My father, george Willard Kirk, died on March 22, 1962. With him died, I believed, all hope of reconstructing a history of his friendship with Lovecraft and of his membersip in the Kalem Club. But I was wrong. Recently, when my mother, Lucile Dvorak Kirk, entered a nursing hme, we were obliged to go through her effects, expecting few surprises.
But, behind closed doors, in a large sealed carton musty with age, marked “to be destroyed without opening upon my death”, we discovered a treasure: hundreds of letters to her from her yet-to-be husband, George, written between 1924 and 1927. In addition, the carton held a metal box containing letters and poems writen by Lovecraft and other Kalem Club members. Rather than destroy them, I brought them back to my home in Duluth, Minnesota, hungry for information about my father during those years.
—Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” in Lovecraft Studies 28 (Spring 1993), 2
George Kirk (1898-1962) was a bookseller and sometime small-press publisher; during the 1920s he was also a friend and associate of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Samuel Loveman. Lovecraft first met Kirk while visiting Loveman in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922, the same trip where he met Hart Crane. All of them would find themselves in New York City within a few years, and Kirk’s time in New York City overlapped with Lovecraft’s marriage (1924-1926) and residence in the city, and Kirk was a member—with Lovecraft, Loveman, Frank Belknap Long, Jr., Arthur Leeds, Rheinhart Kleiner, James F. Morton, and Henry Everett McNeil—of the informal Kalem Club, so-called because their names each started with K, L, or M. A vital literary circle mentioned in many of Lovecraft’s letters during this critical formative period in his life.
Sunday evening we met the rare book dealer George Kirk—a friend of Loveman’s—and the quartette of us explored the excellent Cleveland Art Museum in Wade Park.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 4 Aug 1922, LFF1.51
In Lovecraft’s letters, we see only occasional glimpses of Kirk; he is one of the gang, but learn little about him. Mara Kirk Hart, poring over her father’s letters and other papers, presents Kirk in his own words—and Lovecraft as Kirk saw and knew him. Hart quotes from one of her father’s letters:
An adorable note from HL, next to yourself the move lovable creature on this or any other universe known or imagined. The salutation is “Georgius Rex.” HL is 18th Century English—English to the core—though he has become more and more interested in American colonial houses, furniture, and times. he has been interested in and knows quite well both Roman and Egyptian histories and living. But all that is secondary. I believe I had rather I had met him earlier in life that I might have less of GK [George Kirk] and more HL. But you love me as is, so I complain not at all.
—Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” in Lovecraft Studies 28 (Spring 1993), 3
In her essay, Hart draws on both Lovecraft’s letters and her fathers’ to give an outline of their friendship during the 20s. Kirk was not a writer in the same way Lovecraft was, busy making a living through the book trade, with all of its ups-and-downs. His letters to his fiancée (engaged 1923, married 1927) are a counterpart to Lovecraft’s diary-like letters to his aunts from the same period. It was Kirk’s apartment building at 317 W. 14th St. that was the model for the apartment building in Lovecraft’s “Cool Air,” and Kirk’s brief notes about Lovecraft’s wife Sonia track with their own accounts of the marriage—although Kirk, being on the outside of things, could only make observations, e.g.:
Don’t dislike Mrs. L. She is, as I have said, at hospital. H more than intimated that they would separate . . .
—Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” in Lovecraft Studies 28 (Spring 1993), 3
Hart’s essay in Lovecraft Studies #28 runs a substantial 15 pages, yet it really only whetted the appetite of Lovecraft scholars. Here was fresh primary source material, offering not just additional insight onto Lovecraft’s life, activities, and marriage during this period, but contextual details on Kirk and the Kalem Club itself. While the audience for more information was no doubt modest, it was there—and eventually Hart published further works on her father’s life and letters.
Lovecraft’s New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927 (2006, Hippocampus Press) was edited by Mara Kirk Hart and S. T. Joshi. The book publishes relevant excerpts from Kirk’s almost daily letters to his fiancée from 1924-1927, as well as poems and related essays by other Kalem Club members, including Lovecraft’s, as well as Rheinhart Kleiner’s essays reflecting on the Kalem Club. It is, without exaggeration, an essential resource to further understanding of Lovecraft during his New York period; which are otherwise really only attested by Lovecraft’s letters of the period and scattered references in memoirs by friends like Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
The excerpts go beyond a focus on just Lovecraft; Kirk was not a planet or moon in orbit around Lovecraft, but a comet tracing an arc through a much more complicated system of literary heavenly bodies. So for example, a particularly interesting entry from 1925 reads:
JANUARY [undated]. Wednesday. Meeting at Belknap’s tonight, and I shall not go. If I am strong enough to go anywhere, I shall go to the sale of Currier and Ives at Anderson’s. But I doubt that I shall go out. Have a bit of food and a bit more whiskey so I probably shall soon be either well or dead. . . . Shall send a “Weird Tales” with magazines. It contains “Hypnos,” a very fine short story by deal old H. P. Lovecraft. “Imprisoned with the Pharoahs” is also by him, but it is much too long and not very good. Do not try “The Latvian?” because it is by Herman Fetzer (Jake Falstaff, you know), for it is very poor. But “Hypnos” is little short of being a masterpiece.
—Mara Kirk Hart & S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s New York Circle 36
This is interesting in part because it falls into a gap in Lovecraft’s letters; after a 31 December 1924 note to his aunt Lillian, Lovecraft’s next letter to her is dated 22 Jan 1925. Also, it mentions the May-Jun-Jul 1924 triple-sized issue of Weird Tales that included Lovecraft’s ghostwritten story for Harry Houdini, and confirmation (if any was needed) that Lovecraft’s authorship was an open secret among his friends. It is only though Kirk’s letters that we learn that at times the Kalem Club conversations sometimes turned to the subject of women:
OCTOBER 11, Saturday. Last evening I sat at table thinking of you, only entering conversation when forced to. I missed little, however, since chaps were merely airing their usually absurd ideas about our sex. One was a homo, one an avowed fetishist, one quite nothing where sex is concerned, and your GW with whom you are usually acquainted. I tire of half-baked ideas and people, of old-fashioned and antipathetic prejudices, of raw geniuses, and, when I happen to consider him, of GW. However, in many ways, his sole company is the most bearable of them all.
—Mara Kirk Hart & S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s New York Circle 28
It is tempting to give identities here. Samuel Loveman is known to have been gay (“homo”), James F. Morton is known to have experimented with free love groups and even a nudist group at different points (“fetishist”). A close reading of Lovecraft’s diary-letters to his aunt shows that he probably wasn’t at that meeting, since on Friday, 10 Oct 1924, he went to Elizabeth, New Jersey to view the colonial sites (LFF1.185). Which may well be why the subject turned to women in Lovecraft’s absence! However, in a later letter Kirk does state that he and Lovecraft talked about sex a bit among themselves (Lovecraft’s New York Circle 65), so perhaps it had nothing to do with his absence at all.
One benefit of the fuller account is that we get more of Kirk’s accounts of Lovecraft’s marriage and his wife. In this, Kirk was very much HPL’s friend and not always very conscientious of Sonia, at least not in his letters, but this is still an outside view of the marriage that provides some insight into how they spoke and acted as a couple, e.g. in 1926, when HPL had returned to Providence but before the divorce:
JULY 6. Am on a nice fast express from Boston. Have had a very pleasnt itme seeing Providence with old HPL, and just had dinner with him and a chap I met and liked named Tycon. He’s a very decent young bookseller and is much interested in local history. Mrs. L. was with us much of my first day—very unpleasant at times. HPL loves cats and almost invariably stops to stroke htem. She—Mrs. L—several times remarked that cats are the only things H really loves—and once remarked—in a quite casual way, but looking at me to read its effect, which I doubt she did,—that she believes H would love to take a cat to bed with him. I have heard this sort of thing from her before and can’t say I respect her the more for it.
—Mara Kirk Hart & S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s New York Circle 92
This might have been a slight misunderstanding on Kirk’s part; in her memoir The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985):
My neighbor who so kindly made room for me had a beautiful Persian cat which she brought to my apartment. When Howard saw that cat he made “love” to it. He seemed to have a language that it understood and it immediately curled up in his lap and purred contentedly.
Half in earnest, half on jest, I remarked “What a lot of perfectly good affection to waste on a mere cat, when some woman might highly appreciate it!”
—Sonia H. Davis, “The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft” in Ave Atque Vale 134-135
In 2013, Mara Kirk Hart self-published So Many Lovely Days: The Greenwich Village Years (Kirk Press). This is an account of her parent’s marriage, beginning when they met in Cleveland in 1923 and continuing through marriage, three pregnancies, two births, and many moves as they struggled to maintain a bookselling business; the New York portion ends in 1939, and the final chapters recount her parent’s final days, George Kirk passing in 1962, and Lucille Dvorak Kirk in 1994.
Lovecraft and the Kalem Club are not the main, or even minor, focus of this memoir. It is a deeply personal work at her parents lives, sometimes hand-to-mouth, through the difficult years of the Great Depression, the Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, and the final evaporation of the New York City dream they could no longer afford. Most of the book focuses on the period after Lovecraft stopped living in New York, but still touches on his occasional visits. One thing this book has that the other accounts lack is a better view of Lucille Hart. Women often fall into the cracks in history. At one point, Hart even draws from Lovecraft’s letters:
In May 1928, during a visit to New York, Lovecraft wrote to his beloved Aunt Lillian: “Kirk—good old Georgius—whose marriage has proved extremely congenial, and who is still the same happy-go-lucky, unsubdued old nighthawk of yore. . . . He has a basement flat on West 11th Street—separate from his shop and ciculating library on west 8th, although he lived over the latter at first. Kirk, honest old Mac [Everett McNeil,] and I walked down Braodway together, and when we came to the elevated at 66th, Kirk insisted that Mac and I hop on and accompany him home for a further session. We did so, and found Mrs. Kirk half-expecting such a codicillary assemblage. She is a pleasant blonde person, not especially young or good-looking, but apparently a highly congenial partner for the carefree and irresponsible Georgius. The household served tea, crackers and cheese.” Congenial as George and Lucy seemed to Lovecraft, they were often dsiappointed and exasperated with each other. They loved each other, yes, but financial problems prevented the hoped for marital bliss. What to do?
—Mara Kirk Hart, So Many Lovely Days: The Greenwich Village Years 37 (cf. LFF2.644)
This final book is not essential to Lovecraft studies in the way thatLovecraft’s New York Circlewas—but then, she had written that book. This is a book about the struggles of two people trying to have a marriage, raise kids, and run a business in the busiest city in the United States during a tumultuous period. It’s about love and affection being tested in a thousand ways, from government officials raiding the shop for illicit copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Lucy’s anger at George’s drinking habits. Lovecraft’s letter—almost the only time he mentions Lucy Kirk, and never by name—shows how scarce accounts of wives and partners can be in the standard sources that scholars rely on. This book, at least, gives a fuller appreciation of one member of the Kalem Club, his wife, and their life together.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 