28 Dec 08

Henry & Claude

Taral Wayne

Claude Degler is of course the iconic model of what fans should not become. He was instantly recognized for what he was in his own day, but because Claude was so much further out than "over the top" he earned a place in history. There had always been minor characters of his type. They are as old as SF fandom, if not as old as Man. And there continued to be types like Claude long after the Cosmic Circle was revealed as a sham. But in making his mark on fandom he remains the most successful of all our most colourful kooks… if successful is the right word.

Henry Argasinski, on the other hand was a purely local phenomenon. Keep in mind that the Toronto fandom of the 1970’s was a similarly large and diverse a body, perhaps, as SF fandom was in 1944. His inferiority to the legend of Claude Degler then is not just a matter of numbers, nor a matter of quality even. Once a myth has been created, though, it cannot be supplanted easily. Claude was the myth, Henry can only be compared as an also-ran, and that is his ultimate downfall as a legend. If Claude was the Shakespeare of clowns, Henry was only the comic-laureate of Herzegovina.

Mike Glicksohn taught math at Humberside Collegiate in those days, and Henry was one of his students. I think Mike sponsored Henry’s school SF club. For whatever reason, he pointed Henry in the direction of the Ontario SF Club (OSFiC). Initially I tried to encourage Henry in positive ways. He imitated the newszine I was publishing for the club at that time. Flattering at first, his attention to detail became annoying. If I broke up text with lines of ////// or ++++, so would Henry. He copied my digest covers and full page insides. Even the style of editorial comment, and my way of organizing content came in for imitation. But he would have had few other models, I told myself. I contributed a few drawings to Henry’s zine-of-various-titles, and some short bits of writing as well. (This included fanzine reviews meant as a broad hint.) I also ran a bit of Henry's stuff in the club monthly. For his age, seventeen or eighteen I think, his writing was simultaneously precocious and juvenile. But there might have been potential there that was worth drawing out. After a few months, it was evident that there wasn't.

Among other signs that not all was well was that Henry would change the title of his zine, but essentially publish the same material over and over. His imitations of other club members grew into something rather unsettling. It was as if he had no ideas of his own, but was determined to out-do those who did have them. He invented an artificial language that could not be understood because the meaning of words depended on ever larger contexts, ad infinitum, so that a sentence was never actually finished. Particularly disturbing was his imaginary world, which was populated by one "supermind," with a gigantic brain the size of a pumpkin, and a race of mindless slaves. His super-brain alter ego evidently lived alone in an stone castle, sat on his throne, and supervised the lives of every other being on the planet. I suppose it was about then that I decided enough was enough. I began to cultivate his instinct for self-destruction instead.

That Henry was a nuisance goes without saying. But he was tolerated at first, because none of us were perfect... few of us would call ourselves even normal. But Henry was an order of magnitude less well adjusted. He was a distraction at best and a concern at worst. Now, at the time, I was only marginally adjusted myself. Ten years later, I would just have kept my distance and pitied Henry. But in my early 20's I was quite a lot more proactive, but far less foresighted than later. I had been reading heavily about past fan history, and in particular the story of Claude Degler was on my mind. The match was perfect. I sent Henry his first letter from "Claude" through a mail drop in Ohio. Rather than use my own, identifiable typewriter, the letters were composed on Victoria Vayne’s Selectric. Posing as Claude Degler, I claimed that Henry's own small "cosmic circle" had come to my attention. Not only was Henry an obvious "slan", but his own organization looked as though it were an ideal candidate for a merger. I not only held out membership in the parent organization, the original Cosmic Circle, but equity! In subsequent letters I outlined plans for in-breeding desirable genes, for political takeovers, for collectivist communities of telepathic fans, etc. All right out of the 1944 book, so to speak. I began to drop hints that Degler was aware of OSFiC as well, but regarded it as an unimportant and obsolete sort of fan body that would fall by the wayside. Henry ate it up, and began making broad allusions to his future importance around the club. His zines and other miscellaneous manifestos proclaimed his connection with the CC. Things had gone far enough, in other words, and one way or the other the hoax had to be brought to a stop.

We might have done it gently, or we might have done what any bunch of insensitive, brash, cliquish young pseudo-intellectuals would do. I don't think I need to ask you to guess. You probably know which way we took. How much of the subsequent event was premeditated I don't recall, but it could hardly have been planned to crush a liberated if misguided spirit more cruelly. During the club's summer Toronto Islands picnic, we produced all the carbons of "Claude's" letters, told Henry who the Ohio address really belonged to, explained how everything about the Cosmic Circle had been taken from a book written years earlier, and revealed that Claude Degler himself had disappeared decades ago, and never been seen since. You wouldn't think a 17 year old kid laughing hysterically for 20 or so unbroken minutes, would be quite as unsettling as it was... And like the humanitarian super-brains we were, we picked him up bodily and threw him in the lake to cool him off. It was the perfect end to a perfect afternoon, and a perfect hoax.

It wasn't the end of Henry Argasinski, nor our encounters with him. He formed his own high school club, with about three other members. One, with a knife fetish, was nearly as disturbing as Henry (but seems to have straightened out in later years). Henry continued to publish his little fanzines with the same contents from issue to issue. I was finally forced to cram him against a wall, and threaten to knock his teeth out, if he ever used any of my old contributions again -- and that seemed to work. Finally, perhaps as an act of revenge, or maybe just a projection of his sense of importance, Henry ran for mayor of Toronto. Indeed people did vote for him. I don't know about second place, but he came in above the bottom of the ballot. Doubtless he'd learned enough not to mention anything about mind-control, or communities of supermen to the voting public.

By now he'd be a middle-aged man, likely taking a lengthy prescription of mood modifying drugs, and might well be a respected member of your school board or riding association. It's food for thought.

For those of you interested in SF fan history, quite a lot has been written on the subject. The basic texts are Harry Warner Jr. "All Our Yesterdays", and "A Wealth of Fable", which were published by Advent Publishing from Chicago, and the SCIFI Press out of Van Nuys. (The last is badly named as hard core SF fans despise the term "sci-fi" for science fiction.) Numerous other articles, series, columns, and personal reminiscences have been written over the years, but most are only to be found in the fannish press -- i.e. mimeographed, xeroxed, or offset in loose sheets in runs of a few hundred at most. Of course, many of the people who made fan history are alive and willing to talk you to sleep, telling their stories.

Tiki: No, there's only one of me as far as I know. And I'm the one that urged poor Henry into his most brilliant act of madness, and that sort of narrows it down... On the other hand I do know a local fan who's nickname was Tiki, who is certainly someone else. 


-- Taral Wayne, Parkdale, Toronto, 28 Dec 08