The Strange Case of Allison V. Harding

For decades, no one knew or cared very much about Allison V. Harding, a pseudonymous author for Weird Tales from 1943 to 1951. That has changed in recent years, not so much for her stories as for what she and they represent to readers of today. I'm not sure any of that was possible until we knew who she was. Luckily for the Allison V. Harding literary-industrial complex, somebody figured it out. I was that person by the way. I wrote about my investigations in an early entry on this blog called "Who Was Allison V. Harding?" dated May 24, 2011. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

For years, everything that we knew about Allison V. Harding came from Sam Moskowitz, who examined the files of the original magazine then in the possession of the purchaser of the Weird Tales property, Leo Margulies. I don't know when that took place. It may have been in the early to mid 1960s. It may have been later, perhaps in the late 1960s or early 1970s. In any case, by the time Margulies sold Weird Tales to Robert E. Weinberg in the mid to late '70s, the original files were gone. They had become infested with insects while being stored in Margulies' garage. As a consequence of the infestation and possibly other kinds of damage, Margulies destroyed or disposed of the files--an invaluable resource, an incalculable loss, another Weird Tales disaster like so many others. Robert Weinberg never saw the original files. He certainly didn't know the real identity of Allison V. Harding. I base that on an exchange of email messages I had with the late Mr. Weinberg in 2011 after he had read my article.

When I say that we knew only a few things from Sam Moskowitz about Allison V. Harding, there were really only two as far as I can tell. Two other things he told us were assumptions, one strong, the other weak. The last was just plain wrong.

First, the things we knew:

1. Checks for payment for the Harding stories were sent to a woman named Jean Milligan.

2. They were addressed to her at an attorney's office in New York City.

Now the assumptions:

3. Because she received payment for the Harding stories, Jean Milligan was their author.

4. Because she received her payments at an attorney's office, she was an attorney.

Finally, the one bit of information provided by Sam Moskowitz that was incorrect:

5. Jean Milligan was no longer living when he provided his information.

So:

No. 1 and No. 2 are simple facts. We can assume that Moskowitz was telling the truth when he put them forth.

As for No. 3, I'd say that's a pretty fair assumption. Put another way, if we apply Occam's Razor to the problem, then we have the simplest answer: Jean Milligan was Allison V. Harding.

As far as I can tell, No. 4 is one assumption too far. Just because a person receives mail at an attorney's office doesn't mean that she was an attorney. It looks like other researchers have looked into this recently and haven't found any evidence that Jean Milligan was an attorney. She may not have had even a college degree.

I'm not sure why Moskowitz wrote that Jean Milligan had died. Maybe he came up with that himself. Maybe Margulies gave him that bit of information. If that's the case, I wonder whether Margulies knew her identity and was protecting her for some reason. Then again, maybe one man or the other was just plain mistaken. All of this is mere speculation.

I recently read an article called "The Elusive Allison V. Harding and How to Suppress Women’s Writing . . . Again" by Cora Buhlert. The article is posted on Ms. Buhlert's own website and is dated November 12, 2020. You can read it by clicking here. My reading of Cora Buhlert's article comes from a comment (a link) made by Jean-Yves on this blog on June 4, 2022. Thank you, Jean-Yves.

Cora Buhlert offers a defense of Jean Milligan as Allison V. Harding, as well of her work. Part of her discussion is based on a work of criticism called How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ, from 1983. I haven't read that book, but critiques made by Ms. Russ and in turn Ms. Buhlert carry some weight, especially when you consider a review of the Harding stories made by a writer for The Paperback Warrior and quoted at length in Cora Buhlert's essay.

I have made my own speculations about the author of the Allison V. Harding stories. One is that Jean Milligan's future husband, Lamont Buchanan, associate editor of Weird Tales, was the real author of the Harding stories. Anyway, I don't find the Warrior reviewer's argument very convincing. Cora Buhlert is more convincing in refuting it. But then she makes her own arguments that are also based on assumptions and not entirely convincing. For example, she writes that "even if Lamont Buchanan wrote the stories, it makes no sense for him to use a female pen name." Well why not? How can anyone today say what he or anyone else was thinking when all of this happened more than seventy years ago, especially considering that all of the principals are now gone from this good earth? That's one of the problems with this whole strange case of Allison V. Harding: almost all of the evidence is gone. What remains is either circumstantial or solely in the form of the stories themselves. Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan are supposed to have been hoarders. I'd like to think that there are still manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, and so on among their possessions. On the other hand, knowing what I know about hoarders in my own family, there may be nothing of value left. We may have to accept that the evidence is gone. And so the mystery will likely remain until the end.

Again, I have speculated that Lamont Buchanan was the real author of the Harding stories. I'm willing to consider that he and his future wife worked on at least some of the stories together, in other words that they were co-authors. And I'm willing to consider that everything is as it appears on the surface: Jean Milligan was Allison V. Harding. But that would mean dismissing my feelings and intuition in my reading of the Harding stories, especially The Damp Man stories of 1947-1949.

Again, I'm not trying to take anything away from a woman author, nor to silence her or erase her or cancel her or any other such thing. I am not trying to suppress women's writing. I like and appreciate women's writing in fact. Some of my favorite books have women as their authors: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847), To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (1974). One of my favorite science fiction/fantasy authors, C.L. Moore, was a woman. (And favorite not just because she grew up just four or five blocks away from where I grew up sixty years later.) I wrote recently about Kate Wilhelm, a wonderfully good writer who, for example, pulled off a near tour de force in her novella "The Plastic Abyss" (1973). Very often, women writers can offer things that their male counterparts seem unable to offer, or that they offer only with difficulty, for example, mood, emotion, color, genuine human feeling, depth of personality, sensitivity, perception, and so on.

Again, I base the idea that Buchanan was Harding more than anything on the stories themselves--not by trying to take anything away from Jean Milligan but by not putting things on her that don't belong. What I mean is that at least two of the Harding stories--"The Damp Man Again" and "Take the Z Train"--seem to issue from the male psyche and not at all from the female. "The Damp Man Again" in particular is a man's story. A woman may be able to approximate what a man thinks, but the author of this story seems to have had firsthand knowledge of a man's state of mind, of a sick man's cruelty, misogyny, and warped, sick, and twisted thinking in regards to women. I believe the author of that story didn't just imagine The Damp Man's state of mind--he actually lived it, even if only for moments at a time. We should remember that Buchanan had not yet married when The Damp Man stories were published. His being joined to Jean Milligan was still three years in the future when the last appeared in May 1949. Anyway, a woman doesn't think these things about other women, or at least I don't think she does. I'm not a woman, though, and never will be. I can't say for sure. What we need is for a sensitive and perceptive female literary critic to read the Allison V. Harding stories and let us know what she thinks.

Is anyone up to it?

Several years ago I contacted New Canaan High School in Connecticut looking for a yearbook in which a picture of Jean Milligan might have appeared. They didn't have anything from that long ago. I didn't think to ask about the large class pictures that used to hang on the walls of our high schools. (Do they still?) Someone else thought of it, though, and took this picture--a pretty poor one to be sure--and posted it on the Internet. So now, finally, we have a likeness of Jean Milligan, assuming this is she. She looks genuinely happy and cheerful. I hope that lasted for a very long time to come.

Thank you to the photographer.

Text copyright 2022 by Terence E. Hanley