November 13, 2024

Dungeon Quest

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His name was J. Carey Thomas the second. That’s certain; not much else.

His name is written on the inside cover of the Beinecke Rare Book Library’s copy of Autobiography of an Androgyne, a memoir of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which is one of the things that brought me to Yale for the autumn. The book, according to a page roughly where the copyright would be in a modern edition, was to be ‘sold only, by mail order, to physicians, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists’, and there’s a space for these venerable professionals – all those who were in a position to advocate for the book’s dedicatees, the ‘sexually abnormal by birth’ – to write in their names. But in this copy the name is elsewhere. Perhaps Thomas was not the first owner of the book, then. That’s one of the thoughts that led me to start looking into who he might have been, to try and see what its ownership could tell me about its reception and readership before gender studies scholars got hold of it in the nineties. If he turned out to be a specialist of some kind, it might make a footnote in my thesis; otherwise, it’d probably be a dead end.

What my initial searches turned up was less informative than I’d hoped. There’s little public record of a J. Carey Thomas 2^nd, especially without a first name. There are no other books owned by him in any of the Yale collections; Black Mountain College had a single book inscribed with his name, which is now in a museum in North Carolina. But there was an M. Carey Thomas, a lesbian educator who was deeply involved in the early history of Bryn Mawr, a Pennsylvania women’s college that was one of the first institutions in the US to offer graduate degrees to women.* Some relation, perhaps? Let’s table that: most results in the Yale system are about her.

Google also informed me that a J. Carey Thomas published a volume of poetry, probably at his own expense, called Seven Sonnets and Other Poems in 1917. That’s good to know, but I can’t be sure it was the same J. Carey Thomas. This first name thing is getting really annoying now. But there’s a pdf of the poems online and I’ve read a few of them. They’re not good. One of them, however, is about Walt Whitman, of whom Mr Thomas seems a great fan. Immediately I think that he probably was gay after all.

I backtracked at this point to M. Carey Thomas. Her father, I quickly found out, was called James, but he passed away in 1897, too early to buy the Autobiography in 1911, but perhaps he had a son. His obituary mentions a J. M. W. Carey Thomas, a younger brother of M. (her family called her Minnie) Carey; that could be him. I look again at the the Black Mountain library record and saw that the other book we know our J. Carey owned was Isaac Sharpless’ Story of a Small College. Is the college Bryn Mawr? No, Haverford. That’s where M. Carey’s father went, too. But okay, let’s look in the Haverford archives. That’s how I found out that one J. Carey Thomas II edited the Haverfordian, their journal, between 1907 and 1908. And, look, here’s some of the poems in the same journal under the same name. So it is the same person! And here’s the kicker: James Carey Thomas also performed in a play satirising what Haverford men thought life was like at Bryn Mawr under the supervision of – you guessed it – President M. Carey Thomas. This was in 1908, when she was between fifty and fifty-one, while he was likely in his early twenties.

At this point I’m fairly convinced that James Carey Thomas II was either the much younger brother of M. Carey Thomas or, more likely, a nephew.† I think this is as far as I can get without calling up experts on the life of the more famous Thomas to ask about family trees, although I am slowly making my way through a biography as we speak. And even if I did start calling around, I’m not sure I’d be able to learn more about the person themselves. I’m much more interested in what led him to own this copy of Autobiography of an Androgyne and there’s no-one, I think, who can tell me that.

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For the avoidance of doubt, I did not expect when I started looking into this that I would uncover a lost archive of queer or trans history. I also did not expect to find out very much about J. Carey Thomas. I don’t care to maintain the fiction that uncovering his diary or his papers would have allowed me to know him; I’ve been thinking about the Autobiography of an Androgyne pretty hard since 2023 and I don’t feel any closer to understanding its author, Jennie June, than I did at the beginning.‡ But against my better instincts, I thought that maybe spending time in the archive might allow me learn, at least, something.

The fact is that I have little archival training and the bulk of my academic work doesn’t involve it. I’ve never read Archive Fever. And the people I’ve ventured into Yale’s subterranean libraries to find out about left very slight traces. There’s good evidence that Jennie June published a fair bit under her birth name, but much of that material never made enough of a cultural dent to end up in a library; J. Carey Thomas II, in spite of whatever ambitions he might have had to be a poet, made even less of an impression. To me, then, the archive looks a lot like a calm ocean: flat and apparently opaque, everything under the surface essentially hidden from me. So what am I doing when I take these long dives?

Of course, part of this is about thoroughness, about following things through to their end. But I’ve done that, and I find it difficult to leave J. Carey Thomas II alone. The reality I have to face is that I am invested, that I find it difficult to accept that this man might be lost to history. I know and believe that the past was not the exclusive province of great men and prime movers: Napoleon could not have conquered Europe without an army to die for him. M. Carey Thomas could not have made Bryn Mawr what it was without students, without lecturers of only minor renown, without janitors and cooks and everyone that works in universities still when the students go home. J. Carey Thomas was no everyman, but his almost total invisibility to me depresses me because it suggests that the people in whom I really believe will be even less visible. This is a very minor violence of the archive, in the scheme of things, but it is sad.

I’m going back to the Beinecke this week to see some letters that Rachel Pollack, a sci-fi writer and tarot expert, wrote to Samuel R. Delany. Delany’s a big name, whose entire archive is at Yale; Pollack is not, and most of her books in the Beinecke are there through Delany’s depositing them. I go, then, with a strong sense now of the limits to what I can learn. To hold a letter is one thing, and not a small thing, either. But it is not to understand its writer, any more than to meet them in the street is. And it is not to perceive the whole web of relations that followed them to their writing-desk; it is not to know why someone bought a book or what they thought of it. It’s like finding a treasure-chest at the end of a dungeon, and seeing the treasure inside, without knowing who put it there or what they were hiding it from. The story, in other words, is incomplete. The archive can’t give me what I want, and I’m not cut out for wanting something different.

* Carey Thomas’ legacy seems a complicated thing. Born a Quaker, she was a tireless advocate for women’s education, who also fought personally to prevent the admission of at least one Jewish woman to Bryn Mawr.

† Recall, also, that the obituary mentions J. M. W. Carey Thomas, no ordinal, so perhaps the given names were different. Almost no-one in the Thomas family seems to have gone by their first name.

‡ One of the reasons I’m so interested in her writing is that from the vantage point of the present, she remains a truly odd, inscrutable person. I hope to write more about this soon.