Wilde, Whitman, and the Gay Literary Style

"His purple interludes are at once reminiscent of Oscar Wild and Frank Harris. He is not, of course as Wilde as Oscar but neither is he, on the other hand, as Frank as Harris, though if sufficiently Harrised he might go Wilde."

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"A little Whitman goes a long way with me."

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Leo Adams always believed that his letters were worth preserving, but perhaps not always for the same reasons. As a young man, Adams had some minor literary ambitions and he was susceptible to the encouragements of his friend––a writer, magazine editor, and amateur poet with literary opinions. It is clear from Macbain's first letter in the collection that Leo Adams had written to him from New York several times since arriving. But it is not until after Macbain's next letter, the one to which Adams responds in the passage above, that Adams begins to place carbon paper between the sheets in his typewriter and save copies of his outgoing letters. Here is what Macbain wrote:

I presume that you are by this time so bloated with prosperity and so well poised upon the peak of a general sense of well being that you have relegated artistic aspirations to the limbo of childish fancy and decided to confine your writing to the endorsing of checks. Your letters convince me that you could write a fairly interesting style if you tried and I suggest you try to write and sell something while you are in New York.

Adams responded with this appreciation:

I appreciate the correspondence which you have directed at me. I also appreciate your deliberate thrust that my letters indicate “I could write a fairly interesting style”. That jeweled thought is one of the most treasured gems in my chest of Woolworth possessions. Why, some day, I’ll bet you’ll be selling these letters for my autograph. (December 15, 1928)

When Adams started making carbon copies of his letters he may have been thinking that they might someday enter the historical record––whenever that history finally got written¬¬––but that's not what he said at the time. He was creating a literary record at least as consciously as he was preserving a historical one. And for that, too, we can be grateful. The letters are as "amusing and informative" today as they were to his friends at the time. His style is certainly not "modern": he got his poetry from the newspapers and The New Yorker rather than The Dial or Harriet Monroe's Poetry. His writing, with its conscious deployment of wit, aphorism, and irony, demonstrates the continued influence of Oscar Wilde and the fin-de-siècle among gay men of the period in defiance of modernism's injunction to "make it new."

There is an example in a story fragment enclosed with a letter to Merle Macbain on January 2, 1932. In the story, Adams characterizes himself responding to a neighbor who has offered him advise on how to find a radio repairman:

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  The Hermit of the Shelton Page 1

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  The Hermit of the Shelton Page2

Won't the fact that they have advertised for work of this character indicate that they are making extraordinary efforts to get it; that they are on the lookout for something just like

this? I would rather have more disinterested service.

One can almost hear the imperious voice of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell admonishing her nephew Algernon. Merle Macbain had earlier assessed his friend's writing style in a mock review of a letter he promised but never wrote: "His purple interludes are at once reminiscent of Oscar Wild and Frank Harris. He is not, of course as Wilde as Oscar but neither is he, on the other hand, as Frank as Harris, though if sufficiently Harrised he might go Wilde."

Notes

Back to Leo Adams: A Gay Life in Letters, 1928–1952

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