Stéphane Bouquet: “One of Those Vibrations in the Air”

Photographers Unknown, One of Those Vibrations in the Air

His look and it took maybe 3
hello / seconds
only his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets wil be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves I, The Next Loves, September 2019, Translations by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bed t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slim desire
stretched out a meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves V, The Next Loves, September 2019, Translations by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born in Paris in October of 1967, Stéphane Bouquet was a French poet, author, actor, screenwriter, choreographer, film critic and an established translator of works from the New York School of Poets..

Born to a French nurse and an American soldier, Stéphane Bouquet studied at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris from which he graduated with his Master of Arts in Economics. After his studies, he was employed as a culture journalist and writer for the renowned “Cahiers du Cinéma”, the oldest French-language film magazine in publication. As a longtime film critic, Bouquet published books on such directors Gus Van Sant, Clint Eastwood and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as a work on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 epic neorealist biblical drama “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”.

Bouquet published his first collection of poems, “Dand l’Année de cet Âge (In the Year of this Age)”, in 2001 through Champ Vallon Éditions. Taken from the inscription “in anno aetatis” engraved on Roman tombs, the series of poems follow the day to day life of a man as he ponders life and death. Bouquet wrote seven more collections of poetry among which are “Vie Commune” (2016) and “Les Amours Suivants” (2013). These two works, later translated into English by Lindsay Turner, were reprinted as “Common Life” and “The Next Loves”.

As a screenwriter, Stéphane Bouquet, in collaboration with French director Sébastien Lifshitz, wrote the screenplay for the 2001 autobiographical feature film “La Traversée (The Crossing)”. With Bouquet in the lead role, the film followed the real-life search for the father Bouquet never met. Continuing his collaboration with Lifshitz, he wrote several screenplays for both short and feature LBGTQ films; these include “Les Corps Ouverts (Open Bodies)”, “Les Vies de Thérèse (The Lives of Thérèse)”, “Presque Rien (Come Undone)”, and “Côté Sauvage (Wild Side)”, a winner of four film festival awards. Bouquet also wrote screenplays for French directors Valérie Mréjen, Yann Dedet, and Robert Cantarella.

Bouquet was awarded a 2002-2003 fellowship at the Villa Medici in Rome. During this time, he participated as a dancer in contemporary choreographer Mathilde Monnier’s 2002 production “Déroutes” at the Festival d’Automne de Paris. Bouquet served as both dancer and screenwriter for Monnier’s “Frère & Soeur” that premiered at the Centre Pompidou during the 2005 Avignon Festival. He also conducted workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris as well as workshops for actors and stage directors at La Manufacture in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Stéphane Bouquet translated into French the works of such American poets as James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, and Peter Gizzi. He served as literary critic for the daily French newspaper “Libération” and contributed articles to the evening “Le Monde”. Bouquet was a featured speaker at international residencies and festivals including the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors and the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair. A recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, Stéphane Bouquet died at the age of fifty-seven in Paris on the twenty-fourth of August in 2025.

Notes: Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “Light of the Fig” can be found at the World Literature Today site: https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/light-fig-stephane-bouquet

The Poetry Society of America has an article on Stéphane Bouquet’s style of poetry in its Visiting Poet section by the University of Denver’s Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts Lindsay Turner: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

Top Insert Image:Photographer Unknown, “Stéphane Bouquet”, 2018, Color Print, Eon Magazine, Number 54, Association for the Promotion of Culture, Art, Education and Scientific Research, Sibiu, Romania

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves (Les Amours Suivants)”, English Translation Paperback, September 2019, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, January 2012, French Edition, Capricci Publishing Limited, London

Robert McAlmon: “The Possibility of All Things”

Photographers Unknown, The Possibily of All Things

Almost every night, Joyce and I met for apéritifs, and although he was working steadily on Ulysses, at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home at any hour. We talked of the way the free mind can understand the possibility of all things: necrophilia and other weird rites. We agreed in disliking mysticism, particularly the fake and sugared mysticism of many poets and writers. We spoke of what a strange man Robert Burton must have been to have compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy. and he didn’t know in the end a bit more about it than we did. Sir Thomas Browne, not to speak of Ezra Pound and Eliot and Moore and Shaw, we discovered, but sooner or later Mr. Joyce began reciting Dante in sonorous Italian. When that misty and intent look came upon his face and into his eye I knew that friend Joyce wasn’t going home till early morning.

Wyndham Lewis arrived for a stay in Paris and he was a different man from the Lewis of London. He was free and easy and debonair. Indeed, too many Englishmen will do on the continent what it does not do to do in London. Lewis was intent upon going to the Picasso exhibition; he must meet Picasso and Braque and Derain, although these painters of Paris were cagey and suspicious about English painters of talent. Picasso at the time was doing his pneumatic nudes, which always made me want to stick a pin in them to see if they would deflate.

Lewis was most gracious and jovial and instructed me with a constant flow of theories on abstraction and plastic values. It would not have done to let him know that I had heard most of what he was saying before, in New York. Somehow there was no wonder in Lewis’ discovery that the engineering demand of structures often give them an aesthetic value. The Egyptians, Greeks and Mayans seemed to have known that before Lewis.

Robert McAlmon, Don’t Be Common, Being Geniuses Together 1921-1927, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self Portrait, 1962, Edited by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press

Born at Clifton, Kansas in March of 1895, Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American modernist poet, novelist and publisher who, as an important expatriate in the 1920s, founded the Parisian publishing house Contact Editions. This avant-garde press published the works of such influential writers as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

The youngest of ten children born to traveling minister John Alexander McAlmon and Bessie Urquhart, Robert McAlmon grew up in several rural mid-western towns. In 1916, he studied briefly at the University of Minnesota before his 1918 enlistment with the United States Army Air Corps. Upon military discharge from his San Diego, California station, McAlmon studied intermittently at the University of Southern California. His first poems, inspired by his fellow Army Air Corps team members, were published in the March 1919 issue of “Poetry”.

After a brief stay in Chicago where he met Italian-American writer Emanuel Carnevali, McAlmon relocated in 1920 to New York City where he was hired as an art school’s nude model. He quickly became acquainted with Greenwich Village’s literary circle, including artist and poet Marsden Hartley with whom he formed a life-long friendship. Along with physician and writer William Carlos Williams, McAlone founded the literary magazine “Contact” in 1921. Although never financially successful in its short life, the magazine’s four issues published early works from such modernist writers as Hilda Dolittle, Glenway Wescott, Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy.

On February 14th of 1921, Robert McAlmon entered into a marital arrangement with English writer Annie Winifred “Bryher” Ellerman, the heiress of a vast fortune and lover of Hilda Dolittle. This arrangement, which inspired much gossip, lasted four years and enabled Ellerman to receive control of her inheritance and gave McAlmon financial independence. In 1922, McAlmon moved to Paris where he founded the influential literary press Contact Editions. In addition to his own writings, McAlmon published Hemingway’s first work, “Three Stories and Ten Poems” (1923) and Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” (1925). He also provided financial support to James Joyce and assisted in the revision and typing of the Penelope section of Joyce’s “Ulysses”.

McAlmon published his first book of short stories, the 1922 “A Hasty Bunch”, with James Joyce’s printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon, France. Contact Editions published his second volume of short stories “Distinguished Air” (1925); two collections of poetry, “Portrait of a Generation” (1926) and “North America, Continent of Conjecture” (1929); and an experimental novel on a North Dakota prairie farm community, “Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period” (1924). Two collections of McAlmon’s poetry were printed through other presses: “Explorations” (1921) was published by London’s Egoist Press, and “Not Alone Lost” (1937) by New Directions in Connecticut.

Robert McAlmon, who had openly stated his bisexuality, officially divorced Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1927. He closed Contact Editions and left Paris in 1929. McAlmon traveled over the next fifteen years, with visits to the United States, Mexico and Europe during which he drank heavily and, although he wrote, published little. McAlmon was a friend and a drinking buddy with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, whom he introduced to the spectacle of bullfighting. He knew artist Jean Cocteau, surrealist writer René Crevel, novelist Raymond Radiguet, surrealist poet Louis Aragon and many others from the parties, bars and cafés he attended. McAlmon’s closer ties, however, were with avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

After 1935, McAlmon wrote very little. He was interested in radical politics but his views were not supported by the expatriates in Paris. After the German occupation of France, McAlmon was trapped in Paris and eventually stricken with tuberculosis. In 1940, he was able to escaped France through Spain and returned to the United States where joined his brothers in El Paso, Texas. McAlmon sought treatment for his ailment in El Paso and worked with his brothers in a local surgical supply house.

Despite his many published works, Robert McAlmon died almost an unknown writer in his own country. He passed away, at the age of sixty, in February of 1956 at Desert Hot Springs, California. His body was interred at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1990s, the first American editions of “Village”, “Post-Adolescence”, and “Miss Knight and Others” were published by the University of New Mexico Press. McAlmon’s memoir “Being Geniuses Together”, first published 1938 in London, was reprinted by Doubleday, New York in 1968.

Notes: The Internet Archive’s Open Library site has several books by Robert McAlmon that can be read online after free registration: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=robert+mcalmon&mode=everything

Top Insert Image: Berenice Abbott, “Robert McAlmon”, 1925-1930, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 19.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon with Canadian Poet John Glassco and His Partner Graeme Taylor in Nice, France”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, Ronda, Spain”, 1923, Ernst Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon”, circa 1930s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Christopher Cox: “A Key West Companion”

Photographers Unknown, A Key West Companion

I had met Doris on an earlier trip. She approached me in the supermarket and told me to put back the papayas I’d piled into the shopping basket. “Come over and pick them off the ground outside my fence. I’ll be glad to get rid of them. Take some sapodillas too.” Now she appeared behind the wrought-iron fence with a mild hello, released a tabby cat from her arms, and led me down a narrow brick path into the cool dark garden where hundreds of parakeets and canaries fluttered in several mesh-covered gazebos, each chirping in a different key.

Doris is a wiry woman with white hair who must be in her mid-eighties. She was wearing a turquoise artist’s smock with both the sleeves torn off at the shoulders. Her eyes were a similar blue. “I’ve been here I don’t know how long,” she said. “I came from South Carolina after World War II. I was a WAVE.” Since then she has been involved in various jobs and projects around the island, mostly in connection with the tourist trade. At present she’s creating a Key West historical museum in her back yard.

In the center of the garden Doris had built an Indian chickee, a hut made of thatch and berm (local mud) and encircled by a jagged stick fence. “The abode of the southeast Indians,” she announced. “I’m building a miniature in one of my bungalows, with little Indians and itty bitty pigs turning on spits. It’s for my Indian exhibit.”

There are several bungalows around the garden, each of which will house an exhibit based on a different period of Key West history. But the Indian comes first. Doris pointed to the “historically accurate” piles of coral rock that were arranged near the Indian chickee, then to a huge gooseberry tree that shaded the entire garden. “I grew this tree from two seeds I brought back from Katherine Mansfield’s house in the South of France.” she said. “Mouton, Mentone—I don’t remember the name. Don’t ask me any questions; it’s so long ago. All I know is that it’s never produced gooses or berries.” She laughed at her own joke and then stopped for a moment to perk up the purple orchids, vermilion and staghorn fern that grew on the dark trunk of the tree.

Christopher Cox, The Indians in Doris’s Garden, A Seaport Town, A Key West Companion, 1983, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born at Gadsden, Alabama in August of 1949, Christopher Cox, birth name Howard Raymond Cox Jr., was an author, editor, director and producer. Along with his position as senior editor of Ballantine Books, he is known for his collaboration within The Violet Quill, a group of seven gay male writers whose work established gay writing as a literary movement.

One of four children born to prominent banker Howard Cox and Dorothy Trusler, Christopher Cox received his elementary education at the local Emma Sanson High School. In 1966 at the age of sixteen, Cox was given a summer job in Washington D.C. as a page for Alabama Senator John Sparkman. After his high school graduation, he returned the following summer season to work for Alabama Representatives George Andrews and Armistead Selden. Cox attended the University of Alabama for two years befor moving to New York for a possible career in the theater.

In the fall of 1969, Cox studied acting at director Herbert Berghof and actress Uta Hagen’s HB Studio in New York City. His first role was as understudy for the Mute in a production of “The Fantasticks”. Using Christopher Cox as his professional name, he performed, directed and wrote both plays and lyrics. Cox was the director of the New Play Series and the Writers Workshop at the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company for which he produced a dozen works between 1974 and 1976. Cox performed during the 1970s in both Off-Broadway and Broadway productions, including Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”. During the 1980s, he changed his focus to writing, editing and photography.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Christopher Cox was affiliated with the Violet Quill, also known as the Lavender Quill. This group of seven writers are regarded as one of the strongest collective voices of the gay male experience in the post-Stonewall era. Cox, Robert Ferro, Andrew Holleran, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore met several times between 1975 and 1981 to read aloud and discuss their works in progress. The agenda of the Violet Quill also included working together to promote the recognition, acceptance and publication of gay literature beyond the boundaries of their own community.

As a writer, Cox’s memories of Alabama and its people appeared regularly as central themes in his stories. Significant events in his life, such as the suicide death of his uncle Ray in 1956 and his mother’s death from cancer in 1975, became focal points for his writing. From March of 1975 to 1977, Cox served as secretary to composer Virgil Thompson for whom he arranged and catalogued correspondence and music manuscripts before their transfer to Yale University. This position gave Cox access to Thompson’s circle of people as well as his neighbors in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, which included such notables as Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller and Robert Mapplethorpe. Cox’s 1978 video piece “Neurotic Moon” is a semi-autobiographic work that describes his role as secretary putting together pieces of a famous composer’s life.

In the 1980s, Christopher Cox worked for publishing firms, most notably E.P. Dutton and Ballantine. He wrote freelance articles and reviews for several papers and magazines, including New York City’s weekly alternative “Soho Weekly News” during its run from 1973 to 1982. Cox published his “A Key West Companion” through St. Martin’s Press in 1983 and, in 1987, his monograph on photographer Dorothea Lange through the fine art photography periodical Aperture.

In the spring of 1986, Cox met his lifetime partner William R. Olander, an art historian, critic, and curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.. Christopher Cox died in New York from AIDS-related complications on September 7, 1990 at the age of forty-one. His death was preceded by the death of William Olander, also from AIDS-related complications, on March 18, 1989 at the age of thirty-five.

Notes: After internships at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art, William “Bill”Olander held the position of curator of modern art at the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College from 1979 to 1984. He became the Allen Museum’s acting director for his last two years. The co-founder of the Visual AIDS art project, Olander was known for his work with ACT UP/ NY (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, New York).

Both Christopher Cox and William Olander’s writings, personal papers and correspondence files are contained in the Yale Collection of American Literature Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The collection overview for this material can be found at: https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/caoSearch/catalog/cty-br_beinecke-coxc#summary

The Aperture Foundation’s “Dorothy Lange: Masters of Photography, No. 5”, which contains Christopher Cox’s essay on Lange and forty-three black and white images by Lange, can be found in its entirety on the (SCRIBD) website at: https://www.scribd.com/document/514781915/Aperture-Masters-of-Photography-Linda-Gordon-Dorothea-Lange-Dorothea-Lange-Aperture-2014

Second insert Image: Christopher Cox, “A Key West Companion”, January 1, 1983, Paperback Edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York City

Third Insert Image: “Dorothea Lange: Masters of Photography, No. 5”, 1987, Essay by Christopher Cox, 43 Black and White Images by Lange, Aperture Foundation, Millerton, New York

Hevré Guibert: “He Who Wished to be Master of the Truth”

Photographers Unknown, He Who Wished to Be Master of the Truth

He had to finish his books, this book he had written and rewritten, destroyed, renounced, destroyed once more, imagined once more, created once more, shortened and stretched out for ten years, this infinite book, of doubt, rebirth, modest grandiosity. He was inclined to destroy it forever, to offer his enemies their stupid victory, so they could go around clamoring that he was no longer able to write a book, that his mind had been dead for ages, that his silence was just proof of his failure. He burned or destroyed all the drafts, all the evidence of his work, all he left on his table were two manuscripts, side by side, he instructed a friend that this abolition was to continue. He had three abscesses in his brain but he went to the library every day to check his notes.

His death was stolen from he who wished to be master of his own death, and even the truth of his death was stolen from he who wished to be master of the truth. Above all the name of the plague was not to be spoken, it was to be disguised in the death records, false reports were given to the media. Although he wasn’t dead yet, the family he had always been ostracized from took in his body. The doctors spoke abjectly of blood relatives. His friends could no longer see him, unless they broke and entered: he saw a few of them, unrecognizable behind their plastic-bag-covered hair, masked faces, swaddled feet, torsos covered in jackets, gloved hands reeking of alcohol he had been forbidden to drink himself.

All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips when exhaustion closed his eyes. If he only kept a single image, it would be the one of their last walk in the Alhambra gardens, or just his face. Love kept on thrusting its tongue in his mouth despite the plague. And as for his death it was he who negotiated with his family: he exchanged his name on the death announcement for being able to choose his death shroud. For his carcass he chose a cloth in which they had made love, which came from his mother’s trousseau. The intertwined initials in the embroidery could bear other messages.

Hevré Guibert, A Man’s Secret, Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories, 2020, Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Semiotexte Publishing

Born in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. Through his novels and autobiographical studies, he was influential in changing the French public’s attitudes towards the HIV/AIDS crisis. Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. His art and his writings were closely linked to his private life. Those of whom he wrote often became his friends, and his loved ones were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s writing style was initially inspired by the work of Jean Genet and, later, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, a post-war author who explored obsession and isolation through multiple perspectives. Three of Guibert’s lovers played an important role in his life and work: Thierry Jouno, director for the International Theater for the Deaf whom he met in 1976; philosopher and author Michel Foucault whom he met in 1977; and Vincent Marmousez, a teenager who inspired his 1989 novel “Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”.

Born into the conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and a former teacher, Hervé Guibert moved to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, he entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for the glossy women’s magazine “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel/diary, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”.

Guibert was hired in 1978 as a photography critic by “Le Monde”, France’s evening newspaper, and successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In the same year, Guibert completed his second book “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”, a collection of stories centered on a singular character, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris. During the 1980s, Guibert was a reader at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for the Young Blind) in Paris. This experience became the basis for his 1985 “Des Aveugles” which won the Fénéon Prize for that year.

In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires. For a collaborative work with his theatrical friend, opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau, Guibert shared a 1984 Best Screenplay César Award for the 1983 “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

In 1987, Guibert was granted a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert was given a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began work on recording what would be the remainder of his life. In June of 1989, he married Christine, the partner of director Thierry Jouno, so his royalty income would pass legally to her and her two children.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. In 1990, Guibert revealed his HIV status in his real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. He described in this work the existential effect the virus had on his life, its impact on a complete generation of people, the deaths of friends and lovers, and how AIDS forever transformed humanity’s relationship with desire and sexuality.

Following the release of his 1990 novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances. He filmed scenes of his daily life with AIDS between July of 1990 and February of 1991. This film, “La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty of Shamelessness)”, produced by Pascale Breugnot, was broadcasted posthumously on French television in January of 1992. Guibert published two more additional auto-fictional novels that detailed the progression of his illness: the 1991 “Le Protocole Compassionnel” and the “L’Homme au Chapeau Rouge (The Man in the Red Hat)” which was published posthumously in 1992.

Hervé Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his hospitalization in the autumn of 1991 and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

A consummate photographer and author, Hevré Guibert had published twenty-five books before his death, five of which were published in the last year of his life. Excellent translations of his work are now readily available through many sites. Several volumes of Guibert’s work can be read online at the Internet Archive

Notes: A selection from Hervé Guibert’s posthumously published “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991”, translated from the French by author Nathanaël, can be found at the Asymptote Journal site: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herve-guibert-the-mausoleum-of-lovers/

A 2014 review of “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991” can be found at the Lambda Literary Organization site: https://lambdaliterary.org/2014/10/mausoleum-of-lovers-journals-1976-1991-by-herve-guiber/

Dennis Cooper’s blog has an excellent article on Guibert’s 1989 “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” that contains photography by Guibert, a biography, media trailers, book excerpts and a 1993 interview: https://denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on-herve-guibert-to-the-friend-who-did-not-save-my-life-1989/

There is a noteworthy article by The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas from the print issue of September 21st in 2020 entitled “When a Virus Becomes a Muse”. This review of Hevré Guibert’s life and work can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

Top Insert Image: Ulf Andersen, “Hervé Guibert, Paris”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, 40.3 x 39. 2 cm, William Talbott Hillman Foundation

Second Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Sienne, 1979”, Edtition of 25, Gelatin Silver Print on Cartoline, 14.5 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “L’Oisillon, Santa Caterina, Elba”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, 14 x 21.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Michel Foucault”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 14.5 x 21.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert” Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, September 2020 Issue of The New Yorker

Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.

Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.

After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.

Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.

Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.

As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between 1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.

Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.

Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.

From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/

The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html

Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin,

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Charles Henri Ford: “Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone”

Photographers Unknown, Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone

And you may not have hair as curly as the alphabet
but if your googoo eyes were a bundle of germs
there’d be an epidemic
With your greenhorn complexion
and your grasswidow ways
you’d make a butcher kill a granite cow
and weigh the gravel out for hamburger.
I mean you’d start the eskimos stripteasing,
give dummies the shakes,
get  flyingcircuses  to  crawl  on  their  hands  and  knees.
No I wouldn’t put it past you.
Just let somebody set you on the fence,
by  gosh  foulballs  would  be  annulled
and home-runs the rule.
The weather forcast that overlooked you, baby,
sure better watch out for the next cyclone,
seeing how my uptown’s flattened,
and  my  downtown  a-waving  in  the  wind.

Charles Henri Ford, I Wouldn’t Put It Past You, The Breathless Rock, Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, 1972, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles

Born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi in February of 1908, Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, and artist whose career spanned and influenced twentieth-century’s modernist era. In his lifetime, he exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, published over a dozen collections of poetry, directed experimental films, and edited the American literary and surrealist art magazine “View”.

Charles Henri Ford was the first of two children born into the southern Baptist family of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. He acquired his formal education at Catholic boarding schools in the American South and had one of his first poems published by The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Ford became part of the modernist literary movement with the publishing of his monthly “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” in 1929 and 1930. The magazine introduced new talents such as authors James Farrell and Paul Bowles as well as published submissions by such writers as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.

Through “Blues” magazine, Ford communicated with the young novelist Parker Tyler who introduced him to both the poetry and men in the Village areas of Manhattan. Together they collaborated on a novel, “The Young and the Evil”, a fragmented account of bohemian gay life, drag balls and cruising. After his magazine ceased publication, Ford traveled to France and became a member of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. Through Stein, he became acquainted with members of the American expatriate community which included such artists and writers as Natalie Clifford Barney, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.

Ford had a brief affair with Barnes and traveled with her to Tangiers, Morocco where, while waiting for the publication of “The Young and the Evil”, he typed Barnes’s completed novel “Nightwood” for its publication. Ford returned in 1934 to Paris where he met Russian-born surrealist painter and designer Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protégé whose work was gaining recognition. This creative and loving relationship developed into a strong, though occasionally tempestuous, bond that lasted for twenty-three years. In late 1934, Ford and Tchelitchew left Europe and returned to New York City where they settled into an East Side penthouse.

In 1938, Charles Henri Ford published his first full-length book of poems “The Garden of Disorder” which contained an introduction written by author William Carlos Williams. Influenced by the poetic works of Jean Cocteau, Ford felt that poetry had a relationship with all forms of art, be it a novel, essay or theatrical production. His poetry is easily noticed for its surrealistic format of short spurts of words; however, he also adapted his style to political poetry such as the work he published in the American Marxist magazine “New Masses” , at that time a politically oriented journal which covered anti-lynching and equal rights for women.

In 1940, Ford and Parker Tyler collaborated on the avant-garde and surrealist art magazine “View”, a quarterly publication that established New York as a center of surrealism. The magazine interviewed local artists as well as the many European surrealists who had fled the war in Europe. Contributions to the magazine came from many prominent artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Chagall and René Magritte, among others. A publishing imprint of “View” magazine, View Editions, was established to publish monographs and volumes of poetry, two of which were André Breton’s 1946 “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares” and Ford’s 1959 “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”.

Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved in 1952 to Europe where they continued their artistic careers. Ford had a 1955 photography exhibition “Thirty Images from Italy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, followed by a 1956 solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in Paris. In July of 1957, Pavel Tchelitchew, now a United States citizen, died at the age of fifty-eight in Grottaferrata, Italy, with Ford by his bedside. His body was taken to Paris and interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Ford returned to New York City in 1962 and began to associate with the underground filmmakers and artists involved in the Pop movement. He began to experiment in collage images and created a series of lithographs with spliced-typefaces, acid colors, and pop culture images. A visual form of concrete poetry, these “Poem Posters” were exhibited in 1965 at New York’s prominent Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue. In the latter part of the 1960s, Ford focused on directing his own films, the first of which was the 1967 “Poem Posters”, a documentary of his recent exhibition, later entered into the Fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Ford’s second film, the 1971 “Johnny Minotaur”, was a surrealistic film-within-a-film that combined Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur with erotic imagery of male anatomy and sexuality. Only one surviving print of the film is known.

Charles Henri Ford relocated in the early 1970s to Nepal where he purchased a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he hired local teenager Indra Tamang to cook and be his photography assistant. Tamang became basically Ford’s surrogate son, caretaker, and artistic collaborator for the rest of Ford’s life. They toured India and the Mid-East, resided for a period in Paris and Crete, and finally relocated to New York City. Ford purchased an apartment for himself and Tamang in The Dakota, a building that faced Central Park and was well known for its artistic tenants among whom was the actress Ruth Ford, Charles’s sister. Settled in the city, Ford created a series of art projects incorporating his collage materials and Tamang’s photography.

In the 1990s, Ford edited an anthology of articles previously published over the seven-year history of “View” magazine. Published as “View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947”, the 1992 volume’s introduction was written by Ford’s longtime friend, author and composer Paul Bowles. In 2001, Ford published selections from his diaries in a volume entitled “Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957” that covered the period from his father’s death to the death of Tchelitchew. In the same year, he participated in a two-hour documentary on his life, entitled “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis for Symbiosis Films 2000.

On the twenty-seventh of September in 2002, Charles Henri Ford died in New York City at the age of ninety-four. In his will and testament, Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored novel “The Young and Evil” to Indra Tamang. Ruth Ford died in August of 2009 at the age of ninety-eight; she bequeathed her and her brother’s apartments to Tamang who had been both companion and caretaker. In 2011, Tamang carried Ruth and Charles Ford’s ashes to Mississippi where they were buried in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

Notes: Charles Henri Ford’s 1991 “Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems” is available in its entirety on the Document.Pub site: https://dokumen.pub/out-of-the-labyrinth-selected-poems-0872862518-9780872862517.html

An exhibition review entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Love and Jump Back” by Demetra Nikolakakis for “Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture” magazine can be found at: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/2/25/exhibition-review-charles-henri-ford-love-and-jump-back

The Artforum magazine has an informative 2003 article, written by Michael Duncan, on Charles Henri Ford and his association with novelist Parker Tyler and artist Pavel Tchelitchew: https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-henri-ford-165330/

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative site has short articles with stills on Charles Henri Ford’s two experimental films “Poem Posters” and “Johnny Minotaur”: https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/charles-henri-ford

Matthew D. Kulisch, one of three curators for the Backwords Blog, wrote an article for the site entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Association and America’s First (Queer) Surrealist Artist” : https://www.backwordsblog.com/single-post/2016/10/12/charles-henri-ford-association-and-americas-first-queer-surrealist-artist

The September 2024 issue of Noah Becker’s “White Hot Magazine” has an article entitled “Love and Jump Back: Photography by Charles Henri Ford at Mitchell Algus”, written by Mark Bloch: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/henri-ford-at-mitchell-algus/4984

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Charles Henri Ford”, 1930-1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 26.4 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Gerald Malanga as Orpheus)”, circa 1965, Photolithograph, Image 98.4 x 68.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Third Insert Image: Robert Geisel, “Charles Henri Ford, The Dakota, NYC”, 1989, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Soul Map / Jayne Mansfield), circa 1965, Photolithograph, 99.1 x 69.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Charles Henri Ford (and Indra Tamang), The Dakota, NYC”, 1997, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.9 x 35.6 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981.

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny.

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism.

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year.

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.

Jubi Arriola-Headley: “An Oracle Done Hiding At Last”

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

Imagine now how your fingertips throb (1)
in silence, wild, (2) an oracle done hiding at last,
all the mystery made, (3) all the grave markers,
all the crude headstones – water-lost, (4) I think
by now the river must be thick (5) – red is the operative
word. (6) What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse, (7)
let the empty stage receive the light, (8) linger only with
healthy ideas. Salty ones. (9) God give us a long winter
and quiet music and patient mouths. (10) (We talk about God
because we want to speak in metaphors, (11)
como un demonio sin freno, (12) between hot dog stands
and hallelujahs.) (13) Change our fates, shoot down
the plagues, beginning with time, the children sing to you. (14)
Ha. (15) You have to face the underside of everything
you’ve loved; (16) there will be no more sons. (17)

1. Olga Broumas, (…imagine now/how your fingertips throb,,,)
2. Cecilia Vicuña, “Jungle Kill”
3. Carl Phillips, “Unbridled”
4. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy for the Native Guards”
5. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (I think by now the river must be thick)
6. Linda Dove, “Fear is a Hummingbird Drunk on Taillight”
7. Raymond McDaniel, “No, You Shut Up”
8. Jon Davis, “Gratitude”
9. Alain Border, “Sleep Log”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “A Flame”
11. Jericho Brown, “To Be Seen”
12. cecilia Vicuña, “Horticultura”
13. Matthew Olzmann, “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency”
14. Arthur Rimbaud, “To A Reason”
15. Jubi Arriola-Headley
16. Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Poem V)
17. Chelsea Dingman, “Elegy for Empty Rooms”

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Cento, original kink, 2020, Sibling Rivalry Press

Born in Boston, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a Black queer first-generation American poet and author whose work explores the issues of joy, manhood, and vulnerability. In his work, vulnerability is the key to preserving one’s own authenticity and humanity. With the hope that you will be loved regardless, one has to take the risk of being known for who you really are.

The son of Barbadian parents, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a descendent of a long line of Caribbean story tellers. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Miami and is a 2018 PEN American Emerging Voices Fellow. Arriola-Headley’s work explores the themes of masculinity, vulnerability, joy, rage and tenderness. His poems have been published with Southern Humanities Review, Nimrod, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others.

Currently, Arriola-Headley is the author of two collections of poetry, the first being “original kink” published in 2020 by the Sibling Rivalry Press in Arkansas. This volume of poems, written in casual speech rhythm, relentlessly probes the issues of family dynamics, manliness, injustice, and cruelty, both self-inflicted and imposed. The “original kink” collection was the recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry presented by Western Connecticut State University.

Jubi Arriola-Headley’s second volume of poetry “Bound” was released in February of 2024 by Persea Books, a New York press co-founded by Michael and Karen Braziller. A collection of lyrical poems in varied poetic format, “Bound” boldly examines conventional notions of race, sexuality, gender and pleasure in an attempt to create a world where Black and queer individuals can live without trauma. Plotting a new path to life, Arriola-Headley points out what it means to be human and how we can find freedom and liberation in the very spaces we thought would destroy us.

Arriola-Headley is currently working on a memoir in an essay format. An essay from this work, entitled “Pissant”, explored his teenage years in 1980s Boston, the racism he faced, his queer desires, and the hyper-masculinity of his immigrant father. This excerpt won the first place 2023 Prize for Creative Nonfiction presented by Florida’s First Pages organization, a non-profit that recognizes and encourages emerging writers.

Jubi Arriola-Headley currently lives with his husband on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands in South Florida. His website, which contains selected poems, interviews and videos, is located at: https://www.justjubi.com

Notes: A video is available online at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation site on YouTube showing Jubi Arriola-Headley reciting his poem “Superhero Origin Story (S. O. S.)”.

An October 2020 interview between Jubi Arriola-Headley and PEN America’s Jenn Dees and Michelle Franke can be located at the Pen America site: https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-jubi-arriola-headley/

A 2024 audio interview between Poetry Foundation’s Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers and poet Jubi Arriola-Headley can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/1530526/jubi-arriola-headley-vs-masculinity?query=jubi%20a

Dirk Bogarde: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Sir Dirk Bogarde”, circa 1950s, Studio Portrait, Gelatin Silver Print, The Rank Organization, London

Born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde at West Hampstead, London in March of 1921, Dirk Bogarde was an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. After becoming a matinee idol through his work in such films as the 1954 “Doctor in the House” and 1958 “A Tale of Two Cities”, he made a bold and provocative career decision to accept those challenging roles that pushed the scope of cinema.

Dirk Bogarde was the eldest of three children born to Ulric van den Bogaerde, the art editor of London’s “The Times”, and former Scottish actress Margaret Niven. When living conditions became crowded at the family’s north London home, he lived for a period with relatives in Scotland where he attended Glasgow’s University College School and Allan Glen’s High School of Science. Under a 1937 scholarship, Bogarde completed a two-year study of commercial art at the Chelsea College of Art where he attended classes led by draftsman and sculptor Henry Moore.

Bogarde worked as a commercial artist and set designer in the late 1930s. Interested in acting, he apprenticed with Sally Latimer and John Penrose’s Amersham Repertory Players and made his acting debut, albeit with only one line, at the small, independent Q Theater in west London. Bogarde’s stage debut in London’s West End occurred a few months later in John Boynton Priestley’s 1939 comedic drama “Cornelius”. In the same year, he made his film debut as an uncredited extra in Anthony Kimmins’s 1939 musical comedy “Come On George!” which starred George Formby and Patricia Kirkwood.

After Nazi Germany, the Slovak Republic and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Dirk Bogarde joined the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1940 as an officer in the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit. He eventually achieved the rank of Major and, in his five years of active duty, was awarded seven medals for his service. In addition to his military duties, Bogarde painted and wrote poetry during the war; his paintings of England’s war effort are housed in London’s Imperial War Museum. As a member of the Photographic Intelligence Unit, Bogarde, at the age of twenty-four, was at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, an experience that had a profound, lasting effect on him.

Bogarde returned to acting after the war and made his first appearance, under the stage name of Dirk Bogarde, in the 1947 BBC studio production of Michael Clayton Hutton’s “Power Without Glory” held at London’s Fortune Theater. After signing a contract in 1947 with the entertainment conglomerate The Rank Organization, he was given the role of a police radio caller in John Carstairs’s 1947 film noir “Dancing with Crime”. His first credited role was that of the sweet-talking footman William Latch in Ian Dalrymple and Peter Proud’s 1948 drama “Sin of Esther Waters”. Initially given a supporting role in this proposed Stewart Granger film, Bogarde was chosen for the lead role after Granger left the production. His acting skill opposite Kathleen Ryan in this 1948 film led to a long-term contract with the Rank studio.

After three years as an apprentice Rank actor, Dirk Bogarde was given the role of a young criminal in Basil Dearden’s 1950 crime thriller “The Blue Lamp”. The film became the most successful feature of the year and established Bogarde as an actor of note. His role as the cop killer Tom Riley was the first of many intense but fascinating villains he would play. A few years later, Bogarde became one of the most popular British actors in the 1950s through his role as a medical student in Ralph Thomas’s 1954 light comedy “Doctor in the House”. One of the most successful films in the Rank Organization’s history, the comedy spawned six sequels and both a television and radio series. .

After meeting black-listed American expatriate director Joseph Losey, Bogarde appeared as convict Frank Clemmens in Losey’s successful 1954 crime film noir “The Sleeping Tiger”. Their association would result in several important films a decade later, most notably the 1963 chilling British drama “The Servant” and the 1967 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury winner “Accident”. Bogarde starred in over a dozen films during the 1950s including Philip Leacock’s successful 1956 “The Spanish Gardener”, Ralph Thomas’s 1958 adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities”, and Anthony Asquith’s 1959 “Libel”, in which Bogarde played three different roles opposite Olivia de Havilland.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bogarde acted alongside many renowned stars and under many talented directors. He played the decadent valet Hugo Barrett in Losey’s 1963 “The Servant” which earned him a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award. Bogarde starred as a German industrialist in Luchino Visconti’s 1969 “The Damned” which also featured Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin. Two years later, he portrayed Gustav von Aschenbach in Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice”. For the Charles Vidor/George Cukor 1960 biographical romance film “Song Without End”, Bogarde portrayed Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt; his co-stars were French actresses Capucine and Genevière Page.

Dirk Bogarde left acting in 1977 and began a second career as an author. The first work published was a memoir that described his childhood and early career as an actor entitled “A Postillion Struck by Lightning”. Highly literate with an elegant and thoughtful style, Bogarde wrote over his twenty-year literary career fifteen best-selling books of which nine were memoirs and six novels. He was also the author of numerous essays, reviews and poems for print publications.

Bogarde had a minor stroke in November of 1987. Nine years later, he underwent angioplasty and suffered a major stroke following the operation. Although paralyzed on one side and his speech affected, Borgarde completed the final volume of his autobiography and also published an edition of his journalism. In 1992, he was created a Knight Bachelor in the United Kingdom. On the eighth of May in 1999 at the age of seventy-eight, Sir Dirk Bogarde died in his London home from a heart attack. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at his former estate, Le Pigeonnier, in Grasse, southern France.

Notes: Dirk Bogarde was in a life-long relationship with English actor Anthony Forwood, who was born Ernest Lytton Leslie Forwood in October of 1915 as a descendent of the Forwood Baronetcy, an English landed-gentry family. After Borgarde had gained success in his acting career, he moved to a cottage at the Forwood family home, Buckinghamshire’s Bendrose Estate. Bogarde eventually bought the adjoining estate where he and Forwood lived in its renovated main house until 1960. After residing in both France and Italy for many years, they returned to London in early 1988. Anthony Forwood, who had been previously diagnosed with liver cancer and Parkinson’s disease, passed away at the age of seventy-two in May of 1988.

An extensive history of Dirk Bogarde’s film career, written by feature correspondent Sophie Monks Kaufman for the BBC, is located at: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210322-why-dirk-bogarde-was-a-truly-dangerous-film-star

The official website of the Dirk Bogarde Estate, which contains his book illustrations, personal recordings and home movies, is located at: https://dirkbogarde.co.uk

The Key Military website has a 2021 biographical article in its “Britain at War” series, written by Ellie Evans, on Dirk Bogarde’s service during World War II: https://www.keymilitary.com/article/military-man-behind-matinee-idol

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Sir Dirk Bogarde”, circa 1950s, Studio Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Basil Dearden, “Dirk Bogarde as Matt Sullivan”, 1952, “The Gentle Gunman”, Cinematography Gordon Dines, Ealing Studios

Third and Fourth Insert Image: Director John Schlesinger, “Dirk Bogarde as Robert Gold”, 1965, “Darling”, Cinematography Kenneth Higgins, Vic Films Production, Appia Films, and Joseph Janni Production

Fifth Insert Image: Director Basil Dearden, “Dirk Bogarde as Melville Farr”, 1961, “Victim”, Cinematography Otto Heller, Rank Film Distributors

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dirk Bogarde and Anthony Forwood”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Dirk Bogarde Estate

Reginald Shepherd: “Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind”

Photographers Unknown, Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind

For Robert Philen

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

Reginald Shepherd, You, Therefore, 2007, Fata Morgana, Green Tower Press

Born in New York City in April of 1963, Reginald Shepherd was an American poet, essayist and educator. A careful observer of language, he was a skilled craftsman who could transform fragments of potential poetic material into cohesively molded poetry.

The son of Blanche Berry, Reginald Shepherd spent his early years with his sister Regina Graham in the housing projects of Bronx, New York. Although raised amid the hardships of the tenements, he found inspiration in the many books that his mother was able to afford. Following the death of his mother just prior to his fifteenth birthday, Shepherd and his sister were cared for by their aunt Mildred Swint at her crowded, three-room house in Macon, Georgia.

Shepherd earned his Bachelor of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, and his Master of Fine Arts degrees in Creative Writing at Rhode Island’s Brown University and the University of Iowa. In his last year at the University of Iowa, he was awarded the 1993 Discovery Prize by New York’s 92nd Street Y, a prominent arts and cultural center in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Reginald Shepherd published his first collection of poetry, “Some Are Drowning”, in 1994 through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This collection of passionate poems was chosen by poet and professor Carolyn Forché for the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Poetry Award. Shepherd’s second collection “Angel, Interrupted”, a volume of lyrical, introspective and streetwise poems, was published in 1996. This was followed three years later by “Wrong”, a poetic collection seen through a historical perspective of events marked by desire, disease, and difference, all aspects of human consciousness.

In 2003, Shepherd’s “Otherhood” was published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This fourth collection explored the issues of desire, power, blackness, whiteness and the relationship of man and the natural world. “Otherhood”, which referenced these themes through alternating rapid and hypnotic rhythms, was a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize administered by the Academy of American Poets.

Reginald Shepherd’s last volume of poetry in his lifetime, “Fata Morgana” was published in 2007 by Green Tower Press. An intense and mournful collection of lyrical poems fashioned from a mixture of mythology, personal experience, natural science and politics, “Fata Morgana” explored the journey through personal sorrow and loss until its transformative end. This collection by Shepherd was the winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards.

Shepherd was the editor of the 2004 “The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries” and the 2008 “Lyric Postmodernisms”. He was the author of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist “Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” and its sequel “A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” published posthumously in 2010. A posthumous collection of Shepherd’s poetry, entitled “Red Clay Weather”, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011.

Reginald Shepherd died in Pensacola, Florida, on the tenth of September in 2008 after a long battle against colon cancer. He was survived by his long-term partner Robert Philen, his sister Regina Graham and his aunt Mildred Swint. A National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grant winner, Shepherd published over four-hundred poems in his career in both collections and anthologies.

Shepherd taught both Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University, the University of West Florida, Northern Illinois University, and Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Iowa. He was the recipient of a 1993 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 1994-1995 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship in 1998, and a 2000 Saltonstall Foundation poetry grant.

“The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon (struggle) between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance.”- Reginald Shepherd, “Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse”, Blog Entry, January 2007

Notes: In addition to his poetic and essay writings, Reginald Shepherd authored a poetry, literature and art blog for many years. This site contains many articles discussing Shepherd’s own poetic thought-process as well as the work of those poets he admired. Reginald Shepherd’s Blog can be found at: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com

A review of Reginald Shepherd’s 2008 collection of essays “Orpheus in the Bronx” originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of “Rain Taxi”, a Minneapolis-based book review and literary quarterly publication. It is currently available for reading on The Mumpsimus blog located at: https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/07/orpheus-in-bronx-by-reginald-shepherd.html

On the Poetry Foundation site, there several poems as well as a section in which Shepherd offers a revealing portrait of himself and his poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/reginald-shepherd

A 2003 extensive interview between Reginald Shepherd and writer Brenda Gaines Hunter for Pleiades Magazine has been reissued through the Medium site at: https://medium.com/@bgaineshunter/an-interview-with-reginald-shepherd-e4c60dd328df

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.

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

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

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/