Jonathan Ned Katz: Rediscovering Lucien Price, November 7, 1988

Republished from The Advocate, November 7, 1988, copyright by Jonathan Ned Katz.

Lucien Price, graduate in 1901 from the Western Reserve Academy, Hudson, Ohio.

In 1919, Boston journalist Lucien Price began to write what would become an eight-volume series of novels on a homosexual emancipation theme.

Between 1951 and 1962, Price privately published seven of these novels, each of which tells a self-contained story, with the whole covering the years 1893 to the late 1950s--historical fiction providing a panoramic view of American male homosexual life and including many autobiographical details.

Printed in small editions of several hundred copies, Price's novels have remained unknown, their author forgotten. [In 1988, I said that the "novels are mentioned in only one obscure published source".]

Price and his novels were brought to my attention by an extremely generous correspondent, Michael Dunn, who volunteered to research Price's life, read all his novels, and then sent me an extraordinary 106-page report.

I later bought six of Price's novels, two signed by the author and dedicated to he Kinsey Institute, to which he had sent them. I paid a bookseller about $8 each for Price's books after they were de-accessioned (as they say) by the Kinsey library, which obviously had no idea what it was selling. (So much for the safety of our treasures in major archives.)

Price collectively titled his novels All Souls, a reference to All Souls' Day, the Christian festival in remembrance of the dead. The day was associated for Price with the death and continuing creative influence of Fred Demmler, a young friend (possibly a lover) killed on All Souls' Day, 1918, days before the end of World War I--a death motivating Price to start his novels.

The title All Souls also referred to the rebirth of ancient Greek homosexual love in the modern world as a creative, civilizing force.

As documents of homosexual history and resistance, Price's novels are a fascinating, valuable discovery. As literature, I'm afraid, Price's fictions are fatally flawed. Their plots are melodramatic; their characters, idealized. In these novels, all homosexuals are wise, good, beautiful, and creative; Price's neo-Greek aristocrats always dress for dinner, never splashing spaghetti sauce over their starched white shirtfronts.

Price's purple plots are suggested by a summary of his series's third novel, The Sacred Legion: The Lion of Charonaea. This picks up the story of poet and playwright Ross MacNeil and sculptor Dion Diomedes who, with their great-grand-daddy's lost gold (recovered fortuitously in an earlier volume), move to Lesbos in Greece (yes, Lesbos). They buy a half-ruined old monastery, and when an earthquake cracks the foundations of this Christian edifice (get the symbolism?), the two discover the entrance to an ancient tomb. In it are several old Greek papyruses, the texts, no less, of three lost ancient Greek homosexual plays, and the complete poems of Sappho!

Convinced that heterosexual society would rather destroy these documents than admit their existence, the two arrange to smuggle them out of Greece with the help of a woman friend (who may have had a special interest in Sappho). In America, their friends secretly prepare to reveal the lost poems and plays to the world, forcing it to recognize the existence of an old, valuable homosexual love. Price's novels now read as rather plodding camp liberation classics.

Much more interesting to us than Price's novels would be a book about his life, the details of which are now known only in outline.

He was born in 1893 in Kent, Ohio. His father was a doctor. Price attended Harvard from 1903 to 1907, graduating with honors. There he became lovers with Fred Middleton, another student, with whom he remained friends for life, though Middleton's marriage interrupted their "David-Jonathan friendship" (as Price's early memorialist put it).

From 1907 to 1914 Price worked as a reporter and music reviewer for the Boston Transcript. In 1912 he picked up Fred Demmler in a Boston working-class restaurant and fell in love with the athletic 24-year-old artist.

The famous textile workers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, made Price aware of the desperate conditions of the town's mill workers and constituted an important moment in his political development. Having sent Price to cover the strike, the Transcript refused to publish his reports because they were too sympathetic to the workers.

In 1914 Price, radicalized by the Lawrence strike, began publishing, under the name Seymour Deming, critiques of American society inspired by the Fabian socialism of G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Price spoke with respect of the Industrial Workers of the World, syndicalists, muckrakers, European social democrats, and militant suffragists.

From 1914 to 1964, the year of his death, Price wrote editorials for the Boston Globe. Among Price's friends were historian Samuel Eliot Morison, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn (who called Price "the greatest man I have ever known"). Gore Vidal dedicated a novel, Julian, to Price.

Price's papers at Harvard, including I70-or-so notebooks and his correspondence, open to researchers since 1984, could also, no doubt, tell us much of interest about this unknown homosexual emanancipation pioneer.

Gore Vidal Comments on Lucien Price

When preparing the above essay, Jonathan Ned Katz wrote to Gore Vidal, asking him to comment briefly on Lucien Price. Vidal responded that he met Price after he had publicly praised Vidal's novel Messiah (1975) in the Boston Globe. "This was a time when I was either not reviewed or strongly attacked. I got to know him during the decade (his last) when I could no longer publish novels [and] had turned to theater, TV. . . ."

Videal recently explained in The New York Review of Books that after publishing The City and The Pillar (1948), "about the love affair of two ordinary American youths," his next five novels were not reviewed in The New York Times, Time, or Newsweek, and he was forced to turn away from novel writing for ten years. With Julian (1964), Vidal dedicated to Price "my return to the novel."

Vidal recalled Price as "splendid to talk to, an old-fashioned Platonist in his quetioning style . . . ." Vidal and Price "were as one in our detestation of Christianity and the moral mien that accompanies it like an acid rain."

Prices's novels, said Vidal, display his "idealization of the American past. "He had a view of Arcadia--well, Thebes-that he had impressed upon the Western Reserve." Price "lived in a glowing nativist past." But writing on the modern world in his Globe columns, Price "was shrewd and tough as nails."

Bibliography

Columbia University Libraries. Archives. Lucien Price manuscripts, 1951-1958.

Desmond, Jane. Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off Stage. University of Wisconsin Press, November 7, 2001.

Price had been attracted to one member of Shawn's troupe, John Schubert, an interest that was apparently mutual (John Schubert to Lucien Price, ...

Dunn, Michael. [Report to Jonathan Ned Katz, in Katz Collection, New York Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts.]

Foulkes, Julia L. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: August 21, 2002. ISBN-10: 0807853674. ISBN-13: 9780807853672

Lucien Price to Ted Shawn, 14 December 1935, Folder 52, ibid. 25. Lucien Price to Ted Shawn, 8 February 1934, Folder 39, ibid.

Harvard Crimson. Obituary of Lucien Price, unsigned. "Lucien Price '07". April 06, 1964]

Harvard University Library. Price, Lucien, 1883-1964. Lucien Price correspondence and compositions: Guide.

HathiTrust Digital Library. Holdings

Katz, Jonathan Ned. "Glimpses of Gay Arcacdia: Rediscovering the Works of Lucien Price, Unknown Homosexual Emancipation Pioneer", Advocate, November 7, 1988, page 52-53.

McClure, W. Raymond. Prometheus; A Memoir of Lucien Price, January 6, 1883 - March 30, 1964.

Nathan, Richard. Interviewed by Jonathan Ned Katz about meeting Lucien Price. Recording. Katz Collection, New York Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts.]

Price, Lucien.

All Souls: Volume I. Hellas Regained. Boston, Mass. Boston, Mass. University Press, Inc., 1957. Copyright 1957 by Lucien Price.

All Souls: Volume II. The Great Companions. Boston, Mass. University Press, Inc., 1962. Copyright 1962 by Lucien Price.

All Souls: Volume III. The Furies. Boston, Mass.: Nimrod Press, Inc. 1988. Copyright by

All Souls: Volume IV The Sacred Legion. Fireweed, Book I. Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, Inc., 1955. Copyright 1955 by Lucien Price. [Volume IV of the All Souls novels.]

All Souls: Volume IV The Sacred Legion. Davencliffe, Book II. Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, Inc., 1955. Copyright 1955 by Lucien Price. [Volume V of the All Souls novels.]

All Souls: Volume IV The Sacred Legion. Lion of Charonaea, Book III. Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, Inc., 1954. Copyright 1954 by Lucien Price. [Volume VI of the All Souls novels.]

All Souls: Volume IV The Sacred Legion. Thunder Head, Book IV. Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, Inc., 1951. Copyright 1951 by Lucien Price. [Volume VII of the All Souls novels.]

All Souls: Volume VIII. October Rhapsody. Boston, Mass.: University Press, Inc., 1958. Copyright 1958 by the Estate of Lucien Price. [Volume VIII of the All Souls novels.]

Amphion's Lyre : Discourse to the Harvard Glee Club, on the Evening of May 31st, 1945. (1945).

Another Athens Shall Arise.

Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as Recorded by Lucien Price.

Hardscrabble Hellas: An Ohio Academe. Western Reserve Academy; 1st edition (1929). ASIN: B004048MS4

Immortal Youth, a Memoir of Fred Demmler. Boston, 1919, McGrath-Sherrill Press. [Hardcover. Tan cloth. Has a tipped-in color portrait of the subject. Fred, went to Harvard with Lucien Price, he was known as a promising artist , but died in W.W.I.]

Litany for All Souls. Beacon Press; 1ST edition (January 1, 1945). ASIN: B003L249U6

We Northmen.

William James, Philospher and Man: Quotations and References in 652 Books. Edited by Charles H. Compton. Foreword by Lucien Price.

Winged Sandals.

Shand-Tucci, Douglass. The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture.

Shand-Tucci, Douglass. Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumentical.

Titcomb, Caldwell. “Foreword” to Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead by Alfred North Whitehead and Lucien Price.

Vince, Thomas L. "Lucien Price Book Collection at WRA Library".

Western Reserve Academy: John D. Ong Library. [Lucien Price Book Collection (see Vince above).]