I have, I may remark, been able to secure Mr. Baird’s acceptance of two tales by my adopted son Eddy, which he had before rejected. Upon my correcting them, he profest himself willing to print them in early issues; they being intitul’d respectively “Ashes”, and “The Ghost-Eater”. In exchange for my revisory service, Eddy types my own manuscripts in the approv’d double-spac’d form; this labour being particularly abhorrent to my sensibilities.
But I must give over these my remarks, for I must take a nap against the afternoon; when (tho’ ’tis devilish cold) I am pledg’d to visit my son Eddy in East-Providence, & help him with his newest fiction, a pleasing & morbid study in hysterical necrophily, intitul’d “The Lov’d Dead”.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 20 Oct 1923, Letters to James F. Morton 57
The Gentleman from Angell Street: Memories of H. P. Lovecraft (2001) is a collection of the reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft by the Eddy family, who lived in East Providence and first became acquainted with Lovecraft while he lived at 598 Angell St. in Providence, Rhode Island. All of the non-fiction pieces in this slim collection had been previously published, but all of them had been out-of-print for decades, so the slim collection was a bit of boon to researchers in not having to pay collectors’ prices to read them.
Muriel Elizabeth (Gammons) Eddy and Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr. were married in 1918; they were both writers, in various genres, and Muriel in particular would be president of the Rhode Island Writers’ Guild for over 20 years, while Eddy would have a pulp career that included three stories revised in part by their Providence neighbor H. P. Lovecraft, which were published in Weird Tales—and much else that Lovecraft never had a hand in besides. Students of Lovecraft’s letters will remember the way Lovecraft pleaded with another revision client, Zealia Brown Reed, to give Eddy the job of typing her manuscripts as the Great Depression set in and pushed the Eddys to the brink of poverty.
While Lovecraft was closest to C. M. Eddy, Jr., to the extant of calling him one of his “adopted” sons or grandchildren, it was Muriel E. Eddy that wrote the most about her family’s relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. Her first memoir, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” was published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) alongside “Lovecraft and Benefit Street” (1943) by Dorothy C. Walter and other works. In 1961 she expanded that essay into “The Gentleman from Angell Street”, and wrote several other short pieces, some privately printed, including H. P. Lovecraft Esquire: Gentleman (no date), The Howard Phillips Lovecraft We Knew (n.d.), “Memories of H. P. L.” (1965), “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968), Howard Philips Lovecraft: The Man and the Image (1969), and “Lovecraft: Among the Demons” (1970). In addition to this, she wrote a number of letters, some published and some surviving at the John Hay Library where she weighed in on the early biographical sketch of Lovecraft by Winfield Townley Scott and Sonia H. Davis’ memoir of her former husband.
The rest of the family was rather more limited. C. M. Eddy Jr. published “Walks with H. P. Lovecraft” in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966, Arkham House), and their daughter Ruth M. Eddy wrote “The Man Who Came At Midnight” (1949).
The activeness of Muriel E. Eddy in publishing and discussing her experiences with Lovecraft from the late 1930s until her death 1978 means that she had a rather substantial influence on Lovecraft scholarship during that period. To illustrate this, L. Sprague de Camp’s critical H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) cites seven of Muriel E. Eddy’s publications, plus C. M. Eddy and Ruth M. Eddy’s contributions. In general, these memoirs can be said to be honest and valuable contributions to the understanding of Lovecraft’s life…but are they accurate?
The accuracy of memoirs is important; human memories are imperfect, and tend to fade and distort over time or under influence. Yet these accounts are often all we have to go on for many events and details of life. The more accurate a memoir is, that is the more of it that we can verify according to other documents of the period (Lovecraft’s letters, census data, city maps and directories, etc.), the more we can count the memoir as a reliable source of data for the information that cannot be so independently verified. With some of these memoirs, written decades after the events…and given that they are often the sole source for some of the anecdotes regarding Lovecraft, it is important to look at some of these sources critically.
C. M. Eddy’s “Walks With Lovecraft,” describing their gambols and hikes together in and out of the city, can be said to be reasonably accurate and reliable, insofar as the details of Lovecraft jive with what we know from his letters—there is, for example, an extended account by Lovecraft of their search for “Dark Swamp,” which agrees fairly closely with C. M. Eddy’s version. There are one or two spots where Eddy may be mistaken, but overall it is a solid essay.
Muriel E. Eddy’s memoirs are a bit more complicated to deal with. The 1945 version “Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” written less than a decade after the subject’s death, is relatively straightforward and accurate—though with little slips here and there; she recalled the Dark Swamp adventure, but referred to it as Black Swamp. Still, it provides a good bit of detail on their association, including some unique insights on the revision-work that Lovecraft did for C. M. Eddy, Jr. and many notes on Lovecraft’s habits and character traits that jive exactly with his letters. The later, expanded version that is “The Gentleman from Angell Street” and appears in the eponymous booklet adds much interesting detail—but the accuracy of this new information, and thus the reliability of the whole account, is less.
For example, Muriel E. Eddy wrote:
Our acquaintance with the Lovecraft family stemmed through my husband’s mother having once met Sarah Lovecraft at a “Women Suffrage” meeting,… although I never learned whether or not Howard’s mother really believed believed in equal rights for women.
—Muriel E. Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street 4
This is an intriguing detail, since we know so little (relatively speaking) about Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, and far from impossible. It might explain some of Lovecraft’s attitudes towards women and women’s rights as expressed in his life and letters. However, the memoir also includes a number of small speculations and anecdotes, and these tended to get more evident the further into the expanded essay the reader gets. Some of the anecdotes are likely true, but are strongly influenced by Muriel’s rosey-hued nostalgia; for example when she wrote:
Mrs. Gamwell also gave the children about a hundred picture postcards that Sonia had mailed to Howard. These all held loving, spirited messages to H.P.L. from his sweetheart in New York. Not knowing their possible value in the far-away future, I did not hold on to any of these cards bearing Sonia’s signature, written in her breezy, happy handwriting. It was plain to be seen, from the messages on the cards, that this pretty woman of writing ability—among her other gifts—really liked our H.P.L.! And the strange part of it all was that he had not once mentioned his love affair to us…and we were his very good friends.
The children played for hours with the cards, and they eventually went the way all children’s toys go…in the ash-heap! (ibid. 17)
If a reader traced Muriel’s accounts of Lovecraft over the years, some details shift in the telling. Notably, her account of the extant of Lovecraft’s revision of “The Loved Dead” changes over time, and is a bit at odds with her husband’s own account, given in the Summer 1948 issue of the Arkham Sampler; her insistence on C. M. Eddy Jr.’s sole authorship was likely a response to August Derleth and Arkham House’s publication of stories which Lovecraft had revised or ghostwritten with the emphasis on Lovecraft’s contribution. So too, her references to Lovecraft’s mother seem to shift to reflect views on Susan Lovecraft in line with other memoirs—and this kind of “alignment” of views can easily distort the historical picture, since it appears that several contemporary memoirs are supporting the same image, when in reality later sources may be partially based on earlier ones. A tricky knot to untangle when a memoir is “revised” as “The Gentleman from Angell Street” was.
The most substantial difference between the 1945 and 1961 essays however is the section dealing with Lovecraft’s revision client Hazel Heald.
In this same year, 1932, I formed a little New England writers’ club of my own, and one of my members, a divorcee was very anxious to succeed in the weird writing field. She sent me an original manuscript with a very passable plot, yet told unconvincingly and amateurishly. I let Lovecraft read it when next he came over to our house on Pearl Street, and he agreed that it did have possibilities. (ibid, 22-23)
This is the start of Muriel E. Eddy’s account of “The Man of Stone” (1932) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft. For quite a long time, this was the only such account; Lovecraft wrote little about much of his revision work, and Heald’s own version of events is largely unpublished, although she makes an allusion to the Eddys in a letter:
About HPL and whether he was separated or divorced—I am certain he was divorced but have written to someone I know who will give me all the facts as her husband signed certain papers at that time.
—Hazel Heald to August Derleth, 7 Apr 1937
C. M. Eddy Jr. is claimed to have signed the Lovecrafts’ divorce decree as a witness, though Lovecraft himself did not sign it. So while Heald does not give the exact circumstances of her and Lovecraft coming together, there is nothing to directly counter Muriel E. Eddy’s version of events. At the same time, there is every evidence that Muriel E. Eddy’s version of events was including some information from her friend Hazel Heald, at second- or third-hand.
A skeptical scholar might thus wonder how much of it that Muriel E. Eddy knew and neglected to tell in 1945, versus how much of it she heard about later and incorporated into her expanded memoir—and on top of that, how much Muriel E. Eddy’s rose-tinted spectacles were skewing her account. Particularly notable in “The Gentleman from Angell Street” is her suggestion that Heald held a romantic interest in Lovecraft, and:
With a little encouragement, I am convinced that H.P.L. and Hazel might have married, and they would have made a good pair. But Lovecraft knew his health was failing, and perhaps he did not feel like taking a chance on another marriage, seeing that his first one had failed so miserably.
—Muriel E. Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street 26
This kind of speculation, and the obvious incorporation of second-or-third-hand information that fed into it, make “The Gentleman from Angell Street” less reliable of a source than it could have been. Which is unfortunate, given that we otherwise have little information on the Heald-Lovecraft stories besides the brief mentions in Lovecraft’s letters, and the sparing accounts given in Heald’s surviving correspondence with August Derleth.
An addendum to “The Gentleman from Angel Street” published in 1977 discusses the death of Sonia H. Davis and August Derleth; these memories are brief, vivid, and fairly accurate. She ends with the rather bittersweet yet hopeful note:
Thus the original Lovecraftian circle has been dwindling, and yet, a new one grows in ever widening arcs among the interest generated by fanzine magazines, biographies of HPL, and the eternal works and character of the man himself. (ibid. 29)
Ruth M. Eddy was born in 1921; she would have been only about two years old when Lovecraft met her parents and first visited their house in 1923, and five when Lovecraft returned to Providence after his stay in New York City. Her brief memoir of his visit was published in 1949, and it may be wondered how much of this she actually remembered at such a young age…but some things do stick in the memory, long after children grow up. So she wrote “The Man Who Came At Midnight:”
Gaslight flicked eerily through the crack in my bedroom door. It was Halloween, night of the supernatural, and long past midnight. I had drifted off to sleep with visions of hobgoblins and Jack-o’-lanterns drifting through my childish mind. Suddenly, as in a dream, I heard a sepulchral voice saying, “Slithering…sliding…squealing…the rats in the walls!”
Half-asleep, half-awake, I lay in the darkness for a moment, and then shouted for my mother as loudly as I could. She came into my room and spoke softly, “Everything’s all right, dear. It’s just Mr. Lovecraft telling us about the new story he’s writing. Don’t be afraid. Go back to sleep…[“]
—Ruth M. Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street 59
Ruth’s accounts jive with her mother’s memoir of Lovecraft’s early visits; from Lovecraft’s letters, we know “The Rats in the Walls” was written at about the time he met the Eddys, so it would not be surprising if he read his story aloud to his new friends. Given that this was published after Muriel E. Eddy’s account, there’s also the strong possibility that Ruth was influenced by her mother’s memoir, or at least her parent’s version of events.
There is not much in “The Man Who Came At Midngith” for scholarly interest; no new tidbit of information to seize on—but most memoirs aren’t written for academia, as a record of key facts and vital statistics, or even to set the record straight. They are simply a record of impressions and anecdotes, to keep the memory of the individual from being forgotten as those who knew them in turn grow old and die. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes insightful or gutwrenching—when the person is gone, a life is made of such moments, recalled and set down by those they touched. Or if not a life, then the first step from a pallid ghost to becoming a living myth.
Not a Halloween has passed since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 without my family fathering for the reading aloud of a weird story by our favourite author—now internationally famous as a writer in the genre—although our eloquence cannot compare with his masterful interpretations. (ibid. 61)
The Gentleman from Angell Street: Memories of H. P. Lovecraft was published in 2001 by Fenham Publishing, founded by Jim Dyer, the grandson of C. M. Eddy Jr. and Muriel E. Eddy.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 