‘Allison V. Harding’ was the prolific pseudonymous author of various short stories in of ‘Weird Tales’ magazine – made famous by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories – between 1943 and 1951 and who produced several highly innovative and original pieces of fictional such as ‘The Damp Man’ and ‘The Damp Man Returns’.
Harding’s identity has been the subject of significant debate in recent years as we have only two known facts pointing to Harding’s identity, which are summarised by Terence Hanley as follows:
1. Checks for payment for the Harding stories were sent to a woman named Jean Milligan.
2. They were addressed to her at an attorney's office in New York City.
Hanley continues by pointing out the assumptions that have been made by other authors based on this information:
3. Because she received payment for the Harding stories, Jean Milligan was their author.
4. Because she received her payments at an attorney's office, she was an attorney.
I agree with Hanley that the simple equation of Jean Milligan as being ‘Allison V. Harding’ is tempting and the simplest solution to the problem of Harding’s identity.
I also agree with his dismissal of the idea that Milligan was therefore an attorney, which – as he correctly notes - is simply wrong since there is no evidence for such an assumption to be made and there are multiple reasons – as Scott Nicolay has pointed out - why Milligan could have decided to receive the cheques at a lawyer’s office; including the possibilities that she worked there as something other than an attorney and/or wished to use a lawyer or other articled professional as a financial agent or literary intermediary which wasn’t uncommon at the time and is still practised by some authors (a recent example would be J. K. Rowling writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith).
Hanley further points to Milligan’s future husband Charles Lamont Buchanan as the probable author since Buchanan also happened to be the associate editor of ‘Weird Tales’ at the time which in itself is suggestive of either Milligan or Buchanan’s authorship.
Looking at this for the standpoint of the historian as opposed to a literary critic I must own that I don’t hold with the attempt to construe a ‘man’s touch’ or a ‘woman’s touch’ in the Harding stories. I would argue that this is speculative nonsense in the sense that you simply can’t tell if a man or a woman wrote a story or whether it was a man writing as a woman or a woman writing as man, but rather you have to go on what is known not what you can ‘infer’ about an author from fictional writing.
For example: would you guess that Agatha Christie was a female author if you read say the Hercule Poirot novels without a clue as to the author’s identity? Would that change if you read the Miss Marple novels? What about the Tommy and Tuppence novels?
You get my drift.
To me it is the height of arrogance to think that you can ‘tell’ from an author’s writing if they are male or female or not given that an author’s writing style is acquired from influences as well as their personality and often changes over time based on their experiences and its reception (a good example being the largely forgotten but prolific English novelist Fergus Hume). If we were to do that then we’d probably end up thinking William Wordsworth a woman and Mary Ann Evans a man.
The basic problem with Cora Buhlert’s, Paperback Warrior’s, Terence Hanley’s and Sandy Ferber’s analyses is that they are based almost entirely on reading gender into the works of ‘Allison V. Harding’ – which is ironically both a common feminist complaint and preoccupation (Erin Mackie’s ‘Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates’ comes to mind as an example of this intellectual proclivity) – and then buttressed their preferred conclusion with the few facts that we have.
Some great detective work has been done to add to our precious little store of information with the connection between J.D. Salinger and Charles Lamont Buchanan being unearthed by Hanley as well as the albeit unlikely possibility that J.D. Salinger could have been ‘Allison V. Harding’ and Anya Martin’s work unearthing a couple of useful tit-bits from the early life of Jean Milligan.
However even Buhlert’s use of Martin’s discovery that:
‘Anya Martin of the Outer Dark podcast and symposium, who has done some research into the mystery that is Allison V. Harding, points out on Twitter that Jean Milligan wrote during her teens and was a member of her high school literary club. Anya Martin has also dug up a page from Jean Milligan’s high school yearbook and an article from her hometown paper the New Canaan Advertiser, which confirm her literary activities.’
Simply doesn’t provide any evidence for Milligan being ‘Allison V. Harding’ since it assumes that because Milligan wrote a bit during her teens, was interested in literature generally (as we have no information as to her genre(s) of interest) and wrote one article of a local newspaper that she was Harding. There is no basis for this assumption as it all it shows is that Milligan probably (not necessarily) liked literature and wrote at least one published article but never appears to have written anything else under her own name.
This could however similarly be used to somewhat account for her marriage to Buchanan since literature was quite possibly a shared interest with Buchanan being the Associate Editor of ‘Weird Tales’ as well as writing non-fiction books about sport and American history.
I find Buhlert’s counterargument to this point in favour of Buchanan odd to say the least since she declares that:
‘As for the claim that Lamont Buchanan was both an editor and a writer of non-fiction, whereas Jean Milligan was not known to have written anything other than legal briefs, I’m not sure why writing books about baseball and the history of the Confederacy or the two party system in the US would necessarily predispose someone more to writing horror and urban fantasy than writing legal briefs would.’
To answer Buhlert’s point is simple enough and three-fold:
1. Firstly, this same argument would necessarily invalidate Anya Martin’s evidence of Jean Milligan’s early limited literary activity and interest. After all, why would writing a local newspaper article and joining a high school literary club ‘necessarily predispose someone more to writing horror and urban fantasy than writing legal briefs would’?
2. Secondly, the reason that Buchanan’s non-fiction literary activity and involvement with editing ‘Weird Tales’ is far more relevant than Milligan’s high school literary activities is obvious in that it gives Buchanan a literary pedigree and a proven track record of published writing albeit in different genres (in the same way Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Murders at the Rue Morgue’ but published no other detective fiction focusing instead on horror), while Milligan’s high school literary activities only provide evidence she could have potentially been Harding not that she was as Buhlert would have us believe.
3. We have no reason or evidence to suppose Milligan wrote a legal brief in her life. Having a lawyer as your financial and/or literary agent doesn’t necessarily make you a lawyer or an employee of a law firm. It merely suggests in the absence of all evidence to the contrary that you have access to the postal services of said law firm and the likeliest scenario for that is as a client not as an employee let alone a lawyer yourself.
The nub of Buhlert’s case however is Jean Milligan being the addressee on the cheques and an appeal to Occam’s Razor:
‘As it is, we will probably never know for sure who wrote the Allison V. Harding stories, whether it was Jean Milligan, Lamont Buchanan or both of them together. However, the strongest evidence we have is the fact that the cheques were addressed to Jean Milligan and the simplest explanation is that the person to whom the cheques were addressed was also the author of the stories. So what’s the need to come up with a convoluted theory to explain why someone else wrote the stories than the person whose name was on the cheques?’
I agree that this is the simplest solution in the absence of other evidence, but what Buhlert is doing here is fundamentally dishonest by presenting assumptions as facts (‘Jean Milligan was a lawyer/employed by a law firm’) to counterargue against Buchanan’s proven literary pedigree and the fact that he was ‘in the right place at the right time’. She appears to be doing so because Buhlert is a self-identified feminist and seems to view Jean Milligan as ‘another example’ of a ‘suppressed woman’ rather than because the case for Milligan being Harding is particularly solid.
Yes, the fact that she was the addressee is suggestive but - as Nicolay has pointed out - it simply isn’t a good argument:
‘The suggestion that Buchanan alone assumed the Harding name to create filler for Weird Tales begs several questions: first of all, if he alone wrote as Harding, why would he deceive his own boss? Alternatively, if Dorothy McIlwraith was in on such a secret, why would she send the checks to Jean care of a third party? This makes much more sense if Harding was either Jean by herself or a collaboration. The necessity of avoiding the impression of nepotism would itself have demanded a pseudonym. Moreover, both Jean and Lamont came from wealthy families. However, Lamont’s family felt about his employment with the pulps, Jean’s family might have been even less accepting.’
I agree with Nicolay that Jean Milligan was almost certainly ‘in’ on the stories – the fact that she was the addressee suggests as much – but it doesn’t provide actual evidence that she wrote the stories and the identification of Jean Milligan alone as ‘Allison V. Harding’ simply doesn’t have enough evidence behind it when considered in the context of Buchanan’s associate editorship of ‘Weird Tales’ and his own publishing record.
In summary, to attribute the Harding stories to Milligan alone on the present evidence is tenuous at best and although a distinct possibility is unlikely given what contextual evidence and information we have. You simply cannot make ‘Allison V. Harding’ Jean Milligan unless you can provide something more than the fact that ‘the cheques went to her’, because we don’t know why ‘the cheques went to her’ and she never published any other writing than that mentioned.
We’ll probably never know for sure who ‘Allison V. Harding’ was, but on the balance of probabilities Jean Milligan was involved in it in some way, shape or form. Yet we do not know to what extent she was involved, and we cannot conclude from that evidence that she was in fact ‘Allison V. Harding’ given that her husband Charles Lamont Buchanan is contextually a better candidate and also certainly involved given the ‘addressee’ evidence and his position at ‘Weird Tales’.