Swinburne Hale
(b. Ithaca , New York ,
5 April 1884; d. Westport , Connecticut , 3 July 1937)
Swinburne Hale was the oldest of four children of William
Gardner Hale (1849-1928), Harvard-educated professor of Latin at Cornell
University (from 1880-1892) and afterwards (until retirement in 1920) at the newly
founded University of Chicago, where he also served as head of the Latin
department, and Harriet Swinburne Hale (1853-1928), a graduate of Vassar
College. Swinburne’s siblings included Virginia Swinburne Hale (1887-1981), Margaret Hale
(1891-1962) and Gardner Hale (1894-1931). Virginia and Gardner became artists,
and Gardner ’s
wife Dorothy (1905-1938) became famous posthumously as the subject of Frida
Kahlo’s painting “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” (1939).
Swinburne
was educated at Philips Exeter Academy ,
and Harvard University , where he received his A.B.
in 1905 and afterwards studied law. In the early years of law practice in New York , he lived in Greenwich
Village , where he made many friends among writers, while he also
became prominent in various liberal groups. In 1921, his partner Walter Nellis
at the New York
firm Hale, Nellis & Shorr, described Swinburne as “not a Socialist but
interested in Socialism”.
In 1910 he
married Beatrice Forbes-Robertson, an actress and niece of Sir Johnstone
Forbes-Robertson. They had three daughters. During World War I he served in France in the
Military Intelligence Division. He was
divorced from his first wife in 1920, and in the following year he married Mrs.
Marie Tudor Garland Green. By 1924 he was enmeshed in an affair with another
woman, Greta Hercz (1899-1989), but his second wife was unwilling at that time to
give him a divorce.
Swinburne
Hale published his only book in the summer of 1923: The Demon’s Notebook—Verse and Perverse (New York : Nicholas L. Brown, 1923). The book sports a marvelous frontispiece by
Rose O’Neill (1874-1944), who is remembered today for work of an entirely
different kind: as the creator of kewpie dolls, a singular example of American
kitsch. Hale’s book is divided into two
parts, one labeled “Verse” (containing twenty-four poems), the other “Perverse”
(containing thirteen poems). His
publisher, Nicholas L. Brown, had begun as a bookseller in Philadelphia
before moving to New York
in late 1918. Between 1916 and 1932,
Brown published thirty-some books of poetry and belles-lettres, often classical
in nature, some of which bordered on what was considered erotic for the time,
but which seemed always just on the safe side to avoid any prosecution for
obscenity.
The Demon’s Notebook was reviewed
favorably by Henry Longan Stuart in The
New York Times. Stuart wrote: “At his
best and most serious, Mr. Hale is astonishingly good” (July 8, 1923). What Stuart doesn’t say is that for much of
the volume, Hale is not very serious at all.
The result is an unsatisfying book, which will be remembered by
posterity more for the frontispiece than for any of the poems inside. To give a few examples, the first poem in the
book, “The Demon”, begins: “Let the
Demon work in you! / Do not cast him out! / He knows better than you do / What
he is about!”. In the final poem in the
“Verse” section, “Dedication” (To Rose O’Neill), Hale writes:
But you, the Master-Mistress of my mind,
Whose Demon sits high-throned above my stars—
But you, whose passionate pinions know no kind,
Whose scars are burnt with scars—
You will divine my song in your far place,
And call it with your wings, and hold it high;
And underneath the dark of that embrace
Young songs shall cry.
In the “Perverse” section, Hale writes in the poem “The God
in the House”:
God is moving round my house
Setting things to rights.
I hear his step upon the stair,
But like a savant in my lair
Crouch and nurse my fine despair. . . .
He wants to make of this my house
A sanitary sight.
He thinks it has a curious smell—
But I should do so very well
If I could keep my funny hell.
Hale spent
the summer of 1924 in Taos ,
New Mexico , where his sister
Margaret lived with the writer Joseph O’Kane Foster (1898-1985), whom she would
marry in 1927. There he hobnobbed with D.H. Lawrence, and flirted with Freida
Lawrence, while continuing his affair Greta Hercz, all the time complaining
that he felt he was going insane. In
1972, Joseph Foster published an account of this time in an appallingly poor
monograph, D.H. Lawrence in Taos. In
this book Foster pretends to give accounts of the inner thoughts of the people
involved, but instead he makes them all appear as vacuous and simple-minded.
Swinburne
Hale soon left Taos
and went back east, and his worries about his own mental state came true. In 1925 he was committed to an asylum, the
Westport Sanitorium, in Westport ,
Connecticut , and there he
remained until his death in 1937 at the age of 53. Whether he ever divorced his
second wife or not is unknown, but Greta Hercz claimed to be Mrs. Swinburne Hale
and went by the name of Greta Hale until her own death many years later.
Nice blog, and terrific post about Swinburne Hale. I am researching him and his first wife Beatrice. Am going through her letters to him, 1913-1919, which are in a collection at the NY Public Library. There are also letters in the Ralph M. Pearson collection in New Mexico. By the way, other sources say he and Marie Tudor Garland divorcedin 1924. She also moved out to NM, north of Santa Fe.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine (in the UK) had some papers of Greta Hale, and asked me to look into her, which resulted in the entry on Swinburne Hale. I'll point him to your comment, and to your website, so he can contact you directly if he has anything relevant. Thanks for writing!
ReplyDeleteHi, I'm Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale's great granddaughter. Beatrice wrote a book called Family Legends which I have made available on Amazon if that helps.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes, Nicky Fitzmaurice