Meet The Flamboyant Lady-Like Gentlemen of 1840

by Stephen J. Gertz

It's a scarce little sucker, a rarely seen Leech.

It's The Fiddle Faddle Fashion Book and Beau Monde à La Française, Enriched with Numerous Highly Colored Figures of Lady-Like Gentlemen. Published in London, 1840 by Chapman and Hall, the quarto features four hand-colored lithographed plates, each with multiple figures, by the great caricaturist, John Leech, accompanied by twelve pages of text by Percival Leigh (1813-1889), who often partnered with Leech, a close friend. The two were among the original contributors to Punch, which was established in 1841.

One of the rarest of all suites by Leech, OCLC notes only eight copies in institutional holdings worldwide, with ABPC recording only one copy at auction within the last sixty-five years, in 1949.

Here Leech skewers foppery, dandyism, and the eccentricities of "fashionable boobies" that are feminizing men in London and Paris, while Leigh takes comic aim at contemporary literary absurdities "consisting mainly of a thrilling story of brigand life, the blood-curdling tenor of which may be imagined from the title, Grabalotti the Bandit; or, The Emerald Monster of the Deep Dell" (Frith);  a parody of the popular novels of fashionable life,  and more. 

"It was one of Leech's special delights to caricature the absurd fashions of the day in dress, language, manners and literature" (Field). 

The Fiddle Faddle Fashion Book was very well received upon publication.

"To use the words of the lively and gossiping Pepys, the sight of this jeu d'esprit delighted us mightily; it being a very clever satire on those contemptible fashionable boobies; who, with their frightful display of hairy protuberances, crawl like ursine sloths along the public streets of London and Paris, to the disgust of all rational and well-organized minds. It is to hold them up to the public contempt that the colored plates of the work are devoted, and however unearthly these exquisites may appear to a stranger, they must not be viewed as caricatures, for it is

'From real life these characters are drawn,'

and which may be evidenced wheresoever they are hourly met, many of them inhaling the blasting influence of the poisonous cigar, rendering their faces more like a mattery pustule than the frontispiece of a human being; but it is very doubtful whether creatures so constituted as to fall into such glaring inconsistencies are capable of feeling the bitter shaft of satire. However, the artist, author, and publisher, have done their part well, in thus bringing the subject before the public eye. The work is edited by the author of the 'Comic Latin Grammar,' and contains many witty burlesques on the announcements of some of our most prominent quacks and advertisers, with a pleasing variety of other reading...

"We must not omit to bear testimony to the rising genius of Mr. Leech. We have watched the progress of this gentleman, and we feel assured if he do but study from life, - persevere, - and work hard, he will very soon become one of our most talented artists. We wish him every success" (The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 1033, November 21, 1840).

As I've earlier written:

The clothes-obsessed dandy and dandyism phenomenon first appeared in the 1790s, both in London and Paris. In period vernacular, a dandy was differentiated from a fop in that the dandy's dress was more refined and sober. But not for long.

During the Regency period in London, dandyism was a revolt against  the extravagance and ostentation of the previous generation, and of sympathy with the new mood of democracy. It became, however, a competitive sport  and this revolt against prior tradition became a revolting development.

Immaculate personal cleanliness, crisp and clean linen shirts with high collars, perfectly tied cravats, and exquisitely tailored plain dark coats (similar in many respects to the "macaroni" of the earlier eighteenth century) became the fashion, epitomized by George Bryan "Beau" Brummel (1778-1840). Imitators  followed  but  few possessed  Brummel's sense of panache. Many, if not most,  over-reached.

The style soon went over the top. What flowed naturally and unselfconsciously from Beau Brummel all too often became affectation and pretension in others and it was this class of dandies that became the subject of caricature and ridicule. 

George and Robert Cruikshank had a field day with the subject. But their caricatures of fops and dandies, as usual for the Cruikshanks, ridiculed with grotesquery. Leech, in contrast, caricatured them with a delicate refinement that took the phenomenon to its logical, absurd conclusion, men as women in male-drag. Think Georges Sand with a paste-on moustache. Indeed, the year The Fiddle Faddle Fashion Book was published was the year that Beau Brummel died. His taste dying with him, foppery became a parody of itself and just plain silly.

It would be a mistake to associate this manner of male fashion with homosexuality. While the behavior certainly existed and had descriptive nouns for acts and practitioners, the concept had not yet evolved to require a word to describe a separate class of person and distinct culture. The word was coined and first used in 1869 by Károly Mária Kertbeny (1824-1882), an Austro-Hungarian novelist, translator, and journalist in Das Gemeinschädliche des & 143 des preussischen Strafgesetzbuches vom 14. April 1851 und daher seine nothwendige Tilgung als [section sign]152 im Entwurfe eines Strafgesetzbuches für den Norddeutschen Bund, a seventy-five page pamphlet protesting against anti-sodomy laws in Prussia.

No, only their clothes were gay. Silly gay,  not gay gay.

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[LEECH, John, illustrator]. [LEIGH, Percival, text].  The Fiddle Faddle Fashion Book, And Beau Monde à La Française enriched with Numerous Highly Colored Figures of Lady-Like Gentlemen. Edited by The Author of The Comic Latin Grammar. The Costumes and Other Illustrations by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1840.

First edition. Quarto (11 3/8 x 8 5/8 in; 290 mm). 12 pp. Four hand-colored lithographs imprinted 12 November 1840.

Field, p. 40.
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Of Related Interest:

Robert Cruikshank Devastates Dandies.

The Mother of Political Satire, or Why Did Yankee Doodle Call His Hat Macaroni.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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A Rosary of Teardrops: The Life of Henry Darger

by Alastair Johnston 

HENRY DARGER: THROWAWAY BOY The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist by Jim Elledge (Overlook Duckworth, 2013, 396 pp., illus., $29.95)

Long after his death in 1973 Henry Darger emerged, first as another curious figure in Outsider Art in America, then gradually, as the extent of his work became known, as a remarkable self-taught artist whose obsessions resulted in awkward, childish, brilliantly colored surreal paintings and the longest work of fiction ever written, In the Realms of the Unreal.

John M. MacGregor, a psychologist interested in the mental state of Outsider Artists, wrote the first study of his work (which appeared as Dans les Royaumes de l’Irréel: le Monde de Henry Darger, from Art Brut in Lausanne, 1995, before appearing in English), stating emphatically that Darger had "the mind of a serial killer" and was possibly a "murderer and pedophile." During his decline into senility, Darger’s landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, hired a neighbor to clear out the packrat’s Chicago apartment and only then discovered it contained art and writing: the distillation of his years of longing and scavenging in quest of something unobtainable. The landlords’ (who benefited to the tune of millions from Darger’s art) only acquaintance with the recluse had been occasional remarks about the weather when they ran into him. They had no idea this soul was someone who had been brought to tears by snowfall as a child.

In fact his whole miserable life was one of complete obscurity. Based on the startling artworks (some 300 paintings found in his apartment), a disturbing portrait emerged among critics of Darger as a sexually frustrated lunatic with a vague grasp of children’s anatomy and an insatiable blood-lust. Now we have a full scale biography, meticulously researched and imaginatively reconstructed by Jim Elledge to put Darger's art in a whole new light. Fortunately Elledge is a writer with a grasp of history, particularly the little-known history of gays in the late nineteenth century, and his discourse is free of terms like "discourse" -- not to mention "reification" or "structuralism."

In “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), Charles Baudelaire posited that “genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered at will.” Many artists use memory and reflection, remembrances of things past, as the inspiration for their work. But the innocence and curiosity of childhood are lost as we grow up. Like Balthus, Darger got stuck in adolescence, and the key to Darger is his childhood. So Elledge takes us back to the sordid corner of West Madison Street, Chicago, where Henry Darger Junior was created. His parents were German immigrants scrabbling to raise themselves up to a better life in the new world. Darger’s father was a tailor but, unlike his hard-working brothers who rose out of poverty, Darger’s father was a drunkard, and after the death of his wife in childbirth he became more dissolute and lived with the boy in a run-down shack. Young Henry was raised on the streets. He lied, stole and fought and showed a taste for pyromania.

Various Catholic do-gooders attempted to give him some education but he resisted, slashing one teacher with a knife, and ended up running with gangs of boys who would entice and then roll homosexuals. In school he acted out so much (speaking in voices) the other kids nicknamed him “Crazy.” Older boys and men would protect young Henry, who was small for his age, in return for sexual favors. It was the only route he knew to money and food. We know he was sexually promiscuous because among other things he was locked up at age 12 for excessive and sometimes public masturbation.

Fifty years from now Americans will marvel at the ludicrousness and expense we incurred to imprison people for possessing marijuana. Pot smoking is not a social evil, incarceration is. A century ago the insane asylums were full of people who had syphilis or were habitual masturbators. Spilling your vital seed, your “precious bodily fluids,” as fans of Dr Strangelove know, is a fatal weakness. But recognized authorities like Dr Kellogg (father of the flakes) expounded about the effeminacy that resulted from excessive wanking. In those days a man or boy who jerked off was considered to be temporarily transformed into a girl while his body regenerated his manly essence. Homosexuals were only of one type: men who dressed as women, wore makeup and had floral names, like Daisy or Violet. Machos who liked punking other men or boys were considered normal heteros with a taste for variety. Society thought the evils of masturbation and homosexuality were so great that the only sure cure was castration.

At Jennie Richee, n.d. (detail)

In Elledge's view, the little girls with penises, familiar from Darger’s massive paintings, are not hermaphrodites or freaks — or the product of his ignorance of female anatomy — they are emasculated boys.

Henry failed at schoolwork. If he received any money from his aunt he would be punished as a thief. If he told on the others they would extract sadistic revenge. He did have an interest in history, particularly the American Civil War which had ended three decades earlier. When a teacher mentioned that so many thousand men had died at some battle, Henry said that he had read three different figures in three different books therefore could not agree with the teacher’s estimate. Punished for being a wise guy, he soon shut up. Tales of life in the dark corridors of the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy reminded me of Papillon on Devil’s Island, without the tattoos and shrunken heads, but still pretty vicious. But the “vice, degeneracy and abnormal behavior” exhibited by Henry meant the Catholics couldn’t control him and asked his father to remove him.

At this point the father, turning down an incredibly generous offer from one of the matrons to adopt the lad, handed him over to the State Insane Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, 150 miles away on the prairie where he could forget about him. He was enrolled, unartfully, as Henry Dodger (later amended to Dagett). Henry thought the food was good and plenty, and he wolfed down heapings of breakfast oatmeal. Interestingly the asylum fodder was considered wormy oatmeal, wormy prunes and rotten meat, which suggests that the food in the Catholic home had been worse!

Untitled, pencil & watercolor, n.d., (detail)

The children were beaten with boards, raped and punished in many sadistic ways. One of the guards’ tricks was strangulation with a towel, which didn’t leave marks, until the child’s tongue lolled and they passed out. Deaths from castrations gone wrong led to an inquiry and the newspapers reported the sordid details: a 1907 investigative committee was shocked at the seeming callousness of the hospital staff. The committee reported that there were many problems that needed attention, in particular, although it was called The Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, there were many children of normal intelligence there as well as many adults (transferred from overcrowded prisons) who were left unsupervised after 10 p.m. in the dormitories with the children.

The girls fared as badly as the boys, one was gnawed by rats and lost a finger as well as much of her skin, another died after being put in a scalding hot bath. Her piercing screams were ignored. After Darger’s father’s death he wrote “I was very dangerous if not left alone.” As he entered his teens Henry could no longer face the future in this institution which now consigned him to full days of farm labor. He tried to escape, was captured and roped and led back tied to a horse like a beast. His second attempt was also a failure, but by the time he was 16 he managed to hop a freight and ride back to Chicago. But once there he had no idea what to do but surrender to police who sent him back to the city nuthouse where he had been locked up as a 6 year old. After a month he was returned to the Asylum but fled again, this time going South where he worked for a farmer for a few days and then set off to walk the 160 miles back to Chicago. After a five year absence, he showed up on his aunt’s doorstep and told her he had been cured of his insanity and discharged.

At Norma Catherine. Are captured again by Glandelinian Cavalry

His relatives didn’t know what to do with him, but all he wanted from them was to know what had happened to the baby sister who had been given up for adoption. This was the central puzzle of his life. He couldn’t believe her lot had been as bad as his. His godmother didn’t exactly welcome him with open arms, but called on an old acquaintance, a nun who worked at St Joseph’s Hospital, and managed to get Henry hired as a janitor. However, the nurses and nuns all knew he had been in the asylum and gave him a wide berth and any time they thought he needed a reality check they threatened to send him back. He worked long hours in return for a room and board. 

But then in 1911 his life changed. Darger met an older man, "Whillie" Schloeder, and the two had a friendship that lasted until Schloeder’s death in 1959. They were photographed together thrice and all indications are that they were a couple. With some stability now in his life Henry began writing and illustrating his novel in the style of a children's book, In the Realms of the Unreal. Endless and unreadable, it occupied him for the rest of his life.

Michael Bonesteel published excerpts in his book on Darger and now Elledge has gone further to identify sources and point out the parallels to Darger’s own life in the story of the seven Vivian girls and the war between good and evil. The Vivian girls are fairies in both senses of the word: girls in spirit trapped in boys' bodies, as well as beings from an unearthly realm. There are numerous clues to Henry as Marie, one of the characters, and also the fact that he notes that the real author is Annie Aronburg, another alter-ego. He copied out important personal documents into his notebooks but always changed his own name to Annie Aronburg. Later he used pseudonyms, including Dargarius, claiming he was born in Brazil, and as proof would sing a children's marching song in Portuguese.

It was the abduction, rape and strangulation of a 5-year-old child named Elsie Paroubek that set Henry off. As a janitor he would find all the day's papers discarded in the hospital waiting rooms and could follow the drama which unfolded for a month before the child's corpse was found in a canal. There had been a monumental hunt for the girl, including pursuit of an Italian organ grinder and the belief that she had been kidnapped by gypsies and forced to beg. Another little girl, Lillian Wulff, who had escaped from gypsies showed remarkable strength of character and advised the police. But in the end the murderer was never apprehended.

Henry empathized with the tiny victim because it was the kind of abuse he had put up with all through his childhood. Although Henry had escaped with his life, he "understood her fear, her wanting to be back with her family, and what it meant to be raped and strangled. She became an emblem to him of his own abuse." He was moved to begin writing In the Realms of the Unreal. The illustrations were based on popular sources, Saturday Evening Post, the Sunday funnies etc, but were subsumed by Darger into his own fantasy and took on the sinister qualities of torture and disembowelment found in Japanese guro manga today.

A second novel, Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House, is even more autobiographical, as Elledge points out, interweaving stories from Darger's life with fiction based on his library as well as his established cast of characters (Penrod -- a readymade boy hero from Booth Tarkington -- and the Vivian girls), but this time set in Chicago, rather than a fantasyland. The hero, Webber George, is badly behaved and mad at God for not making him a girl. (The surname George is common among the Romany or gypsy families but Elledge doesn't pursue this.) Many of Webber's escapades are drawn directly from Darger's autobiography and he himself enters the narrative to say, "the writer knows quite a number of boys who would give anything to have been born a girl."

Creative activity quelled his pent-up rage and inner torment, since "God had made his life a rosary of miseries and tragedy." A third work, promisingly titled The History of My Life, written in his seventies, derails into an apocalyptic revenge tale of a tornado (appropriated from Oz, though Darger had witnessed the devastation of a tornado personally) named Sweetie Pie that wreaks havoc on the Midwest, destroying all those places where Darger had suffered.

We now have several coffee-table books reproducing the remarkable art of Henry Darger and this biography fills in the sad details behind the work: his life of pain and despair, religious anguish and daily misery. (As an aside, all of the works of Darger are marked © Kiyoko Lerner, but this would never stand up in court. Apart from the fact he has living relatives, most of the work is not registered with the copyright office and she could not prove legal entitlement [See U.S. Copyright Law, Involuntary Transfer of Ownership, Section §201 (e)].)

What remains? We know he had a cupboard full of books including all of L. Frank Baum, some Dickens, books about the Great Fire of Chicago, and a mass of ephemera, pictures clipped from magazines to be traced and collaged into his art, which he pasted into old phone books. He also had a collection of 78 rpm records that he played into the night while he worked: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin. Darger would be astounded at this interest in his life. (Even the little victim "Elsie Paroubek" brings up 65,000 Google search results.)

Acres of manuscript remain for the doctoral thesis machine to pick over before we wring all the sentimentality out of one of the saddest lives ever saved from the rubbish dump and held up for our contemplation.
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A Notorious Book Condemned by the United States Congress

by Stephen J. Gertz

I, your merry gondolier through the murky waters and curious byways of literature that flow beneath the  bridge of dreamy sighs, bring to your attention, strictly as a caveat lectorem public service, a forgotten classic of 1950s sensationalistic narcotics paranoia and lurid drug eroticism so notorious that it drew the attention of United States Congressman Ezekiel C. Gathings (D-Arkansas) and the House Select Committee  on Current Pornographic Materials, Investigation of Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material of 1952.

After spraying paraquat on Marijuana Girl, a paperback original by N. R. De Mexico (Robert Campbell Bragg, 1918-1954, a member of Anaïs Nin's poetry and erotica-writing circle in NYC), the Committee needled the following opus:

A “book which may be considered another Manual for the Guidance of Potential Dope Addicts is Lady of the Evening by Les Scott. The author does mention some of the evils of drug addiction but probably only as a screen to cover his emphasis of its delights. One chapter… is certainly a glorification of the ecstasies to be derived from marijuana cigarettes…There is also a chapter which describes ‘queer’ life in Greenwich Village, with a pseudo-philosophical discussion of homosexuality, both male and female” (House Select Committee  on Current Pornographic Materials, Investigation of Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material, 82d Congress, 2d Session, 1953, House Report 2510, p.16). 

In sum, if not insane, a sultry dame seduces the male protagonist to join her in heroin addiction; household Hints From Heloise in Hell. Soon, he accompanies her to a dope-soaked orgy hosted by a lesbian junkie-pusher. Later, she takes him on a walking-working tour of a shooting-gallery. Later still, dope-crazy Heloise  rushes headlong toward plate glass to swan dive off a balcony yet behold! she is forcibly prevented from becoming a splattered junkie lady of the evening on the sidewalk only to wind up a screaming junkie lady of the evening in a straight-jacket.

Preceding Lady of the Evening, Scott's Touchable (1951) limns the cautionary tale of small-town girl Ruth, who loses herself in “The Inferno” (the Big City) where lesbianism, prostitution, degradation, absinthe, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin (here known as “The White Fairy”) find her. It's another don't-miss, over-the-top  pulp fiction portrayal of sex and drugs in post-WWII America. Or, at least, in Greenwich Village,  NYC, where the rest of the country expected this sort of activity and got a contact high reading about it.

("Robert W. Tracy," co-author of Touchable, was the pseudonym of Alvin Schwartz, whose enduring fame is as one of the early writers for Batman and Superman comics during the 1940s - he wrote the first Superman comic to feature Bizarro - and who, later, during the 1950s, wrote for Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman before moving to Canada in 1968 to write documentaries).

Of Scott's Twilight Woman (1952), its dust jacket's blurbmeister  writes, "Tom Grant was convinced that Iris had everything a woman needed. Only she wouldn't marry him. Why? Iris maintained that a woman of the twilight was not good wife material. Grant was convinced she would be better than the woman he had married, Bertha, his ex-wife. Bertha, utterly beautiful, utterly alluring, utterly frigid, but whose white body still held a terrible fascination for him"

"Of course that was before Bertha met Anthony Amato. And then there was red-haired Natalie Jarvis, the estranged wife of a friend. Not to mention Audrey, who 'did her part to keep the kettle bubbling'" (Howard Prouty, ReadInk). Busy Bertha's kettle bubbles bisexually and, by the way, Iris is an "ambisextrous hellion."

A look at the imprint's endpapers tells quite a tale. It's the story of "sophisticate," here a code-word for "adult content," as if the illustration didn't countersink  the nail. "Arco Sophisticates" set  sophistication back a century but made up for it with some of the wildest, most lurid pulp fiction in hardcover you'll ever come across.

Not quite so, however, the many books by Jack Woodford, the 30s-40s screenwriter and author of soft-core pulp, that Arco published. A successful, unpretentious ham n' eggs writer, Woodford wrote a few no-nonsense writing instructional books that get right down to the pith: “One of your first jobs, as you write for money, will be to get rid of your vocabulary.” “Money talks. And writes. And publishes. And reviews. But it can't read.”

Illiterate legal tender aside, the road to Arco Sophisticates begins at  Jack Woodford Press, an imprint established in the late 1940s and edited by two characters with experience publishing and retailing sex lit., Allan Wilson and Moe Shapiro, that the authorities kept their eyes on; it was a division of Citadel Press, which had a reputation for publishing Leftist and erotic literature, and Woodford had been on  the censors' radar for years. Jack Woodford Press reissued many of Woodford's books from the 1930s. By the early  1950s, however, Woodford was an angry alcoholic who felt taken advantage of.

"What Woodford really wanted was to find a publisher with whom he might make more money in royalties and over whom he might exercise more control.

"He had no trouble finding one. During 1951 and 1952, the Arco Publishing Company [established in 1937] issued between seven and twelve novels cowritten by Woodford, as part of their ‘‘Arco Sophisticates’’ series. Milton Gladstone, its founder, had made a publishing breakthrough with a book on how to study for the Army tests, and followed with others in the ‘how-to’ genre. He did not publish much fiction, but obviously Woodford was too tempting to pass up. There were several other writers in the series whose titles, styles, and themes imitated Woodford’s.

"The print runs were approximately 7,000; if Woodford’s contract was like that of other writers, he got an advance of $500 a book, and 50% of all subsidiary rights. In 1952, Gladstone was subpoenaed by the Gathings Committee, and reprimanded for several of the ‘Sophisticates’ because they touched on nymphomania, drug use, gambling, and 'perversions.' One committee member felt he could not even mention many of the titles (Carnal Cargo? Hot Star?); they were 'filthy' and ‘terrible’ (US House of Representatives 230; ‘News of the Week’ 2318). It may have been such pressure that made Gladstone stop issuing the ‘Sophisticates’ line" (Gertzman, Jay A. The Jack Woodford Press: Bestsellers at the Army Base, the Drug Store, and the Tourist Bookstore, 1946–1959. Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2007,  pp 25–48).

Without putting too fine a point on it these titillating novels were not sold in mainstream book shops. In addition to drugstores,  Army bases, chain and department stores, typical retail outlets included urban tourist-tenderloin district, i.e. Times Square, NYC, bookstores.

Gladstone sold Arco Publishing Company to Prentice Hall, a division of Simon & Schuster, in 1978.

It would be a grievous omission to not take note of another of Les Scott's books,  Twilight Women.  “The story of a strange love cult and its secret rites! Rance finds himself in the midst of its wild, sensuous members. Trouble. To love them meant not only violating their society’s moral code but punishment by death.” Great cover art (alas, uncredited) illustrates a nude Betty Page-lookalike with a towel draped over her lap and a tree branch masking her breasts. Given the subject matter of Twilight Woman, the secret rites of the strange love cult in Twilight Women will come as no surprise. It's a fun, camp read.

Leslie Scott (1893-1975) was a prolific writer of pulp westerns with over 250 titles to his credit. Why he decided to rip the canvas off the Conestoga wagon to expose the shocking, sordid shadow-world of modern sophisticates remains a mystery but I suspect a shift in the marketplace led him to trade  gingham for sheer gowns.

That shift was quite specific. 1951-1952 heard the roar of anti-drug hysteria over a drug epidemic that did not exist, whipped up by the media after the Kevauver Crime Committee declared organized crime's involvement with the drug trade as "a frightening menace to the youth of America." Suddenly, dope-themed novels became hot-sellers, particularly in paperback. "Murder, rape, kidnapping speedily went out of style as first-choice plot material" (Gerrity, John. The Truth About the Drug Menace. Harper's, February 1952, p. 27, as cited in my Dope Menace).

I did not presume that Leslie Scott and Les Scott were one and the same person simply because the Library of Congress catalogs their books together so I contacted his son, Justin Scott, who confirmed that Les Scott was, yes, Leslie Scott of pulp western fame.

"He did indeed write Lady of the Evening, Touchable, and Twilight Woman. They were handsomely produced books. I've misplaced my copies, they're around the house somewhere I am sure - and I have fond memories of reading them when I was a child."

Yikes! Call retro-Social Services.

"As for reading the 'lurid,' I was a very lucky kid, because my father conveyed the fact - not often stated in those days - that men and women were equal partners in bed."

Cancel that call.

As for Lady of the Evening getting the third degree glare from Congress, he proudly states, "I cannot think of a higher compliment to my father's work."

It is unfortunate that few, beyond the dweeb writing this post, read United States Congressional Committee reports in search of book reviews. Had the Gathings Report been widely read by the general public I suspect that Lady of the Evening might have become a best-seller.

Lady of the Evening is an essential addition to any collection of drug literature, Touchable a tempting elective. 
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SCOTT, Les. Lady of the Evening. A New Arco Sophisticate. New York: Arco Publishing Company,  n.d. [1952]. First Edition. Octavo. 176, [6, as publisher's catalog] pp. Pale green cloth, red lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket. 

SCOTT, Les and Robert W. Tracy (pseud. of Alvin Schwartz). Touchable. A New Arco Sophisicate. New York: Arco Publishing Company, n.d. [1951]. First Edition. Octavo. 184, [6, as publisher's catalog] pp. Gray cloth, red lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket.

SCOTT, Les. Twilight Woman. A New Arco Sophisticate. New York: Arco Publishing Company, n.d. [1952].  First edition. Octavo. 175, [6, as publisher's catalog] pp. Black cloth, silver lettered. Illustrated endpapers. Dust jacket.

SCOTT, Les. Twilight Women. New York: Beacon B-156, [1957]. 16mo. 186, (5) pp as adv. Illus. wrappers. First Edition, first printing, a paperback original. For some unexplained reason, some date this book to 1952. As Beacon did not begin publishing until 1954 this is clearly a mistake  easily avoided by consulting one of the many paperback reference works.

The Library of Congress' catalog of books by Leslie Scott/Les Scott can be found here.
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Images from the author's collection, with the exception of Twilight Woman courtesy of ReadInk, with our thanks.

Thank you to Justin Scott.

A tip o' the hat to William Dailey for permission to plagiarize my catalog notes from yesteryear.

Special, impossible without him thanks to my friend and colleague in crime and publishment, Jay A. Gertzman, whose only connection to Stephen Jay Gertz is our mutual interest in erotica, the book trade, and censorship, fostered through my uncle and one of his mentors, Elmer Gertz, one of the great 1st Amendment/civil liberties attorneys in the United States during the 20th century.
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James Baldwin, Teen Writer

by Stephen J. Gertz

A national treasure.

In the Spring of 1941, sixteen year-old James Baldwin made his debut as a published writer.

Raised in Harlem, his mother was married to a man with whom Baldwin had a tumultuous relationship; his home life was difficult. He was inculcated with a strong sense of religion; from age fourteen through sixteen he was a preacher in a small revivalist church. He attended New York’s prestigious DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and contributed to Magpie, the school’s student-published literary magazine. Magpie’s editor-in-chief was a kid who would become one of Baldwin’s life-long friends, Richard Avedon, pre-camera, and with literary ambitions of his own.

In these stories and poems we hear Baldwin celebrating Blackness yet struggling with his own, and religion, racism, his conscience, and his desperate desire to give voice to the emotions roiling within himself. It's a voice that already is clear and knows what it wants to say and how to say it.

Winter 1941, Vol XXV, No. 1

To the Winter 1941 issue of Magpie Baldwin contributed two poems, and a six-scene play illustrated by Harold Altman, who would go on to a distinguished career as an illustrator and graphic artist.

Winter 1941, Vol XXV, No. 1, p. 28.

These Two
By James Baldwin
Winter 1941, Vol. XXV, No. 1, p. 19.

A Play in Six Scenes

Etching by Harold Altman.

Scene 1.—A cold wet alley about serve A.M. Day is just breaking. We hear the swish and patter of heavy rain. Drunkard stumbles into alley. He is completely intoxicated.

DRUNKARD—Gosh . . . shure ish dark . . . (He stumbles over something and mutters inaudible curses.) Wha'sh devil . . . deshent man can't even git home peashful. (He stumbles again and falls.) Well I'll be . . . ish two men . . . heyT wake up. Hey! wake up . . . ish rainin' . . . (He attempts to lift one body which is lying atop the other. Suddenly he lets it drop, recoils yells.) Hey! They're dead—dead. (He stumbles to the mouth of the alley). Moider! Moider! Help, police! (We hear windows slammed up.) Moider! Moider!

(Now we hear voices from the windows.) "Hey! What's all the racket down there? . . . What's wrong? . . . Shut up down there!"

DRUNKARD—Ish two dead men down here! Moider! (And he is off again)...

In the same issue Avedon contributed two poems and three humor pieces.

From Not England by Richard Avedon, p. 34.

...These are the words I write. 


This is the twisted song I sing 


Till I am hoarse with it. 


These are the words that wring 


My every dream into a nightmare...

"There was a boy."


A friend of mine. 


There was a boy." 


Beaten on my brain, 


"There was a boy."

No, no, I can not mourn that England's churches 


Have been burnt away, 

Or England's charm, or England's years of grace.

I can not turn but what I see the face, 


With clear eyes and a blond head, 


Of an English boy I knew. 


The boy is dead.

Spring 1941, Vol XXV,  No. 2

In the Spring 1941 issue of Magpie Baldwin contributed two poems and three stories, “A Woman at the Well,” “Incident in London,” and “Mississippi Legend.”

Judgment Day
By James Baldwin
The Magpie, Spring 1941, Vol. XXV, No. 2, p. 6.

Dey tells me dat on Judgment Day
In some udder clime,
I'se "wine hate to gib account

Ob mah earthly time.

Dey tells me dat, if I drink gin,
Lie, o' steal, o' fight,
I ain't gwine neber be allowed

To walk in Jesus' light.

Dem as tells me all dese things
Goes to church on Sunday,

From dey shoulders sproutin' wings,

Shootin' crap on Monday.

No, I neber managed yet

To git real good religion;

Don't know why I didn't—
'Twarn't fer lack o' teachin'.

Guess I'se jes' a sinner,

Bound to go to Hell—
Jes' de same I'se kinder glad—
Shootin' crap is swell!


From The Woman at the Well
By James Baldwin
The Magpie, Spring 1941, Vol. XXV, No. 2, p. 26.

Illustration by Bernard Bier

"Oh Lawd I want..."

Jeems walked along the hot, dusty road, heart alive with song. His faded blue dungarees flapped in the still, oppressive air. Rivulets of water ran down the dusky cheeks gathering under his chin to form large, hesitant beads. The rough, wooly hair glistened in the sunlight; the eyes, large and eager, surveyed the world peacefully from beneath the shining, heavy brows. Under one forearm he carried a Bible.

"Two wings . . ."

Dog, but he was tired! It was a long journey, the way he was going. He had been travelling all day, and though he had often made the journey before, this time it seemed slower than usual.

"Dis rate I'll jes' git to de church Sunday mo'nin' in time to walk right in an' preach," he grumbled. 

"Won't hate time to wash or nothin'." This was immediately followed by the consoling thought: "It doan matter so long's dey git de Word; Eben Jesus was ragged sometime." Heaven and earth contained no greater honor than to do as Jesus might have done...

From Mississippi Legend
By James Baldwin
The Magpie, Spring 1941, Vol. XXV, No. 2, p. 42.

It was Annie Simpson as tol' me this here story, an' I ain't a-sayin' as it's the truth or a lie. Annie Simpson's a real respectable woman, an' she ain't got no cause to lie to me. I been knowin' her all my life an' she's one o' the sweetest chillun I know.

Annie used to live down on a farm in Mississippi. 'Twant her farm, but she used to work it on a sharecroppin' basis—you know, that means she was workin' for somebody else an' givin' them half o' the crops at the end o' the year.

Annie says that everybody down there was real religious, but she says she never seen a woman as religious as Mattie Jones before. She says Mattie was so blame holy that she wouldn't even straighten her hair, or light her stove on Sunday. Said Sunday was a day of rest an' that folks oughtn't to do no work atall on that day. On Sundays Mattie went to church real early in the mornin' an' stayed there all day, singin' an' shoutin' an' praisin' God. Sometimes she stayed there till way early Monday mornin'. Annie says she was as pious as anybody, but she couldn't never stay there that long. She says she had to get some sleep some time. Anyway, Mattie was always the leader in somethin' like that...

Winter 1942, Vol XXVI, No. 1

And from Magpie winter 1942, a powerful poem of a lynching and lost love by the magazine's new editor, a seventeen year-old with a deep, old soul:

Black Girl Shouting
By James Baldwin
The Magpie, Winter 1942, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, p. 32.

Stomp my feet 


An' clap my han's 


Angels comin' 
To dese fair lan's.

Cut my lover
Off dat tree! 


Angels comin' 


To set me free.

Glory, glory,
To de Lamb 


Blessed Jesus 


Where's my man?

Black girl, whirl
Your torn, red dress 


Black girl, hide 

Your bitterness.

Black girl, stretch
Your mouth so wide. 


None will guess 

The way he died

Turned your heart
To quivering mud 


While your lover's 


Soft, red blood

Stained the scowling
Outraged tree. 


Angels come 


To cut him free!

Baldwin was a haunted artist, struggling inside, desperate to break the fetters of his background, shed the negro skin he was born into and fashion a new black one, and burst the barricades of his conscience.

Sonnet
By James Baldwin
The Magpie, Winter 1942, Vol.. XXVI, No. 1, p. 32.

Go away and let me rest in peace 


Thou restless, ruthless, ever-searching Mind. 


Why is it that you come, and never cease 


To tear apart each refuge that I find? 

I had thought that I could come and hide 


Far from the bitter battle fray 


But you have come and waked the country-side 


And put an end to my complacent day.

Tell me, may I never hope to see 


Some blessed refuge from the bruising rain? 


I thought that this was it, and I would be 


Forever sheltered from this roving Brain. 


But now I must depart—my peace is o'er 

For you have forced my barricaded door.

In the following, Baldwin has heard the calling, has seen his future, knows his path, and what he must do.

Loose Stone Rolling
By James Baldwin
The Magpie, Winter 1942, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, p. 47.

I am called and I must go 


Through this wild and blinding snow 


Ease this pain within my breast 

Plunging through the wilderness.

Not for me the sheltered cave 


Or the drab and solid rock 

I must up and be away

Far beyond the ordered flock.

Upon high school graduation, James Baldwin moved far beyond his ordered flock to Greenwich Village and began his career as a writer  in earnest. The fire next time was now, he told it on the mountain, and he burned oh so brightly.
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Cover images of Magpie, and of the poem Paradise courtesy of Between the Covers, which is currently offering these three scarce issues of Magpie for $2,250.

Accompanying illustrations by Altman and Bier courtesy of The Magpie Sings the Great Depression, which has a complete list of Magpie writers and illustrators, 1929-1942, and selections from Magpie's content here.

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