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

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

ENTRY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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

Dunn, Michael.

Harvard Crimson.

Price, Lucien.

Shand-Tucci, Douglas