“Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974) by R. A. Everts

If anyone speculated about Lovecraft’s sexuality while he was alive, they were polite enough not to publish about it. It wasn’t until Lovecraft was safely dead that the lockpicks of biographers went for his underwear drawer. When Winfield Townley Scott published “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in The Providence Journal for 26 Dec 1943, he wrote:

His stories are sexless and one supposes the man was nearly so, all but mothered into impotency. One can say that almost all of his adult relationships were homosexual, if the word is intended in the blandest sense: there is no sign of strong sexual impulse of any kind. He was “not at ease” with women. His marriage was a mistake and a quick failure. He was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing. When he bought pulps at Douglass Dana’s Old College Book Shop, at the foot of College Street, he tore off the more lurid covers lest friends misunderstand his interests.

Speculation on Lovecraft’s sexuality picked up during the period of the Lavender Scare. Attention on that front shifted to his ex-wife, Sonia H. Davis, who was perhaps uniquely in a position to know. Her memoir does not go into any detail, but suggests Lovecraft was reserved, e.g.:

When I parted for the night, I said “Howard, won’t you kiss me goodnight?” His reply was, “No, it is better not to.”
—Sonia H. Davis, “The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft” in Ave Atque Vale 143

This scene has been interpreted as an invitation to resume marital relations and Lovecraft’s decline; the morality involved is old-fashioned these days. But certainly Sonia implied that she and Howard engaged in normal heterosexual relations as a married couple. She implied further in the “pinkey” anecdote and the “asequately excellent lover” comments in Memories of Lovecraft (1969), and once, August Derleth asked her directly about it:

A propos your piece on Lovecraft, the question of HPL and sex had been bothering me for some time, especially in view of his violent reaction against Oscar Wilde as a person, however much he admired his work; so in 1953 when I was in Los Angeles, I asked Sonia Davis—the ex-Mrs. Lovecraft—rather bluntly about HPL’s sexual adequacy. She assured me that he had been entirely adequate sexually, and since she impressed me as a well-sexed woman, not easily satisfied, I concluded that HPL’s “aversion” was very probably nothing more than a kind of puritanism—that is, it was something “gentlemen” didn’t discuss, and so on.
—August Derleth, Haunted vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1968), 114.

The idea of Lovecraft as prudish, sexually repressed, asexual, or homosexual thus developed further in the literature; L. Sprague de Camp would synthesize several of these lines of thought in “Sonia & H. P. L.” (1973) and his biographical essay “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman” (1971), where he wrote:

He abhorred sexual irregularities and deviations, yet his own approach to sex was so prissy and inhibited as to make some wonder whether he, too, had a touch of lavender.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman” part 1, Fantastic Stories (Aug 1971) 98

Writers have described Lovecraft as “sexless,” which does not seem to have been really the case. During the early months of his marriage, he seems to have performed his husbandly duties adequately if without great enthusiasm. The charge of “latent homosexual tendencies” has, however, becomes such a fad that it is leveled at almost any notable, including Lovecraft, whose love life is the lease unusual. As far as the evidence goes, it is probably true that Lovecraft had a low sexual drive. Otherwise, there is nothing to support the “latent homosexual” charge.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman” part 2, Fantastic Stories (Oct 1971)

Comments like this may have been what inspired R. Alain Everts to write up “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman” for Nyctalops #9 (1974), an article based on Sonia’s memories of her long-dead second husband and H. P. Lovecraft’s sexuality:

During the course of my friendship with Sonia Lovecraft, the topic of her sexual relationship with Howard Phillips Lovecraft came up not once—due more to the young age at that time of this author, than to the lack of his scholarship. Fortunately for me, however, several times Mrs. Lovecraft brought up the subject herself and this scholar duly recorded and filed away the pertinent data.

In several unpublished recollections of HPL, Sonia mentioned in passing that aspect of their relationship—of course, as was HPL, she was also a Victorian prude when it came to sex and sexual relations; however Sonia lived into an age of greater liberties regarding sexual matters and the revelation of them in publick. And, she also had given birth to two children prior to her 20^th birthday, children by her first husband, only one of which survived. This experience, although somewhat traumatic and repressing to her at the time, was certainly much more than Howard had ever had, for he was a virgin at their marriage in 1924. His bride was hardly blushing, and although both were not enthusiastic in any sexual sense of the word, both were able to sustain satisfying sexual relations.

There are two immediate issues with this piece: first, the degree to which it tracks with (and thus was likely informed by) earlier works like Winfield Townley Scotts’s influential biographical essay make it suspect, and second, the source documents and conversations that Everts cites have never been published. While we know he was in contact with an elderly Sonia H. Davis for several years, this means that everything he’s reporting is being filtered through his own viewpoints and in his own words, and the veracity of the material is qualified by how trustworthy Everts himself is as a scholar and journalist (see The Curse of Cthulhu for some potential issues).

Even if Everts accurately presented Sonia’s comments on Lovecraft’s sexual reticience, she herself may have been influenced by posthumous publications on HPL. For example, when Everts quotes her as saying:

Sonia also reaffirmed a statement that I have heard from various sources—that when HPL was growing to young manhood, “his mother’s admonitions to him were ‘devastating.’” This possibly pertains to HPL’s looks—his mother did tell him that he was “grotesque” and that he should not go out at daytime for fear of scaring the neighbours. No doubt some sexual admonitions arose also, for the entire family, according to what Sonia recalls Annie Gamwell telling her, knew of Winfield Lovecraft’s paresis, and the adventures with prostitutes and women on his lengthy travels that gave him his affliction. In fact, Annie told Sonia prior to her marrying HPL that they could not have children—in fact this was a warning that Annie was giving to Sonia, and to me her choice of words was interesting—could not instead of should not.

The idea that Susan Lovecraft was concerned about her son’s appearance first appeared in the letters of Clara Lovrien Hess to Winfield Townley Scott, and were reported in his column in the Providence Journal. Sonia was in correspondence with Scott at the time (some of their letters remain at the John Hay Library) and would have learned of this; Scott’s research and speculations may well have influenced her memories. The story of Annie Gamwell confessing that HPL’s father had syphilis, for example, was written after Scott revealed Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s diagnosis and cause of death. It is impossible to tell, at this distance, how much if at all Sonia’s memories were fitted to the facts as reported, rather than straight recollections, with all their inherent inconsistencies and errors.

If this skepticism seems extreme, it is because the evaluation of historical evidence demands a certain amount of rigorous questioning of the sources: who is writing? When did they write it? Why did they write it? What sources influenced the writing? Both Everts and Sonia had their own biases when expressing views on Lovecraft’s sexuality, explicit and implicit, and this has to be understood when reading the essay. Without access to Everts’ source materials, we cannot tell if he was censoring Sonia by leaving out recollections that didn’t fit his theme (that of Lovecraft as heterosexual, capable of sexual intercourse, but of low sex drive), or if he was presenting everything she said and adding his own interpretation based on the then-current state of Lovecraft scholarship. The emphasis on Winfield Lovecraft’s syphilis, for example, appears to be an addendum to the discussion on WSL and syphillis in Dr. David H. Keller’s “Shadows over Lovecraft” (1948), Dr. Kenneth Sterling’s “A Reply to Keller’s Article on Lovecraft” (1951), and Arthur S. Koki’s “H. P. Lovecraft: An Introduction to His Life and Writings” (1962).

The degree to which “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” parallels or is in conversation with Lovecraft scholarship of the 1970s cannot really be overstated. While the quotes from Sonia’s unpublished memoirs or interviews are unique and original, the actual content strongly follows existing lines of thought. For example, when Everts quotes her as saying:

He was reared more like a girl evidently instead of being reared like a man; yet he was far from unsexed as someone has stated. But it was this sort of up-bringing, I believe, that made him squeamish and prudish about perfectly natural functions.

The “reared like a girl” comment dovetails some anecdotes in Sonia’s account that Susan Lovecraft had hoped to give birth to a girl, and that a young Lovecraft (who, as many infants in the 1890s, wore dresses and kept long hair) “looked like a beautiful little girl” and his mother cried bitterly when the long locks were cut off (Ave Atque Valley 121). Sonia and Lovecraft didn’t begin their relationship until after Susan Lovecraft’s death, so Sonia was reporting at best second-hand recollections, which were then quoted (hopefully accurately) by Everts—but the photographs of the infant Lovecraft in a dress were published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945), and Lovecraft’s own recollections of his earliest years were published in the first volumes of the Selected Letters.

The degree to which Sonia’s memories were affected by such post-Lovecraft materials is unknown; that she speculated on such things seems clear, based on material that didn’t pass through Everts’ hands. Everts’ motivation for adding it in this essay seems clear enough: it’s relevant, even if speculative, and it helps sell the narrative of a young Lovecraft who was prudish and dominated by his mother, “all but mothered into impotency” as Winfield Townley Scott put it.

An interesting question to ask is: what is not in “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex?” There is no reference to any speculations about Lovecraft as a homosexual or transgender. This was not a strong theme in Lovecraft scholarship at the time, although it would swiftly become one when L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) came out the following year. While Winfield Townley Scott had given short shrift to the idea of Lovecraft as a homosexual, de Camp would devote an entire chapter to Lovecraft’s sex life and speculation of HPL as a closeted homosexual. Whether this was a deliberate choice on Everts’ part (in some private correspondence, Everts evinced some homophobia), or simply accurate reporting of Sonia’s thoughts is unknown.

The idea of Lovecraft as transgender is relatively recent, and mostly based on the same evidence that was presented for HPL as a closeted homosexual; e.g. the idea that his mother attempted to raise him as a girl, as Sonia speculates in this essay. This harkens back to an older perspective on homosexuality that muddled sexuality and gender identity, with the idea that homosexual men were necessarily effiminate and possibly overly-influenced by women when young. Contemporary understanding of transgender identity does not follow this line of thought, but when reading older material out of context, misunderstandings can happen.

Also absent are any quotes from Lovecraft’s letters on the subject of sex. This may be more understandable as HPL’s more extensive discussions on the subject weren’t published until the later Selected Letters volumes published after this article came out. Some of Sonia’s further comments on Lovecraft and sex in her letters to August Derleth are also not present, but there is no reason to believe Everts would have had access to those letters and she may never have repeated those comments to him.

Today, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” is probably more interesting for the snippets from Sonia H. Davis than for Everts’ speculations and interpretations on Lovecraft’s sexuality. Some of the estimations have held up as more evidence has been presented: the idea of Lovecraft having a low sex drive seems well-supported based on his letters, the impressions of friends, and especially Sonia’s estimation quoted here. Lovecraft the prude has shown to be more complicated; his correspondence doesn’t include any frankly explicit or erotic material, but he was not otherwise reticient in writing about sex, even if he never went into anatomical detail. There is some supporting evidence in the memoirs of Mara Kirk Hart for Lovecraft’s reticience in discussing sex verbally.

“Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman” by R. A. Everts is ultimately a nonfiction work representative of a particular historical period and context, and understanding what works that Everts and Sonia were influenced by and responding to changes how we read and understand the essay. Its historical impact on Lovecraft studies hasn’t been dramatic; there are no terrific revelations here, mostly quite confirmations of ideas that had already been passed around before. However, it is one of the first works to discuss Lovecraft and Sonia’s sex life openly, quoting some of Sonia’s own words on the subject, and for that, at least, it has a place in the study of the lives of both H. P. Lovecraft and Sonia H. Davis.

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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“When Sonia Sizzled” (1973) by Gerry de la Ree

Immediately after “Sonia & H. P. L.” by L. Sprague de Camp in The Normal Lovecraft (1973) is an essay by Gerry de la Ree titled “When Sonia Sizzled” that also takes as its subject Sonia H. Davis, the former wife of H. P. Lovecraft. De la Ree was a noted collector who managed to procure an enviable number of original letters and artwork connected with pulp writers of the 1930s, including original art from Clark Ashton Smith, and he used part of this collection as the basis for a series of publications, of which The Normal Lovecraft was one example.

“When Sonia Sizzled” is one of several essays and articles that he wrote on pulp matters. Like much of The Normal Lovecraft, it has never been reprinted. The essay begins, thus:

Except for a repeated general distaste for life in New York City, H P. Lovecraft in general restricted commentary on his two years of married life with Sonia Shifirkin Greene. His brief autobiographical sketch, published in 1963 by Arkham Hosue and written some 30 years earlier, makes no mention of this period.

Likewise, in “Ec’h-Pi-El Speaks”, an autobiographical sketch written in 1929 and published by this writer last year, H. P. L. again skipped over the period of his marriage as if it had never existed.

Lovecraft’s closest associates have often testified to his apparent lack of interest in the opposite sex, and both his fiction and his countless letters seem to bear out this contention.
—Gerry de la Ree, “When Sonia Sizzled” in The Normal Lovecraft 28

In context, by 1973 Arkham House had published the first three volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, which covered a period up to 1931—the entirety of his New York period (1924-1926) and marriage leading up to the divorce decree (1924-1929). August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, editors of those volumes, had selected, excerpted, and in places edited Lovecraft’s letters to emphasize information value and points of interest. Sonis is mentioned in ~45 pages of Selected Letters I and ~14 pages of Selected Letters II, mostly in letters to his aunts or to mutual friends and amateur journalists. But it is a paltry account of the marriage; whether the editors did this deliberately or it fell out like that as they prioritized Lovecraft’s fiction isn’t clear.

Today, with so many of Lovecraft’s unabridged letters published thanks to Hippocampus Press, we have a better sense for how often Lovecraft mentioned Sonia in his letters, and to whom. In fact, he did mention her much more frequently and in greater detail in letters to his aunts than anyone else, and to some correspondents—especially later ones—he does not mention his marriage at all. There was nothing particularly nefarious in this omission; Lovecraft was under no obligation to bare his soul to everyone he wrote a letter to, and the failure of his marriage must have been a source of personal disappointment and embarrassment.

However, it does mean that when scholars in the 1970s were trying to reconstruct Lovecraft’s marriage and find out more about his wife, they hit a wall. Sonia’s memoir was available in some formats, and small articles like “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968) by Muriel E. Eddy, Memories of Lovecraft (1969) by Sonia H. Davis, and “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1973) by R. Alain Everts were available, but that was pretty much it, except for sporadic mentions in Lovecraft’s letters and in a few memoirs by friends who had known both Sonia and Howard.

Gerry de la Ree knew this. And with diligence and no doubt money, he bought Sonia’s letters to Samuel Loveman from the 1940s. “When Sonia Sizzled” consists mostly of excerpts from these letters, which date from after Sonia had been informed of Lovecraft’s death and when she had come into contact with Derleth, but before she published her memoir. In one letter, Sonia enclosed a letter she had received from August Derleth dated 21 November 1947, to get Loveman’s opinion on it. De la Ree quotes an excerpt:

I have so far had no reply to my letter of 18 September. Meanwhile, I hope you are not going ahead regardless of our stipulations to arrange for publication of anything containing Writings of any kind, letters or otherwise, of H. P. Lovecraft, thus making it necessary for us to enjoin publication and ale, and to bring suit, which we will certainly do if any manuscript containing works of Lovecraft does not pass through our office for the executor’s permission.

You will be interested to know that we know have in Lovecraft’s own letters to his aunts a complete and detailed account of how things went during his entire married life.
—Quoted in The Normal Lovecraft 29

Derleth was not the executor of Lovecraft’s estate. He was not even the literary executor; that was R. H. Barlow, who died in 1951. Arkham House had an agreement with Lovecraft’s surviving aunt Annie Gamwell to publish HPL’s writings before her death in 1941, and on this basis Derleth often pretended to complete authority over Lovecraft’s copyrighted work, and occasionally threatened legal action against those who published or republished anything by Lovecraft without Arkham House’s blessing. In hindsight, this can be seen as a deliberate bluff, a means for Derleth to concentrate and maintain control of the Lovecraft material, if not an actual monopoly.

However, at the time, this would not have been easy to discern; if Derleth had ever sued and been forced to go through discovery by someone calling his bluff, things might have gone very differently for Arkham House and Lovecraft’s legacy. Sonia’s follow-up to this was a letter to Loveman dated 1 Jan 1948; it mostly continues repeats assertions that appeared in her memoir, particularly that she financially supported Lovecraft during the New York period, which Derleth had flatly denied.

Readers in 1973 might have appreciated the peek behind the scenes, which led to the publication of Sonia’s memoir in 1948; although there was much more drama to it than these few letter excerpts state. The actual details of how much financial assistance Lovecraft received from his wife and aunts during that period is interesting for those who would like to reconstruct Lovecraft’s parsimonious budget; it was obviously sufficient to live on, but not thrive, or else he wouldn’t have left.

The third and final letter snippet de la Ree quotes from is dated 16 Nov 1949, after the publication of Something About Cats and Other Pieces by Arkham House, which contains a version of Sonia’s memoir, “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923), and “Four O’Clock” (1949). By this point, Sonia and Derleth had achieved détente, which would grow into amicability in later years. De la Ree quotes her as writing to Loveman:

Yes, Derleth sent me a copy of “Cats”. He paid me a modicum for the H. P. L. story as well as for the two revisions, and while not much, it helped last year when I wasn’t earning anything while I was sick.
—Quoted in The Normal Lovecraft 31

None of these letters has ever been published in full, and aren’t likely to be anytime soon. If they still survive, it is in someone’s private collection. When read in conjunction with letters from Sonia and Derleth that survive at the John Hay Library and Wisconsin Historical Society, we can get a fuller picture of the tumultuous period in the late 1940s when Sonia stumbled into the complicated literary legacy of her deceased husband, and had to contend with one of the biggest fish in that small pond that was Lovecraft publishing.

Still, this was when Sonia was hot—or as de la Ree put it, when she sizzled—when her memoir was the hottest thing to hit Lovecraft fans since Arkham House had begun publishing in 1939. We know now, because of access to Derleth’s letters, that he was more concerned with Sonia’s portrayal of Lovecraft as antisemitic than with how much money she gave to Lovecraft to live on in New York, and his efforts to discredit and downplay her memoir probably reflect Derleth’s own interests in Lovecraft’s legacy as much as his friendship with the late HPL.

In 1973, “When Sonia Sizzled” was a peek behind the curtain of Lovecraft publishing in the 1940s, and was probably safe to publish because both Sonia and Derleth were safely deceased. Searchers after more data on Sonia herself were no doubt disappointed, but even if this isn’t the most substantial piece, it is still a piece of the puzzle that was her life, both with and after her marriage to H. P. Lovecraft. It wasn’t the whole story, nor did it pretend to be, but it added a bit of context to how Sonia came to publish her memoir. Today, with more of the pieces of the puzzle, we have a better picture of what happened.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1973) by R. Alain Everts v. “Sonia & H. P. L.” (1973) by L. Sprague de Camp

During my recent visit to Los Angeles over the Christmas hollidays [sic], I telephoned the Diana Lynn Lodge where Mrs. Sonia Lovecraft Davis had been living for the past 8 years. I phoned on 22 December and spoke with Mrs. Davis’ nurse, who informed me that Sonia was quite ill and deteriorating rapidly. She no longer read – that used to give her the greatest pleasure – as did writing, which she also no longer did. For the most part she watched television and slept – and of course died alone in that particularly horrible manner that we condemn the old to.
—R. Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Nyctalops #8 (Apr 1973), 45

Sonia H. Davis, the former wife of H. P. Lovecraft, was seldom mentioned in his letters after the divorce was filed in 1929. She largely disappeared from his life after the editing of “European Glimpses” in 1933. Was not informed of his death in 1937, and did not learn of it until 1946. Many of Lovecraft’s friends and correspondents did not know he was married, or if they knew, did not know Sonia’s name or where she was. When Winfield Townley Scott published “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in The Providence Journal for 26 Dec 1943, he wrote honestly:

Then a quite astonishing thing happened—I don’t know how else to describe this sudden outbreak of a semi-invalid tangled with apron strings; Lovecraft in 1924 went to New York and married. So far I have not discovered either the woman’s name or her present whereabouts.

The next year, in “His Own Most Fantastic Creation” in Marginalia (1944, Arkham House), the first extensive biographical essay on Lovecraft, Scott had at least learned Sonia’s name and some basic account of the marriage, though he added:

It is very difficult—and so I think I shall not bury this somewhat footnote-ish aside in an actual footnote but, without apology, keep it up here in larger print—to write of Lovecraft’s marriage. This is principally because the former Mrs. Lovecraft is inaccessible; one hears that she is remarried and that she is probably living out West, but even old friends of Lovecraft who knew his wife are unable to establish communication with her because they are denied, by her relatives, knowledge of her present name and whereabouts. To write of the marriage from others’ reminiscences and speculations is under the circumstances certainly permissible, and as certainly embarrassing. One can only hope, in view of Lovecraft’s increasing fame and the consequent importance of his biography and of the need for fairness all around, that this one woman who ever lived intimately with him will tell her story. Until then, one can only piece the story together form the fragments offered by outsiders—human outsiders! (ibid. 321)

Sonia did finally get in contact with Winfield Townley Scott, and with his assistance, she did write her memoir of the marriage, and he also helped her to get it published, in abridged and edited form. This led to Sonia meeting August Derleth, the eventual publication of “Four O’Clock” (1949), and many other things—but relatively little from or about Sonia herself made it to print. She had some scattered references in mid-century amateur journals, including attempts to sell books associated with Lovecraft. In 1961, when Scott revised his biographical essay for his collection Exiles and Fabrications, he included material from Sonia’s memoir, but new material on or about Sonia was almost nil.

Fans eager for data could look to “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968) by Muriel E. Eddy, but would scarcely learn anything not already in Sonia’s memoir. August Derleth put together Memories of Lovecraft (1969) from some of Sonia’s letters, but again, this is fairly thin. New facts about Sonia, and new information on her marriage with Lovecraft wasn’t really made public until after her death.

I heard later that Sonia had died on 26 December 1972 – I had the pleasure of her acquaintance for nearly 5 years, and of her family for the same length of time. it was on her 85th birthday in 1968 that I first met her personally although I had corresponded with her from some time previously. I was more than anxious to meet her, to try and persuade her to talk about her second husband, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, which she was at first extremely reticent to do – she was now the widowed Mrs. Nathaniel Abraham Davis, and owed most of her final good memories ot him. However, during the course of our personal acquaintance, in which I visited her several dozen times, to talk with her, to tape record her reminiscences of Howard Lovecraft, and her own life, to take her out to lunch and on special errands, and simply to visit this lonely and charming, and until her decline into senility, vibrant lady.
—R. Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Nyctalops #8 (Apr 1973), 45

Everts’ article was the first really new information on Sonia H. Davis’ life and background available to fandom, and it must have derived from his communications with Sonia and her family. Later authors, like L. Sprague de Camp in Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), either Drew on Everts’ piece or similar sources when writing about her birth in what is now Ukraine, her parents, her early history as a young immigrant to the United Kingdom and then the United States, apprenticeship as a milliner, and all the events that led up to her marriage with Lovecraft and carried on afterwards. Everts, at least, had read Sonia’s autobiography in manuscript, later published as Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024), edited by Monica Wasserman.

Scholarship is not just the accumulation of evidence, the piling together of facts, the collection of books and manuscripts to cite and quote with uncritical acceptance. Today, we can compare Everts’ article with Sonia’s autobiography and other sources and conclude it is largely accurate. However, there is a lot that Everts doesn’t say in this short piece as well. Everts’ relationship with Sonia was not always completely friendly; Everts developed a negative reputation in fandom, partially covered in The Curse of Cthulhu (2002), whereby he alienated several fans by action or inaction, such as the failure to return a photograph of Robert E. Howard lent by Novalyne Price Ellis, accusations of other borrowings, etc. A photocopy of a letter from Everts to Sonia dated 24 Apr 1969 survives among the August Derleth papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which includes admission of borrowing material without permission, and responses to some allegations apparently levied against Everts by Sonia, though in that letter Everts states his intention to return everything and his belief that the true sources of the allegations are August Derleth and Muriel E. Eddy.

Which is a long way to say, we have to read this piece with the understanding that it is not Sonia H. Davis expressing herself directly to the reader, but is filtered and edited through Everts, and Everts does not include anything in the article that speaks to their possible contretemps.

From 1946 until about 1960, Sonia worked at various jobs – she broke her hip that year and had to go to live in a rest home in southern Los Angeles. In 1965, she was transferred to the Diana Lynn Lodge in Sunland, on the north rim of the San Fernando Valley, where she died just after Christmas of 1972.
—R. Alain Everts/ 21 January 1973
—R. Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Nyctalops #8 (Apr 1973), 45

“Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” has been superseded as a source of information about Sonia’s life by later works, the only really unique information in there concerns her relationship with Everts (which, again, not the whole story) and the end of her life. It holds a place in historical scholarship because when we ask how we know certain information and when did we know it, Everts’ article stands out as a point where new biographical information on Sonia became publicly available, where fans and scholars could read and cite it. The snapshot it offers of the end of Sonia’s life, with Everts as one of her few points of contact outside the rest home, is poignant but necessarily brief.

Yet it is also at this point that Everts takes a hand in shaping the narrative of Sonia and her marriage to Lovecraft. He would go on to create his own publishing imprint, The Strange Company, whose publications include material borrowed or copied from Sonia’s files, including Alcestis: A Play (1985) by Sonia H. Greene & H. P. Lovecraft. We can only speculate why Everts waited until after Sonia was dead; perhaps the money wasn’t there earlier, or life got in the way; such things happen. Sadly, his correspondence and interviews with Sonia have never been transcribed and published or made accessible, save in brief essays like “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”

Yet there was another essay on Sonia H. Davis published in 1973, and one that showcases a different approach to the same material. This was “Sonia & H. P. L.” by L. Sprague de Camp, one of the items in The Normal Lovecraft (1973, Gerry de la Ree), a magazine-sized chapbook published by fans for fans. To understand de Camp’s approach, we need to wind back a little:

For five years I had been writing short articles for [George] Scither’s Amra on authors of heroic fantasy, such as Pratt, Howard, and Lovecraft. In 1970 I decided to expand the series by rewriting these pieces as regular magazine articles and eventually to combine them into a book. The only market for the articles was the now defunct Fantastic Stories, which paid badly and often neglected to register copyrights. […] The book, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, which resulted from these labors, was slow to become airborne. I tried a sample and synopsis on a prospective new agent; no results, so for a few years I put it aside. In 1974 I sold the book to Arkham House; it appeared in 1976 and is still in print. Meanwhile my book-length biography of Lovecraft had been published.
—L. Sprague de Camp, Time & Chance: An Autobiography, 366-367

The first biographical article on Lovecraft, “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman,” ran in two parts in Fantastic Stories August and October 1971; Sonia appears in the second part, which covers 1921-1937. For sources, de Camp leaned heavily (or exclusively) on Sonia’s memoir and Lovecraft’s letters at the John Hay Library in Providence, RI, where they had been deposited after Lovecraft’s death. There is no indication that de Camp contacted Sonia directly—and given the timing, this might be understandable; by the time de Camp got seriously into writing about Lovecraft, Sonia was in her twilight years, in a rest home in California, health declining. By the time de Camp decided to expand his biographical essay of Lovecraft into a full-blown book, Sonia was already dead.

So what did de Camp have to write about in “Sonia & H. P. L.” that wasn’t already published?

Five years later, Lovecraft wrote Derleth: “My one venture into matrimony ended in the divorce-court for reasons 98 per cent financial”. This ignores other weighty factors, such as his topomania (his fantastic attachment to Providence), his xenophobia, and his strong anti-sexual bias, which he probably got from his mother and which made him at best a tepid and half-unwilling lover.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Sonia & H. P. L.” in The Normal Lovecraft 25

It would be fair to say that de Camp was correlating the contents; he could take Sonia’s memoir, combine that material with Lovecraft’s letters, and use the ideas from Winfield Townley Scott’s biographical essay as a framework to build his own image of Lovecraft, Sonia, and their relationship. When de Camp sticks to just the facts, this has the overall benefit of combining Sonia and Lovecraft’s different perspectives of the marriage and relationship; however, whenever de Camp gets into analysis, his own biases show through more strongly:

Lovecraft never pretended to be other than he was. Sonia had taken the initiative in their courtship, although he had tried to warn her of what she was getting into. And if the episode left him looking hardly heroic, he would not have looked much more so, according to the mores of the time, if he had gone on letting Sonia support him.

Over the next few years, Lovecraft and Sonia visited each other every times. Although Sonia was a full-blooded woman, Lovecraft declined to renew martial relations. For reasons that we can guess at but cannot really know, he let his maternal tabu against sex prevail, even though it would have been perfectly legal and moral. Although his organs and instincts, as far as is known, were normal, he had been early inclucated with the ideas that sex was “sordid” and “bestial”. Young persons might be subject to irrepressible animal urges, but middle-aged persons like himself and Sonia ought to be “all though” with it. (To him, middle age began at thirty.)

Then came the divorce and Sonia’s move to California. Poor strenuous, generous, passionate, managerial, loving Sonia! The moral would seem to be: girls, don’t marry a man with the ideas of “making a man of him” or otherwise drastically changing him. It won’t work.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Sonia & H. P. L.” in The Normal Lovecraft 27

This was the kind of psychologizing that de Camp would receive considerable criticism for when Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) came out, but more than that, there’s a great deal of rampant speculation and characterization on de Camp’s part in those few paragraphs. It was Winfield Townley Scott who had first emphasized that Lovecraft’s relationship with his mother was unhealthy and speculated on Lovecraft’s sexuality, on fairly weak evidence, and de Camp doubled down on both ideas.

The characterization of Sonia as “a full-blooded woman” was a counterpoint to that; de Camp built her up as a sexual entity in opposition to Lovecraft’s apparent asexuality. In this, de Camp was not alone—August Derleth had famously cornered Sonia in 1953 and asked about her sex life with Lovecraft. As he put it:

A propos your piece on Lovecraft, the question of HPL and sex had been bothering me for some time, especially in view of his violent reaction against Oscar Wilde as a person, however much he admired his work; so in 1953 when I was in Los Angeles, I asked Sonia Davis—the ex-Mrs. Lovecraft—rather bluntly about HPL’s sexual adequacy. She assured me that he had been entirely adequate sexually, and since she impressed me as a well-sexed woman, not easily satisfied, I concluded that HPL’s “aversion” was very probably nothing more than a kind of puritanism—that is, it was something “gentlemen” didn’t discuss, and so on.
—August Derleth, Haunted vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1968), 114.

This interest in Sonia and Lovecraft’s sexual life can be seen in the historical context of the Lavender Scare as an effort on the part of some scholars to establish Lovecraft as heterosexual; Sonia’s confirmation of heterosexual relations would help immensely in that regard. De Camp would bring up the possibility of Lovecraft as a closeted homosexual in Lovecraft: A Biography (Derleth was, at the time of its publication dead and thus past the ability to protest). Both de Camp and Derleth seemed fixated on the idea of Sonia as sexually aggressive, though never to the point of suggesting she was promiscuous, and make this part of their characterization.

When de Camp did finally write Lovecraft: A Biography, he had more to say about Sonia than he did in “Sonia & H. P. L.”; the bibliography includes both Everts’ “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” Derleth’s letter in Haunted, and “Misc. unpublished autobiographical MSS. in the John Hay Library” (479), in addition to Sonia’s memoir and Memories of Lovecraft (1969). Yet it is easy to see how, in 1973, not long after Sonia H. Davis passed away, her memory was already being shaped and fitted to the purpose of would-be Lovecraft biographers, her words selectively used to convey the impression they wished to give rather than presented unaltered.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Man Who Came At Midnight” (1949) by Ruth M. Eddy

Ruth Muriel Eddy Bell (27 May 1921 – 21 May 2009) was not the last living person to have met H. P. Lovecraft—but with her passing went one of the last living memories of the Old Gent. Fortunately for us, she recorded her impressions in a brief memoir, “The Man Who Came At Midnight,” first published in The Fantasy Commentator, Vol. III, no. 3 (Summer-Fall 1949).

How much Ruth might remember, and how accurate are those recollections? We know from Lovecraft’s correspondence with her mother Muriel E. Eddy that HPL first visited the Eddys in 1923. Ruth was the youngest of the three children, only about two years old when Lovecraft supposedly came at midnight. These early impressions were very likely influenced in later years by Muriel’s various memoirs of Lovecraft, her stories told and retold until they became part of family lore. So what we have is not a “pure” memoir, but a memoir that was expanded, shaped, and influenced by the other things written about Lovecraft by his friends and possibly critics. This was a step in the process of building Lovecraft’s legend.

※

THE MAN WHO CAME AT MIDNIGHT
by
Ruth M, Eddy

Gaslight flickered eerily through the crack in my bedroom door. It was Hallowe’en, 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.” Her warm tones were reassuring, and I was comforted as she leaned down to kiss me.

But sleep was impossible, for little as I was then, I lay listening to the strange-sounding story our nocturnal visitor was reading. As I was to find out years later, not only was Howard Phillips Lovecraft an expert writer of weird, spooky and uncanny tales, but he was also something of an actor. He made his fictional characters come truly alive through reciting his manuscripts aloud. And this he did in the wee sma’ hours of the morning as my parents listened attentively.

Lovecraft did not like daylight. He preferred darkness, always. Even when doing creative writing at home, if it was daytime he would draw the heavy curtains and write by artificial light. He did not like to leave his house during the day, but he and my father would often explore dark, unlighted alleys after midnight, walking along wharves and dimly-silhouetted bridges on the edge of the swamplands. It is not hard to imagine H.P.L. postulating unknown entities in these dark places, and from such nocturnal jaunts would often come ideas for his future stories.

In case I could stay awake long enough, I would sometimes listen to these tales, drifting off to sleep however before the story had ended. I grew accustomed to his voice, though I never quite got up enough courage to peek past the bedroom door at the reader himself. Yet in later years, as my father and mother discussed this friend of theirs, I could not help feeling that I had really known him, too.

How Lovecraft loved coal-black cats! He always had one near him. Cats sat in his lap while he wrote and they followed him out on his lone midnight explorings. His beloved black cat played a prominent part in ’’The Rats in the Walls,” and when one day this cat disappeared he became heartsick.

I feel H.P.L. would have been astounded, indeed, had he heard his “Dunwich Horror” broadcast two years ago on Hallowe’en. Never a lover of modern days and ways, using even such a common device as a telephone annoyed this gentleman and scholar of a different world! He preferred writing by hand to typing, and my parents often typed his manuscripts to relieve him of a hated task.

The shy and reticent Howard Lovecraft gained encouragement from my father and mother because of their interest and enthusiasm in his work, and soon after that Hallowe’en night he sold his macabre “Rats in the Walls” to a well-known magazine. Not a Hallowe’en has passed since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 without my family gathering for the reading aloud of a weird story by our favorite author—now internationally famous as a writer in the genre—although our eloquence cannot compare with his masterful interpretations.

And even though I never saw Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I shall always remember him as the man who came at midnight!

※

Muriel wrote several times about Lovecraft reading “The Rats in the Walls” (Weird Tales Mar 1924) in manuscript to the Eddys, including in “Message in Stone” (1956), and the accounts of mother and daughter are consistent, though Ruth offers her own viewpoint and details. There are other details in the account that show things a young Ruth could not have known and picked up later—the bit about Lovecraft’s pet cat, for example. The idea of Lovecraft loving the darkness speaks to early myth-making; as with most aspects of Lovecraft’s legend, the reality is more complicated, with his letters often painting him as both a night owl and enjoying sunlit walks and writing outdoors in the daylight.

It is fun to imagine what it might have been like, to lie awake in the dark and hear a sonorous voice read off a dark tale, probably filled with words she did not yet understand…and only later coming to understand who she had been listening to. There is no indication that Ruth Eddy was being dishonest in this account, only that she was being influenced by more than her childhood memories. She was so young, after all; and was writing of events twenty-five years in the past. No surprise, then, to find that her adult mind may have shaped whatever impressions she had from those sleepless nights of long ago.

“The Man Who Came at Midnight” by Ruth M. Eddy has been reprinted in The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001), A Weird Writer in Our Midst (2010), and Ave Atque Vale (2018).

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Amateur Writings” (1998) by Edith Miniter

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.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“In Memoriam” (1937) by Hazel Heald

Hazel Heald had three letters published in the pages of Weird Tales.

The first was published in the more-or-less immediate aftermath of Lovecraft’s death. Lovecraft died on 15 March 1937; in May 1937, “The Horror in the Burying-Ground” was published in Weird Tales, the last of the stories attributed to Heald and probably ghosted by Lovecraft, and then in the month after that, we get her acknowledgement of his death:

From Mrs. Heald
Hazle Heald writes from Newtonville, Massachusetts: “I want to express my sorrow in the passing of H. P. Lovecraft. He was a friend indeed to the struggling author, and many have started to climb the ladder of success with his kind assistance. To us who really knew him it is a sorrow that mere words cannot express. His was the helping hand that started me in the writers’ game and gave me the courage to carry on under the gravest difficulties. But we must try to think that he is ‘just away’ on one of his longest journeys and that some day we will meet him again in the Great Beyond.”
—Weird Tales (June 1937)

While stopping short of acknowledging that Lovecraft was a collaborator or ghostwriter, this was Heald’s first public acknowledgement that the woman praised as “veritably a female Lovecraft” (Weird Tales Jun 1935) owed more than a debt of inspiration to the man himself.

The second letter, published a couple months later, is effectively a memoir of her time and relationship with Lovecraft that Heald; the longest piece on Lovecraft by Heald that would be published during her lifetime:

In Memoriam
Mrs. Hazel Heald writes from Newtonville, Massachusetts: “A brain like H. P. Lovecraft’s seldom was found—uncanny in its intelligence. he was ever searching for more knowledge, gleaning by endless hours of study a richer and fuller understanding of people and of life. Being a great traveler, he reveled in the study of old cities and their hidden lore and would walk many miles to inspect some historic spot. he was a real friend to all who knew him, always ready to give his valuable time to aid some poor struggling author—a true guiding star. He was very partial to dumb animals, especially cats, signifying that interest in several of his tales. He would step out of his way to pat some forlorn alley cat and give it a friendly word, and the kittens of a neighbor furnished him unbounded enjoyment. He was an ardent lover of architecture and all the fine arts, and a day spent in a museum with him was time well spent. by endless hours of toil he worked far into the night giving the world masterpieces of weird fiction, sacrificing his health for his work. Lovecraft was a gift to the world who can never be replaced—Humanity’s Friend.”
—Weird Tales (August 1937)

In an era when fans and scholars tend to highlight Lovecraft’s cosmicism, and even his supposed misanthropism, the characterization of the benevolent, friendly Lovecraft might strike many readers as odd—yet this was part of his immediate legacy. Those who wrote about Lovecraft in the wake of his death weren’t his harshest critics or his most bitter foes, but his friends, those whom he had loved, even when he had argued with them; whom he had helped and corresponded with over years, even when they disagreed on many subjects.

Hazel Heald had corresponded with Lovecraft, he had visited her at her home and eaten dinner at her table, they had gone to view museums together. She wasn’t writing from ignorance of Lovecraft, but from personal experience.

Weird Tales would change. In 1938, the magazine was sold to the publisher of Short Stories, a more general fiction pulp headquartered in New York City. Editor Farnsworth Wright went with the magazine, and Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of Short Stories, also became his assistant editor at Weird Tales. The geographic shift caused other changes: Margaret Brundage’s delicate pastels had to be shipped under glass, an expensive option that meant the disappearance of her characteristic covers. With the death of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft and the virtual retirement of Clark Ashton Smith from writing, new authors needed to be found. The look and feel of the magazine was shifting; and though none of the readers knew it, Farnsworth Wright would soon be fired and McIlwraith would take over as editor.

In February 1939, WT changed size, moving from 128 pages to 160 pages and using a cheaper, thicker pulp paper. Hazel Heald’s final letter is a concise comment:

Mrs. Hazel Heald writers from Somerville, Massachusetts: “Your improved and larger magazine contains a feast of reading enjoyment.”
—Weird Tales, Aug 1939

This was the last word Hazel Heald published in Weird Tales.

The first two letters (“From Mrs. Heald” and “In Memoriam”) were republished in H. P. Lovecraft in “The Eyrie” (1979), and “In Memoriam” was republished as a standalone mini-essay alongside other memoirs in Lovecraft Remembered (1998). Its inclusion in the latter volume might feel like filler; there aren’t many facts to latch onto, no dates or places. With Lovecraft’s letters, her letters to August Derleth, and Muriel Eddy’s fond memories, we have enough context to say that Heald was no doubt recalling her own museum visit with Lovecraft, and the carefully-worded emphasis on support for struggling authors maintains the fiction of Lovecraft as a teacher or reviser rather than a ghostwriter.

Yet this is the most Heald published about Lovecraft, and this memoir—brief as it may be—is at least a genuine expression of her view of Lovecraft, the Lovecraft that she knew and wanted other people to know.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968) by Muriel E. Eddy

Of his marriage to Sonia Greene, not too much is known. He visited us the night prior to his departure for New York, to advise us that he was saying goodbye to Providence, and asking us if we would accept some of the personal furniture he would no longer have any use for. He made no mention at all of his forthcoming marriage. One of these pieces of furniture was a marble-topped bureau, which we still have—another was a folding bed, gone with the years. Both were delivered to us by an expressman the next day.

[…218] The next news we have of Lovecraft was an engraved announcement of his marriage to Sonia Greene. It was a simple announcement, but it took us so completely by surprise that it was several hours before we thoroughly digested the news. The marriage, destined to be short-lived, took place in New York in the spring of 1924. Lovecraft sent us snapshots of himself and Sonia—now dimmed with the passing of the years—and in letters to us he never forget to include “Sonia sends he love, and hopes some day to meet you.” In the snapshots, Sonia Greene Lovecraft appeared as a tall, handsome woman, dark and stately. […]

At least one weird story by Sonia appeared in Weird Tales, bearing signs of Lovecraft’s unmistakable revision, and published when she was still Sonia Greene. If Sonia, too, was a writer, we anticipated a long and happy marriage, but such was not to be—after an interval of several months, during which letters from Lovecraft became few and far between, we began to receive postcards from Lovecraft bearing various postmarks, and we realized he had left New York and perhaps Sonia.
—Muriel E. Eddy, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Ave Atque Vale 217, 218

One of the issues that arises from multiple memoirs by the same individual is that there are only so many memories to mine, so many impressions that can be conveyed before their small store of experiences of the deceased runs out. Muriel E. Eddy and her husband were friends and correspondents with Lovecraft (see: Her Letters To Lovecraft: Muriel E. Eddy), and she wrote fairly extensively about her encounters with Lovecraft in later years (see: Her Letters To August Derleth: Muriel E. Eddy, Deeper Cut: Muriel E. Eddy’s Selected Letters to the Editor, The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001) by Muriel E. Eddy & C. M. Eddy Jr.), even to speculative posthumous encounters (“Message in Stone” (1956) by Muriel E. Eddy). It should come to no surprise that a large part of her reminiscences over the years cover many of the same memories, the same impressions.

Yet the essay titled “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce,” which ran in the fanzine Haunted vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1968) is a bit peculiar, if only because the one aspect of Lovecraft’s life that Muriel did not know much about was his marriage. They knew him in Providence, R.I. before his 1924 marriage in New York, and resumed the acquaintence after he returned to Providence in 1926, but had little or no contact with his wife (and then ex-wife) Sonia until some decades later. And perhaps that is what inspired this piece.

I had not heard from the former Sonia Greene Lovecraft for many years. In the Fall of 1967, she wrote to me, after August Derleth had published some of my husband’s work. Sonia told me about the happy marriage she had enjoyed with Dr. Nathaniel A. Davis for many years. Sonia said he had been an M.D., a PH.D., anthropologist, scientist, poet, artist, writer and lecturer.

At the time Sonia wrote she was in a nursing home in California because of a broken hip. She told me that she read poetry to other patients in the nursing home. She was in good spirits and said she was glad to still be mentally alert.

—Muriel E. Eddy, The Gentleman From Angell Street 29

The brief essay that results is a bit of a mish-mash, combining selected memories of Lovecraft mingled with details borrowed from Sonia’s memoir The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, then out-of-print, and a healthy dose of Muriel’s own speculation.

※

Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce
by Muriel E. Eddy

“Here, have some sweet chocolate. I buy it—broken up, much cheaper—down at the dime store. There’s lots of nourishment in chocolate! Chocolate and cheese, crackers and pears—and ice-cream when I can afford it—this is about all I require when I’m deep in the throes of writing!”

It was our dear friend, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, speaking, and the place was our humble little gas-lit kitchen, way back in the year 1923, on Furnace Street, in the Fox Point section of Providence. He had arrived at midnight, with a big sack of his beloved sweet chocolate and a brief-case of manuscripts under his arm…manuscripts to read aloud to us!

That was the never-to-be-forgotten night when he announced to use the fact that he was bound for New York on the morrow, to marry Sonia Greene, a writer whom he had helped sell some stories…a Jewish divorcée with a pretty face, a charming manner, and what he considered to be a genuine love for him.

His brown eyes looked misty with dreams as he recounted her many charms. he’d never expected any woman to want him, but according to her letters Sonia REALLY wanted him. Later, my children got many postcards to play with, which she had penned affectionately to him; and now wonder he thought she loved him—every other word was a “love-declaration!”

A long, long manuscript, entitled “A Magician Among the Pyramids,” which he had ghost-written for the late Harry Houdini, master magician, was all typed and in his pocket to go to New York with him. Unfortunately, he lost it, the next day, in the Union Station, while awaiting his New York train. He had fallen asleep while re-reading the typed manuscript, in the waiting-room, and that is why it fell to the floor and was lost. Evidently it was swept up by the station janitor and was destroyed. So part of HPL’s honeymoon was spent in re-typing the original manuscript, which, fortunately, he had in his suitcase. Some honeymoon!

I wish I could say that this marriage was a perfect union of souls; but oh, it wasn’t…not at all. Sonia failed to understand why this poetic soul could not thoroughly commercialize his talents. Little by little came the rift in the lute…that makes sweet music mute!

The divorce was touching to us, because we loved this man and understood his heartbreak at what he considered his failure to make Sonia happy. But it was Howard’s wonderful gentlemanly Spirit that made him marry Sonia in the first place. He couldn’t say “no” because he was a gentleman!

—Haunted vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1968), 86, 93

※

From a scholarly point of view, there’s not a lot here. The bit about Lovecraft and the broken choclate appears elsewhere in Muriel Eddy’s memoirs, with greater detail (and possibly less putting-words-directly-in-Lovecraft’s-mouth). The incident of the lost manuscript for “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” and typing it up (with Sonia’s assistance) during their honeymoon is covered in Sonia’s memoir and Lovecraft’s letters. The bit about the children and the postcards is another anecdote which Muriel covers in greater depth elsewhere:

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 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!

—Muriel E. Eddy, The Gentleman From Angell Street 17

Given the lack of new facts or impressions, it is perhaps unsurprising that “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” was never reprinted. The main value it possessed at the time it was published was that there was relatively little information in print about Lovecraft’s marriage—there was no full biography of Lovecraft at that point, Sonia’s memoir was out of print, and the abridged letters of Lovecraft in Selected Letters I (1964) and II (1968) offered only limited insight into their relationship. This is a memoir that found a space largely because better sources were not widely available, and it shows.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” (1993) by Mara Kirk Hart

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 the essay was republished in Lovecraft Remembered—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.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Memories of Lovecraft (1969) by Sonia H. Davis & Helen V. Sully

My memory is becoming a little bit dim; but the things of interest in my life, I still remember, and altho’ I am the widow of another man, I shall always remember H.P.L. as I would any good friend.
—Sonia H. Davis to August Derleth, 29 May 1966, Mss. Wisconsin Historical Society

To support and promote Arkham House, co-founder and editor August Derleth tried innumerable ways to get the word out about the press, publishing a vast array of ephemera to advertise the wares, attract notice from potential customers, and explain about delays or difficulties. On two occasions, Derleth attempted a regular journal to supplement and advertise the small press: the Arkham Sampler (1948-1949) and the Arkham Collector (1967-1971), both of which contained a similar mix of content: news about Arkham House and its publications, book reviews, original fiction and poetry, short essays by or about Lovecraft, etc.

There were two general problems with such publications: getting them to pay for themselves (through a combination of subscriptions and increased sales of Arkham House books), and getting enough solid content to fill an issue. It was an imposition on Derleth’s already crowded schedule, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that he occasionally cut a corner or two in an effort to save time or get an issue to press—and he did sometimes publish some exceptional content, without which Lovecraft studies would be the poorer.

In the Winter 1969 issue of the Arkham Collector are two small back-to-back articles: “Memories of Lovecraft: I” by Sonia H. Davis (Lovecraft’s ex-wife, who survived him) and “Memories of Lovecraft: II” by Helen V. Sully (who had visited Lovecraft in Providence). These are effectively filler for the issue; neither woman appears to have had a direct hand in putting them together, rather Derleth directly adapted what they had written about Lovecraft elsewhere and presented them as a series of quotes. Still, as memoirs go, each of these “Memories” has their points of interest.

“Memories of Lovecraft: I” by Sonia H. Davis

Sonia Haft Lovecraft Davis, who was married to H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s and divorced by mutual consent late in the decade has written some paragraphs about Lovecraft in letters to the editor. The following excerpts are from her letters—
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 116

This is the original opening to “Memories of Lovecraft: I.” August Derleth and Sonia H. Davis first came into contact in 1947, and while their initial interactions were rough (even antagonistic), they did eventually make peace and become friendly correspondents, which lasted through at least 1970, based on letters in the August Derleth archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Derleth would pass away in 1971, and Sonia in 1972. It is from this collection of letters that Derleth borrowed several personal memories of Lovecraft that Sonia had shared with him over the years.

Given that the August Derleth/Sonia H. Davis correspondence is split between the John Hay Library in Providence and the Wisconsin Historical Society, it is difficult to consolidate a lot of the information in the letters, much less easily search them, but an attempt to survey the available documents has not uncovered which letters that Derleth excerpted these quotes from. The letters may have been misplaced, or included among the Arkham House business files, but it makes it difficult to gauge how accurate the quotations are, or in what context they took place. However we can say a few things based on internal evidence and other Lovecraft materials that are available to scholars.

During our marriage we often went to theatres, sometimes to the Taormina, a favorite Italian restaurant, where H. P. L. learned to eat minestrone and spaghetti with parmesan cheese, which he loved. But he balked at the wine.
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 117

In his letters to his aunts during their marriage, Lovecraft mentions the Taormina Italian restaurant three times (LFF 1.237, 264, 2.555), and the comments on Sonia introducing him to Italian food, particularly minestrone and spaghetti (with lots of parmesan cheese) are well-attested in his letters:

My taste has become so prodigiously Italianised that I never order anything but spaghetti & minestrone except when those are not to be had—& they really contain an almost ideal balance of active nutritive elements, considering the wheaten base of spaghetti, the abundant vitamines in tomato sauce, the assorted vegetables in minestrone, & the profusion of powdered cheese common to both.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 18 Sep 1925, LFF 1.402

Some of the comments attributed to Sonia’s letters involve information that she would not have had directly, but might have gotten through Lovecraft himself, family photographs, or conversations with his aunts; there is also evidence that her memories may be skewed somewhat by prior anecdotes or biographical notes on Lovecraft, for example:

As a child H. P. L. was not only far from being ‘hideous’ but he was a very beautiful baby with flaxen curls, beautiful brown eyes and an engaging smile. As a boy of six he was still a very handsome and interesting-looking child. […] H. P. used to speak of his mother as a ‘touch-me-not’ and once—but once only—he confessed to me that his mother’s attitude toward him was ‘devastating’. . . . In my opinion, the elder Lovecraft, having Beena travelling salesman for the Gotham Silversmiths, and his wife being a ‘touch-me-not’, took his sexual pleasures wherever he could find them; for H. P. never had a sister of a brother, and his mother, probably having been sex-starved against her will, lavished both her love and her hate on her only child.
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 116-117

Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853-1898) and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft (1857-1921) were both dead by the time H. P. Lovecraft met Sonia, so this is speculation—and no doubt inspired in whole or in part by earlier memoirs or brief biographical pieces like Winfield Townley Scott’s “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944), which included the revelation that W. S. Lovecraft (who worked as a commercial traveller for the Gorham Silver Co.) died of syphilis, and Townley’s publication of excerpts from the Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess, which was the first suggest that Susan Lovecraft disliked her son’s appearance.

The most interesting snippet is one which frankly no one else could have provided, and which appears in no other source:

H. P. was inarticulate in expressions of love except to his mother and to his aunts, to whom he expressed himself quite vigorously; to all other it was expressed by deep appreciation only. One way of expression of H. P.’s sentiment was to wrap his ‘pinkey’ finger around mine and say ‘Umph!’
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 117

There is no significant doubt that Sonia did actually write these segments; several of them echo points in her long memoir The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, and can be taken as elaborations on ideas already expressed (although the ‘umph’ is new). It is unfortunate that the original letters from which they were taken have not come to light yet, as reading between the lines it seems likely that Sonia was responding to some specific point or question of Derleth’s, rather than random recollections.

“Memories of Lovecraft: I” has been republished at least twice, in Lovecraft Remembered (1998) and Ave Atque Vale (2019); in both cases, Derleth’s opening paragraph explaining the origin of the memories was not reprinted.

“Memories of Lovecraft II” by Helen V. Sully

Helen Sully (now Mrs. George Trimble of Auburn, California) a friend of Clark Ashton Smith’s, was given a letter of introduction to Lovecraft by Smith when she traveled east in the summer of 1933. She was driven to Providence to meet Lovecraft by the family of Frank Belknap Long.
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 117

Derleth pointedly does not give any indication of the source of the quotes that follow. It was originally a brief memoir titled “Some Memories of H. P. L.” (now located at the John Hay Library), which Derleth then revised, cutting out some portions and rewording others, and formatting it similar to “Memories of Lovecraft: I.” To get an idea of the extent of the revisions, compare these two paragraphs:

That night, after dinner, he took me into a graveyard associated with Poe. . . . It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.

That night, after dinner, he took me down into a graveyard near where Edgar Allan Poe had lived, or was he buried there? I can’t remember. It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eery light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began running out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.

The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 119

Ave Atque Vale 365-366

Derleth had done this kind of quiet editing several times before, such as when he revised the ending of “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft. Sully’s brief memoir is an especially interesting read because Lovecraft’s own notes on her 1933 visit are exceedingly sparse and lacking in detail; perhaps not surprising given its brevity.

“Memories of Lovecraft: II” was reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998), without Derleth’s introductory paragraph, while “Some Memories of H. P. L.” was published in Ave Atque Vale (2019). Of the two, I prefer Sully’s unedited version, although for most purposes the content is almost identical.

While they may not appear to be much—a few pages of scattered recollections covering small portions of Lovecraft’s life—these are some of the pieces to the puzzle that was Lovecraft, and have been pored over by scholars, their ideas and accounts analyzed, challenged, accepted, refuted, and incorporated into every biography of Lovecraft since their publication.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” (1959) by Dorothy C. Walter

The time of this meeting was early in 1934. Mr. Lovecraft was living in Providence, Rhode Island, his native city. I was spending the winter with relatives there. A man who knew us both wanted us to become acquainted, and so it came about that one day Mr. Lovecraft climbed our doorsteps, rang out bell, and settled down on my aunt’s parlor sofa for a leisurely conversation.
—Dorothy C. Walter, “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” in The Shuttered Room & Other Pieces 178

Lovecraft scholars are spoiled in the sense that so many of Lovecraft’s letters have survived. There are direct, primary source accounts of Lovecraft’s life and thought that are just absent from the majority of pulp writers or average individuals of the time when Lovecraft lived. This also means we have a large body of material to compare and contrast memoirs and anecdotes of Lovecraft’s life with; a way to evaluate the accuracy of recollections and see what a particular memoir actually adds to our understanding of Lovecraft’s life that his letters do not.

However, not everything made it into Lovecraft’s letters, or not all letters survive. There is, for example, no direct mention of Dorothy C. Walter or any meeting with her in Lovecraft’s extant correspondence. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the meeting didn’t happen or that Walter made it up, as is suspected with “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach or “The Day He Met Lovecraft” (1972) by Lew Shaw. It does mean that we need to examine the content of Walter’s memoir carefully to evaluate the plausibility of the scenario and confirm and corroborating details.

In the opening to her memoir, Walter claims her meeting with Lovecraft occurred in “early 1934.” Lovecraft spent two weeks in New York City with friends after Christmas, returning to Providence on January 9th. Walter adds a further detail:

[…] I took my turn tending an exhibit of distinguished paintings of bird-life being shown that week by my aunt’s pet project, the Audubon Society, at the John Hay Library […]
—Dorothy C. Walter, “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” in The Shuttered Room & Other Pieces 182

The Calendar of Events January 1934 for Brown University shows that from 9 – 23 January, the John Hay Library at Brown University hosted “Paintings of North American Birds by Rex Brasher under the auspices of the Audubon Society.” So that’s a good corroborating detail; it shows that Walter was at least in the right place at the right time, and narrows down the scope of when the visit could have occurred. Her memoir also emphasizes the extreme cold of that January, which called Lovecraft to beg off his first appointment to visit. Lovecraft was particularly sensitive to cold due to some undiagnosed circulatory issue, and this jives with behavior and observations in Lovecraft’s letters for January 1934, which contain passages like this:

I envy you your climate—we’re having a cold spell, so that I haven’t been out of the house for three days.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, [31 Jan 1934], O Fortunate Floridian 103

So while we don’t have explicit reference to Lovecraft visiting with Dorothy C. Walter some Sunday afternoon in mid-to-late January in his letters, such a visit is certainly very plausible.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment; the main reason to suspect the authenticity of Walter’s memoir, besides the lack of mention in HPL’s letters, is that the memoir is embellished with some additional research which may have skewed or informed her depiction of Lovecraft. Walter had written about Lovecraft previously in “Lovecraft and Benefit Street” (1943), and letters and papers at the John Hay Library show she was somewhat active in the early Lovecraft studies from shortly after Lovecraft’s death through the early 1960s, in part through her connection with Lovecraft’s friend W. Paul Cook (whom she claims encouraged her to meet with Lovecraft). It is clear reading her “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” that some of her information was derived from Cook and/or his memoir “In Memoriam” (1941), including the anecdote with the kitten:

“Lovecraft, you know, prefers to write at night. He is also passionately devoted to cats. I suppose he knows every Tabby and Tom in Providence and loves them all.

“Years ago when I was living in Massachusetts and he was visiting me, I asked him to write an article on the Supernatural in Literature for the magazine I was getting out. He did it too—to the Queen’s tatste—but that’s not the story. Knowing his nocturnal habits, I settled him at my desk to make a start on it, when the lateness of the hour forced me off to bed to be ready to pull out and go to work next day. Just before I left him, I dropped a half-grown kitten into his lap. he was delighted. In no time at all the little cat was curled up comfortably, safe in the presence of a friend.

“Next morning I found Howard sitting exactly as I had left him—not one scratch on his paper, the kitten still asleep in his arms. And when I remonstrated because he hadn’t got on with my article, he replied, ‘But I didn’t want to disturb kitty!’
—Dorothy C. Walter, “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” in The Shuttered Room & Other Pieces 189

The two versions of the anecdote aren’t identical, but it’s clear that Walter wasn’t above repeating second-hand material to pad out her brief hours with Lovecraft. In truth, aside from the fact of the encounter itself, there really isn’t much new information about Lovecraft that is contained in Walter’s memoir, no major surprises in thought or action, just a confirmation of Lovecraft’s habits as he himself maintained and as seen by someone outside his normal circle and a couple brief anecdotes. Better to have it than not, but easy to overlook among more substantial or provocative memoirs like The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis.

Which is perhaps, as it should be. Not a great deal can be expected from a three-hour visit, nor did it develop into the kind of friendship and correspondence that Lovecraft had with other women. It was one of many social calls that were part of the life of old New England, even into the 1930s.

Soon after his call I went back to my home in Vermont, remaining away from Providence for several years. By the time I returned, Mr. Lovecraft was dead.
—Dorothy C. Walter, “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” in The Shuttered Room & Other Pieces 178

Based on a letter from August Derleth dated 2 Nov 1959, Walter was concerned about misprints in “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft.” These concerns were apparently well-founded, as in a letter to Derleth dated 9 Jul 1960, Walter points out several misprints and a dropped line. Derleth’s reply dated 13 Jul 1960 was apologetic, but the damage was done. After initial publication in The Shuttered Room & Other Pieces (1959), “Three Hours with H. P. Lovecraft” was reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998) and Ave Atque Vale (2018), retaining the same errors, and was translated into German for Das schleichende Chaos (2006).

Perhaps, when it is reprinted again, some kindly editor might fix the errors that Walter felt plagued the piece.

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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