Yesterday I completely rewrote ye just-publish’d story, “The Quickening of Ursula Sphinx,” as I am nigh unhappy with the version that has been publish’d in STRANGE VERSUS LOVECRAFT and wanted to improve the story and then use it in the book I am writing with David Barker. —W. H. Pugmire’s Blog, 12 July 2013
Whoever compiles the full and complete bibliography of W. H. Pugmire will have their work cut out for them. Not only because much of Pugmire’s work is distributed in scarce fanzines and limited editions, but because Wilum had a penchant for re-writing that went beyond cleaning up a bit of purple prose or updating references that had aged unpleasantly. When Pugmire re-wrote a story, he could completely transform it in only a few sentences—and did.
“The Quickening of Ursula Sphinx” was published twice; the first time in the now-scarce Strange versus Lovecraft(2013) bizarro anthology, and then re-written for inclusion in the also-scarce In the Gulfs of Dream and Other Lovecraftian Tales(2015), written with David Barker. Finding either will be a hunt; but to truly appreciate how Pugmire could rework a story would require access to both.
The context of the publishing makes an interesting contrast. Strange versus Lovecraft is a collection of Lovecraftian bizarro fiction, and Pugmire is in the odd position of having not just the first story in the anthology, but the most straitlaced one—or perhaps more accurately, in a gathering of grindcore, anti-folk, and crust punks, Pugmire is the OG horror punk who sets the bar against which everything else is measured. Meanwhile in In the Gulfs of Dream, “The Quickening of Ursula Sphinx” is buried deep in the two-author collection, not an afterthought but also not a standout. Among a collection of other less experimental and irreverent Lovecraftian tales, the story finds its place more in relation to the shared characters and ideas of Pugmire and Barker’s other works.
The story by itself is a slight one, only about six pages long, and centers about one of Pugmire’s characters, Ephraim Kant, who has unearthed the thought-lost “talkie” film of silent film actress Ursula Sphinx—who has arrived at the viewing party. The atmosphere and mood opens with the Lovecraftian equivalent of The House on Haunted Hill (1959), just a smorgasbord of Lovecraftian and horror images, tropes, and in-jokes, all in a good-natured fun but marked by Pugmire’s love for the outré and decadent, the sensual and the surreal.
The first changes in the story are minor, mere tweaks on the language:
“Have you not read Ephraim’s second novel, In the Valley of Shoggoth? He mentions these Outer Ones there, in the third chapter, wherein his narrator discusses the queer influence of mortal blood upon cosmic daemons of an alternative dimension?”
“Have you not read Ephraim’s second novel, In the Vale of Shoggoth? He mentions these Outer Ones there, in the third chapter, wherein his narrator discusses the queer influence of mortal blood upon cosmic daemons of alien dimension.”
Strange versus Lovecraft 8
In the Gulfs of Dream 217
Later, the changes become more pronounced and impactful. The language refined, the ideas more clearly expressed—the equivalent of another draft.
I waved my hand to the others who milled about the room. “Have we all done time for lunacy? Are any of your evening guests slaves to sanity?”
“My dear, what a wicked imagination you have. Ah—but here is our Living Legend.”
Waving my hand to the others in the room, I continued. “We’ve all done time for lunacy, yes? We are none of us slaves to dull sanity.”
“He licked his lips. “I promised you that tonight would be a mad affair.” The babble in the room suddenly ceased, and when our host looked up an element of rare wonder entered into his eyes. “Here is our Living Legend,” he whispered.
Strange versus Lovecraft 10
In the Gulfs of Dream 219
The climax of the story though, is where the story fundamentally pivots. Pugmire plays another variation of the magic of the silver screen, like “Pickman’s Other Model (1929)” (2008) by Caitlín R. Kiernan. There is the promise of something captured in the film as it begins to play. In another writer’s hands, this could have been drawn out into a full-blown novella, a legend of what happened that night, a la Fury of the Demon. Pugmire, though, doesn’t look away. Let’s the reader see what happens.
Ephraim took hold of my arm and guided me out of my chair, out of the row in which I had sat, toward the flickering image on the pale wall. I watched the image of the youthful Ursula Sphinx, that semi-human priestess, open her mouth, and I thought that she would buzz again; but instead, she sucked at aether, and the blurred bloody blotch fell, so as to encase her. I saw that cosmic essence sink into the texture of the young woman’s flesh, into her ears and nose and mouth. She stepped out of the screen, toward us. She stopped just before me, her fantastic eyes shimmering, and with the sweetest buzzing tone, she spoke my name with a mouth that wore one little stain of gore. Tilting to her, I kissed the blood from off her mouth.
I sensed our host beside me and allowed him to help me to my feet. I liked the way his buzzing voice poured laughter into my ear as the young woman floated toward us. Ursula Sphinx stopped just before me, her fantastic eyes on fire, as in the sweetest droning purr she spoke my name, with that mouth that wore one little stain of my bloodshed. Tilting to her, I kissed my crimson liquid from her lips.
Strange versus Lovecraft 14
In the Gulfs of Dream 222-223
The bloody mouth is a recurring image in Pugmire’s fiction, one he liked to return to, at once carnal and horrific. It’s easy to see why Pugmire cut down this paragraph a bit, as it is more effective to move Ursula Sphinx’s quickening to a little earlier—yet the key points, the big change between the two versions of the story is that in the second one, the strange actress tastes the blood of the protagonist. And so, the narrator becomes a part of the proceedings, not just a witness but a celebrant in the climax of the rite, partially captured on film.
For those most interested in the Mythos as setting and stories as sources of lore, this little piece would probably be classed as a minor work. Compared to many of Pugmire’s stories, it is; but it is a little gem of its kind. A look at how and why an author could revise a story, the way a few words’ difference can change the meaning so completely, while retaining the core of both texts.
The correspondence of August Derleth with Muriel E. Eddy and her husband C. M. Eddy, Jr.—the two overlap and intertwine so much they have to be taken together, especially as later in life Muriel did the writing or typing for both of them—encompasses about 121 separate letters, postcards, and notes, for a total of approx. 222 pages. The bulk of this is spread out among three folders (5-7) in box 16 of the August Derleth archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society; a single letter is at John Hay Library.
The correspondence ran from 1939 to ~1970. It appears to have begun from their mutual correspondent Hazel Heald, and from the publication of The Outsider and Others (1939) by Arkham House.
My dear Mr. Derleth—
Mrs. Hazel Heald, of Cambridge, Mass, told me that you had published a book of Howard P. Lovecraft’s weird stories—and I am wondering if you would please let me known just how much it is, where shall I send for it, if it contains a photo of our beloved H. P. L. and all about it. —Muriel E. Eddy & C. M. Eddy, Jr. to August Derleth, 29 Nov 1939
Early correspondence was apparently either sporadic or not retained; there is almost a five-year gap between the 1939 letter and the next, in September 1944. After this, however, correspondence becomes more regular. Being in Providence and with access to the local newspapers, the Eddys kept Derleth apprised of relevant items that appeared in the papers during the critical 1940s period which saw important pieces published including Winfield Townley Scott’s “The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, R. I.” (1943) and Sonia H. Davis’ “Howard Phillips Lovecraft As His Wife Remembers Him” (1948).
Besides local news, points of conversation included Derleth’s latest publications, Lovecraft’s ex-wife, C. M. Eddy, Jr. and H. P. Lovecraft’s work for Houdini (including The Cancer of Superstition), and some of the Eddy tales that Lovecraft had a hand in: “The Ghost-Eater” (Weird Tales Apr 1924), “The Loved Dead” (Weird Tales May-Jun-Jul 1924), and “Deaf, Dumb and Blind” (Weird Tales Apr 1925). Derleth would ultimately re-publish these stories, as well as a version of The Cancer of Superstition, in the Arkham House books Night’s Yawning Peal (1952), The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966), and The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1970), as well as The Arkham Sampler (Summer 1948).
Until the publication of Lovecraft’s own letters, these letters from the Eddys were the primary source of data on the revisions with Lovecraft, and likely influenced Derleth’s presentation of the stories. For instance, with regard to “The Loved Dead” and its putative banning:
The yarn started out to be a little short study in psychology under the tentative title of “The Leaping Heart”—i.e., a heart that leaped from sheer joy whenever in the presence of the dead. H. P. L. discussed it with me and we decided it might do for a W. T. story. One point we were agreed on was that as many of these tales told by a hero now deceased leave leave the reader completely up in the air as to how the story could ever have reached the public eye. H.P.L. calmly informed me that my hero was suffering from a medically-recognized mental ailment, and he couldn’t be blamed for anything he did during the course of the yarn. He even named the malady—a long Latin term which I had never heard before.
Once I had placed my hero in the graveyard, the story wrote itself. I asked H.P.L. to look over the first draft of the completed story, and decided only minor changes need be made.
Off it went to Weird Tales, but they, at first, were afraid to use it. Finally, the powers that be decided to include it in the big Anniversary Issue. They did!
Then the fun started!!
P.T.A. groups and church organizations in several parts of the country protested vigorously—and succeeded in having the issue removed from the newsstands in many cities and towns!
Some have been kind enough to say that this censorship stimulated enough of a demand for W.T. so that it helped save if from extinction! It’s always been my “pet” Weird Tales story! —C. M. Eddy, Jr. to August Derleth, 12 Feb 1948
Derleth quoted this more-or-less verbatim in The Arkham Sampler (Summer 1948) when he reprinted “The Loved Dead,” Lovecraft had a slightly different recollection:
It may interest you to know that I revised the now-notorious “Loved Dead” myself—practically re-writing the latter half. […] I did not, though, devise the necrophilia portion which so ruffled the tranquility of parents & pedagogues on the banks of the Wabash. —H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [Mar 1935], Letters to Robert Bloch & Others132
For all their ongoing interest in Lovecraft, which resulted in works like “Message in Stone” (1956) by Muriel E. Eddy and The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001) by Muriel E. Eddy & C. M. Eddy Jr., recollections in the surviving letters are fairly thin on the ground. As with some of Lovecraft’s other friends and correspondents, the Eddys only knew a part of Lovecraft’s life, and had a limited store of stories and insight to share. As an example, a letter dated 25 Sep 1948:
Clara Hess is the primary source for the idea that Lovecraft’s mother Susie Phillips Lovecraft found her son “hideous”; a letter from her was published in the Providence Journal 19 Sep 1948 by Winfield Townley Scott, and letters from Hess to Derleth survive that show Arkham House followed up on the lead for Lovecraftian lore.
For the most part, however, the letters from the Eddys to Derleth verge on the prosaic; for a while, she sent him clippings regarding the Newport Tower, and attempts were made to market some of C. M. Eddy, Jr.’s other weird tales, including “The Red Cap of Mara,” which was eventually published posthumously in The Loved Dead and Other Tales. Over the years, visitors to Providence stopped at the Eddys’, to talk about H. P. Lovecraft with someone that knew him.
Dear August Derleth—
I have erected a little shrine in my house in memory of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. I have so many visitors who are interested in Lovecraft that I decided to have a little corner devoted to “Lovecraftiana”—old “Weird Tales” with his stories, etc.—All I lack is a sutable photo of H. P. L. for the center. I wonder if you have one like that which appeared in one of his published books (published by you)—a picture of his face or profile—or a copy thereof which I might have? I only have the little snapshot of Lovecraft taken in N.Y. and it isn’t a very good picture for a memory-shrine! —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 2 Dec 1960
Personal events made it in there as well; Muriel and Cliff would give their condolences on Derleth’s divorce, asked after his children, mourned the deaths of Hazel Heald and Clark Ashton Smith. The Lovecraft circle slowly shrank with the passing years.
One of the more notable anecdotes from this period involved fans visiting or writing:
Don’t you think, August, that it is amazing how so many young people love H.P.L.’s work? One young negro boy has written me that he has all of the H.P.L. stories and books, and loves them dearly! —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 24 Feb 1965
While this happened a decade after the events of Lovecraft Country (2016) by Matt Ruff, it’s nice to think that there was a real-life Atticus Freeman out there enjoying H. P. Lovecraft.
Over the years, the Eddys dug through their accumulated correspondence for more material related to Houdini and Lovecraft, some of which was sold to collectors. C. M. Eddy, Jr. sent Derleth some extensive notes for “The Dark Brotherhood,” one of Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations” with H. P. Lovecraft, based on a dream Lovecraft recounted in one of his letters. The Eddys were getting older, and eventually were forced to retire and live off social security.
In 1964, C. M. Eddy, Jr. conceived the idea of a new story, based on the Dark Swamp incident, to be eventually titled “Black Noon”:
Now that I feel slightly improved as to my state of health I’m trying my hand at writing again. The story I’m working on is a novelette half fact and half fantasy—with the central character a prototype of the late H. P. L. Would you have any suggestion or recommendation as to the best possible market to try it on, as I’ve rather lost track of the fantasy market, during my years of non-writing. —C. M. Eddy, Jr. to August Derleeth, 4 Jun 1964
While signed as by C. M. Eddy, Jr., the writing is Muriel’s. In truth, his health was on a downward spiral, as chronicled in Muriel’s letters to Derleth. Their daughter Ruth is frequently mentioned as trying to work and care for her aging parents.
Mr. Eddy finds it increasingly difficult to walk; he walks haltingly, with his cane. Since my operation, I find it quite hard to get out, much, but Ruth helps us both, in our dilemma. My operation was a tumor of the stomach—but not malignant! […] Mr. Eddy has not yet finished “Black Noon”, the H.P.L. yarn he has been working on—he seems to need encouragement. maybe you can give him the needed “mental stimulus.” —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 27 May 1965
Cliff is on the waiting list to enter a hospital (ie: Doctor’s orders) as his stomach now is acting up.
I am pretty sad as he cannot hold anything; district nurses come now, to wash and dress him, and a “Sunshine lady helper” brought him an electric razor to help keep his face shaven. […] Cliff and I are now on “medicare”…saves money on prescriptions, anyway. […] Pray for Cliff. I hate to say “Goodbye” because we have been married so many years…since Feb. 10…1918. —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 2 Nov 1965
Cliff rec’d letter and will send MSS. very soon.
He has written some of it by hand—His hand is shaky, but he may as well submit it “as is”, as his days are numbered.
He sleeps a very great deal—sometimes I can’t wake him easily. I am urging him on, to complete “Black Noon.” —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 21 Dec 1965
Cliff needs cheering up, at this point. He is drowning in the sea of depression—I think a few lines from you might do wonders. I hope you will do a little favor for me. It’s “sneaky,” but God will forgive us both, I am sure—would you send Cliff a $5.00 check (made out to him) and I will re-imburse you. He must, however, never know I have re-imbursed you. With the check, you might just say: “This is to buy yourself more paper for ‘Black Noon.’ to which I still look forward, or whatever you need to complete the job!” (or say whatever you are prompted to say.”)
It may encourage him, as he has stopped short; he has H.P.L. almost in the swamp, the cat riding on his shoulder—now he says nobody cares, and he sometimes threatens to tear up the manuscript. […] The doctor says Cliff is depressed because his illness shuts him away from the world. —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 19 Nov 1966
The Eddys had never asked Derleth for money before; to his credit, he appears to have acquiesced to this request.
Once more I have to tell you that Cliff is very sick again (complications) and doctor says if he pulls out of it, it will be a miracle. He has lost several pounds, and cannot remember very much of anything. […] Hospitalization is out of the question, because it is considered a chronic condition, incurable. So I am carrying on, with God’s help, hoping I am doing the right thing by him.
He cannot wear his dentures, so he can only eat soft foods, such as soft-cooked cereals, etc. that require no chewing.
He never did finish “Black Noon,” which I deeply regret. —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 10 May 1967
C. M. Eddy, Jr. was hospitalized for a time, then spent the last few months of his life in a nursing home. He passed away in his sleep on 21 Nov 1967, at the age of 71. He and Muriel had been married 49 years.
With the death of her husband, Muriel E. Eddy carried on life as best she could. She was still interested in matters Lovecraftian, which formed her main bond with Derleth through the years:
It is terribly depressing to me not to have Cliff here. I got so used to talking with him, during the years of his illness. I still cannot imagine he has gone, beyond recall. So many things I want to talk over with him.
I have been hearing from a young man in California. Sonia (HPL’s ex) was writing to me, but suddenly she stopped. She had somebody in the Nursing Home write me that she was too ill with her heart condition to write, as she was writing the sotry of HPL’s life, or something like that. A thought came to me that it was because of a letter I wrote her mentioning Hazel Heald, for whom HPL used to revise material. I assured her that HPL did not ever speak of marriage to Hazel, but that Hazel (now at rest) DID very much like him. She typed some of his stories fro him to pay him for revising her work. She told me at the time she was going to write you and inquire if you wanted to incorporate it in anything you were writing about HPL, and that she would try to see if you would pay for it. believe me, that was not my idea at all, so if she did write, asking you, please do not blame me, August. Since then, she has not written to me. She just asked her room-mate to write me, letting me know she was financially at a low ebb, and that her health was very poor, and she wanted to reserve all her energy towards whatever she was writing or compiling. —Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 2 Mar 1968
The “young man” was Randall Allan Kirsch (who later changed his name to R. A. Everts). This was an ongoing headache for Derleth, as Everts made claims regarding Sonia H. Davis as a possible heir to Lovecraft’s estate, since their divorce was never finalized. Derleth kept carbon copies of his few letters to Muriel on the subject of Everts, possibly for safety.
Another interesting late letter regarded women reading H. P. Lovecraft:
One of the women that Muriel heard from was Elaine Gillum Eitel of Texas, whose master’s thesis was The Sense of Place in H. P. Lovecraft (1970). Muriel E. Eddy had become a torchbearer for Lovecraft’s memory, and her letters with Derleth seemed to be a way for her to share her ongoing enthusiasm on the subject with someone else who could appreciate it.
One of the last items of correspondence in the Eddy folders at the Wisconsin Historical Society is a get-well card, signed by Muriel and Ruth Eddy, which must date to Sep-Nov 1969, when Derleth was hospitalized for 87 days, during which he had four operations. He survived until 1971, when a heart attack killed him and brought a final end to his long friendship with the Eddys. Derleth had set to publish the fragment of “Black Noon,” but those publishing plans died with him; it was eventually published in Exit Into Eternity (1973).
Muriel E. Eddy would live until 1978. It is difficult to summarize a friendship of twenty-odd years in letters in postcards; Derleth and the Eddys shared an interest in Lovecraft, but their correspondence went beyond just that, as they revealed more of their personal Iives to one another. It is difficult to extract Muriel from the men in her life; she wrote little in her letters to Derleth about her own writing and work, though she was a pulp writer and poet in her own right. Since she tended to focus on romance rather than weird fiction, perhaps Derleth had little interest, or perhaps she was simply diffident on the subject.
While some of Muriel’s letters appear gossipy to the extreme, it has to be remembered that Derleth would have been one of her major outlets for all things Lovecraft-related, and probably one of the few social outlets she had while caring for her ailing husband. If Muriel’s memories or deductions about Lovecraft were not always correct, she seemed at the least to never wish to tarnish Lovecraft’s posthumous reputation. The end of her correspondence with Derleth marked the closing in a chapter of the book of history, as one more voice that knew Lovecraft grew silent, never to share her memories again save by what had made it into print.
Winfield, do you ever think of Philomena Hart? She used to be so interested in H.P.L. and many’s the letters we exchanged…re: him. I always had the greatest of respect for BOTH the Harts … B.K.H. was HPL’s good friend. (By mail, at least. HPL used to adore BKH’s column.) —Muriel E. Eddy to Winfield Townley Scott, 23 Sep 1947, Brown Digital Repository
Mary Philomena Hart (née Kelly) (1894-1944), journalist and book reviewer, was the wife of Bertrand K. Hart (1892-1941), who for many years was the literary editor of the Providence Journal. Betrand Hart had a long-running article series titled “The Sideshow,” known colloquially in Providence as “bekes” according to H. P. Lovecraft, because he would sign each article “B. K. H.” Sideshow articles tended to be relaxed, positive, and centered on small affairs local to Providence and Massachusetts (where the Harts made their home).
H.P.L. and B.K.H. became friends by mail. In 1929, “The Sideshow” had a discussion about the weirdest tales, and Lovecraft couldn’t resist writing in. Letters went back and forth, and excerpts from some of them ended up in “The Sideshow”; these are all reproduced in Miscellaneous Letters. Following B.K.H.’s death in 1941, his widow Philomena edited a collection of these columns into book form, published as The Sideshow of B. K. Hart (1941).
She didn’t stop there.
It is the business of the living to keep on living, and so Philomena Hart continued her own column in the Providence Journal. On 9 January 1944, a few months before her own death, she published an article on H. P. L. and B. K. H.:
A Lovecraft Postscript Based on Barnes Street Letters.—The Providence Poe and His Decade of Mail to “The Sideshow”
Of all the fascinating mail which made its way through the years to the desk of “The Sideshow” there was nothing more exciting than the frequent postcards and letters that carried the initials, “H. P. L.” Winfield Scott and I talked at length about them when he was preparing his rewarding paper on Mr. Lovecraft for the Book Page a fortnight ago. They were written in tiny, clear script, their message was always pertinent to something that had appeared in B. K. H.’s column and usually they dealt with the eldritch, the supernatural, the oblique.
Mr. Lovecraft hoped one day to compile an anthology of horror-tales meeting his own exact requirements. “I fight shy,” he wrote in a long letter on the theme, “of tales dependent on a trick ending. Best horror dwells in atmosphere—even in language itself—and not in obviously stage-managed denouments and literary cap-pistol shots.” Once he wrote for B. K. H. a Providence ghost story of such eerie wonder that speaking of it the next morning in the Journal B. K. H. said “Personally I congratulate him up on the dark spirits he has evoked in Thomas Street but I shall not be happy until joining league with wraiths and ghouls I have plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost by way of reprisal upon his own doorstep on Barnes Street. I think I shall teach it to moan in a minor dissonance every morning at three o’clock sharp with a clanking of chains.
* * *
Only a couple of days later came Mr. Lovecraft’s answer to this threat in the form of a sonnet dedicated to B. K. H.
“The Thing, he said, would come that night at three From the old churchyard on the hill below. And, crouching by an oak-fire’s wholesome glow I tried to tell myself it could not be. Surely, I mused, it was a pleasantry Devised by one who did not truly know The Elder Sign bequeathed from long ago That sets the trailing forms of darkness free. He had not meant it—no—but still I lit Another lamp as starry Leo climbed Out of the Seekonk and a steeple chimed THREE—and the firelight faded bit by bit— Then at the door that cautious rattling came And the mad truth devoured me like a flame.”
* * *
It was an oddly enduring friendship, that of B. K. H. and Lovecraft, for they met only through correspondence. There was never through the years even a telephone conversation though they must have often been at shouting distance from one another. Sometimes there would be post-cards nearly every day, occasionally two long arresting letters in one week coming from Barnes Street, then when matters discussed in “The Sideshow” were out of the range of Mr. Lovecraft’s particular interests there would be a spell of silence. Then suddenly some allusion in the column, some provocative line would start the welcome flood in motion again.
B. K. H. always valued Lovecraft highly, always felt that one day our Providence Poe would meet the recognition he so richly deserved. B. K. H. would have been delighted indeed that the present literary editor of the Journal saw fit to devote an article to the personality and the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.
The correspondence did not last a decade; Lovecraft was only at 10 Barnes Street from 1926-1933, when he moved to 66 College Street, and the last “Sideshow” to mention Lovecraft was published in 1931. The excerpts from Lovecraft’s letters, and the poem “The Messenger,” are all borrowed from B. K. H.’s columns.
Winfield Townley Scott, the literary editor of the Providence Journal, had published “The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, R. I.” on 26 Dec 1943, an extensive review of the first two volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction from Arkham House, The Outsider and Others (1939) and Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943). Scott would go on to write the first extensive biographical treatment of H.P.L.: “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944).
It is always the unexpected that jars loose old memories, and sometimes sets one to sit down and write it out before they are forgotten again. So it seems to have been with Philomena Hart, who recalled happier days when her husband was still alive, and strange letters and postcards would come in the mail to brighten their life.
While going through the letters from Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, one passage caught my eye:
Dear August Derleth,
The moment I saw this article I knew I had to send it to you! Her memories of H. P. L. do not coincide with ours—neighter of us remember that H. P. L. wore a black cloak (shades of Dracula!) or a wide-brimmed hat! Also, that he sat often in the railway station. (Only when he was about to meet one of his literary friends!)
—Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 4 Jun 1967, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society
The brief description was unfamiliar; I knew of no such published account of Lovecraft. The enclosure did not survive in the file, however Muriel often sent Derleth clippings from local papers. An online search quickly located the article she discussed: “Mrs. Hinckley’s Providence,” which ran in the 4 Jun 1967 issue of the Providence Sunday Journal. Running for six pages (with ads and photographs), this article consists of a slightly rambling memoir of Rhode Island native Anita Wheelwright Hinckley (1884-1972), who wrote a number of memoirs of Rhode Island, including Wickford Memories (1972).
Lovecraft fans will note many familiar street names as Mrs. Hinckley reflects on the changes that the city went through over the course of her life, including Angell St. and Benefit St. She was most definitely familiar with the same geography of where Lovecraft lived and worked, and reference to the Providence Art Club suggests their families probably moved within the same general social circles.
But what did Mrs. Hinckley have to say about Lovecraft?
Before I forget it I want to write about Mr. Lovecraft. He was an unusual person, medium height, always dressed in black, with a cape coat and a wide-brimmed hat winter and summer. He wrote gruesome stories rather like Edgar Allan Poe, and some charming poetry.
Dorothy Walter, a member of our Short Story Club, said Mr. Lovecraft used to call on her when she was young. About 20 years ago a stranger came from Baltimore and asked Miss Walter and me many questions. I only remember that my father knew Mr. Lovecraft and always spoke to him. When we came from Wickford to go to school, Mr. Lovecraft was usually sitting in the Providence railway station, probably because it was nice and warm there.
It isn’t clear when Mrs. Hinckley saw H. P. Lovecraft. The 1910 Federal Census has her living in North Kingston, Rhode Island; but that same year she married Frank Hinckley of Providence, and their first child was born there in 1911. On the face of it, Mrs. Hinckley’s residence in Providence seems to have covered most of Lovecraft’s adult life. Yet the recollection “When we came from Wickford to go to school” recalls one of her other memoirs:
One day a week [George Cranston] would go to Providence to replenish his stock. He went on the early train, the one we children took to go to school spring and fall, and the one my father always took as long as we lived in Wickford. Winters, when the weather was bad, we had governesses and studied at home. —Anita W. Hinckley, “Wickford Tales” (1965)
This suggests that a school-age Hinckley saw Lovecraft at the train station in Providence sometime in the 1890s or early 1900s (her father died in 1906, and she would have graduated high school in 1902). The problem is that Hinckley is older than Lovecraft; unless she saw him hanging out at the train station when he was 10-12, it seems unlikely.
When comparing Mrs. Hinckley’s account, written thirty years after Lovecraft was in his grave and probably at least 60 years after she saw him, we can confirm very little and might wonder at the accuracy of her memory. Lovecraft wasn’t known to go about in a cape coat and wide-brimmed hat, though a 1905 photograph does show Lovecraft in a dark coat and hat, so it isn’t improbable that he could have been wearing something similar.
Dorothy C. Walter (1889-1967) was the author of “Lovecraft and Benefit Street,” which appeared in The Ghost and Rhode Island on Lovecraft(1945), and “Three Hours with Lovecraft” in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959). Walter doesn’t mention Hinckley in those pieces, but there’s not necessarily any reason why she would. Nor is there any mention in Lovecraft’s letters of David Sherman Baker (1852-1906), whom Mrs. Hinckley claims knew Lovecraft—but, then again, since Mr. Baker died when HPL was only 16, before we have many letters, that might be understandable. The inquisitive stranger might have been science fiction fan and Lovecraft scholar George T. Wetzel (1921-1983) of Baltimore, although the description is scanty.
Ultimately, there is very little we can confirm from Mrs. Hinckley’s brief memoir. Yet there is no reason to think it is a deliberately false or exaggerated account, as with “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach. While Mrs. Hinckley may not have had much insight to give on Lovecraft’s life, tidbits like this are an example of the little invisible connections and influences that folks have on each other all the time.
Historical Racism Included below are excerpts from period newspapers that contain historical racism and racist language. As such, please be advised before reading further.
A nervous breakdown and poor attendance prevented H. P. Lovecraft from graduating high school in 1908. A spat in the letter columns of the Argosy led to Lovecraft joining amateur journalism in 1914. The period in between these events are the most mysterious of Lovecraft’s adult life. It is the era when we have the fewest letters to guide us on his daily activities, when he seems to have been the recluse that he later pretended to be.
We know, from Lovecraft’s later letters, that Lovecraft did not find a job or complete his education, although he took some correspondence courses and perhaps night school classes. He lived at home with his mother, read voluminously, and occasionally wrote letters and poems that were published in newspapers and pulp magazines. Yet he seemed to have no close friends during this period, no occupation; it is difficult to form an impression of his mental and physical health. The letters to the editor, and the rare responses such as “Not All Anglo-Saxons” (1911) by Herbert O’Hara Molineux, appear to have been his main social outlet and feedback; at least, those are what we have to go on.
So it is always interesting to run across “new” letters from Lovecraft in this period. The digital archive of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island have revealed three letters from Lovecraft to the paper published in 1909. They provide an insight not only into Lovecraft’s thoughts during his “hermitage,” but provide some continuity with his later conflicts once he joined amateurdom and came into more regular contact with other people. It is easiest to discuss these letters with regard to their subject and context.
H. P. Lovecraft on Robert E. Lee
In January 1909, the outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter to the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association, encouraging them to work on a permanent memorial for the Confederate general. The letter was widely published and reported on in the newspapers, and a succinct notice appeared in the Providence Journal:
Providence Journal, 22 Jan 1909
Memorials to Lee were not entirely lacking; Washington College was renamed Washington and Lee after Lee’s many years of service there, and the University Chapel (formerly the Lee Chapel) contains the remains of Robert E. Lee and many of his immediate family. The announcement stirred emotions, since the Confederates were traitors and fought for the cause of slavery. Charles F. Janes wrote a letter to the editor in response.
This in turn inspired a lengthy response from one H. P. Lovecraft, which reply was printed in the 31 Jan 1909 edition of the Providence Journal:
Robert E. Lee
To the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal:
In the Journal of Jan. 24 I notice a letter of Charles F. Janes relating to Roosevelt’s proposed memorial to Gen. Robert E. Lee, in which several statements somewhat derogatory to the great Confederate leader’s motives are made. Mr. Janes asserts that our President honors Gen. Lee only because he was an able warrior, insinuating that the cause for which he so valiantly labored and bravely suffered was wrong, indirectly accusing him of attempting to “destroy this Government of the people, by the people and for the people,” and calling him a “foe of the country.” This unjust treatment of Gen. Lee can be construed as nothing more than a survival of the rabid, unreasoning spirit which pervaded the North before, during and immediately after the Civil War. When Robert E. Lee became a General in the Confederate Army, he did so not as an enemy, but as a friend of the Republic. He saw that no peace could come to the Union if Southern affairs were to be managed by Northerners who had no definite ideas of the actual conditions in the South, and who derived their information as to slavery from false and exaggerated reports, or from hystical effusions like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which portrayed the darkest side of the situation. In other worse, he clearly saw that his State had seceded only because the yoke of the Union bore too heavily upon it, and that its secession was within the limits of constitutional right.
It was not without regret that Gen. Lee entered into battle against the flag under which he had once nobly fought; it was not that he loved the Union less, but Virginia more. Believing in the best of faith that he was benefiting the country by separating the two discordant sections, fighting up to the very last for the cause he knew to be right, yet supported only by a pitifully small band of hungry, sick and ragged heroes, Gen. Robert Edward Lee deserves not one word of censure from the American people, but volumes of praise and veneration. As Senator Hill of Georgia once truly said: “He was Caesar without his ambition. He was Cromwell without his bigotry. he was Napoleon without his selfishness. He was Washington without his reward.“
H. P. LOVECRAFT Providence, Jan. 24
During Lovecraft’s childhood in the 1890s, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the United Confederate Veterans made concerted efforts to promote the “Lost Cause” mythology of the C.S.A.—painting the Confederate soldiers as heroes fighting against overwhelming odds to preserve Southern white culture. These groups promoted the construction of Confederate military monuments and the censoring of school books that published narratives “unfair to the South.” Lovecraft was at the perfect age to absorb this pro-South, white supremacist message, and he did, characterizing himself and his friends as “Confederate sympathizers” (LRK70) and composing poems such as “C.S.A. 1861–1865: To the Starry Cross of the SOUTH” around age 12.
In adulthood, Lovecraft continued to view the South through the lens of Lost Cause ideology, and wrote: “The more I learn of the South, the more my Confederate bias is strengthened” (LJM 355)—which attitude is perhaps understandable when most of what Lovecraft absorbed would have likely continued to promote those same slanted views. Lovecraft also showed some admiration for Southern leaders such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. One visitor to his room noted small pictures of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis on the wall by his desk (AAV100). This 1909 letter to the editor exemplifies Lovecraft’s rose-tinted view of the antebellum South.
In his letters, Lovecraft specifically emphasized Lost Cause viewpoints such as emphasizing the legitimacy of secession, the legality of slaveholding, and the evils of Reconstruction by “the diabolical freed blacks and Northern adventurers” (ML434), “ignorant adventurers and politically exploited blacks” (MF1.289), and “carpet-baggers and scalawags” (MF1.476).
Lovecraft was not alone in his support of Robert E. Lee and the proposed memorial; a Mrs. Bliss also had a letter published in support in the same edition. In the 7 Feb 1909 edition of the Providence Journal, three letters were published that responded to these. While all of them were indirectly addressing Lovecraft’s points, only one, that by Charles F. Janes, named Lovecraft explicitly:
Providence Journal, 7 Feb 1909
Perhaps to give Lovecraft his due, one final letter was published in response, in the 14 Feb 1909 edition:
General Lee and His Lost Cause.
To the editor of the Sunday Journal:
Of the three letters regarding Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Journal of Feb. 7, each seems to present a different amount of condemnation of the great warrior. The article signed “Prescott” appears to be the most unjust, hence demands first attention. In the course of this letter, it is stated that Lee was “lured on by the ambition, not only of becoming victor in the finals, but the Washington of the South.” That Lee was, in intent, and purpose, the “Washington of the South,” cannot be disputed by any intelligent observer, but to aver that the hope of victory and unswerving principle, the object which spurred him on, is most unfair to a man of such a type as Robert E. Lee represents.
The General was not ambitious; he was, instead, of a character unexcelled by that of any other American, save possibly Washington. Had he been less upright, had he possessed less Virginian honor, or had he felt less sincerity of purpose, he would not have remained loyal to his oppressed and troubled State, but would have accepted the tempting offer of Lincoln to command the Union forces in place of Gen. Winfield Scott. His glorious honor is shown by his words to Gen. Hampton in 1869, when he told the noted cavalry leader that he did nothing but his duty in fighting with the Confederacy, and that he would repeat this course if the same conditions existed. His was the truest patriotism, a rigid devotion to the state, which had been forced into battle by its oppressors.
That the United States Government declined to accept the citizenship of Lee after his surrender is a fact which must always throw a shadow on its reputation for justice and fairness, for after the war, the great commander realized his defeat, recognized the union, and said to his men, “Remember that we are one country now. Do not bring up your children in hostility to the Government of the United States. Bring them up to be Americans.” In the face of such a magnanimous sentiment, is it not rather small and petty to suggest, as does the “Prescott” letter, that the erection of a Lee memorial be left ot those on the Virginia side of the Potomac?
The letter of Charles F. Janes makes as its principal point an attempt to prove Gen. Lee a “foe of the country.” Mr. Jane asserts that in telling how the brave military leader “entered into battle against the flag, under which he had once nobly fought.” I admit that he was a “foe of that flag and the country which it represents.” That he was a very reluctant foe of the American flag is a fact, which no one desires to controvert, but that that, or any one cflag, could truly represent the divided country of 1861, is a point which requires thought. A country is, in the last analysis, essentially composed of nothing but its people, and when these become divided into two sections, who shall say which section is actually the true country, even though one retains the old name and flag?
When the war cloud first menaced America, the Southerners desired to retain the Union banner and simply fight for their rights, but as this would have been rebellion, they decided to adopt a more peaceful course, and secede, which they did, without the intention of war. The war was caused by attempts to force the seceded States back, for which there was no constitutional justification. Horace Greeley, himself a Northerner, said: “We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.” Southern States were as much as if not more truly American than their Northern neighbors, hence Gen. Lee in fighting with the Confederacy, did not wage war against his country, but fought with one part of it against another part, for a cause which would have benefited both. That his section did not bear the old name, nor carry the old flag was no fault of his, for he and his men were all Americans, seeking their rights from those who would not grant them willingly.
The letter of Bertha G. Higgins contains an inquiry as to where in the United States Constitution will be found an admission of the right of a State to seced from the Union. The answer is, in articles IX. and X. of the amendments. Article IX. reads: “The enumeration in the Cosntitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained byt he people.[“] The text of article X. is: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibtied by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” As there is nothing prohibitory of secession in the Constitution, these articles may be considered as tacit admissions of the rights of States to withdraw from the federation. They are from the first set of amendments, having been proposed in 1789. Without them , it is doubtful if some of the Southern States would have ratified the Constitution and entered the Union in the first place.
The moral right of secession is a different and more weighty matter than the legal right, but an impartial observer cannot fail to see that it was not without great deliberation, long suffering, and patient waiting that the eleven Confederate States exercised their constitutional prerogative and withdrew from the Union. The provocation was great, far greater than the average Northerner can imagine. It was not one act alone, but a series of persecution that forced the Southern States to a choice between withdrawal and ruin. The excessive tariff whereby the North waxed rich at the expense of the South, coupled with the unfair legislation against slavery, was more than enough to give a moral right to secession, even had no legal right existed.
However, the outcome of the war has proved not only the futility of the Constitution, but the practical permanence of the Union, therefore the people of both sections should now be unanimous in attempting to make the Union one in spirit as well as fact, in attempting to dispel those last drops of bitterness against the Government, which linger in so many Southern minds, and that remaining vestige of Northern prejudice which applaud the Union side of the great civil struggle without more than a superficial glance at its causes, events, and effects. What could accomplish such a unification more than a memorial, erected by a reverent and united people, to Robert Edward Lee, the brave Confederate general, who labored so valiantly to benefit his country by division?
H. P. LOVECRAFT Providence, Feb. 10.
If that reads like a 19-year-old NEET on social media—that’s pretty much what it is. Lovecraft was not a historian or lawyer, and his spurious arguments are those made by an intelligent but enthusiastic layman who has bought completely into the Lost Cause and has never been seriously challenged on his views. Nor would Lovecraft appear to receive any substantial pushback to his views of the Confederacy, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, or the institution of chattel slavery in the antebellum South during his lifetime.
While the argument over Robert E. Lee seems to have ended there, a third letter to the editor later in 1909 highlights another aspect of a young Lovecraft’s beliefs, one which would have a more lasting impact on his life.
H. P. Lovecraft on The Clansman
The Ku Klux Klan was founded after the American Civil War, as an organization to organize and promote racial violence and opposition to Reconstruction. In response, Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts, including the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, to combat these terror tactics and prosecute the organizers. By the end of Reconstruction, the first incarnation of the KKK was largely suppressed, though other groups like the White League and Red Shirts continued.
This band of terrorists was romanticized by Thomas Dixon, Jr. in his trilogy of novels The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900 (1902), The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). Dixon’s The Clansman became a popular play of the same name(1905), which became a massively successful film titled The Birth of a Nation in 1915—which in turn directly inspired the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Clansman play was not met without controversy; the openly racist nature of the content sparked concerned citizens to protest. In some places, the increased racial tensions contributed to violence, as in the 1906 Atlanta race massacre. In Providence, a petition was raised against the holding of the play.
Providence Journal 8 Sep 1909
The Clansman was performed in Providence, despite the protests of BIPOC citizens. Lovecraft had read the novel, and saw the play (when exactly we don’t know, but quite possibly during Sep 1909). In a letter to the editor of the Providence Journal, Lovecraft wrote about The Clansman. The letter was published in the 26 Sep 1909 edition:
“The Clansman’s Other Side”.
To the Editor of the Sunday Journal:
The action of the Police Commission and the court in permitting the presentation of the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s, drama of reconstruction times, “The Clansman,” during the week of Sept. 13, is a hopeful sign, inasmuch as it is indicative of the fact that, despite the protest of the negroes, the truth may be publicly shown and spoken. “Magna est veritas, et praevalebit.” In the North, where only scattered portions of the black race are found, the play no doubt seems exaggerated, and the depths of African racial character portrayed in it seem almost incredible to those accustomed to the relatively superior negroes of the Northern States, but to condemn this drama as some have lately done is unfair.
“The Clansman” teachs us a lesson of which some are sadly in need, namely, tht we must never, under any circumstances, at any time, or in any place, again allow the negro, with his dark ancestry of innumerable centuries of savagery, to become in any way a political power, or to hold any office whatsoever over persons of the superior Aryan race, and that never must the Ethiopian approach the Caucasian on the plane of absolute equality, lest, as is said by “Stoneman” in the play, the noble Anglo-Saxon population of this country degenerate into a puny brood of mulattoes. “Race prejudice” is often condemned, but is it not an essential instinct for the preservation of the purity and distinction of races, an instinct almost as important as that of self-preservation? To “uplift” the blacks in masses to our level is impossible. Ethnology, even more than history, shows us that the African has still far to progress in the upward trend of natural evolution before he can call the Aryan “brother.” To study the negro in his native savage state is enough to disprove the oft-repeated platitude that slavery is the cause of the inferiority of the race in this country.
Another point of error in some denunciations of “The Clansman” regards the mortal status of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was illegal, no one desires to controvert that point. But the “law” that it defied was but a travesty on justice, but a ruinous series of revengeful attacks on the decent people of the South by ignorant and malicious “carpet-baggers,” “scalawags,” and blacks. The Ku Klux Klan was composed of the noblest of young Southrons that the land could afford, an organization of Honor, Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy and Patriotism, to protect the weak, innocent and oppressed from unjust “law,” and the more hideous and unspeakable terrors of the black peril. To deny that such a black peril existed, and would exist again if the negroes once more came into power, is prejudiced folly. As a slave, the average negro was happy, contented and peaceable; free, the innate demon comes uppermost, especially if aided by unscrupulous whites who have interests of their own in the matter. To say that “The Clansman” arouses “hate” against the negro is untrue. “Hate” for a race as a race is unthinkable. The black at his normal level is a part of the perfect scheme of nature, harmonious and unobtrusive. “Hate” is due only to those of our own race who seek to disturb nature and raise the African above, or depress him beow his natural place. The black, according to everything that is right, should not be in America. Two distinct races can never peaceably inhabit the same continent, a fact that should have occurred to the slave traders when they unwittingly planted the seeds of African barbarism on the soil of our fair land. But that evil having been done, the only true way to escape from the difficulty would seem to be continued slavery, together with gradual emancipation, and colonization of large numbers of the black in Africa, the land from which they unwittingly came, and where they normally belong. Negro slavery was a poor system of labor, it is true, to exist in a civilized nation, but it was the only system by which the blacks could be held to their place among a superior race. While in individual cases negroes have risen high, it cannot be denied that the race is utterly unfit in the mass to hold power. Negro crime was unknown in slavery, but after a premature emancipation had loosed upon the South an enormous pack of dusky savages, with but a thin veneer of civilization to offset a world-old heredity of barbarism, led by crafty, evil-minded and grasping “white trash,” who directed their ever-changing and childish minds into channels even more ruinous than those which they themselves would have followed if allowed to drint on alone, is it a wonder that the men of the South banded together in order to secure for themselves and their families the protection tha the United States Government refused them? As was written on the title page of the revised prescript of the Klan: “Damn[a]nt qu[o]d non intelligunt.” Therefore, the Aryan who denounces the Ku Klux Klan, and, incidentally, the play which truly shows its noble activity, shows himself to be no very staunch friend of his race, nor of his country.
H. P. LOVECRAFT Providence, Sept. 21.
From a scientific and historical viewpoint, nearly everything Lovecraft wrote in that letter is incorrect. What Lovecraft got right was when he wrote “Magna est veritas, et praevalebit.”—”Truth is great, and will prevail.”
Although Lovecraft would not live to see the lies of Thomas Dixon, Jr. overturned, Lovecraft would be alive at the birth of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, to see its meteoric rise and its tremendous fall from grace. In time, the reactionary, pseudohistorical image of the American Civil War which emphasized States’ rights and de-emphasized the horrors of slavery would diminish. The Civil Rights Movement would push to complete the work begun during Reconstruction, and though great progress has been made, it has not been without decades of perseverance, violence, and setbacks. Racism is still deeply entrenched in U.S. culture.
An editor read this long letter from a 19-year-old Lovecraft and chose to publish it. Perhaps they agreed with him, perhaps they merely wished to cater to “both sides” in the debate over The Clansman play and book. That sort of thing sells papers. We don’t know; we can only look at what Lovecraft wrote, and see what he wrote—in his period away from the world, with few friends, few opportunities, little outlet for his thoughts and emotions, and no one to tell him he was wrong.
What Lovecraft’s letters to the editor in 1909 tell us is not that Lovecraft was racist—we knew that—but what the context was in which his prejudices took shape and found such early expression. An editor could have tossed these letters; they chose to publish them, without comment, because they were topical to issues of the day. These were issues of race and prejudice that were living, ongoing concerns, and perhaps the publication of these letters gave Lovecraft a little boost in the recognition that he had been heard. They certainly did not prepare him for what was to come.
When Lovecraft quoted “Damnant quod non intelligunt.”—”They condemn what they do not understand,” he himself did not understand his own errors and shortcomings. Lovecraft condemned those who protested against The Clansman because he thought he had the facts—as many intelligent but inexperienced 19-year-old men who post on social media do. While it is tempting to say that “this was Lovecraft when he was young, before he wrote any of his mature fiction,” that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Many of the attitudes expressed in these letters would remain with him throughout his adult life, expressed here and there, rarely changing in any substantial degree. Yet not entirely without challenge.
When Lovecraft finally joined amateur journalism, he was confronted with people different from himself, with their own views—intelligent people he could not immediately dismiss, and who were willing to argue with and denounce his views. It is perhaps unsurprising that in his first major public denunciation, “Concerning the Conservative” (1915) by Charles D. Isaacson, Lovecraft’s views on The Clansman—and its new film adaptation, The Birth of a Nation—were at the heart of the conflict with his peers.
Death is not the end. There are always those that are left behind to grieve, to mourn, and to pity—the lingering strands of a broken web of social relationships—and to sort out the ownership of the deceased’s property. When Howard Phillips Lovecraft died, it fell to his surviving aunt Annie Gamwell to spread the sad news, receive the condolences from her nephew’s many friends, and dispose of his possessions in accordance with his wishes. Those she couldn’t contact directly, were informed by friends.
I am writing a letter off tribute and condolence to Mrs. Gamwell—a letter that would have gone forward some time ago if it had not been for delay in verifying her name. In going through a lot of HP’s letters, I couldn’t find that he had ever referred to her as anything but “my aunt.” I feel sure that she will have received myriads of letters and expressions of sympathy. —Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 30 Mar 1937,Eccentric, Impratical Devils 243
Shortly after Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei contacted Annie Gamwell with the aim of seeing to the publication of his unpublished works, and a book collection of his stories. This would lead them to create Arkham House in 1939 for this purpose. However, in this endeadvor they also had to deal with someone else: Robert H. Barlow, who had been named Lovecraft’s literary executor in his “Instructions In Case of Decease.” Annie Gamwell did her best to abide by her nephew’s wishes.
Later, Mrs. Gamwell will write you about other books of Howard’s. He left you the choice of a good many, after specific requests. —R. H. Barlow to Clark Ashton Smith, 4 Apr 1937, To Worlds Unknown 272
The implications from Smith’s correspondence is that he wrote a letter of condolence to Annie Gamwell first, and she replied. How many letters they exchanged is not clear; only two postcards from Gamwell to Clark survive. Yet there are traces of at least an intermittant correspondence from 1937-1938 in Smith’s letters.
She has just written me, saying that HPL’s instructions left me a second choice of his effects after Barlow. This choice, with full appreciation of his generosity, I am loath to exercise, and I am telling her that I would rather have his things remain in her care as long as possible. It is evident that the breaking up of the study is painful to her. —Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 6 Apr 1937, Eccentric, Impratical Devils 248
While everyone involved wished to do right by the memory of Lovecraft, and by his surviving aunt who desperately needed whatever money her nephew’s writing or possessions could bring, they were not all on the same page about how to accomplish this. Derleth and Wandrei ended up at cross purposes with Barlow, with Smith caught in the middle. Marcos Legaria treats with this at length in L’Affaire Barlow: H. P. Lovecraft and the Battle for his Literary Legacy (2023).
None of this seems to have come through the Smith-Gamwell correspondence, but it shows in Smith’s letters to others about the situation.
I have suggested the memorial preservation of the study to Mrs. Gamwell; admitting, at the same time, that I am in no position to judge the practicality of the plan. Certainly nothing could be more desirable. —Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 13 Apr 1937, Eccentric, Impratical Devils 256
The first known surviving postcard from Annie Gamwell to Clark Ashton Smith is dated 15 May 1937, and was found tucked into a copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1933) by Edgar Allan Poe.
My dear Mr. Smith—
I have found your ode to Howard—I’m sorry I wrote so hastily, hope it did not bother you.
My mind & life are very much confused & I wonder if I can ever be calm & happy again. Howard was such a safe & sound & beautiful companion & I feel so helpless & queer without him.
With best wishes. A.E.P. Gamwell.
[PS] Your book started to-day. —Annie E. P. Gamwell to Clark Ashton Smith, 15 May 1937, Brown Digital Repository
The “ode” was presumably “To Howard Phillips Lovecraft” by Clark Ashton Smith, which would be published in the July 1937 issue of Weird Tales; Smith must have sent a manuscript copy. While going through her nephew’s things, she found something addressed to Smith, which she sent to him—a copy of The Californian (Winter 1936).
Mrs. Gamwell sent me The Californian with your Night Ocean, which HPL had put aside in an envelope address to me. —Clark Ashton Smith to R. H. Barlow, 16 May 1937, To Worlds Unknown 275
Then followed a gap. How much more did the two have to say to one another? We can only speculate. Yet another postcard is attested to, which suggests that Annie Gamwell was still in contact with Smith at least periodically, possibly while still going through his things.
My dear Mr. Smith—
I am still in the midst of my sad memories & the many things which my nephew loved. His loss becomes more serious continually. I found these cards & hope you will care for them. This card is a new excellent old library very near our house, the Providence Athen[a]eum.
It was a hard life for Annie Gamwell, who had outlived not only her parents, brother, and sisters, but also her son and beloved nephew. Aside from a few cousins, she was the last of her family, and the last few years of her life must have been sad ones—a sadness probably only alleviated by the obvious evidence that her nephew was still remembered and loved by his friends after his death, and that they were there to offer their words of comfort and support in her time of need.
Comic books arose during the peak of the pulp magazine era, and commonly shared writers, artists, and sometimes publishers. Given the crossover in creative talents, it is no surprise that several ideas and sometimes entire stories were lifted from the pages of Weird Tales and other pulps to appear in the pre-Code horror comics. Many of these stories were produced basically anonymously, with little or no credit given to the writers or artists involved, which makes it more difficult to determine who did what, or whether a particular idea was borrowed, stolen, or just carried over by a creator from one project to another.
This is the case for “The Obi Makes Jumbee,” an 8-page story that first appeared in Spook Comics, a one-shot horror comic from Baily. Though not dated, the issue is thought to be published in 1945 or 1946 (in one panel, a character reads a newspaper with the date December 1945). No writer is credited. The Grand Comics Database says the art is credited to Robert Baldwin (I can’t find a signature on any of the pages, so I’m not sure where that came from), but also claims the art was actually done by Munson Paddock. Based solely on the art style, I lean toward Paddock. Since Paddock is only known to have worked with Baily in 1945, that would support that date.
The one thing we can say about the script is that it probably came from a Weird Tales fan.
Spook Comics, p27
The U.S. invasion and occupation of Cuba (1906-1909, 1917), Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), and the purchase of the Danish Virgin Islands in 1917, brought more and more of the Caribbean into their sphere of influence. So too, more U.S. citizens gained contact with the island cultures, which differed radically from the hard racial limits of Jim Crow. More tantalizing to many would-be anthropologists or tourists were the syncretic African diaspora religions on these tropic isles—remnants of African indigenous religions, often hybridized and combined with elements of Roman Catholicism.
In the 1930s, zombies and Haitian Vodou were popularized in the United States through William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), and works that were inspired by it like the film White Zombie (1931). Seabrook wasn’t the first to write about Vodou or Vodoun; novels like The Goat Without Horns (1925) by Beale Davis, but it was Seabrook who captured the imagination of a generation of writers, whose zombie stories trickled into first pulps and then comic books. H. P. Lovecraft read Seabrook, as did Seabury Quinn, August Derleth, and many others. While far from the only source of data on African diaspora religions—Zora Neale Hurston would write Tell My Horse (1938) and other works, to name one—Seabrook was the most sensational and popular, and his version of Haitian Vodou made a lasting impression on “voodoo” as it appeared in pulps, comics, and film.
“Jumbee” however, is something a bit different. As a category of supernatural being, jumbee is most often associated with the folklore and African diaspora religion (“Obi”) of the Virgin Islands, and Jumbee tales were told by a substantially smaller group of authors—especially Henry St. Clair Whitehead, H. P. Lovecraft’s friend, correspondent, and fellow Weird Tales writer. Although Whitehead died in 1932, in 1944 Arkham House published his first collection of supernatural fiction: Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales. A follow-up collection, West India Lights (1946) includes Whitehead’s non-fiction article “Obi in the Caribbean.” Given how scarce Jumbee stories are in comics (“The Obi Makes Jumbee” is the only comic story with that word in the title on the Grand Comics Database), it seems likely the author of that comic script had to have read Whitehead.
They knew enough to differentiate Jumbee from zombies, Obi from Vodou. Yet they make what seems to be an odd mistake or artistic license. “The goat without horns” is a term used for human sacrifice in some works that discuss Haitian vodou. Seabrook didn’t originate the term, though he helped popularize it, and in his book he quotes from the March 1917 Museum Journal of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia:
In Hayti the basis of Voodooism is the frank worship of a sacred green snake that must be propitiated to keep off the evil spirits. The meetings of the cult are held at night about bonfires in secret places in the forests. The presiding official is an old man “papaloi,” or woman “mamaloi” who has gained renown as a Voodoo sorcerer. After assembling, all present take an oath of secrecy and then the priest exhorts them to remember the sacred green snake, and to hate the whites. Prayer is offered to the divine serpent that is supposed to be present in a box placed near the fire. Then follows the sacrifice of a cock which the “papaloi” kills by biting off its head. With a great deal of drumming and incantation the blood is smeared over the faces of the worshipers and drunk by the officiating priest. A goat may be sacrificed with similar ceremony. After the goat there might be a human sacrifice, as was reported by a French priest. He said that it was the wish of some of the devotees that “a goat without horns,” that is a child, be sacrificed. This was done and the flesh, raw or partly cooked, was eaten by the members of the cult.
Readers familiar with blood libel will recognize the familiar tropes at work; similar accusations were made against witchcraft and against many non-Christian religions. For a horror comic dealing with Hollywood-style voodoo in the 1940s, a human sacrifice wouldn’t be unusual—but the odd thing is that the writer doesn’t use “the goat without horns.” Instead, the mamaloi dancer Caresse invokes “The Goat with a Thousand Horns.”
There’s no such figure in Seabrook’s book, or any other text or story on Vodou (and, in context, it is being used as another appellation for Damballah). But it is awfully close to the epithet of “the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” associated with Shub-Niggurath in H. P. Lovecraft stories like “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” Is that a sub rosa reference to Lovecraft? Maybe. Certainly, it’s not the only oddity in the tale.
For example, the rival club is called the Belfry, and is owned by Batso…Batso’s Belfry… “Bat’s Belfry” (1926) by August Derleth. Coincidence? Or an Easter egg for Weird Tales readers?
Spook Comics, p28
The basic idea of the narrative seems to borrow very heavily from the beginning of Manly Wade Wellman’s “The Third Cry to Legba” (Weird Tales Nov 1943), where a new voodoo-themed club has a dancer (Illyria) that provides authentic Haitian dances for the clientele. In Wellman’s story, this is a plot by the evil magician Rowley Thorne to start a new cult, and he is thwarted by occult detective John Thunstone.
Interestingly, Wellman was inspired by real life, as he mentioned in ‘The Eyrie‘:
It is a fact that something appeared recently in New York newspapers that might be the public version of THE THIRD CRY TO LEGBA. Some may remember an account of how a certain singer chanted black magic songs and attracted big audiences, including at least one attentive being that she must have wished would stay away. We can’t check on that now, for the singer is untimely dead.
Wellman was probably referring to the case of Elsie Houston:
Ironically, the Brazilian singer was apparently claiming initiation in another African diaspora religion, Candomblé. To the general public of the United States of America, ignorant of the differences, it was all “voodoo” in their eyes. The Daily News article is actually fairly restrained; the American Weekly gave Houston an entire page to herself.
While the Weird Tales connections (real or apparent) are fun, “The Obi Makes Jumbee” also has a bit more plot than you might expect for a mere eight pages. The setup has readers expecting a zombie yarn—and they get gangsters, a fake death, a doublecross, a fake zombie, double murder, and then at the end—it’s all true. Which is as neat a bit of storytelling as you can expect. I might almost believe Wellman wrote it himself; he did a good bit of comic book scripting. Unless we find evidence to prove that, however, that remains speculative.
This miscellany includes excerpts from period newspapers, one of which (“Iwo Jima & Innsmouth”) contains historical racism and racist language. As such, please be advised before reading further.
Any tool is also a toy. The only question is whether you’re using it for work or for play. When it comes to online newspaper archives, they are a wonderful tool that has made available a vast amount of minute detail of the past that would otherwise be inaccessible to the average researcher. They are also, however, vast fun if you’re in the right mindset—because newspaper writers are inherently creative, highly literate, hungry for content, and often have a wonderful sense of humor. The result is bits and pieces that are often bizarre or brilliant, though sometimes sober and horrific.
Most of them are effectively noise when considered in terms of “serious” research into Lovecraft’s life, but as a reflection of the growing popularity of Lovecraft and the influence of his work, they stand out as tide water marks: examples of the spread of awareness of Lovecraft and his work. They are sometimes incredibly fun, if only because of how weird they are. I’ve culled out a dozen of the best clippings to showcase the wacky and sometimes fascinating Lovecraftian oddities that have appeared in newspapers over the past century.
Quick links for readers who want to jump to a particular clipping:
“Are strange stories ever enacted in the North woods? repeated an old-time lumberman from the Ashland district, who has been spending a few weeks in Bangor. “Well, I know one—as weird a yarn as ever was told. If you print it, people will say either that I tried to ‘kid’ you or I should be examined by an alienist; and yet, in my own mind, I believe it true.
“I can’t say from personal experience, for it happened at least 75 years ago. but it’s a tradition among some of the old lumbermen, and it’s been handed down from father to son. Personally, I’m not imaginative, and I don’t believe in any kind of ghosts. I never read Edgar Allen [sic] Poe or Ambrose Bearce [sic] or Harold [sic] Lovecraft. Yet here, as I heard it from many lips, was a tale like Bearce’s [sic] ‘Damned Thing’ and Lovecraft’s ‘Dunwich Horror’ rolled into one.
“Seventy-five years ago, then, in the lumber camps of the great woods and on lonely, outlying farms, hroses and cattle were being slaughtered in considerable numbers. Always it was done in the same way—their throats were ripped open, as though from the teeth of some savage dog or wild animal. And yet gradually, through the countryside, there spread a belief that it was not an animal at all. Tracks sometimes were left near the stables or tie-ups—tracks something like those of a man’s bare foot, and yet were not a man’s. Sometimes a shadowy form, ape-like and hairy, was seen gliding through the darkness—or so imaginative persons said. But the cries of the cattle were real and tangible; and the following morning—for few dared venture out in the dark—always disclosed that the ‘wood demon’, as some called him, had been at his deadly work.
“Finally there arose one who loudly announced he didn’t care for man or devil; he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery, if it was the last thing he did in the world. I don’t recall just what led this man to suppose that, on a certain night, he was due for a visit from the strange marauder. But the story goes that he insisted on staying in the tie-up, and so became the one human witness of the horror that followed.
“The hours passed; nature had never been more placid or calm. And the man was about to return to camp, laughing at himself for having believed in old wives’ tales, when—the thing happened.
“It was a clear night, and a ray of moonlight fell through a hole chopped in the roof that the steam rising from the cattle might escape—a crude but popular system of ventilation in those days. And through this hole, filtering through the moonlight and the shadows, came as strange an object as ever found its way from the Inferno. It was like a huge ape, yet the man swore it was not an ape; it was like a man yet it was not a man; it had hairy, strangely contorted limbs, and cruel teeth that gleamed in the darkness—for the man had put a burlap bag over the lantern he carried.
“It sprang upon the cattle, ripped open their throats, drank of their blood, and disappeared through the roof—as an ape might have done. But, as I have told you, it was not an ape. And the man who had said that he feared nothing in the world just stood there in a corner, a high powered rifle in his hand, too paralyzed by fright to so much as stir. He said afterward that, even had the Thing turned and attacked him, he couldn’t have moved a muscle.
“What was the thing? I don’t know! I never heard how the story ended; but I believe the mystery was never solved. if there is any moral, it is simply that it points the truth of what Hamlet said: ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'”
One seldom thinks of vampiric sasquatch as having anything to do with H. P. Lovecraft. Yet vampirism of animals is a key plot point of “The Dunwich Horror” Weird Tales (Apr 1929); just as an orangutan formed an essential feature of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and an unseen menace is the key to Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). One suspects that the errors in the names of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are probably intentional, to give an air of rusticity to a tale that is probably fabricated out of whole cloth. No name is given for the author of the piece, and it may have been a friend or friend-of-a-friend of Lovecraft. Whoever it was had at least a modest affection for weird fiction.
Abdul Alhazred, the mad Arab of Lovecraft fame, once wrote in the “Necro[no]micon”—”Science and fact, as seen by our little minds, are but dew-spangled cobwebs that catch the light of a tiny candle; and the resulting glitter [b]linds us to the horrible expanse of black doom behind the puny light.
“For that cobweb and that candle are instable as a breath. The breeze can make them tremble, a wind will rend them. And afar, even now, I hear the trampling of a mighty storm.”
The Knob Noster Gem was a small local paper; Dan Saults was the publisher, editor, and probably wrote a good chunk of the daily output. Judging by this little space-filler figment, he was also a Lovecraft fan.
Robin Hood, Bran Mak Morn, and Cthulhu (1937)
Friar Haw Foresees The Twentieth Century
As Robin Hood’s Prophet Might Have Outlined The Ills Of Our Day
by L. W. S., Eaton, O.
Sherwood forest was aflame with the torches of autumn, bringing all of its robust life. Robin Hood and his merry men had cast aside every care and fathered again beneath the mighty brown oaks and beeches. The silver tang of life was in the air and lusty merriness was in the hearts of Robin’s men.
Of course they were spilling great quantities of the favorite cool brown ale down their throats and singing its praises until the song rang and echoed far down the dark rows of mossy tree trunks, as jolly Friat Truck continually banged his tankard on the rough oak table, swinging his head from side to side.
And brawny Little John Arose, flinging the rumble of his deep bass into the depths of Sherwood forest:
So, laugh lads, and quaff lads ‘Twill make you stout and hale, Thro’ all my days I’ll sing the praise Of brown October ale.
Really Robin Hood had called his men together for the purpose of hearing once again the strange prophecies of Friar Haw, but he always had to allow them their little fling first, as a prelude. The men had arrived at some degree of respect for the words of Friar Haw, and they usually sat engrossed. Even the snorts of Friar Tuck had grown fewer.
Friar Haw, grim and ascetic, had been taking Robin’s men into the dream-world of the 20th century. Today he had sat oblivious of the roistering men, his face like a white autumn sickle moon. The men could see that he wasn’t going to talk today about streamlined chorus girls and elaborate movies.
He arose. “Few people,” he began, “who shall live in the 20th century shall realize fully the abysmal depths to which the world conflict in the early part of that century shall plunge the races with the blood of long centuries in theri veins. yea, dark forces of life, far more ancient than the ancient oaks of Sherwood, as ancient as the ideas of Chthulhu [sic], Yog Sothoth, Gol-goroth and the blood of the Gaelic, Cymric and Teutonic. The king of the Dark Empire of the Stone Age, covered so long by the imposition of a new god called Reason, shall break loose again in the emotional abandon of those dark years of 1914-18, and shall continue long afterwards.
“The surface of the collective civilized mind shall be torn adunder and the long-buried emotional elements of the days of a Bran Mak Morn shall break loose, and the 20th century would shall be puzzled and at a loss to understand what forces are driving men.”
“And,” interposed Little John, who had a common sense kind of mind, “what are you driving at, or trying to say? It sounds crazy to me.”
“Oh, doubtless!” said Friar Haw, his sickle face growing a shade colder. “Yet the original minds of the 20th century shall see that strange things are happening. Now, in the country called Germany, age-old psychic forces break loose again. Wotan, who is half rage and frenzy and half seer who understands ‘the runs and interprets destiny.’ Wotan shall be personified in a man named Hitler, a strange figure whose reasoning shall be guided by very, very ancient emotional forces.
“You are to remember that men taken collectively in a nation are not dominated by reason. A wise man of that century shall say: ‘Where the mass rather than the individual is in motion, human control ceases. And at at that point the archetypes begin to operate.'”
“In Germany the stormy personality of Wotan shall come to life again in the youth movement. The waking will be celebrated with the slaughter of more than one sheep. Aye, men called Nietszsche, Schuler, Stephen George and Klages shall anticipate the waking, as shall one called Richard Wagner put it into his music.
“But I have taken only Germany as one example in the Old World, where the 20th century shall see the troubled awakening on every hand of the most ancient archetypes, the most powerful emotional forces. Frightened men shall shout ‘Peace! Peace!’ where there shall be no peace. men shall come to understand somewhat the things that Wotan whispered through Mimir’s head. mean shall come to appreciate what Valhalla means, and the Valkyries and the Fylgjur.”
Whereupon Robin Hood jumped to his feet and shouted: “Engouh for today! I’d rather go and rob a bishop. This chatter makes me uneasy inside.”
“Yes,” came from the sickle autumn moon face of the prophet, “it is a far cry from your simple Sherwood forest and your October ale drinking. yet it shall be the sap in the roots of your Sherwood conflicted with a conflict of world cultures.”
This is fanfiction. Yet L.W.S. (Leonard W. Sharkey) of Eaton, Ohio must have been a serious fan indeed, to weave references to Lovecraft (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth) and Robert E. Howard (Gol-goroth, Bran Mak Morn) into his narrative of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, on the run-up to World War II. A likely inspiration for these references is “The Children of the Night” (Weird Tales Apr-May 1931) by Robert E. Howard—which is probably the only story at the time that mentions Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Gol-goroth, and Bran Mak Morn all in the same tale. Sharkey did at least one more Robin Hood/Friar Haw tale, albeit without Mythos references (The Camp of Robin Takes A Forward Look).
Lovecraft & Whippoorwills (1945)
Whip-poor-wills will remind some readers of the stories of the late H. P. Lovecraft.
You never heard of Lovecraft?
Many persons have not, but they will, in time, and all through the affectionate remembrance of two young men in Wisconsin.
They founded a press to put his stories sold to pulp magazines into book form. Extremely limited editions have made these books collectors’ items.
Lovecraft’s tales are somewhat Poe-like in character. They are laid in New England, and bring in visitors from “the outside,” strange beings always ready to push into our own known world.
Some of the stories incorporate the whip-poor-wills, which set up a constant cry, according to legend, every time one died.
If they missed getting his soul, they screamed unusually loudly, and then died out. In this way it was possible to tell what happened to the departing soul.
In 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House in Wisconsin to publish the work of H. P. Lovecraft in book form. It was a beginning to establish Lovecraft’s literary legacy, and awareness of the Providence-born horror writer was slowly trickling out into public awareness, although this was slow going, and involved many misunderstandings.
Whippoorwills are a key example. They only feature in one of Lovecraft’s stories, “The Dunwich Horror”; but the idea seems to have appealed to August Derleth, who incorporated the idea of the whippoorwill as psychopomp in several Cthulhu Mythos stories, notably the novel The Lurker at the Threshold(1945). Derleth’s repetition of the idea—and articles like this one—contributed to the spread of certain basic conceptions (and misconceptions) of what Lovecraft wrote.
Iwo Jima & Innsmouth (1945)
Journalettes by Charles B. Gordon
Friday, this newspaper used a cut of three Japanese prisoners, taken on Iwo Jima, and their American guards. The three Japs were three of the most repulsive looking human beings whose faces we have ever gazed upon.
. . . — V . . . —
We think he’s dead now, but some years ago, there was a writer named H. P. Lovecraft. This voracious reader made acquaintence with his works through the current 25-cent pocket books, but it is our belief that most of his output was printed first in pulp “horror” magazines. At any rate, he was the greatest master of the “horror[“] story specializing in stories about beings, things, or whatever you might want to call them, which emerged from places under the earth, under the water, or from ages thousands of years past, but were generally possessed of at least a few human qualities, enabling them to “get by” on the earth of the present day.
. . . — V . . . —
The pictures of those Japs taken on Iwo Jima gave us for the first itme a partial realization of what the creatures of such books of Lovecraft’s as “Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Dunwich Horror” must have resembled.
War doesn’t just breed prejudice, it encourages its expression. The enemy is described in terms that downplays or denies their humanity. As things instead of people. The bloody battle of Iwo Jima ran 19 February–26 March 1945. Casualties were horrific, especially on the Japanese side; of 20,933 troops, only 216 Japanese were taken prisoner from the main battle, with an additional 867 taken prisoner post-battle. A photo of three such prisoners was made available to the press—men who, like their counterparts in the US military, had served their country, be it right or wrong, and lived through a terrible and terrifying conflict.
The racist depiction of Japanese military and civilians was sadly common—though as far as I have found, this is the first and only instance where they were compared directly to Lovecraft’s Innsmouth folk during the conflict.
Paper shortages during World War II put a severe crimp in the publishing plans of Arkham House, but also opened up other opportunities. Bartholomew House was a small New York publisher that put out two cheap (25 cents) paperback editions of Lovecraft with the permission of Arkham House: The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth (1944) and The Dunwich Horror (1945). Another cheap paperback readily available to the military was the Armed Services Edition of The Dunwich Horror and Others (n.d., 1945?). These books helped spread the word of Lovecraft during the war years—and beyond.
Lovecraft & Hitler (1945)
Two pieces appeared in the Chicago Tribune in April 1945 which tied Lovecraft to the ongoing world war.
Werewolf Hunt
The werewolf myth, which the frenzied and frightened Nazis threaten to revive as a romantic disguise for a post-war assassination cult, has haunted hte lower levels of the human mind since the era of the cavemen. Its roots are in primitive cannibalism. The word means man-wolf; that is, a betwitched creature which has human form by day and lupine hide, teeth, and appetite by night. The superstition is one of the unwholesome ideas that have survived from pre-history among European peasants to provide material for folklorists and themes for authors who have a bent toward the weird, grotesque, and horrible.
* * *
Hitler, whose career has a werewolfish flavor, comes froma stock in which this notion was likely to breed and influence character. We quote from his best and msot objective biographer, Konrad Heiden, who says in “Der Fuehrer” while discussing his pedigree:
“The Waldviertel in lower Austria, from which both the Hitler and Pölzl families came, is a gloomy, remote, impverished section; like many such regions it has no lack of superstitions and ghost stories. The ancestors were mostly poor peasant people; ‘small cottager’ often stands in the church records.”
* * *
The myth is closely related to the vampire bugaboo, and, therefore, in the novel called “Dracula,” a veritable case book of vampirism, you will find werewolves as auxiliary phantoms. The anthologies of terror stories which ahve become quite an article of commerce in the war time book trade contain numerous examples of werewolf tales. We expect to find out in “Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft,” edited by August Derleth and new on the counters.
* * *
To kill a werewolf according to the folklore formula, yo umust use a gun that has been blessed at a shrine of St. Hubert and fire a silver bullet.
In this, the unnamed newspaper writer would be disappointed. Vampires and werewolves were not Lovecraft’s normal schtick. However, we know that they did read the new collection—and the horrors in those pages probably compared to those that came in over the news wire. U.S. forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp on 11 Apr 1945.
Powers of Darkness
The lifting of the curtain on the massive horrors of Germany’s prison and concentration camps recalls the supernatural tales of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer who was relatively unknown until August Derleth undertook his popularization. To conjure up the mood of unearthly terrors, Lovecraft invented the mythology of Cthulhu in which there are many monstrous spirits of evil, forever seeking to take possession of this planet.
* * *
Lovecraft wrote of his work: “All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inahbited at one time by another race hwo, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.”
* * *
Perhaps Cthulhu has come back, thru the cracks in Hitler’s mind. Lovecraft, who died in 1937, would be staggered by the revelation.
* * *
During his lifetime, Lovecraft’s work appeared in pulp paer magazines, chiefly in Weird Tales. Arkham House of Sauk City, Wis., a publishing enterprise over which August Derleth presides, has been assembling this scattered material and putting it between covers in limited editions. A collection of 14 tales, regarded as the best of Lovecraft’s 50-odd, was recently issued by the World Publishing company. Derleth, its editor, says in his introduction:
“The weird tradition was particularly his. In the scarcely two decades of his writng life he became a master of the macabre who had neither peer nor equal in America. . . . It has been said of ‘The Outsider’ that if the manuscript had been put forward as an unpublished tale by Edgar Allan Poe, none would have challenged it.” —Chicago Tribune, 27 Apr 1945, p14
Lovecraft never wrote that “black magic” quote. The unnamed author of this little piece is drawing on The Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft(1945). To place Lovecraft’s horrors with those of Nazi Germany is understandable, journalists must have grasped for any straw of comparison. Three days after this was published, Adolf Hitler committed suicide.
Unlike many of these small newspaper pieces, another journalist picked up on this thread and glossed it in another paper:
Powers of Darkness
The lifting of the curtain on the massive horrors of Germany’s prison and concentration camps recalls the supernatural tales of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer who was relatively unknown until August Derleth undertook his popularization, says a Chicago Tribune column. To conjure up the mood of unearthly terrors, Lovecraft invented the mythology of Cthulhu in which there are many monstrous spirits of evil, forever seeking to take possession of this planet.
Lovecraft wrote of his work: “All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on teh fundamental lore or legend that this race [sic] was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.”
Perhaps Othulhu [sic] has come back through the cracks in Hitler’s mind. Lovecraft, who died in 1937, would be staggered by the revelation.
It is like a telephone game, as Derleth’s jumbled quote gets increasingly jumbled with every step. Yet the tying-together of Lovecraft and Hitler in this instance shows how relevant Lovecraft’s fiction could be, how plastic and adaptable his work was to a new syntax—and how new editions helped spread knowledge of Lovecraft and the Mythos to new audiences.
Lovecraft’s Men From Pluto (1955)
Space Travel
Friday Dr. Wernher von Braun, an expert in the field of astrophysical and astronomical lore, spoke at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. he talked chiefly of efforts being made to study the areas beyond the earth’s atmosphere. he talked of artificial satellites and of space travel, topics which tickle the imagination of young and old alike in these days of scientific discussion.
Dr. von Braun asserted that there was no doubt of the capacity of man to leave earth, point toward the moon, circle it and return to earth again. As one who is an expert in the designing of rocket propellants and in all the developments in this sphere he speaks with authority. He insists that we know enough now to launch a space ship and be reasonably sure of its safe voyage moonward and its return.
To the layman all this is fantasy. How can man survive in the intense heat which must exist beyond the atmosphere? How can direction be assured where there is no air friction against which rudders can press when a craft is to be turned? We have to ahve water to direct a ship, air to direct a plane. What possiblity of management exists in the ether where every object runs free?
And to make such a voyage the start must be swift. Through the great spaces where there is no atmosphere presumably the speed would not generate sufficient heat to decompose the ship. But what about the start and the finish? How can the ship begin its flight without at least a speed of 5,000 miles an hour? And how can it be toned down to reason when it returns to the lst hundred miles of its voyage?
We are still skeptics on the whole matter. Those who say such a trip to the moon is possible are the delight of the small boy and the radical scientist. but to the down-to-earth citizen, accustomed to keep his feet on the ground or rise only moderately above it, the natural comment is a Bronx cheer. If such a voyage is possible today, as Dr. von Braun asserts, let’s get at it and stop expending our energies in talk.
The usual reply from the space scientists to such suggests is that the cost is tremendous and there is no source for the funds. That is a complete answer, the best in the world if discussion is preferable to achievement. We have heard people say you could abolish certain diseases in the world if had ten or fifteen billions to spend on them. We have noted those who think permanent peace could be achieved by the careful expenditure of a few hundred billions. The poist that there isn’t any such money so it is easy to talk about it.
If a space ship would cost a few billions there can be no space ship. it would not be worth the price. The scientists, instead of telling us such a craft is possible today, might better expend their time and energy in seeking ways of bringing their creations down to the possible range of expenditure. Otherwise space travel lies in the same domain as the weird tales of Jules Verne, Lovecraft’s story of the men from Pluto who visited earth or Wells’ novel about the coming of the Martians.
The Luna 3, the first spacecraft to manage a successful circumlunar trajectory, did so in 1959; the first manned trip in lunar orbit, however, was Apollo 8 in 1968. It turned out, probably much to the anonymous author’s chagrin, that there actually were billions of dollars to spend on the space race.
The reference to “Lovecraft’s story of the men from Pluto” is a bit bizarre; as near as I can tell this has to be a reference to “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales Aug 1931), which featured the Fungi from Yuggoth. Who were about as far from the stereotypical 1950s humanoid aliens as one might imagine—but this is a good example of a typical misreading or misunderstanding. I wonder how many science fiction fans wondered where they could read about Lovecraft’s men from Pluto?
Man has a back, and if you beat it he works. (Alhazred Bhati Khan, 11th century despot of Samarkand).
The labor policies of Alhazred Khan are frowned upon in the more enlightened areas of the world today. But if his theories on back-beating have fallen in esteem, his basic goal of increasing production has never been held in higher regard.
The actual title of the piece was “Bosses ‘Whip’ Workers With Musical Gimmicks,” and it was about how employers use new psychological tools to manipulate the workplace and motivate their employees. However, the author Ted Smart apparently thought it needed a hook, and so created Alhazred Bhati Khan—who never existed—presumably by combining Lovecraft’s Alhazred, the Hindu word bhati (भाटी), and the Turkic or Mongolian title khan. Samarkand was a reality, however, and if anybody ever checked to see who was ruling it in the 11th century, they did more work than Ted Smart did. I have to wonder if any Lovecraft fans noticed.
Cipher puzzles are fairly common amusements in newspapers, and have been for decades. As an exercise, they’re fairly simple substitution ciphers: each letter of the alphabet is replaced by another letter, to render what appears on the surface is gibberish. However, the relationship between the letters remains; and there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. Figure out a word or two, either by frequency analysis or trial and error, and the rest of the cipher alphabet falls in place pretty easily. In this case, the puzzle designer has been a little clever: one word has been encoded as the English word FRIGHT, which gives a hint to the solution of the puzzle.
The answer, on the other hand, is a bit of a cheat:
The answer is a cheat because this isn’t a real Lovecraft quote, but a highly abridged version of a line from Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature”:
Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
The reason why the full quote isn’t used is pretty obvious: space. While not intellectually any more challenger than the briefer text to decipher, 59 words is a lot more daunting in terms of sheer volume of words to be deciphered. On the plus side, at least Lovecraft wasn’t reminding the readers of the San Francisco Examiner to drink their Ovaltine.
Tucked in at the end of a column of classifieds ads, just above a threat from the Mafia against a fratboy, this is one of a number of ads for a copy of the Necronomicon for sale that have cropped up here and there. Such hoaxes are classics of fan-activity, and vary from carefully-constructed and believable to error-ridden and silly. This one is fairly restrained and detailed, and the writer probably was familiar with Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon,” which had been most recently republished in The Necronomicon: A Study(1967).
Such ads seem to have become rare after the first widely-available commercial Necronomicons began to hit the market in the 1970s.
Old Ben Lovecraft (1978)
Mulligan’s Stew by Hugh A. Mulligan AP Special Correspondent
RIDGEFIELD, Conn. (AP)—My old aunt used to say you never really know who your neighbors are until one day you read about them in the paper being appointed to the White House transportation staff or taken off in the patrol wagon for wife-beating or graduating with high honors from welding school.
And, by George, she was right.
This town, for instance, is chock full of interesting people, what you might call real characters just waiting to be discovered by some sharp-eyed reporter or a playwright in search of a sequel to “Our Town.”
Over on Ludlow Hill there’s a man who never in all his born days has seen a flying saucer. Old Ben Lovecraft has lived in these rocky, rolling hills of Connecticut for nigh onto half a century, since moving up from the Bronx, without catching so much as a glimmer of an outer world touchdown on his two acre zoned spread there behind the town dump.
The other night he thought he saw an eerie light reflecting from an elliptical shaped object in his driveway that wasn’t there when he took in the cat and turned off the carriage lamps. he put on his new Christmas cardigan, grabbed a flash light from the hall closet and made his way stealthily along the hedges bordering the garage. he could hear chattering and the sound of equipment being unloaded.
There in the moonlight, he saw five tiny creatures no bigger than a breadbox with enormous shiny eyes filing out of an aluminum cylinder. They fled in panic the instant his beam hit them.
“You know how racoons scamper after they’ve tipped over a garbage can to get at a turkey carcass,” Ben drawled in his matter of fact way. “I called the Air Force and they didn’t want to hear about it. They already had four people on hold with positive sightings.”
Fascinating fellow, Ben. A real skeptic. He’s seen “Star Wars” twice and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” three times and doesn’t believe a word of either of them. […]
At the time of this writing, there are 91 hits for “Old Ben Lovecraft” on newspapers.com. The Associated Press spread the “Mulligan’s Stew” humor column far and wide. While some of the other bits and pieces mentioned above are diamonds in the rough, this is closer to what constitutes noise in search results. Half the country might have read about “Old Ben Lovecraft” between March and April 1978, when the article ran. Perhaps a few had a chuckle; the flying saucer craze of the 50s had given birth to the impressive big box-office sci fi spectacles of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). No doubt a lot of the country had no idea why some folks got so excited.
Why Lovecraft? I suspect it was simply because Lovecraft was still known as a science fiction writer, and the “Old Ben” part was borrowed from “Old Ben” Kenobi in Star Wars. It’s also possible that the author simply wanted a distinctive name and typed out the first that came to mind; certainly a fan would probably have added a reference to Cthulhu in there at some point.
Lovecraft, C. M. Eddy, Jr., and Dark Swamp (1995)
What happened that night in the swamp?
Editors: I am in my 75th year of life as I write this, and I do not wish to allow a few things to pass unnoticed before I go. My mother, Muriel Eddy, was a gifted author; for several years she was the poet laureate of Rhode Island, the state in which we lived.
My father was also an author—of uncanny horror stories. he had a buddie named H. P. Lovecraft, the famous author of many books about strange things.
Lovecraft was a night person, and back in 1922 and 1923 he and my father would often walk through Providence’s Chinatown at midnight. One night they decided to go into the woods of the “great swamp” of Chepatchet, R.I., because they had heard that “It” (a ghost or monster) had been seen there.
Nobody knows whether or not they encounted the “It” being; they did survive their night in the great swamp, but neither would talk about it. I wonder to this day what they saw.
Perhaps that telephone-game is why his facts are slightly garbled. For while Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr. did certainly survive the Dark Swamp in Chepatchet, they weren’t exactly silent about it. We have first-hand accounts from Lovecraft’s letters, a memoir by C. M. Eddy, Jr., and memoirs from Muriel E. Eddy, who would have had the facts from her husband. Unfortunately, the accounts do not all agree.
Lovecraft’s Version In four letters written c. Oct-Dec 1923, Lovecraft mentions Eddy and Dark Swamp. These are the only accounts that were published at the time of the trip, and Lovecraft goes into some considerable detail.
I find Eddy rather a delight—I wish I had known him before. Next Sunday we are going on a trip which may bring you echoes in the form of horror-tales from both participants. In the northwestern part of Rhode Island there is a remote village called Chepachet, reached by a single car line with only a few cars a day. Last week Eddy was there for the first time, and at the post office overheard a conversation between two ancient rustic farmers which inspired our coming expedition. They were discussing hunting prospects, and spoke of the migration of all the rabbits and squirrels across the line into Connecticut; when one told the other that there were plenty left in the Dark Swamp. Then ensued a description to which Eddy listened with the utmost avidity, and which brought out the fact that in this, the smallest and most densely populated state of the Union, there exists a tract of 160 acres which has never been fully penetrated by any living man. It lies two miles from Chepachet—in a direction we do not now know, but which we will ascertain Sunday—and is reputed to be the home of very strange animals—strange at least to this part of the world, and including the dreaded “bobcat”, whose half-human cries in the night are often heard by neighbouring farmers. The reason it has never been fully penetrated is that there are many treacherous potholes, and that the archaic trees grow so thickly together that passage is well-nigh impossible. The undergrowth is very thick, and even at midday the darkness is very deep because of the intertwined branches overhead. the description so impressed Eddy that he began writing a story about it—provisionally entitled “Black Noon”—on the trolley ride home. And now we are both to see it . . . we are both to go into that swamp . . . and perhaps come out of it. Probably the thing’ll turn out to be a clum p of ill-nourished bushes, a few rain-puddles, and a couple of sparrows—but until our disillusion we are at liberty to think of the place as the immemorial lair of nightmare and unknown evil ruled by that subterraneous horror that sometimes cranes its neck out of the deepest pot-holes . . . It. —H. P. Lovecraft to Edwin Baird, c. Oct 1923, Letters to Hyman Bradofsky & Others 45
Lovecraft’s letters to Baird was published in Weird Tales (Mar 1924), and forms the first account in print.
My next trip, on which I had as a companion my new adopted son Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr., was on Sunday, Novr. 4; and led thro’ much the same territory as did my trip of Septr. 19 with out amiable confrere Mortonius. It was a quest of the grotesque and the terrible—a search for Dark Swamp, in northwestern Rhode-Island, of which Eddy had heard sinister whispers amongst the rusticks. They whisper that it tis very remote and very strange, and that no one has ever been completely thor’ it because of the treacherous and unfathomable potholes, and the antient trees whose thick boles grow so closelytogether that passage is difficult and darkness omnipresent even at noon, and other things, of which bobcats—whose half-human howls are heard in the night by peasants near the edge—are the very least. It is a peculiar place, and no house was ever built within two miles of it. the rural swains refer to it with much evasiveness, and not one of them can be induc’d to guide a traveller through it’ altho’ a few intrepid hunters and woodcutters have plied their vocations on its fringes. It lies in a natural bowl surrounded by low ranges of beautiful hills; far from any frequented road, and known to scarce a dozen persons outside the immediate country. Even in Chepachet, the nearest village, there are but two men who ever heard of it. Eddy discover’d its rumour at the Chepachet post office one bleak autumn evening when huntsmen gather’d about the fire and told tales and express wonder why all the squirrels and rabbits had left the hills and fled across the plain into Connecticut. One very antient man with a flintlock said that IT had mov’d in Dark Swamp, and had cran’d ITS neck out of the abysmal pothole beneath which IT has ITS immemorial Lair. And he said his grandfather had told him in 1849, when he was a very little boy, that IT had been there when the first settlers came; and that the Indians believed IT had always been there. This antient man with the flintlock was the only one present who had ever heard of Dark Swamp.
So on that Sunday my son and I took the stage for Chapachet, and in due time alighted before the tavern. In the tap-room they had never heard of Dark Swamp, but the landlord told us to ask the Town Clerk, two houses down the road beyond the White Church, who knows everything in the parish Upon knocking at this gentleman’s pillar’d colonial house, we were greeted by the genial owner him self; a prefect rural magnate and Knight of the Shire, than whom Sir Roger himself cou’d not be more oddly humoursome. he told us, that the Dark Swamp had a very queer reputation, and that men had gone in who never came out; but confest he knew little of it, and had never been near it. At his suggestion we went across the road to the cottage of a very intelligent yeoman nam’d Sprague, whom he reported to have guided a party of gentlemen from Brown-University thro parts of the swamp in quest of botanick specimens, some twelve years gone. Sprague dwells in a trim colonial cottage with pleasing doorway and good interior mantels and panelling;a ND tho’ it turn’d out that ’twas not he who guided the gentlemen, he prov’d uncommon genial and drew us a map by which we might reach the house of Fred Barnes, who did guide them […] After a long walk over the same highroad travers’d by Mortonius and me, we came to Goodman Barnes’ place; and found him after waiting Al of thirty-five minutes in his squalid kitchen. When he did arrive, he had not much to say; but told us to find ‘Squire James Reynolds, who dwells at the fork of the back road beyond the great reservoir, south the the turnpike. Again in motion, we stopt not till we came to [Cady’s] Tavern, built in 1683 […] The tavern lyes on the main Putnam Pike; but shortly after quitting it and passing the reservoir we turn’d south into the backwoods, coming in proper season to Squire Reynolds’ estate. We found the gentleman in his yard; a man well on in years, and having a very market rural speech which we had thought extinct save in stage plays. he told us, we had better take the right fork of the road, over the hills to Ernest Law’s farm; declaring, that Mr. Law owns Dark Swamp, and that it was his son who had cut wood at the edge of it. Following the Squire’s directions, we ascended a narrow rutted road betwixt picturesque woods and stone walls; coming at last to a crest […] We found Mr. Law […] He inform’d us, that Dark Swamp lyes in the distant bowl betwixt two of the hills we saw; and that ’tis two miles from his house to the nearest part of it, by a winding road and a cart0path. He said, the peasants have a little exaggerated its fearful singularities, tho’ it is yet a very odd place, and I’ll to visit by night. We thanked him greatly for the civilities he had shewn us, and having complimented him on the fine location of his seat, set out to return to town with the information we shall use upon our next trip. —H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Jr., 8 Nov 1923, Selected Letters 1.264-267
[…] setting a time and place of next meeting December 2nd, 6:45 a.m., west facade of the Federal Building—whence leaves the coach for Chepachet and the Dark Swamp. —H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 24 Nov 1923, Letters to Maurice W. Moe137
We were on a still hunt for the grotesque & the terrible—the ghoulish & the macabre—in the form of a hideous locality which Eddy had heard certain rusticks whispering about . . . . . Dark Swamp. The peasants had mutter’d that it is very remote & very strange, & that no one hath ever been completely across it because of the treacherous & fathomless potholes, & the ancient trees whose thick boles grow so closely together that passage is difficult & darkness omnipresent even at noon, & other things, of which bobcats—whose half-human cries are heard in the night by cotters near the edge—are the very least. It is a very peculiar place, & no house was ever built within two miles of it. The rural swains refer to it with much evasiveness, & not one of them can be induc’d to guide a traveller thro’ it. It lies near where we were lost south of the pike—there & westerward—& probably brushes the foot of Old Durf himself. Very few know . . . . or admit they know . . . . of it. Eddy discover’d its rumour at the tavern in Chepachet one bleak autumn evening when huntsmen gather’d about the fire & told tales. One very ancient man said that IT dwells in the swamp . . . . & that IT was alive even before the white man came.
Well, anyway, we took the nine-twenty-five for Chepachet on Nov. 4, & wasted all the noon period getting shunted from one villager to another for directions. One bimbo—a bearded chap named Sprague, who lives in a colonial house—was especially valuable, & gave some extra tips on Durf. […] The last Swain we were directed to was Ernest Law, who owns Dark Swamp, & who was reached by a rutted road that climbs upward betwixt woods & stone walls. […] He told us how to reach Dark Swamp, & inform’d us it is a very odd place, tho’ the peasantry have a little exaggerated its fearful singularities. We thank’d him for the civilities he shew’d us, & having congratulated him on the fine location of his seat, set out to return to town with the information we shall use upon our next trip. […] —H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 5 Dec 1923, Letters to James F. Morton 58-59
“Durf” in this case is Durfee Hill, the second-highest point in Rhode Island, located near Chapechet. On 19 September 1923, Lovecraft and James F. Morton had gone to Chapechet to climb the hill, as detailed in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (Selected Letters 1.250), which makes no mention of Dark Swamp. According to Lovecraft, C. M. Eddy, Jr. heard about Dark Swamp in Autumn (say, October), they went there on 4 November 1923, but couldn’t find it, though they got directions to find it next time, made plans for such a trip in December—and ultimately never returned to Chepachet.
One unanswered question is what Eddy was doing in the Chepachet post office to overhear these rumors of Dark Swamp. We know Lovecraft was in Chepachet in September, but why would Eddy be there? Stephen Olbrys Gencarella in “Lovecraft and the Folklore of Glocester’s Dark Swamp” (Lovecraft Annual #16) notes several other discrepancies in Lovecraft’s account that suggests that whatever the original story, HPL elaborated the tale with subsequent telling.
Ken Faig, Jr. in “Searching for Dark Swamp” in Lovecraftian Voyages, traced through old maps and records and confirmed much of the geography and named personages that Lovecraft mentions in his letters regarding the search for Dark Swamp, which he believes is currently inundated and forms the northern part of the Ponaganset Reservoir.
C. M. Eddy, Jr.’s Version In 1966, Eddy’s brief memoir “Walks With Lovecraft” was published in The Dark Brotherhood by Arkham House. Near the end of the memoir, Eddy recalled the trip to Chapachet:
One other jaunt with Lovecraft is retained rather vividly in memory, for all that it was in a way a frustrating one. It was a trip made into the country in August 1923, in search of a blighted area called the “Dark Swamp”—a place of such stygian darkness that the sun reputedly never shone there, never penetrated its fastnesses, even at high noon. Lovecraft had no very clear idea of its setting, but had been told that it was located off the Putnam Pike, about halfway between Chepachet, Rhode Island, and Putnam, Connecticut.
The day we set out was blisteringly hot; though we took the first trolley in the morning to the end of the line in Chepachet, it was already very warm at that hour. In Chepachet, we started out on foot on the road toward Putnam. The heat increased as the day wore on. We had brought sandwiches with us, and from time to time we stopped at farmhouses along the way for water and to inquire about Dark Swamp. But no one seemed to have heard of it, and after four miles, Lovecraft, considerably wilted by the heat, decided reluctantly that we would have to give up the quest. So we found some reasonably comfortable stones at the side of the road and sat there until one of the Putnam-Providence cars stopped for us and put an end to our search. We never afterward took it up again, though, despite the discomfort of the summer day, it was as rewarding as any walk with Lovecraft, in that he found many of the old farm buildings fascinating and conveyed that fascination to me. —C. M. Eddy, Jr., “Walks With Lovecraft” (1966) in The Gentleman from Angell Street 49-50
The most immediate discrepancy between the two accounts is that while Lovecraft places the search for Dark Swamp in early November 1923, Eddy places it in August. The comments about the heat make sense if it was a summer hike, but in the autumn?. Lovecraft doesn’t mention the heat in his own accounts, but did allow that he was “monstrous weary, and cou’d scarce stand” at the end of the hike (SL1.267), which would jive with Eddy’s account (though Lovecraft avers that they hiked 17 miles around Chepachet, not 4 miles).
Granted that Eddy was remembering back ~43 years, so some details could be hazy; Lovecraft mentions they were walking about noon, and if it was an All-Saints summer, perhaps that might account for Eddy’s memory of summer heat. More odd is that Eddy makes no mention that he was the originator of the search; by his account, it was Lovecraft that had been told about the swamp, rather than Eddy that told Lovecraft about it. However, we know Lovecraft had been in Chapechet before; perhaps it was Lovecraft who heard of Dark Swamp when he went to Chepachet with Morton, and later asked Eddy to go with him to find it.
Muriel E. Eddy’s Version There are three versions of the story in Muriel Eddy’s memoirs of Lovecraft, two published before C. M. Eddy’s 1966 memoir and one after. All versions agree largely with each other, and more with C. M. Eddy’s version than with Lovecraft’s—this makes sense given that all of Muriel’s information probably came from her husband or memories of what Lovecraft mentioned about the trip. Though Selected Letters 1, with Lovecraft’s lengthy account of the trip to Long, was published in 1965, the Eddys do not seem to have referred to it.
It was during the hot summer months that Lovecraft expressed the desire to have Mr. Eddy accompany him on a quest to find a so-called “Black Swamp” somewhere, it was said, in the wilds of Chepachet, R.I.—a swamp so overhung with trees that no sunlight ever penetrated it. Always on the lookout for oddities of nature, the idea of seeing such a swamp intrigued Lovecraft to such an extent that he took the whole day off, leaving his writings, as eager as any schoolboy to witness nature’s phenomenon. The whereabouts of that swamp—if such a swamp truly exists—is still a msytery—at least, it was never located, and Mr. Eddy almost had to carry Lovecraft back from the rural excursion, at least a mile, to the trolley line, for, unaccustomed to such vigorous jaunts at that time, the writer of tales macabre soon became so exhausted he could hardly move one foot after the other. It was a great disappointment to Lovecraft that the trip was failure, as far as finding the swamp was concerned; but the rural characteristics of the village delighted him, and found place, I am sure, in many of his later stories. —Muriel E. Eddy, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft(1945) 18
It was during the summer of 1923 that Lovecraft expressed the desire to have Mr. Eddy accompany him on a quest to find a so-called “Black Swamp” somewhere near the small village of Chepachet, Rhode Island. It was said to be a swamp so overhung by trees that sunshine never penetrated it.
The thought of visiting such a swamp intrigued H.P.L. and he discarded his habit of staying in during the bright hours of the day to join my husband in the long hike. They took a trolley to Chepachet, and from then on they were on their own. It was a long walk to any kind of swamp land from the civic center of the community, and hours later, after viewing several small swamps but not finding any to answer the description of Black Swamp, they were about to turn back when Lovecraft suggested that they stop in and rest at one of the farmhouses dotting the section. besides, he averred, some of the farmers in that region might possibly know where (and if) there was such a swamp in the vicinity.
The wife of one farmer invited them into the kitchen and offered refreshment in the form of a glass of milk and gingerbread. H.P.L. eagerly accepted it, and he listened attentively as their hosts assured them that Black Swamp was virtually unknown to them, and it must have been a pipe dream somebody had, writing up a non-existent place. There were plenty of swamps, but none, they were sure, through which sunlight never filtered. Sometimes their cows got lost in the swampland, but they always found them sooner or later.
Lovecraft, later, jotted down in a little notebook he carried, tidbits of their quaint Yankee talk, saying the trip was not entirely a failure, as he had gleaned quite a bit from hearing the antiquarians converse. It would come in handy when he wrote his next story, he assured my tired-out husband. —Muriel E. Eddy, “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961) in The Gentleman of Angell Street 11-12
My husband often accompanied Howard on trips to get new ideas. One day they took a trolley car from Providence to the village of Chepachet, Rhode Island, to find a black swamp. it was said to be so overhung by trees that sunshine could not penetrate it.
They hiked for hours, and saw several swamps, but found nothing to answer the description.
But H.P.L. made many notes for future reference. He told Cliff that no trip was ever wasted.
Although Howard never wrote a story about the non-existent swamp, my husband used this as a basis for the last story he wrote during his retirement. Entitled “Black Noon,” it will be published in 1970 by August Derleth of Arkham House, Sauk City, Wis.
—Muriel E. Eddy, H.P.L. “The Man and the Image” (1969) 4 Later revised as “Lovecraft Among the Demons” (1970) in The Gentleman from Angell Street54
Muriel E. Eddy’s accounts add certain details lacking in both Lovecraft and her husband’s accounts, such as being served milk and gingerbread by a farmer’s wife (perhaps while waiting in the kitchen of Fred Barnes?) which might be authentic; others might be invented (no notes related to Dark Swamp are in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book) or the result of the telephone game from husband to wife (neither of them mention any smaller swamps, either).
Both Lovecraft and Muriel Eddy reference “Black Noon,” a story begun by C. M. Eddy, Jr. If the story was begun in 1923, as Lovecraft suggests, it was not completed at that time. C. M. Eddy, Jr. attempted to complete the story in the 1960s, but ill-health made it difficult to impossible for him to write, and the story went unfinished at the time of his death in 1967. In the Arkham Collector Summer 1968, August Derleth announced “Black Noon” would appear in the forthcoming anthology Dark Things, but Derleth died in 1971, before this fragment could be published, and it was not included in Dark Things. “Black Noon” was eventually published in Eddy’s posthumous collection Exit Into Eternity (1973).
“Black Noon” is set in Eddy’s fictional Fenham, with a thinly-disguised Weird Tales (as Uncanny Stories), Lovecraft (as Robert Otis Mather), and Dark Swamp (as Witches’ Swamp). Although little of their adventure features in the fragment, some of the description of the swamp echoes Lovecraft’s:
[…] the trees on either side of this new construction had grown so close together that their trunks touched one another, and so tall that their leafy branches had interlocked to form a well-night impenetrable covering. In addition, hybrid vines, whichh grew rampant in the swamp, had over-grown both oaks and branches to eliminate all light from the canopy thus formed. The only thing that could find a way through this natural barrier was the fog which, during the early Fall, hung over the entire swampy area!
Even at high noon, the portion of the road was black as a moonless midnight! (117-118)
Neither of the Eddys ever mention Lovecraft’s “IT”; whether this was an invention of Lovecraft’s or a local legend that he picked up on but the Eddys failed to mention is unclear. Thomas D’Agostino in “Dark Swamp’s IT” (2020) leans into local legends; Stephen Olbrys Gencarella in “Lovecraft and the Folklore of Glocester’s Dark Swamp” (Lovecraft Annual #16) goes even deeper, and critically analyzes D’Agostino’s claims. Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Gencarella that Lovecraft may have been pulling his correspondent’s legs a bit—whether or not there was a germ of local lore at the heart of it, Lovecraft let his imagination elaborate with each telling.
However, it is interesting that Clifford Myron Eddy mentioned “IT,” when his parents did not. Did the elder Eddys decide it was more believable to leave out the legendary critter, or did the younger Eddy read Lovecraft’s account in his letters? Alas, we may never know. All we are left with is an intriguing bit of data, and it isn’t clear if it is fool’s gold or the real thing; if it is just a bit of glitter among the dross of clippings, or a valuable addition to Lovecraft studies. All researchers can do is sieve through the data.
Lucky for some of us, it is good fun to pan for digital gold in newspaper archives.
Racist Language The following article deals explicitly with racism in humor, many examples of which use racial pejoratives. Frank discussion of these matters requires the reproduction of at least some samples of racist pejoratives and ideas in quotes, titles, etc. As such, please be advised before reading further.
Few authors have been as personally identified with their work as H. P. Lovecraft. Even during his own lifetime, Lovecraft’s friends began to incorporate fictional versions of them into his stories—as “Howard” in “The Space-Eaters” (1928) by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.; as the unnamed mystic dreamer in “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935) and Luveh-Keraph, Priest of Bast in “The Suicide in the Study” (1935) by Robert Bloch; and as “the man with the long chin” in The Village Green (192?) by Edith Miniter.
In life, Lovecraft was a self-effacing and ready correspondent who made many contacts with his fans and peers in pulp fiction and amateur journalism; he liked to project the image of himself as older and more reclusive than he actually was. After his death, this personal myth-making took on a life of its own, as his legend developed and spread. There was no absence of humor from the early decades as awareness of Lovecraft and his Mythos grew, with both parody and satire present in works like “At the Mountains of Murkiness, or From Lovecraft to Leacock” (1940) by Arthur C. Clarke.
A notable absence in early humor directed at Lovecraft is any mention of his racism. The biographical facts of Lovecraft’s life were generally slow to emerge, and not always readily available to fans. So while comments on Lovecraft’s racism and antisemitism were made public by the first version of his wife’s memoir in the 1940s (see The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis), and August Derleth felt the need to address the issue in print in Some Notes on H. P. Lovecraft (1959), Lovecraft did not develop a widespread reputation as a racist until the publication of L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). De Camp, who had studied Lovecraft’s published and unpublished letters and other materials, emphasized Lovecraft as neurotic, a flawed human being, a possible homosexual, and especially as a racist—and published the entirety of the poem “On the Creation of Niggers” which is attributed to Lovecraft.
De Camp’s biography came at a time when Lovecraft was beginning to spread to a much larger audience, due to reprint of his work in paperback, films like The Dunwich Horror (1970), and growing influence on music, adaptations in comic books, and other media—and as Lovecraft was gaining more critical awareness and acceptance. The same year as de Camp’s book came out, the first World Fantasy Convention was held in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, with the theme “The Lovecraft Circle,” and the first World Fantasy Awards were given out—in the form of a bust of Lovecraft, carved by noted cartoonist Gahan Wilson. So, just at a time when Lovecraft’s popularity blossomed and more information on his life emerged, de Camp released a highly influential book.
Many Lovecraft scholars criticized de Camp’s approach, presentation, and conclusions—though not the underlying facts: while speculation about Lovecraft’s sexuality or mental health were subjective, Lovecraft’s prejudices were clearly expressed in his letters. The critiques, however, didn’t have the reach of the book itself, and many of de Camp’s misconceptions continue to color perceptions of Lovecraft to the present day. This has been very apparent in various fictional depictions of Lovecraft in various media, which often exaggerate Lovecraft’s characteristics and prejudices for humorous effect.
When the little kitten darted from the door and fled into the hall, the apparition in the darkness shouted out loud. It shouted in the high nasal accent native only to that part of New England once known as Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. And its words were these:
“Come back!” it cried. “Come back, my pet! Come back, NIGGER-MAN!“ —Gregory Nicoll, “The Man Who Collected Lovecraft,” The Diversifier (May 1977) 68
As a subject of satire and ridicule, Lovecraft might seem to be a particularly strange dead horse to choose to whip. Obviously, Lovecraft is dead and is unaffected by mockery; he can’t regret or reform his reviews, and won’t roll in his grave no matter how hard you make fun of him. Humorous takes on Lovecraft are thus aimed at the living: at fans who are familiar with Lovecraft and his fiction, whether or not they enjoy either. In the case of Lovecraft’s racism in particular, this effectively serves as a kind of damnatio memoriae: unable to condemn a living Lovecraft for his prejudices, they make fun of a dead Lovecraft. These humorous portrayals, with all of their exaggerations, have influenced Lovecraft’s posthumous reputation and image.
Does making fun of a dead man constitutes “punching down?” Certainly, Lovecraft has no ability to defend himself from false accusations or inaccurate claims about his prejudices. On the other hand, he doesn’t really need any such defense. While Lovecraft may have no power to answer now, Lovecraft was racist, and part of the white majority that kept racial and ethnic minorities as second-class citizens during his life. Empathy in cases of historical racism should be on the victims of discrimination, not the perpetrators. Lovecraft may not have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan or participated in any racial violence directly, but he was still part of the majority of U.S. citizens that supported the legalized racism of Jim Crow and the social norms that prevented racial equality.
The occasional depiction of Lovecraft as “Genre’s Racist, Crazy Uncle” has exactly that much truth in it: Lovecraft’s prejudices were largely tolerated during his lifetime, and for some decades beyond that, because they were the same prejudices that millions of other people in the U.S. held. Just because those prejudices were common does not make them universal. Just because other people were racist does not make Lovecraft’s racism okay. The broad cultural background radiation of racism during Lovecraft’s lifetime is an explanation for his views, not an excuse for them.
The fact that Lovecraft is often depicted as much more cartoonishly racist than he was in real life, or than his peers, is in part down to the needs of the writer or artist to make a joke, but also in part due to lack of understanding of what Lovecraft’s prejudices were and how they fit into the historical context. Pretty much no one that mentions “On the Creation of Niggers” in any context wants to read a dissertation on the tradition of racist light verse in English poetry, just as few people who are familiar with the name of Lovecraft’s cat in “The Rats in the Walls” want a lecture on the propensity for naming pets racial epithets around the turn of the 20th century. They care about the current context, when the N-word is a racial epithet of unique power, not a historical context when such usage was more broadly accepted by a more openly racist society.
Many expressions of prejudice that were commonplace in the early 20th century seem egregiously racist now. Plain statements of Lovecraft’s life may seem ludicrously racist by the standards of the present, because many plain statements of racism in the 1930s and 30s are ludicrously racist by today’s metric. It is difficult for today’s readers to get a grasp of what a “normal” amount of racism was in the 20s and 30s when minstrel shows, coon songs, and the African Dodger were still socially acceptable.
In 1897 I was trying for Beethoven—but by 1900 I was whistling the popular coon songs & musical comedies of the day. —H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 3 Sep 1931, Letters to J. Vernon Shea et al.46
As a consequence, when combined with a general ignorance of the actual nature and scope of Lovecraft’s prejudices, the exaggerations of Lovecraft’s bigotry are often much more extreme to get a laugh.
Ah! Look, it’s attempting to communicate. No doubt the savage thing knows language as a house pet knows its reflection in the mirror. The sense is taken in, but the process, the meaning is forever lost. —H. P. Lovecraft, Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time by Brandon Masters
There is a certain irony in that the more that we know of the facts of Lovecraft’s prejudice, the more ridiculous and far from Lovecraft’s actual beliefs that humorous takes on Lovecraft’s racism tend to get. The earliest humor was written by weird fiction fans who were generally aware of who Lovecraft was, his work, and some of the scholarship about his life. Later writers tend to be less familiar with the minutiae of Lovecraftiana and base more of their image of Lovecraft off the memes and stereotypes of Lovecraft and his work, or lean into a particular presentation that relies on such a specific image of Lovecraft as cartoonishly bigoted.
In terms of accuracy, there’s a kernel of truth here: Lovecraft did express some prejudice against Italian immigrants, especially those in the Federal Hill area of his native Providence, RI. Lovecraft had even made mention of Italian immigrants in some of his publications, such as his very first widely-published poem, “Providence in 2000 A.D.”:
In 1912 my first bit of published verse appeared in The Evening Bulletin. It is a 62-line satire in the usual heroic couplet, ridiculing a popular movement on the part of the Italians of the Federal Hill slums to change the name of the main street from “Atwells’ Avenue” to “Columbus Avenue”. I pictured Providence in 2000 A.D., with all the English names changed to foreign appellations. This piece received considerable notice of a minor sort, I am told, though I doubt if it had much effect in silencing the Italians’ clamour. The idea was so foolish that it probably died of its own weakness. —H. P. Lovecraft to the Kleicomolo, 16 Nov 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 76
The humor comes from the juxtaposition of the prosaic (and to contemporary eyes, ridiculous) prejudice against the harmless (if stereotypical) Italian immigrant and the eldritch entity breaking its way through the dimensional barriers. The cartoon also draws on and supports the misconception that Lovecraft’s fiction was largely driven by his personal fears and prejudices.
In real life Lovecraft actually liked Italian food, generally had congenial relationships with Italian immigrants he got to know, and rarely included Italian characters in his fiction. But that is a lot more nuance than can be expected in six panels. The joke doesn’t work if Lovecraft is presented as someone who isn’t triggered by the fact an Italian offered him a calzone, whose cosmic horrors aren’t inspired by more prosaic prejudices.
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, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.402
If there is a problem with the humorous expression of Lovecraft’s racism, it isn’t in the fact of making fun of a dead racist, or of painting racism as ridiculous or illogical. The problem is what it is often wrapped around in: the normalization of negative depictions of someone with mental health issues, and the downplaying of the dangers that contemporary racism represents. While a few scholars and pedants may decry the propagation of misinformation about Lovecraft and his fiction, that is ultimately a minor quibble compared to the bigger issues of propagating negative stereotypes like de Camp’s neurotic picture of Lovecraft, or of ignoring the really scary part about Lovecraft’s prejudices:
Many people held them then, and many people still hold them today.
Racist humor always has the caveat that to a certain audience, it isn’t funny because it’s ridiculous or breaking a taboo, but because it appeals to their own prejudices. Dave Chappelle mentioned in a 2006 interview with Oprah about someone laughing at him, rather than with him. The same thing cannot happen in the same way with Lovecraft because Lovecraft is white, and even prejudicial words like “cracker” and “honky” don’t have the same bite or weight as the N-word. Yet at the same time, making fun of Lovecraft’s prejudices has become a popular excuse for continuing to spread that language—the name of his cat, the poem “On the Creation of Niggers”—many writers find it acceptable to repeat that in a humorous context, as the punchline of the joke.
So might their audience.
The use of nigger by black rappers and comedians has given the term a new currency and enhanced cachet such that many young whites yearn to use the term like the blacks whom they see as heroes or trendsetters. —Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2003) 36
The moral problem with the humorous portrayal of Lovecraft’s racism isn’t about making fun of Lovecraft, who is already dead and long past injury. It is that the jokes themselves do little but reiterate and spread prejudice. They don’t teach the audience anything about Lovecraft’s racism, and often only work when predicated on an audience already aware of Lovecraft’s racism in some form.
Is there any hidden moral or germ of insight in these portrayals?
A case in point might be made for the Midnight Pals, which takes as its set-up the idea of famous writers, living and dead, sitting around a campfire and having brief conversations. The nature of the form means that the personalities are exaggerated and deliberately satirical. Lovecraft is often portrayed as neurotic, racist, although often ultimately harmless (as opposed to J. K. Rowling, who also appears.) In most cases, Howard’s portrayal makes him the butt of the joke, and the series is clear in demonstrating that racism is bad and Lovecraft is cringe for his prejudices—though not ostracised. Indeed, despite the differing beliefs presented, the campfire group is specifically accepting, even of members who are wildly far apart in their views on race, sex, etc.
The series doesn’t work without some butt to the jokes. Like Archie Bunker, Lovecraft in the Midnight Pals has become the mostly-lovable racist, whose prejudices are played for laughs rather than evidence of malice.
Humor is only one way of portraying Lovecraft in fiction, and Lovecraft’s racism is often used to make him a figure of ridicule. Yet even to do that, humorists often have to go far beyond Lovecraft’s own recorded words and actions. As racist as Lovecraft was, and with the unusually deep record we have from his letters and essays to give evidence to that racism, many people remain ignorant of what Lovecraft actually wrote and said, and many humorists invent new ways for Lovecraft to be racist—which perpetuates the idea of Lovecraft as racist, but isn’t very useful for refuting his actual beliefs. Lovecraft the racist is more often than not effectively a straw man when it comes to humorous portrayals.
It’s not conclusive, Clark, but it appears this dark-haired woman is your ancestor. Please, take no offense…university rules, you know. I’ll have to ask you to leave the premises. —Prof. Upsley, Rat God (2015) by Richard Corben
A very rare form of humor when it comes to Lovecraft’s prejudices is irony. In Richard Corben’s Rat God, the very Lovecraftian protagonist discovers that he is less of a WASP than he thought he was—thanks to the late revelation of a long-forgotten Native American great-great-grandmother. The story takes obvious inspiration from Lovecraft’s “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” as well as the prejudices expressed in Lovecraft’s own life and letters. The result is not funny in a ha-ha sense, but a grim irony in that the character who exhibited such terrific prejudice throughout the story has discovered that he himself is now subject to the same prejudice by others.
Corben’s ironic unmasking of Lovecraftian prejudice does something that a lot of riffs on Lovecraft’s prejudices don’t: it moves the plot forward. It has something to say beyond “look at how racist Lovecraft is! Isn’t that funny?” It is a bit more subtle, but it also has a point, and illustrates that prejudice is a doctrine which is, ironically, color-blind to its targets. Who knows who every ancestor of theirs is, after all? Who do you think you are?
It has to be recognized that the depiction—accurate or exaggerated—of Lovecraft’s racism goes far beyond humorous jokes and portrayals. There are quite serious fictional depictions of or references to Lovecraft as a racist, as in Richard Lupoff’s Lovecraft’s Book (1985, later re-released as Marblehead), Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow’s graphic novel Providence, Lovecraft Country (2016) by Matt Ruff, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle, Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark, and The City We Became (2020) by N. K. Jemisin. Accuracy is always a challenge for any historical character incorporated into a fictional work, and each author’s usage of Lovecraft is determined by their own research (or lack thereof) and their understanding—and perhaps especially, by the point they want to make.
In several of the latter novels, the point is specifically to bring attention to Lovecraft’s racism, as part of the point of their narrative is the acknowledgment and refutation of Lovecraft’s prejudices. Where a humorous depiction of Lovecraft’s racism shows prejudice as laughable, the serious depiction shows racism as no laughing matter. Either approach is workable depending on what point or mood the creator is trying to get across, one is not superior to the other, and many of the same observations about humorous depictions of Lovecraft’s racism also applies to non-humorous depictions.
Both humorous and non-humorous depictions of Lovecraft tend to be strongly driven by the myth of Lovecraft, rather than historical reality. The neurotic, cartoonishly racist caricature of a horror writer is often an easier character to work with than the more complex and nuanced historical human being, just as bumbling or villainous Nazis are easier to depict than stalwart German troopers with wives and kids who enlisted in a rush of patriotic spirit or economic need and ended up participating in a genocide. Lovecraft is not alone in being depicted first and foremost as a racist; many characters based on historical persons are essentially caricatures.
Lovecraft stands out in this respect only in that he is a pulp author from the period that humorists and their readers are still familiar with. Would the same jokes work if the subject was Ernest Hemingway or Catherine Lucille Moore? Probably not. Not because such jokes wouldn’t be as accurate (or inaccurate) as applied to Lovecraft, but because readers are less familiar with those writers and their prejudices. Lovecraft’s continued relevance, name recognition, and a vague awareness of his life are the main drivers for his continued humorous portrayals—racist warts and all. These depictions have been shaped by previous characterizations of Lovecraft, and in turn continue to shape his myth.
Real historical people are messy and complicated. Myths are easier to deal with. Yet the more the myth is repeated—the more extremes the depiction of a fantasy Lovecraft’s racism become—the harder it is to see the real historical individual. Many people, if they have the image of an individual as racist, take any correction of that image as an attempt to downplay or deny that racism. It can be very difficult to correct such a reputation once it takes hold.
In the small village of Itchno, which is on the outskirts of the town of Konotop, in the small Province of Chernigov, on the cold and wintry night of March 16, 1883, with the temperature several degrees below zero, an infant girl was born. —Sonia H. Davis, Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024) 1
In February 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, I noted the news as the invaders moved through Konotop, the birthplace of Sonia H. Davis, who had once been Sonia H. Lovecraft. In 2019, when I prepared my notes for a panel at NecronomiCon on Lovecraft’s ex-wife, I had wondered if there were any records of her early life still there in the city. As the Russians overran the city, any hope I had of some original documents about Sonia or her family surviving to fill in the gaps in her early life faded.
It was mid-October 2022 when I got in touch with Monica Wasserman (The Papers of Sonia H. Davis), and to my surprise found there were better sources closer at hand than Konotop. We shared a common interest in the former Sonia H. Greene, who had become Mrs. Lovecraft. However, Monica’s dedication to the subject far outstripped mine. Her considerable research on Sonia’s life included access to the papers of Sonia and her third husband at Brown University, tracking down some of Sonia’s books and the extremely scarce second issue of The Rainbow, and scouring newspaper archives and genealogical databases. She even managed to access photographs of Sonia that had never been published, and contacted Sonia’s living relatives for family lore.
My own research was more modest, though complementary: while Monica had focused on her subject, I’d been focused on everything else around Sonia. I had been meticulously reading H. P. Lovecraft’s letters for references to Sonia, and had obtained access to other correspondence from or related to Sonia in various archives. Monica had unearthed the goods: I could offer a bit of context and insight from the Lovecraftian side of things. When Monica followed through on her project of actually publishing Sonia’s autobiography, unearthed from the archive and supplemented by additional autobiographical materials like The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, she was very gracious in allowing me to be a beta reader and to comment on it before publication. Because a few of my suggestions found their way into the final product, I’m listed as a contributor.
Most readers come to Sonia H. Davis as an adjunct to their interest in her second husband, H. P. Lovecraft. Her memoirs of their marriage shed light on a critical period of Lovecraft’s life, and fans and scholars alike sought her out for what she could give them about him. Yet that interest never manifested in any profitable form. Lovecraftian scholarship and publishing in the 1930s-early 1970s was almost entirely a small-scale endeavor, dominated by amateurs and small presses like Arkham House that sometimes seemed more labors of love than businesses that could produce actual revenue. There was no major biography of Lovecraft released during Sonia’s lifetime, though every major biography since has depended at least in part on her memoirs.
Pretty much no one seemed interested in Sonia’s own story. Until Monica Wasserman, that is.
Sonia’s autobiographical manuscript is, first and foremost, the story of her life. Born to Jewish parents in Ukraine (then a part of the Russian Empire), the loss of her father, her travels to the United Kingdom and then the United States, the new family her mother made, her need to work at a young age, marry at a young age, to become a mother, a successful businesswoman, an amateur journalist…long before she met Lovecraft, Sonia lived a life worth telling about. Her story is the story of many immigrants that came to the United States, living by her wits and the sweat of her brow, striving for education to better herself, dreaming of her own business and financial freedom, and yes, even of love.
While Sonia is very honest in her autobiography, there are things she doesn’t talk about very much. This is where Monica added footnotes, stitched-in material from The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft and other autobiographical writings, to fill in some of the gaps. The result is more complete than just the individual works by themselves would be; the formatting by Helios is carefully done so it is easy to see at a glance when another text is “pasted-in,” and perhaps most importantly, in a way that preserves the intent of the book:
To tell Sonia’s story in her own words.
To appreciate Monica’s work, it is important to realize that Sonia desperately needed an editor. While some of her autobiographical writings proceed in a fairly linear manner, she had a tendency to hop around in time, or to put down sudden thoughts and recollections as they occurred to her, and there is much that might be forgotten (or omitted) when writing for a general audience decades later. We see little of her daughter, Florence Carol Greene, who grew up to be the journalist Carol Welde, for example, though we know their relationship was fraught and eventually irrevocably sundered. Endings seemed to be particularly difficult for Sonia; she struggled to wrap things up. The raw manuscripts aren’t unreadable, but they benefit immensely from someone taking the time and care to put them in order and to clarify a few obtuse points with cogent endnotes.
Monica put in the work so that the reader can access Sonia’s story more easily.
Two Hearts That Beat As One is, as of the moment it saw print, the definitive text on Sonia’s life. In a format accessible to both scholars and casual readers, it provides a unique glimpse into the life of a woman who suffered, strove, and finally achieved much of what she hoped for—love, a degree of economic comfort, and purpose—with her third husband, Nathaniel Davis. In time, old age would take this all away. All lives end, and the last chapters are rarely pleasant. Here, at last, Sonia is the star and subject of her own story, not a brief and shadowy chapter in H. P. Lovecraft’s.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 