Her Letters To Lovecraft: Ida C. Haughton

The Woodbee for October is edited by Mrs. Ida C. Haughton, and though not of large size, does credit both to her and to the Columbus club.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur (Mar 1917), Collected Essays 1.145

Ida Clara Cochran was born 22 July 1860 in Ohio, the first child of Samuel and Caroline Cochran. She had, apparently, little formal education. On 11 April 1883 she married Edwin S. Haughton. On 14 October 1887, their only child, Edna M. Haughton, was born. She was born, lived, and died in Ohio; and if she had any profession other than housewife it is not denoted on the federal census. Yet Ida C. Haughton had a considerable involvement in amateur journalism, one that brought her into contact—and conflict—with H. P. Lovecraft.

Organized amateur journalism in the United States began during the 19th century, when industrialization made amateur printing more feasible for individuals. There were several levels of organization, from small local groups like the Blue Pencil Club in New York City to larger regional groups like the Eastern Amateur Press Association, the New England Amateur Journalists Association, etc., and finally the national-level organizations: the National Amateur Press Association and the United Amateur Press Association—the latter of which was especially prone to faction, and by the time Lovecraft joined in 1914, had effectively split into two groups (the United Amateur Press Association with Lovecraft and Haughton, and the United Amateur Press Association of America with Elsie Gidlow). Various levels of organization were combined; so that for example the Blue Pencil Club was largely aligned with the NAPA and shared considerable overlap in membership, and the Woodbees Club in Ohio was wholly affiliated with the UAPA.

Ida C. Haughton was a member of the Woodbees and the UAPA. While it isn’t clear exactly when she joined, Lovecraft begins to mention her in his review column in the United Amateur (official organ of the UAPA) in 1915. There is, at this early date, no sign of animosity; while Lovecraft criticizes her poetry somewhat for perceived technical irregularities, his criticism is always balanced with praise, e.g.:

“Dead Men Tell No Tales”, a short story by Ida Cochran Haughton, is a ghastly and gruesome anecdote of the untenanted clay; related by a village dressmaker. The author reveals much comprehension of rural psychology in her handling of the theme; an incident which might easily shake the reason of a sensitive and imaginative person, merely “unnerves” the two quaint and prim maiden ladies. Poe would have made of this tale a thing to gasp and tremble at; Mrs. Haughton, with the same material, constructs genuine though grim comedy!
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur (May 1917), Collected Essays 1.154

Little of Haughton’s work has been reprinted (notably, a convention report from 1920), so we have largely only Lovecraft’s reviews to judge, but she seems to have been fairly prolific in poetry, short fiction, sketches, short essays, and involved with editing of the Woodbee and sometimes her own amateur journals. Ida C. Haughton was noted for her devotion to her family and genealogy, having published a book Chronicles of the Cochrans (1915), which includes an autobiographical portion, and was involved with family reunions and an organization of Cochran descendants. Her daughter Edna M. Haughton, a schoolteacher, was also a member of the UAPA and the Woodbees, and there are indications that Ida recruited other relatives for amateur journalism as well:

The Woodbee for October is a magazine of wonderful merit, reflecting the sound scholarship of its gifted editor, Mrs. Ida Cochran Haughton. Mrs. Haughton feels constrained to apologise because of the prevalence of material from the pens of members of her family, but she has no reason to do so, since it would be difficult to find better literature than that which she used. […] The editorial comment, news notes, and other miscellaneous matter are of that high standard which one naturally expects from a writer of Mrs. Haughton’s culture and attainments; and it is not too much for the impartial critic to say that her management of the Woodbee has set a new standard in correct and graceful editorship. The October number is an issue to which amateurdom may well point with pride as one of the most substantial achievements of the year.
—H. P. LovecraftL, “The Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur (Jan 1918), Collected Essays 1.183

Amateur journalism was a democratic institution, and the UAPA held annual elections for officers drawn from among the membership. This led to politics, and Sayre’s law applies. At the time he was recruited and ever afterward, Lovecraft was associated with a faction of the United which emphasized literary ability, high standards in printing and criticism. Haughton and the Woodbees were more focused on the social aspects of amateur journalism, with more emphasis on amateurism and less on high-minded literary ability. After Lovecraft’s presidency (1917-1918), he was succeeded by three presidents from his faction: Rheinhart Kleiner (1918-1919), Mary Faye Durr (1919-1920), and Alfred M. Galpin (1920-1921). During this period, the columns of the United Amateur were largely dominated by Lovecraft and his friends; and the official organ reflected their efforts to project a quasi-scholar, high-brow aesthetic.

Ida C. Haughton, and many others in the United, were critical of Lovecraft & friends’ management of the organization, which we get the occasional hint of in Lovecraft’s letters:

The very boorish and puerile attack on the critical department made last year by Mrs. Haughton, is yet echoing in the United.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Edward H. Cole, 13 May 1918, LAGO 35

Since Lovecraft was the critics department, more or less, he apparently took this personally. Haughton was at this point also the head of the Western Manuscript Bureau of the United, and later Secretary, receiving new membership applications and handling recruitment, and Lovecraft was apparently not happy with how she handled her duities:

Record each application received; send the applicants their certificates, properly filled out, with suitable words of welcome; and send all credentials to one or both of the MS. Bureaux—preferably the Eastern, unless she can endure dealing with that utterly impossible Haughton creature.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 14 Nov 1918, LAGO 218

I was very pleased to receive your recent letter with interesting enclosures, & have duly forwarded the membership application to the new Secretary—Mrs. Ida C. Haughton, 1526 Summit St., Columbus, Ohio. I am glad to welcome you as a full-fledged member of the United, & hope that your affiliation may prove permanent.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Arthur Harris, 11 Sep 1919, LRKO 239

Your failure to hear from the association officially is due to the negligence of the new Secretary, a rather eccentric elderly woman who was given the post merely because she happens to live in the next convention city. […] Smith is not a member of the United, & I fear he does not know that Mrs. Haughton is our Secretary; but I will tell him, also writing Kilpatrick. I wish Mrs. H would get some blanks printed—I have typed them till I hate the sound of the machine!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James Larkin Pearson, 19 Sep 1919, LRKO 320

While never publicly insulting Haughton, it is clear that the criticism leveled against Lovecraft and his faction must have increased in fervor and volume, at least if Lovecraft’s reaction to it is anything to go by:

It is that filthy Cleveland sewer-rat [William Dowdell] and that disgusting Columbus hippopotamus-jellyfish [Ida C. Haughton] who have done all the malevolent work by their raucous howls, and I fervently wish them both a swift and rough passage to the abode of Beëlzebub.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, [Apr 1920], Miscellaneous Letters 83

At the 1921 convention, Ida C. Haughton won the vote for president.

Lovecraft was still Official Editor of the United Amateur, but had to deal with Haughton’s directives and her control of the United’s finances, as the UAPA collected dues from members to cover the printing of membership forms, lareaute certificates, and the United Amateur journal itself.

Since they were both officers of the organization and had to work together, Ida Haughton appears to have written to Lovecraft for the first time in 1921:

Ida has just written me that she and her Columbus henchman expect next year’s UNITED AMATEUR to be conducted in a more commonplace and democratic manner; with less of the purely artistic and more of the chatty and plebian. Only on such conditions, she implies, will the Columbus purse strings be liberally open. I have been dreadfully polite in replying, and have courteously ladled out wish to the effect that I’ll see her in hell first.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 12 Apr 1921, Miscellaneous Letters 122

Part of the animosity came from Haughton’s accusation that Lovecraft had mismanaged the official organ fund. This frustration reached its peak with Lovecraft composing the satiric poem “Medusa: A Portrait”; to make sure there was no doubt who the gorgon in the poem was supposed to be, Lovecraft wrote a mocking dedication to Haughton when he sent the poem around to his close friends:

TO THE HON. IDA COCHRAN HAUGHTON, VISCOUNTESS WOODBY—
MY LADY:—

I shou’d be but a Cheater, and unworthy of the poetick Art, were I not to acknowledge to you by this Dedication the Indebtedness I ebar you. For ‘tis plain that I may my self claim but partial Credit for a Picture which, without so illustrious a Model, wou’d never have been drawn with any Sort of Fidelity. Truly, the Satirist desiring to shew certain Traits of Mind, wou’d be hard put to it, had he not before him some sort of living Example; and I am in Candour forc’d to concede, that of the QUalities I here seek to pourtray, no human Being cou’d display so great and flourishing an Abundance as your self. I shall ever count it a Piece of the greatest good Fortune, if my Satire succeed, that your Hatred of me mov’d you to slander and vilify me behind my Back; for lacking that Provocation I shou’d have neither had the Temerity to expos,e your Failings, not possessed so compleat a Fund of Lies and Calumnies from which to draw a Picture of such Venom as I never thought before to exist upon Earth.

Conscious, therefore, of my Debt, I will commend this unrpetentious Effort to your well-known Graciousness, and beg leave to subscribe my self,

MY LADY,
Your Ladyship’s most obedient,
Most devoted, humble servant,

THEOBALDUS SENECTISSIMUS, ARMIGER.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 29 Nov 1921, Miscellaneous Letters 130-132

This language was only used in private to close friends; how Lovecraft phrased his reply to Ida C. Haughton is not known, since none of their correspondence is known to survive. In public, in the pages of the United Amateur, Lovecraft kept things civil, although occasional signs of frission slipped through:

It is not in a spirit of affront to him that we give preference to the plan of President Haughton, as outlined in her opening message, for the re-restablishment of a special magazine for credentials. We should be glad to curtail the official organ in the interest of such a magazine, as indeed we offered to do at the beginning of the term.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Editorial,” United Amateur (Sep 1921), Collected Essays 1.298

A “credential” was a work which demonstrated literary ability, be it a poem, short story, or essay, and which formed part of a would-be amateur journalist’s application to national organizations like the UAPA and NAPA; it was often the first piece of theirs that would be published in an amateur journal. Having a separate magazine for publishing credentials was intended to encourage new recruits, and Lovecraft seems to have largely approved of this move:

Mrs. Haughton and other assemblers of the recent New Member deserve much credit for providing a sorely needed outlet for the work of the recruit. The United should have further numbers of this or an analogous publication, and it is to be hoped that such can be made feasible. The editorial note in the present issue would gain strength and pertinence is more closely connected with the subject-matter and less fertile in accidental misstatements.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes,” United Amateur (May 1922), Collected Essays 1.317

In 1922, the presidency of the UAPA went from Ida C. Haughton to Howard Conover, and Lovecraft and members of his faction were effectively outed from all positions of leadership. In 1923, Lovecraft’s faction returned as his wife Sonia H. Greene became president, but her presidency faced issues, both from her personal difficulties and because the treasurer of the former administration refused to turn over the funds. Despite efforts to carry on with recruitment and publication, the United Amateur Press Association was moribund, and would not survive many more years.

Ida C. Haughton’s later years in amateur journalism are opaque; references to her in Lovecraft’s editorials and letters drop off after her term as president, although there was still considerable animosity on his part into the mid-1920s:

I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of Dowdell or of anybody else. I am rather sorry (not outwardly but genuinely so) when disaster befalls a person–sorry because it gives the filthy herd so much pleasure. To be a real hater, one must hate en masse. I hate animals like the Haughton rhinoceros mildly and temperately, but for mankind as mankind I have a most artistically fiery abhorrence and execration, I spit upon them!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 8 Mar 1923, LJM 29

Shall be glad to see The Old Timer, & hope Old Medusa gets her unshielded by Adamic censorship. But don’t fancy the old rhino is really a human being—she simply ain’t! That cow-mountain is nothing but a festering tumour of ectopic tissue, produced by fatty degeneration & morbid cell-sprouting–a senile & purulent excrescence on the race, wholly acraniate or at best microcephalic, & with muscular reactions—which produce written articles–caused by neuro-ganglial maladjustments induced by a gall-bladder dislocated by malignant elephantiasis into a position corresponding to the seat of the rudimentary brain in that species of primitive organism of which she is a noisomely decadent variant. She—or it—is a mere octopus of ugliness, nightmare, stupidity, & snarling malevolence . . . . a pitiful object that ought to be buried.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 23 Mar 1923, LJM 34-35

When it comes to real cause for serious offence, how the devil can you think this farce even half as grave as that other old Ohio slush-brain’s attack on me in 1921? Boy, there isn’t half the real poison in the whole damn carcass of Peg-Ass-Us, that there is in one ophidian strand of the false hair of that fat cow-hippopotamus in Columbus! Put that li’l ol’ memory to work, Kid! Whilst all Witless-Cut has done is to fume picturesquely under deserved criticism, that ‘Idra Hot-One monster ran the very gamut of abuse & positive insult—culminating even in an aspersion on my stewardship of the United funds!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 15 Jun 1925, LMM 140

With the dissipation and collapse of the UAPA, however, Lovecraft’s ire would cool. When, at last, a bit of sad news came to him, he regarded his old enemy a bit differently.

By the way—did you notice in one of the Oakland amateur papers the news that savage old Ida C. Haughton, my deadly foe in the early 1920s, was burned to death a year ago through the igniting of her clothing at a fireplace? Poor old gal! I’m surely sorry to hear it! I wished her a lot of things, but nothing quite as drastic as that!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 12 May 1936, LJM 385

As for the continuance of the history to the finish in 1927—I really can’t tell when I’ll be able to get around to it, but I surely would like to do it some time—since no other old United member seems disposed to tackle the job. I doubt whether I’d try to revive the animosities of 20 & 15 years ago—for those issues are long dead, as indeed are some who participated in them. Poor old Mrs. Haughton, my arch-foe of 1921-22, was burned to death a year or two ago when her clothing ignited at a fireplace.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Hyman Bradofsky, 24 Nov 1936, LHB 383

It is hard to judge, from this distance, the issues which were so critical as to spark animosity between Ida C. Haughton and H. P. Lovecraft in the early 1920s. So too, we really only have Lovecraft’s side of the argument; and none of their brief correspondence survives for us to judge either Haughton’s tone or the content of her letters to him. Lovecraft’s animus, and his pity, both seem genuine; he certainly did not celebrate her death. Their quarrel had ultimately died with the United itself, and survives only in dusty editorials and old letters.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

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