Queer Places:
Glenveagh Castle, Glenveagh, Church Hill, Co. Donegal, F92 HR77 Ireland
Studio 44, 3044 Fillmore St, San Francisco, CA 94123
Alan Campbell (1910 - November 26, 1959) was born George W. Campbell in San Francisco, where he came of age in outré establishments such as Myrtokleia's "tearoom" on Telegraph Hill.
In 1932 Havelock Ellis told an intern at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York, Joseph Wortis, about Arthur Kingsley Porter’s homosexuality. Ellis was proposing Wortis undertake research on the subject, to be funded by an anonymous donor on Ellis’s behalf, research so intense it would lead Wortis to undergo analysis by Freud himself. Ellis’s biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, tells the story in her biography of Ellis, published in 1980, forty-seven years after Porter’s death: a strange enough tale, how in the summer of 1932 Porter and his wife called on Ellis, confiding that Porter was homosexual and suffering from depression, concerned over the danger of losing his job at Harvard because of scandal. His wife was very sympathetic. What advice had Ellis to proffer? There is no way of knowing exactly what Ellis actually said, but in a letter of July 31, 1932, Porter told Ellis: “I feel a deep sense of gratitude to you, deeper than I know how to express, for having put me in touch with Alan.” Alan Campbell was a young aspiring American novelist, a homosexual also, who moved into the Porters’ beautiful home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few months later, and there apparently a ménage à trois was established. However, during the following months Porter’s letters indicate that Campbell was restless and did not settle easily into the Cambridge scene … . Eventually Campbell left for a trip to California. On January 3, 1933, Porter wrote: “We are sailing on the 14th, not without misgivings on my part, for depression has been gaining again since Alan went to California.” He and Mrs. Porter then crossed the Atlantic to their castle in County Donegal, Ireland, and in June they paid Ellis a visit in London. On July 11 Alan Campbell wrote that Porter had thrown himself off a cliff near his home. A historian of Harvard, Richard Norton Smith, tells the story (confirmed by sometime Senior Fellow Francis Burr and seconded by the Boston jurist Charles Wyzanski) in his The Harvard Century of what happened “when an elderly professor was revealed to the president as homosexual”: Lowell, Smith reports, “summoned the man to University Hall (where the president’s habitual pacing often cowed visitors into the far corners of the room) and demanded his resignation on the spot. He had devoted his life to Harvard, replied the professor. What was he expected to do now? What would President Lowell himself do, if he were in his shoes? ‘I would get a gun and destroy myself,’ said Lowell.”
With the financial assistance of Noël Sullivan, he traveled to India when he was twenty-one. Campbell's account of his visit to Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's school in West Bengal, was published as "Tagore's Abode of Peace" in Asia (1933). Writing pseudonymously as Arion, he also published Starborn (1938), a novel based on personal experiences. The book was released by Obelisk Press in Paris, the same company that published Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and other writers who wrote explicitly about sex. Back in California by the fall of 1934, he visited Robinson Jeffers at Tor House. In a September 28, 1934 letter to Frederick and Maud Clapp, Una Jeffers writes, "Who do you think is coming today? Alan Campbell who was with the Kingsley Porters in Donegal." He may have lived in Carmel for several months the following year, for an Alan Campbell operated a bookshop in the village and wrote music and book reviews for the Pacific Weekly in the latter half of 1935. After traveling widely and residing in Santa Rosa, California for a number of years, Campbell returned to San Francisco, where he opened Studio Forty-Four, a bookstore and art gallery on Fillmore Street. On November 26, 1959 he came home with a large gash above his eye —which, he told his mother, resulted from a fall in a bar. He then tripped while descending a flight of stairs and died on the landing below.
My published books:
