Woodburn Prescott Harris (1888-1988) was a Lovecraft correspondent circa 1929, of whom little is known. Only three Lovecraft letters to Woodburn Harris survive, but one is a gargantuan 70 pages. Harris was an English and Drama teacher, seemingly a Shakespeare specialist, who married in the 1920s and thereabouts quit teaching to become a farmer at Vergennes, Vermont. How Harris came to know Lovecraft is uncertain, but it seems that it was only later that he took up Lovecraft’s revision services. Lovecraft wrote of Harris…

“Our intelligent rustick friend Woodburn Harris has suddenly blossom’d into a prolifick professional client — being intent on saving the country [by publishing on the prohibition of liquor]” (Selected Letters III, p.130).

In the list of the addresses of Lovecraft correspondents sent by Barlow to Derleth, Barlow has added a very curious note (Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. gives the list in full in the Lovecraft Annual 2012). Barlow noted for Derleth of Harris that he…

“should have many pink discussions”.

The meaning of this word “pink” seems uncertain. Barlow was gay and Derleth (so I’m told) was bisexual, and the book Selected Papers on Lovecraft (p.69) tantalisingly noted in passing the… “the incredibly erroneous views on sex of Woodburn Harris”. This small constellation of hints might lead some to consider that “pink” could be a code for gay.

But on the face of it “pink” was more likely to imply the correspondence was politically communist in tone. I have found one contemporary reference online, with a similar usage: “I was a member of this parlor pink discussion group back in 1942”, referring to membership of a group with “communistic overtones” (Investigation of Communist activities in the Chicago area, 1954). Also a mention of detecting “well-organized pink discussion groups” in the context of anti-communism (U.S.A. journal, 1956). So it would be tempting to presume that Barlow’s meaning of pink was the same as “pinko”: a once-common term in the 1940s and 50s, meaning someone who was a communist sympathiser or a fellow traveler with socialism. The OED dates “pinko” to as early as 1936, and Barlow’s notes were written 1937.

This seems the most plausible explanation, yet it is one that appears to be directly contradicted by Lovecraft himself…

“As for our young communist — I have just set Farmer Woodburn Harris of Vermont on to him, and expect some brilliant fireworks. Harris is a political conservative of the traditional Yankee mould, and his keen wit and horse-sense will form a delightful foil to young Weiss’s bolshevism…” (Selected Letters III, p.187).

Harris had been an Acting Sergeant Major in the First World War, was the son of a minister and had been a school principal, and by 1930 Harris was a reader of Joseph McCabe’s (apparently sober and balanced) pamphlets concern the facts of the historical reality of Jesus. Harris defended McCabe from shoddy criticism in a letter to the editor in The Outlook, July 9, 1930, p.398. These facts and the Lovecraft comment above suggest that Harris was certainly not a communist “red”, or even a “pink” sympathiser.

So it appears that the word “pink” remains an enigma, unless perhaps someone with access to the Barlow and Derleth letters can shed any light on its use and meaning in those letters?

Possibly the solution to the riddle is that Barlow knew of Weiss’s correspondence with Harris, thus the “pink” nature of the letters that Harris might have in his possession? But against Weiss’s name on the list Barlow notes that Weiss was an outright “Red”. So why might he use “Pink” elsewhere on the list, when “Red” would have served if he was referring to Weiss’s correspondence with Harris?

Perhaps Barlow himself (apparently a communist sympathiser at one time) had once had some correspondence with Harris on politics?

Woodburn Harris circa 1917.

Woodburn Harris in the Middlebury College News Letter, Aug 1956, “Class of 1911” (class reunion photo).