Killdozer!

Speaking of Theodore Sturgeon, it was twenty years ago today that a man in Granby, Colorado, went on a rampage with a heavily modified bulldozer that has since been dubbed "Killdozer." Maybe that was after Sturgeon's story "Killdozer!", which was published in Astounding Science-Fiction in November 1944. "Killdozer!" was adapted to comic book form in Worlds Unknown in April 1974 by writer Gerry Conway and artist Dick Ayers. Two months before that cover date, in February 1974, NBC had broadcast a made-for-TV movie version of Killdozer! with Clint Walker, Neville Brand, and Robert Urich. We watched that movie when we were kids. I haven't seen it since. Anyway, this makes a quadruple-Killdozer! anniversary year: eighty years since the first publication of the story, fifty since the movie and comic book adaptations, and twenty since the real-life Killdozer rampage. Maybe every thirty years there's a Killdozer outbreak, so watch out, America, in 2034.

Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1944. Cover story: "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon. Cover art by William Timmins (1915-1985).

Worlds Unknown, April 1974. Cover story: "Killdozer!", originally by Sturgeon, adapted by Gerry Conway. Cover art by . . . I'm not sure. That looks like Gil Kane art under somebody else's inks? Comic books are supposed to be a low art, science fiction barely higher, but I would say that the comic book version of the Killdozer cover is better, and not by a little.

And speaking of influences or possible influences . . . a year after "Killdozer!" was first published, Weird Tales had its own story of a murderous machine. The title is "The Murderous Steam Shovel." The author was Allison V. Harding. This is the first Harding story I have looked at with a woman as the narrator. Her name is Vilma. That might lend some credence to the idea that Jean Milligan (1920-2005) was Allison V. Harding. Whether she was or not, it seems that at least some of the Harding stories were influenced or inspired by stories written by others. This one looks like an example.

"The Murderous Steam Shovel" by Allison V. Harding in a two-page spread in Weird Tales, November 1945. The art is by the rare and elusive Boris Dolgov. It doesn't seem likely to me that the artist for Marvel Comics in 1974 saw this image from nearly three decades before. Nevertheless, he arrived at a similar kind of personified machine. Artist Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965) also personified machines--to perfection.

Addition:

In 1939, Riverside Press published Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. Here's an image of the dust jacket of the first edition, swiped from the Internet. Dolgov's murderous steam shovel looks a little like Virginia Lee Burton's version, named in her book Mary Anne. They're seen from the same angle, and both were drawn with a crayon or charcoal on textured paper. (I think.) I wonder if Dolgov was aware of Virginia's book.

Text and captions copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Allison V. Harding in Tellers of Weird Tales

If you click on the label on the right, you will see all of the articles I have written on this blog about Allison V. Harding. There are more items to add to the resulting catalog. These will help to bring things up to date and to help fill in some gaps.

In late 2010, I was reading Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies, a hardbound anthology edited by Marvin Kaye, when I came upon a story called "The Damp Man." It was my first encounter with Allison V. Harding. I enjoyed the story. It reminds me of movies from the 1940s. In his very brief introduction to "The Damp Man," the late Mr. Kaye set forth the mystery of Allison V. Harding: she was actually Jean Milligan, an attorney in 1940s New York. I like to solve mysteries. If you turn that around, you could say that unsolved mysteries are troubling, not just to me but maybe to all of us. Witness the current fascination not only with true crime but also with the real or supposed mysteries of history. Conspiracy theories are attempts to solve mysteries, I guess, even where no mystery exists.

For months I thought about the mysterious case of Allison V. Harding. I began this blog in part--a large part in fact--so that I might solve that mystery. My first entry, dated April 22, 2011, was on C.L. Moore. How else could I begin? But my second was on Allison V. Harding. That was on April 26, 2011. I listed the thirty-six stories in the Harding oeuvre in that first article. I naïvely thought that someone out there in this wide world might know something about her and the woman behind the Harding stories. I didn't think that a secret like this one could be so closely guarded. And yet it was. In fact, there may have been just one person in this same wide world who knew the true identity of Allison V. Harding, and he was living, I believe, as a recluse in his New York City apartment.

By the way, the first Harding story in Weird Tales is called "The Unfriendly World" (July 1943). Regardless of its subject matter, I think the title of the story to be fitting, considering what I subsequently found out about Allison V. Harding.

I asked for help in my first entry on Harding. No help came. So I kept going and I solved the mystery: Jean Milligan (1919-2004) was the wife of Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015), the associate editor of Weird Tales magazine during most of the time during which the Harding stories were published. I wrote about my investigations in "Who Was Allison V. Harding?" on May 24, 2011.

On May 26, 2011, I published an entry on Lamont Buchanan. I think everything I wrote then is still valid. The next day, May 27, 2011, I published an article and list called "Lamont Buchanan's Books."  I found a review that stated he had published thirteen books. I found only twelve.

On February 8, 2014, I wrote about John Giunta (1920-1970) and his role as the cover artist for the last Damp Man story, "The Damp Man Again" (Weird Tales, May 1949).

On September 15, 2015, I wrote an entry called "Take the Z-Train," accompanied by a cartoon by Charles Addams. That was the first time that I wrote about my idea of Lamont Buchanan as the actual author of the Harding stories, this based on my reading of the stories themselves and on the circumstances under which they were published. I didn't then and still don't have any evidence that he was the actual author. I would like to think that there is some kind of extant evidence--or proof--one way or another, but I'm not very hopeful of that. I should remind everyone that the sole bit of evidence that Jean Milligan was the author of the Harding stories is Sam Moskowitz's account of seeing her name as the payee in the original files of Weird Tales, which are, of course, no longer in existence.

When I wrote on September 15, 2015, I didn't know that Lamont Buchanan had died. That unhappy event took place on April 21, 2015, almost exactly halfway between his birthday and that of his departed wife. According to the website Find A Grave, his place of death was Connecticut. He was ninety-six years old.

The next day, September 16, 2015, I wrote "Wounds," about Lamont Buchanan but also about parallel events in the life of my own family. (My aunt and uncle lived reclusive lives. Both fell at home within a few weeks of each other and went first to the same hospital, then to the same nursing home. She died before he did.)

On September 17, 2015, I wrote "The Origins of the Damp Man." In that article, I made a comparison between the loathsome and creepy stalker of the story title and the psychopathic killer in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), one of the first film noire movies. (Remember that part where I compared "The Damp Man" to movies of the 1940s?) I also found another case of a frozen ghost (nineteenth-century ghosts gave way to twentieth-century monsters of one kind or another) in "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" by John Kendrick Bangs (1891). I think this was the first time I suggested that the Harding stories may have been influenced by--or maybe derivative of--others that had come before them.

On September 18, 2015, came "Allison V. Harding-Revelations and Requests," a brief entry in which I asked people to read the Harding stories and respond with their own ideas about possible inspirations and antecedents for them.

My next entry was, in contrast, a long one. It's called "J.D. Salinger and Lamont Buchanan." The date was September 19, 2015. In it, I wrote about the extraordinary possibility that Buchanan was a model for Holden Caulfield, hero of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was Shirley (Baker) Ardman (ca. 1922-2014), a student at Columbia University in 1940, who made that claim. She was introduced to Salinger by Buchanan so that she might interview him. Shirley told her story to Noel Young, who wrote about it in an article called "Top Tips for Writers from J.D. Salinger--Advice from Beyond the Grave," dated January 26, 2012, and posted on the website The Drum. Unfortunately, the link I provided is no longer live.

I asked many questions in my article of September 19, 2015. One was facetious: Was Allison V. Harding actually J.D. Salinger slumming among the pulps? On September 24, 2015, in "The Undead Past," I cleared that up--I hope--by stating that I don't think Harding was Salinger, but I also asked whether any scholar was up to the task of uncovering further connections between Salinger and Buchanan. I think the answer is the same now as it was then: probably not.

On October 1, 2017, the New York Daily-News published a full-page article called "You Ask Me Rye?" by James Fanelli, regarding the $15.4-million estate of Lamont Buchanan and its possible disposition. (These punning titles have to stop.) It's probably the best and most thorough account of Buchanan's life and situation that I have found, especially his later life. It includes quotes from his last living blood relatives and relatives by marriage, nieces and nephews all. It also includes a photograph of Lamont Buchanan, the first that I have ever seen. I feel certain there are--or were--others, but who knows what has happened to the Buchanans' personal property? Who knows what might be--or might have been--in their possession when they died? Could there have been a solution to the strange and mysterious case of Allison V. Harding? Maybe. Maybe not. The article is about money (Buchanan's) and fame (Salinger's) and not very much about writing or literature. If writing and literature had been the main thing, we would probably have never heard about it. Everything would have gone in the Dumpster, and maybe that's where it all went anyway.

On April 26, 2021, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this blog, I wrote "A Season of Discovery and Beginning," about C.L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, and other people and things. The spring-season months of March, April, and May seem to have been central in the lives of Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan.

Most recently, I wrote "The Strange Case of Allison V. Harding" (Sept. 29, 2022) and "Allison V. Harding: Further Possibilities" (Oct. 1, 2022). Those two entries bring us to today. Other people have written about Allison V. Harding, Lamont Buchanan, and Jean Milligan in the time since I discovered her identity. They include Scott Nicolay, Anya Martin, Mike Barrett, Douglas Anderson, Cora Buhlert, and the seemingly anonymous author behind the website Paperback Warrior.

Since I first wrote, there has been at least one published collection of the Harding stories. I was supposed to write an introduction to another, but that is a project that has gone by the wayside, as so many have these past seven years since the troubles began in my family. Or maybe I should say that troubles that already existed began bubbling up again in that time. I know something now about troubles that exist in families and the lives of family members. I think I understand something about the strange case of Lamont Buchanan, who is, I believe, really at the heart of the Allison V. Harding story. I wish that all of these things could have been otherwise. I wish that maybe only a couple could have been otherwise, but as the Bible verse says, "Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward."

Charles Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015). This photograph was published in the New York Daily News but without attribution. Presumably it was provided to the newspaper by someone else, perhaps an attorney, caretaker, associate, or family member. In republishing it here, I do not make any claims to a copyright to it and express my wish not to infringe on anyone else's copyright. I trust and hope that my use of it here falls under the doctrine of fair use. My use is strictly for informational and educational purposes, as I do not profit materially from writing this blog.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Takings and Turnings

Some object to the supposition that Allison V. Harding was not a woman but a man, believing--rightly I should add--that the things that are women's should remain women's and not be taken from them. Yet every day in America, the things that are women's are being taken from them, most importantly the integrity of their bodies and of their sex, also their uniquely female experiences and identities. The things and places that are or should be women's are being taken from them, too. Women are now not always the victors in women's sports. Some sports records are held not by women but by men. Women and girls are no longer safe in women's restrooms, dressing rooms, changing rooms, shower rooms, and locker rooms. Men have entered women's prisons and women's shelters and have assaulted them there, sexually and otherwise. The takers in all of this are men, but they are being helped in many cases by women. Others who object are forced to remain silent, all that is, but the most powerful among them. Even then, these powerful women are vilified, and there are attempts to strip them of their power, to strip them even of their own creations. If we're looking for a case in which there are real attempts at silencing and erasing a woman writer and to take from her the things that she has created, look no further than that of J.K. Rowling. Men are doing that and women are helping them.

I have written before about the desire afoot in this world to destroy the past and everything that remains of the past. There is that negative goal to be sure, but I have overlooked the possibility that there could be a positive goal to replace it. The desire to destroy is a powerful one, but what comes after the destruction? The skilled destroyers among us can only wake up empty once they have done their work--either that or cast about for fresh, new things to destroy. The replacers, though, still have their goals and may pursue them through and past all of the destruction.

We have given up on God, and so there can be no spiritual transcendence. The yearning for transcendence remains, though, and so we replace spiritual transcendence with other kinds of attempted transitions, transferences, and transmutations. Ordinarily, we seek spiritual transcendence of the body and of our earthly experience because God and a purely spiritual existence lie on the other side. The replacers among us have decided that we are Gods--each one of us, capital-"G" Gods. We have usurped his role, believing we have his wisdom and authority, are confident that we can exert his power. We believe we can remake his world and his universe, of which we are a part. We believe we can remake ourselves in our own image. Whatever we can envision--whatever we might want of ourselves--we can become. We have become Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

Weird fiction has its limitations. For one, it tends to be told in the form of a tale: One time this weird thing happened when somehow I stepped outside the normal world and normal experience, but then I came back, or: I witnessed this weird thing that came into our universe but then went away again, but we should be on the lookout for that ever happening again. The weird tale--tale being the operative word--tends to be a premodern form. Science fiction, on the other hand, tends to more sophisticated and modernistic. And it takes place in the real, material world. It isn't weird. It's real and normal, logical and rational. Weird fiction is also a prewar genre. Once the world was awakened from a sometimes irrational past into a scientific and technological present of atomic bombs and rocketships, of the possibilities of apocalypse and dystopia, of alienation and all of the psychopathology of modern living, weird fiction lost much of its power. Science fiction became the alternative. Before the war there were monster movies. After the war, Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein. Meanwhile, science fiction came into the movies, and we had The War of the Worlds, This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There were weird-fictional monsters after the war--vampires and zombies for example--but these were often given scientific explanations, such as in The Last Man on Earth, Night of the Living Dead, and The Omega Man. Other weird tales were turned into types of horror, including body-horror (An American Werewolf in London) and the horror of the psychopathic killer, who was depicted as a supernatural or almost supernatural phenomenon, even if psychopathy is seen in our time as a scientific, medical, psychological, or sociological (i.e., a "soft"-scientific) problem. There were exceptions of course. I'm working here in generalizations.

Before the war there were serious authors who wrote weird fiction--their tales tended to be called "ghost stories"--but before the war there doesn't seem to have been any great discontinuity between serious literature and genre literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and still others wrote in those genres. Some authors of the American South before and after operated in what is called the "Southern Gothic" mode. After the war, though, serious literature turned away from weird fiction and ghost stories and towards science fiction. Again, there were exceptions. Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Joyce Carol Oates have worked in Gothic modes. But when turning to genre fiction for their subjects and themes, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Walker Percy, and others like them have chosen science fiction rather than weird fiction as their preferred mode. Put another way, science fiction is fiction, a higher and more literary form, versus weird fiction as a folk form, simpler form, or more popular form. Again, there are exceptions, H.P. Lovecraft being a notable example.

Still working in generalizations.

My point here is that we are living in and will continue to live in a science-fictional world and a science-fictional society. The real-world problems and threats confronting us are science-fictional, not weird-fictional: We have done away with the supernatural--or think we have done away with it--and have turned entirely towards the material and the scientific--or at least what we call the scientific. We face threats in the form of apocalypse and dystopia, but for now at least, the greater threats, I think, are our development of artificial intelligence, our turning towards robots and away from human beings, and perhaps greatest of all, our seeking to transcend ourselves as we were created towards something we believe we ourselves can create--or re-create. Again, we believe that we and the universe in which we find ourselves are flawed. And we believe ourselves capable--wise enough and powerful enough--to remake all of it. These attempts to correct our perceived flaws, to remake ourselves, to transcend ourselves, to remake the entire world and all of human nature--the belief that we can do these things--can be seen as a kind of gnosticism, if I understand the term and the concept correctly.

There are new gnostics--new progressives and new utopians--among us. Two of them were born in the 1930s--the last decade, by the way, in which weird fiction may still have stood above science fiction in popularity. These men, both from central Europe--a place of origin for so many twentieth-century horrors--don't have long for this earth. We can't rejoice that they will die, nor should we. That's not the point. The point is that they and everyone like them will die, and all of the grand ideas filling their heads will die with them. That's the fate of all of us, now and until the end of time. There is no escaping it. Our physical bodies are mortal. That's how we were made. We cannot transcend them, at least on our own and under our own power. We certainly can't transmute them. We cannot be anything other than what we are. It is essential that we all remember these things and hold them in our thoughts every day. 

The science-fictional idea is that we will progress into the future. The weird-fictional alternative might be that we are bound to ourselves and the world as we and it were created in a supernatural beginning and which continue to operate under supernatural auspices. We may try to escape those bounds, but our destiny or fate is either to return or to face the dire consequences of our transgressions. How many transgressive weird-fictional heroes and protagonists are punished or suffer these consequences in the end? Dr. Frankenstein is certainly one of them and may have been the first. His example is still with us. We should heed it.

Victor (an ironic name) Frankenstein tried to create a man where there was never before a man. Medical doctors today are trying to make men where there were never men and women where there were never women. Technologists would like to create beings out of machinery and souls where there were never before souls. These are things that simply can't be done. Women can never have the things that are men's. Beyond that, after their attempted transitions, they will never again have a chance at the things that are women's. They might as well try to get with child a mandrake root. But all women should remember that men in attempted transition may very well continue to have the things that are men's and take from women the things that are women's. Women in attempted transition give things up; men in attempted transition become takers. Remember that.

Trans- . . . that prefix . . . The word weird has to do with fate or destiny, but it also has to do with turning or becoming. To transgress, to transition, to transmute, to become transhuman, to pursue transference, to transcend--all are a kind of turning or becoming. But what things can we do strictly on our own, and what others will forever lie beyond our power? Transgression--our first sin--is a choice placed before us. Transcendence--offered to us so that we might live--is the alternative. All of these other things can only lead to earthly and bodily horrors.

And then maybe we will have a return to weird fiction.

In this cover for Mandrake the Magician, magic meets science--and wins!--but only by resorting to good old-fashioned fisticuffs. Note the Frankenstein-village setting of the Gothic romance juxtaposed with the flying saucers of science fiction. The monsters of science fiction have taken the place of those of weird fiction. Note, too, that the aliens and their ship (like a cupola) are entirely green.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Allison V. Harding: Further Possibilities

I have thought that stories by Allison V. Harding published in Weird Tales were actually the work of Lamont Buchanan, associate editor of the magazine, writing under a pseudonym. That's based on my reading of the Harding stories--at least some of them--as the work of a man rather than of a woman. According to Sam Moskowitz in his examination of the original Weird Tales files, Allison V. Harding was the pseudonym of Jean Milligan. That's based on the assumption that because payment for the stories was sent to Jean Milligan, she was their author. A third possibility is that Buchanan and his future wife collaborated on the stories. Now I have a fourth possibility, that Jean Milligan was acting as a literary agent or representative for Lamont Buchanan. I don't have any evidence to back that up. It's only a supposition.

I'm not sure that anyone knows when, where, or how Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan met. They are supposed to have known each other in New Canaan, Connecticut, where Jean Milligan went to high school. (A newspaper article from 2017 calls them "high school sweethearts.") Both were born in 1919. Both would seemingly have graduated from high school in the same year, 1937, though Jean Milligan, having been born on May 31, may have been in the class of 1938. Lamont Buchanan was older than she by almost three months (he was born on March 6) and would have celebrated his eighteenth birthday during the 1936-1937 school year, when he would presumably have been a senior.

I have found a city directory for 1938 for Stamford, Connecticut. Here is a transcription of the original entries for all of the Buchanans listed in that directory:

Buchanan Charles L Mrs h Weed n Wahackme rd

--Claire F wid Paul 137 South ave

--Lamont student r off Weed n Wahackme rd

I take that to mean that Lamont Buchanan, son of Mrs. Charles L. Buchanan, was a student with a rear office (?) either on Weed Street (a north-south street) or Wahackme Road (an east-west road), which intersects Weed Street just to the northwest of New Canaan. At the time, the Milligan family was living on Richmond Hill Road, which is less than a mile to the south, also an intersecting road with Weed Street. Unfortunately, Jean Milligan was not listed with her parents. Perhaps she was still in high school in 1938. Or maybe she was away at college.

Jean Milligan's mother, Beatrice Isabel (Humphrey) Milligan, died on November 10, 1938, at age fifty-three. On May 19, 1939, Jean returned to New York from a trip overseas, most recently (or maybe it was her only destination) from Bermuda. She was nineteen years old. There are so many things now that we will never know. But did Jean travel away from the place of her recent loss?

On May 12, 1940, Jean Milligan was enumerated in the Federal census with her father, John R. Milligan, at 81 Richmond Hill Road in Fairfield County. She was twenty and working as a secretary. Unfortunately, I can't read the next piece of information, the industry in which she worked. You can try to turn it into "Law office" if you want, but I don't think that's what it says. It looks more like "Tell office," perhaps signifying a teller's office. She was in her third year of college. The Darien, Connecticut, city directory for 1940 also has an entry for her at 81 Richmond Hill Road. It even has her mother's name and death date. Jean then was a student. I suspect the directory was published before the census was made, in which case Jean Milligan may have been in college until late 1939 or early 1940, when she began working as a secretary. This is assuming she didn't work and attend classes at the same time. 

Meanwhile, Lamont Buchanan was living with his mother, Anne Buchanan, at 227 57th Street in Manhattan. They were enumerated there on April 3, 1940. Like Jean Milligan, he was in his third year of college. It's interesting to see that several artists and at least one magazine editor, Paul R. Milton of The Dance Magazine of Stage and Screen, were also in residence at 227. In other words, there were connections to art and the magazine industry, also to advertising and related fields, in Buchanan's own building. We should remember that Buchanan's father, Charles L. Buchanan, was also a writer.

On October 16, 1940, Lamont Buchanan registered for the draft. He was living at the same address as before, but now we find out that he was a student at Columbia University. His father was then living at 853 7th Avenue, New York, New York. At five feet, eleven inches tall and only 135 pounds, Lamont Buchanan must have been rail thin. And by the way, he had brown hair, brown eyes, and a light complexion.

There were developments at Weird Tales magazine in 1940, too. Farnsworth Wright was last credited as editor in the issue of March 1940. In the next issue, May 1940, Dorothy McIlwraith assumed the helm. Her associate was Harry Aveline Perkins, another of a cohort born in 1919. His birthday was April 22. According to Douglas A. Anderson on his blog, Lesser-Known Writers, Perkins remained as associate editor of Weird Tales until September 1942. Curiously, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) does not have entries either for Harry Aveline Perkins or for Lamont Buchanan. ISFDb does however have an entry for Jean Milligan as Allison V. Harding. Lamont Buchanan became associate editor of Weird Tales with the November issue of 1942. Seven months later, in July 1943, the first Harding story, "The Unfriendly World," appeared. Thirty-five more followed. The last was "Scope," in January 1951.

By 1942 when Buchanan started with Weird Tales, the magazine was already on a bimonthly schedule. Only three issues intervened between his arrival on staff and the publication of the first Harding story. It's probably safe to assume that the lineup for at least a couple of issues was already set by the time Buchanan started. If that's the case, then a story by Allison V. Harding appeared in one of the very first issues available to her. A curious coincidence. Can we say that Buchanan actually guided that story into print? Can we say also that he may have been biased in doing so? If so, what was the source of his bias? Did he act in favor of a woman whom he had presumably known for several years but who was not known to have been a writer or editor under her own name, then or ever? Or was it in his own favor, Buchanan the current associate editor and current or future published writer?

So Jean Milligan attended college. Whether she graduated or not, I can't say. She worked as a secretary. Her father, John R. Milligan, was an investment counselor in his own firm, Van Cleef, Jordan, & Wood, with offices at 14 Wall Street in Manhattan. He was in a position to employ her in his own office or to secure employment for her in another. Sam Moskowitz said or assumed that Jean Milligan was an attorney in New York during the 1940s. She received payments for the Harding stories at a law firm. But, again, just because she received payments doesn't mean she was the author, and just because she received them at an attorney's office doesn't mean she was an attorney. I think it safer to assume that she was the author of the Harding stories than that she was an attorney, but what if she was receiving payment on behalf of someone else? What if she was acting as a kind of literary agent for an obviously pseudonymous author?

More assumptions. More unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions.

According to Douglas Anderson, Lamont Buchanan remained with Weird Tales until September 1949. Allison V. Harding had just three more stories in the magazine after that, "The Underbody" in November 1949, "Take the Z Train" in March 1950, and, possibly an outlier, "Scope" in January 1951. Presumably, "The Underbody" was already lined up for publication when Buchanan left. "Take the Z Train" may also have been. "Scope" came more than a year later, though. That's why I have called it a possible outlier.

By 1950-1951, Buchanan was already a published author of books. His books from 1947-1948, before he left the employ of Weird Tales, were:

• The Story of Football in Text and Pictures (New York: Stephen-Paul, 1947)
• The Story of Basketball in Text and Pictures (New York: Stephen-Paul, 1948)
• People and Politics: The Pictorial History of the American Two-Party System (New York: Stephen-Paul, 1948)

His books from 1951, the same year in which the last Harding story was published, were:

• The Story of Tennis in Text and Pictures (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951)
• A Pictorial History of the Confederacy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951)
• The World Series and Highlights of Baseball (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1951)

So, by 1950, when the enumerator of the Federal census came around again to his apartment (on May 25), Lamont Buchanan was a published author of books. There were three of them already. More were on the way. And yet he gave his occupation in the census as a freelance writer for magazines. Which magazines though? Was Weird Tales one of them?

Still more unanswered questions.

Now here's a reproduction of the only newspaper article I have found on Buchanan's writing career:

In case you can't read it, the pertinent part says:

Lamont Buchanan, making capital of his background as a ghost-writer for political windbags, and a concocter of "think pieces" for the oversized picture magazines, has produced an amazing pot-pourri combining the illusory profundity of the former with the graphic illustrative quality of the latter.

The source is a review of Buchanan's book People and Politics, written by Richard N. Boulton and published in the Hartford Courant Magazine, May 29, 1949. So in addition to being a magazine editor and author of books, Lamont Buchanan was a ghostwriter and a magazine writer. Another way of saying "ghostwriter" is to say that Buchanan wrote things for which other people took credit or were given credit.

This chronology continues . . .

Unfortunately, I haven't found Jean Milligan in the 1950 census.* But there was, finally, a direct link established in 1952 between her and Lamont Buchanan: they were married that year, presumably in Manhattan. Lamont Buchanan had his last known book, Ships of Steam, published in 1956. After that, he went silent, at least under his own name. But could he have continued in his anonymous or pseudonymous writing or in his ghostwriting? If he did, it couldn't have been for Weird Tales, which had come to an end in September 1954.

Lamont Buchanan wrote and edited under his own name. He also wrote--apparently anonymously--for "oversized picture magazines." And he was a ghostwriter. These things are known and sourced. On the other hand, we know almost nothing about Jean Milligan--except that she received checks for the Allison V. Harding stories. Until there is more evidence uncovered, this is, I think, where the mysterious case of Allison V. Harding stands.

* * *

By the way, there was another writer associated with Van Cleef, Jordan, & Ward. Her name was Edith Louise Hough (1915-1981) and she was the author of Sicily: The Fabulous Island, published in 1949. The website Find A Grave says that "for many years she was a secretary at the investment firm of Van Cleef, Jordan, Ward & Davidge in Washington, DC." On Thursday, May 30, 1957, she shot and killed Zurab Abdusheli in her apartment in Washington, D.C., after he had become "psychologically aggressive." Ms. Hough shot him several times before putting a final bullet into his head. "I couldn't stand to see him suffering," she said. The last shot, she said, was "to put him out of his misery." I wonder if she considered that all of his misery could have been avoided if she hadn't fired any shots at all, but then Edith Hough was a paranoid schizophrenic. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalized, but only for a while. It's a famous case in the annals of psychiatry, and you will find plenty about it in print and on the Internet.

-----

*I have found a Miss Jean Milligan who was an educator, presenter, and assistant director at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York. She was supposed to have been a native of Youngstown, Ohio, rather than Cleveland. This Jean Milligan attended Oberlin College and taught art there for a time. She worked in Rochester from 1946 to 1951, when she took a position at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This doesn't sound like our woman, but there isn't anything here that rules her out except for her supposed birth in Youngstown. There is a photograph of a Jean Milligan in an Oberlin College yearbook of the right vintage, but that Jean doesn't look like our Jean. I think we'll have to go on looking.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

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

A Season of Discovery and Beginning

Tellers of Weird Tales turned ten years old last week. I first wrote on April 22, 2011. My first entry was on C.L. Moore (1911-1987), who grew up in the same neighborhood in Indianapolis in which I grew up, though half a century before. Being from Indiana and having the pride of a Hoosier in me, I took a special interest in her. In the year before beginning this blog, I began writing an article about her. That article was finally published in the summer of 2019 in Traces, the magazine of the Indiana Historical Society. Its working title was "The Weird and Wondrous Fiction of C.L. Moore." It went to print as "Amazing Tales: The Weird and Wondrous Fiction of C.L. Moore." It's because of my research and writing on C.L. Moore, too, that I have a place on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb), but that's for a different article I wrote, published by Paco Arrelano. I'm not a member of the ISFDb, so I'm not sure that I can add to it. I hope someone will add my article from Traces on my behalf. I would also like to hear from Señor Arrelano in hopes that I can get a copy of his magazine Delirio in which my article appeared.

Although C.L. Moore was the subject of my first entry on this blog, she wasn't the reason for my starting it. The impetus actually came while I was reading Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye (1988). Included in that book is the first Damp Man story by Allison V. Harding. Mr. Kaye's introduction to "The Damp Man" is brief, for at the time almost nothing was known about the pseudonymous Harding. But here in front of me was a mystery, one I was determined to solve. I began on April 26, 2011, ten years ago today. I solved the mystery less than a month later, on May 24, 2011, with my entry entitled "Who Was Allison V. Harding?"

The answer to that question was and is Jean Milligan (1919-2004), later the wife of the former associate editor and art editor of Weird Tales magazine, Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015). And now I see that I have to update my entry on the late Mr. Buchanan. Anyway, I have to admit that I was a little hard on Marvin Kaye for the part he played in the Weird Tales debacle of a few years back, but I also have to thank him for the part he unknowingly played in getting this blog off the ground. I have to reassert, too, that I am the person who discovered the identity of Allison V. Harding and Jean Milligan. No one else did that, and no one else should be taking credit for the discovery or pretending like it's something that just fell out of the sky. (This is where the passive voice, mostly a scourge, comes in handy. In using it, you don't have to say that somebody did something, only that something happened, no doer necessary.) Anyway, I did it. I discovered the identity of Allison V. Harding. It's my work. I expect to be cited for it. And I have this to say to people who like to glom on to the work of others: if you want to be known for your work, then do your work. Get up and do it and don't thieve it from others. And once you have done it, publish it, however you can. Get it out there into the world.

* * *

There has been some controversy recently about Allison V. Harding and Jean Milligan. I might have been a little responsible for that, too, by suggesting that Lamont Buchanan was actually the writer behind the pseudonym. The controversy comes from the idea that we're all trying to take something away from women writers, that somehow we're anti-woman and that we want to erase them and silence them. That isn't my idea at all. In fact, it's closer to the opposite. (Should I point out here that the first three authors and five out of the first ten about whom I wrote on this blog were women?)

My idea that Lamont Buchanan was Allison V. Harding came to me as I was reading the last Damp Man story, "The Damp Man Again," from Weird Tales, May 1949. As I was reading, it occurred to me that this was not the work of a woman, for no woman would write about another woman in this way. Only a man--a bitter and angry man at that--could write about women with this kind of cruelty, mean-spiritedness, and misogyny, writing that has in it even intimations of psychopathy and a desire to hurt and punish women. Feminists might object to my suggestion or belief that Lamont Buchanan was Allison V. Harding, but they should first read "The Damp Man Again"--"Take the Z-Train," too--and see what they think afterwards. It's worth noting here that Lamont Buchanan was still a single man in 1949 when "The Damp Man Again" was published. He and Jean Milligan were not married until 1952, in The Bronx, where they went on to live out their lives together. By the way, there is a Harding Avenue in The Bronx. If we play a word game, then Harding Avenue can become Harding Ave. can become Harding, A.V., can become A.V. Harding . . . you get where I'm going.

* * *

There has been another recent controversy when it comes to Allison V. Harding. I wasn't the first person to have made a connection between Lamont Buchanan and J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) and Salinger's character Holden Caulfield, but I think I was the first to get it out into the world of science fiction and fantasy fandom and scholarship. I don't really believe that J.D. Salinger was Allison V. Harding, and I doubt that Buchanan and Salinger, who may have been friends in their college years, collaborated or talked to each other about writing as late as 1947 or 1949 or 1950. But you never know. There seems to be a hole in the scholarship on J.D. Salinger that hasn't been filled yet. I still want to say to all of the bored academics of this world, "Get up and get busy and forget about all of that woke BS that seemingly occupies everybody in your formerly respectable fields!" That's a little long and not very pithy for an exhortation, but you get the idea. In the meantime, the only people who seem to be interested in the idea that Buchanan was the model for Caulfield are those vying for or writing about Buchanan's estate. Money has its ways.

* * *

I have never counted the number of authors who contributed to Weird Tales. Years ago I estimated it at about 700. I had thought that by now I would be about finished with them. But in writing this blog I have gotten on to things other than biography. Biography and the discovery of lives and identities is fun, but so are other things. In any case, I'm planning to get back to some biographies soon. First I have to finish my current series, which is going on about as long as Burroughs' Mars series. I didn't want this anniversary to go by unobserved, though, and so I will let you know that Tellers of Weird Tales is ten years old in this season of discovery and beginning. I plan to continue writing, even after I go over the 1,000,000-visits mark sometime this summer, even after I have covered all of the magazine's writers and artists.

Ten years is a long time. As one of my entomology professors would say, "Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana."

C.L. Moore at her desk at the bank in Indianapolis, another discovery I have made, and maybe the only photograph of her at work. I presume that the typewriter in front of her is a Royal typewriter and the one that she used in composing her stories. The name of her Venerian character Yarol is an anagram of that brandname. From the Indianapolis Times, May 22, 1939.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Undead Past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

--from Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner (1951)

My grandfather, a son of illiterate Irish immigrants, was born in 1891. His older brother Willie drowned in the canal just west of downtown Indianapolis when he was four, leaving my grandfather as the oldest of the brood. He grew up to marry a dark Irish beauty and went to work as a government meat inspector. The two sent their four oldest sons to war. Four more served in the 1950s. Their only daughter, my aunt, died less than a month ago. She was buried in a cemetery plot purchased by her father in 1945. Even now, fifty-six years after his death, he has continued to provide for his family.

I don't know how it happened exactly, but my Irish grandfather--tall, able, hardworking, a natural aristocrat--and his wife--dark, devout, and I imagine long-suffering--carried through them something of the undead past. Forces from long ago lived in their generation and in their children's generation and still yet in their children's children's generation. Now we are like Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate in another Faulkner novel attempting to solve the mystery of what went on all those years ago that things should be as they are today. The Irish have a sense of fatedness that very often elides into a sense of doom. It would be easy to fall into that and believe that forces from the past are irresistible. To believe in an irresistible fate or doom might be a mistake. But it might also be a mistake to believe that we can escape from or are unaffected by a past that is never dead.

Lamont Buchanan's father, Charles Lamont Buchanan, Sr., was born in 1884 in New York City. His parents were divorced and his mother died when he was a child. There was tussling over guardianship and inheritance which was finally settled by the end of the century. Buchanan eventually became a successful writer and critic. In 1948, he secured an apartment in his native city, an apartment that is--or was until recently--a home for his son, Lamont Buchanan, and his son's wife, Jean Milligan. In 1949, perhaps in some security, Lamont Buchanan left the employ of Weird Tales magazine. For the next seven years, he made a go at being an author of books. Then, with his last book in 1956, he seems to have fallen silent. Like his onetime or then-current friend J.D. Salinger, he retreated into seclusion. Unlike with Salinger, no one seems to have sought him out. No one now wonders about unpublished manuscripts among his papers.

Charles Lamont Buchanan, Sr., died in 1962. That was more than half a century ago. The scandal in his family, if you can call it that, occurred in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The weird story of his ancestor's suicide is from near the beginning of that century, now two hundred years past. All of those events--and countless more--are past and yet seemingly not past. They have shaped the people who came after them, and by that, shaped the history of weird fiction in America. Likewise, whatever trauma or pathology or quirk of personality that made J.D. Salinger the writer and subsequently the recluse that he was also resides in the province of the past. Yet people still read his books, which came out of his personal or familial past. Moreover, Salinger's two children survive. Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan may or may not have had a daughter. If there is such a person, then the undead past must live on in her as well, just as it does in all of us.

I don't want to invade the privacy of Lamont Buchanan and his family. That's the reason why I hesitate to tell the whole story as I know it. You might think it silly to consider events from half a century or a century ago to be private, but those things are not dead, and just as I wouldn't want someone unknown to me probing into my family, I won't probe into someone else's. And yet I have. What I have already written may have gone too far. I guess one difference might be that Lamont Buchanan made of himself a person of public interest. Our probing might be excusable. But that's a pretty weak excuse.

I'll close by saying that no, I don't believe J.D. Salinger was Allison V. Harding. That's a ridiculous idea, despite the uncanny similarities between their respective scenes at the carousel. I believe Lamont Buchanan was Allison V. Harding. But I also believe that any connections between the two men ought to be explored to the fullest extent. Scholars of literature are always looking for some new line of research in a world in which all possibilities have been exhausted. Here is something new and unexhausted. Someone should go to it.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

J.D. Salinger and Lamont Buchanan

J.D. Salinger was one of the most famous recluses of the twentieth century. Born on January 1, 1919, in New York City, Salinger attended public schools in Manhattan, then the McBurney School, also in Manhattan, and Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Valley Forge in 1936 and attended New York University in 1936-1937, Ursinus College in the fall semester of 1938, and Columbia University beginning in 1939.

Salinger's career as a published author began in March-April 1940 with "The Young Folks," a vignette in Story magazine. The editor of Story was Whit Burnett (1900-1972), who became a mentor to and correspondent of the young writer. Salinger went on, of course, to write The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and finally Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). By the early 1960s, he had begun living like a recluse, claiming, "It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years." (Quoted in Time, Aug. 4, 1961.) His last published story was "Hapworth 16, 1924" in The New Yorker, June 19, 1965. After that, Salinger retreated into Greta Garbo-like seclusion and died in his New Hampshire home on January 27, 2010, at age ninety-one. Curiously, he was involved, though briefly, in Dianetics.

Charles Lamont Buchanan was younger than J.D. Salinger by two months and six days. Born on March 7, 1919, in New York City, Buchanan eventually dropped the "Charles" and became simply Lamont Buchanan, probably to set himself apart from his father. In the late 1930s he was living in New Canaan, Connecticut. He may have graduated from New Canaan High School at about the same time as his future wife, Jean Milligan, but I haven't found any evidence of that. The high school itself doesn't have yearbooks or records from that long ago. I also haven't found anything showing that Lamont Buchanan attended college, but somehow or other he landed a job as associate editor at Weird Tales in September 1942. He was then twenty-three years old. 

Lamont Buchanan remained with Weird Tales until September 1949. He published a number of books on history, sports, politics, and transportation between 1947 and 1956. From that year forward, though, he seems to have become a recluse. If he is still living, Mr. Buchanan is likely at home in his apartment in New York City. His wife, Jean Milligan, died on December 6, 2004, in New York City. The Buchanans may have a daughter, but like everything else in their lives, the facts are lost in secrecy and obscurity.

I didn't find anything to show that Lamont Buchanan attended college until I did find something to show that he attended college. Today (Sept. 16, 2015), I found out that he attended Columbia University. And that he knew J.D. Salinger. And that he is supposed by at least one person to have been a model for Holden Caulfield. And I find all of that to be incredible, not as in unbelievable but as in incredible that only now is this showing up anywhere in the universe. One of the most well-known and intensely studied American authors of the twentieth century, and only now are we hearing about all of this. (Well, in 2012 anyway.) I wonder if it's even true or if it's all just a hoax.

The information comes from an article called "Top Tips for Writers from J.D. Salinger--Advice from Beyond the Grave" by Noel Young, dated January 26, 2012, and posted on the website The Drum. The article tells of how Shirley Ardman, an eighteen-year-old journalism student at Columbia University, who may have been going by the name Louise Brown or Louise Baker at the time, landed an interview with Salinger in 1940. Salinger had only recently entered the fraternity of published authors with his story "The Young Folks." Shirley's assignment was to interview someone from that fraternity. One of her classmates knew Salinger and provided an introduction. The classmate was named Lamont Buchanan.

Shirley met Salinger in a hotel bar where he drank Ballantine's and she had a cocktail. They talked about writing, magazines, and fiction in general. From their talk, Shirley Ardman composed a 1,200-word piece that went unpublished until 2012 and the aforementioned article in The Drum. The piece, called "A Case of Youth," begins as follows:

"People are stupid," Mr. Salinger observed, glancing vacantly at the other occupants of the bar. "Certainly they’re stupid," he repeated, "or they wouldn’t read all the tripe that’s ground out for the pulp and slick magazines. Why, the hacks that write those stories are no better than the people who read them."

There are some things to take away from that paragraph. First is the sophomoric arrogance. Second is the implication that Salinger read pulp magazines. Third is that he doesn't seem to have made much of a distinction between things written for pulps vs. for slicks. Fourth is that the author sounded a little like his future youthful protagonist, Holden Caulfield. And fifth is that he also sounded a little like Lamont Buchanan, who wrote, as Allison V. Harding, the following:

Abernathy wondered if those around him were as miserable as he was, or if their misery was an unrecognized, locked-up something deep inside. For this underground tomb [a subway station] was a place for reflection, although conversely, in its bustle and noisome urgency, humans could take holiday from their consciences, and pushing, wriggling, hurrying off and on these mechanized moles that bore them to and from their tasks, forget, and in the forgetting be complacent. (From "Take the Z-Train" in 100 Wild Little Weird Tales [1994], p. 488)

That's not arrogance exactly, but it also doesn't display a very high opinion of humanity. One difference is that Salinger seems to have placed himself above humanity, while Buchanan's protagonist recognized himself as one among them.

The article by Noel Young tells about Shirley Ardman's meeting with J.D. Salinger and a little about herself. Fans of Weird Tales will be especially interested to read the following words:

A classmate of Shirley's, Lamont Buchanan, who knew Salinger, offered to introduce them, and so the meeting was arranged.

Later, Shirley was to suggest that Lamont was at least in part the model for Holden Caulfield, the central figure in The Catcher in the Rye.

and these:

Shirley, who now suffers from Alzheimer’s, remembered little of the actual interview but she scorned our use of the name "J.D. Salinger." "We called him Jerry," she insisted.

She seemed to remember Lamont Buchanan much better, correcting my [i.e., Mr. Young's] Scottish way of pronouncing his first name.

If Lamont Buchanan was the model for Holden Caulfield, this is the first I have heard of it. It may be the first that anybody has heard of it. That's one of the things I find so incredible.

Shirley Baker Ardman died on March 12, 2014, presumably in Swampscott, Massachusetts, at age ninety-two. Born in Weston, West Virginia, she was returned to her native state for burial. Whatever she may have remembered about Lamont Buchanan is now forgotten in her passing. That leaves us to make whatever we can of her account.

So was the Lamont Buchanan she knew the same Lamont Buchanan who worked for Weird Tales? There is good reason to believe that he was, for he was of the right age, in the right place, and engaged in the right field of endeavor. If Mr. Buchanan attended Columbia University until graduating at about age twenty-two (a supposition), and if he was himself connected, or connected through friends, to the world of magazine publishing in New York, then there can be little wonder how he arrived at Weird Tales in 1942. A biography of Harry Aveline Perkins (1919-?), Lamont Buchanan's predecessor, might be illuminating at this point. Did the two young men know each other before 1942? Did Perkins also attend Columbia? And did Perkins know J.D. Salinger or Shirley Ardman?

The questions continue: Did Lamont Buchanan really know J.D. Salinger? Were they friends? If so, for how long? When I first wrote about Allison V. Harding, I noted a similarity in her writing to that of John Collier (1901-1980), who wrote for the slick magazines of the 1940s, just as Salinger did. (Both contributed to The New Yorker and Esquire.) I wonder now if Lamont Buchanan, if he was Allison V. Harding, had aspirations to writing for the slicks, or at the very least, if he emulated the writing style he saw there. Was he trying to be like John Collier or J.D. Salinger or even Ray Bradbury, who wrote for Weird Tales and other pulps before moving on to slick magazines? But now I'll take the wondering a little further into the realm of the unbelievable if not the impossible: I have supposed that Allison V. Harding was a man based on her stories. Once I made that supposition, the easiest conclusion was that Allison V. Harding was Lamont Buchanan. But what if Allison V. Harding was J.D. Salinger slumming among the pulps with the help of his friend Lamont Buchanan?

     "And at the end, the best of all--the merry-go-round, on the horses that went up and down, up and down, round and round, with the strange, strange wonderful music of the calliope--he would travel miles on his green and yellow horse even as Mother stood outside the world of his racetrack and gestured and seemed to stamp her foot, wanting him to stop and making motioning noises.

* * *

     "It was then--sometime during his umpteenth ride on the bucking green and yellow merry-go-round horse--then so that his seven-year-old mind knew well the whistling sounds of the calliope organ, then that something had come out of another world, it seemed--a thing of crashing noise and blinding light; a thing prefaced only by a little wetness and Mother's anger as she stood, no longer controlling him, already completely outside of his world, under a hastily raised umbrella, stamping her foot and calling to him.
     "Henry was caught up then in that instant by his friend, who took him in this time of greatest joy bursting like the nod of a flower. . . ."

--From "Take the Z-Train" by Allison V. Harding

Weird Tales (Mar. 1950)

     "Then the carrousel started, and I watched her go around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.' It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

* * *

     "Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there."

--From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

(1951)

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley