Nicholas L. Brown

Nicholas L. Brown (b. Bialystock, Russia [now Poland], 5 October 1885; d. Philadelphia, 17 November 1947) 

Nicholas Leon Brown was the second son of Leon Brown (1862-1922) and his wife Anna Helen Brown (1861-1939). He had one older brother, two younger brothers, and two younger sisters. 

He immigrated to the United States in October 1902, at the age of 17, and within a few years had set up a bookshop in Philadelphia at 5th and Pine Street (where around 1904 or 1905 the future publisher E. Haldeman-Julius bought a pamphlet edition of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and mused about how thousands of such booklets could be made available--it was the germ idea of Haldeman-Julius's famous series of booklets that began in 1919 and became known after 1923 as the "Little Blue Books"). 

Nicholas L. Brown remained primarily a bookseller for the rest of his life.  He married Anna Koren (1886-1961), another immigrant from Bialystock, in Brooklyn on 1 June 1910. They would have three children, Constance Ruth Brown (1914-1919), Daniel Coleman Brown (1921-1999), and Ruth N. Brown (1925-2005). 

In the early teens, Brown began publishing books, as privately printed limited editions of what passed in those years as classical erotica. By 1916, he was publishing some books under his own name as publisher, first in Philadelphia, and after a move in 1918 in New York. His publishing list was never large, but included volumes of poetry, belles lettres, and translations. Brown published most of the output of Mitchell S. Buck, a Philadelphia heating engineer who translated classical erotica, and wrote modern works on classical themes. His volume Afterglow: Pastels of Greek Egypt 69 B.C. (1924) was published by Brown and includes a preface by Arthur Machen.  I have written more fully of Buck and his publications in an entry at Lesser-Known Writers. Brown also published in 1918 a reprint of Sonnets from the Pantagonian (originally 1914) by Philadelphian Donald Evans, and Precipitations (1920), a book of poems by the modernist Evelyn Scott (Scott would marry the British weird fiction writer John Metcalfe in 1930, after five years together as a couple). Other publications include a limited edition of Samuel Putnam's translation of Claude Farrère's Fumée d'opium, as Black Opium (1929), and the occult novel Souls in Hell (dated 1924, but published in December 1923), by John O'Neill, which sports a dust-wrapper blurb by Arthur Conan Doyle. 

In February 1931, Brown's bookstore in New York was robbed of rare books and letters valued at $5,000.  The letters included ones by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dickens, and Daniel Webster. Brown's publishing activities seem to have ceased in 1932, and by 1935 he had moved back to Philadelphia where he remained for the rest of his life. Brown died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 61.

Swinburne Hale

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.