Charles J. Finger is one of those authors whose life spans the 19th and 20th centuries and is therefore in danger of receding into the mists of irrelevance. He won the Newbery Medal for children's literature for his 1925 book "Tales From Silver Lands," a collection of folk tales gathered from the indigenous populations of Central and South America, and he spent the last 20 years of his life in Northwest Arkansas, having founded an artists' colony near Fayetteville.
Elizabeth Findley Shores, whose byline might ring familiar to anyone reading Arkansas media over the past 30 years, has researched and written an extraordinarily insightful biography of this otherwise neglected figure, illuminating the fascinating and necessarily secretive codes of fin de siècle gay men.
While you might pick up "Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger" (University of Arkansas, $39.95) skeptically, chances are you will find it hard to put down.
Born in northwest London on Christmas Day 1867, almost from the beginning Finger embroidered his legend with fanciful details. His birth date is often given as 1869, nudged forward to obscure the fact that he was born before his parents were married.
His father was a German tailor, his mother Irish, and they were prosperous enough to live in Mayfair, not far from Buckingham Palace, and to send "Charley" abroad to study music in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, where he lived with his father's relatives. When their fortunes dove, he returned to help support the family by working as a church organist. He studied shorthand to prepare for a career as a newspaper reporter.
After his parents immigrated to the United States in 1888, Finger stayed behind in London, where, Shores convincingly asserts, he had become part of a circle of literary-minded types who "reveled in the easy homosociality of the Regent Street Polytechnical Institute." As a young man in London, Finger was embedded in the gay subculture at a time when having sex with another man could have resulted in several years in prison.
Finger left London in 1890 in the wake of the Cleveland Street Scandal, where the government was accused of covering up a raid on a homosexual male brothel to protect the names of aristocratic and other prominent patrons.
Ernest Parke, writing for a radical weekly, still managed to produce a number of stories about the brothel and the cover-up, including one that implicated the Earl of Euston and hinted that Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, had also been involved. (Euston filed a libel suit against Parke and won; he claimed he had been given a tout card and went to the brothel expecting nude women instead of men.)
While Parke was jailed for alleging homosexual activity, Parliament undertook to investigate Parke's claims of a cover-up, initiating a "panicked period in London's gay world."
Finger essentially ran away to sea, signing on to a coal ship bound for Chile. Between 1890 and 1895 he traveled around South America, working as a shepherd, gaucho, gold prospector and fur trapper, while collecting stories that would later make up "Tales From Silver Lands." Shores compares him to the character of Jack Harkaway, popular in the penny dreadfuls of the time, who Finger would later describe as "unyoked by women."
By 1896, Finger was in San Angelo, Texas, herding sheep and writing for the San Angelo Standard, the Houston Labor Journal, Searchlight magazine and other Texas publications. He became a U.S. citizen.
In 1897, Shores reports, he left Texas. "[T]he gap in his journals could indicate he left ... suddenly to escape harassment or even arrest. While Finger was in New York, a newspaper in El Paso, Texas, reported gossip that a local businessman had been engaging in the kind of crime 'for which Oscar Wilde served two years' but attempts to 'catch the man in his acts' had been foiled."
Finger returned to Texas in 1898, and established the San Angelo Music Conservatory. He married the daughter of a sheep rancher in 1902, moved to New Mexico in 1904, and, in 1905, became an auditor with the Ohio River and Columbus Railway Company, eventually rising to the position of director in the firm.
In 1919, he became a regular contributor to St. Louis literary magazine Reedy's Mirror (named for its publisher, William Marion Reedy) and the following year he moved his family — which eventually included five children — to a farm outside Fayetteville that he called Gayeta Lodge, where Finger began to pursue a full-time writing career. After Reedy's Mirror collapsed following the death of its editor, Finger started his own magazine, All's Well, which he wrote almost single-handedly from 1920 through 1935. He also found time to write and publish 36 books after settling in Fayetteville.
Shores' scholarship and humane generosity gives us a rounded and robust portrait of a complex figure who might otherwise be consigned to the footnotes of academic volumes. Charles J. Finger, like most people we know almost nothing about, turns out to have been a deeply interesting creature.
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