Hunter Taylor Stagg, a bon vivant of exquisite taste but few resources, occupied a niche of his own in Richmond’s rising cultural scene in the 1920s.
Hunter Stagg fields customer queries with a smile at The District Bookshop in Washington, D.C., where he worked before his death in 1960. (Photo courtesy Susannah Mitchell)
His status as co-founder of the influential but short-lived literary journal The Reviewer put him in the orbit of the satirical fabulist James Branch Cabell and the genre-breaking Ellen Glasgow. Through Cabell, he made connections to members of New York’s cultural life, especially writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten.
An acquaintance, H.H. Cooper, reminisced about Stagg’s incandescent youth: “In those days, the Reviewer flourished, and Hunter was a leading writer about new books. Self-taught, epileptic, bisexual, alcoholic, handsome in the romantic dark Southern style: even Ellen Glasgow said he was charming. At Christmastime, Cabell emotionally thrusts a hundred-dollar bill upon him.”
He came into the world on May 29, 1895, the youngest son of Thomas E. and Sarah Stagg. His boyhood home, 912 W. Franklin St., is today the controller’s office at Virginia Commonwealth University.
At age 7, a horse-drawn carriage knocked him down as he played in front of his house. A horse crushed Stagg’s head.
“And that’s kind of where Hunter’s problems start,” explains Ray Bonis, a historian and contributor to the local blog The Shockoe Examiner. “To relieve pressure on his brain, the physicians cut a hole in his head. The procedure is called trepanning. The operation saved his life but also caused occasional epileptic seizures. And to control those, he took phenobarbital, which gave him terrible depression, and to ease that, he drank to the extent of alcoholism, which eventually came between him and longtime friends.”
During the 1920s, Stagg fell in among a circle of 20-something word-passionate misfits, from good families but awkward in Richmond’s polite society, he the single man amid the three women co-founders of the Richmond Reviewer. One, Emily Clark, wondered rhetorically, “Was there ever a more unlikely group?” The Reviewer came from the efforts of the “insanely gallant or gallantly insane” quartet of editors.
The Reviewer began out of conversations during a 1920 party at the 1510 West Avenue home of Helen Lefroy Caperton. Clark and company sought a rebuke to Baltimore’s literary lion H.L. Mencken’s sweeping charge in 1917 that the South produced nothing worth reading (except, he thought, Cabell). He called the region, “the Sahara of the Bozart.” Cabell, who agreed to guide the Reviewer’s team, in his reminisces considered the journal’s creation as “miracle or art or accident.”
“The Richmond literary whirl was small,” Bonis observes. “They all more or less knew each other, and The Reviewer was their clubhouse.”
Stagg, Clark, Margaret Waller Freeman (ultimately the second Mrs. Cabell) and Mary Dallas Street (who “made little secret of her homosexuality,” per the quarterly Virginia Cavalcade) refused most efforts to bankroll the publication, fearing loss of control, while recruiting a constellation of writers who contributed for no pay. The roster included Gertrude Stein, British novelist John “The Forsyte Saga” Galsworthy, poet Amie Lowell, and even the English proponent of “magick,” Aleister Crowley.
The Reviewer attracted some 1,200 subscribers, the majority from out of state. The effort of publishing a monthly arts journal with little more than pluck — plus Clark’s marriage to Philadelphia explorer and author Edwin Swift Balch — drained the upstart spirit. The publication went to Paul Green, the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, playwright of “The Common Glory” and “The Lost Colony.” Green, however, needed time for his own writing. The Reviewer folded into the Southwest Review and ceased in October 1924.
On Nov. 19, 1926, Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes visited Richmond to speak in the chapel of Virginia Union University; it was his first journey to the South.
Through New York’s Van Vechten, Stagg arranged an intimate reception at his residence at 2301 Park Ave. in Richmond, devising a cocktail to help ease any tensions in the deeply segregated city. The potent potable, named Hard Daddy after a Hughes poem, consisted of whiskey, lemon juice and maple syrup over ice.
A portrait of Stagg by artist Berkeley Williams Jr. (Image courtesy Richmond Public Library)
In a Dec. 1, 1926, thank-you letter to Stagg, Hughes described the gathering as a “perfectly delightful little party, very New Yorkish and jolly. … Richmond was certainly good to me.” He recalled later how “the cocktail shaker was never empty. … Not a soul refused to shake hands with me and we all had too good a time! And nobody choked in the traditional Southern manner when the anchovies and crackers went ’round because they were eating with a Negro. And after three ‘Hard Daddys,’ all the glasses got mixed up.”
Stagg took pleasure in the afterglow: “If Thursday evening in my library can by any stretch of imagination be called a party, it should go down in history as the first purely social affair given by a white for a Negro in the Ancient and Honorable Commonwealth of Virginia.”
Hughes later said that “[Stagg] is a beautiful and entertaining person who ought to draw a salary for just being alive.”
In his Richmond News Leader literary column “Galley Sheets In The Wind” of March 21, 1927, Stagg emphasized Hughes’ work “as the authentic artistic expression of something in human nature, we are not quite prepared to say what, only that we are sure it is something very real.”
Then, what appeared to be a career on the rise went in another direction. After the 1924 demise of the Reviewer, Stagg had taken his wit to both the morning Richmond Times-Dispatch and evening News-Leader, but most of the books he wrote about are little known today. Cabell and Van Vechten also expected Stagg to produce a novel, but it never materialized.
Cooper recounts a Richmond social affair on Feb. 6, 1935, where an acquaintance, Lucy Tilson Cary, exclaimed to Stagg, “Oh, dear, I always think of you as a beautiful boy of 20.”
He responded dryly: “And the awful thing is, Lucy, I do, too.”
He instead traveled some and kept voluminous correspondence with an assortment of friends. His letters, housed at the VCU Cabell Library’s Special Collections and Archives, both typed and legibly handwritten, are often gossipy and witty, alternatively joyful and despondent.
With the advent of the Great Depression and mounting health issues, Stagg moved to Washington, D.C., to live with the family of his sister Helen. Her 1948 death led him to live in a series of rented rooms between stints at psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeth’s. He kept up appearances and managed The District Bookshop for collectible titles.
A photo of Stagg that includes a note to an unknown friend on the back (Images courtesy VCU Special Collections)
“I am a cheerful old ghost, though,” he wrote in correspondence on Jan. 29, 1951, “who finds life a pretty amusing affair. This is because I have an incurable interest in people and books.”
To alleviate his financial difficulties, in 1954 he auctioned a portion of his rare books collection.
In December 1960, the 65-year-old Stagg was found in a Washington street, unable to speak or move. He was taken to St. Elizabeth’s, where he died on the 23rd.
Cornelia Howard, a former Richmonder then living in Los Angeles, wrote to H.H. Cooper about Stagg’s death. She was amazed he’d lived so long.
“He was really much nicer than a lot of people gave him credit for,” reflected Howard. “Often sweet and helpful to people though he was helpless himself.”
His grave at Hollywood Cemetery went unmarked until July 2007. Cabell biographer Edgar MacDonald and Charles Saunders, the former director of library services at the Times-Dispatch, provided a headstone. The epitaph they chose is attributed to the obscure third-century B.C. author Theodoridas of Syracuse:
A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this shore,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when he was lost,
Weathered the gale.
