Also worthy of special note are the impressions records in the early 1920s by fellow amateurs Edith Minister and George Julian Houtain.
—Peter Cannon, Lovecraft Remembered xii
Edith Miniter died in 1934, predeceasing her friend and correspondent H. P. Lovecraft by a couple months shy of three years. She wrote no long memoir or character-study of her friend, though she included a character based on him in her novel The Village Green (192?), lampooned his style in “Falco Ossifracus” (1921), and permanently influenced Lovecraft’s thoughts on Dracula. The majority of her reflections on Lovecraft were in small observations that peppered the amateur journals she contributed to in the 1920s. When Peter Cannon was compiling memoirs for Lovecraft Remembered, he selected five of these random snippets and collected them under the title “Amateur Writings.”
Epgephi Maisuings
The next morning there was a great deal of discussion as to when two others would arrive from Providence. They had sent a message saying it would be “in the early afternoon,” which sounds plain enough, but that bunch can discuss hours and hours over just anything—whether or not to let me get on intimate terms with next door’s hens, for instance. They were still discussing when the two rang the door bel, and some weren’t half dressed (hadn’t got their earrings on).
The two who came were Mr. Lovecraft of Providence, who has so many other names there would be more than enough had he as many lives as I, and Mr. R. Kleiner of New York. They had been quoting each other’s poetry to each other and taking each other’s pictures, doing it for two days, and I guess were pretty glad to see US. . . .
Well, talk about Cats being “night owls.” I was tucked up in my crib hours before the house was still. Mrs. Thompson and his niece, Miss Hamlet, took Mr. Lovecraft home with them to Dorchester, ’cause he said he’d just got to have a “quiet room to himself,” and there was no such thing here, though there’s eighteen rooms and six halls in this establishment. . . .
—Edith Miniter, Lovecraft Remembered 82
Cannon doesn’t give a source, but this is from Miniter’s amateur journal Epgephi (Sep 1920), a convention report which showcases Lovecraft’s visit to Boston. Since joining amateur journalism in 1914, Lovecraft had swiftly risen to prominence and was increasingly meeting fellow amateurs in person. Despite mentions of Lovecraft in amateur journals being known to Lovecraft scholars for some time, access to those materials has not been common or easy to obtain.
This Was a Very Good Dinner
The banquet was a pleasant affair with one exceptionally fine speech, that of Howard P. Lovecraft, his subject being “Within the Gates,” while he was introduced as “One Sent by Providence.” And he was much funnier than that, I assure you. He equals anything I ever heard—even the renowned Truman J. Spencer in his active prime on such a topic as “The Amateur Printer,” with which he has been known to keep the table a-roar for an hour. Willard O. Wylie toastmastered in slick manner and introduced some novelties, as when—à la Rotarian—each person introduced his or her left-hand neighbor; also when he called for “stunts.” Then J. Bernard Lynch sang “A Starry Night” to best advantage, with a better accompanist in Miss Ivie than he can usually command; and Miss Gladys Fraze showed that Apple Creek, Ohio, turns ’em out smart and zippy. The Houtain-MacLaughlin engagement was announced, making a pleasing opening for congratulations, and Sonia Greene had collected a few nickels as a blind and then presented the president-elect with a literal bucket of flowers, thus enabling Mr. Houtain to make a considerable hit later by saying to people, “Will you have a rose or a flower?”
—Edith Miniter, Lovecraft Remembered 82-83
Amateur journals are always rare by default; the print runs were usually small, the audience was fellow amateur journalists, and they weren’t offered for public sale. They were the immediate precursors and inspiration for the fanzines of the science fiction and fantasy fandom that emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with some overlap between amateur journalists and printers and fan journalists and printers—H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Jr., and R. H. Barlow, for example, strode both worlds, and it wasn’t uncommon for some amateur journals to contain material that would have fit in well with fanzines of the day, such as poems by Clark Ashton Smith, essays on Robert E. Howard’s fiction, short fiction from Lovecraft—his story “Celephaïs” first appeared in his future wife’s amateur journal The Rainbow (1921-1922).
The Crowd of Jollity
After adjournment, we went to the ball game and to Revere Beach, where H. P. Lovecraft dropped eighty-five feet and was all over. Until the next evening, when we had a mock trial at 20 Webster Street because Messers. Heins and Houtain considered they had been “swindled” at the banquet (too good, so they wanted more, near as I can make out). Then all seemed really over, but before we could turn around, James Morton, R. Kleiner, and E. Drench were back from a hike that took in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Athol, Massachusetts, where Cook reported looking out one evening and finding “three tramps in the woodshed,” and the tramps said the loving cup was christened in water. Kleiner then went back to New York and we did think all was over, but Dench went on another hike and came back when we were away and clumb in the window L. A. Sawyer keeps unlocked solely for the grocer’s boy, so evidently, though the ‘vention lies mouldering in its grave, its soul is marching on.
—Edith Miniter, Lovecraft Remembered 83
Given the scarcity, reprints of amateur journalism material are often piecemeal. For example, the article “An Early Portrait of Lovecraft” by George Wetzel in the fanzine Renaissance vol. 2, no. 2 (1955) contains quotes and excerpts from amateur journals, including Epgephi, but only bits and pieces; A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H. P. Lovecraft (2010) reprints a few amateur pieces, but nothing by Miniter. While Lovecraft’s contributions have been compiled in his Collected Essays, no definitive collection of all of the writing about Lovecraft in amateur journalism has ever been compiled and published. And is unlikely to be, given the vast amount of material involved; in his 23 years as an amateur journalist, hundreds of periodicals were published, and there was a flurry of publications about him after his death in 1937.
Very Clubable Men (and Women)
H. P. Lovecraft reports going home at midnight of July 6 and “sleeping eighteen hours without taking anything off.” I suppose if Hazel Adams and I had been there, he’d have removed his hat and given it to us to hold. That’s what he did when he tried all the soporific stunts at Revere. . . .
Rheinhart Kleiner and Howard P. Lovecraft went to the Art Museum on Tuesday, in an evident desire to see something beautiful. They probably did not know Gladys Fraze was to be at the ball game.
—Edith Miniter, Lovecraft Remembered 83-85
Reprints and quotations are thus generally selective. The Fossil, the official publication of The Fossils, the historians of amateur journalism, has access to a good library of amateur journalism and often reprints material, but the Fossils are devoted to far more than just random observations on H. P. Lovecraft. The best reprint collection of Edith Miniter’s material is Going Home and Other Amateur Writings (1995, The Moshassuck Press) and The Coast of Bohemia and Other Writings (2000, The Moshassuck Press), now sadly out of print, although some of the contents—including the bit from the Epgephi in Lovecraft Remembered—are included in Dead Houses and Other Works (2008, Hippocampus Press) and The Village Green and Other Pieces (2013, Hippocampus Press). All four of these books were edited by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., former president of The Fossils.
Conscience and Convicts
Conscientiousness ought to be Howard P. Lovecraft’s middle name, but perhaps the “P” stands for probity, which SOule’s Synonyms says is the same thing. he really tried to make out that he understood his subject, “The Bushovik,” but if he did, it was more than anyone else could say. We got a vague notion that a man named Bush is somewhat in the plot, that Bush writes good stuff—moral:—which Lovecraft unwrites and rewrites, collecting therefore a little cash and great deal of headache.
Sub-title—”A number of Charleston convicts,” says the Boston Herald, “have taken to writing poetry.” Isn’t that going from bad to verse?
This proved inspiring. However far he got lost in the Bush, the speaker invariably wandered back to those convicts. In both places he was excruciatingly funny. He always is, and what part of the fun is due to the speech, and what to staccato utterance and an air of temporarily abandoning Greek for this time only, is difficult to decide. That Lovecraft is learned there’s no denying, but he can condescend to canaille. He is reading a book recommended by his barber, he let ’em make him president of the National, he spoke to us. Sandusky is right. Lovecraft IS a good old scout!
—Edith Miniter, Lovecraft Remembered 85
Miniter’s references can be a little difficult to decipher for those who weren’t there at the time, but Lovecraft did revision work for David Van Bush, which included both moral subjects and poetry. We don’t often think of Lovecraft as funny, though his dry sense of humor is clear in his letters, but Miniter gives us an account of what he’s like giving a humorous speech during a dinner—and this is the kind of aspect of Lovecraft’s life that only amateurs who met him in that context can write about. Damn few of them did, so we’re fortunate to have Miniter’s account.
Today, amateur journals have largely shifted into the collector’s market, like pulp magazines and comic books, and journals that once couldn’t be given away command prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is very far from the spirit of when they were first published, for love of the written word, to be distributed to friends and colleagues. At the time when it was published in Lovecraft Remembered, “Amateur Writings” would have been new to many Lovecraft fans—and even today, is obscure, for the reasons given, though the Miniter reprint volumes noted above make them more accessible than previously.
Amateur journalism was the gateway by which Lovecraft emerged from his private, reclusive period (~1904-1904) and into public view. It got him writing, socializing, and travelling. He had his contretemps and challenges (see “Concerning the Conservative” (1915) by Charles D. Isaacson), but it also led him to meet Sonia H. Greene, whom he would marry, and his sojourn in New York. Many of his earliest stories first appeared in amateur journals before they were published in Weird Tales. And during the first twenty years of his amateur career, Edith Miniter was there, watching, commenting, and building a friendship with H. P. Lovecraft.
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 