Kenneth Morris and the Problem of Pseudonyms

Kenneth Morris left no bibliography of his writings, which were published in a large number of theosophical magazines from the mid-1890s on past Morris's death in 1937 and into the 1940s. The making of such a bibliography is greatly complicated by Morris's use of pseudonyms, which he used on his fiction as well as on his poetry and other writings. Some of the pseudonyms are easily decipherable as variations on his name or initials. His earliest writings were signed as by “Ceinydd Morus”—a Welsh form of his name.  Later this became “Cenydd Morus.”  Also he used the initials C.M. [on poetry], and K.V.M.—the V. standing for his middle name, Vennor. Otherwise he used a number of pseudonyms, listed alphabetically below. At least one is decipherable:  C. ApArthur can be decoded as C [for Cenydd]  Ap [Welsh “son of”] Arthur [Kenneth’s father’s name]. The name “Quintus Reynolds” appeared on early work (mostly poetry or essays) and then reappeared nearly two decades later on fiction.

In the 1940s, the first attempt at noting all of Morris's stories was made by George Simpson, who collected some twenty-six stories. Simpson was doubtless aided by the fact of Morris's 1926 collection, The Secret Mountain and Other Tales, which contains ten stories, most of which previously appeared under various pseudonyms. But Simpson's compilation was by no means comprehensive, and it includes four items that may or may not have been by Morris. Three were bylined “Stanley Fitzpatrick”—but Stanley Fitzpatrick was an actual person whom Morris knew at Point Loma, an elderly woman, who rarely published anything, and who died in her eighties at Point Loma in 1928.  Might she have broken her decades of publishing silence in 1914-1918 to publish three rather Morrisian short stories that George Simpson thought were by Morris? Or might Morris have had a hand in encouraging her or in influencing her by his example?  The truth is probably unrecoverable.  But if one accepts the three short stories as by Morris, then one must also accept the serialized sixteen-chapter theosophical novel published under the same name during the same time period. I will discuss the Stanley Fitzpatrick stories in detail in the future, but for the present, their existence exemplifies some of the difficulties in ascribing any pseudonymous writings to Morris. It is also worth noting that there are a large number of mythological and fantasy stories in these theosophical magazines for the decades in which Morris contributed his stories. Some of these stories are anonymous, or signed with initials (that may or may not be identifiable with other members of the Point Loma theosophical community). It is problematic to attribute many of them to Morris.

Kenneth J. Zahorsky and Robert H. Boyer published a much fuller Morris bibliography in 1981, but there were still a good number of theosophical magazines that they hadn't been able to examine. And since then I have built upon their work, and added considerably to the Morris bibliography by examining these rare magazines. A number of early Morris stories were revealed and reprinted in The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris (1995), and since then I have found four additional stories that I feel certain were authored by Kenneth Morris, one even being under his own name.


Kenneth Morris's known pseudonyms (used on fiction only):

C. ApArthur. [Three instances, 1915-1917]  C [for Cenydd]  Ap [Welsh “son of”] Arthur [Kenneth’s
               father’s name]
Walshingham Arthur [1929]
Aubrey Tyndall Bloggsleigh [1919]
Floyd C. Egbert [Two instances 1917-1918]
F. McHugh Hilman [1916]
Ambrosius Kesteven [1919]
Maurice Langran [1917]
Fortescue Lanyard [1917]
Vernon Lloyd-Griffiths [1917]
K.V.M.  [Three instances 1899-1921]
Hankin Maggs [1916]
Jefferson D. Malvern [1916]
Patton H. Miffkin [1918]
Bingham T. Molyneux [1930]
Sergius Mompesson [1915]
Kenneth Morris [Eight instances, 1922-1933]
Ceinydd Morus [Six instances 1899-1902]
Cenydd Morus [Three instances 1914-1917]
Even Gregson Mortimer [1917]
Ephraim Soulsby Paton [1915]
Quintus Reynolds [Two instances 1915]
Evan Snowdon [1917]
Wentworth Tompkins [1916] 
Thomson J. Wildredge [1915]