Muriel E. Eddy was a writer, poet, the wife of pulp writer C. M. Eddy, Jr., a mother of three, and a correspondent with H. P. Lovecraft. Today, she is most remembered for her several memoirs written about Lovecraft, including “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961), “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945), “Message in Stone” in Fate Magazine (Oct 1956), “Memories of H. P. L.” in The Magazine of Horror (Winter 1965-1966), “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” in Haunted (Jun 1968), and H. P. L. “The Man and the Image” (1969) (also partially reprinted as “Lovecraft: Among the Demons”). The most recent publication of the Eddys’ memoirs of Lovecraft is The Gentleman from Angell Street: Memories of H.P. Lovecraft (2025) from Helios House.
Less well-known is that Muriel E. Eddy was an inveterate letter writer, often writing in to newspapers and pulp magazines, and having her missives published quite a few times. Many of these letters are of marginal interest for Lovecraft fans, since she wrote many letters about other subjects, often simply praising a magazine or giving advice, for example, her letter published in the Jan. 1926 issue of Weird Tales:
Muriel E. Eddy, of Providence, Rhode Island, writes: “Lukundoo, by Edward Lucas White, in your November issue, receives my vote, as it is by far the most noteworthy, really thrilling and chilling tale you have yet published. It calls to my mind a story I read years ago (by a titled Englishman), entitled The Hand of Fate, wherein the unfortunate hero was fatally marked by an Egyptian magician, before his birth, by a snake. The snake began its growth from the birth of the hero, slowly, bit by bit, out of his side, causing his death. In that story no one dared destroy the hideous monster growing from the man’s side, as to have done so (some thought) would have caused him to bleed to death.”
However, that does leave a collection of letters from Muriel E. Eddy to the editors that do deal with Lovecraft and related matters. Most of these are individually brief and necessarily repetitive. As an addendum to her body of memoirs about Lovecraft, however, they have interest and value, giving greater context to how she constructed and presented the narrative of her friendship with Lovecraft over the years.
I enjoyed the article about Howard Phillips Lovecraft in the Sunday Journal of Dec. 26, by W. T. Scott, inasmuch as the late Mr. Lovecraft was well known to our family. It was my husband’s uncle, Arthur Eddy, who owned the bookshop on Weybosset street where H. P. Lovecraft loved to browse. Incidentally, there was one great love of Mr. Lovecraft’s life, perhaps unknown, and therefore overlooked, by most of the public. H. P. Lovecraft adored black cats, and would never pass by a stray black feline on the street without stopping to pat it. Mr. Lovecraft often brought his manuscripts to our house to read aloud to us before submitting them to publishers. He was an excellent reader, as well as writer, of weird and macabre tales, calculated to send cold shivers up and down one’s spine He was a gentleman and a scholar, indeed, as Mr. Scott has said in his most interesting article.
H. P. Lovecraft’s wife, whose name Mr. Scott did not know, was Sonia Greene, who lived in Brooklyn, New York.
We are pleased and honored to have been intimate friends of this gifted author. I am convinced that, some day, in the not too distant future, Providence will be proud of having produced such a prolific writer of weird, uncanny yarns that are already known throughout the world.
Dear Sir: In the OCTOBER issue of “Thrilling Wonder Stories” I was intrigued by a letter from B. De Revere, in which he (or she?) mentioned liking H. P. Lovecraft’s horror tales. As my husband and I knew H. P. L. personally, (he lived in Providence all of his life) I want to publicly thank B. De Revere for all the nice things said re: Lovecraft.
If you, dear editor, had known the man as we did . . . of his passionate love for cats, his dislike of all fish, and his hatred of daylight, you perhaps would realize that anything he wrote in the “weird” or fantastic line, he really “lived” . . . and I used the word “live” advisedly . . . even when he lay dying in the hospital, he asked the nurse for a pencil and paper and vividly recorded (for the doctor’s benefit) exactly how he felt while dying.
Lovecraft was a tall, spare man. His skin was the color of tallow. His handclasp was firm but his hands were always ice-cold. He despised sunshine, and adored utter darkness. He wrote his best horror tales after midnight. His favorite food was sweet chocolate . . . he consumed pounds of it, and cheese and fruit. He loved coffee smothered with sugar . . . as strong as love and as black as sin!
Lovecraft’s marriage was short-lived and his divorce was conducted quietly and without press notices. We sympathized with him in his every mood, because we knew him intimately and well—we often visit his unamrked grave in beautiful Swan Point cemetery in Providence, where a huge shaft in the center of the burial plot proclaims that his parents sleep there. His grave was somewhat sunken, last time we visited it, and covered with creeping green myrtle vines. His very spirit seemed hovering over his grave as we stood there in silent prayer for a man whose genius shall ever life, after his boens have crumbled into dust.
During his lifetime, we used to tell him that his stories rivalled those of Edgar Allan Poe. He “pooh-poohed” the very notion! He considered his work nothing at all, and never displayed any vanity. He wrote simply because he HAD to write . . . from an inner urger that would not let him sleep. May he rest in peace!
—125 Pearl Street, Providence 7, Rhode Island.
Notes: While Lovecraft was very much a night-owl by preference, he was not opposed to sunlight and often walked and wrote outdoors during the daylight hours. Lovecraft noted his own appreciation for coffee, chocolate, and cheese, but he rarely ate fresh fruit. Lovecraft’s death diary existed and has been partially published in various formats, most recently in Collected Essays 5. There was a brief press notice about Lovecraft’s divorce in the Providence Journal 26 Mar 1929.
Editor: I’ve been besieged with requests for more information about Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the late Providence writer of weird yarns—so here goes! Lovecraft used to come over to our house and read his manuscripts night after night. Once, he gave my husband a new kind of hair-cutter and advised him to learn how to cut his own hair. It would, he averred, save many a barber’s bill. He assured us he always cut his own hair and shaved himself.
Lovecraft was the soul of neatness, and always looked like the old-fashioned gentleman of culture he preferred to call himself! He once visited the oldest church in Rhode Island with Mr. Eddy and, while there, signed his name in the register—”H. P. Lovecraft, Esquire, Gentleman.”
My hubby’s uncle (now dead) owned and operated a huge second-hand bookstore on Webosset street in Providence. His name was Arthur Eddy. Lovecraft spent hours at night, talking to our ancient uncle and poring over many volumes in the basement. He never appeared in daylight—but always turned up around the Witching Hour of twelve. Uncle liked H.P.L. and stayed open until the wee sma’ hours of morning, to humor this then embryo writer. He once predicted that, with the years, Lovecraft’s fame would mount. How right he was!
Lovecraft asked us to do much of his typing. He used an old, old machine on which he occasionally typed a story—one of the “invisible type” variety, no longer made. It is to be regretted that this typewriter was sold to a second-hand man when some disinterested outsider was cleaning his apartment after his death. I’m sure it would have been a collector’s item, had it not been sold to this unknown person, to whom the name “Lovecraft” meant nothing!
I have pictures of H. P. Lovecraft as a small child, and also pictures of his mother and father. Last summer we ascertained where his grandfather had lived during his boyhood and took interesting snapshots of the yard in which H.P.L. used to play—when he was not ill, for he was not a rugged child. I have a photo of his grandfather (who had brilliant dark eyes, a Lovecraft characteristic) and of his birthplace as well as of the grave in which he is buried (his body was placed in the ground, not in a vault).
I feel that memories of this man are precious indeed—and I even have a letter he wrote to us, congratulating our cat when she presented us with several kittens—written just as one would write to a human mother—because Lovecraft was noted for his great devotion to felines!
By the way, my favorite story in FEBRUARY TWS is “THE SHAPE OF THINGS” by Rad Bradbury. It is written in such a manner that one wonders if—MAYBE—it couldn’t be true! Fantastic but truly fsacinating stuff to ponder over! I enjoyed all the stories and I loved the monstrous hairy spider (?) on the cover! I’ll keep reading TWS!
—125 Pearl Street, Providence 7, Rhode Island.
Notes: The reference to the “disinterested outsider” might be an aside on R. H. Barlow, Lovecraft’s literary executor, who helped deposit Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University, and some of Lovecraft’s books. The remainder of Lovecraft’s possessions were disposed of by his surviving aunt, Annie Gamwell; it’s possible she sold or gave away the typewriter along with other items she did not wish or could not afford to keep. Several of the photographs mentioned appeared in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945).
My hubby picked up a copy of April 1948 Famous Fantastic Mysteries on the newsstand, and brought it home to me; he was fascinated by the cover . . . somehow, the pointing finger of the old genii with the red eyes and blue face and hair, popping out of the magic beanpot (at least, it looks like a tiny red-brown beanpot, to me!) intrigued him endlessly. He read it on the trolley coming home, and had all the other strap-hangers gaping, open-mouthed, and wondering, no doubt, what it was all about.
As usual, I turned to the letter deparment, first of all . . . somehow, when a magazine conducts such a department, it seems a safer magazine to read, proving that it is not afraid to publish readers’ frank comments . . . and what did my eyes discover there? Mention of Howard P. Lovecraft, Providence, R. I.’s own native son and favorite author of weird stories, in a letter signed Donald L. Fox, of Bicknell, Ind.
This letter praised a sketch of Lovecraft that appeared in the August 1947 issue on page 113 which I , most unfortunately, missed. In fact, this April issue is, believe it or not, the first one we’ve seen. Lay the blame on other lovers of uncanny yarns here in our city . . . no doubt copies of Famous Fantastic Mysteries sell so rapidly that no newsdealer can keep them stocked sufficiently for their customers.
If any kind reader happens to have this issue, if they’ll loan me their copy, I’ll guarantee its safe return, once I’ve glimpsed the drawing of Lovecraft.
You see, my husband and I were literary buddies of H.P.L., as we always called this now famous writer. he used to bring his manuscripts over to our house, for criticism, though Heaven knows they were always letter-perfect in our opinions. Just the same, Lovecraft would read them aloud, munching on bars of sweet chocolate between paragraphs, for he loved this confection. H.P.L. hated cold weather with an intense hatred. He was a man of many idiosyncrasies, but withal a wonderful pal and a staunceh friend. He always made himself perfectly at home with us, loved to pet our cats, and hated fish—in fact, any kind of sea-food was hateful to this master of the macabre.
When H.P.L. died, it broke our hearts. He was buried in historic old Swan Point Cemetery, here in Providence, and we often visit his grave. Sometimes it seems he is very near, as we read over cards he sent us on his various travels.
As for the magazine: “City of the Dead” is a great story . . . kept us interested throughout. We enjoyed Robert W. Chambers’ novelette, “The Messenger”, and the sketch of Algernon Blackwood was wonderfully executed. But best of all I enjoyed the wonderful “Readers’ Viewpoint” with letters from readers everywhere! From now on, I’m taking no chances. I’m ordering my copies of F.F.M. in advance.
Glad to see a letter from August Derleth . . . We know him, too. We met him last summer during his hurried trip to Providence.
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy 125 Pearl St. Providence 7, Rhode Island.
I am pleased to see Joe Lee’s article on Houdini . . . whose real name was Erich Weiss. My husband, Cliff Eddy, was “ghost writer” for Houdini for many years. He also assisted Houdini in exposing fake mediums. I am proud to say that Houdini and his wife Beatrice (now dead) were personal friends of mine. They were remarkable people . . . I often wondered what happened to their pet parrot, Laura, after she flew out an open window in Hollywood (after Houdini’s death) and was last seen heading for the foothills.
Laura always accompanied her mistress on tour and I remember the pretty green bird with the red head perched on her mistress’ shoulder as we walked up a busy street in a sudden downpour of rain.
Laura seemed to enjoy the rain and laughed delightedly and when we entered the lobby of the hotel where we were staying, the bedraggled parrot was still laughing. But when folks started to laugh at her she hid her head under a wing and cried like a baby.
Mrs. Houdini ordered half a melon for the parrot as a special treat, but Laura much preferred sipping tea from a spoon.
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy,
Providence, R. I.
Notes: Written in reply to “I Knew Houdini” by Joe Lee, Houdini’s former publicity director, published in The American Weekly magazine section of the Chicago Herald-American for the week of 20 Jun 1948. While not directly related to Lovecraft, this letter is relevant for its insight into the Eddy/Houdini relationship, which in turn was connected with Lovecraft’s relationship with Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess Houdini. This letter was published simultaneously in multiple papers, also appearing in at least the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, 8 Aug 1948 and the San Francisco Examiner, 8 Aug 1948.
I read the Sonia H. Davis article on H. P. Lovecraft on the book page of the Aug. 22 Sunday Journal. I thank Mrs. Davis for giving us her impressions of one of the finest writers Providence has ever produced. My husband and I knew Lovecraft so well that we often visit his grave at Swan Point Cemetery in memory of a very dear friend and a gentleman of the “old school.”
Often, we typed Lovecraft’s manuscripts, finding it a joy to assist this prolific writer of the weird and uncanny. Lovecraft lived in a world of his own making, a sort of “dream world” where night became day. Most of his writings were accomplished at night. Providence was Lovecraft’s first, last and only real love in my opinion. He derived his inspiration from Providence’s little-known alleys, back streets and ancient burying grounds. We knew Lovecraft I really believe, better than anyone else (outside of his two aunts), and no finer gentleman ever lived, I feel safe in saying, than this man who just could not reconcile himself to married life, perhaps because his writing meant his entire life to him.
First, from a letter from Lovecraft’s friend Mrs. Clifford Eddy:
“I was deeply impressed . . . but one thing I think the charming Sonia overlooked entirely. Writing was H.P.L.’s entire life . . . Lovecraft often used to ssay: ‘I never was young; I was born old!’ But thanks to Sonia for giving us even the vaguest insight into married life with this extraordinary man.
“Sonia perhaps was unaware that after the divorce H. P. L. traveled several times ‘Boston-ward’ to visit a very fine young lady, and to assist her in literary work. The visits were sources of pleasure to the young lady, for she wrote me of visits to museums with H. P. L., of candle-lit suppers on cheese sandwiches and chocolate cake, and of his gentlemanliness and courtesy. It was purely a platonic friendship, but it proves that at heart H. P. L. was surely not a recluse entirely! He was human, but always his literary work came first, last and foremost!”
Notes: This excerpt ran in Winfield Townley Scott’s column, “Bookman’s Gallery,” in the Providence Journal, and was a further response to Sonia H. Davis’ article. The entire letter is available at the Brown Digital Repository. The “young lady” referred to was almost certainly Hazel Heald, a revision client that Lovecraft got in touch with trough Muriel E. Eddy, who had a somewhat romantic and rose-tinted view of their potential relationship.
[8] Fantastic Adventures, Oct 1948
SHAVER AND LOVECRAFT
Sirs:
The May issue of FA was a pip! It bubbled with good reading! “Forgotten Worlds” by Lawrence Chandler was wonderfully illustrated and it held my attention all the way.
I agree with Milton Papayianis of Barstow, California, regarding Richard S. Shaver and H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft, a close friend of the family for years, loved red roses, sweet chocolate ice-cream, and soft dreamy music. My husband has composed music for years, and H.P.L. lovecraft to watch him at work.
To those of you who love the weird things in life, I’m sure you love weird music too, as much as the late master of the weird did. My hubby often talked with H.P.L. about setting some of his weird poems to music, but unfortunately H.P.L.’s untimely death prevented this.
Muriel E. Eddy 125 Pearl St. Providence 7, R.I.
Notes: In the 1940s, some fans drew connections between Lovecraft and the Shaver Mystery; Richard Shaver’s stories and many letters about them were published in the pages of Fantastic Adventures. I have been unable to find independent confirmation that Lovecraft particularly enjoyed roses or “soft dreamy music”; in his letters, Lovecraft indicated his musical tastes tended toward the popular music of his youth. C. M. Eddy, Jr. did write and publish songs, although it isn’t clear he ever approached Lovecraft about such an adaptation; composer Harold Farnese, however, did set some of Lovecraft’s weird poetry to music, so the idea isn’t too far-fetched.
Since my letter appeared in the October FA I have been deluged by letters asking me whether or not HPL, the great weird master, was ever married. The answer is, emphatically, yes.
He had a beautiful wife, and she has just written an article pertaining to her married life with him, which appeared, with her photo, in our local paper. HPL was her second husband. They divorced, and she remarried. Her third husband has since passed on. She stated in her article that Lovecraft loved cheese souffle for breakfast, cared very little for foreigners, and that he really loved his native Rhode Isalnd. The article was very interesting, and Sonia H. Greene Lovecraft Davis is really a fascinating woman. Perhaps she’ll read this and write into FA herself!
The October issue of FA was wonderful, from “kiver to kiver.”
Muriel E. Eddy 125 Pearl St. Providence 7, R.I.
Notes: While they never met, Muriel Eddy and Sonia H. Davis did develop a correspondence after Sonia’s memoir on Lovecraft appeared in the Providence Journal.
Editor Startling Stories: I’ve been so interested in the many letters re: Lovecraft. Here in Providence, R.I., folks call me an authority on Howard Phillips Lovecraft, because my husband and I knew him intimately for many years. We were aware of his many idiosyncrasies and we loved him!
We know he was allergic to fish—so we never served him fish or any sea food! We knew he enjoyed the white baked meat of chicken—and cheese. He loved chocolates and when he married Sonia Greene in 1924 his two aunts gave our children over 100 empty chocolate boxes to play with! (In fact, a bathtub full!) We used an old gas-plate Lovecraft formerly brewed his coffee on, for a long time.
We remember how dearly this famous author of the weird and uncanny loved coffee with many spoonfuls of sugar! Many a night we listened to Lovecraft reading his original manuscripts—and enjoyed the facial expressions that played over his unusually mobile features as he read aloud with many a theatric gesture!
I’d be glad to furnish readers with any information on Lovecraft I am able to—and in the meantime I’ll just say I do enjoy “STARTLING STORIES” and the November issue was EXCEPTIONALLY fine! I LOVE your illustrations and covers!
—125 Pearl Street, Providence 7, Rhode Island.
Notes: When Lovecraft moved to New York City in March 1924 and married Sonia, he instructed his aunts to send much of his furniture and belongings to him in New York, and some of the other items ended up with the Eddys, who at the time were in a straitened financial situtation. With regards to chicken, Lovecraft’s letters and other memoirs confirm he did enjoy it, and his friend Harry Brobst, when interviewed by Will Murray, claimed that Lovecraft especially liked white meat and disliked dark meat (Ave Atque Vale 313).
To the Editor—The year 1962 marks the 25th anniversary of the death of one of New England’s most prolific writers of the weird and uncanny in literature . . . the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who was born Aug. 20, 1890, and who died Mar. 15, 1937, in Providence.
My husband and I were personal friends of H.P.L. (as he is known to many of his readers) and we read many of his yarns, which are now published all over the world in many different languages. We spent many hours with this genius, talking over his stories and criticizing them in the rough spots.
Here at 588 Prairie av., Providence, we have many mementoes of this talented writer, who some say rivalled Edgar All[a]n Poe with his weird ideas. My husband, Clifford Eddy, was a frequent pal on the long midnight walks Lovecraft used to take to get story ideas.
MRS. MURIEL E. EDDY Providence
Notes: According to a 2 Dec 1960 letter to August Derleth, the Eddys had established a Lovecraft “shrine” in a corner of their home for visitors, including photographs of HPL.
I was greatly interested in Feb. FANTASTIC because of the story “The Shadow Out of Space,” by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. My husband and I were close personal friends of the late H. P. Lovecraft. This year makes the 25th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death, which occurred March 15, 1937. He is interred in beautiful Swan Point Cemetery, Providence’s finest, most exclusive burying-ground. We often visit the grave of this unusually gifted author of the macabre.
I would be pleased to hear personally from any Lovecraft fans. I have plenty of time and will answer all letters if a stamp is enclosed.
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy 688 Prairie Ave. Providence 5, R.I.
Notes: “The Shadow Out of Space” was one of August Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations,” with H. P. Lovecraft, though in fact Derleth wrote them all, often based on some inspiration from Lovecraft or some prose fragment or portion of a letter.
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy of 688 Prairie Avenue, Providence, RI, 02905, writes, “Having known Howard Phillips Lovecraft very well, from 1923 to the year of his death, 1937, I would like to share my memories of “HPL” with any of your readers who would care to write to me.
“HPL was a constant nocturnal caller at our home during those years. We discussed manuscripts constantly with him. We knew his aunts, too, and we often visit his grave, here in Providence, R. I.”
Notes: The Magazine of Horror had published some Lovecraft-related material in previous issues, which may have inspired this letter, and this offer probably led to Muriel E. Eddy’s “Memories of H. P. L.” being published in Magazine of Horror (Winter 1965-1966).
During our many years of close association with the late Providence-born author of weird, uncanny and bizarre tales, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who died on March 15, 1937, we learned much about this wonderful writer that is not too widely known to those who read his stories and shiver, loving every word of them, or the students who are writing theses on this now famous Providence author of the macabre.
Born August 20, 1890, he was the only child of Sarah Susan (Phillips) Lovecraft and Winfield Scott Lovecraft. As a young boy, H. P. L. (as he was affectionately known to us) became interested in the weird. he was a devotee of Edgar All[a]n Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and others in that category.
Knowing Lovecraft made us appreciate the wonderful city we live in. he loved the fan-shaped designs over ancient doorways, and he loved to explore old cemeteries such as St. John’s Churchyard. Many of his stories were inspired by his ramblings in ancient cemeteries.
On March 15, 1966, this now famous writer, born and brought up in our fair city, will have been gone from our midst 29 long years, yet his fame is spreading like wildfire.
His work is now internationally known. During the past seeral years we have had callers from England and Sweden who wanted to discuss H. P. L. and his writings with us and to see his last resting-place in beautiful Swan Point Cemetery. It is considered a rare privilege by my husband and me to realize that we knew this wonderful man personally.
Long may his memory live!
Muriel E. Eddy Providence
Notes: In 1959, the Swedish editor and radioman Torsten Jungstedt visited the Eddys at their home in Providence, R.I., as recounted in letters to August Derleth.
[15] Magazine of Horror, Summer 1966
“Thanks for publishing my brief Memoirs of HPL,” writes Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy of 688 Prairie Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island 02905, “in the Winter 1965/66 issue, and thanks to readers who’ve written me how much they liked it. As my husband (Clifford Eddy) and I knew this master of weird fiction so well, I had some photos of HPL copied, so that I can send them (as mementos) to sincere Lovecraft fans. To those who care to send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, regular size, I’ll send a picture. . . . Call on me, if you wish. We even had a caller from Sweden and two from England, wishing information on HPL, which we gave to them gladly. We still remember how HPL loved ice-cream and hated fish! I still have a chair HPL’s aunt (now gone) gave to me when HPL left Providence to marry Sonia Greene in New York. I used to own the folding bed HPL slept in (his aunt also gave it to me) until one night it collapsed on me! His aunt gave me many souvenirs of HPL which I cherish—those I have left—after all these years. Memories of HPL will never cease!
“Glad to see so many fine stories in the Winter issue. I believe that Master Nicholas, by Seabury Quinn, was my favorite. The Faceless God, but Robert Bloch, was a close second.”
In the January, 1966 issue of Fantastic the story which held the most appeal for me was Robert Sheckley’s “What a Man Believes.” It really “rang the bell” for me!
Being an “old-timer” when it comes to reading odd, strange and different stories, I feel I am qualified to judge a story pretty well . . . and having read thousands of manuscripts during my lifetime (I’m heard of the R.I. Writers’ Guild here in Providence, R.I., and I’m almost 70 years old!), I don’t mind adding a few more “unbelievable tales” while I’m still alive! Robert Sheckley truly made an “unbelievable” tale BELIEVABLE!
My husband and I were bosom friends of the late weird writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who died March 15, 1937, in our city, and who lies sleeping in beautiful Swan Point Cemetery. One night, after reading an especially weird manuscript aloud to us, he remarked that he believed the human brain was practically indestructible. . .that (who [k]new?), the brain MIGHT keep on functioning even after death. . .at least, it was a subject worth thinking about!
His remark has haunted me for years. Every time we visit Lovecraft’s grave, I think about it, and I wonder if, after death, it is ever a possibility that the human brain MIGHT keep right on functioning. . .whether the heart stops or not. . . .Sheer fantasy, I’m sure. . .or. . . is it?
To get off the subject. . .ALL of the stories in the January, 1966, issue are well worth reading. . .and of course Virgil Finlay’s weird illustration of “Six and Ten Are Johnny” is great. By the way, Virgil has also illustrated many Lovecraft stories. . .he’s my favorite illustrator!
Many times I regret that H.P. Lovecraft died so young. . . he was only 47 at his demise. He’d be 75 if he’d lived. We cherish his memory and invite correspondence referring to H.P.L. and all weird, uncanny subjects! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK and I’ll continue to be a FANTASTIC FAN!
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy Pres. R. I. Writers’ Guild 688 Prairie Avenue Providence, R.I. 02905
Notes: The anecdote about a brain still living evolved over time, derived from “Thoughts and Feelings of a Head Cut Off,” a story ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, possibly by C. M. Eddy, Jr. The identification of the idea with Lovecraft appeared notably in “Message in Stone” (1956) by Muriel E. Eddy. The idea of an indestructible brain doesn’t sound very much like the materialist H. P. Lovecraft, but it is possible he contributed the idea at some point during a brainstorming session and the years transformed the incident in Muriel E. Eddy’s mind.
Toys for Debbie by David A. Kyle rang the bell for me. What a story! And what toys! ALL the stories were well worth reading—the illustrations were wonderful—your “letters” department was fine!
If I sound extra enthusiastic it’s because I AM! I’m a lover of “different” stories from way back. I’m pushing 70 now. My birthday is January 19, hubby’s is January 18—do we have any “birthday twins” among your readers?
My hubby and I have one entire room lined with weird and fantastic books and magazines. We were intimate friends of the late author of the weird and uncanny, H. P. Lovecraft. We spent many pleasant nighttime hours with this fantastic man, listening to him read his manuscripts aloud under flickering gaslight. This was in the early ’20s, when everybody didn’t have electricity in their homes! Nights seemed darker, then . . . and as H. P. L. loved darkness, we three reveled in it, as we pictured monsters, hobgoblins, shapeless creatures of his own imagination and witches steeped in witchcraft, while Lovecraft nibbled on a chicken leg and enjoyed our hospitality!
I could ramble on and on about our association with this master of the weird. We visit his grave often, and we have many pictures of H. P. L. and even one of his parents! We revere his memory and in his honor we peruse all “different” publications on the newsstands. Yours wins top honors with us! Also your cover appealed greatly to me, and it illustrated your feature story, a corker—The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein—beautifully. You’ve got yourself a steady If reader!
—Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy, President, R. I. Writers’ Guild, 688 Prairie Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island 02905.
March 15 of this year will mark the 31st anniversary of the death of the new famous Providence author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Mr. Lovecraft’s many books of weird literature may be found in many public libraries now throughout the land, and his works have been translated into many foreign languages.
My late husband, Clifford martin Eddy, and I, knew Mr. Lovecraft very well. He was a constant visitor at our home, and as he preferred nighttime to day, we called him “The Man Who Came at Midnight.”
He used to love to read us his original manuscripts before submitting them to an editor. he was not conceited; in fact, he thought but little about his talent for conceiving weird and uncanny plots. I think the story that caused the most shivers when Lovecraft read it aloud, many years ago, was his now famous: “The Rats in the Walls” . . . truly a macabre yarn, a real weird classic in literature.
Born on the East Side, (Angell street, to be exact) Mr. Lovecraft loved Providence dearly. Many of his stories have a Providence-inspired background. One recognizes Benefit Street and Federal Hill in at least two of his weird tales!
All honor to the memory of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, now sleeping the eternal sleep in historic old Swan Point Cemetery. When I visit my husband’s grave, I always pay tribute also at the last resting-place of a truly great Providence author, recognized all over the world since his untimely death, (he died at only 47 years of age) the unforgettable Howard Phillips Lovecraft!
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy Providence
Notes: Ruth M. Eddy’s memoir of Lovecraft was “The Man Who Came at Midnight” (1949), recalling her childhood in the 20s when he came to visit.
[19] Magazine of Horror, Jul 1968
Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy writes from 688 Prairie Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island, 02905: “I am deeply sorry to tell you and interested readers of your esteemed magazine (which has always been a welcome visitor to our home) that my dear husband, author of several stories published in the now defunct WEIRD TALES, etc, such as The Loved Dead, Deaf, Dumb and Blind, etc., passed away on Tuesday, November 21, 1967, at the Osteopathic Hospital in Providence, R.I., after a long and painful illness. Death came to him as he slept. The doctor attending him telephoned me at quarter past six a. m., saying my husband had expired at about six a. m. Death came peacefully, after months of suffering.
“My husband, Clifford Martin Eddy, was a bosom pal of the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft, as so many people know, as since a letter of mine appeared in these columns a year or so ago, I received and answered much mail concerning our friendship with the late master of the macabre in fiction. Now my dear one lies sleeping in the same cemetery in which Howard P. Lovecraft sleeps, beautiful Swan Point Burial Ground, here on Blackstone Blvd., in Providence, R.I., where both Lovecraft and Eddy were born.
“Memories of HPL filled Mr. Eddy’s life, and we talked much about the happy times when Lovecraft came to visit us at our humble abode. Now that Mr. Eddy has left this earth I shall always recall those precious moments. To alleviate the loneliness incurred by my dear husband’s demise I shall be glad to answer any letters regarding HPL or my husband’s writings. Mr. Eddy and Mr. Lovecraft often discussed plots of their stories before writing them, and I was always an interested listener, although at times I, too, have tried my hand at weird stories. But these two men (I think you will agree) were tops in their field! August Derleth of Sauk City, Wisconsin, has re-published a few of my husband’s stories in anthologies, and I hope some of your readers remember the name ‘Eddy’ as well as that of Lovecraft! My husband was not as prolific a writer as was HPL, but what he did write was bloodcurdlingly readable! He was 71 at his death, and on February 10, 1968 we would have observed our Golden Wedding . . . but God saw fit to take him . . . and who we are to question God? Nevertheless, I miss him . . . sorely. Letters will help assuage my loneliness! I visit his grave (and Lovecraft’s) very often.”
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.
What follows is an extended deep-dive into the history of one of the most contentious affairs in pulp science fiction in the 1940s, the Shaver Mystery, and its interactions with H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos, which was also beginning to coalesce in the same period. The ramifications of their interactions would spill over into science fiction fandom, conspiracy circles, and occult literature, with long-lasting effects on popular culture. Because this is very long, the following internal links are provided for those who would like to jump to specific sections.
I am certainly inclined to believe that [Shaver] has been inspired by the success of Lovecraft in attempting to create a literary mythos with much the same basic motif as he developed in his stories of the Old Ones. But, unlike Lovecraft, Mr. Shaver is not an artist. —Alan Devereux, “Mr. Shaver’s Memories” in Fantasy Review (Oct-Nov 1948) 11
The entire Shaver mythos is so obviously derived from the Lovecraftian fictional background that it is hard today to imagine that it impressed any experienced readers. The first Shaver story told how the people of ancient Earth were endangered by a degenerated elder, how the hero and his followers learned of the danger, and how escape was achieved with the help of immortal elder gods. —Harry Warner, Jr., All Our Yesterdays: an informal history of science fiction fandom in the 1940s (2004), 234
In 1926, Hugo Gernsback had founded Amazing Stories as the first pulp magazine devoted to science fiction. Mismanagement cost Gernsback the magazine, and it went through several hands; by the late 1930s it was owned by pulp publisher Ziff Davis and its readership in decline. In 1938, the editorship of Amazing was given to Ray Palmer, a young and enthusiastic pulp writer and editor who had cut his teeth in science fiction fandom, writing, editing, and publishing fanzines.
Palmer worked to improve the magazine’s circulation by aiming at younger readers, with more adventure, sensational illustrations, and less hard science. Small hoaxes in the pages of Amazing were not uncommon, with stories written by pseudonymous authors accompanied by fake biographies and critical comments from Palmer. At the same time, editor John Campbell had just taken over rival magazine Astounding Stories and was aiming for a more high-brow market. The dichotomy polarized science fiction fandom—Palmer became known as a hack, or at least a purveyor of junk fiction. But Amazing’s circulation increased.
In the October 1943 issue of Writers’ Digest, in the small personal ads are buried two notices from a “Shaver, Barto, Pa.” One was a lonely heart advertisement, the other was more unusual: advice requested for a newly discovered ancient language.
What response was received from these advertisements is unclear, but the response was likely unsatisfactory, because in December 1943 a letter from a Pennsylvania steelworker named Richard S. Shaver arrived at the offices of Amazing Stories. Shaver claimed to have discovered an ancient alphabet for a universal language (later called “Mantong”), supposedly of a pre-human race with connections to Atlantis.
Crank letters were a part of the business every pulp editor had to deal with, along with unsolicited manuscripts and fanmail. However, Palmer saw potential reader interest, and printed the entire letter as “An Ancient Language?” in Amazing Stories Jan 1944. Moreover, Palmer encouraged readers to try out Shaver’s language. Readers responded. As Palmer put it:
Many hundreds of readers’ letters came in, and the net result was a query to Richard S. Shaver asking him where he got his Alphabet.
The answer was in the form of a 10,000 word “manuscript” typed with what was certainly the ultimate in non-ability at the typewriter, and entitled “A Warning To Future Man.”
I read it through, every single word, and then sat back. What was it I had here? Certainly not an attempt by an “author” to sell a story. Mr. Shaver wanted no money for hia manuscript. It wasn’t a manuscript, but a letter. Mr. Shaver seemed anxious that it be published, not for notoriety, but out of sincere (apparently) desire that the world be warned of a terrible danger it faced, and informed of a wonderful heritage it had lost, and which should be recovered if at all possible. —Ray Palmer, The Secret World(1975), 36-37
Palmer continued to correspond with Shaver, who sent him a 10,000-word letter or manuscript titled “A Warning to Future Man.” Ray Palmer bought the manuscript, and re-wrote it.
I put a clean piece of paper into my typewriter, and using Mr. Shaver’s strange letter-manuscript as a basis, I wrote a 31,000-word story which I titled “I Remember Lemuria!” although I added all the trimmings, I did not alter the factual basis of Mr. Shaver’s manuscript except in one instance. Here, perhaps, I made a grave mistake. However, I could not bring myself to believe that Mr. Shaver had actually gotten his Alphabet and his “Warning to Future Man” and all the “science” he propounded from actual underground people. Instead, I translated his thought-records into “racial memory” and felt sure this would be more believable to my readers, and a reasonable and perhaps actual explanation of what was going on was in Mr. Shaver’s mind—which is where I felt it really was going on; and not in any caves or via any telaug rays or telesolidograph projections of illusions from the cavern ray operators. —Ray Palmer, The Secret World(1975), 38
For those of you who will read on and carefully weigh what I am about to tell you I am convinced there will be no thought of puns. Instead, when you consider the real truths behind what I say—and even better, experiment and study to corroborate them—it seems to me to be inevitable that you will forget that I am Richard Sharpe Shaver, and instead, am what science chooses to very vaguely define as the racial memory receptacle of a man (or should I say being?) named Mutan Mion, who lived many thousands of years ago in Sub Atlan, one of the great cities of ancient Lemuria! —Richard S. Shaver & Ray Palmer, The Shaver Mystery Compendium, Vol. 1, 8
In the original manuscript, Shaver had made more explicit reference to Atlantis, not Lemuria; Palmer’s change brought a Theosophical bent to the re-written work (see The Book of Dzyan for other examples of Theosophical influence on the pulps). A footnote interpreted “Mutan Mion” through Shaver’s universal language, which shows the long build-up to this particular story.
In the words of Mutan Mion (amplified by many explanatory footnotes from Palmer), the readers are introduced to a scientifically advanced civilization that lives in underground caverns as protection from the damaging rays of the sun. As the advanced, nigh-immortal Titans and Atlans prepare to migrate to a different solar system, Mutan Mion and Sub Atlan are faced with the threat of the dero.
Pressed for a more complete explanation, Mr. Shaver has defined ‘dero’ for us:
“Long ago it happened that certain (underground) cities were abandoned and into those cities stole many mild mortals to live, at first, they were normal people, though on a lower intelligence plane; and ignorant due to lack of proper education. It was inevitable that certain inhabitants of the culture forests lose themselves and escape proper development; and some of them are of faulty development. But due to their improper handling of the life-force and ray apparatus in the abandoned cities, these apparatii became harmful in effect. They simply did not realize that the ray filters of the ray mechanisms must be changed and much of the conductive metal renewed regularly. If such renewals are not made, the apparatus collects in itself—in its metal—a disintegrant particle which gradually turns its beneficial qualities into strangely harmful ones.
“These ignorant people learned to play with these things, but not to renew them; so gradually they were mentally impregnated with the persisitently disintegrative particles. This habituates the creature’s mind, its mental movements, to being overwhelmed by deterimental, evil force flows which in time produce a creature whose every reaction in thought is dominated by a deterimental will. So it is that these wild people, living in the same rooms with degenerating force generators, in time become dero, which is short for detrimental energy robot.
“When this process has gone on long enough, a race of dero is produced whose every thought movement is concluded with the decision to kill. They will instantly kill or torture anyone whom they contact unless they are extremely familiar with them and fear them. That is why they do not instantly kill each other—because, being raised together, that part of their brain that functions has learned very early to recognize as friend or heartily to fear the members of their own group. They recognize no other living thing as friend; to a dero all new things are enemy.
“To define: A dero is a man who responds mentally to dis impulse more readily than to his own impulses. When a dero has used old, defective apparatus full of dis particle accumulations, they become so degenerate that they are able to think only when a machine is operating and they are using it; otherwise they are idiot. When they reach this stage, they are known as ‘ray’ (A Lemurian word not to be confused with ray as it is used in English.) Translated, ray means ‘dangerous or deterimental energy animal.’ Ray is also used to mean a soldier—one of those who handles beam weapons (note how the ancient meaning has come into our modern word).” —Richard S. Shaver & Ray Palmer, The Shaver Mystery Compendium, Vol. 1, 28-29
Mutan Mion finds aid from Mars and the Nortans (yet another advanced subterranean people), sometimes referred to as Elder Gods and Goddesses. After getting some upgrades and falling in love, Mutan Mion returns to free the Atlans from the dero—who, it turns out, are also cannibals:
These devilish abandondero had a meat market in the lower floors, filled with human flesh; and a pile of choice cuts I saw was composed mainly of Atlan girl breasts! These dero things were cannibals and lived off immortal Atlan flesh! —Richard S. Shaver & Ray Palmer, The Shaver Mystery Compendium, Vol. 1, 73
The story ends with Mutan Mion victorious, the dero temporarily thwarted but not utterly destroyed, and he heads off to a new planet with his love. His warning to the future is inscribed on “telonian message plates” and left for the wild men left behind on the planet to discover. Implicitly in this story, those wild men are the ancestors of homo sapiens today—and the threat of the dero remains.
“I Remember Lemuria!” took clear inspiration from hollow earth fiction such as Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre (“Journey to the Center of the Earth,” 1864), Edgar Rice Burrough’s Pellucidar novels beginning with At the Earth’s Core (1914), and A. Merritt’s “The Moon Pool” (1918) and “Conquest of the Moon Pool” (1919)—the latter of which are known to have been in Shaver’s library (see “Dick Shaver’s Library” in Shaverology); Shaver also specifically cited Merritt’s works in his “Open Letter To The World” (Amazing Stories Jun 1945). Palmer’s re-casting of the story as one of “racial memory” or recalling a past life was not novel. Past-life stories such as Jack London’s The Star Rover (1915), Lovecraft’s “Polaris” (1920), and Robert E. Howard’s “People of the Dark” (1932) were well-known among science fiction and weird fiction fans.
Yet these works were all presented as fiction. What was remarkable about “I Remember Lemuria!” was not the content—but because Shaver insisted it was true, and Palmer steadfastly claimed to believe him. The reader response, both positive and negative, was tremendous. Letters poured in. Fans debated and denounced the stories. Issues of Amazing Stories sold well.
From 1945 to 1948, more Shaver material appeared in Amazing Stories. Palmer assisted with the prose, but encouraged by publication Shaver continued to develop and expand on his new artificial mythology. Many science fiction fans derided it as a hoax; others bought into it. There’s always a wild conspiratorial fringe in any population, and Shaver’s talk of malicious dero, conspiracies to restrict access to technology, and invisible rays afflicting people caught the imaginations of few.
Palmer left Ziff Davis in 1949, and would go on to help publish more of Shaver’s material in smaller independent magazines and fanzines; he would also be influential in the development of ufology, and founded Fate magazine, among others. He was a titan in the development, spread, and popularization of fringe ideas like flying saucers and various conspiracy theories, and thanks to him Shaver’s Mystery has an outsized cultural footprint, such as the subterranean Derro race in Dungeons & Dragons. Shaver himself continued to write, publish, and evolve his strange little world of paranoid fantasies, with the dero becoming more sexually sadistic and voyeuristic.
In 1934, the death of Shaver’s brother severely impacted his mental health; he began experiencing auditory hallucinations, and was institutionalized at the Ypsilanti State Hospital. When he got out two years later, he found his wife had died (accidentally electrocuted) and their daughter taken into the custody of her maternal grandparents. The following years are poorly-documented but apparently involved rough living and an arrest trying to cross the border to Canada, and culminated in a stay at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Michigan, from which Shaver was discharged in May 1943 into the care of his parents. (This is a highly abridged version of the account given in The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey (2013) by Fred Nadis). The letter to Amazing Stories would come about six months later after his release from Ionia.
Shaver was not unique, however. In the 1930s, a fan named G. P. Olson (or Olsen) of Sheldon, Iowa began to write bizarre fan letters expounding theories about vampires and physics to writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Hugh B. Cave, Henry S. Whitehead, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith. In 1932, Cave wrote to Carl Jacobi suggesting that he mine Olson for ideas for his own fiction (see “The Fool Olson” in Weird Talers)—and I suspect that is ultimately what Palmer did with Shaver, at least in the early part of their correspondence and friendship. Whether Palmer’s encouragement of Shaver’s paranoid fantasies, and the resultant negative response from fans, was detrimental to his mental health is hard to say; that Palmer ultimately exploited Shaver is impossible to ignore.
Lovecraft’s influence on Shaver is also difficult to assess. “I Remember Lemuria!” includes references to Elder Gods, but these do not seem to be the Elder Gods of Lovecraft’s fiction. Nor did Lovecraft go in very much for hollow earth stories, though he certainly had cannibalistic underground peoples in stories like “The Lurking Fear” and “The Rats in the Walls,” and the ruins of an advanced alien civilization feature prominently in At the Mountains of Madness (1936). Probably the closest Lovecraft approached Shaver’s mythos was in “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft—and, as it turns out, this is the one Lovecraft story we know Shaver read.
Palmer published a number of letters from fans in the pages of Amazing Stories as the Shaver Mystery stories unfolded. Being typical fans, some of these were hoax letters, and slipped past the editorial radar. One such letter that saw print:
THE NECROMINICON [sic]
Sirs:
In line with your research on the Lemurian question, may I refer you to the “Necrominicon” [sic] of Abdul Alhazred, and also, the singularly famous “Das Inausprechlichen Kulten” [sic] by Von Junzt.
Both of these volumes may be found in the reserve room of Miskatonic University’s library at Arkton [sic], Massachusetts.
I am a graduate in occult sciences of this university, and have been engaged in conflict with Mr. Shaver’s “underground deros” since my graduation there in 1935.
Translation of the seventh chapter of the “Necronominicon” [sic] using the “Lemurian alphabet” should aid greatly in discovering the missing plates.
I regret deeply that a certain interest in the (deleted by the editor for very good reasons) keeps me from aiding you materially in your search, but a hint to so fertile a brain as Mr. Shaver’s should be enough. And I feel quite sure that after you have read the above-mentioned volumes, many things should be clear that are now confused and dark.
This was all in good fun, and Palmer seemed to know that Poldea was pulling his leg—yet it may also have suggested possibilities to Palmer. In an undated letter to August Derleth of Arkham House publishers, Palmer wrote asking for copies of Lovecraft’s The Outside and Others (1939), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943), and Marginalia (1944), and added:
I wonder if you were right when you said Lovecraft did not believe a word of what eh wrote. Strangely enough, I have received some interesting comments on “truth” contained in his writings which, together with corroborative evidence in support of those comments, intrigues me very much.
Also, do you have on your lists the name of John Poldea? An affirmative answer would be very interesting to me.
A copy of Derleth’s answer is not in his file of correspondence with Palmer at the Wisconsin Historical Society, but it was likely very much in the negative on both accounts. In a follow-up letter, Palmer wrote:
I am slightly amazed at your reaction to my question concerning Lovecraft. I understand little about the matter, except that it seems you’ve built up a “legend” about Lovecraft and his creations. Would you mind explaining briefly.
I published a letter which I knew was fake, in order to get the reaction, which was terrific, regarding the Miskatonic U and the books Das Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Necronomicon of Alhazred.
Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised to know how many people believe there are such things—and maybe you wouldn’t be surprised to know how many people know there are not—and yet are fascinated by your “legend”.
You say you’d jump on any statement that Lovecraft believed what he wrote with both feet. This fascinates me. Personally I believe he did believe what he wrote, and further, I think I could even prove it.
I might even be able to produce what he wrote about! —Ray Palmer to August Derleth, 20 Jun 1945, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society
For Palmer, this was just another possible dimension by which to extend the Shaver Mystery; and even Shaver wasn’t sure how much of it he believed in or not, so long as it got a reaction from people. What Palmer probably had no idea of was how he was crossing nearly every possible line with Derleth, who had worked and sweated to build Arkham House in part on Lovecraft’s reputation as a literary figure, not a general pulp writer and certainly not as part of some cockamamie hoax running in Amazing.
A carbon copy of Derleth’s answering letter was immediate, and makes the Arkham House founder’s position clear—including an unsubtle legal threat if Palmer decided to push the matter any further:
You ask about Lovecraft. Contrary to your belief, we have NOT been building any “legend” about Lovecraft and his creations. We have been doing all in our power to keep him a straight literary figure, even to the extent of my taking time to write a brief critico-biography of him when I have little time for anything off-trail, and when you write that you “believe he did believe what he wrote and think” you “could prove it” this is simply to anyone who knows a plain bid to use the memory of a dead man in a cheap bid for publicity, which I construe as plain fraud and which would force me and the Lovecraft estate into legal action against the Ziff-Davis Company, regrettable as that is. I know very well what you are getting at when you say you might “even be able to produce what he wrote about”—crackpots have offered to write a NECRONOMICON for us, and you may be sure that such a purely Lovecraft creation would again, if fraudulently offered, bring action from us.
Where you got the idea we have built up a legend about HPL and his creations is beyond me. Certainly there are a lot of people who believe in the NECRONOMICON, and so forth; the origin of all these things is correctly set down in my H. P. L.: A MEMOIR, coming in book form in a month or so. I suggest you get hold of a copy and inform yourself before falling into any belief pattern. The UNAUSSRPECHLICHEN KULTEN was Howard’s invention, and I still have in my possession letters between R. E. Howard and HPL, with some of my own, showing that I contributed the UNAUSSPRECHLICHEN to the title in place of another word Howard wanted to use. Other titles came from other writers with Lovecraft’s permission.
Naturally, when, in the face of the contention of the man who has read more of the Lovecraft papers and letters than any man alive, you still say you “believe” to the contrary and contemplating offering “proof”, I have no other course but to think that you are contemplating some cheap plan to involve HPL and his mythos in a publicity plan for the Z-D magazines. I might expect that from Davis, but hardly from you, and you are right when you suggest that I might be “shocked”. I frankly hope that I am very much wrong.
Before going into the publication of any NECRONOMICON etc., you might look into the legal aspects of copyright in this matter; you will find that we have very solid grounds to take action against anyone purporting to offer “THE” book. I am thoroughly familiar with the copyright laws, and your use of a NECRONOMICON in this way is the equivalent of anyone else’s use of a w–k character or device under copyright. —August Derleth to Ray Palmer, 21 Jun 1945, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society
In strict point of fact, Derleth’s legal position was probably weaker than it looked. He had an arrangement with the estate of Lovecraft to reprint his works, in cooperation with Lovecraft’s literary executor R. H. Barlow (then in Mexico), but his stated control over the copyrights was mostly bluff and bluster. Yet it was an effective threat, because Palmer had no way of knowing that. Nor was Palmer aware that he had inadvertently threatened everything Derleth had built at Arkham House by confusing the nascent Mythos with Shaver’s Lemurian stories. Certainly, Palmer didn’t appear to have any idea of Derleth’s personal involvement with the Mythos, as with the naming of Robert E. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten (for which see “Unspeakable! The Secret History of Nameless Cults”).
For Palmer, it was all potential fodder for the expanding Shaver Mystery—and his own weird capability of believing things. As it was, in Palmer’s answering letter he did his best to defuse the situation and cover his ass.
Your information is interesting. Some of my readers informed me there was a “business” being built up about the “cthulhu mythos”. I understand Esquire has purchased an article about Lovecraft hinting such a buildup. You see, I am not without foundation for that idea. […]
Nor did I mean that I had any mss to present. I meant that I (and numberless readers) believe Lovecraft’s writings to a certain extent, and that excludes those fictional books and university. You see, what I said I could prove was the existence of the “beings” Lovecraft writes about. I’ve had some quite entertaining experiences with them of a personal nature. But before you think me mad, we’ll drop my little dabblings into demonology, as they are personal, and get back to the “proof” I could offer that many readers believe in Lovecraft, and dis-believe in his Necronomicon and Kulten books, and the Miskatonic U. they believe in his demons, because they’ve seen them. I have dozens of sincere letters addressed to my Discussions columns, affirming that these experiences are true, and that they are identical with Lovecraft’s so-called fictional ones. Of course, suggestion is a powerful thing, and Lovecraft’s writings can be said to be powerful. Believing them is a matter of personal choice. I believe that more people believe them sincerely than accept Lovecraft asa great writer. This should interest you, since you are not trying to build up anything but his reputation as a writer.
On a purely personal vein, I know Lovecraft believed his basic theories, and his choice in taking that field for expression of his art was not just because he liked weird things. But of course, this has nothing to do with your reaction.
Regarding “hoaxes”, you remember I asked if you had a certain name on your list? You said no, which absolved you of being an innocent party to a rather filthy trick that was played on me, to discredit my Lemurian stories through the Lovecraft “mythos”. I have since discovred the unprincipled gentlemen were those who call themselves the “fans” of science fiction, and you know who they are.
[…] But, since the “fans” have taken up Lovecraft’s creations as a club to show that mine are the same attempt at “falsifying”, I will retaliate by publishing those letters which show a sincere belief in Lovecraft does exist Naturally these letters are authentic. I have thousands of letters from persons who believe in Shaver, many more than those who believe in Lovecraft. but most significant, all belief in both because they present the same basic theory (I’ll not call it fact, because I’d rather have the scientific world go on calling the Shaver material “metaphysics” or whatever they choose. I am prepared to present the positive scientific proof of the Shaver stories, by producing the caves, the machines, and the people. But this must wait until I am prepared scientifically. Amazingly, we have uncovered a vast storehouse of new knowledge, which if not handled carefully, might be very ineptly applied to our bloodthirsty civilization.)
But please be assured I have no manuscripts, or any ideas of producing Lovecraft’s fictional pieces as the real McCoy. But perhaps I will produce one of his “monsters”. It would look very well in the local park along with the giraffes and the anteater. —Ray Palmer to August Derleth, 22 Jun 1945, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society
In his memoir The Secret World (1975), Palmer wrote of some remarkable experiences he had when he visited Shaver and his wife in Pennsylvania; this may or may not have been the personal experiences that Palmer spoke of. It is hard to tell because Palmer never seemed to be able to turn the huckster or hoaxer part of himself off; it wasn’t just a poise, it seemed to be fundamental to his being to believe whatever he was selling at the moment, at least to some degree. However, he had badly miscalculated his audience: Palmer had misunderstood or misread Lovecraft, and Derleth knew it.
The end result was that Shaver and Palmer never made any attempt to shoe-horn the Cthulhu Mythos into the Shaver Mystery, at least not in the pages of Amazing. Ray Palmer acknowledged Poldea’s fake letter in Amazing Stories Dec 1945 with a good-natured shrug and didn’t pursue that particular development of the Shaver Mystery further.
However, some of the fans were more critical than Poldea. In the popular fanzine Vampire published by Joe Kennedy, a scathing review was published in issue #4 of Maxin 96, a Lemurianist/occultist/Shaver Mystery zine published by fan David D. Dagmar. The review caught the eye of Amazing Stories’ competitor Startling Stories, which reprinted it in the Summer 1946 issue as part of a regular feature that reviewed science fiction fan publications. In response, Shaver sent a rebuttal to Kennedy, who would report:
Up until a couple moths ago, I corresponded with Shaver. He wrote me when a highly unfavorable comment on the Lemurianist fanzine, Maxin-96, was reprinted from Vampire in Startling’s fanzine review. Shaver seemed to welcome the chance to blast somebody’s ears off for the opposition which the “Shaver mystery” had evoked from the majority of actifandom. Misspellings and simple errors displaying marked ingorance of the fundamental rules of English grammar abounded in his letters. For the publication in Vamp he forwarded me a four-page “prose poem” which, as a piece of literature, was mildly amazing. The thing started off in undistinguished blank-verse style, rambled on another page, with references to Palmer and the deros becoming more and more frequent, bubbled and forthed into an attack on the opposing fan element (supposedly dero-controled!), then broke into straight prose, meandered on as a letter for a page or two, with intermittent ravings, then came to a decidedly abrupt conclusion. I sent it back to him. However, the main reason it was impossible to correspond with the guy, although I tried to give his side of the story a fair chance, was that all my arguments concerning the Shaver “truths” were either completely ignored or raidly passed over with but sparse comment. You can’t argue with a chap who just keeps drilling, over and over, THE DEROS ARE POWERFUL! YOU MUST BELIEVE! I’ve compared the Shaver letters and certain portions of his Palmer-rewritten published stories with examples of psychoneurotic literature quoted in psychology texts. The resemblance is remarkable, and indicative of far more than pure coincidence… No, I don’t correspond with R.S. Shaver any more. —Joe Kennedy, Gruzlak #1 (Oct 1946), 14-15
Eventually, Kennedy and Shaver agreed to a rewritten version of this rebuttal as “Lovecraft and the Deros” by Richard S. Shaver. This piece was first published in the fanzine Vampire #6 (1946); it was later republished in another fanzine, Spicy Armadillo Stories #5 (1991). The entire text is reproduced below.
※
LOVECRAFT AND THE DEROS
((EDITOR’S NOTE: Since much has been written in the fan press against the Lemurian series in Amazing Stories, we believe that it is no more than fair that Dick Shaver be given an opportunity to tell his side of the story. We are completely convinced of the author’s sincerity, although the following article does not necessarily reflect the views of Vampire’s staff.))
Up to twelve years ago I was a stf fan, much like yourself, I suppose. I thought I knew exactly what was true in science and what could happen and that I could draw a precise line in my reading between fact and fantasy.
Then it happened, almost exactly as I tell it in the stories I write. Things that couldn’t happen except through a wonder-science never produced by modern men of science at all.
There were three conclusions. The first that these machines and rays came from space (visitors). The second was that they were modern secret science—things that science had developed and kept to itself as a monopoly, for the power and wealth the advantages of using these apparatuses would give them. This second conclusion was my conclusion until I knew more about it, which took many years. It is the usual deduction of the person first contacting secret ray.
The third deduction came after long experience with the phenomena I talk about in my stories. That this thing was a persistence of the same thing the medieval were talking about when they raised such a hullabaloo about witchcraft. The same thing Homer was talking about when he mentioned the immortal gods. I did a lot of research, believe it or not. And this last deduction is the correct one. The caverns I saw were not modern—they were not even built fairly recently by space travelers who stopped here long enough to leave such gigantic traces—were built before Man had a history. They are the big missing portion of history, and they have a history all of their own far more important in many ways than our own surface history.
Witchcraft, fairy tales, legends of the underworld—are not all antique fiction. It is surprising how well they describe some things that are done with with the machines. Merlin, in King Arthur, had a cave full of machines; and he died in it. In Deirdre—a ray from nowhere cuts down the heroes at the climax. The list of references is endless—I know—I looked them up. Take “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel”—a fifth century Irish MSS.—translated in the Five Foot Shelf—The Men From the Elfmounds are mentioned over and over. The underworld was well known in the past and it shall be in the future. It has been the monopoly of a little group of savagely monopolistic people for a few centuries.
Read Lovecraft’s rewrite for a woman friend of his—”The Mound” in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, quite a long story and as good a picture of the underworld as ever I read. Take off about twenty per cent for Lovecraft’s weird ideation and ornamentation—and you have an exact picture of the underworld—except for the radioactive light.
As for Maxin 96 ((The Lemurianist fanzine—ed.)) I find it unfortunate that all the occultists have leaped to my banner—for I never meant to inferno that spirits had anything to do with what I am talking about. In fact the ray phenomena I mention explain away all spiritualist phenomena as ray work—of my despised dero—incidentally—the real explanation of all evil is dero, detrimental energy robot. These mysterious ray phenomena do exist and occur regularly. I always thought it was wool and lies and fakers myself just as you probably do—’till they happened without benefit of a medium within miles. No, I didn’t leap to the conclusion that they were spirits. I figured out the real reason—and it is some answer. naturally it is hard to swallow offhand, mainly because you don’t get all the background. Read “Da Derga’s Hostel” and Lovecraft’s “The Mound.”
I note in Vampire how the fans booed me at the convention in Newark. All this active fan opposition hurts like hell—but the truth of it is—they lose so darn much I could give them—if THEY UNDERSTOOD! But they are not my worst worry. My worry is the mad dero of the caverns—and they do our country even more harm. Some of those fans who are most loud in denouncing my “LIES” are directly used by the dero ray for that purpose. DON’T BE USED! The very copulation by which those same fans were conceived was watched over a telaug by a dero or a tero—humans who inherit a long line of conditional variational factors from a surrounding entirely different from our own—was watched for the vicarious entertainment received from the augmented emotional and sensory impulses which is greater than ordinary human.
Under our feet is a world of scientific wonder beyond any writer’s power of description, but there before Earth had a sun. Those metals don’t rust—those caves are as dry and hot as a desert—perfectly preserved, they wait for modern scientists to wrest their ancient secrets from those machines. That no scientist will accept this “impossible” truth is the only stumbling block between men and a wonder world. Our race was not the only race on earth; there were greater races and greater times. We are in truth the degenerate descendants of a great race, and not the apre’s mutant brother evolutionists would have us think. If you had been to Mars on an unannounced trip—how would you tell about it? Prove it, people would say. Well, it’s a hard job, but we may get it done—this proof you want is growing every day. Pluto did live, and strangely enough Dante’s concept of the nether world and the city of Dis has its counterpart in actuality.
There was a semi-sequel to this article, in the form of an answer to a letter to Shaver from J. O. Cuthbert in 1948 that opens “Dear Mr. Shaver: L—la-ngai-ygg—Ia—Shub-Niggurath. Ph’nglui mglw ‘nafh Cthulhu R’lyan wgah ‘hagl fhtagn.”, Shaver’s response to that reads:
Dear J. O. Cuthbert:
Did you ever read Lovecrafts [sic] protege’s story, The Mound? Better than Lovecraft, and it has some true data on the caves mingled with Lovecraft expansion. In a Lovecraft collection of storys [sic]. —Richard S. Shaver, The Shaver Mystery Magazine (1948), vol. 2, no. 2, 34
Beyond the Wall of Sleep, which reprinted “The Mound,” was published in 1943, the same year that Shaver began corresponding with Palmer, and a year before Shaver wrote “A Warning to Future Man.” It isn’t clear when Shaver read Beyond the Wall of Sleep, though, and there are many disparate threads of science fiction, fantasy, and folklore that could (and probably did) work to inspire Shaver besides Lovecraft. The Togail Bruidne Dá Derga is a real Irish story reprinted as part of Harvard Classic’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books line in volume 49, Epics and Sagas (1937).
In 1964, a portion of Richard S. Shaver and Ray Palmer’s correspondence in the 1940s was published in the Shaver Mystery zine The Hidden World (issues A-13, -14, -15, and -16). These letters give some insight into Shaver’s life, thoughts and habits, and working relationship with Palmer. Direct references to Lovecraft only occur in two of the published letters, but are relevant. The first is:
The mention of Merritt is good I think—there are several reasons—the Lovecraft cult of writers uses his name all the time to good effect—and certainly Merritt is more worthy of such honor—as well as the corroboration of my contentions which his work offers and the enticement of his followers is also commercially valuable as they are legion. —Richard S. Shaver to Ray Palmer, [n.d., c.mid-Oct 1944], The Hidden World A-14, 2443-2444
There are a number of mentions of A. Merritt and his stories, particularly “The Snake Mother” (1930) in Shaver’s letters and other writings. Shaver was likely discussing “Open Letter to the World” (Amazing Stories Jun 1945), which mentions Merritt repeatedly. The “Lovecraft cult of writers” references the growing popularity of Lovecraft (who was published in an Armed Services Edition during the war), and emulators and pasticheurs like August Derleth.
The second reference to Lovecraft in Shaver’s letters to Palmer is more extensive:
Reading in Lovecraft’s “Marginalia” which Bob sent me—noted a concept of his directly opposed to one of yours—wish you would think about it—for to a degree he is right.
He is talking in a chapter entitled “Notes on Interplanetary Fiction”.
“The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true ‘hero’ of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena.”
I have thought that perhaps you said the reverse in order to get me to think more carefully of character work in my writing, and in the main you agree with Lovecraft here. Personally, I think he is right, and that if the characters are too natural, we lose the illusion of other worldliness we are trying to create. I think then motivations of such characters should be different, as out of the ordinary as the settings, and thus the whole behavior of your characters, too, becomes the reverse of what we call “natural”—so here I disagree to an extent with Lovecraft, too. I admit the characters behaviour [sic] should be logical, and I stop there.
Personally I think Lovecrafts [sic] buildup for his marvels gets a little tiresome, but old stf fans are apt to be immune to the usual fanfare of intense surprise attempted by the stf writer.
In stf we have to write about marvels, we have to do it in a way that the average man can understand and enjoy as much as he does his Sunday supplement, and it is here that I agree and endorse your views. But that does not necessarily mean the characters can all be “natural”, meaning everyday people, at all. Some of the characters must of course be natural to set off the unnaturalness of those who are motivated by an other-world set of values.
Granted we all agree if boiled down to it. I thought you would be interested in his idea—the “hero of a marvel tale is a set of phenomena.” —Richard S. Shaver to Ray Palmer, [n.d., c. Mar 1945], The Hidden World A-15, 2632-2633
“Bob” is Robert McKenna, a friend of Shaver’s who would also help improve Shaver’s prose and ghostwrite for him. Arkham House published Lovecraft’s Marginalia in 1944; which included his essay “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction,” which Derleth had excerpted from one of Lovecraft’s letters. The fundamental idea of the weird phenomena taking center stage rather than the human characters who witness it is very much at the core of Lovecraft’s fiction, exemplified in stories like “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour out of Space,” and more fully expressed in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
Shaver’s focus on this bit of writing advice is a glimpse behind the curtain of the Shaver Mystery. While Shaver seems to have very much believed in Deros, rays, et al, he was also keenly aware that what he and Ray Palmer were creating was fiction—perhaps as a way to get the truth out there to the masses, but still very clearly a creative exercise, which involved plotting, narratives, characters who required development, motivations, etc. Palmer, as something of a pulp hack, knew the advantages of character-driven stories, and probably steered Shaver in this direction with his fiction in Amazing Stories; Shaver’s fiction outside of those pages tends to be far less character-focused. With Lovecraft’s advice opposing Palmer’s, Shaver struggled to find his own course and his own voice somewhere between the two.
Despite Harry Warner’s proclamation that Shaver’s Mystery was derived from Lovecraft, in the corpus of Shaver’s writing references to Lovecraft and his work are so few that it cannot be said that the Lovecraft Mythos inspired the Shaver Mystery—but Lovecraft certainly seems to have been one of the influences on Shaver. Lovecraft and Shaver shared some inspirations in common, such as A. Merritt’s “The Moon Pool,” which explains a few of their similarities, but at no point does Lovecraft’s artificial mythology impinge on Shaver’s Atlantis and Lemuria. “Lovecraft and the Deros” emphasizes how much Shaver dismisses Lovecraft’s Mythos in favor of recasting “The Mound” in terms of his own artificial mythology. I suspect that if Lovecraft was a more substantial influence on Shaver, more references to “The Mound” would have found their way into Shaver’s writing at some point…yet all we have, really, is “Lovecraft and the Deros.”
Henry S. Whitehead, “Bothon,” & the Shaver Mystery
Recalling the “old days” brings us to a mention of Henry S. Whitehead’s “Bothon” in this issue. Reverend Whitehead is, of course, dead, but this unpublished story of his is far from dead. We consider it a very fine piece of work, and as we read it, we remember that Henry S. Whitehead was himself a researcher into the unusual, and we wonder what he would have said about the stories of Mr. Shaver? It is a very astounding fact to consider that in this story “Bothon,” Reverend Whitehead’s story is similar in all details to many letters we have from readers who claim to remember, or be reincarned, or have contact with some weird occult record which describes the events Whitehead describes so graphically in his story. Could it be that “Bothon” is itself a “thought record or a “racial memory” or did he believe eh was reincarnated and the story that formed in his mind was really memory of that former life? It is introguing to wonder what the truth behind “Bothon” really is. —Ray Palmer, Amazing Stories Aug 1946
The Reverend Henry St. Clair Whitehead was an Episcopal priest and pulp writer, a friend and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, E. Hoffmann Price, and Robert E. Howard who wrote for pulps like Adventure, Weird Tales, and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. He was best known for his “jumbee” stories, based on the folklore of the U.S. Virgin Islands, which he would visit during the 1920s, as well as “The Trap,” a story written with Lovecraft, and “Cassius,” a story written based on one of Lovecraft’s ideas. At the time of his death on 23 Nov 1932, Whitehead apparently had several unpublished manuscripts, including one called “The Bruise.”
I’m helping Whitehead prepare a new ending for a story which Bates rejected. It was about a man in 1923 who got a bruise on the head which caused him to hear strange cataclysmic sounds—that turned out to be the Tokyo earthquake. The bruise had made a sort of radio of his ears! In my new version, the bruise excites certain cells of hereditary memory & causes him to hear the destruction of one of the cities of fabulous Mu—the sunken continent of the Pacific—20,000 years ago. —H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 31 Mar 1932, Essential Solitude2.469
I’m now helping Whitehead prepare a new ending & background for a story Bates has rejected. The original told of a young man who bumped his head & thereafter heard sounds of a mighty cataclysm, although the city around him was quiescent. It was supposed to be due to a result of the bruise—which made the fellow’s head a natural radio & enabled him to hear the Japanese earthquake—which was occurring at the time. Bates rightly thought this tame, so I am having the cataclysm & its cause somewhat different. I am having the bruise excite cells of hereditary memory causing the man to hear the destruction & sinking of fabulous Mu 20,000 years ago! —H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 4 Apr 1932, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 361
He had a splendid tale under way called “The Bruise”, which (at my suggestion) involved the lost & fabulous Pacific continent of Mu. I am wondering whether it was ever finished. —H. P. Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, 7 Dec 1932, Letters to E. Hoffmann Price & Richard F. Searight 38
Whitehead also had another story under way—his old tale “The Bruise”, with a new ending (suggested and mapped out by myself) involving the fabulous lost continent of Mu 20,000 years ago; but whether this was ever put in final publishable shape I don’t know. —H. P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, 6 Jan 1933, Letters to Woodburn Harris & Others75
Harry Bates was editor of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror (1931-1933), a short-lived competitor to Weird Tales that Whitehead contributed to, and Astounding Tales of Super-Science (1930-1933).
Years after Whitehead and Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth, co-founder of Arkham House, pursued the publication of Whitehead’s collected weird fiction, which eventually resulted in two books: Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946). This required dealing with Whitehead’s heirs; a confusing situation where a woman named Edna Black owned the copyrights, but a woman named Mary Starr owned several of the actual manuscripts. Included in a letter from Starr to Derleth dated 8 Nov 1943 is a list of unpublished manuscripts; at the bottom are two stories labeled “Scar-Tissue” and “Bothon.”
Mss. Wisconsin HIstorical Society, August W. Derleth Archive
It isn’t clear what some of these annotations mean, such as the checkmarks; possibly those indicate that the completed manuscript had been submitted to a given market (which suggests that “Scar-Tissue” at least may have been sent to Weird Tales, and was presumably rejected).
“Scar-Tissue” involves Gerald Canevin, a series character in Whitehead’s fiction, and a Dr. Pelletier who encounter a patient named Joe Smith who not only remembers Lemuria, but carried a physical scar that corresponds with a wound obtained in a past life as a gladiator. Canevin and Pelletier had previously appeared together in “The Great Circle” (Strange Tales Jun 1932). “Bothon” follows the general plot laid down by Lovecraft: a man bangs his head, and the bruise unlocks memories of his past in Lemuria. The story ends with a reference to a man named Smith who had similar memories.
The interrelation between “The Great Circle,” “Scar-Tissue,” and “Bothon” is unclear. Canevin and Pelletier form a link between “The Great Circle” and “Scar-Tissue,” while “Scar-Tissue” and “Bothon” share much common ground, including the character Bothon, and the latter “Bothon” appears to reference the character of Smith in “Scar-Tissue”; but there is no Canevin or Pelletier in “Bothon.” Was this the aborted start of an intended series, or the tail end of an ongoing one? We may never know. All three stories are also somewhat uncharacteristic of Whitehead’s typical pulp product, with more action and fantasy, but that was a direction that some of his fiction was headed toward near the end of his life.
It is unknown if one or both stories were complete at the time of Whitehead’s death, or existed in draft. “Scar-Tissue,” if it was submitted to Weird Tales as the above list implies, must have been in decent shape. Lovecraft’s involvement appears to have been primarily suggestion and plotting for “The Bruise”—he never mentions “Scar-Tissue” nor contributed any actual text to “The Bruise.” Though there have been claims that someone else may have written or completed the stories:
It is not certain that Whitehead ever finished the revision and expansion of “The Bruise” before his death. As late as December 1932, Lovecraft speaks of the process being still “under way” ([see letter to Price above]). It is possible, therefore, that the story was finished and retitled by August W. Derleth, who oversaw the editing and assembling of West India Lights, where it appeared. Derleth fleshed out a number of Lovecraft’s plots and notes into complete stories (see The Survivor and Others, 1957), and frequently wrote fiction pseudonymously. It has been claimed, for example, that in Night’s Yawning Peal (1952), an anthology he edited, there were three such tales, Derleth appearing (in addition to an entry under his own name) as Stephen Grendon, Michael West, and—J. Sheridan le Fanu! See Jack L. Chalker, “Arkham House & Sons, part 2,” Fantasy Review, no. 97 (December 1986): 19. —A. Langley Searles, “Fantasy and Outré Themes in the Short Fiction of Edward Lucas White and Henry S. Whitehead) in American Supernatural Fiction: From Edith Wharton to the Weird Tales Writers (1996), 75n62
As mentioned in the review of “The Murky Glass” (1957) as by August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft, Derleth’s approach to “posthumous collaboration” was often one of entirely original writing based around an extent bit of text or story synopsis. Derleth did use pseudonyms as well; this was a common practice in the pulps, and “Stephen Grendon” was an established alternate name that Derleth used many times. So Derleth was certainly capable of writing or revising a story and publishing it under a different name, and had done so. But did he do it?
Before or concurrent with the publication of West India Lights, both “Scar-Tissue” and “Bothon” were published in Amazing Stories in 1946, in the July and August issues respectively. While there is no copyright notice or reference to Derleth attached to the stories, and unfortunately no letters with Starr or Black from this period attest to any deal or payments for publication, Derleth’s letters to Ray Palmer show that he submitted the stories, and brokered their sale at the same time as he was arguing with Palmer about Lovecraft:
Yes, I’d like to look at the Whitehead things concerning Lemuria, etc. Would appreciate your sending me the manuscripts. —Ray Palmer to August Derleth, 20 Jun 1945, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society
I will send along the Whitehead stories—BOTHON and SCAR-TISSUE—just as soon as my secretary gets around to typing them: in a fortnight or so. They are very good stories of the Lemuria type which you seem now to tbe seeking. —August Derleth to Ray Palmer, 21 Jun 1945, MSS. WHS
Thanks for getting the Whitehead stories in shape for me to look at. —Ray Palmer to August Derleth, 22 Jun 1945, MSS. WHS
This was followed up some months later by a receipt of sale:
MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society
Derleth submitting stories on behalf of Whitehead’s heirs isn’t unusual. In the early 1950s, Derleth had arranged for the reprinting of two of Whitehead’s stories in the pages of Weird Tales (“The Tree-Man,” WT Sep 1953 and “Passing of a God,” WT Jul 1954), so we know Derleth did sometimes act as agent for such stories. Whether Derleth was acting as agent or ghost-writer, some of this money should have gone to Edna Black; unfortunately, the correspondence for this period between Black and Derleth is lacking.
There are some substantial textual differences between the text in Amazing Stories and West India Lights, with the Amazing Stories version of the text being substantially shorter and punchier. Probably Palmer cut the text down for publication to better fit the space in the magazine. To give one example of the differences:
“Do you get that picture? Here we were, prisoners of war — after a couple of months of the hardest training I have ever known, in the Ludektan gladitorial school, about to shed our blood to make an Atlantean holiday! Yes, Ludetka was the southernmost province of Atlantis, the cultural center of the continent. There had been innumerable wars between the Atlanteans and Lemuria. Like Rome and Carthage.
“Do you get that picture? Here we were, prisoners of war — after a couple of months of the hardest training I have ever known, in the Ludektan gladitorial school, about to shed our blood to make an Atlantean holiday!
“Scar-Tissue,” West India Lights 233
“Scar-Tissue,” Amazing Stories (Jul 1946) 149
Practically all of the changes in the Amazing Stories text represent a condensation of the story, truncating some of the battle scenes and speeding up the pacing. The above is a rare instance where a bit of the “lore” of the setting was excised. Was this done by Palmer so that Whitehead’s story dovetailed more closely with the Shaver Mystery? Given that so much setting material was left intact, probably not.
What is remarkable about “Scar-Tissue” and “Bothon,” and what might be most suggestive of Derleth’s involvement, is not so much the existence of two salable manuscripts by Whitehead that finally saw print after fourteen years—but that both such stories were directly relevant to the current trend in Amazing Stories. The timing is key: just when Amazing Stories was pushing the Shaver Mystery hard, here comes two stories of essentially similar theme from a different, established author, that could almost have been written to order.
Whether Derleth saw an opportunity to market Whitehead’s stories and took it, or Derleth re-worked one or both of the stories to fit isn’t clear, but it seems more than coincidence that two such atypical stories from a fortunately deceased author could emerge at just this time in Amazing Stories. That topicality makes them suspect. Yet without access to the original manuscripts there is no way to know for sure.
Despite Searles’ surety that someone other than Whitehead was involved, the evidence for Derleth revising, completing, or writing “Scar-Tissue” or “Bothon” is entirely circumstantial. We know at least from Lovecraft’s letters that “The Bruise” contained recognizable elements to be found in “Bothon,” and the 1943 manuscript list from Mary Starr clearly lists both stories. So it seems likely that if Derleth did touch up the manuscripts, he at least had some manuscript to work with, rather than writing the tales out of whole cloth, or based only on the synopsis in Lovecraft’s letters about “The Bruise.”
There is undoubtedly more to the story of how these two Whitehead works ended up at Amazing Stories. It’s notable that the publication in those magazines does not mention Lovecraft, Derleth, Arkham House, or West India Nights; for a tireless self-promoter and champion of Lovecraft like Derleth, it seems odd he wouldn’t make more of the opportunity for some free advertising, or to at least promote the Lovecraft connection elsewhere. In fact, when Clark Ashton Smith commented on “Bothon” in a letter to Derleth after West India Nights came out, Derleth’s reply didn’t mention Lovecraft at all (Eccentric Impractical Devils 370).
There are several Lovecraftian traces in “Bothon” that are not present in “Scar-Tissue.” The simian slave-class is called “Gyaa-Hua”; compare with “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft, where the slave-class is called the “gyaa-yothn.” Two transcribed bits of ancient Lemurian speech in “Bothon” are: “Iï, Iï, Iï, Iï;—R’ly-eh!—Ieh nya, —Ieh nya; —zoh, zoh-an-nuh!” and “Ióth, Ióth,—natcal-o, do yan kho thútthut,” which bare similarities to some of Lovecraft’s alien speech,” especially the appearance of”R’y-eh” is particularly close to “R’lyeh” from “The Call of Cthulhu,” and “kho thútthut” could be a phonetic rendering of “Cthulhu.” Either Whitehead or Derleth could easily have inserted these references; though given Derleth’s contretemps with Palmer over adding anything Lovecraftian to the Shaver Mysteries, why he would insert such a reference is unclear. It is perhaps notable that when Lovecraft used Mu in his fiction in “Out of the Æons” (1935) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft, he made no reference to either R’lyeh or the gyaa-yothn/gyaa-hua.
The connection between Lovecraft, “The Bruise,” and “Bothon” does not appear to have become publicly known until after Derleth’s death, when Selected Letters IV (1976) was published, which book contains the references in letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Clark Ashton Smith. Without access to concrete evidence in the form of drafts, letters, or business records to clarify matters, this small tangent to the Shaver Mystery and its almost-connection to the Lovecraft Mythos must remain a mystery.
Manly Wade Wellman, The Necronomicon, & the Shaver Mystery
“Suppose,” said Thunstone, “that I wanted a copy of the Necronomicon?”
“Suppose,” rejoined the old woman, “that I gave it to you?” She turned to a shelf, pulled several books out, and poked her withered hand into the recess behind. “Nobody else that I know would be able to look into the Necronomicon without getting into trouble. To anyone else the price would be prohibitive. To you, Mr. Thun—”
“Leave that book where it is!” he bade her sharply. —Manly Wade Wellman, “The Letters of Cold Fire” in Weird Tales May 1944
Lovecraft and Wellman overlapped a bit at Weird Tales, but never corresponded. Nevertheless, Wellman had respect for his elder in weird fiction, and paid homage to Lovecraft in several stories, including “The Terrible Parchment” (WT Aug 1937) and “The Letters of Cold Fire” (WT May 1944), which feature the Necronomicon, and “Shonokin Town” (WT Jul 1946) where Lovecraft is mentioned as an expert in eldritch lore.
Wellman came into his own in Weird Tales during the 1940s, when his occult detective character John Thunstone ran in a successful series of tales. Like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others, Wellman had learned to build up a degree of interconnectedness in his stories for greater verisimilitude—Thunstone mentions Weird Tales authors H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn’s occult detective Jules de Grandin (who would also mention Thunstone in his own stories), and several of Wellman’s characters exist in the same general setting, and sometimes face the same enemies—notably the pre-human, magically adept beings known as the Shonokin.
One of the details revealed in Richard S. Shaver’s correspondence with Ray Palmer in The Hidden World is that Shaver himself read Weird Tales, at least occasionally, and even submitted short fiction to the magazine. One story that caught his eye was “The Letters of Cold Fire” by Manly Wade Wellman:
In a tale in Weird Tales mag. recently it spoke of THE DEEP SCHOOL of Magic. I think you will find this is pertinent. Men who had been through the school could no longer stand the light at all. The underworld – hereditarily – have extra large eyes. This was in the Rowley Thorne – Dunstone [sic] series – runs regularly in Weird Tales and the author may know something though it’s hard to tell among all his magic wool. He should not be hard to contact and writers can explain what they mean. I hope he is not one who believes really the common concept of magic. —Richard S. Shaver to Ray Palmer, 8 Jun [1944], The Hidden World A-14 2338-2339
It isn’t known if Shaver ever attempted to contact Wellman. In Weird Tales Jul 1946 and in the fanzine Sunspots #28 (Fall 1946), Wellman claims to have received letters form those who were convinced the Shonokin were real and could tell him more. Could Shaver have been among them? Perhaps, perhaps not; Shaver’s further letters to Palmer don’t mention any such attempt.
What is known is that Shaver remembered “The Letters of Cold Fire,” and later when the subject of grimoire came up after reading William Seabrook’s Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940), Shaver was inspired to an elaboration on his theories.
Such writers as your firned [sic] friend of Weird Tales mention such EVIL books—the book from the DEEP SCHOOL etc. etc.—and such wonderful things can be done with formula in them—is standard weird talk for witch stories through the ages—why—because once that was true and magicians—or mag-neticians—did save those books and work wonders with but they were not numerous to save that wisdom for us—or they lived in the caves and all that history of theirs still lies down there waiting for us—but if my observations of dero are right they are still using the ancient libraries for toilet paper and fire starting as in the ancient days. —Richard S. Shaver to Ray Palmer, Jan 12 [1945], The Hidden World A-15, 2570
There is something strange and terrible about the image of a Dero, after evacuating last night’s cannibalistic feast, reaching for the age-softened, crumbling pages of the Necronomicon to wipe themselves clean—and that is an aspect of Shaver’s mystery that readers of Amazing Stories perhaps did not appreciate, the degree to which Palmer and other ghostwriters cleaned things up, for Shaver could be quite brusque about subjects like torture, sex, and some of the more unpleasant aspects of life in his stories.
Muriel E. Eddy, David H. Keller, & the Shaver Mystery
In a 1948 interview, David H. Keller, a prolific author of science fiction and weird tales and a contemporary of Lovecraft’s, was asked about the Shaver Mystery:
“What is your opinion of the Shaver controversy?”
“A healthy affair in some ways. After all there is not much difference between Shaver and Lovecraft as far as the basic idea is concerned. Even Jules Verne hinted at it in his JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Merritt talked about those Old Ones and Lovecraft wrote constantly in regard to such a menace. […] —David H. Keller, interviewed by Jacob Hudson, Fantasy-Times #64 (Apr 1948), 5
Keller’s comparison of Shaver and Lovecraft is not unique; it’s a point that crops up repeatedly in the literature. One of the key points Keller makes is that “Lovecraft wrote constantly in regard to such a menace”—but did he really? At this date, Arkham House had brought Lovecraft into print in hardback, and in the mid-40s editions paperback editions were available through Bartholomew House and the Armed Services Edition. Weird Tales under Dorothy McIlwraith published or re-printed Lovecraft stories provided by August Derleth and Arkham House, as well as Derleth’s own pastiches. Derleth’s first “posthumous collaboration,” the novel The Lurker on the Threshold, was published in 1945.
While Lovecraft wrote of many terrors, some ancient and some underground, there was never a single unifying threat that ran through multiple stories as the Deros do through Shaver’s oeuvre. However, for casual readers who absorbed a great deal of Derleth along with Lovecraft, this fine distinction between the Mythos as Lovecraft wrote it versus how Derleth tended to play it up was easily lost. Derleth’s pastiches tended to emphasize a unity and structure to Lovecraft’s Mythos that wasn’t originally there, while Shaver seems to have had a very clear conception from the beginning of how things were in the underground caverns, even if he struggled with how to present this information to the audience.
This kind of comparison led to another tangential connection between Lovecraft and Shaver, in the pages of Fantastic Adventure, another Ziff Davis pulp magazine that was under the editorship of Ray Palmer. While the Shaver Mystery stories largely appeared in Amazing Stories, some of Shaver’s fiction also appeared in Fantastic Adventure, which was at least nominally dedicated to fantasy, although in practice Ray Palmer tended to run both fantasy and science fiction together in the magazine.
In Fantastic Adventure s(Feb 1948), Shaver’s story “Slaves of the Worm” ran. The story is not explicitly related to the Mystery—not a Dero in sight—and may owe something to Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (1929) and “The Valley of the Worm” (1934) as well as A. Merritt’s “The Face in the Abyss” (1923) and its sequel “The Snake Mother” (1930). Yet something about the story prompted a reader to write in and compare it to Lovecraft; and Ray Palmer agreed.
Not many would look to the letter-columns of Fantastic Adventures for a brief memoir about Lovecraft, yet that is part of the legacy of the Shaver Mystery too.
Robert E. Howard, Serpent People, & the Shaver Mystery
One of the hallmarks of conspiratorial literature is how quickly it is to absorb new ideas into its existing framework, and the same is true for the Shaver Mystery. In the August 1946 issue of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer wrote a piece about the pamphlets of Maurice Doreal, an occultist, which presents his ideas of the hollow earth (drawing much inspiration from Theosophy), and wrote that:
I am advising that Doreal’s booklets be read by all students of the Shaver matter. I do not believe that he is correct in all his statements, but there may be a basis underlying them, and this knowledge should be known to students simply as a matter of theory.
In the October 1946 issue of Amazing Stories, an answering letter from Doreal was published, essentially confirming the subterranean evil Dero exist, and working the Dero into their schema.
Maurice Doreal (also M. Doreal, Morris Doreal, etc.) was a pseudonym for Claude Doggins, an occultist and conspiracy theorist inspired by both Theosophy and pulp fiction. One of Doreal’s most notable publications is The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean (n.d.). The esoteric poem includes a lot of material drawn from ancient Egyptian religion, Hermetic occultism, and Theosophy, but there’s one passage in particular which is basically a synopsis of Robert E. Howard’s story “The Shadow Kingdom (Weird Tales Aug 1929):
In the form of man they amongst us, but only to sight were they as are men. Serpent-headed when the glamour was lifted but appearing to man as men among men. Crept they into the Councils, taking forms that were like unto men. Slaying by their arts the chiefs of the kingdoms, taking their form and ruling o’er man. Only by magic could they be discovered. Only by sound could their faces be seen. Sought they from the Kingdom of shadows to destroy man and rule in his place.
While Doreal does not connect the dero to the serpent people directly, they share certain attributes, being evil, shape-shifting, and subterranean. It goes to show how flexible and adept at self-promotion Doreal was to latch onto the Shaver Mystery, however briefly. Doreal also borrowed from other pulp authors, notably referencing Frank Belknap Long Jr.’s “The Hounds of Tindalos” (Weird Tales mar 1929), also referenced in The Emerald Tablets:
Strange and terrible are the HOUNDS of the Barrier. Follow they consciousness to the limits of space. Think not to escape by entering your body, for follow they fast the Soul through angles. Only the circle will give ye protection, save from the claws of the DWELLERS IN ANGLES.
Like Shaver, Doreal’s writings influenced popular conspiracy theories, and his works tied together aspects of Theosophy, pulp fiction, and the nascent ufology culture. Michael Barkun in A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America(2013) notes that Doreal also authored a pamphlet giving a revisionist history of the world featuring this serpent race (Mysteries of the Gobi), where the perverted, underground Lemurians were supposedly the ancestors of all Semitic peoples. Another pamphlet, Flying Saucers: An Occult Viewpoint postulated the serpent people were extraterrestrials, which would help set the stage for popular depictions of reptilian humanoid aliens, such as the television series V. All of these have uncertain publication dates, but based on this letter we can definitely say they were around in the 1940s.
Doreal would be quoted extensively in David Icke’s Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race has Controlled the World for Thousands of Years—and Still Does (2001), which collates and updates the whole idea of shapeshifting reptilians for a 21st-century audience. Icke is noted for his antisemitism, and for his identification of members of the Jewish Rothschild family as secret reptilians (Barkun 146); the entire shape-shifting reptilian alien idea in popular culture has been tinged by Icke’s prejudice.
Robert E. Howard did not invent the idea of serpent people or reptilian humanoids; H. P. Lovecraft had played with the idea in “The Nameless City” (1921), A. Merritt had the eponymous Snake-Mother of Yu-Atlanchi in “The Snake-Mother” (1923); Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had a woman-headed serpent in “The Were-Snake” (1925); Edgar Rice Burroughs had underground serpent people in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929-1930); Clark Ashton Smith had made serpent a part of his stories in “The Double Shadow” (1933) and “The Seven Geases” (1934); Edmond Hamilton, famous for his space operas, included reptilian alien humanoids in “Monsters of Mars” (1931) and “The Snake-Men of Kaldar” (1933), and John Murray Reynolds had similar Scaly Ones in “The Golden Amazons of Venus” (1939); E. Hoffmann Price played on Southeast Asian beliefs about the Naga in “Snake Goddess” (1939), and there are many other precursors and cases of independent invention. There is even a famous case in 1934, an engineer named G. Warren Shufelt even advertized that there was an underground city of lizard people beneath Los Angeles.
Richard S. Shaver had serpent-people in his Shaver Mystery fiction too—most notably in “The Fall of Lemuria” in Other Worlds Science Stories (Nov 1949). These snake-people probably owe more to Merritt’s “Snake-Mother” than to anything Howard or anyone else wrote.
Yet Howard’s serpent-people have gained pop-culture precedence—and entered conspiracy circle legend—because of several contributing factors. For Lovecraft, Smith, and many others, the reptilians and serpent people, whether beneficient or inimical to humanity, hatched no conspiracies, and dwelt underground and apart from humanity and its affairs. Howard’s were actively seeking to undermine and manipulate human civilization, and doing so with the aid of magical disguises to impersonate others.
Marvel Comics introduced serpent people to their universe through works adapted from and inspired by the work of Robert E. Howard; in the pages of Conan the Barbarian,Kull the Conqueror, and (oddly enough) Marvel Premiere #4, where Dr. Strange fights the spawn of Sligguth in a story that combines aspects of “The Shadow Kingdom” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Robert E. Howard’s version of the serpent-god Set, and his serpent-people followers, would play a major role in the Marvel Universe during storylines like Atlantis Attacks! (1989), although since Marvel subsequently lost the license to Conan, the serpent-people have played substantially less of a role.
Roleplaying games have featured a number of reptilian and serpent-people, some of whom were inspired by pulp fiction, others of which are original. The Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game adapted Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft’s serpent-people lore and glossed and expanded it. Dungeons & Dragons have the Yuan-Ti, who were largely humanoid serpent-people with shapeshifting powers, that first appeared in Dwellers in the Forgotten City (1980); whether they were originally based on Howard’s serpent people or not, they embody many of the tropes—but there are innumerable fantasy serpent- and reptile-people in fantasy and science fiction, too many to narrow them all down to one single source. Publisher White Wolf would also borrow from Howard when creating the clan called the Followers of Set for Vampire: The Masquerade (1991), whose discipline of Serpentis gives them serpent-like powers and attributes.
The Followers have an Egyptian theme, despite the fact that the Egyptian god known as Set, Seth, or Sutekh does not have serpentine attributes—a common misconception which also affected the Marvel comics (where the Egyptian god Seth was a separate deity, though still serpent-themed) and even Dungeons & Dragons (where the Mulhorandi god Set was largely based on the Egyptian god, but also took on serpentine characteristics). Robert Bloch would commonly err in making the serpentine Set an Egyptian god in some of his early horror and fantasy stories. The confusion comes because in the Conan tales, Set is the god of the Stygians—who are intended to be strongly reminiscent of ancient Egypt, and to be the precursor civilization to it:
Meanwhile, also, a tribe of Vanir adventurers had passed along the Pictish coast southward, ravaged ancient Zingara, and come into Stygia, which, oppressed by a cruel aristocratic ruling class, was staggering under the thrusts of the black kingdoms to the south. The red-haired Vanir led the slaves in a general revolt, overthrew the reigning class, and set themselves up as a caste of conquerors. They subjugated the northern-most black kingdoms, and built a vast southern empire, which they called Egypt. From these red-haired conquerors the earlier Pharaohs boasted descent. —Robert E. Howard, “The Hyborian Age” (1936)
There is a terrible irony to Doreal and Icke’s adding bigotry to Howard’s serpent people: Howard was thinking about Jews when he wrote it. Howard’s original story “The Shadow Kingdom” was in part inspired by some of his own characterization of Jews in the Old Testament in his private letters (see Deeper Cut: Conan and the Shemites: Robert E. Howard and Antisemitism). However, a study of Howard’s letters do not show any definite awareness or belief in popular antisemitic conspiracy theories, and Howard never made any explicit connection between serpent people and Jews in his fiction. Howard did not confuse fantasy and real-world prejudice; he took a metaphor based on a personal reading of the Old Testament and wove into his fantasy fiction—making literal serpents out of the metaphorical manipulators of King Saul. This wasn’t a huge stretch for Howard, who had already included his antipathy to serpents and characters with snake-like attributes in several stories before Kull was created (see “Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory.”)
The 1930s and 40s saw the cross-pollination between pulp and popular fiction and fringe conspiracy theories, and what would become New Age movements, many of which were in a foundational stage during the interwar and WW2 period. Doreal’s letter in support of Shaver’s Mystery is an example of how easily these works incorporated ideas from science fiction and weird fiction into already-extent occult and conspiratorial ideologies about the hollow earth and hidden masters. It also demonstrates how antisemitic tropes can grow and spread, sometimes under unlikely guises.
Marebito (稀人, 2004)
Marebito(“Unique One,” 稀人) is a Japanese horror film from director Shimizu Takashi (清水 崇), based on a novel and screenplay by Konaka Chiaki (小中 千昭). As the film opens, freelance cameraman Masuoka (played by Tsukamato Shin’ya 塚本 晋也) is obsessed the nature of fear and with viewing the world through a camera lens. Masuoka investigates the apparent suicide of a terrified man underground that was captured on camera. His investigation leads him to a subterranean network of tunnels beneath Tokyo. Masuoka meets people who live in the tunnels and believe in Richard Shaver’s Deros; Masuoka himself finds a section of the underground that resembles ancient ruins and believes he has come to the Mountains of Madness spoken of by Lovecraft—although he acknowledges both Shaver and the hollow earth theory are fiction. Yet in that netherworld, fact and fiction seem to merge.
Throughout the film, possibly-supernatural events occur, and the line between what is real and what is just in Masuoka’s head is not clear. The film plays with aspects of voyeurism, documentary filmmaking, the nature of reality, and the uncertain nature of perception. The narrative is shot through with sudden transitions, artifacts of digital recording in settings of clear reality, impromptu encounters and conversations, and a growing uncertainty about who the characters really are and how much of this is really happening, or if Masuoka is just off his meds and reality and delusion are merging together inseparably.
The Deros are a repeated touchstone in the ideology of the film, not something seen on the screen much, but a pervasive idea. Likewise, while Lovecraft is seldom referenced directly, the questioning of the nature of fear is strongly reminiscent of his work. This is no accident, Konaka Chiaki has also written Cthulhu Mythos fiction, including the screenplay for a Japanese television adaptation of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (インスマスを覆う影, 1992). In Marebito, Konaka gets to marry those ideas with the questioning of reality and memory that are trademarks of some of his anime work such as Serial Experiments Lain and The Big O.
Shimizu Takashi brings these ideas to the screen with an aesthetic that places it in the general oeuvre of the Ring films directed by Nakata Hideo (中田 秀夫) and the later documentary-style horror films of director Shiraishi Kōji (白石 晃士). While there is no single video artifact or ghost at the center of Marebito, the visual transition between watching what is “really” happening and watching the same through the lens of a camera introduces a layer of visual rhetoric that gives the film considerable depth. If Konaka adapted Shaver and Lovecraft for a new Japanese context, Shimizu adapted that script for a new Japanese syntax, translating the voyeuristic impulses of Shaver and the fear of the unknown in Lovecraft into present-day fears of video surveillance, the questionable fidelity of memory, and the pliable reality of recordings.
Which might be an interesting way of looking at the Shaver Mystery and the Lovecraft Mythos in the 21st century: not as literal truth, and not necessarily as something to copy and pastiche, but collections of ideas and images to use as a springboard for new work. Shaver and Lovecraft did not live to see the long tail of their creations influence popular culture, nor for the fringe of true believers to spread their ideas of ancient aliens from the pulps to the mainstream. Yet it is a new century now, and new voices find uses for old pulp ideas.
In this way, the Shaver Mystery and the Lovecraft Mythos live on.
His funeral was held at High Noon at a funeral home, and, though the little gods of fate seemed to will that we should arrive there too late for the services, we did visit Swan Point Cemetery, with its many tombs, winding lanes and exquisite monuments—and did I imagine it, or did the spirit of our late beloved friend and fellow-writer hover over us as we bowed our heads in reverence and respect to the memory of one of the finest men—yes, and greatest geniuses, who ever walked this earth? A man little-known, perhaps, by the majority, but a man who, to those who came in more than casual contact with him, exemplified all that is fine and good in a fellow human being. —Muriel E. Eddy, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) 21-22
From the very first, Muriel E. Eddy’s memoirs of H. P. Lovecraft were fairly rose-tinted—and, occasionally, given to flights of imaginative fantasy like the above. The Eddys did not make it on time to Lovecraft’s funeral; such things happen, but they did apparently visit his grave periodically. Lovecraft’s grave, initially unmarked, was not the point of pilgrimage for fans and admirers that it is today; but he had long known and expected this to be the resting place for his mortal remains, in the family plot, and it is clear from Lovecraft’s letters to the Eddys that they were well aware of that.
H. P. Lovecraft was an atheist and materialist; he had no expectations for survival of consciousness after death. His afterlife, as it is, lay in the publication of his work, the memories of his friends, and increasingly his appearance as a fictionalized character in various works. Muriel E. Eddy was, apparently, not a materialist, and was at least open to the idea of ghosts or consciousness that survived after death. At least, she was willing to write about it for Fate Magazine, which offered $5 for tales of evidence of existence after death. This was not exactly new territory for Muriel, who had sold a “psychic experience” to The Occult Digest in 1939. So it was that in the October 1956 issue of Fate, “Message in Stone” appeared.
Message in Stone
We were greatly saddened when Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the famous Rhode Island writer of weird and uncanny tales of the unknown, died in March, 1937. Mr. Lovecraft had been a friend of the family for years. He often had brought his weird writings, still in manuscript form, to our house, reading them aloud in his sepulchral voice and awaiting our approval or disapproval. He considered the Eddy family “good critics.” I still can see him, sitting in our humble abode and reading his famous horror tale, “The Rats in the Walls,” which has been reprinted frequently since his untimely demise.
We often discussed the mystery of death and one night Lovecraft expressed the opinion that the human brain was practically indestructible. He believed that, whether or not his body was embalmed, his brain would continue to function. He said that if his brain continued to “work,” as he believed it would after death, he would send a message in some material form that we could understand.
At that time he was in excellent health and death seemed distant. However, shortly afterward Howard Phillips Lovecraft suddenly became seriously I’ll and died in Jane Brown Hospital in Providence, R.I., in March, 1937. He was only 47 years old.
After the funeral I often visited his grave and placed floral offerings there. The grave is in Swan Point Cemetery and is marked by a tall granite shaft.
One night in September, 1937, I had a very vivid dream about Howard Phillips Lovecraft. In my dream I visited his grave, now covered thickly with grass, and was on my knees, parting the grass as I hunted for something.
My dreams haunted me and early the next day, a Sunday, I drove out to the cemetery. I felt driven by an invisible force.
As I stood beside Lovecraft’s grave, I seemed to hear his sepulchral voice again, intoning the words, “If my theory is correct, if my brain continues to function after my death, I will send you a message in some material form that you can understand.”
My eyes scanned the grass on the burial plot, still wet with dew, and then I glimpsed something white shining on Lovecraft’s grave. Stooping, I parted the heavy growth with my hands and picked up a heart-shaped stone, as smooth as satin and about two inches across. It was milky white and looked oddly like a quarried stone of the translucent variety. I recalled that Lovecraft’s grandparents, long dead, had owned a stone quarry in East Providence.
How the stone happened to be lying on Lovecraft’s grave may be only a matter of conjecture. However, he had known that I collected odd-shaped natural specimens, such as unusual shells, odd bits of wood and minerals, especially stones and rocks of unusual formation.
I could find no stone in the cemetery that resembled even remotely the one I found on Lovecraft’s grave. —Providence, R. I.
[Fate Magazine (Oct 1956), 103-105
Some of the details in the piece are correct, others likely honest mistakes. The description of the grave is accurate; at the time, there was no individual marker for HPL, only the granite shaft for the family plot. Lovecraft was 46 at the time of his death, but if Muriel E. Eddy was counting by year, it’s an easy mistake to make. The Phillips did not own a quarry in Providence, but they owned a small mortgage on such a quarry, and in Lovecraft’s letters he talks about sometimes getting mineral samples from there for his friend James F. Morton, who was curator of a museum of geology in New Jersey.
As for the more imaginative part of the Fate piece—there is no account in Lovecraft’s letters or other memories of him hoping for the functioning of his brain after death. However, it is notable that several of his stories for Hazel Heald, notably “Out of the Æons” (1935) and “The Horror in the Burying-Ground” (1937) both deal with a kind of living death, with the mind functioning in a paralyzed or petrified body. Muriel E. Eddy claims to have introduced Heald to Lovecraft, and Heald features prominently in Eddy’s later memoirs, so possibly she remembered either the stories or Lovecraft writing or talking about the stories.
Another likely influence on “Message in Stone” is the magician Houdini, whom both Lovecraft and her husband C. M. Eddy, Jr. had worked with:
I remember Mr. Eddy’s painstaking revision of Houdini’s “Thoughts and Feelings of a Head Cut Off”….an experience which the master magician had undergone in his youth. Harry Houdini said in his story that somewhere in his travels he came across an ancient supersitition that if a head was severed quickly and unexpectedly from a body, the brain in the head kept on thinking for several seconds! […]
I am quite sure this story was never offered for sale by Harry Houdini, as it lacked the ring of veracity . . . perhaps it was somewhat exaggerated! When we told H.P.L. about it, he exclaimed, “Oh, what I could have done with that story, but perhaps Houdini wouldn’t have liked it if I’d changed it too much. I took a lot of liberties with his ‘Pharaoh’ story and he seemed satisfied, but this one!” And a far-away look was in his eyes. . . .
Later on, were were discussing the possibility of the truth of a brain functioning after death, and Lovecraft averred that perhaps the brain did function . . . for a few minutes after the death of one’s body. It was a weird subject, and there I ended! I sometimes wondered what Lovecraft’s true feelings regarding this matter really were. […]
My husband spent some time investigating Spiritualism at Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, for Harry Houdini, and when he returned home with much data about some of the mediums he’d met, Lovecraft came over to see us and seemed much interested in the subject. He scoffed at the idea of communion with the dead, and said that, in his opinion, death was the absolute end. —Muriel E. Eddy, “A Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961) in A Gentleman from Angell Street20-21
The Harry Houdini Circumstantial Evidence blog relates a possible manuscript related to this story, titled “Thoughts and Visions of a Head Cut Off.” Houdini is an important connection as well because of a tradition that began after his death; his wife Bess began to hold séances annually on Hallowe’en, in an attempt to contact her husband’s spirit. Muriel was aware of this:
By the way, Houdini’s last desire was that on every Hallowe’en his resting-place should be visited by friends to see if his (Harry Houdini’s) ghost appeared. . . . he made light of ghosts and Spiritualism, you jnow. As Lovecraft was a “ghost-writer” also for Harry Houdini . . . . . . well! Mrs. Harry Houdini . . . and Harry’s brother Hardeen . . . have joined the ranks of every human’s ultimate glory . . . . could not supervise the weird visition at Houdini’s grave this Hallowe’en. I supose that trek will now be abandoned . . . . Houdini proved his own point . . . he STAYED dead! Somtimes, in a joking mood, Lovecraft used to say that . . . . . PERHAPS . . . . the human brain NEVER stopped functioning . . . . . even after death. A weird thought, and, visiting H. P. L.’s grave one day recently . . . . . your friends the Eddys . . wondered . . . just vaguely. But OF COURSE H.P.L. was just joking! —Muriel E. Eddy to Winfield Townley Scott, 2 Nov 1945, MSS. Brown Digital Repository
Muriel’s information was a little out of date; while Bess Houdini died in 1943 and Theodore Hardeen in 1945, Bess had passed the séance tradition on to Walter B. Gibson in 1936, who in turn would ask Doroth Dietrich to carry on the tradition, which is still ongoing.
Something said in jest would definitely be more in keeping with what we know about Lovecraft, and of course Muriel E. Eddy would have had to play up the belief in his posthumous existence to get published in FATE Magazine. Her account, minor enough as it is, caught the attention of at least one journalist, who distilled it for a fluff piece to fill a few column inches:
“Message in Stone” was never republished, and the whole incident is largely ignored in Muriel E. Eddy’s most well-known memories. Yet in H.P.L.: The Man and The Image (1969), she ends a rambling collection of memories with the note:
On one of my visits to H.P.L.’s grave, I found a heart-shaped stone. I wondered if he had seen it there, what type of storey might have been concocted by his fertile brain.
Muriel E. (Gammons) Eddy was born in Taunton, Massachusetts in 1896. She started to write poetry and fiction at a very early age. Muriel was educated in Attleboro Falls, Massachusetts; Redlands, California; and the Horace Mann School in San Jose, California, where she lived during her early teen years. Her father owned a movie theatre during that time, and it was there that she would spend many hours watching the motion picture shows, and writing stories and poems. Upon returning to Massachusetts, much of her poetry was published in her hometown newspaper, The Attleboro Sun.
Being the avid reader that she was, Muriel read all that she could, including the various magazines sold at the local newsstands. One of these held a letter to the editor from Clifford Eddy, Jr. Muriel wrote a letter to him and a correspondence ensued; they were both twenty-one. At the time, the two found they had many common interests: their love for writing, reading habits, their fertile imagination, and their almost twin birthdays (his, January 18, 1896; hers, January 19, 1896). They married the following year on February 10, 1918, eventually settling in Providence, Rhode Island.
Muriel continued writing, all the while raising three children. Her short stories in many different genres including romance, mystery, personal adventure, and suspense were published in the various magazines of the day such as Ghost Stories, Scarlet Adventuress, Complete Detective Novel Magazine, True Confessions, MidnightMagazine, and The Occult Digest. […]
Muriel and Clifford met H. P. Lovecraft and maintained a close friendship with him until his death in 1937. —Jim Dyer, “Introduction” in In the Gray of the Duski-ii
A few letters from Lovecraft to Muriel, and to her husband C. M. Eddy, Jr., survive; so there is no doubt that they did correspond. Beyond that bald fact, the correspondence of Muriel E. Eddy and H. P. Lovecraft gets complicated.
The difficulty comes from the fact that Muriel, more than most of Lovecraft’s friends, memorialized her and her husband’s relationship with Lovecraft. While her major memoir is “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961), she also published “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945), “Message in Stone” in Fate Magazine (Oct 1956), “Memories of H. P. L.” in The Magazine of Horror (Winter 1965-1966), “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” in Haunted (Jun 1968), and H. P. L. “The Man and the Image” (1969) (also partially reprinted as “Lovecraft: Among the Demons”), not to mention miscellaneous letters, notes, and probably a few reprints under different titles.
While that sounds substantial, most of these are relatively minor pieces, largely repetitious or filled with Muriel’s own speculation. Digging into the minutiae of what Muriel wrote and when, and trying to cross-reference her statements made through several decades versus the facts given in Lovecraft’s letters and other sources, reveals a great deal of omission, correction, and even contradictions.
To give an example, take this snippet from one of her later, self-published memoirs:
One day he walked all the way up to the top of the First Baptist Metting House in Benefit Street to sign his name in the guest book. He wrote, “H. P. Lovecraft, Esq., Gentleman.” He signed many of his letters to my husband and me with that phrase, and also “your obedient servant.”
*********
Our friendship with Howard began with letter writing, although we also lived in Providence – because he hated to use the telephone or any other mechanical device such as the typewriter. He always wrote in longhand, and later I was to type many of his manuscripts.
We wanted very much to meet him in person, and he finally came to our house one afternoon in August, 1923. —Muriel E. Eddy, H. P. L. “The Man and the Image” (1969)3
There is no doubt that Lovecraft did often sign his letters in just this way; we have numerous surviving examples to attest to that. So far, so good. Several of Lovecraft’s letters also attest to how much he detested typing, and his penchant for writing longhand; this is also verified by surviving manuscripts in Lovecraft’s writing. How much Muriel E. Eddy did typing for Lovecraft is more debatable; we cannot point to a typescript and say “Yes, Muriel typed this for Lovecraft.” We do have letters from Lovecraft where he mentions that C. M. Eddy, Jr. typed for him:
I gotta new way to get all my old manuscripts retyped in double-spacing, too. It’s the new local boy Eddy, what I was tellin’ ya about. I revise his stuff; and for every story I jazz up, he types one for me. —H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 19 Oct 1924, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 139
Does this mean Muriel E. Eddy didn’t type Lovecraft’s manuscripts? No. But it also means that without supporting evidence, we’re left to take her word on the matter. This becomes important because some of the most interesting and critical points in Muriel Eddy’s memoirs of her friendship and correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft are less well supported by outside evidence.
All of Muriel E. Eddy’s memoirs agree, for example, that Lovecraft first came to visit the Eddys—who lived in Providence, Rhode Island, just a couple of miles from Lovecraft’s front door—in 1923. However, according to Muriel, they actually came into contact years earlier.
Cliff and I met Howard Philips Lovecraft in 1923. We were introduced by their mothers, who were both active in the women’s suffrage movement. — Muriel E. Eddy, “Introduction” in Exit to Eternity (1973)iii
The 19th amendment granting women’s suffrage in the United States passed in 1919, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft died in 1921, so this hypothetical first contact would have been c. 1918-1919. Yet there is no mention of the Eddys in Lovecraft’s correspondence before 1923, and the earliest surviving letters from Lovecraft to the Eddys dates to 1923. There is no reference in Lovecraft’s letters of his mother ever attending a suffragette meeting. However, Muriel expanded on this early contact:
Meeting Howard Phillips Lovecraft “in person” was the culmination of months of letter writing. Though we lived but a few miles apart, it had been necessary to contact H.P.L. (as we later learned to call him) by mail, during his mother’s lifetime. […] She said she preferred that we enter into correspondence with Howard, as generally speaking, he hated to talk over the ‘phone, not caring for modern-day inventions or mechanical instruments. […] So we wrote to H.P.L., and found him a willing and eager correspondent. Letters flew thick and fast between us, and he invited us to join the United Amateur Press Association, to which he belonged. He also sent us many copies of The Tryout, a small monthly booklet for amateur writers published by C. W. Smith up in New Hampshire, to which he was a faithful contributor, writing for it under various pen names, one of which was L. Theobald, Jr. We, too, were soon steady contributors to this small magazine. — Muriel E. Eddy, “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961) in The Gentleman From Angell Street(2001), 3, 4-5
While there are no letters from this period to attest to a “thick and fast” correspondence, Lovecraft was definitely keen to recruit fellow-writers to amateur journalism, and the United Amateur Press Association was his personal preference. That being said, The Tryout was associated with the rival National Amateur Press Association, and I’ve yet to find either of the Eddys on the rolls of the UAPA or NAPA. However, in 1918 Muriel E. Eddy did publish a few poems in The Tryout. That much, at least, seems to suggest that they may really have been in contact with Lovecraft as early as 1918.
August Derleth, who presumably got the data directly from C. M. Eddy, Jr. or Muriel Eddy, wrote a slightly more detailed account of Lovecraft coming into correspondence with the Eddys:
By one of those coincidences that are found so frequently in life, however much their incidence may be ridiculed in fiction, Mrs. Sarah Lovecraft and Mrs. Grace Eddy, two ladies of Providence, Rhode Island, who were allied in interest in the movement for women’s suffrage early in this century, had sons who were bending their efforts toward success at writing. Early in 1918, during a lull in a telephone conversation about the goal toward which both worked, the disclosure of their sons’ spare time activity was made, though Clifford M. Eddy Jr. was then courting and shortly married another writer, Muriel Gammons, and it was not until September of that year that Muriel Eddy sent H. P. Lovecraft a note, enclosing a poem of her own and one of her husband’s. Lovecraft responded out of his enthusiasm for fellow writers— and amateur pressdom— as he did in many other cases— with an application blank for each inviting them to join the United Amateur Press Association, and signed his note, “H. P. Lovecraft, Director.” The Eddys accepted Lovecraft’s invitation to join the association, but they did not actually meet one another until the summer of 1923. — August Derleth, The Dark Brotherhood and other pieces (1966), 97
Muriel went on to write:
All of his letters were interesting and instructive and helped us a great deal. Then the letters became fewer and fewer, and it was evident that Howard was under some sort of stress about which he preferred not to talk. Finally, we knew the reason. His mother had become a patient at Butler Hospital, and his two aunts had taken over the running of the Lovecraft household. […] After her death, we began to hear from him again… and after over a year of intermittent writing back and forth, we had the temerity to invite him to visit us…never dreaming that he would accept the invitation! — Muriel E. Eddy, “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961) in The Gentleman From Angell Street(2001), 5
Lovecraft’s letters after his mother’s death do show his great bereavement at her loss; at the same time, his involvement with amateur journalism and relationships with individuals like Winifred Virginia Jackson and Sonia H. Greene were undergoing a profound shift; it would not be unusual if a correspondence was allowed to lapse after a while, only to pick up again after things had settled for a period.
Two letters from H. P. Lovecraft to Muriel E. Eddy survive from this period, dated 5 September and 20 October 1923. Both of the Eddys were active writers during this period, though Muriel also had to keep house and watch the children (Clifford b. 1918, Fay b. 1920, and Ruth b. 1921—Muriel’s pregnancies might have been another reason the correspondence lapsed; it was a busy few years). C. M. Eddy, Jr. appears to have had at least occasional other employment as a theater promoter and other jobs. Still, money was obviously tight, and it was going to get tighter. There is evidence from city directories and other sources that the Eddys moved frequently in the 1920s.
The 5 September 1923 letter opens with Lovecraft enclosing several of his weird fiction manuscripts, and a discussion of the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. This was obviously part of an ongoing discussion about pulps, because Lovecraft wrote:
I never saw The Thrill Book, & was distinctive tantalized by what you say of “The Sargasso Sea”. —H. P. Lovecraft to Muriel E. Eddy, 5 Sep 1923, Miscellaneous Letters 156
Much of the letter is, unfortunately, not available; the partial transcription included in Miscellaneous Letters is taken from a dealer’s listing. The end of the letter, however, is a brief postscript that says simply: “P.S. Batch of new Tryouts just came—I’ll enclose a copy.” This would be another point in support of Muriel’s claim that Lovecraft had approached the Eddys about joining amateur journalism.
The 20 October 1923 letter opens “My dear Mrs. Eddy:—” and an enclosed story revision—”The Ghost-Eater” for C. M. Eddy, Jr. (which would be published in Weird Tales Apr 1924). The fact that Lovecraft is addressing this business matter through Muriel may suggest that she was the primary point of contact, at least at first, although as with the case of Fritz and Jonquil Leiber, perhaps Lovecraft alternated letters between the two, keeping up a parallel correspondence. The letter goes on to thank her for her comments related to The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag (1923), which Lovecraft had edited and written the critical preface to.
Taken together, these letters show an active and literary correspondence, mixed with a bit of revisory business. “The Ghost-Eater” is the earliest story of Eddy’s that Lovecraft is known to have touched-up, and might represent C. M. Eddy’s early attempt to crack Weird Tales as a market. Other stories Lovecraft had a greater or lesser hand in were “Ashes” (WT Mar 1924), “The Loved Dead” (WT May-Jun-Jul 1924), and “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind” (WT Apr 1925).
There is a gap in the extant Lovecraft-Eddy correspondence; this is no doubt due in part to Lovecraft’s elopement with Sonia H. Greene to New York in March 1924. Muriel wrote that she saw the announcement in the paper where Lovecraft advertised for the typescript of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” (for Harry Houdini), which he had lost on the trip:
I was so sorry for Lovecraft and so intrigued with the expected sight of the advertisement that, impetuously, I sat down, and clipping out the notice, I pasted it on a sheet of note-paper and drew a heavy black edge around it, writing underneath, “My deepest sympathy”.
In the very next mail came a printed announcement of Howard’s marriage to Sonia. They were married March 3, 1924, in St. Paul’s Church in New York City. Was my face red when that announcement arrived…after having just sent Lovecraft a note of sympathy! […]
[19] Lovecraft initially seemed overjoyed and exhilarated, sending us smiling snapshots of himself, also of Sonia, but not taken together. At first his letters were typical missives, then they dwindled, and finally, we did not hear from him at all. — Muriel E. Eddy, “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961) in The Gentleman From Angell Street(2001), 15-16, 19
The Eddys were definitely included on the list of those to be sent the engraved wedding announcement:
About the announcements—the engraved cards ought to come today, and the envelopes are already here and addressed. Of Providentians I have remembered Harold, Ronald, and Eddy—the only ones I think would be really interested. — H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 18 Mar 1924, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.113
The others mentioned are probably Harold Bateman Munroe and Ronald K. Upham.
We know that the correspondence with the Eddys continued during Lovecraft’s New York period (1924-1926), but also that there were gaps—understandable given Lovecraft’s often upset situation (and possibly the Eddys’ as well). For example, in his letters to his aunts, Lovecraft mentions:
I had a piquant note from Eddy today, and must answer it soon. My correspondence and amateur work, however, have had to be greatly neglected on account of this rush order for three chapters of a book of American superstition. — H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 30 Mar 1924, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.131
And in the opening of a letter to C. M. Eddy, Jr., Lovecraft apologizes:
Once more a prodigal adopted grandfather sues for pardon anent epistolary delinquencies! — H. P. Lovecraft to C. M. Eddy, Jr., 21 Jul 1924, Miscellaneous Letters 158
It is clear from the surviving letters that Lovecraft continued to have a relationship with the Eddys; after he left Providence, the Eddys’ absorbed some of Lovecraft’s furniture from his aunts (as well as dozens of postcards from Sonia H. Greene, which were sadly destroyed). Lovecraft wrote a letter of introduction for C. M. Eddy to Harry Houdini, and C. M. Eddy apparently did some work for Houdini. Lovecraft certainly helped revise or amend some of C. M. Eddy’s fiction for Weird Tales, and they were to collaborate on The Cancer of Superstition for Houdini, a project cut off by the magician’s untimely demise.
There is some indication that Lovecraft may have had a falling-out with, or at least frustration with, the Eddys in late 1925/early 1926. A pair of letters suggests frustration:
Strange case—but as I just wrote A E P G on a card, I’m through with freaks & paupers & plebeians & odd fish at last. It took a long time to shew me how profitless they all are—Arthur Fredlund, Herbert Benson, Eddy, &c—but I now see how asinine it is to bother with them. They give no pleasure in the end, & become an intolerable nuisance & parasitic pest. — H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 22 Dec 1925, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.520
As for me, I’m sick of Bohemians, odds & ends, freaks, & plebeians—C. M. Eddys & satellites & miscellany &c. They amuse me for a while, but begin to after a time to get frightfully on one’s nerves. People get one one’s nerves when they harbour different kinds of memories & live by different kinds of standards& cherish different kinds of goals & ideas. — H. P. Lovecraft to Lilian D. Clark, 11 Jan 1926, Letters to Family & Family Friends 2.536
Without the Eddys’ end of the correspondence, we don’t really have an idea of what the problem was, but given the general impression of poverty that surrounds the Eddys from Lovecraft’s other letters of the period, it probably has to do with the straitened circumstances of the little family.
One thing we don’t get from this period, or after, is a real sense of Lovecraft’s relationship or correspondence with Muriel E. Eddy. With three kids under ten years old, she certainly had her hands full, on top of whatever other efforts she made to support the family while C. M. Eddy, Jr. tried to alternately write and work odd jobs, so it would not be surprising if C. M. Eddy, Jr. took over the bulk of the correspondence chores. We get a picture of the Eddys as a couple in a few letters from Lovecraft:
Orton is now attempting some writing—though of a popular & low-grade sort, for the Macfadden publications. (the same ones which honest Eddy’s wife writes for.) — H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 12 Apr 1929, Letters to Family & Family Friends 2.747
He has so far managed to keep meagrely afloat—with a wife & three children—by undertaking outside work of various sorts; but recent economic conditions have left him jobless & reduced him to such depths of want & peril that nothing short of a miracle—or a flood of fairly lucrative literary chores—can keep him & his flock from actual freezing, starvation, & eviction during the interval before he can again secure some industrial affiliation. — H. P. Lovecraft to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, 16 Jan 1930, Letters to Woodburn Harris & Others 429
I say the “House of Eddy” because C.M.E. Jr. made it clear last night that his wife does most of the adaptive revision in cases of this kind. He takes care of the grammatical & rhetorical side, while Mrs. Eddy supplies the “human-interest” hokum & blah for which the Macfadden editors are so avid. She, it seems, has produced much of this material, & has helped many beginners to develop into steady sellers. Her help, Eddy says, generally amounts to actual collaboration—although in your case, as I have just warned, you must not let it approach the status of instruction lest the results of Belknap’s lessons be undone. The rates charged by the Eddys for this collaborative revision of Macfaddenistic material would be very reasonable, & they would be glad to discuss the matter of placement with you whenever you wish to write. — H. P. Lovecraft to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, 29 Jan 1930, Letters to Woodburn Harris & Others 436-437
The last letter from Lovecraft to C. M. Eddy, Jr. is c. 1930, and mentions “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop. A checklist among Lovecraft’s papers suggest he was still in touch with the Eddys at least as late as 1934, as he apparently sent them postcards from St. Augustine, Charleston, and Nantucket, but these are not known to survive (Collected Essays 5. 267).
There is a notable gap in the correspondence, near the end of Lovecraft’s life. Muriel Eddy claimed that she was responsible for putting Lovecraft in contact with Hazel Heald, Lovecraft’s last major revision client. If Muriel E. Eddy did this by letter, those epistles do not appear to have survived and are not in evidence from what other correspondence we have. Then again, why would they be? Lovecraft seldom mentioned such correspondence to others.
How do we square this evidence for correspondence—solid (in the form of two letters to Muriel E. Eddy and ten to C. M. Eddy, Jr.) and circumstantial (references to the Eddys in Lovecraft’s other letters)—with Muriel’s own memoirs? Whether or not Muriel was misremembering or deliberately glossing over a few details, it seems clear that Lovecraft’s relationship with the Eddys was not quite as tight as she liked to present, and the impression given is of a friendship occasionally strained by time, distance, and business or financial matters, albeit not a friendship that was ever completely abandoned on either side.
Because so much of the surviving correspondence is between Lovecraft and her husband, it is difficult to get a bead on Muriel E. Eddy’s relationship with Lovecraft. There is a strong impression that at the beginning (c.1918-1924), Lovecraft was writing mostly to Muriel, as he would to any of a number of amateur journalists. As Lovecraft’s business with C. M. Eddy, Jr. waxes—first with revising his work and getting stuff typed, then the Houdini-stuff, and finally the Bishop revising/typing—we see less and less of Muriel.
While there are a few contradictory points in Muriel’s memoirs of Lovecraft, it’s important to point out that she was not necessarily dishonest—memory can get vague and fuzzy, and by the time Muriel was weighing in Lovecraft had been dead for years. As she told the stories over and over, they became more fixed, as evidenced by comparing the earlier memoirs to later ones; repeating narratives makes them clearer in the mind, but it also means a person teaches themself how to tell a story, sometimes adding or removing details, being informed by what other people wrote, etc. Most of Muriel’s comments on Lovecraft’s marriage, for example, are pure hearsay and speculation, and quite often wrong.
It is unfortunate that more of the Lovecraft/Eddy correspondence is not available. Muriel E. Eddy’s memoirs, even flawed, provide a fascinating insight into Lovecraft’s life and work, and also into her own life and that of her husband during this tumultuous but critical period. What drove a woman like Muriel E. Eddy to write to H. P. Lovecraft? What prompted him to write back? How long did they correspond, of and on? We do not have—will never have—all the pieces of the puzzle.
Imagine a young mother, bouncing a toddler on her knee, squinting at one of Lovecraft’s manuscripts and trying to type it out—or perhaps C. M. Eddy, Jr. was there, a rugrat at his foot, as he read aloud while she typed. Or that breathless expectation on a hot summer afternoon in Providence, as a tall man in a straw hat walked up to the door to introduce himself, with a name they had only read in letters up to that point…it’s easy to wax romantic about these relationships. Yet the whole point of tracing such correspondence and combing through these memoirs is to get a better sense of who these people were, and what their lives were like.
Thanks to Donovan Loucks for his help with this one.
I have, I may remark, been able to secure Mr. Baird’s acceptance of two tales by my adopted son Eddy, which he had before rejected. Upon my correcting them, he profest himself willing to print them in early issues; they being intitul’d respectively “Ashes”, and “The Ghost-Eater”. In exchange for my revisory service, Eddy types my own manuscripts in the approv’d double-spac’d form; this labour being particularly abhorrent to my sensibilities.
But I must give over these my remarks, for I must take a nap against the afternoon; when (tho’ ’tis devilish cold) I am pledg’d to visit my son Eddy in East-Providence, & help him with his newest fiction, a pleasing & morbid study in hysterical necrophily, intitul’d “The Lov’d Dead”. —H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 20 Oct 1923, Letters to James F. Morton 57
The Gentleman from Angell Street: Memories of H. P. Lovecraft(2001) is a collection of the reminiscences of H. P. Lovecraft by the Eddy family, who lived in East Providence and first became acquainted with Lovecraft while he lived at 598 Angell St. in Providence, Rhode Island. All of the non-fiction pieces in this slim collection had been previously published, but all of them had been out-of-print for decades, so the slim collection was a bit of boon to researchers in not having to pay collectors’ prices to read them.
Muriel Elizabeth (Gammons) Eddy and Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr. were married in 1918; they were both writers, in various genres, and Muriel in particular would be president of the Rhode Island Writers’ Guild for over 20 years, while Eddy would have a pulp career that included three stories revised in part by their Providence neighbor H. P. Lovecraft, which were published in Weird Tales—and much else that Lovecraft never had a hand in besides. Students of Lovecraft’s letters will remember the way Lovecraft pleaded with another revision client, Zealia Brown Reed, to give Eddy the job of typing her manuscripts as the Great Depression set in and pushed the Eddys to the brink of poverty.
While Lovecraft was closest to C. M. Eddy, Jr., to the extant of calling him one of his “adopted” sons or grandchildren, it was Muriel E. Eddy that wrote the most about her family’s relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. Her first memoir, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” was published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) alongside “Lovecraft and Benefit Street” (1943) by Dorothy C. Walter and other works. In 1961 she expanded that essay into “The Gentleman from Angell Street”, and wrote several other short pieces, some privately printed, including H. P. Lovecraft Esquire: Gentleman (no date), The Howard Phillips Lovecraft We Knew (n.d.), “Memories of H. P. L.” (1965), “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968), Howard Philips Lovecraft: The Man and the Image (1969), and “Lovecraft: Among the Demons” (1970). In addition to this, she wrote a number of letters, some published and some surviving at the John Hay Library where she weighed in on the early biographical sketch of Lovecraft by Winfield Townley Scott and Sonia H. Davis’ memoir of her former husband.
The rest of the family was rather more limited. C. M. Eddy Jr. published “Walks with H. P. Lovecraft” in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966, Arkham House), and their daughter Ruth M. Eddy wrote “The Man Who Came At Midnight” (1949).
The activeness of Muriel E. Eddy in publishing and discussing her experiences with Lovecraft from the late 1930s until her death 1978 means that she had a rather substantial influence on Lovecraft scholarship during that period. To illustrate this, L. Sprague de Camp’s critical H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) cites seven of Muriel E. Eddy’s publications, plus C. M. Eddy and Ruth M. Eddy’s contributions. In general, these memoirs can be said to be honest and valuable contributions to the understanding of Lovecraft’s life…but are they accurate?
The accuracy of memoirs is important; human memories are imperfect, and tend to fade and distort over time or under influence. Yet these accounts are often all we have to go on for many events and details of life. The more accurate a memoir is, that is the more of it that we can verify according to other documents of the period (Lovecraft’s letters, census data, city maps and directories, etc.), the more we can count the memoir as a reliable source of data for the information that cannot be so independently verified. With some of these memoirs, written decades after the events…and given that they are often the sole source for some of the anecdotes regarding Lovecraft, it is important to look at some of these sources critically.
C. M. Eddy’s “Walks With Lovecraft,” describing their gambols and hikes together in and out of the city, can be said to be reasonably accurate and reliable, insofar as the details of Lovecraft jive with what we know from his letters—there is, for example, an extended account by Lovecraft of their search for “Dark Swamp,” which agrees fairly closely with C. M. Eddy’s version. There are one or two spots where Eddy may be mistaken, but overall it is a solid essay.
Muriel E. Eddy’s memoirs are a bit more complicated to deal with. The 1945 version “Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” written less than a decade after the subject’s death, is relatively straightforward and accurate—though with little slips here and there; she recalled the Dark Swamp adventure, but referred to it as Black Swamp. Still, it provides a good bit of detail on their association, including some unique insights on the revision-work that Lovecraft did for C. M. Eddy, Jr. and many notes on Lovecraft’s habits and character traits that jive exactly with his letters. The later, expanded version that is “The Gentleman from Angell Street” and appears in the eponymous booklet adds much interesting detail—but the accuracy of this new information, and thus the reliability of the whole account, is less.
For example, Muriel E. Eddy wrote:
Our acquaintance with the Lovecraft family stemmed through my husband’s mother having once met Sarah Lovecraft at a “Women Suffrage” meeting,… although I never learned whether or not Howard’s mother really believed believed in equal rights for women. —Muriel E. Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street 4
This is an intriguing detail, since we know so little (relatively speaking) about Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, and far from impossible. It might explain some of Lovecraft’s attitudes towards women and women’s rights as expressed in his life and letters. However, the memoir also includes a number of small speculations and anecdotes, and these tended to get more evident the further into the expanded essay the reader gets. Some of the anecdotes are likely true, but are strongly influenced by Muriel’s rosey-hued nostalgia; for example when she wrote:
Mrs. Gamwell also gave the children about a hundred picture postcards that Sonia had mailed to Howard. These all held loving, spirited messages to H.P.L. from his sweetheart in New York. Not knowing their possible value in the far-away future, I did not hold on to any of these cards bearing Sonia’s signature, written in her breezy, happy handwriting. It was plain to be seen, from the messages on the cards, that this pretty woman of writing ability—among her other gifts—really liked our H.P.L.! And the strange part of it all was that he had not once mentioned his love affair to us…and we were his very good friends.
The children played for hours with the cards, and they eventually went the way all children’s toys go…in the ash-heap! (ibid. 17)
If a reader traced Muriel’s accounts of Lovecraft over the years, some details shift in the telling. Notably, her account of the extant of Lovecraft’s revision of “The Loved Dead” changes over time, and is a bit at odds with her husband’s own account, given in the Summer 1948 issue of the Arkham Sampler; her insistence on C. M. Eddy Jr.’s sole authorship was likely a response to August Derleth and Arkham House’s publication of stories which Lovecraft had revised or ghostwritten with the emphasis on Lovecraft’s contribution. So too, her references to Lovecraft’s mother seem to shift to reflect views on Susan Lovecraft in line with other memoirs—and this kind of “alignment” of views can easily distort the historical picture, since it appears that several contemporary memoirs are supporting the same image, when in reality later sources may be partially based on earlier ones. A tricky knot to untangle when a memoir is “revised” as “The Gentleman from Angell Street” was.
The most substantial difference between the 1945 and 1961 essays however is the section dealing with Lovecraft’s revision client Hazel Heald.
In this same year, 1932, I formed a little New England writers’ club of my own, and one of my members, a divorcee was very anxious to succeed in the weird writing field. She sent me an original manuscript with a very passable plot, yet told unconvincingly and amateurishly. I let Lovecraft read it when next he came over to our house on Pearl Street, and he agreed that it did have possibilities. (ibid, 22-23)
This is the start of Muriel E. Eddy’s account of “The Man of Stone” (1932) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft. For quite a long time, this was the only such account; Lovecraft wrote little about much of his revision work, and Heald’s own version of events is largely unpublished, although she makes an allusion to the Eddys in a letter:
About HPL and whether he was separated or divorced—I am certain he was divorced but have written to someone I know who will give me all the facts as her husband signed certain papers at that time. —Hazel Heald to August Derleth, 7 Apr 1937
C. M. Eddy Jr. is claimed to have signed the Lovecrafts’ divorce decree as a witness, though Lovecraft himself did not sign it. So while Heald does not give the exact circumstances of her and Lovecraft coming together, there is nothing to directly counter Muriel E. Eddy’s version of events. At the same time, there is every evidence that Muriel E. Eddy’s version of events was including some information from her friend Hazel Heald, at second- or third-hand.
A skeptical scholar might thus wonder how much of it that Muriel E. Eddy knew and neglected to tell in 1945, versus how much of it she heard about later and incorporated into her expanded memoir—and on top of that, how much Muriel E. Eddy’s rose-tinted spectacles were skewing her account. Particularly notable in “The Gentleman from Angell Street” is her suggestion that Heald held a romantic interest in Lovecraft, and:
With a little encouragement, I am convinced that H.P.L. and Hazel might have married, and they would have made a good pair. But Lovecraft knew his health was failing, and perhaps he did not feel like taking a chance on another marriage, seeing that his first one had failed so miserably. —Muriel E. Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street 26
This kind of speculation, and the obvious incorporation of second-or-third-hand information that fed into it, make “The Gentleman from Angell Street” less reliable of a source than it could have been. Which is unfortunate, given that we otherwise have little information on the Heald-Lovecraft stories besides the brief mentions in Lovecraft’s letters, and the sparing accounts given in Heald’s surviving correspondence with August Derleth.
An addendum to “The Gentleman from Angel Street” published in 1977 discusses the death of Sonia H. Davis and August Derleth; these memories are brief, vivid, and fairly accurate. She ends with the rather bittersweet yet hopeful note:
Thus the original Lovecraftian circle has been dwindling, and yet, a new one grows in ever widening arcs among the interest generated by fanzine magazines, biographies of HPL, and the eternal works and character of the man himself. (ibid. 29)
Ruth M. Eddy was born in 1921; she would have been only about two years old when Lovecraft met her parents and first visited their house in 1923, and five when Lovecraft returned to Providence after his stay in New York City. Her brief memoir of his visit was published in 1949, and it may be wondered how much of this she actually remembered at such a young age…but some things do stick in the memory, long after children grow up. So she wrote “The Man Who Came At Midnight:”
Gaslight flicked eerily through the crack in my bedroom door. It was Halloween, night of the supernatural, and long past midnight. I had drifted off to sleep with visions of hobgoblins and Jack-o’-lanterns drifting through my childish mind. Suddenly, as in a dream, I heard a sepulchral voice saying, “Slithering…sliding…squealing…the rats in the walls!”
Half-asleep, half-awake, I lay in the darkness for a moment, and then shouted for my mother as loudly as I could. She came into my room and spoke softly, “Everything’s all right, dear. It’s just Mr. Lovecraft telling us about the new story he’s writing. Don’t be afraid. Go back to sleep…[“] —Ruth M. Eddy, The Gentleman from Angell Street 59
Ruth’s accounts jive with her mother’s memoir of Lovecraft’s early visits; from Lovecraft’s letters, we know “The Rats in the Walls” was written at about the time he met the Eddys, so it would not be surprising if he read his story aloud to his new friends. Given that this was published after Muriel E. Eddy’s account, there’s also the strong possibility that Ruth was influenced by her mother’s memoir, or at least her parent’s version of events.
There is not much in “The Man Who Came At Midngith” for scholarly interest; no new tidbit of information to seize on—but most memoirs aren’t written for academia, as a record of key facts and vital statistics, or even to set the record straight. They are simply a record of impressions and anecdotes, to keep the memory of the individual from being forgotten as those who knew them in turn grow old and die. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes insightful or gutwrenching—when the person is gone, a life is made of such moments, recalled and set down by those they touched. Or if not a life, then the first step from a pallid ghost to becoming a living myth.
Not a Halloween has passed since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 without my family fathering for the reading aloud of a weird story by our favourite author—now internationally famous as a writer in the genre—although our eloquence cannot compare with his masterful interpretations. (ibid. 61)
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 