“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.

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

“A Glimpse of H. P. L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana

Sensible of the slowness with which the Old Corner turns over its stock, (they still have a 2-volume Gay’s Poems which they had years ago on Empire St.!) I cashed your money order & sailed confidently in—but lo! The daemon-book had performed an incantation on itself, & evaporated like a puff of smoke into the sinister & tenebrous aether! In other words, it wasn’t there—& just as I was looking forward to a free reading of it before mailing it on to you! Damn sorry—but Fate is Fate. And to think that it still remained on shelves till only a little while ago! Well—one may only shrug one’s shoulders philosphically & make the best of it. Here’s the $3.25.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, 28 Sep 1926, Letters to Wilfred B. Talman 44

The book was probably A. E. Waite’s The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts; the bookshop was the Old Corner Bookshop, formerly of 77 Empire Street and then on 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, R. I. Lovecraft browsed their wares for well over a decade, perhaps two, and no doubt the proprietor sold him many a volume—little knowing that those selfsame books might come back to him one day.

According to some letters, at the time of his death in 1937, H. P. Lovecraft’s library consisted of up to ~2,500 books. At the time, believing she might need to sell some of the books, his aunt Annie Gamwell asked a neighbor Mary Spinks to catalogue the collection; this partial and not always accurate list covers part of the books Lovecraft owned. R. H. Barlow, the executor of Lovecraft’s estate, was given the pick of some. Others may have been sold or dispersed. Sometime after Annie Gamwell’s death in 1941, a large portion of Lovecraft’s library—and, apparently, manuscripts and some of his knick-knacks—were purchased by H. Douglass Dana of the Old Corner Bookshop. Some of these were eventually sold to the John Hay Library to become part of their Lovecraft collection:

…but for a while there were books from Lovecraft’s library available for general sale.

Imagine Providence in 1945. The war was over, or almost would be. Word had got out that the bookstore had purchased what remained of Lovecraft’s library, and two fantasy fans converged like ghouls to an unopened grave. Donald M. Grant had just graduated high school; Thomas P. Hadley was a few years older. Together, they quickly decided to produce a tribute chapbook to H. P. Lovecraft: Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) was published by Grant-Hadley Enterprises, with a second edition issued in December. The partnership wouldn’t last—Grant was drafted near the end of 1945—but both Grant and Hadley would go on to make their mark on fantasy publishing in various ventures.

That is the legend. I’ve yet to find a direct account from Hadley or Grant on how they met or decided on their subject. The earliest I’ve been able to trace the story is Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era (1983) by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. But the timing is more or less right. H. Douglass Dana had been selling used books in Providence, R.I. since 1910; Lovecraft used to frequent the Old Corner Bookstore, and mentions it in his letters. Dana’s bookstore was noted for periodic disasters: hurricanes flooded the shop in 1938, 1944, and 1954, and after every wave of destruction would require fresh stock.

It would explain why there’s a memoir from Mary V. Dana.

Mary Van Meter was born in 1909. The 1930 Federal census lists her profession as salesperson at a bookstore. By the 1940 Federal census, she had married Herbert Douglass Dana, and was definitely helping him run the Old Corner Bookstore. Her memoir of Lovecraft is probably the weakest entry in the bunch—how much might any bookseller remember a single, occasional customer?—but we can actually time this memoir fairly specifically:

Though the shop was then at the foot of his street and he came in occasionally, we rarely exchanged a word or even knew his identity until the summer of 1936. […] We met at that time a young booklover, R. H. Barlow by name, who became badly smitten, biblimanically speaking, with a little set of books we had. He was visiting an uncle, whom he mentioned with such enthusiastic admiration and affection, describing him as an author and scholar of rare erudition, that he aroused our curiosity. He kept popping in practically every day of his visit to look at this set, trying to calm his conscience or squeeze his pocketbook. Finally, he decided to have his uncle lend his approval to fortify his own.
—Mary V. Sana, “A Glimpse of H. P. L.” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft 25

The “uncle” was Lovecraft; Grant and Hadley either didn’t know better or didn’t care to correct her on that point. Barlow visited Lovecraft in Providence from 28 July—1 September 1936 (O Fortunate Floridian xvii; for more on Barlow and Lovecraft, see Adventurous Liberation: Lovecraft in Florida), so the dates work out. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of new material on Lovecraft, otherwise. The one cogent observation Mary Dana made was:

In fact, the only thing we remembered about him up to that time was the fact that he often had a copy of Weird Tales or similar magazine under his arm, and once spoke with distaste of their lurid covers.
—Mary V. Sana, “A Glimpse of H. P. L.” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft 25

As an anecdote, this should be taken with a grain of salt, though it isn’t out of keeping with some of Lovecraft’s comments about Weird Tales covers in his letters. A comment similar to this may have been the origin of a particularly long-lived Lovecraftian legend:

[Lovecraft] was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing. When he bought pulps at Douglass Dana’s Old Corner Book Store, at the foot of College Street, he tore off the more lurid covers lest friends misunderstand his interests.
—Winfield Townley Scott, “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944) from Exiles and Fabrications 71

There is no physical proof of this, or mention of such a practice in Lovecraft’s letters, but the Danas would seem to be a likely source for such an anecdote. It is ironic that Mary V. Dana remembered Barlow so vividly, a decade later. In 1951 catalogue, the Danas advertised for sale the books from Lovecraft’s library that Barlow had inherited (see The Man Who Collected Lovecraft), which they purchased after Barlow’s death.

There is one other important contribution that the Danas made to Rhode Island on Lovecraft. The book was “illustrated by Betty Wells Halladay from objects owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library.” Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945—with the added caption:

These drawings present objects from Lovecraft’s collection of oddities, items that he inherited, picked up on his travels, or was gifted by friends. While there are clues in Lovecraft’s letters that might help us identify some of these items, any such effort would be speculative. Is that stone head the Nameless Eikon that Clark Ashton Smith sent H. P. Lovecraft from California? Or the Cthulhoid effigy the horror in clay made for him by R. H. Barlow? Is that clay humanoid figure a gift from Stuart M. Boland or Samuel Loveman? Did Lovecraft pick up the Egyptian seal and scarab from some museum trip? We really don’t know. Some of them may yet reside at the John Hay Library, and perhaps there are answers there. For now, we can only say there were one more contribution that the Old Corner Bookshop made to preserving (and dispersing) Lovecraft’s legacy.

“A Glimpse of H. P. L.” was first published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) and the second edition; it was subsequently reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998) and Ave Atque Vale (2018). It has also been translated into German by Malte S. Sembten for Namenlose Kulte (2006).

Rhode Island on Lovecraft can be read for free at the Internet Archive.

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.

Shadows of Innsmouth (2014) by Gonzo

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with cartoon depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

In 1992, author William Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh published Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), consisting of a book with a 3.5″ floppy disk. It was an art project as much as anything else: the book was treated with photosensitive chemicals so that the words would begin to fade as they were exposed to light; the disk would run once and then encrypt itself. Buyers were purchasing a not so much a physical product as an experience and a challenge: how did they want to experience this, knowing that it would be rendered unreadable by the act of reading? How would they preserve it?

It was a very cyberpunk stunt, and clever programmers eventually cracked the encryption; even before that, copies of the text were available on the web, shared through networks of pirates and fans. The text survives today, even though it was designed to be forgotten, and now on a near-obsolete physical media format, because of determined interest and repeated, if often shadowy, lines of transmission. If you download the text of Agrippa now, you will probably get an accurate copy of the original text—but how would you know? What would you compare it to? The digital archivist finds themselves in a position not unlike a scholar of ancient manuscripts, comparing different and fragmented versions of texts to discern clues as to the route of transmission.

Early digital works, more than most, tend to illustrate the difficulties of preservation. The lack of physical substrate means the technological end of things—what’s the file format? Do we have a program that can open that? What operating system does it use? Do we have a computer that can run that?—means that trying to experience these works as they were originally is increasingly difficult. In many cases, the original project files and source code of a digital work, the programs used to create it, may be long gone. All we have is the end product, which may have been compressed, reformatted, or translated in various ways across its route of transmission.

Which is to say that you’re probably never going to read Shatter (1985) on a Macintosh Plus in MacPaint, or see the magic of how Batman: Digital Justice (1990) was put together on a Macintosh II that boasted a whopping 8MB of RAM. However, you can still buy print collections of those comics—which is more than most digital works can say.

The internet provides a direct market for creators to sell their works, in many cases bypassing middlemen and brick-and-mortar stories; for artists in particular, having a website meant they could sell directly to their customers through various paradigms—memberships, purchasable files, mail order—and the product didn’t have to be physical. Potential buyers who wanted a digital comic could go to the website, fork over a credit card number, and access the gallery of images or download a .zip or .PDF with the images. There was piracy, and various attempts at anti-piracy measures, because nothing was perfect, but they were generally good enough, especially for honest merchants and customers. Systems like this still exist today, although many creators have, for ease and because of issues with payment processors, opted to use middleman websites like Itch.io or DriveThruComics.

There are a lot of benefits to this kind of digital ecosystem: niche artists who would struggle to find a publisher can self-publish and still find an audience for their works; customers interested in such niche works have a better chance of finding such materials, which tends to foster the creation of more of it. This is especially true for works of parody and erotica, which often struggle with traditional print distribution channels.

Digital artist Gonzo began (as near as I can tell) with his own website, Taboo Studios, circa 2008. Gonzo created erotic comics using 3D rendering software, which has become increasingly available as a in the early 2000s thanks to the release of graphic processing cards for home use and improvements in software, often with horror settings and narratives, and frequently focused on monster sex as the kink of choice. In 2014, Gonzo published the first part of one of the first of his erotic monster sex comics based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, “Shadows over Innsmouth.”

Shadows of Innsmouth is an almost faithful retelling of the H P Lovecraft classic, ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’. I say ‘almost’ faithful as all of the core events in the original book happens in the comic, but this time with more sex, a female lead character and its set in 2014 not 1914 – But I’m sure you will consider these changes all good changes 🙂

The story starts with Jennifer the new assistant librarian at Miskatonic University who happens to be going through a rough patch in her life, she finds the Lovecraftian novel and quickly discovers that the Innsmouth of legend is based on a real town. Her curiosity intrigued she sets off to Innsmouth to discover which parts of the book are true and which existed only in Lovecrafts twisted imagination�

This 94 page storyline based comic is the first part and features, weird mysteries, kinky sex, stranger sex, the deep ones, amphibian creatures from the sea, tribal island girls, cheating, monster breeding, emotional turmoil, selling out the future of a town in a demonic pact� and much more.

A must for any Erotic Horror fan and the first in a series of re-imaginings of his work.
—Gonzo, read me.txt file that accompanies “Shadow over Innsmouth”

Foreword to “Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo

This is a work that should be seen in the same vein as “The Statement of Randolph Carter Twisted” (2024) by Lisa Shea or The Colour Out of Space (2024) by H. P. Lovecraft & Sara Barkat: artistic re-interpretations of the original work. “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is a likely suspect for an erotic adaptation in particular because the monster sex is already there—just off the page.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo, page 13

Gonzo’s style in this is reminiscent of 1970s European erotic comics, with two large panels taking up the entire page providing room for detail and dialogue or exposition, although Gonzo could and did juggle up his formats occasionally. Like most 2000s-era render artwork, the figures are relatively stiff, and Gonzo wasn’t above borrowing artwork to use as skins for books or wall art—you might recognize the cover of Lovecraft Unbound (2009) on the cover of the books stacked on the table, for example, and there are other borrowings as well.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 71

Gonzo included sexually explicit artwork—it is a pornographic work, after all—but most of the action builds up to the explicit scenes. As is typical, the limitations of the software and modeling tend to show in difficulty rendering non-Caucasian features, and many of the skin textures on objects are distorted.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 83

Gonzo also clearly took inspiration where he found it; the transition from human to Deep One may be reminiscent of an Animorphs, but is a familiar conceit to show the progress of time and transformation. The Deep Ones themselves tend to look a bit like cave trolls from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings (2001), although Gonzo draws in the Gillman from the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) in the second part—as well as another Lovecraftian critter, this one with tentacles.

“Shadows of Innsmouth” (2014) by Gonzo – page 117

These erotic render artworks may seem a little strange and quaint today, because the state of the art has moved on. A decade of artists have worked creating custom textures, models, working with more advanced programs and faster hardware. Gonzo’s 2014 art reflects the time and tools with which they were made.

In their stated goal of creating an erotic adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Gonzo was largely successful. It is certainly no worse than similar efforts like The Adult Version of Dracula (1970) or Evil Head (2012). Gonzo hits the beats of the story, with their own little twists for the sake of titillation.

Nor was Gonzo alone in creating Lovecraftian erotic works using rendering software and available through much the same way. Artist Iopriest created two Lexi Crane comics, and the artist known as Jag27/Otto Maddox worked Lovecraftian entities into their horror-themed erotic horror comics as well. This was a niche that obviously found at least some audience.

Besides “Shadows of Innsmouth,” Gonzo (now Gonzo Studios) completed adaptations of “From Beyond,” “Dagon,” “Azathoth,” and “Call of Cthulhu.” While Taboo Studios’ web page is defunct, Gonzo has moved their wares to Renderotica, where they are still available for purchase and download.

For the moment.

It has to be emphasized that there is no guarantee that “Shadows of Innsmouth” will be available in a decade, or a year, or even tomorrow. An issue with a payment processor, an untimely death, an accident with a server…and the files will be gone, less accessible than the text of Agrippa. Like “The Fluff at the Threshold” (1996) by Simon Leo Barber, there isn’t really a dedicated archive for these kind of digital creative works. You can buy them, for now, and pirates probably still circulate copies, but the continued existence of these comics remains tenuous. They might disappear at any time.

The world will be a little less weird when that happens.

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.

“Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner

When Mrs. Phillips Gamwell, Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s aunt, returned to Providence from Cambridge, Mass., she and H.P.L. took an apartment on College Street near my dwelling. I had heard of Mrs. Gamwell before, so it was not long before I was visiting her, thusly bringing about my acquaintance with her nephew.
—Marian F. Bonner, “Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.”
in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) 23

The heart ceases to beat.

The last breath is released.

The countdown begins.

When someone dies, all that is left of them are the physical records—the letters, manuscripts, and other writings—and the memories of them in those still living who knew them. Both are perishable. Unless efforts are taken to preserve them, both will be lost. However, the living memories are the more fragile, the more liable to fade or shift with age, and once the person who holds them gone, they are gone forever, unless some effort was made to save them in fixed form. Some efforts were made to save H. P. Lovecraft’s written legacy: his stories, poems, letters, even the scraps were saved by friends and heirs.

The memories of his life, however, were not systematically preserved. Friends, neighbors, and acquaintances wrote and published their impressions of H.P.L. sporadically; there was no attempt to interview his surviving aunt Annie Gamwell while she was alive, for instance. In hindsight, that looks like an oversight—but in truth, it is the rare individual whose memory is preserved long after their death, except in census records and government databases, dusty family bibles and photo albums. Lovecraft, at least, inspired sufficient publication to catch a few recollections and memoirs before those who knew him passed on themselves.

Marian F. Bonner was Lovecraft’s neighbor and correspondent, although she was primarily a friend of his aunt. In 1945 she put together a brief memoir for the collection Rhode Island on Lovecraft. Bonner was not, apparently, a reader of his fiction; seemed entirely outside of the posthumous cult of personality that was Lovecraft’s fandom, or the politics of amateur journalism. Her random collection of recollections and impressions does not speak to any particular image or issue in Lovecraft by anyone else. It is a brief sliver of a life, and several of her impressions were apparently absorbed from Annie Gamwell, rather than directly from interactions with H.P.L.:

His aunt once told me of the meals he would pick up at various, unearthly hours, perhaps at a diner. He abused his digestion horribly according to her reports. His use of sugar in his favorite beverage, coffee, was enormous.
—Marian F. Bonner, “Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.”
in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) 24

At the time “Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.” was published, none of Lovecraft’s correspondence with Bonner had seen print. Lovecraft’s letters would confirm much of what Bonner had said—the letters with the cat heads that Lovecraft had drawn on them, the Gaol Lane anecdote, the 1936 Christmas tree, his tendency to practically cover a postcard with tiny writing.

It is only a short memoir, and there is almost nothing in it that isn’t covered elsewhere by other memoirs or letters. Yet it captures her relationship with Lovecraft and his aunt. We are richer for its existence than we would be without it, for it is a piece of Lovecraft’s life we wouldn’t have had, otherwise.

As an addendum, at the John Hay Library at Brown University, a note survives which is attributed to Bonner:

Bridget Mullaney was one of the Lovecraft family’s servants during the 1890s. She was apparently unaware that Lovecraft’s cousin Phillips Gamwell had died in 1916, or the cause of the family’s slow financial dissolution. The black sheep uncle was Edwin Phillips. It is interesting to compare these third-hand impressions of a young H. P. Lovecraft with the recollections of the Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess.

“Miscellaneous Impressions of H. P. L.” was first published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) and the 1946 second edition; it was subsequently reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998), Ave Atque Vale (2018), and Lovecraft Annual #9 (2015), alongside her letters with Lovecraft. It has also been translated into German by Malte S. Sembten for Namenlose Kulte (2006).

Rhode Island on Lovecraft can be read for free at the Internet Archive.

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.