“LOGAN CLENDENING:

CANONIZING AN IRREGULAR SAINT”

published originally in the Baker Street Journal, December 1992.


We Baker Street Irregulars possess more than a few religious parallels in our structure and lore. For example, Sherlockiana’s beginning is a 1912 parody of contemporary biblical exegesis by Ronald A. (later Monsignor) Knox; and in calling Sherlock Holmes the Master, one need not subscribe to the blasphemies of Samuel Rosenberg, or his heretical adherents, to admit that we refer not only to Holmes’s masterful accomplishments but also to the death-and-resurrection theme in the Sacred Writings.


    Etc., etc. I need not go on, except to point out one more parallel, and that is that we have our own communion of Saints. Chief among them are Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Edgar W. Smith; others figure in the second and third ranks. But, like the Church, the BSI sometimes overlooks a candidate for canonization for many years. Such as been the fate of Logan Clendening of Kansas City, Missouri, a physician who contributed to our literature in its early days, was a friend and benefactor of Vincent Starrett, and in many ways personified the sort of man we think of as an Old Irregular. He even looked the way an Old Irregular should. But he was passed over, my suspicion being that he fell afoul of the Great Morley-Woollcott Schism, was cast into darkness, as far as the BSI’s founder was concerned, and died while Morley’s writ was still in full effect.


    This historian, wishing to rehabilitate Logan Clendening, now presents the basic case for Irregular Sainthood, nearly fifty years after the good man’s death.


Dr. Clendening died in 1945, but mention his name to Kansas Citians even today, and some will remember him — usually for his idiosyncrasies. He was a superb raconteur, a bon vivant and practical joker, an inveterate party-giver and party-goer, altogether one of the most memorable characters in Kansas City’s
history. As a Sherlockian, he was known to the small circle of Baker Street Irregulars of his day, his repute primarily due to a parody that he wrote in 1934. But Clendening was also an eminent physician with a national following as a medical writer. He wrote a good number of popular works on medicine, plus a lively syndicated column, “Diet and Health,” that was carried by nearly 400 U.S. newspapers. And he was always good copy himself.


   Born May 25, 1884, in Kansas City, Clendening received his M.D. from the University of Kansas in 1907. He began a private practice and later became a Professor of Clinical Medicine at KU, where he also founded a Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine. In 1927, at the behest of H. L. Mencken, who wanted a comprehensive book about health and medicine for the layman, Clendening wrote The Human Body, a bestseller which remained in print through successive editions for many years. Its success encouraged him to give up private practice for writing and journalism, though he continued to teach to the end.


    Prior to knowing Vincent Starrett, Clendening pursued his love of Sherlock Holmes alone. In his 1936 book A Handbook on Pickwick Papers, he recalled his first visit to London: “When I first went to England, in 1911, all my appreciation of it became suddenly vitalized. Here was the frame from which that glorious picture of adventure had been plucked. I walked the streets of London, with its strange customs and unfamiliar speech, and despite those embarrassments felt that I had come to the city of my heart. There Macauley had lived at the Albany, there was Gaunt House, town residence of the Marquis of Steyne, out yonder was the garden where Keats heard the nightingale, and round the corner was something much better than prosperity — Baker Street and the lodgings of Sherlock Holmes.”


    Clendening’s initial contact with Vincent Starrett was a letter of appreciation for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. “I am an old Sherlockian,” Clendening wrote Starrett on December 7, 1933, “and enjoy every reference.” Shortly thereafter, their budding acquaintance developed through an incident related in Starrett’s auto- biography Born in a Bookshop “a Sherlock Holmes hoax perpetrated by [pulp writer] Harry Bedford-Jones. That incorrigible spoofer had invented a number of the singular adventures that Dr. Watson had mentioned only in passing, and had sent them to Woollcott with an ingenious cock-and-bull story purporting to explain how they came to be in his custody. Woollcott, considerably excited, thereupon wrote to Clendening suggesting that he put the matter up to his friend Starrett, and see what he thought.”


    Clendening and Woollcott had been boyhood friends in Kansas City. When the first BSI annual dinner was called for December 7, 1934, Starrett invited Clendening to come and fatefully invited Woollcott — definitely not Chris Morley’s favorite person — as well. As far as Morley and his friends were concerned, Woollcott crashed the dinner, cut many of them dead, monopolized William Gillette’s attention, and stole Bill Hail’s deerstalker hat. And then he had the nerve to write a notorious account of the evening for The New Yorker.


    In it, Woollcott mentioned his friend Clendening. Alluding to the possibility that he and Starrett were being followed, as they rode from Woollcott’s apartment to Christ Cella’s restaurant in a hansom cab, Woollcott may have condemned Clendening by guilt through association:


This baseless apprehension was born of a letter from a medico in Kansas City, warning me that my hansom cab would be trailed through the night by a heavily veiled lady in a four-wheeler. But if Dr. Clendening failed to arrive, heavily veiled or otherwise, the faithful were out in full force. . . .


We do not know why Clendening failed to attend that historic dinner. He had certainly planned to be there. A few weeks before, on November 20, 1934, he had written to Starrett:


Dear Starrett:

When you and Dr. Watson get in that hansom on December 7, look out for a veiled lady who will hail a hansom right behind yours and instruct the driver to keep your hansom in sight. No, you are wrong, when you search the pursuing hansom you will not find that the veiled lady has disappeared and that Professor Moriarty has taken her place. I warn you not to search the hansom unless you are properly armed.

    I have written to Woollcott suggesting that we have one woman, Irene Adler — who is the only woman there was — at the dinner, and nominate Miss Katherine Cornell to play the part. I have provided for a hound of the Baskervilles so you don’t have to worry about that part of it. But shouldn’t we have goose in which each one will find a blue carbuncle?

    Is the menu to be illustrated? I hope so.


Clearly a kinsprit (if only Clendening were not, in Morley’s eyes, associated with the egregious and unforgivable Woollcott).


    Others appreciated him more. Earlier that year, Clendening had written what for those days was a slightly risque little parody, which Starrett arranged to be privately printed by his friend Edwin B. Hill of Ysleta, Texas. “The Case of the Missing Patriarchs” introduced Clendening to the wider Sherlockian world — still a very small one in those early days, for thirty copies of his parody sufficed to satisfy the Sherlockian demand of that day. Even so, Clendening was pleased: “Dear Starrett,” he wrote, “I was as excited about the very rare and difficult item as if it was the first thing of my own I had ever seen in print.” It has since been reprinted over a dozen times, and was the only item included in both Ellery Queen’s The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar W. Smith’s Profile by Gaslight. Queen called it “one of the shortest and cleverest pastiches of Sherlock Holmes ever conceived,” and Smith, calling it a classic piece, suggested that it might also have been entitled “The Navel Treatise.”


    Humor came easily to Logan Clendening. Once asked why he had quit private practice, he replied: “My boy, about this country are several headstones marking my progress in the operating field. I desisted, I may say, almost by universal acclaim.” And he applied his sense of humor to teaching and writing. “Even when imparting information,” one of his successors as chairman of medical history at KU remem-bered, “Clendening was entertaining — purely and simply entertaining.” That style, in person and in print, was projected easily by a strong, witty, opinionated, colorful personality that attracted people’s attention and held their interest. William Reddig’s history of Kansas City during the reign of Boss Pendergast, Tom’s Town, called Clendening “a man of civilized pursuits, opposed to athletics, politics and anything else that interfered with eating, drinking and laughter. . . . As a columnist, Dr. Clendening was primarily concerned with man’s wonderful capacity to enjoy good food, and he devoted more attention to the nuances of the burp and the marvels of the alimentary canal than he did to the latest medical discoveries.”


    In February 1939, Clendening burst into headlines from coast to coast one bright and frosty afternoon in an incident that put him briefly in jail. For months his writing had been disturbed by the incessant pounding of a WPA jackhammer on the street below his home. Appeals to bureaucracy did no good. Finally Clendening did the sort of thing that we all yearn to do when driven to the limits of exasperation by mindless provocation. He strode out of his house — having dressed for the photographers who were sure to flock “in a splendid Homburg, a boutonniere, gloves, and neatly folded pocket handkerchief” — produced a rusty axe, and chopped the offending jack-hammer’s air compressor into submission.


    (Clendening never could resist an opportunity for a practical joke. Once he found himself in a French village milling with reporters in pursuit of Edward VIII and Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Reversing his collar, and feigning an English accent, he passed himself off as a clergyman summoned to marry the King to the notorious divorcee. Another time, when giving an Arabian Nights party at a Kansas City country club, he had several truckloads of sand dumped onto the ballroom floor without bothering to consult the club authorities beforehand.)


    While Clendening wrote primarily on medicine, he was a serious literary scholar as well. He celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of A Study in Scarlet in an essay offering his “Personal Recollections of Sherlock Holmes,” in the Winter 1937 University Review from the University of Kansas City. It combined bold opinion with faithful attention to the Higher Scholarship, including detailed consideration of chronological problems in the Canon. In it, Clendening, a man who worshipped Dickens, Thackery, and other writers taken seriously by Academia, threw down his gauntlet for Conan Doyle in words that bring his voice to life for us:


One of the most curious things about Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle was that he always considered himself an inferior writer. He admired vastly such novelists as Hardy, Meredith, Mrs. Humphrey Ward and J. H. Shorthouse, whose dreadful novel John Inglesant fluttered women’s clubs from Cam-bridge to Wichita. He yearned to give the world the results of a sober analysis of its woes, to write something fraught with that sense of doom which always seems to mark the attitude of the superior man. Of course, he was far superior to all of them, not only because he was more original and a better narrator, but because his style had more sparkle; he had more wit in one page than Mrs. Humphrey Ward packed into all those pseudo-profound books that are now lying around second-hand stores, and I hope only around second-hand stores. He had even, I think, more profundity. He had more message. If there is any human being now alive who has ever read one of Thomas Hardy’s books twice, unless it is a Professor of English Literature in some dreadful denominational college or a senior sweating for his projected master’s degree, I would like to know who it is. In other words, I would like to know anybody who has ever read any of Thomas Hardy’s novels twice, for pleasure. For any applicant for this post, I could name three hundred people who have read all of the saga of Sherlock Holmes four times, and that seems to me to be the real test of a writer.


    Clendening brought missionary zeal to the cause of literature and good living. “Kansas City would like to be a great industrial center,” he once snorted: “I’d prefer to see it with lots of continental cafés.” He contributed to the civic ambiance of his preference by presiding over a local version of his friend Woollcott’s Algonquin Round-Table. Composed of literary-minded physicians (minding the psychiatrist Karl Menninger), businessmen, and journalists, it met weekly at the University Club for competitive discussion and sharply-barbed repartee. One member, a young writer who would become a local institution in the Kansas City Star, was invited after Clendening read one of his theater reviews in 1929. For four meetings, Landon Laird recalled, he was too intimidated to utter a word, until forced to in self-defense when Clendening directed a baleful glare at him: “Gentlemen, I told you I imagined our newcomer — that oaf over there — was a dull fellow, and, as usual, Dr. Clendening’s analysis of mankind has been correct. However, if the said newcomer doesn’t say something at our next session, we shall throw him out of the nearest window.”


    Clendening, Laird said, made the weekly discussions of literature and theater come alive: “The men who knew Clendening revered him, not so much as the medical man who had a facility of speech but as the Kansas Citian who delighted them in their meetings as the happy-go-lucky speaker on Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist. He truly knew Dickens. For that matter, he truly knew Trollope, Sterne, Goldsmith, and a dozen other writers physicians remember by name, but not by content.”


    Clendening was also a literary traveller, and his Handbook on Pickwick Papers came about through circumstances that robbed Sherlockiana of a classic collaboration. Sometime around 1935, Clendening, Starrett, and Woollcott conceived a trip to England the following summer that would take the formidable trio in the footsteps of both Mr. Pickwick and Sherlock Holmes. “The scheme had been inspiredly broached one afternoon when we foregathered at Mr. Woollcott’s famous apartment, Wit’s End,” Clendening said. Why both characters? Because “only Sherlock Holmes shares Mr. Pickwick’s popularity. Only about Pickwick and Sherlock Holmes do people talk as if the characters and places were real.” Clendening would pursue Pickwick, Starrett Holmes, and Woollcott would add spice to the fare, sweeping unseemly hoi polloi out of their way with his steely glare and caustic tongue.


    “Together we were to compile a volume of Sherlockiana and Pickwickiana,” Starrett recalled in Born in a Bookshop, “that would be forever the standard work for literary tourists of the future.” But when the time came for the trip to England, Starrett had left for China as the Chicago Tribune correspondent,* and Woollcott was tied down by his new Town Crier radio series. Clendening, going alone and concentrating on Pickwick, lamented the absence of his friends. “Mr. Woollcott’s addiction to Dickens has been incorporated in many of his eternally delightful writings,” he wrote, “and Mr. Starrett, besides being the eminent biographer of Sherlock Holmes, is a Droodian of the deepest dye, whose complete collection of solutions of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is to be the basis for a, to me, long awaited definitive Sherlockian analysis of the matter.”


        Clendening liked to collect books almost as much as read them. But while he loved the finer points of bibliography and bookmaking, he was no snob as a bibliophile. His Handbook on Pickwick Papers declared: “If you really crave a Pickwick in parts, there is the Lombard Street edition, in which each part has been reproduced as issued; and they look and read like the originals. For all practical purposes they are as good as the originals. And I can feel the shiver of horror that runs through the Grolier Club as I pen these lines.” His most extensive collection was medical in nature, eventually reaching some 10,000 volumes and containing rarities like Harvey’s original treatise on the circulation of the blood. But he collected in purely literary areas as well. In 1938 the Kansas City Star described his literary collections, kept in a downtown office dedicated purely to his literary interests and research: Dickens, of course; Shakespeareana, especially the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, on which he wrote in The Colophon; Sherlock Holmes (“not only his adventures, but psychological, clinical analysis of Conan Doyle’s immortal character”); works on witchcraft and demonology; Mencken’s and Ernest Hemingway’s books, all inscribed to Clendening; and on and on.


    Clendening never attended a BSI dinner. Whether he was ever invited again, only the BSI’s late Buttons, Edgar Smith, could tell us. But his love for Holmes never flagged. When Starrett sent him a copy of his leaflet Two Sonnets in 1942, containing the immortal “221B,” Clendening wrote back at Christmas-time: “It certainly was nice to hear from you and know that you are still wooing the Muse in behalf of the immortal pair. On the strength of your sonnets I got out the ‘Study in Scarlet’ and read it through from cover to cover and can testify that it is almost as fresh as the first day I ever read it.”


    By that time, Starrett was building his second Sherlock Holmes collection. He had been forced by circumstances to sell his first one in 1940, an act he bitterly regretted, but his new collection got off to a running start thanks to Clendening. Starrett told the remarkable story in Born in a Bookshop:


Once more when financial disaster threatened, I was obliged to sell some of my books. I had brought together perhaps the finest collection of Sherlockiana in the world, which I prized above gold arid rubies; but when the rub came it had to go. I was pretty sick about this catastrophe and, for a time, I thought I would never collect books again. Then a beautiful thing happened. My loss had been well publicized by the appearance of Scribner’s fine catalogue of my collection, and one other collector at least knew how I was feeling about it. Inspired by my enthusiasm, Clendening had been making a Sherlock Holmes collection of his own; and one day I received a letter from him. It was a casual sort of letter. “My dear boy,” it said in effect, “I find that I am not getting as much fun out of my Holmes collection as I had anticipated. I have too many other hobbies to do justice to this one. I hear that you have just parted with your own collection, and I think you ought to start another. Why not start with mine? It is small but goodish — it contains a number of the better pieces that you might have difficulty duplicating — and I am boxing it up this afternoon and getting it off to you tomorrow morning. You will really take a load off my mind if you will accept it.”


“The box,” Starrett concluded, “contained some twenty of the most desirable items in the field, including the desperately rare first printing of A Study in Scarlet. It was the nucleus of a new collection and, touched and overwhelmed by the gift, I began upon it at once. It was unnecessary to underscore the generosity of the gift or of the doctor’s fellow feeling. I suppose no finer thing ever was done for one collector by another.”



Logan Clendening died on January 31, 1945, and by his own hand. In the small dark hours of the morning, he cut his throat. “Not the easy, anesthetic way” available to him as a physician, the Kansas City Times observed: “He chose the hard and cool way out, the knife blade.” Sixty years old now, he was disturbed by his failing health, and depressed by the terrible turn that he had seen the world take in those war-torn years.


    “It is hard for those who knew him to realize that the blithe spirit that was Logan Clendening is gone,” the Star pondered. “No one could have enjoyed life more than he. Few have contributed more to make life sparkle for others in conversation and writing.” But as a doctor, Clendening had had a realistic, even cynical view of mortality, writing in The Human Body that “you may be perfectly sure that if you live long enough you will grow old, you will be unbeautiful and unattractive, and that surely death will come. When it comes, you may be certain you will disappear like all the rest and that you will not be missed nearly as much as even in your least sanguine moments you have been inclined to suppose.”


    “I am like the old Frenchman who said, ‘La vie est triste. J’lai lu tout les livres,’”  he wrote to a friend eleven days before his suicide: “I too have read all the books and written all I am ever going to.” Clendening was not a man to proclaim a philosophy but fail to act according to its dictates. But he was wrong about his not being missed. “It seems difficult to think of Logan as gone,” Landon Laird wrote in the Kansas City Times. “The happier imagination is that he is just around the corner, waiting to greet one with his hearty laugh and his offer of ‘Let me show you the sights around here.’” And Vincent Starrett, years later, pronounced the final word on the subject: “Logan Clendening was one of the finest human beings I ever knew.”


    For us, today, the example of Logan Clendening sets a high standard, one of wit, humor, scholarship, fellowship, and of exuberant sodality — very much the whiskey-and-sodality that Christopher Morley boasted of — exactly the qualities we need to preserve the best of the early BSI’s spirit forever.



* A misunderstanding on my part at the time: while Starrett was long absent from Chicago at the time, spending the better part of a year or so in the Far East, he did not go as a correspondent for the Tribune.



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