Hubert Kennedy Reading John Henry Mackay Selected Essays Peremptory Publications San Francisco 2002 1 © 2002 by Hubert Kennedy Reading John Henry Mackay: Selected Essays is a Peremptory Publications ebook. It may be freely distributed, but no changes may be made in it. The caricature on the title page is by Bruno Paul (1874–1968). In: Martin Möbius [pseu- donym of Otto Julius Bierbaum], Steckbriefe erlassen hinter dreißig literarischen Ue- belthätern gemeingefährlicher Natur (Berlin: Verlag Schuster & Löffler, 1900), p. 98. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please write to [email protected]. 2 Contents Introduction 4 Knabenliebe in den Schriften des Anarchisten John Henry Mackay 9 Boy-love in the Writings of the Anarchist John Henry Mackay 15 No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: John Henry Mackay’s Helene 23 Hiding in the Open: John Henry Mackay’s “A Farewell” 31 Twilight of the Gods: John Henry Mackay’s Der Unschuldige 46 Götterdämmerung: John Henry Mackays Der Unschuldige 71 Anarchist Angst: John Henry Mackay’s “The Adoption” 95 John Henry Mackay, ein Berliner Original 105 John Henry Mackay’s The Anarchists 127 John Henry Mackays Der Schwimmer: Reaktionen auf einen Roman 138 3 Introduction Since 1981 I have published a number of articles about the German writer John Henry Mackay and have translated several of his works. Here is a selection of those arti- cles. The first article I wrote, a biographical sketch of Mackay, “Anarchist of Love,” pub- lished in Alternate, a gay magazine in San Francisco, is not included here; it has been ex- panded several times and will appear as a separate ebook. Next was a brief article I wrote for publication in the German gay magazine Du & Ich while on sabbatical leave from Providence College (Rhode Island) and a guest of the Institute for the History of Science, University of Munich, in 1982–1983. Later that year I read an English version at the international gathering of gay scholars “Among Men, Among Women: Sociological and historical recognition of homosocial arrangements” at the University of Amsterdam, 22–26 June 1983. Both versions are included here. My interest in Mackay’s writings had been prompted by a new edition in 1979 of the two volumes of his “Bücher der namenlosen Liebe” (Books of the Nameless Love), a joint publication of the Verlag rosa Winkel (Berlin) and the Verlag der Mackay- Gesellschaft (Freiburg/Breisgau). It was also in Munich during my sabbatical year 1982– 1983 that I translated the second volume, Mackay’s novel Der Puppenjunge, into English as The Hustler (published in 1985 by Alyson Publications, Boston). I also spent two months in Freiburg, where I translated Kurt Helmut Zube’s biography of Mackay, using a second typewriter in his home while he worked indefatigably on yet another Mackay publication. Zube was the secretary of the Mackay-Gesellschaft, founded by him in 1974, and almost single-handedly brought most of Mackay’s writings back into print. My trans- lation of the biography Der Bannbrecher John Henry Mackay: Sein Leben und sein Werk by K. H. Z. Solneman (Zube’s pseudonym) was meant to be a publication of the Mackay- Gesellschaft, but never appeared. On returning to Providence College, where I was professor of mathematics, I contin- ued to read the works of Mackay, whose anarchist view I found very congenial. I noted that this view was at the heart of his early love poem Helene, but had been overlooked there by both Kurt Zube and by Mackay’s American biographer Thomas A. Riley, whose Germany’s Poet-Anarchist John Henry Mackay: A Contribution to the History of Ger- 4 man Literature at the Turn of the Century, 1880–1920 (New York: The Revisionist Press, 1972) was essentially his PhD dissertation at Harvard University in 1946. This resulted in my first “Mackay” article in a scholarly journal, “No good deed goes unpunished: John Henry Mackay’s Helene” (1986). Using the pseudonym Sagitta, Mackay wrote explicitly about the “nameless love”— his name for homosexuality and, in particular, for the love between men and boys. In my reading of Helene I discovered that the title character must have been patterned after a boy described in his “Sagitta” novel Fenny Skaller. This put me on the alert for more unnoticed references to boy-love in his non-Sagitta writings. I found one in the very short story “Ein Abschied: Ein später Brief” (A Farewell: A Late Letter), which had gone un- noticed by both of Mackay’s biographers as well as by Edward Mornin in his literary study Kunst und Anarchismus: “innere Zusammenhänge” in den Schriften John Henry Mackays (Freiburg/Br.: Mackay-Gesellschaft, 1983). All three had assumed that an un- named former lover of a dying man was a woman. I read that character, whose gender was never stated in the story, as a man and the former relationship as one of man-boy love. I called Mackay’s tactic “hiding in the open” and I made that the title of the article in which I reported my find in the journal Paidika in 1991. Homosexuality was not entirely absent from Mackay’s fiction under his own name. It occurred in a matter-of-fact way in his late novella Der Unschuldige (The Innocent, 1931). The way in which he treated it there was extraordinary for the time. I pointed this out in the article “Twilight of the Gods: John Henry Mackay’s Der Unschuldige” in Journal of Homosexuality in 1993. A German translation then appeared in Forum Homo- sexualität und Literatur in 1995. Both versions are included here. In 1989 Edward Mornin edited a volume of writings left unpublished by Mackay on his death in 1933. It included a novel and three short stories. I wrote about one of those short stories in “Anarchist Angst: John Henry Mackay’s ‘The Adoption,’” which ap- peared in the James White Review in 1997. The year 1997 marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first gay right’s organization in Berlin. To mark the occasion there was an exhibition “Goodbye to Ber- lin? – 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung” at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. I was invited to speak at the lecture series in connection with it and read my paper “John Henry Mac- 5 kay, ein Berliner Original” on 18 June 1997. It was later printed (with added footnotes) in Forum Homosexualität und Literatur. The point of departure for my speech was the play Die Sozialaristokraten (The Social Aristocrats) by Arno Holz, which had its premiere in Berlin also in 1897. I recalled the centenary of Holz’s play and the fact that one of the characters in it was modeled on Mackay. This allowed me to view him as a “ein Berliner Original” (a Berlin original). Because of the extensive quotations from Holz and for other reasons I have not put the paper into English. In 1990 Mark Sullivan, secretary of the Mackay Society (New York), planned a “centennial edition” of Mackay’s book The Anarchists, which was first published in German and English in 1891, and asked me to write an introduction for it. When the book finally appeared (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999), it also contained two other brief notes by me (one on “Some Personalities in The Anarchists” and the other a list of edi- tions of the work) along with several other essays, among them a literary study by Ed- ward Mornin. Only my introduction is included here. The work itself, in the 1891 English translation by George Schumm, may be read on the Internet at: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/macan/macan.html. In the years 2000–2002 I self-published with Xlibris five volumes of translations of the writings of Mackay, for each of which I wrote an introduction and/or an afterword. The Swimmer was published in 2001 as a “centenary edition” of the original publication in 1901. To further mark the centenary, Wolfram Setz combined my introduction and afterword to the novel and put it into German for publication in Forum Homosexualität und Literatur (2001). Thus four of the articles included here are in English only, two in German only, and two in both languages. And in the nature of such publications there are many repetitions. But I hope readers will find sufficient original material here to attract their interest! * * * For the present collection I have put the articles into a more uniform format (turning all endnotes into footnotes, for example), but have otherwise not changed the wording, although typos and some other minor corrections have been made. In particular, page 6 numbers in references always refer to the original publications, even where the publica- tion referred to is also in this collection. 7 8 In: Du&Ich, 15(6) (June 1983): 50–51 Knabenliebe in den Schriften des Anarchisten John Henry Mackay Als der deutsche Schriftsteller John Henry Mackay vor 50 Jahren starb, blieb dies fast unbemerkt. Die wenigen Todesanzeigen haben ein falsches Datum oder stellten gar sein Leben ganz falsch dar: eine Anzeige in Bulgarien erwähnte zum Beispiel nicht ein- mal seinen Anarchismus, für den er am meisten bekannt war. Damals war die Zeit der Machtergreifung der Nationalsozialisten, und Mackay, der sich seit fast 50 Jahren gegen die aggressive Gewalt gewandt hatte, wurde zur Unperson. Wahrscheinlich enthielt keine in der Nazizeit veröffentlichte Anthologie auch nur ein Gedicht von ihm. Seine anar- chistischen Verse wurden im wilhelminischen Deutschland verboten, aber seine Lyrik wurde viel gelobt, und ein Gedicht, das Richard Strauss vertonte, ist zum populärsten von seinen Liedern geworden. Strauss arrangierte sich mit den Nazis und überlebte. Dies war für Mackay un- möglich gewesen; er starb aber an den Folgen seiner ernsten Krankheit (oder vielleicht durch Selbstmord).