Allison V. Harding

Allison V. Harding (either Jean Milligan, b. Cleveland, Ohio, 31 May 1919; d. New York City, 6 December 2004; or Charles Lamont Buchanan, b. New York City, 6 March 1919; d. New York City, 21 April 2015)

The byline “Allison V. Harding” has long been known as a regular contributor to Weird Tales magazine in the 1940s, and the mystery behind the pseudonym has frustrated many readers. In the 1970s, Sam Moskowitz acquired some of the surviving financial records of Weird Tales and its companionly-edited magazine Short Stories, and from them he learned that the person who was paid for the "Allison V. Harding" stories was named Jean Milligan, who as of 1954 lived in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan. Moskowitz believed she was already dead, and that she had been an attorney. Both suppositions appear to be wrong. 

Jean Milligan was the youngest of three daughters of John Raymond Milligan (1885-1959), a 1907 graduate of Amherst College who became an investment banker and was a partner in the private Cleveland banking house Tillotson & Walcott, and Beatrice Isabel Humphrey (1886-1938), a graduate of Smith College, who had married around 1909.  Jean’s sisters were Mary Louise Milligan (1910-1949), who attended Vassar and married an attorney, and Katherine Milligan (1914-1973), who married first a businessman and later an industrial engineer. 

Around 1927, the Milligan family moved from Ohio to New Canaan, Connecticut, and John R. Milligan took a position with Edward B. Smith & Company in New York. Later he worked for the Banker’s Trust until his retirement in 1950.  Little is known of Jean’s education, but in the early 1940s she is listed in New Canaan city directories as a student.  At the same time, another student living in New Canaan was [Charles] Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015) who would eventually become Jean’s husband. They are reputed to have been high school sweethearts, but it is impossible at present to guess which schools they may have attended, or what degrees they might have attained.  With the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales magazine, Buchanan became the Associate Editor under Dorothy McIlwraith. Weird Tales appeared six times a year, every other month. At the same time, McIlwraith also edited (presumably with Buchanan as subordinate) Short Stories, which came out twice a month for most of the 1940s (it became a monthly in April 1949). Buchanan’s final issue as Associate Editor of Weird Tales was dated September 1949.    

Thirty-six stories bylined Allison V. Harding appeared in Weird Tales magazine, beginning with “The Unfriendly World” (July 1943) and ending with “Scope” (January 1951).  Six Allison V. Harding stories appeared in Short Stories, ranging from “Night without Darkness” (September 10, 1944) to “Corpse on a Vacation” (January 1950). According to the New York City Marriage Licenses Index, Jean Milligan married Lamont Buchanan in the Bronx in 1952. Harding ceased publishing soon after Buchanan left Weird Tales. It has been suggested (first by Terence E. Hanley) that the writer of the "Allison V. Harding" stories was not Milligan but her future husband, Lamont Buchanan. This seems entirely possible and plausible.(For some tentative evidence, see this blog's entry on Buchanan.)

Buchanan himself published some thirteen books between 1947 and 1956, mostly to do with sports or history, before disappearing from public view along with his wife. Milligan’s family was wealthy, and Buchanan’s  maternal grandmother seems also to have had some wealth (his father was a familiarly-known music, art and drama critic). After their marriage, Buchanan and Milligan lived frugally for decades in the same rent-controlled apartment that Milligan had lived in since the early 1940s. They had no children, and in 2004, they were both moved into an Upper West Side nursing home, where Milligan died a short time later.  After Buchanan's death in 2015 at the age of 96, it was discovered that he had amassed a fortune of over fifteen million dollars.  

Whether they were written by Buchanan or Milligan, posterity has not looked kindly on the Allison V. Harding stories, tending to view them as second-rate filler. Robert Weinberg, in his The Weird Tales Story (1977), called them "undistinguished works that filled up space and were quickly forgotten" (p. 45).  The tales are not without some favorable qualities, usually in terms of atmosphere, but the characters are one-dimensional, and the plots are at times silly. Cumulatively the defects overshadow any more positive traits.

Of the contributions to Weird Tales, one of the more interesting tales is “The Damp Man” (July 1947), in which a young female swimmer is stalked by a large fat man with a fleshy dead-white face. A newspaperman takes it upon himself to protect the girl.  The atmosphere in the stalking scenes is handled fairly well, but the Damp Man is revealed to be Lother Remsdorf, Jr., a millionaire who is not like other men, but who has water in his veins rather than blood.  When Remsdorf follows the girl northwards, he freezes to death in the cold weather.  Remsdorf reappeared in two sequels, “The Damp Man Returns” (September 1947) and “The Damp Man Again” (May 1949).   Other representative Harding tales include “The Murderous Steam Shovel” (November 1945), in which a malevolent steam shovel haunts its operator and his wife, and “Take the Z Train” (March 1950), in which a man boards a train and encounters his younger selves, apparently as the summation of his life. Harding’s stories are rarely reprinted by anthologists.  

Cover by John Giunta, illustrating the third Damp Man story (May 1949)

NB: some of the above is based on the Harding entry I wrote for Supernatural Literature of the World (2005), edited by S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz. This entry last updated in 2017.

Eva-lis Wuorio

Eva-Lis Wuorio (b. Viipuri, Karelia, Finland, 12 November 1917*;  d. Ruovesi, a small town near Tampere, Finland, 1988)

**Updated 23 January 2021**

Eva-Lis Wuorio (the name is pronounced “A-va-lees Worry-oh”) emigrated from Finland to Canada in 1930 when she was thirteen.  According to naturalization records, her full name was Eva-Lis Maria Wuorio, and that of her mother, Gertrude Eva Emilia Wuorio (maiden name Pennanen von Timberg). They settled in Toronto, where her mother worked as a housekeeper. Her father’s name was Bruno Leonard Henrik Wuorio. Eva-Lis attended schools in Finland, Sweden, Canada and Switzerland. 

Wuorio in Ibiza, early 1960s

Viipuri (now Vyborg, in Russia) is an ancient walled city by the Gulf of Finland near the border between Finland and Russia. It has changed hands a number of times in history; most recently it was taken over by the Soviet Union during World War II. From her childhood in Viipuri Wuorio retained a love of being near the sea, and this influenced her later travels and her choice of residence on various islands, the settings of some of her books.

Wuorio became a reporter and columnist for the Toronto Evening Telegram, and the Toronto Globe and Mail, and later an assistant editor at Maclean’s Magazine. As a reporter she travelled around Europe and  northern Africa. Between 1955 and 1987, she published eighteen novels (some with fantasy elements) and one short story collection. Her first book was Return of the Viking (1955), illustrated by William Winter, the story of three children who time-travel and learn about Canada’s historical past, meeting Leif Ericson in this adventure.  It was followed by The Canadian Twins (1956), illustrated by Biro. The setting of The Island of Fish in the Trees (1962) was the result of Wuorio living in Ibiza, one of the Balearic islands in the Mediterranean Sea near Spain. The book, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, was named the Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year by the New York Times. In Tal and the Magic Barruget (1965), illustrated by Bettina Bauer Ehrlich, a young Welsh boy spends a summer in Ibiza and seek a kind of genie, a barruget, to help with the housework. October Treasure (1966) is set in the Channel Island of Jersey, where the author was living at the time. Wuorio spent several months on the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, which is reflected in Kali and the Golden Mirror (1967), also illustrated by Ardizzone.  

 

Most of Wuorio’s novels were written for children or young adults, though, after reading so many mysteries while travelling, she decided to write a mystery herself. Her mysteries include The Woman with the Portuguese Basket (1963), Z for Zaborra (1965, later published as The Terror Factor), and Midsummer Loki (1967, later published as Explosion).  Wuorio’s To Fight in Silence (1973) was based her own newspaper stories of the 1940s (which her mother kept in a scrapbook), when she interviewed hundreds of Norwegians who were training in Canada for the war, and dozens of Danish officials who were trying to explain their country’s predicament to the outside world.  The book is set in Nazi-occupied Denmark, where a young Norwegian and his Danish cousins attempt to evacuate the Danish Jews before the Germans can send them to concentration camps. 

Wuorio’s penultimate book is of particular interest to readers of fantasy:  Escape If You Can: 13 Tales of the Preternatural (New York: Viking Press, 1977). This short story collection, marketed for children, has a deftness to the writing and a cosmopolitan feel overall. There is little questioning of the supernatural, or shock at the experience of it:  it merely is. Some of the stories are told from a child’s perspective, while others are more adult.  All are somewhat unconventional, and even when using familiar tropes (like werewolfery) Wuorio creates a story that is moody and introspective, with a distinct sense of place and setting. The results are uniquely her own, and may perhaps be more appreciated by adults tired of the commonplace who are looking for something different. 

*Some sources give her birthyear of 1918, but early Canadian Border Crossing records, and Tampere City Library information, give 1917.

NB: For confirmation of Wuorio’s vital statistics, I’m grateful to Jukka Halme and the Tampere City Library. I'm also grateful to Phil Stephensen-Payne and Ken Johnson.

Maximilian J. Rudwin

Maximilian J. Rudwin  (b. Międzyrzec, Poland, on or about 22 January 1885; d. Dayton, Ohio, 14 May 1946)

**entry revised 7 March  2019**

From the 1910s through the 1930s, Maximilian J. Rudwin produced some excellent pioneering scholarship on the European traditions of the fantastic in literature, especially as related to various manifestations of the devil.  Rudwin was an unusually peripatetic scholar, and virtually nothing has been written about him or his oeuvre. His trail has not been easy to follow, nor has it been simple to trace his origins. 

Rudwin was born Joseph (sometimes Josef) Maccabee Rubin in Międzyrzec in eastern Poland. He emigrated to the United States in 1906 to attend the University of Wisconsin, from which he received a B.A. in 1908.  He received an M.A. in Cincinnati in 1910. In 1912, when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, he ceased using his birth-name and became Maximilian Joseph (sometimes Josef) Rudwin. In 1913 he received a Ph.D. in German Literature from Ohio State University, one of the very first students to be awarded a Ph.D. at that university. He taught for a few years at Purdue University (c. 1914-15) in Indiana, then at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (c. 1917-18), followed by Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (c. 1919), and then he returned to school at Columbia University (c. 1920-22) in New York, where he received a second Ph.D in 1922. Rudwin then studied in France, and got another doctorate at L'Université de Montpellier in 1926. In 1925 he married Armelle Laura Lefevre, a young French woman nearly twenty years his junior.  They had two children, a daughter Genevieve Maximilienne Rudwin (1926-1963) and a son, Sylvere Rudwin (1927-1993).  The marriage did not last long, and the couple divorced in the early 1930s.  Armelle remarried, and raised her children with her second husband in Massachusetts.

Rudwin continued his drifting around in academia, teaching at Swarthmore College (c. 1922-24), and the University of Pittsburgh (c. 1925-26). In the later 1920s he certainly spent time in Kansas and Colorado, before stopping for a few years (c. 1929-30) at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and then moving on the the University of Texas at El Paso (c. 1932-33). Rudwin himself surfaces only sporadically after his divorce. From 1934-36 he was Associated Professor of Modern Languages at St. Bonaventure in western New York State, after which time he moved to New York City. In 1942 he was working for the U.S. Government Office of Censorship in New York. Rudwin was an interpreter at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, when he died in 1946.

Rudwin published widely in English, and sometimes in French and German. His first book was only thirty-seven pages, Die Prophetensprüche und -Zitate im religiösen Drama des deutschen Mittelalters [The Prophet and Disputation Scenes in the Religious Drama of German Middle Ages] (1913). His 1913 Ph.D. thesis from Ohio State University was published as Die teufelszenen im geistlichen drama des deutschen mittelalters [The Devil Scenes in the Religious Drama of the German Middle Ages] (1914), and expanded as Der Teufel in den deutschen geistlichen Spielen des Mittelalters und der Reformationszeit [The Devil in German Religious Plays of the Middle Ages and the Reformation] (1915). Other books include The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy (1920), A History and Bibliography of the German Religious Drama (1924); Bibliographie de Victor Hugo (1926), Romantisme et Satanisme [Romanticism and Satanism] (1927) and Les écrivains diaboliques de France [The Diabolical Writers of France] (1937)

A number of interesting essays appeared in the journal The Open Court, including “Sympathy for Poland in German Poetry” (June 1917), “The Gloom and Glory of Russian Literature” (July 1918), “The Satanism of Huysmans” (April 1920), “The Satanism of Barbey d’Aurevilly” (February 1921), and “Supernaturalism and Satanism in Chateaubriand” (1922), which was his Columbia University Ph.D. thesis.  It was intended to be the opening section of a planned book on The Devil in Modern French Literature, but no such title was ever published in English, and some of this material may have appeared in Les écrivains diaboliques de France. Other contributions to The Open Court include “The Supernatural in French Literature” (March 1927) and “The Supernatural of George Sand” (September 1927). An article on “Balzac and the Fantastic” appeared in 1925 in The Sewanee Review.  And an article on Gérard de Nerval, “Gérard’s Germanic Fantasies” appeared in volume 2 (1930) of the Todd Memorial Volumes: Philological Studies, edited by John D. Fitz-Gerald and Pauline Taylor. In the 1920s and 1930s Rudwin frequently reviewed books for Books Abroad.  

Rudwin’s two books so far unremarked are his most important: an anthology titled Devil Stories (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), and a critical study, The Devil in Legend and Literature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1931).  Devils Stories collects nineteen tales dealing with the Devil.  It includes works by Machiavelli, Washington Irving, Wilhelm Hauff, Gógol, Thackeray, Poe, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Richard Garnett, Anatole France, Górky, and John Masefield, among others. Rudwin gives a nine page introduction to his splendid selection. It seems a real pity that this anthology did not sell well, for it was to be the first volume of a series of “Devil Lore: Anthologies of Diabolical Literature” to be edited by Rudwin.  Other books were to have been Devil Plays, Devil Essays, Devil Legends, The Book of Lady Lilith, Anthology of Satanic Verse, and Bibliograhpia Diabolica. None of these titles ever appeared.  

The Devil in Legend and Literature makes up for the loss of some of the aforementioned books. It is one of those classic works of romantic scholarship which is entitled to sit on the bookshelf alongside of Clark B. Firestone’s The Coasts of Illusion (1924), John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu (1927), and Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn (1930), among many others. Rudwin approaches the lore of the Devil from many sides and many cultures, covering belief in the Devil, the names and forms of various Devils, the legend of Lilith, the Devil-compact in tradition as well as in literature, and the Devil in literature and poetry. Illustrations by Dührer, Doré, William Blake and others complement the text.  Rudwin’s book is well-documented, with an unusually thorough thirty-five page analytical index which makes it very useful for reference. 

One other item is worth mentioning here: Rudwin’s lengthy and critical review of Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), which appeared in 1918 in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.  Scarborough’s book was the first to attempt to cover its field, and Rudwin was an unusually qualified reviewer for the subject matter.  His review is charitable, but points out many faults and areas for further study, noting that “it has only been within recent years that the literary status of supernatural personages has been made a subject of serious inquiry.  The harvest is great, and the laborers are few.  Dr. Scarborough’s wish that her book may lead others to pursue similar investigations will be endorsed by the men who have preceded her in this interesting field of work.”

Rudwin was a pioneering scholar of the fantastic, and his best work deserves to be read and remembered. 

E.F.A. Geach

E. F. A. Geach (b. Essen, Germany, 24 May 1896; d. Cardiff, 10 August 1951)

Eleonora Frederika Adolphina Sgonina (her forenames were sometimes spelled as Eleonore, Frederyka, or Adolfina) was the oldest of four children of Adolf (sometimes Adolph) Sgonina (1870-1954) and his wife Eleonore (1874-1949), who were German-Polish and who were married in 1895.  Eleanora had three younger brothers.  Her father was a civil engineer, and just before the turn of the century the family settled in Cardiff, where Adolf became Managing Director of an Iron Works. At least two of his son would follow him in his profession.

Eleanora was educated at the City of Cardiff High School for Girls, and she apparently attended Cambridge University in 1914-15, before she registered as a Home Student at Oxford for the Hilary Term 1917. She kept terms at Oxford for three years, concluding with the Michaelmas Term 1919.  Her tutors included Miss C.A.E. Moberly (one of the two pseudonymous authors of the famous slim 1911 book An Adventure, recounting their apparently ghostly encounter during a summer 1901 visit at the Petit Trianon in Versailles) and Miss Dorothy Sayers. 

In between her time at Cambridge and Oxford, she married George Hender Geach (1884-1941), who (though he was born and died in Cardiff) worked in the Indian Education Service as a professor of philosophy at Lahore (later, he was principal of a teacher’s training college in Peshwar). After a short period of time in India, Eleanora returned to England for the birth of their one child, Peter (born in Lower Chelsea in London in March 1916), who became a distinguished philosopher. The marriage was unhappy and was quickly broken up. Up until around the age of eight, Peter lived with his maternal grandparents in Cardiff, after which time he was sent off to school by his father and raised by a guardian. Peter Geach never saw his mother again after childhood.

As E.F.A. Geach, Eleonora began publishing poetry while at Oxford. She collaborated on a small book of poems with a fellow student, D.E.A Wallace, better known as Doreen Wallace (1897-1989), who became a prolific novelist in the 1930s.  The book was entitled –Esques, and was published by B. H. Blackwell in May 1918.  It includes eight poems by Geach, nine by Wallace, and one collaboration. The poems are divided into six sections headed Arabesques, Burlesques, Fresques, Grotesques, Humoresques, and A Picturesque, thus explaining the book’s odd title.  One poem, “Episode”, in the Humoresques section seems to refer to Geach’s marriage:  “I loved you for a year, / perhaps a little more . . ./ And now it’s all over / And I feel as though I had never known you – / I feel no gaps, no longing. / Your passage through my life / was like the flight of a bird through the sky.”  T.S. Eliot reviewed –Esques (very briefly) in The Egoist, noting wryly:

“The authors of –Esques trickle down a fine broad page in a pantoum, a roundel, a villanelle, occasionally pagan, mode of thirty years ago:

Why then, O foolish Christ

Didst thou keep tryst

With maudlin harlots wan

With glad things gone?

 To which the obvious answer is. Why did you?  Young poets ought to be made to be cheaply printed; such sumptuous pages deceive many innocent critics.”  (August 1918,  p. 99)

from Fifty New Poems for Children (1922)

Geach, along with Dorothy Sayers and T.W. Earp edited Oxford Poetry 1918, also published by Blackwell. Earp co-edited the annual volume for the years 1915 through 1919; Sayers joined him for three years, 1917-1919. Geach was involved only for the one year. In the 1918 volume there are two poems by Geach and a third in collaboration with D.E.A. Wallace.  One of these poems, consisting of eight lines and titled “Romance”, seems to have been an inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem “The Road Goes Ever On”, the first expression of which appears in the final chapter of The Hobbit, though its better-known versions appear in The Lord of the Rings.  That Tolkien would have known the poem comes from the fact (first noticed, I believe, by John D. Rateliff) that it was reprinted immediately after Tolkien’s own poem “Goblin Feet” in Fifty New Poems for Children, a slim volume published by Blackwell in 1922 (p. 28). The poem reads:

                        Romance

Round the next corner and in the next street

Adventure lies in wait for  you.

Oh, who can tell what you may meet

Round the next corner and in the next street!

Could life be anything but sweet

When all is hazardous and new

Round the next corner and in the next street?

Adventure lies in wait for you.

Geach published one further booklet, Twenty Poems, which Blackwell released in March 1931. The poems were all new to the booklet save for one, which was reprinted from The Poetry Review.  These small volumes contain all of Geach’s known writings.  After her time in Oxford, she returned to her family in Cardiff, where she died in 1951.