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).

The Editor of The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis, is currently writing a book on the history of walking in America. You may remember that my recent book on Lovecraft in New York had a lot to say about the nature of Lovecraft’s walking, including noting his occasional use of canes. Wayne Curtis has a preview of his book, an article which explains the culture of walking cane use as a mode of gentlemanly display…

“A century and a half ago, walking sticks and canes weren’t just associated with the aged, but with young dandies and others of dapper inclination.”

These included “system canes”, of special interest to writers now since they can serve a pivots for a plot in a story with a historical setting. These could conceal and deploy anything from…

“a picnic utensil set, opera glasses, an ear trumpet, a perfume bottle, a detachable baby rattle, a blow gun, a winemaker’s thermometer, a folding fan, a telescope, a flask with cork top, a pocket watch, a sewing kit, a compact and mirror, a full-length saw blade, a microscope, a pennywhistle, a set of watercolors and paintbrush, a whistle for hailing a cab, and gauges for measuring the height of a horse.”

On Lovecraft’s main cane, here is Kirk on the Kalem Klub establishing their Sunday “dandy walk” promenade, in which they strolled in their best suits up and down Clinton St…

“The occasion required the “wearing” of a cane, but the acquisition of this adjunct to our Sunday splendour proved no great problem. Lovecraft produced an heirloom [a walking cane] from Providence which was undeniably authentic, and at once chastely severe and unobtrusively classical.” (Letter from Kirk, in Lovecraft’s New York Circle, Hippocampus Press, 2006, p.225).

This cane was presumably Winfield’s “silver-headed walking stick” (L. Sprague de Camp), which Lovecraft had inherited, and which Lovecraft must have taken to New York. de Camp says that Lovecraft came to wear Winfield’s sartorial garb on special occasions. A dandy cane was certainly part of Lovecraft’s dream vision of himself as a young man…

“After carefully tying my stock, I donned my coat and hat, took a cane from a rack downstairs, and sallied forth upon the village street” (recalling a dream he had, in Selected Letters I, p.100).

In a letter to Frank Belnap Long in 1927 he wrote…

“be sure to depict me [in Long’s new novelette, presumably “The Space Eaters”] in my new Puritan frock coat. I think I shall adopt an umbrella also — as a constant companion…” (in Selected Letters II, p.172)

There may be more on Lovecraft’s ownership of walking sticks and umbrellas, and use of them on special occasions, in the collection Lovecraft Remembered, edited by Peter H. Cannon, but I don’t have access to that. It seems that fancy canes, at least until 1927, were generally used only by Lovecraft on special occasions. But one also wonders if he took a stout defensive cane or umbrella on some of his more insalubrious New York night-walks and his deeper rural rambles, if only to defend himself from dog attack. Rabid dogs were then a concern, albeit a minor one, over and above the fear of general dog-bite from aggressive farm and village dogs.