stories: 1935-1963” is available through the Victoria University of Wellington’s Electronic Text Collection located at: https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-PeaFret-t1-body-d12.html

Frank Sargeson’s “A Great Day” in its entirely can be found at: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/great-day-sargeson/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Frank Sargeson”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: John Reece Cole, “Harry Doyle and Frank Sargeson, Cottage at Takapuna, Aukland”, early 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Dave Roberts, “Frank Sargeson”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Flickr Images

Kerwin Mathews: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Kerwin Mathews”, 1960, Publicity Photo, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Columbia Pictures Corporation

Born in Seattle, Washington in January of 1926, Kerwin Mathews was an American film and theatrical actor. Although he appeared in several war and crime dramas, Mathews is best known today for his starring roles in the heroic fantasy adventure films of the 1950s and 1960s.

Born the only child of the family, Kerwin Mathews was two years old when he and his divorced mother moved to Janesville, the county seat of Rock County, Wisconsin. He graduated from the city’s high school in 1943 where he had been active in the school’s theatrical productions. During World War II, Mathews served in the United States Army Air Forces as both a pilot and a swimming instructor. After his military service, he studied for two years at the private Milton College before transferring, with drama and musical scholarships, to Beloit College. 

After graduating from Beloit College, Mathews remained for three years as a member of its faculty with courses in speech and the dramatic arts; he also appeared in productions by regional theater assembles. After teaching English at Lake Geneva’s high school in the early 1950s, Mathews decided to pursue an acting career in California. While training at the Tony-Award winning Pasadena Playhouse, he was noticed by a casting agent from Columbia Pictures and, upon approval by studio head Harry Cohen, signed to a seven-year contract. 

As an actor on television, Kerwin Mathews made his debut appearance as Major Caldwell in “The Escape of Mr. Proteus”, a 1954 episode in American Broadcast Company’s science-fiction series “Space Patrol”. Between 1954 and 1959, he had a variety of roles on major theatrical series including “The Ford Television Theater”, “Playhouse 90”, “Matinee Theater” and the “Goodyear Television Playhouse”. Mathews had the lead role of Johann Strauss Jr. in the Walt Disney 1963 two-part television film “The Waltz King”, a biographical film on the struggles of Johann Strauss Jr. to prove himself as talented as his composer father.

Mathews’s first appearance on the big screen was an uncredited role as a reporter in Fred F. Sears’s 1955 crime film noir “Cell 2455, Death Row”. He received his first film credit in Phil Karlson’s 1955 heist film “5 Against the House” for his acting alongside Guy Madison, Kim Novak, Brian Keith and William Conrad. In 1957, Mathews appeared in a starring role as actor Lee J. Cobb’s son in Vincent Sherman’s crime film “The Garment Jungle”. His first leading role in film was Sergeant Thomas A. (Tom) Sloan in Paul Wendkos’s 1958 World War Two film for Columbia Pictures, “Tarawa Beachhead”, a role which gained him critical recognition for his performance.  

Both handsome and an agile fencer from his days at Beloit College, Kerwin Mathews was chosen by Columbia Pictures for the role of the dauntless hero in Nathan Juran’s 1958 classic Technicolor fantasy-adventure “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”. This film featured stop-motion animated creatures created by the master of the craft, Ray Harryhausen. The climatic battle between Mathews and the sword-wielding skeleton became a classic scene in the fantasy adventure genre. The first of the three Sinbad movies from Columbia, “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” was  selected in 2008 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

In 1960, Mathews had the leading role in another Columbia/Harryhausen film, director Jack Sher’s 1960 “The 3 Worlds of Gulliver” based upon Jonathan Swift’s 1726 “Gulliver’s Travels”. In 1962, he was given the lead role in Nathan Juran’s 1962 “Jack the Giant Killer” with stop-motion animation by Project Unlimited, an Academy Award winner for its work on George Pal’s 1960 “The Time Machine”. Despite his previous appearances in such movies as “The Last Blitzkrieg” with Van Johnson and “The Devil at 4 O’Clock” with Sinatra and Spencer Tracy, Mathews felt that Columbia was now restricting his roles to the adventure genre. 

Kerwin Mathews appeared in one last film for Columbia Pictures, the 1963 psycho thriller “Maniac” and then traveled overseas as a freelance actor in a search for better roles. However even in Europe, the roles he managed to obtain were all in the adventure genre. Mathews starred in the 1960 Italian-French epic “The Warrior Empress” and Hammer Films’s “The Pirates of Blood River” for Columbia. He next had the lead role in two French spy films written and directed by André Hunebelle, the 1963 “OSS 117 Is Unleashed’ and its sequel, the 1964 French-Italian collaboration “Shadow of Evil”. In 1968, Mathews  starred in two low-budget films in Europe, “Battle Beneath the Earth” filmed in England and “The Killer Likes Candy”, a spy film directed by Maurice Cloche and Federico Chentrens.

Mathews returned to the United States in 1969 and continued acting. He had the supporting role of Marquette in Gordon Douglas’s 1970 American Western for United Artist, “Barquero”, which starred Lee Van Cleef, Warren Oates and Forrest Tucker. In 1971, Mathews had supporting roles in Harry Essex’s monster film “Octaman”, part of the RiffTrax Live series, and the television movie “Death Takes a Holiday”. His last lead role was in Nathan Juran’s 1973 horror film “The Boy Who Cried Werewolf”, a film he immediately disavowed..

After guest-starring on the television series “General Hospital” and “Ironside”, Kerwin Mathews ended his acting career in 1978. He had relocated to San Francisco where he managed Pierre Deux, an antique and furniture retail establishment. Throughout his later years, Mathews was a committed patron of the city’s various opera and ballet companies. He died in his sleep at his San Francisco home at the age of eighty-one in July of 2007. Kerwin Mathews was survived by his life-long partner of forty-six years, Tom Nicoll, a British display manager he met in Knightsbridge, London in 1961. 

Top Insert Image: Kerwin Mathews as Alan Mitchell, 1957, “The Garment Jungle”, Film Still, Cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc, Director Vincent Sherman, Columbia Pictures 

Second Insert Image: Kerwin Mathews, “Barquero”, 1970, Film Still, Cinematographer Jerry Finnerman, Director Gordon Douglas, United Artists 

Third Insert Image: Kerwin Mathews, “Jack the Giant Killer”, 1962, Film Still, Cinematographer David S. Horsley, Director Nathan Juran, United Artists

Fourth Insert Image: Kerwin Mathews, “OSS 117 Is Unleashed”, 1963, Film Still, Cinematographer Raymond Pierre Lemoigne, Director André Hunebelle

Bottom Insert Image: Kerwin Mathews and Charles Van Johnson, “The Last Blitzkrieg”, 1959, Studio Publicity Shot, Cinematographer Edward Scaife, Director Arthur Dreifuss, Columbia Pictures 

James Kirkup: “Behind Its Music Laughs the Mouth of Pan”

Photographers Unknown, Behind Its Music Laughs the Mouth of Pan

Lips hardened by winter’s dumb duress
Part on this other, broader smile of youth
That masks deep shyness in its shallow kiss,
While silently behind its music laughs the mouth
Of Pan, and mourns the skull of a severer myth.

The keen and thick-fringed eyes denote
Languor, delight, astonishment or grief,
Interpreters expressive of the heart
That makes the lake dance, and the leaf.

Boy, in cupped hands hold whatever passion time invents:
Fire your tiny forges with gigantic sound, and fill
Heaven with your fierce harmonics! Inspire those instruments,
Aeolus, lyre and grove-hung harp, that now miraculously thrill
Our childhood, the toy that trembles to an ancient will!

James Kirkup, Boy with a Mouth Organ, June 1951, Poetry Review, Volume 42 Number 3 (May-June)

Born in South Shields, County Durham in April of 1918, James Harold Kirkup was an English poet, author, dramatist, travel writer and accomplished translator of prose, verse and drama. The only son of a carpenter, Kirkup received his initial education at Westoe Secondary School in South Shields and later earned a degree in Modern Languages at Kings College, Durham University. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and worked as an agricultural laborer for the Forestry Commission in the Yorkshire and Essex regions. Kirkup also taught for a short period at Colwall, Malven’s Downs School where poet Wystan Hugh Auden had been an educator.

Kirkup’s first volume of poems, “The Drowned Sailor and Other Poems”, was published in 1947 by London’s Grey Walls Press. From 1950 to 1952, he was the first Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University, a position that made him the first resident university poet in the United Kingdom. During this residency, Kirkup published his first substantial collection of poetry, the 1951 ”The Submerged Village and Other Poems”, through the Oxford University Press, one of the most prestigious publishers of contemporary poetry in the English language. Between 1952 and 1963, he published five more poetry collections though this press.

In 1952, James Kirkup moved to Gloucestershire and became a visiting poet at the Bath Academy of Art and Design until 1955. After a brief period of teaching at a London grammar school, he decided to relocate to Europe in 1956. Kirkup taught for three years at several European universities, including Spain’s University of Salamanca. Invited to teach at Tohoku University in Sendai, he arrived in Japan at the beginning of January of 1959. During his thirty years in the country, Kirkup held the position of an English Literature professor at several Japanese universities.

Kirkup recorded his first experience of Japan in his 1962 “These Horned Islands: A Journal of Japan”. He described his travels in Japan and the country’s effect on his life in his 1970 prose volume “Japan Behind the Fan”. Kirkup discussed the various art forms he encountered in Japan, including its poetry, theater, and Noh dramas, in a subsequent volume published in 1974, “Heaven, Hell and Hara-kiri: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Superstate”.

James Kirkup’s study of the Japanese poetic art of haiku would remain a strong influence on his work, one that would engage him for the rest of his life. Delighted by his many discoveries in Japan, Kirkup published many collections of haiku poems. Among these are the 1968 “Paper Windows: Poems from Japan” and the 1969 “Japan Physical” which contains “Song of the New Mats: Thirteen Haiku”, a set of haiku poems describing the scent of green tatami mats. 

After settling in the Principality of Andorra, Kirkup began an arrangement in 1995 with James Hogg and Wolfgang Görtschacher of the University of Salzburg Press for the republication of his earlier out of print books. He also offered new manuscripts that established the Salzburg imprint as his principal publisher. This two-year collaboration resulted in more than a dozen publications including “A Certain State of Mind”, “Broad Daylight: Poems East and West”, “Tanka Tales”, and the two volume collection “Collected Shorter Poems: Omens of Disaster (Volume 1)” and “Once and For All (Volume 2)”. 

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, James Kirkup published over one hundred-fifty volumes of poetry, translations, autobiography and travel writing during his lifetime. He died in Andorra at the age of ninety-one in May of 2009. His papers are held at Yale University, the University of Leeds, Yorkshire, and at the South Shields Library in South Tyneside, Tyne and Wear, England. Kirkup’s poem “Ghosts, Fire, Water” from his 1995 anthology “No More Hiroshimas: Poems and Translations” was adapted by New Zealand composer Douglas Mews for unaccompanied choir and alto solo. Mew’s musical adaptation has been performed worldwide since 1972.

Notes:  The Haiku Foundation has an excellent article by David Burleigh which discusses Jame Kirkup’s life in Japan and his strong interest in the haiku form. The article can be found at: https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/files/original/f021d52af5d1ffe7ff926ca47d2b0e99.pdf

For many years, James Kirkup was an obituary writer for the British online newspaper, The Independent. He wrote some three-hundred obituaries, many of them faxed to the news service from his home in Andorra. The Independent’s obituary for Kirkup can be found at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/james-kirkup-poet-author-and-translator-who-also-wrote-approximately-300-obituaries-for-the-independent-1685745.html

James Kirkup’s collected papers and audiovisual materials in the Archives at Yale are located at: https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/833

 

Claude Cahun

The Photography of Claude Cahun

Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in October of 1894 to a literary Jewish family in Nantes, Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor and author. She was the niece of avant-garde symbolist writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of historian and Orientalist writer David Léon Cahun. 

Cahun adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 for its gender neutrality, Claude being a French name that can be used by any gender with the same spelling and pronunciation. After experiencing antisemitism in the Nantes school system, Claude Cahun attended the private Parsons Mead School in Ashtead, Surrey, and continued her education at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. 

Claude Cahun’s father, newspaper publisher Maurice Schwob, divorced his wife after her permanent internment at a psychiatric facility. In 1909, he met the widowed Marie Eugénie Rondet Malberbe and, after a lengthly courtship, married her in 1917. Claude Cahun had met Marie Malberbe’s daughter, Suzanne Alberte Malberbe, previously at school in 1909. They were already years into their lifetime artistic and romantic partnership by the time their parents married. 

In 1922, Cahun and Malberbe, now an established designer, illustrator and photographer under the name Marcel Moore, settled in Paris. At their home, they held salon meetings attended by Paris’s intellectuals and artists. As prominent members of the Parisian art world, Cahun and Moore would host such notables as poet and painter Henri Michaux, writer Adrienne Monnier, Surrealist leader and theorist André Breton, and American-born bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach.

Claude Cahun is known primarily for her highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated visual surrealistic elements. She began shooting her series of self-portraits at the age of eighteen while studying at the University of Paris. During the 1920s, Cahun’s self-portraits featured her attired in such various guises as an angel, doll, body builder, aviator, vampire and Japanese puppet. Some of these images, which presented a blurring of gender indicators and behaviors, are believed to have been taken with Marcel Moore behind the camera. Cahun and Moore collaborated on many projects and equally shared the credit for their collage work. 

In 1925, Cahun published “Heroines”, a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters intertwined with witty comparisons to contemporary women. She was active during 1929 in the experimental theater group Le Pateau for which she played Elle in “Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”,and Satan in “Le Mystère d’Adam”. In 1930, Cahun published “Aveux non Avenus (Disavowed Confessions)”, a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages by Marcel Moore. 

In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a coalition of revolutionary artists and writers who eventually mobilized against war and fascism. It was through this group that she met Breton and surrealist writer René Crevel. Cahun participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery and the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, both in 1936. 

With the rise of antisemitism in 1937, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore fled Europe and settled on the island of Jersey. After German troops invaded Jersey in 1940, they reverted to their original names and masqueraded themselves as being sisters. For several years, Cahun and Moore heroically risked their lives by producing and distributing anti-Nazi fliers to the German soldiers. Many of the anti-Nazi fliers contained translated snippets of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence: these BBC excerpts were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh critiques. Cahun and Moore would don their best dresses and attend German military events at which they secretly placed their pamphlets in cigarette boxes and in soldier’s pockets or on their chairs.

In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death. Their home and property was confiscated and much of their art was destroyed by the Germans. Cahun and Moore survived, saved by the 1945 liberation of Jersey from German occupation. Cahun’s health, however, never recovered from her treatment in the prison. She died at Saint Helier, Jersey, in December of 1954 at the age of sixty and was buried in St. Brelade’s Church, one of the twelve ancient parish churches on the island. After Cahun’s death, Moore relocated to a smaller home in Jersey. She died by suicide in February of 1972 at the age of seventy-nine. Moore is buried alongside Cahun in St. Brelade’s Church. 

Claude Cahun’s work was largely unrecognized until forty years after her death. Her participation with the Parisian Surrealists, predominately male, brought an element of diversity to their creative work through her gender non-conforming photography and writings. Cahun’s work was meant to upset the conventional understanding of photography as a document of reality. Her poetry and writings challenged the prevailing gender roles as well as social and economic boundaries. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are part of the Jersey Heritage Collections of the Bailiwick of Jersey.

An extensive article on Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, entitled “Marcel Moore, Her Life and Art”, written by the JHT Curator of Art Louise Downie can be found at the Jersey Heritage Organization’s site. This article primarily covers the life of Moore who was a successful illustrator, photographer and fashion designer. The article is located at: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/media/PDF-Heritage-Mag/marcel%20moore.pdf

The November 4th 2020 edition of the online The Art Newspaper has an extract from author Jeffrey H. Jackson’s history book “Paper Bullets” which outlines Cahun and Moore’s artistic campaign against the Germans during World War II. The article is located at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/11/04/extract-or-how-artist-couple-claude-cahun-and-marcel-moore-resisted-the-nazis-with-their-paper-bullets

Top Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Autoportrait”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Second Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait with Roger Roussot in Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Third Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Crayon and Ink on Paper, Jersey Heritage Collections

Fourth Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait in Orchards”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”, circa 1929-30, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Patrick Anderson: “With a Harsher Cry Birds Bury My Stolen Heart”

Photographers Unknown, My Bird-Wrung Youth

My bird-wrung youth began with the quick naked
voice in the morning, the crooked calling,
and closed in the quiet wave of the falling
wing, dropping down like an eyelid–
O syringing liquid
song on the bough of flight and at night, light falling,
the nested
kiss of the breasted

ones floating out to sleep in a cup of colours:
wren’s flit and dimple, the shadowy wing of the curlew
spent between stone and fern in the hollow,
the barn-raftered swallow and far at sea the rider
gull on the billow
all night, all night kept sleep till steeply
the pillow
threw morning cockcrow

up in a column of straw and blood. In childhood
days opened like that, whistled and winked away,
but now with a harsher cry birds bury
my stolen heart deep in the wild orchard,
and whether they prettily
play with the plucked bud here or marry
a cloud, I
am lost, am emptied

between two sizes of success. For, clocking
past ceiling and dream sailing, they drop down
to pick apart in a nimble and needed rain
my limbs in love with longing, yet till I long
for my twin in the sun
they rise, they almost form, to be born
with a song
in a seventh heaven!

And I alone in the ambivalence
of April’s green and evil see them still
colonizing the intricately small
or flashing off into a wishing distance–
their nearer syllables
peck through the webs of every loosening sense
and in their tall
flight’s my betrayal.

Patrick Anderson, My Bird-Wrung Youth

Born in the village of Ashtead, Surrey, in August of 1915, Patrick John MacAllister Anderson was an English-born Canadian poet, journalist, travel writer and autobiographer. Influenced by the works of Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, his poetic work, which became a major force in shaping Canadian poetry,  was distinctive for its rapid juxtaposition of contrasting images. 

Patrick Anderson was educated at the University of Oxford where he earned both his Bachelor and Master of Arts. In 1938 with a Commonwealth Fellowship, he studied at New York’s Columbia University. While in New York, Anderson met Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Doernbach, who became his wife; together they relocated to Montreal in September of 1940. Anderson taught at Montreal’s Selwyn House School, an English-language independent boys’ school, from 1940 to 1946. After receiving his professorship, he taught at McGill University in Montreal between 1948 and 1950. 

Anderson quickly became part of Montreal’s artistic life and, due to his wife’s interest, became a member of the Labor-Progressive Party. In March of 1942 he, along with poets Francis Reginald Scott, Abraham Moses Klein, and Patricia Kathleen Page, founded Montreal’s literary magazine, “Preview”, a socially and politically committed literary journal inspired by the work of the 1930s English poets. In 1943, critic John Sutherland, owner of the rival magazine “First Statement”, published a review of Anderson’s poetry that suggested homoerotic themes in the writing. Anderson, married at that time to Doernbach, threatened to sue, an action which resulted in Sutherland printing a retraction.

Patrick Anderson was still an influential editor at the “Preview” during its merger with Sutherland’s “First Statement” in 1946. However, he resigned in 1948 when Sutherland viciously attacked poet F. R. Scott’s 1946 collection “Poems”. Anderson had privately published in England two collections of his juvenile poetry: the 1929 “Poems” and the 1932 “On This Side of Nothing”. In 1945, John Sutherland’s First Statement Press published Anderson’s first Canadian chapbook of poems “A Tent for April”. The poems in this collection contain lush, often metaphysical imagery that contained an undertone of sublime sexuality. Anderson’s 1946 “The White Centre” continued the style and themes of his previous volume. The speaker, now in adulthood, looks back on his childhood and also ponders what it means to be Canadian, particularly in a time of war. 

During the post-war years, Anderson returned occasionally to England and continued his connections with several of its literary circles. During his professorship at McGill University’s Dawson College, Anderson’s marriage finally disintegrated and he decided to accept a lectureship at the University of Malaya. Anderson’s poetic account of those years, the 1953 biographical “The Colour as Naked”, opened with poems of his British childhood and youth, continued through his life in Quebec, Malaysia and New York, and ended with the poem “Leaving Canada”, a farewell to his home for a decade. 

Patrick Anderson returned to his home country of England where he remained for the rest of his life, except for a few guest lectures in Canada during the 1970s. He worked as a teacher and entered into a same-sex relationship with Orlando Gearing. During the period between 1955 and 1972, Anderson published five works of prose of which parts of three dealt with his experiences in Canada: the 1955 “Snake Wine: A Singapore Experience”, the 1957 “Search Me, Autobiography-The Black Country, Canada, and Spain”, and “The Character Ball: Chapters of Autobiography” published in 1963.

Literary context, eccentric character and exotic experience were central concerns in Anderson’s prose works. The overtly homosexual experience became an important focus in his later poetry. This interest was further manifested in Anderson’s editing, a collaboration with Alistair Sutherland, of the 1961 “Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship”, a collection of excerpts from novels, journals, poems and essays on the friendship between men that is sexual in some way. This volume was published by New York’s Arno Press as part of a series entitled “Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature”.

In 1964 and 1969, Patrick Anderson published two travel accounts, “The Smile of Apollo: A Literary Companion to Greek Travel” and “Over the Alps: Reflections on Travel and Travel Writing”, which covered the grand tours of Scottish biographer James Boswell, Lord Byron and author William Beckford. Anderson continued to write poetry even as he wrote his prose and travel works. In 1976, he published “A Visiting Distance—Poems; New Revised and Selected”. Anderson’s final volume of poetry and last published work was the 1977 “Return to Canada: Selected Poems”.

Patrick Anderson died in March of 1979 at the age of sixty-three in the civil parish of Halstead, Essex, England. Despite his published memoirs and travel writing, he treated his sexual identity as a private matter and declined the inclusion of his work in a 1972 anthology of gay- male literature. 

Notes: There was some discrepancy about Patrick Anderson’s same-sex partner in the researched articles; the name of Alistair Sutherland was mentioned in several. For this posting, I am referencing Canadian writer Blaine Marchand’s August 2015 article of an interview with Patricia Kathleen Page, a close early friend of Anderson and a co-founder of the 1942 “Preview” literary journal. She stated in 1976 that Patrick eventually left Doernbach and lived for the rest of his life with Orlando Gearing. The Blaine Marchand article for Plentide Magazine is located at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca/query-project-blaine-marchand/

All twenty-three issues of the “Preview” literary journal from 1942 to 1945 are available to read online or as downloads at the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project’s website at: https://www.modernistmags.ca/mags/preview/