1965: Edward Sturgeon: Author: Felix Sturgeon's Son
The Dark Side
Argyll Sturgeon was a Scot, born in 1890 as William Dickie Sturgeon, the son of Robert Graham Sturgeon and Mary Frew Dickie of Girvan, Ayrshire. He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and travelled to the U.S.A. in 1914. He arrived in Boston and took up the profession of Teacher. He taught Mathematics and Languages at private schools. Whilst teaching he acquired the nickname Argyll – due to his chosen fancy-dress at partys as an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander.
In the late 1920s he married a divorcee, Christine Hamilton Waldo, nee Dicker, who had two small boys, Peter and Edward - called Ted to distinguish him from his father, Edward Waldo. Argyll adopted the boys and gave them his surname, as well as changing Ted’s name to Theodore Sturgeon – his middle name remaining Hamilton.
The new family moved to Philadelphia, where Argyll took the position of Head of the Department of Modern Languages at Drexel Institute (later the Drexel Institute of Technology). He was also, with his wife, a keen amateur actor. The couple moved to Scotland in 1937, after the boys were grown up. The boys remaining in the USA.
Argyll was, apparently, determined to bring up the boys as good scholars and upright citizens. Felix’s (Christine) acquiescence in his strictness is something of a mystery, since evidence in her correspondence indicates that she doted on the boys. As the boys passed through adolescence, Felix and Argyll became a separate unit from the boys, such that when they ‘came of age’ – Peter was nineteen and Ted, seventeen – Argyll and Felix began to take extended trips to Europe without them.
Edward (Ted) Sturgeon
Ted signed up as merchant seaman, and Peter, after clerking for his birth father’s colour business – EW and F Waldo, in Baltimore, joined the British Battalion of the International Brigade and fought in Spain. Felix’s anxiety about him is poignant; she wrote a pleading letter to the Brigade, inquiring about Peter’s whereabouts. Peter went on to become a Paratrooper in World War 2 and after the War became a scientific writer in a pharmaceutical business and founder of American Mensa. He married Ines Forte. Having permanently left the USA in 1966, Peter lived in Zurich and Vienna, where he died in 2005.
Felix and Argyll travelled by car through Spain in 1935. She wrote an article for the college magazine Drexerd describing this trip. Felix, Argyll and a male friend motored through Spain, camping along the way. on the brink of Franco’s attack on the Popular Front.
After their parents departure for Scotland the boys felt somewhat abandoned. Ted, Theodore Sturgeon became a well know writer of Science Fiction novels after his earlier writing attempts at Comic stories. Ted married three times ; his first marriage produced two daughters; his second was annulled and his third marriage to Marion McGahan produced four children.
The second child of this marriage was named Tandy who has been a great source of information to me concerning Argyll and Felix Sturgeon. Ted and Marion’s family were raised very permissively in Woodstock, New York. The children, apart from one all took careers in Education and between them raised seven grandchildren of Ted and Marion.
Ted, Theodore Sturgeon became a well-known writer of Science Ficti
The character Armand Bluett in the novel the Dreaming Jewels is modelled on Theodore’s observation of his stepfather Argyll – Armand is a bad, bad guy!
‘Armand was a bony individual with a small moustache and cold wet eyes.’ Page 7
‘A master storyteller’ – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
In 1965 Theodore wrote an essay titled Argyll.
The essay, along with a letter: ‘To Mother and Argyll, 1952’ were collated and published by the Sturgeon Project, July 1993.
Letter to mother and Argyll, Congers, New York, December 8th, 1952
‘ . . . .So here’s the botherment I’ve been chewing all these years, stated baldly only for the sake of simplicity:
I have been carrying for some 22 years the most ravening, active, and violent hostility toward you, Argyll, that can be imagined.
. . . to this day the sound of a key sliding into a Yale lock stops my heart, grabs at my stomach with a cold hand. It is Argyll coming home, looking about like cold lightning at everything that might be wrong. Is the radio on? Is it time I should be doing homework? Was I talking too loudly?
. . . Then one day an errand downtown for a certain thread for mother. The place is closed. There’s a dollar bill, on the way down, a broken banjo-ukelele in the window of a Salvation Army rummage shop. Go in, handle it. The man say 75c. On the way back, look at it again. Such a desire! The remembrance for 12 weeks there has been no 25c allowance. Sudden fearful decision. Buy it. Bring it home. Show it to Mother. It has a broken drum and no bridge and no tailpiece and no strings. Mother says dubiously, all right, but don’t tell Argyll. (The only time she ever said that.) Ten-cent soldering iron in a tin can on the stove. Cut a new tailpiece out of another tin can, double the tin, solder up the edges – clever! And so happy. While the iron is heating, whittle the bridge from a piece of old broom-handle.
The key in the lock. First blind terror. Allowance or no, 75c price or no, mother’s half-approval to the contrary, perhaps I’d stolen. Flash of hope: Argyll, entering the foyer, usually goes straight through the living-room into his den. If he does I can have all the evidence whisked away out of sight before anyone knows. But no, he sees something going on, must know what it is. Enters kitchen; key case, keys dangling, briefcase; soft grey overcoat, grey herringbone double-breasted suit with tiny red stripe, saddle-soaped expensive brown shoes. Hawk nose, cold eyes to me, standing heartstill, waiting. Flick to work surface, flick to stove, back to work surface and banjo-uke. ‘What’s that?’ I run to it, pick it up. Shreds of enthusiasm; I show him. ‘A banjo-uke. Look it needs a new tailpiece, I’m making one, all I have to do is . . . ‘ ‘Where did you get it?’ ‘bought it,’ I whisper, ‘I bought it.’ Jingle of key case. Argyll walks to inner kitchen door. ‘ You little parasite. Ought to charge you for the gas.’ Goes out. I’m alone again. Turn of gas. Pick up tools, uke. I can’t have my banjo-uke.
Granny comes to visit. Gives Peter and me each 5$. Peter buys an old cavalry sabre for 50c. I nuy a pair of roller skates from a boy called Dick. Argyll insists on keeping the change for us. Months and months later we want the money for Christmas shopping. Argyll, very annoyed: ‘I feed you, I house you, I clothe you – what else do you expect?’ and no money.
. . . These episodes are all off the cuff. There are without exaggeration hundreds of them. Most of them key on Argyll’s ill-concealed contempt of both of us as scholars and therefore as people.’
This letter takes up the equivalent of 16 pages of foolscap typing.
The last few pages do contain happier anecdotes where Ted, now an older man, can enjoy the company, on occasion, of Grenada Argyll, sharing a drink and some conviviality.
The memoir over 53 pages contains many more highly concerning memories of the two boy’s childhood with Argyll as the father figure.
After reading the Memoir and Letter I find it incredible as to how John and Morag could have formed a ‘friendship’ and partnership to open a Free School based on the beliefs, values and practice of A. S. Neill’s Summerhill. Did John ‘need’ a partner for financial reasons? Was he fooled by the suave academic scholar with a Sorbonne education? Maybe he was swayed by the ’charms’ of Felix; or their double-act! Argyll and Felix apparently up and left Kilquhanity after only 15 months. Vivienne – a staff member in 1941, in her letters to Felix say how sorry she was to have missed their departure which was unannounced around Christmas 1941. As can be read in Memoir, Argyll was a physical and emotional child abuser; at the very least of his two stepsons.
Extracts from Memoir: Theodore Sturgeon 1965
‘ . . . Mother and Argyll came in together and announced that they had just been married, which was the first inkling Peter and I had of it.
For me this began quite a happy period. I recall Pete’s being surly and recalcitrant and going into many rages in which he was really dangerous. . . . I don’t remember what the particular quarrel was but Argyll clobbered him on the side of the face once and knocked him down, shouting, ‘That’s the first time I ever struck you . . .’ It was by no means the last. Yet in all I remember it as pleasant.
. . . since he was sure he was right about our intelligence, the only conclusion he could reach was that we simply did not care to become Rhodes scholars or earn his respect. But meanwhile by god we toe the line.
He became convinced we were smoking before we ever did, and set traps for us. One night he lined us up in front of a combination ashtray and cigarette canteen, half full, and told us we would stand there until we confessed which one of us had taken the two missing cigarettes. We stood there until 11pm, genuinely innocent, but he wouldn’t believe us, I don’t recall if we were strapped for that; we were, though, for a lot of things. It was always quite a procedure. Bare the bottom, kneel down by the bed. He would take off his black belt and lay on with it. I found out early that if I yelled, the next two or three licks would be lighter. But Pete was so stubborn he would hang on and hang on and just not yell at all, and Argyll would hit harder until he did, bringing up welts that bled at the high end.
He always thumbed our toothbrushes to see if they were wet. Pete always remembered to wet his toothbrush though he never brushed his teeth. I always felt I got the rough end of the toothbrush chewings-out.
We had a puppy named Jerusha for a while but Argyll couldn’t discipline her – he used to whip her with a wire after rubbing her nose in it – so he got rid of her. (I always felt she had earned her keep the time she peed on the rug and then rubbed her own nose in it.)
The worst thing we could ever do was to make noise in the morning, especially Saturday or Sunday morning. We’d try and try, but we got it almost every single week, Argyll coming red-eyed down the hall in his pyjamas and his belt: ‘You first!’ and we’d have the non-yelling contest.
I finished out 5b and 6a, and then when I was eleven, we got sent to boarding school in Gettysburg. There I learned how to gamble, smoke, swear, swim and what a homosexual was. I came back and did 8b in a six-weeks summer school course. Argyll said if I did well he would give me something that I always wanted. In the four subjects I got three 8s and a 9, and he said that wasn’t good enough, and that what he was going to get me was a bicycle. I never did have a bicycle of my own.
He could open the door (you never heard him coming down the hall) and in four seconds flat know the radio had been on (forbidden) or someone had touched the piano (forbidden) or that homework wasn’t done. And his coffee better be ready. Once he was giving me a long lecture and I sat with my cheeks resting on my hands, elbows on knees: suddenly he fetched me a terrific clip on the temple that knocked me dizzy, saying that I was ‘making monkey faces’ at him; it hadn’t even occurred to me.
I had learned all about masturbation in boarding school but know, toward the end of my twelfth year, I found out I could have an orgasm. So one morning I was sitting on the pot in the bathroom, well lubricated with Ivory soap, working away at it, when the door banged open and there he stood. He said ‘I thought there was something like this!’ and all I could think of to say was, ‘Please -please don’t tell Mother!’ and he said ‘Of course I shall tell your Mother’ and marched out.
Some days later,Mother announced we were going to the Doctor: get dressed. So of we went to the University of Pennsylvania psychology department, where I was given a thorough physical by a very nice man named Twitmeyer. I liked him fine and he gave me a clean bill of health and had no advice and counsel for me at all.
But Argyll just wouldn’t accept it. About a week later we went to the operating abode of one Dr Ludlum. Now along with the radio and the piano, another, and the most verboten thing in the house was a newspaper, which Argyll was convinced would instantly rot the mind of the young. But I used to peek on my way home from school, and I knew perfectly well who Dr Ludlum was, because there had been an axe murder where a guy called Williams had dropped his wife six places around town, and he was being examined by Dr Ludlum, the state’s foremost criminal psychiatrist. . . He gave me a fast physical and took some blood out of my finger and made a smear and studied it through a microscope.
Then he took my mother into the other room and I waited what seemed forever. Finally they came out and he said sit over there. I sat down and he put one hand on one arm of the chair and the other hand on the other arm, bang! bang!, and came looming over me like a thunderhead. ‘How often do you masturbate, boy?’ he demanded. I said I dunno. Some. He said, ‘Better stop it. It won’t do you any good.’ And suddenly the whole thing was over and we were outside. The only thing his report said was that I lacked certain fatty components in my blood and I should eat bacon every day for a while.
When Ted was about ten years old there occurred a legal meeting over custody between the boys, their natural father, Argyll and Felix. The outcome was custody for Argyll and Felix following this Argyll began proceedings for legal adoption of the boys. This resulted in a name change from Waldo to Sturgeon and from Ted to Theodore.
Later in his teen years Ted developed physically and became a proficient and strong athlete.
I was suddenly taller and heavier than Argyll was; I became aware of a number of previously dissociated things. Rooting around in a drawer I found a whole mail-order course in muscle development. Once I found a strange device – a slightly tapered glass tube about ten inches long and three inches in diameter, average, with a rubber diaphragm in the larger end with a one inch hole in it, and a nickel plated cap on the other end, into which was set a hand-pump with a T-handle and a relif valve like one on a sphygmomanometer. I just naturally put my penis in it and worked the pump. Mirabile!
Then there was a pair of wooden handles with ropes and big eyebolts to be screwed into the lintel of a doorway; between them was a canvas sling effect, two inch ribbons, two of them also suspended from the lintel, between the ropes of the handles. One was supposed to chin on the handles, work one’s head into the sling, with one strap across the nape of the neck and one under the chin, and slowly let down until one was suspended by one’s head. Ten minutes a day with this was supposed to gain you an inch and half in height in a month, by expanding the gristle between the vertebrae. It does appear as if Argyll had a Napoleon complex.
I might interject here that Argyll had one of the most fabulous minds I have ever encountered. The old Army Alpha Intelligence Test from World War 1 contained 212 questions, right and wrong. It was impossible to compute his I.Q. from the thing because he got 208 of them right.
The Argyll Memoir extends to some 56 pages which pretty much continue to describe situations in which Argyll’s behaviour might be considered to be somewhat. There occasions when he ‘goes’ with other women apart from Felix; when Felix leaves him for New York; when Argyll invites two gay men to come and look after Ted and Peter when he and Felix are away. This results in further sexual adventures which Ted reportedly enjoys.
The Memoir concludes:
After they left for Scotland, I never saw Argyll again. . . . From time to time, as those years went by, I would go into towering furies, thinking about some of the things mentioned herein. Finally, not long after I had married Marion, one of these fits reached such a pitch that I had to do something about it. So I wrote a long letter to Mother (as above) telling her frankly how I felt, and reminding her ofsome of these episodes. She wrote back, rather briefly saying in essence that she was terribly sorry I had ‘misunderstood’ so many things he had said and done, and it was pity I had not said so at the time, because those things had very little to do with the way he had felt about me all that time. And anyway, the years had mellowed him very much and he was much beloved by the young people in Grenada where he was teaching. And he would write me himself.
He did too – it took forever, and I can just see Mother’s nudge-nudge to make him do it. His letter ran about a page and a half, answered no challenge directly, and the bulk of the missive was a lot of quasi-poetic theory about the difficult, almost mystic nature of the relationship between father and son.
When I knew he had only a few days to live I sent him a cablegram – a nice one.
In the Introduction to Memoir written by one: Paul Williams he writes:
It is often said of Theodore Sturgeon, that all his writings are, ultimately about love. Perhaps so, but it must also be said that many of his finest works are equally particularly concerned with that twisted manifestation of love – called hatred. This present essay (Memoir) offers more than a few insights – and raises a great many new questions – concerning the role of hatred, or the struggle between love and hatred in shaping the extraordinary life and oeuvre of Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon.
In June 1993 Samuel Delaney wrote an Afterword to Theodore Sturgeon’s Memoir and Letter to Mother.
This account of a battle royal, between a man- William Dicky Sturgeon – and a boy – Edward Hamilton Waldo – by the end of which neither has his own name any more, and both, one suspects, have been wounded to the depths of their very souls, is remarkable in many ways. First, as with everything Sturgeon turned his pen to, I want simply to say what an extraordinary piece of writing it is! Cool, matter of fact, clear, and, like everything Sturgeon wrote, vivid, its cumulative effect is devastating.
To step back from it a moment, it is all too easy to see a brilliant stepfather, from the Depression thirties, who just didn’t quite believe children were human.
In its quiet and cumulative amassing of detail after detail, incident after incident, ‘Argyll’ is fearful and moving.
Quite a read and how do I make sense of John and Morag, Argyll and Felix as a partnership. There is no doubt that whilst at Kilquhanity Argyll and Felix had their ally(s) in Vivienne whose letters to Felix (elsewhere) demonstrate concerns about how Kilquhanity School was developing in its ‘infancy’. But I know they departed ‘under a cloud’ after only14 months.
s mentioned elsewhere, on the reading of Theodore’s Memoir/Letter to Mother Argyll was a deeply difficult man, both with his wife and stepsons. I have to wonder how he was with the children of Kilquhanity – remember, he was much loved by his students in Grenada.
My suspicions would be that Argyll and Felix behaviour in the free atmosphere of the new school would have led to ‘misunderstandings’ between John and Morag and them.
