God Head

By Leonard Cline

Lavished with praise at the time of its 1925 publication, Leonard Cline's phantasmagoric God Head is being republished so a new generation of readers can marvel at its dark magic. Cline's mesmerizing debut follows the journey of Paulus Kempf, a fugitive labor agitator who takes refuge with a colony of Finns on the remote shores of Lake Superior in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Kempf, a former surgeon, poet, writer, sculptor, and hyper-intellectual, is at first deeply impressed by the folklore and traditions of the quiet, gentle Finns, not to mention their generosity and hospitality. But he soon begins to play upon their superstitions and exploits their kindness through the power of his cunning and imagination, manipulating them into seeing him as a kind of a god.

As Cline's novel hurtles toward its unforgettable climax, Kempf's capacity for compassion or mercy swiftly falls to the wayside as he seduces his host's wife and then murders the man in cold blood. Soon thereafter he carves a giant God Head into the side of a nearby mountainside, which the villagers look upon with awe and fear, held in the thrall of Kempf's mysterious intimations of its malicious power. Having achieved complete domination over the Finns, Kempf ultimately tires of their gullibility and returns to civilization, his quest for self-mastery complete.

God Head's descent into the dark void of the human heart will thrill modern readers who are sure to cherish this lost literary artifact from the shadow canon of American fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781609090333

Book preview

Part One

Kullervo

1

It seems to me now that from the time I slipped out of the back door at Imatra Hall that night and dodged away behind the houses, with the queer howl of the woman still shuddering in my ears, up to the time I found myself on top the mountain and all the quiet stars overhead, I was not once conscious. Often in my life I had been afraid and often I had turned aside from the path I would have followed, but never before had I been hunted so, and seen the hunters, men gone beasts with rage, and fled. That is when panic seizes one, when one starts to run. It mounts the back and whimpers in the nape of the neck, and one knows nothing but that whimper, albeit one die or commit murder.

On the granite knob of the mountain I grovelled, and I thought over all that had happened, and groaned with disappointment and terror.

I remembered the glaring lights and the shining varnished woodwork of the Finnish hall, and that audience of stolid miners with their brachycephalic heads and cropped tow hair and mild blue eyes, gazing at me on their platform as I spoke. What had I been saying? What is always said . . . : that we were long deceived and abused, that now was the time to get more money from the masters, that the mines must continue or the warmakers would get no profits, that they would meet our terms because they depended on us to operate the mines, that already in a fortnight the strike was on the eve of success. Extravagances designed to inflame and to encourage, the sly prodding of leadership everywhere: rabbits out of a hat and silver coins out of an empty handkerchief, and . . . And all together, boys! down with the tyrants!

Then the great doors of the hall slammed open. In plunged the sheriff, a snarl on his face; and behind him strode a dozen deputies, and behind them thrust the mob, the good citizens, the patriots, the masters. They carried clubs.

I stopped talking.

On they came, down the aisle toward me, and staring, staring at me, still without a word. My Finns were shifting heavily about in their chairs to look, they creaked and their boots scuffed on the floor; and the invaders tramped on down the aisle. Slow to apprehend and reluctant to act, the Finns were watching. I too did not move, but I understood and I had no strength in me. I understood they were coming first to get me, up there on the platform. O, the report of their fury had been conveyed to me, their threat to lynch me as instigator of the strike, so calamitous now at the incipience of the war; as a paid agent of the Kaiser no doubt, or at least as a traitor. . . . And on they came. . . . But now at the front row of seats something distracted the sheriff. He halted abruptly. He yanked a big Finn to his feet, and held him at arm’s length, and clubbed him on the head. Blood gushed down the frightened, bewildered face. . . .

Until that minute I had not noticed the woman. Only men were in the chairs that night; she had been standing by herself against the rear wall. Now she howled like a hurt animal, like nothing human. A reboation, an ululation swelling in a shrill crescendo. Upon the howl I could feel terror startle through all of us. Hearts clutched, breath stopped, energy wrenched loose in a rush for escape. Over went benches and chairs as the Finns jumped to their feet. They teemed toward the main doors, pushed back the struggling deputies and the vengeful mob, but fleeing, offering no resistance. In a moment the doors were jammed so that all egress there was stopped. Then the miners turned back, and they began to run insanely, blindly, from wall to wall, five hundred of them, big men stampeded, jibbering. Above their crazy farrago lifted and sank still the howl of the woman and the curses of the mobmen roared as they beat about them with their clubs. Like water in a pan when it is tilted from side to side the struggle of tormented flesh was flung.

I saw a yellow-haired giant stand gazing dumbfounded at the door, still wedged tight. Behind him a deputy, maniac with vengeance, measured his distance, ran a few steps, and brought his cudgel down on the miner’s head. The Finns have thick skulls. The miner did but shudder a little beneath the blow, drawing his head down between his shoulders, without even looking around. Once again the deputy swung, and again the great chunk no more than winced. But now the crush of men pried from its hinges one of the big doors and it toppled, ten feet high, a weight four men would stagger under, down on the miner. It convulsed him. With his face a red smear now he leaped away, I saw him streak across the floor and crash headlong through a window of stained glass.

Convulsed now at last I too turned to flee. Why had they ignored me? I was the one man above all that they sought. But they knew me of course only as a malign name, they had never seen me. They spoke of me as the mysterious Paulus Kempf, anarchist, wobbly, traitor and spy: the man from whom little Joe Rey, with his soft dago eyes, ostensible leader of the strike, took his orders. Perhaps they never suspected that the pale, meager man, thin-whiskered and already growing bald, on the platform could be actually that dread agent of the enemy. They did not once think I would be so bold as to come openly into Ironwood and address a meeting. They had pledged themselves to hang me and I have no doubt they would have done so. But their imaginations kindled with fury pictured Paulus Kempf as a Goliath with Hohenzollern moustaches and hands dripping gore. And so five steps from me the sheriff had halted; and so now I fled. . . .

Loneliness on the mountain-top, in the chill of early spring on the Gogebic.

Under me was the rock into which I could not shrink, and over me were the empty streets from star to star that I had no wings to follow; and all around, swarming the roads of two counties, the streets of five towns, alert and quickened with rage, were my enemies. They would capture me . . . and what would it matter? I thought. For the strike was broken, another of my efforts spent, another of my dreams had withered in a crapulous awakening.

Six feet away my ledge of granite ended at a sheer drop of a hundred feet. I groped my way towards it, until at last when I put forward my hand it reached down dizzily into shadow only. There I paused, sobbing and broken. . . .

O life, eager woman, rich-veined girl that I had adored so barrenly, was it your hair that fell about me then? and did you lean yourself above me? Was the wind your kerchief, cooled in the rocky basin of the great lake, with which you rinsed my cheek and brow? Men might call it weakness, that I drew back finally from that dark brink; but I know it was strength, for all that is strong in man is desire of you.

2

Crépuscule. . . . The world whitened, drenched by the dawn with pity. From my high place I gazed to the gray north, across the hills with their wilderness of hickory and birch and the green conifers; and beyond them was Lake Superior. White it lay at daybreak, but the sun mounted over my shoulder and touched it with flashes of silver, and then I saw how blue it was. . . . How far was it? Thirty miles perhaps.

To the south of me was Ironwood, where still no doubt the sleepless mob took counsel on the curbstone and gloated over a score of prisoners in the jail, and incensed each other with promises of what would be done to me when I was caught. To the northwest was Bessemer and there the Gogebic range with its precious ore ended. I looked down on the roads between the two towns, the vermillion roads of the iron country twining over hills through the woods. Every quarter of a mile the shaft of a mine poked up, and the shacks and the bunk-houses of the miners clustered around. Along these roads I knew were patrols of vigilant militiamen.

From Bessemer to the lake, and on and on as far as I could see across the wilderness to the northeast, there were no mines. I would be safe could I reach that forest, and I could make my way through it to the lake; but there I would be alone. Deer and bear and all manner of wild things still haunted those woods, I had been told; no men were known to have settled in them. Day and night alternated over the empty littoral of the lake, and its sharp waters beat desolately on the cold pebble-strewn shingle. There would be no people. And yet, I thought, what should I do with people? The people of the world are drunk, they go about scowling, their eyes are yellow and their brows black, the avenues of the world quiver beneath the tramp of armies. The people of the world are bent on war and I have tried to balk them. Ah, God damn the people! . . .

Therefore that night I crept down the mountainside and awaited my opportunity to slink across the guarded road. I circled through the woods around the foot of the hill where Jesseville hung. When I mounted a knoll or hurried across a clearing I looked for Polaris and his beam I followed.

Phantasmal night. Terrors and shapes pursued me, loomed suddenly before me, menaced me with upraised fists; stealthy footfalls I imagined crackling in the brush on all sides of me. And across the black sky moved slow columns of ghastly bluish light, monstrous fingers they were that pointed along the hills and the roads and poked into every coign and hiding-place. They were searchlights set up at the various mines and on top the shafts, sweeping the highways in search of suspicious travellers . . . sweeping the hills in search of me. Later I learned that barriers were strung across every road on all the Gogebic, and men armed with shotguns lay in wait behind them; that word had circulated I was seeking to escape and must be captured. What hue and fever wracked the range that night I did not know, but nevertheless surmised; and I pressed on ecstatic with fear beneath the screening trees. The darkness and the loneliness of the woods terrified me too, but not so much as did the thought of noose and gallows-fire and pouring of bullets behind me.

Until finally I stumbled and fell and could not get to my feet again. I had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours. I was exhausted with physical and mental effort. For forty hours I had not slept. My senses failed me now.

3

From troubled dreams I could not recollect I wakened finally, when the sun was already high. I calculated it was nearing noon from the angle of the yellow beams that speared through the trees, almost vertical. It had rained during the night, saturating me as I slept. I was cold and shivered as I climbed to my feet, gazing around me puzzled at first on the trees of a dingle, carpeted with rotting leaves of autumns past, so thick my heels sank into them when I walked. No stir was there but the whisk of a squirrel, no sound but the vehement little clamor of birds. I groped for memory of the night, and then presently I remembered.

For a time I toiled through underbrush where there were no paths. But then I came to the edge of a road, an old corduroy road in which the weeds grew high between the decaying logs, where neither hoof nor heel had passed for a long time. I reconnoitred from the shadow, and when I saw nobody I ventured to step out into the sun.

Clouds of enormous black mosquitoes wafted out of the woods, along with the odor of wet black earth and mouldering vegetation. I tied my handkerchief around my head so that it hung down over the back of my neck; and thus they did not bother me so much. I heard a snap of twigs in a thicket, and looked, and there was a deer floating away through the wood-dusk, dun fur kindling into gold now and then when an arrow of sunlight glanced upon it. Four times after that, as I fared on through the desolate corridor of that abandoned road, I saw deer. I saw a hedgehog too waddling across the road; and once I sniffed the rank smell of a skunk and got a queer thrill of pleasure from it. . . . I think perhaps not until then did I realize suddenly that I was indeed alone. But I did not comprehend how utterly alone until one time, from the crest of a rise, I chanced to look back.

Away and away the road unfolded, walled on either side by the grave woods, until a mile distant—ten miles, a thousand years, back—it swerved aside. Not a living thing was there, except at intervals when a bird darted out from the trees on one side and sank from sight among the trees on the other. I turned and gazed far ahead of me, until the road ascended a hill and dropped beyond it. Not a living thing was there. . . . And how many decades has it been since one of my kind was here? I wondered. It was as if I had blundered into a pathway worn by the rude feet of some Gogmagog of ages past, where no man since had trod. Even as I stared I could imagine him, the tips of the hemlocks brushing his bare knees, a beast’s skin slung about his shoulder and loins, his eyes flaring in a bearded savage face. . . .

I was alone. . . .

It occurred to me that my nerves were in bad condition, for I shivered and still was warm. I was so warm with the sun on my back, pushing on northward, thrusting deeper into the wilderness, fleeing the broil and the hatefulness of men, that I took my hat from my head and threw it away into the trees. And then I fell to coughing; and when the paroxysm had passed, leaving me trembling in every muscle, it came upon me that I had a fever. I halted abruptly, but the road reeled when I stood still and so I continued. After all—the thought was as if in a far voice, ineffably slow and weary—it is merely that I am hungry. I will eat. . . . I gathered grass and munched it, walking on through the woods. I found a few early violets beside a fallen tree and ate them; and I became ill and regurgitated. . . . But I was hungry, I told myself.

My head ached, and my back and my legs. Now these—said the physician that I had onetime been, striding suddenly at my side—are the symptoms upon which one must base one’s diagnosis. It is fortunate that one is permitted to revise one’s decision before signing the death-certificate, because otherwise one would lose so much money. I will bet twenty-five dollars on Harvard, but upon Johns Hopkins I will not lay a penny; it is much too near the park. It was always too near the park, God damn it! How can a man study when it is so near the park? . . .

It is all quite clear to me even today as I write these memoirs, that maundering colloquy of a dozen me’s—the surgeon, the student, the artist, the radical, the Greenwich Villager, the youth that loved Clara in her loft above Fourteenth street, the labor leader, and always again the fugitive wandering sick and feverish through the wilderness. I remember it because it struck me even then as funny and I laughed uproariously about it. I laughed when I tried to take my own pulse and counted three-hundred and forty-nine before the minute was spent. . . .

A squirrel sat chattering on a stump by the side of the road. I threw a stone at it and struck it by freak of fortune, and knocked it quivering into the grass. Then I pounced on it and twisted the slender neck; and with my pocket knife I stripped the fur from a leg, and gnawed it. . . .

He stood above me and laughed—ah, Gogmagog himself, warden of the wilderness, tusked and fierce! He wore the sun upon his head, and before the blast of his monstrous cachinnation the trees bent low and the grass shrivelled crisp under his great bare feet. The trees and the grass swayed and swayed, the earth rocked like a ball beneath the feet of a burlesque creator; and that ceaseless roar, that was the swing and pound of the tides of all the oceans in his