I’ve been doing a little digging into Rheinhart Kleiner (1892–1949) after Lovecraft’s New York period, spurred by An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia‘s comment that Lovecraft lost touch with Kleiner from the end of Lovecraft’s New York period through to 1936-37 (although Lovecraft did encounter him, as part of groups, on some of his New York visits in the 1930s). I wondered why they lost touch.

One reason might be that Kleiner appears to have been active as a hardline communist in New York during at least the later part of that period, a member of “Unit 36-S” of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project. The New York City FWP was a body set up in 1934/5 and it was swiftly infested with bickering communist and socialist sects (seemingly to the detriment at that time of fellow Kalem member Arthur Leeds — see the chapter on Leeds in my latest book). Perhaps of relevance to this discovery is that fellow Kalem member George Kirk’s Chelsea Book Shop in New York was also cited in the official record as having been one of… “the two official book shops of the Communist party of the United States”.

I also stumbled on another curious mystery of Kleiner’s later years, which is the whereabouts of his c.1946 book Burrowings of an Old Bookworm. This is not currently on any bibliographic databases. Imprimatur (Vol.1, 1-3, p.31) noted of Paul W. Cook’s Vermont little magazine The Ghost…

“The fourth number (July 1946) is entirely devoted to Burrowings of an Old Bookworm by Rheinhart Kleiner.”

Burrowings was apparently… “a long bookish memoir largely devoted to popular fiction he read during his boyhood” (L.W. Currey’s description of The Ghost). Burrowings is also mentioned in Rheinhart Kleiner’s death notice in Wilson Library Bulletin, 1949…

“Rheinhart Kleiner, trade writer; at [222 Demott Avenue, according to New York Times] Clifton, New Jersey; after a long illness; fifty-six. Well known in his field in England and Australia as well as in the United States, his latest book was Burrowings of an Old Bookworm.”

My suspicion would be that Burrowings may have been a circulated typescript memoir in carbon, rather than an actual book? I guess an inspection of The Ghost, currently available from L.W. Currey for $150, could yield more precise details.

An item I did discover is James Guinane’s self-published 46-page mimeographed booklet RK: Rheinhart Kleiner: a Memoir (1951). Guinane was a young Australian amateur journalist (Churingas) on the remote island of Tasmania, and he also presumably(?) corresponded with Kleiner. The booklet is described as…

“American amateurs receiving it can recall nothing to equal it in the artistic use of mimeographing … Forty-six pages of Guinane’s polished prose are divided into nine chapters on various phases of Kleiner’s personality and literary output.” (review in LOC X Collection 1324).

This is not yet scanned and online. There’s currently a cheap copy of it listed on Amazon USA, but sadly they won’t ship it to the UK.

I found an online photograph of Lovecraft’s friend and correspondent Henry S. Whitehead…

He looks thin and tired here because he was ill in the later part of his life. Lovecraft remarks that he was immensely fit when well.

I’ve also found out that Whitehead had two aspects of his career which would have interested Lovecraft. 1) He had worked in an area of New York known to Lovecraft, and had there worked with immigrants, and so would have been able to compare experiences with Lovecraft about ‘the pest zone’. 2) He had also been a “chaplain for the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane”.

I here go through his early church career in chronological order, based on a quick dash through the online archives now available:

His Columbia University alumni news magazine (Vol.13, 1921/1922, p.6) reported…

   [Graduates of 19]”’04 — Henry St. Clair Whitehead, formerly rector of Christ Church of Middletown [South Farms, c.1914-1917], Connecticut, and also chaplain for the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane, is now located at 28 Brimmer Street, Boston, Massachusetts.”

After Middletown he moved to New York. He was on a list of newly appointed curates 1916-17, his appointment being to St. Mary the Virgin from Nov 1st 1917. The publications of his church show…

   “Rev. Henry S. Whitehead is Pastor of the Children, Church of S. Mary the Virgin, New York City” (The American Church Monthly, Vol.5, Mar-Aug 1919, p.926). “Rev. Henry S. Whitehead is on the staff of the Church of S. Mary the Virgin in New York, and is an authority on pastoral work. In his article on “Work Among Foreigners” he shows why the Episcopal Church is especially well adapted to undertake this work.” (The New American Church Monthly, Vol.4 No.4, Dec 1918, p.274).

In New York he was living at 144 West 47th St. (co-incidentally not that far from Everett McNeil then at 543 West 49th St., and with probably the same predominately Irish population). His connection with St. Mary the Virgin was dissolved sometime between late 1919 and May 1920, according to the Annual Convention journal of his church. He was then attached to the Diocese of Massachusetts, living at 28 Brimmer Street, Boston until he was shipped out to be… “acting archdeacon of the Virgin Islands from 1921 to 1929.” He then went to Florida — a news item reports on a children’s Halloween Party of welcome for the “new rector” at Dunedin (St. Petersberg Times, 10th Nov 1929).

So when had he been… “chaplain for the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane [at Middleton]”? He started his church career in 1912, after graduating from the Berkeley Divinity School at Middletown. So his stint in the madhouse was either 1912-1914, or else was an additional duty undertaken while serving as rector at South Farms, Middletown. Whitehead later refers in fiction to this period, in his (Lovecraft revision?) story “Bothon”…

“It happened while I was chief intern in the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane. I served there for two years under Dr. Floyd Haviland before I went into private practice.” (“Bothon”).

In I am Providence (pp.845-846) S.T. Joshi discusses theories that “Bothon” was not written by Whitehead, but by Derleth from a Lovecraft plot outline. But the apparently autobiographical use of the “Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane” may suggest otherwise, as I’m not sure Derleth would have bothered to slip in such an obscure detail from Whitehead’s early career. On the other hand, the setting may have been in the original outline, decided on in consultation with Whitehead.

There has also been some controversy about Whitehead’s claim to have graduated from Harvard. I have found that “Whitehead, Henry S” appears in the Harvard Club of New York City members’ book from 1912 through to 1920. He is listed as of the class of 1904, the same year when — according to his alumni magazine — he also graduated from Columbia. Yet he is listed in the Harvard College Class of 1904 book under Special Students and Affiliated Members, with a ‘b’ next to his name which indicates he withdrew at the end of the Sophmore Year — so I assume he must have transferred to Columbia for his final year? The Harvard College Class of 1904 (first report) book also gives his full name: “Henry St. Clair McMillin Whitehead”. The Harvard College Class of 1904 (second report) book gives his own account of his career from 1904 to undertaking his religious training in 1909…

Richard Ely Morse (1909-1986) worked mostly as a librarian at Princeton University. He earned his… “B.L.S. from Columbia University School of Library Service in 1932”, so when Lovecraft first knew him he was a new 23 year-old graduate. In 1968 Deke Quarterly stated that… “In his career he worked at the Princeton University Library, The Library of Congress, and the library of the Cooper Union Museum in New York” [being the Museum Librarian there from c.1936 until he resigned c.1949]”.

He published a volume of poetry titled Winter Garden in 1931, and he inscribed a copy for Lovecraft. The inscription is given in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. On noting the volume’s publication, Morse’s fraternity magazine remarked: “He is president of the poetry society and editor in chief of the literary magazine [at Amherst].” Today at nearby Deerfield, which appears to be a feeder school for Amherst College, there is a current… “Richard Ely Morse ’26 Fund. Established in 1992 by Richard E. Morse ’26, this fund supports students who are proficient in music, art or literature.”

Morse was published in the Dial (Sept 1927), in The Best Poems of 1928 (“The Swan”), and his poetry can be found in the little magazines as late as 1967. Here is part of his “The Swan” (original line breaks missing due to OCR)…

   “HIS swan, upon the icy waters of my heart, sails night and day; reflected amid the drift of tarnished wood-leaves, desolate and gray. Bending his plumed, silver-shining neck he seeks in baffled love that shadowed apparition always vanishing from him above. And now he moves his head in spectral bitterness, to assuage his pain darting it beneath the calm of silver that shatters and forms again. There is no escape, only the mocking image of the mirrored swan beneath him sails, under a moon long turned to stone, for ever on….” (from “The Swan”).

An online forum comment mentioned that… “He [Lovecraft] certainly did observe it [homosexuality] in persons he was introduced to by way of Samuel Loveman (e.g. Richard Ely Morse)”. On this see I Am Providence, p.827. Lovecraft and Morse had met face to face, rather than simply by correspondence, and were introduced by Loveman (known to have been a gay man) in May 1932.

Morse’s poem “Mad Dreams (for H.P. Lovecraft)” appeared in Fantasy Commentator Vol.7 No.1 (#41), 1990.

Three of Lovecraft’s letters to Morse are held at the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. Another is in the British Museum. Letters to Morse are published in the Selected Letters. I have found that Morse had a letter, mentioning Lovecraft by name, published in The American Scholar (1949, Vol.18, p.231) — but I am unable to access more than a snippet via online methods. He contributed a poem to The Acolyte in 1942, “In Memoriam: H. P. Lovecraft” (collected in Marginalia).

Morse served as a corporal in the U.S. Army in 1942-1943. Possibly a search of Army records might reveal a photograph?

His entry in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia states he published an article “Some Modern Book Illustrations” in The Californian (Spring 1937). While at the Cooper Union Museum (c.1936-c.1949) he had contributed texts to exhibition catalogues such as “The Art and Technique of Modern Glass” and is also credited in the catalogue “Alter Ego: Masks, Their Art and Use”. He has a bibliography titled “Relating to Puppets, Marionettes and Shadow-Plays” in the Cooper Union Museum catalogue for “Small Wonders: Puppets and Marionettes” (c.1949). A few years later he wrote the text for Clowns and Ballerinas: The Circus and Dance in Art (1952), an exhibition catalogue for Princeton University Library. This exhibition may have been partly drawn from his own private collection, as he is said to have… “collected photographs, drawings, and prints relating to the commedia dell’arte and to the dance” (The Princeton University Library Chronicle) which he bequeathed to Princeton on his death. He had already donated “140 dance programs and souvenir booklets” to Princeton in 1966.