David Derek Stacton
Encyclopedia
David Derek Stacton was an American
novelist, historian
and poet
.
(several of his books are set in Nevada). Stacton attended Stanford University
from 1941–43. He served in the Civilian Public Service
as a conscientious objector
, and wrote a letter as “David Stacton” decrying the compliant American masses to Dwight Macdonald’s Politics in 1945. He legally changed his name to David Derek Stacton on September 3, 1946. He changed his name to disassociate himself from his father, and because he believed the surname was unique to him in the United States (as a child he had been known to friends as “Lyonel”). He attended San Francisco State College from 1947–48, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley
in January 1951. He lived in Europe from 1951–1954, 1960–1962, and 1964–1965. Most of his books as David Stacton were originally published in England. Stacton wrote under the pseudonyms Carse Boyd, Bud Clifton, David Dereksen and David West. He also ghosted Living Religions Of The World a 1956 work accredited to Frederic Spiegelberg
.
Stacton may have lied about being married, and recollections by friends and people who personally met him strongly indicate that he was gay and unafraid of being flamboyant in person. One memoir records Stacton's penchant for drag. The few author descriptions in contemporary reviews were much taken by his wearing of cowboy boots. In 1965-1966 he taught at Washington and Lee College. He died January 19, 1968 in Fredensborg, Denmark. His death was reported as being from a stroke. Stacton had suffered from epilepsy
since a child.
and biographical novel
s, and then ended his career as a writer of lengthy histories. His historical novels are distinctive for covering many disparate periods and historical figures and were popular with a coterie of critics but they never reached a wide audience. His novels usually focus on a couple of characters who are often highly private, unusual, even perverse individuals, so that his novels are more about encompassing the range of their personalities and motives through introspection rather than through narrative and plot. Stacton frequently refers to life as a "Cosmic Opera House". He sees his characters as parables and illustrative of certain trends, and he wrote three series of thematically related triptychs. In his first triptych, "The Invincible Questions", Stacton chooses protagonists who are more important for their personal inquiries into the nature of reality than anything that they do, despite being a pharaoh, a king, and monk. His second "American" tripych is highly critical of the development of American history and of America's tendencies to both imperialism and isolationism (Gore Vidal
's silence about Stacton may be significant). And in his third triptych, Stacton examines, with considerable irony, the eternally fraught relationship between archetypal Man and Woman, beginning with Hindu myth
, then looking comically at a famous period romance, and concluding with sad events at a film festival in the recent past.
Stacton's novels are often low in dialogue, and his better novels are instead full of his witty scornful comments on his characters and life. At his best Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore
and Peter Pan
). In 1963, Time magazine praised his work as "masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood" and suggested that "something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London
"http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829810,00.html. His other literary influences include Walter Pater
, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey
for his witty attention to history. Several of Stacton's novels feature homosexual characters prominently when this was uncommon.
Besides the novels and other literary works published under his name, he also published a wide range of pseudonymous cowboys, thrillers and exploitation novels. Pulp novels about juvenile delinquents written under pseudonyms proved very popular, were translated into numerous languages and D for Delinquent was one of Ace’s top sellers for 1958. The Power Gods, about a motorcycle gang, was set in Nevada. Muscle Boy features in many histories of gay pulp fiction. Muscle Boy was inspired by an actual crime ring based in San Francisco, but Clifton transplanted the action to Muscle Beach
and populated it with an assortment of flamboyant party boys and hustlers. The reaction of the real life figures identifiable in the novel was one reason he left the San Francisco area, more or less permanently, in 1959.
He was the inspiration for the author Fellowes Kraft in John Crowley
’s Ægypt
quartet. Fans of David Stacton include John Crowley
, Thomas M. Disch
, and Peter Beagle.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist, historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
and poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
.
Biography
Stacton was born in San Francisco. In author profiles, however, he claimed to have been born April 25, 1925 in Minden, NevadaMinden, Nevada
Minden is a census-designated place in Douglas County, Nevada, United States. The population was 2,836 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Douglas County and is adjacent to the city of Gardnerville. It is named after the town of Minden, in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It...
(several of his books are set in Nevada). Stacton attended Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
from 1941–43. He served in the Civilian Public Service
Civilian Public Service
The Civilian Public Service provided conscientious objectors in the United States an alternative to military service during World War II...
as a conscientious objector
Conscientious objector
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....
, and wrote a letter as “David Stacton” decrying the compliant American masses to Dwight Macdonald’s Politics in 1945. He legally changed his name to David Derek Stacton on September 3, 1946. He changed his name to disassociate himself from his father, and because he believed the surname was unique to him in the United States (as a child he had been known to friends as “Lyonel”). He attended San Francisco State College from 1947–48, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in January 1951. He lived in Europe from 1951–1954, 1960–1962, and 1964–1965. Most of his books as David Stacton were originally published in England. Stacton wrote under the pseudonyms Carse Boyd, Bud Clifton, David Dereksen and David West. He also ghosted Living Religions Of The World a 1956 work accredited to Frederic Spiegelberg
Frederic Spiegelberg
Frederic Spiegelberg was a Stanford University professor of religion. A friend of Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Jung, he participated in Jung's Eranos symposia and lectured in Jung's institute in Zurich. Paul Tillich helped Spiegelberg escape Germany in 1937 after Spiegelberg was fired...
.
Stacton may have lied about being married, and recollections by friends and people who personally met him strongly indicate that he was gay and unafraid of being flamboyant in person. One memoir records Stacton's penchant for drag. The few author descriptions in contemporary reviews were much taken by his wearing of cowboy boots. In 1965-1966 he taught at Washington and Lee College. He died January 19, 1968 in Fredensborg, Denmark. His death was reported as being from a stroke. Stacton had suffered from epilepsy
Epilepsy
Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...
since a child.
Overview
David Stacton's earliest published works were poems, often betraying the influence of T.S. Eliot, which were published in American little magazines. They were collected in 1953. David Stacton began as a writer of moody California-based novels, became moderately well-known as a writer of short, concentrated historicalHistorical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
and biographical novel
Biographical novel
The biographical novel is a genre of novel which provides a fictional and usually entertaining account of a person's life. This kind of novel concentrates on the experiences a person had during his lifetime, the people he met and the incidents which occurred are detailed and sometimes...
s, and then ended his career as a writer of lengthy histories. His historical novels are distinctive for covering many disparate periods and historical figures and were popular with a coterie of critics but they never reached a wide audience. His novels usually focus on a couple of characters who are often highly private, unusual, even perverse individuals, so that his novels are more about encompassing the range of their personalities and motives through introspection rather than through narrative and plot. Stacton frequently refers to life as a "Cosmic Opera House". He sees his characters as parables and illustrative of certain trends, and he wrote three series of thematically related triptychs. In his first triptych, "The Invincible Questions", Stacton chooses protagonists who are more important for their personal inquiries into the nature of reality than anything that they do, despite being a pharaoh, a king, and monk. His second "American" tripych is highly critical of the development of American history and of America's tendencies to both imperialism and isolationism (Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
's silence about Stacton may be significant). And in his third triptych, Stacton examines, with considerable irony, the eternally fraught relationship between archetypal Man and Woman, beginning with Hindu myth
Hindu mythology
Hindu religious literature is the large body of traditional narratives related to Hinduism, notably as contained in Sanskrit literature, such as the Sanskrit epics and the Puranas. As such, it is a subset of Nepali and Indian culture...
, then looking comically at a famous period romance, and concluding with sad events at a film festival in the recent past.
Stacton's novels are often low in dialogue, and his better novels are instead full of his witty scornful comments on his characters and life. At his best Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
and Peter Pan
Peter Pan
Peter Pan is a character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie . A mischievous boy who can fly and magically refuses to grow up, Peter Pan spends his never-ending childhood adventuring on the small island of Neverland as the leader of his gang the Lost Boys, interacting with...
). In 1963, Time magazine praised his work as "masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood" and suggested that "something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
"http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829810,00.html. His other literary influences include Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...
for his witty attention to history. Several of Stacton's novels feature homosexual characters prominently when this was uncommon.
Besides the novels and other literary works published under his name, he also published a wide range of pseudonymous cowboys, thrillers and exploitation novels. Pulp novels about juvenile delinquents written under pseudonyms proved very popular, were translated into numerous languages and D for Delinquent was one of Ace’s top sellers for 1958. The Power Gods, about a motorcycle gang, was set in Nevada. Muscle Boy features in many histories of gay pulp fiction. Muscle Boy was inspired by an actual crime ring based in San Francisco, but Clifton transplanted the action to Muscle Beach
Muscle Beach
Muscle Beach refers to either Muscle Beach Venice, an area in Venice, California, on Ocean Front Walk two blocks north of Venice Boulevard or to Original Muscle Beach, two miles north of Venice, south of the Santa Monica Pier...
and populated it with an assortment of flamboyant party boys and hustlers. The reaction of the real life figures identifiable in the novel was one reason he left the San Francisco area, more or less permanently, in 1959.
He was the inspiration for the author Fellowes Kraft in John Crowley
John Crowley
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer...
’s Ægypt
Ægypt
Ægypt is a sequence of four novels by John Crowley. The work describes the work and life of Pierce Moffett, who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills at the...
quartet. Fans of David Stacton include John Crowley
John Crowley
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer...
, Thomas M. Disch
Thomas M. Disch
Thomas Michael Disch was an American science fiction author and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W...
, and Peter Beagle.
Awards
- Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
- 1961 and 1966 - National Endowment for the ArtsNational Endowment for the ArtsThe National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
Literature Fellowship - 1968
Poetry
- An Unfamiliar Country: 25 Poems (Fantasy Press, 1953)
- A Desert Fox, With Cactus-Colored fur (Albert Sperisen, 1960) – broadside poem
- Aetatis Suae LII (Albert Sperisen, 1961) - broadside poem
- Closing In (New Broom Private Press, 1976)
- Five Poems (Limited Editions Unincorporated, 1977)
- If Light in August (The Conspiratorial Impermanent Press, 1984)
Biography / History
- A Ride on a Tiger: The Curious Travels of Victor Jacquemont (Museum Press, 1954)
- The Crescent and the Cross: The fall of Byzantium May 1453 (G.P. Putnam, 1964) (under name of David Dereksen)
- The World on the Last Day: The Sack of Constantinople by the Turks, May 29, 1453 (Faber, 1965)
- The Bonapartes (Simon & Schuster, 1966)
Novels
- Dolores (Faber, 1954)
- A Fox Inside (Faber, 1955) - a California noir
- The Self-Enchanted (Faber, 1956)
- Remember Me: A Story of Ludwig II of Bavaria (Faber, 1957) - The Invincible Questions Triptych I
- The Power Gods (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958) as Bud Clifton
- D is for Delinquent (Ace, 1958) as Bud Clifton
- Muscle Boy (Ace, 1958) as Bud Clifton
- The Bad Girls (Pyramid, 1958) as Bud Clifton
- On a Balcony: A Story of Akhnaton and NefertitiNefertitiNefertiti was the Great Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti and her husband were known for a religious revolution, in which they started to worship one god only...
(Faber, 1958) - The Invincible Questions Triptych II - Segaki: A Story of Medieval Japan (Faber, 1958) - The Invincible Questions Triptych III
- The Murder Specialist (Ace, 1959) as Bud Clifton
- A Dancer in Darkness (Faber, 1960) - novel based on John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi"
- Wish Me Dead (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960) as David West
- A Signal Victory: A Story of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan (Faber, 1960) - American Triptych I
- The Judges of the Secret Court (Faber, 1961) - based on John Wilkes BoothJohn Wilkes BoothJohn Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and, by the 1860s, was a well-known actor...
's assassination of President Lincoln; - American Triptych II - Let Him Go Hang (Ace, 1961) as Bud Clifton
- Tom Fool (Faber, 1962) - based on the career of Wendell Wilkie; - American Triptych III
- Navarro (Doubleday, 1962) as Carse Boyd
- Ride the Man Down (John Long, 1962) as Carse Boyd
- Old Acquaintance (Faber, 1962) - The Sexes Triptych III
- Sir William: or a Lesson in Love (Putnam, 1963) - novel based on Emma Hamilton's affair with Lord Nelson; The Sexes Triptych II
- Kaliyuga: or a Quarrel with the Gods (Faber, 1965) - The Sexes Triptych I
- People of the Book: A Novel of the Thirty Years War (Putnam, 1965)
Short Stories
- "The March of the Gnomes" Prairie Schooner #23, 1949
- "A Dog Named Ego" Arizona Quarterly, 1950
- "Where It Was Sunny", Prairie Schooner, 1950
- "Trip to the Wedding", Decade of Short Stories, Spring 1951
- "The Dinner at Vidocq" New Directions In Prose And Poetry" #13, 1951
- "The Cruel Self" ADAM International Review 1952/1954
- “Florimond”, Magpie, October 1952
- “The Metamorphosis of Kenko”, Contact, October 1962
- “A Visit to the Master”, The Virginia Quarterly ReviewThe Virginia Quarterly ReviewThe Virginia Quarterly Review is a literary magazine in the United States. It was founded in 1925 by James Southall Wilson, at the request of University of Virginia president E. A. Alderman...
, Summer 1965 - "Little Brother Nun", The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1967
- “Notes Written in the Self with a Singular Distaste for Writing Anything Down”, Transatlantic Review, Spring 1968
Obituaries / overviews
- New York Times, January 24, 1968
- Washington Post, January 25, 1965
- (London) Times, February 21, 1968
- Malcolm Reiss. David Derek Stacton 1923-1968 (University of California, 1968) - 4 page check-list of Stacton's writings compiled by Stacton’s agent for a memorial exhibition at the Bancroft Library, University of California in November 1968
- "David Stacton", David R. Slavitt, Hollins Critic, December 2002
- Writers revisited: David Stacton and the judges of the secret court by Crawford Killian http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/fiction/2010/05/writers-revisited-david-stacton-and-the-judges-of-the-secret-court.html
Research resources
- David Stacton Papers at The Bancroft Library, University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...