My memory is becoming a little bit dim; but the things of interest in my life, I still remember, and altho’ I am the widow of another man, I shall always remember H.P.L. as I would any good friend.
—Sonia H. Davis to August Derleth, 29 May 1966, Mss. Wisconsin Historical Society
To support and promote Arkham House, co-founder and editor August Derleth tried innumerable ways to get the word out about the press, publishing a vast array of ephemera to advertise the wares, attract notice from potential customers, and explain about delays or difficulties. On two occasions, Derleth attempted a regular journal to supplement and advertise the small press: the Arkham Sampler (1948-1949) and the Arkham Collector (1967-1971), both of which contained a similar mix of content: news about Arkham House and its publications, book reviews, original fiction and poetry, short essays by or about Lovecraft, etc.
There were two general problems with such publications: getting them to pay for themselves (through a combination of subscriptions and increased sales of Arkham House books), and getting enough solid content to fill an issue. It was an imposition on Derleth’s already crowded schedule, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that he occasionally cut a corner or two in an effort to save time or get an issue to press—and he did sometimes publish some exceptional content, without which Lovecraft studies would be the poorer.
In the Winter 1969 issue of the Arkham Collector are two small back-to-back articles: “Memories of Lovecraft: I” by Sonia H. Davis (Lovecraft’s ex-wife, who survived him) and “Memories of Lovecraft: II” by Helen V. Sully (who had visited Lovecraft in Providence). These are effectively filler for the issue; neither woman appears to have had a direct hand in putting them together, rather Derleth directly adapted what they had written about Lovecraft elsewhere and presented them as a series of quotes. Still, as memoirs go, each of these “Memories” has their points of interest.
“Memories of Lovecraft: I” by Sonia H. Davis
Sonia Haft Lovecraft Davis, who was married to H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s and divorced by mutual consent late in the decade has written some paragraphs about Lovecraft in letters to the editor. The following excerpts are from her letters—
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 116
This is the original opening to “Memories of Lovecraft: I.” August Derleth and Sonia H. Davis first came into contact in 1947, and while their initial interactions were rough (even antagonistic), they did eventually make peace and become friendly correspondents, which lasted through at least 1970, based on letters in the August Derleth archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Derleth would pass away in 1971, and Sonia in 1972. It is from this collection of letters that Derleth borrowed several personal memories of Lovecraft that Sonia had shared with him over the years.
Given that the August Derleth/Sonia H. Davis correspondence is split between the John Hay Library in Providence and the Wisconsin Historical Society, it is difficult to consolidate a lot of the information in the letters, much less easily search them, but an attempt to survey the available documents has not uncovered which letters that Derleth excerpted these quotes from. The letters may have been misplaced, or included among the Arkham House business files, but it makes it difficult to gauge how accurate the quotations are, or in what context they took place. However we can say a few things based on internal evidence and other Lovecraft materials that are available to scholars.
During our marriage we often went to theatres, sometimes to the Taormina, a favorite Italian restaurant, where H. P. L. learned to eat minestrone and spaghetti with parmesan cheese, which he loved. But he balked at the wine.
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 117
In his letters to his aunts during their marriage, Lovecraft mentions the Taormina Italian restaurant three times (LFF 1.237, 264, 2.555), and the comments on Sonia introducing him to Italian food, particularly minestrone and spaghetti (with lots of parmesan cheese) are well-attested in his letters:
My taste has become so prodigiously Italianised that I never order anything but spaghetti & minestrone except when those are not to be had—& they really contain an almost ideal balance of active nutritive elements, considering the wheaten base of spaghetti, the abundant vitamines in tomato sauce, the assorted vegetables in minestrone, & the profusion of powdered cheese common to both.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 18 Sep 1925, LFF 1.402
Some of the comments attributed to Sonia’s letters involve information that she would not have had directly, but might have gotten through Lovecraft himself, family photographs, or conversations with his aunts; there is also evidence that her memories may be skewed somewhat by prior anecdotes or biographical notes on Lovecraft, for example:
As a child H. P. L. was not only far from being ‘hideous’ but he was a very beautiful baby with flaxen curls, beautiful brown eyes and an engaging smile. As a boy of six he was still a very handsome and interesting-looking child. […] H. P. used to speak of his mother as a ‘touch-me-not’ and once—but once only—he confessed to me that his mother’s attitude toward him was ‘devastating’. . . . In my opinion, the elder Lovecraft, having Beena travelling salesman for the Gotham Silversmiths, and his wife being a ‘touch-me-not’, took his sexual pleasures wherever he could find them; for H. P. never had a sister of a brother, and his mother, probably having been sex-starved against her will, lavished both her love and her hate on her only child.
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 116-117
Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853-1898) and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft (1857-1921) were both dead by the time H. P. Lovecraft met Sonia, so this is speculation—and no doubt inspired in whole or in part by earlier memoirs or brief biographical pieces like Winfield Townley Scott’s “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944), which included the revelation that W. S. Lovecraft (who worked as a commercial traveller for the Gorham Silver Co.) died of syphilis, and Townley’s publication of excerpts from the Letters of Clara Lovrien Hess, which was the first suggest that Susan Lovecraft disliked her son’s appearance.
The most interesting snippet is one which frankly no one else could have provided, and which appears in no other source:
H. P. was inarticulate in expressions of love except to his mother and to his aunts, to whom he expressed himself quite vigorously; to all other it was expressed by deep appreciation only. One way of expression of H. P.’s sentiment was to wrap his ‘pinkey’ finger around mine and say ‘Umph!’
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 117
There is no significant doubt that Sonia did actually write these segments; several of them echo points in her long memoir The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, and can be taken as elaborations on ideas already expressed (although the ‘umph’ is new). It is unfortunate that the original letters from which they were taken have not come to light yet, as reading between the lines it seems likely that Sonia was responding to some specific point or question of Derleth’s, rather than random recollections.
“Memories of Lovecraft: I” has been republished at least twice, in Lovecraft Remembered (1998) and Ave Atque Vale (2019); in both cases, Derleth’s opening paragraph explaining the origin of the memories was not reprinted.
“Memories of Lovecraft II” by Helen V. Sully
Helen Sully (now Mrs. George Trimble of Auburn, California) a friend of Clark Ashton Smith’s, was given a letter of introduction to Lovecraft by Smith when she traveled east in the summer of 1933. She was driven to Providence to meet Lovecraft by the family of Frank Belknap Long.
—The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 117
Derleth pointedly does not give any indication of the source of the quotes that follow. It was originally a brief memoir titled “Some Memories of H. P. L.” (now located at the John Hay Library), which Derleth then revised, cutting out some portions and rewording others, and formatting it similar to “Memories of Lovecraft: I.” To get an idea of the extent of the revisions, compare these two paragraphs:
| That night, after dinner, he took me into a graveyard associated with Poe. . . . It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said. | That night, after dinner, he took me down into a graveyard near where Edgar Allan Poe had lived, or was he buried there? I can’t remember. It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eery light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began running out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said. |
| The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 119 | Ave Atque Vale 365-366 |
Derleth had done this kind of quiet editing several times before, such as when he revised the ending of “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft. Sully’s brief memoir is an especially interesting read because Lovecraft’s own notes on her 1933 visit are exceedingly sparse and lacking in detail; perhaps not surprising given its brevity.
“Memories of Lovecraft: II” was reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998), without Derleth’s introductory paragraph, while “Some Memories of H. P. L.” was published in Ave Atque Vale (2019). Of the two, I prefer Sully’s unedited version, although for most purposes the content is almost identical.
While they may not appear to be much—a few pages of scattered recollections covering small portions of Lovecraft’s life—these are some of the pieces to the puzzle that was Lovecraft, and have been pored over by scholars, their ideas and accounts analyzed, challenged, accepted, refuted, and incorporated into every biography of Lovecraft since their publication.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 