Tag: nonfiction

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

My father, george Willard Kirk, died on March 22, 1962. With him died, I believed, all hope of reconstructing a history of his friendship with Lovecraft and of his membersip in the Kalem Club. But I was wrong. Recently, when my mother, Lucile Dvorak Kirk, entered a nursing hme, we were obliged to go through her effects, expecting few surprises.

But, behind closed doors, in a large sealed carton musty with age, marked “to be destroyed without opening upon my death”, we discovered a treasure: hundreds of letters to her from her yet-to-be husband, George, written between 1924 and 1927. In addition, the carton held a metal box containing letters and poems writen by Lovecraft and other Kalem Club members. Rather than destroy them, I brought them back to my home in Duluth, Minnesota, hungry for information about my father during those years.
—Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” in Lovecraft Studies 28 (Spring 1993), 2

George Kirk (1898-1962) was a bookseller and sometime small-press publisher; during the 1920s he was also a friend and associate of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Samuel Loveman. Lovecraft first met Kirk while visiting Loveman in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922, the same trip where he met Hart Crane. All of them would find themselves in New York City within a few years, and Kirk’s time in New York City overlapped with Lovecraft’s marriage (1924-1926) and residence in the city, and Kirk was a member—with Lovecraft, Loveman, Frank Belknap Long, Jr., Arthur Leeds, Rheinhart Kleiner, James F. Morton, and Henry Everett McNeil—of the informal Kalem Club, so-called because their names each started with K, L, or M. A vital literary circle mentioned in many of Lovecraft’s letters during this critical formative period in his life.

Sunday evening we met the rare book dealer George Kirk—a friend of Loveman’s—and the quartette of us explored the excellent Cleveland Art Museum in Wade Park.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 4 Aug 1922, LFF1.51

In Lovecraft’s letters, we see only occasional glimpses of Kirk; he is one of the gang, but learn little about him. Mara Kirk Hart, poring over her father’s letters and other papers, presents Kirk in his own words—and Lovecraft as Kirk saw and knew him. Hart quotes from one of her father’s letters:

An adorable note from HL, next to yourself the move lovable creature on this or any other universe known or imagined. The salutation is “Georgius Rex.” HL is 18th Century English—English to the core—though he has become more and more interested in American colonial houses, furniture, and times. he has been interested in and knows quite well both Roman and Egyptian histories and living. But all that is secondary. I believe I had rather I had met him earlier in life that I might have less of GK [George Kirk] and more HL. But you love me as is, so I complain not at all.
—Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” in Lovecraft Studies 28 (Spring 1993), 3

In her essay, Hart draws on both Lovecraft’s letters and her fathers’ to give an outline of their friendship during the 20s. Kirk was not a writer in the same way Lovecraft was, busy making a living through the book trade, with all of its ups-and-downs. His letters to his fiancée (engaged 1923, married 1927) are a counterpart to Lovecraft’s diary-like letters to his aunts from the same period. It was Kirk’s apartment building at 317 W. 14th St. that was the model for the apartment building in Lovecraft’s “Cool Air,” and Kirk’s brief notes about Lovecraft’s wife Sonia track with their own accounts of the marriage—although Kirk, being on the outside of things, could only make observations, e.g.:

Don’t dislike Mrs. L. She is, as I have said, at hospital. H more than intimated that they would separate . . .
—Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924-1926” in Lovecraft Studies 28 (Spring 1993), 3

Hart’s essay in Lovecraft Studies #28 runs a substantial 15 pages, yet it really only whetted the appetite of Lovecraft scholars. Here was fresh primary source material, offering not just additional insight onto Lovecraft’s life, activities, and marriage during this period, but contextual details on Kirk and the Kalem Club itself. While the audience for more information was no doubt modest, it was there—and eventually Hart published further works on her father’s life and letters.

Lovecraft’s New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927 (2006, Hippocampus Press) was edited by Mara Kirk Hart and S. T. Joshi. The book publishes relevant excerpts from Kirk’s almost daily letters to his fiancée from 1924-1927, as well as poems and related essays by other Kalem Club members, including Lovecraft’s, as well as Rheinhart Kleiner’s essays reflecting on the Kalem Club. It is, without exaggeration, an essential resource to further understanding of Lovecraft during his New York period; which are otherwise really only attested by Lovecraft’s letters of the period and scattered references in memoirs by friends like Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

The excerpts go beyond a focus on just Lovecraft; Kirk was not a planet or moon in orbit around Lovecraft, but a comet tracing an arc through a much more complicated system of literary heavenly bodies. So for example, a particularly interesting entry from 1925 reads:

JANUARY [undated]. Wednesday. Meeting at Belknap’s tonight, and I shall not go. If I am strong enough to go anywhere, I shall go to the sale of Currier and Ives at Anderson’s. But I doubt that I shall go out. Have a bit of food and a bit more whiskey so I probably shall soon be either well or dead. . . . Shall send a “Weird Tales” with magazines. It contains “Hypnos,” a very fine short story by deal old H. P. Lovecraft. “Imprisoned with the Pharoahs” is also by him, but it is much too long and not very good. Do not try “The Latvian?” because it is by Herman Fetzer (Jake Falstaff, you know), for it is very poor. But “Hypnos” is little short of being a masterpiece.
—Mara Kirk Hart & S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s New York Circle 36

This is interesting in part because it falls into a gap in Lovecraft’s letters; after a 31 December 1924 note to his aunt Lillian, Lovecraft’s next letter to her is dated 22 Jan 1925. Also, it mentions the May-Jun-Jul 1924 triple-sized issue of Weird Tales that included Lovecraft’s ghostwritten story for Harry Houdini, and confirmation (if any was needed) that Lovecraft’s authorship was an open secret among his friends. It is only though Kirk’s letters that we learn that at times the Kalem Club conversations sometimes turned to the subject of women:

OCTOBER 11, Saturday. Last evening I sat at table thinking of you, only entering conversation when forced to. I missed little, however, since chaps were merely airing their usually absurd ideas about our sex. One was a homo, one an avowed fetishist, one quite nothing where sex is concerned, and your GW with whom you are usually acquainted. I tire of half-baked ideas and people, of old-fashioned and antipathetic prejudices, of raw geniuses, and, when I happen to consider him, of GW. However, in many ways, his sole company is the most bearable of them all.
—Mara Kirk Hart & S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s New York Circle 28

It is tempting to give identities here. Samuel Loveman is known to have been gay (“homo”), James F. Morton is known to have experimented with free love groups and even a nudist group at different points (“fetishist”). A close reading of Lovecraft’s diary-letters to his aunt shows that he probably wasn’t at that meeting, since on Friday, 10 Oct 1924, he went to Elizabeth, New Jersey to view the colonial sites (LFF1.185). Which may well be why the subject turned to women in Lovecraft’s absence! However, in a later letter Kirk does state that he and Lovecraft talked about sex a bit among themselves (Lovecraft’s New York Circle 65), so perhaps it had nothing to do with his absence at all.

One benefit of the fuller account is that we get more of Kirk’s accounts of Lovecraft’s marriage and his wife. In this, Kirk was very much HPL’s friend and not always very conscientious of Sonia, at least not in his letters, but this is still an outside view of the marriage that provides some insight into how they spoke and acted as a couple, e.g. in 1926, when HPL had returned to Providence but before the divorce:

JULY 6. Am on a nice fast express from Boston. Have had a very pleasnt itme seeing Providence with old HPL, and just had dinner with him and a chap I met and liked named Tycon. He’s a very decent young bookseller and is much interested in local history. Mrs. L. was with us much of my first day—very unpleasant at times. HPL loves cats and almost invariably stops to stroke htem. She—Mrs. L—several times remarked that cats are the only things H really loves—and once remarked—in a quite casual way, but looking at me to read its effect, which I doubt she did,—that she believes H would love to take a cat to bed with him. I have heard this sort of thing from her before and can’t say I respect her the more for it.
—Mara Kirk Hart & S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s New York Circle 92

This might have been a slight misunderstanding on Kirk’s part; in her memoir The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985):

My neighbor who so kindly made room for me had a beautiful Persian cat which she brought to my apartment. When Howard saw that cat he made “love” to it. He seemed to have a language that it understood and it immediately curled up in his lap and purred contentedly.

Half in earnest, half on jest, I remarked “What a lot of perfectly good affection to waste on a mere cat, when some woman might highly appreciate it!”
—Sonia H. Davis, “The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft” in Ave Atque Vale 134-135

In 2013, Mara Kirk Hart self-published So Many Lovely Days: The Greenwich Village Years (Kirk Press). This is an account of her parent’s marriage, beginning when they met in Cleveland in 1923 and continuing through marriage, three pregnancies, two births, and many moves as they struggled to maintain a bookselling business; the New York portion ends in 1939, and the final chapters recount her parent’s final days, George Kirk passing in 1962, and Lucille Dvorak Kirk in 1994.

Lovecraft and the Kalem Club are not the main, or even minor, focus of this memoir. It is a deeply personal work at her parents lives, sometimes hand-to-mouth, through the difficult years of the Great Depression, the Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, and the final evaporation of the New York City dream they could no longer afford. Most of the book focuses on the period after Lovecraft stopped living in New York, but still touches on his occasional visits. One thing this book has that the other accounts lack is a better view of Lucille Hart. Women often fall into the cracks in history. At one point, Hart even draws from Lovecraft’s letters:

In May 1928, during a visit to New York, Lovecraft wrote to his beloved Aunt Lillian: “Kirk—good old Georgius—whose marriage has proved extremely congenial, and who is still the same happy-go-lucky, unsubdued old nighthawk of yore. . . . He has a basement flat on West 11th Street—separate from his shop and ciculating library on west 8th, although he lived over the latter at first. Kirk, honest old Mac [Everett McNeil,] and I walked down Braodway together, and when we came to the elevated at 66th, Kirk insisted that Mac and I hop on and accompany him home for a further session. We did so, and found Mrs. Kirk half-expecting such a codicillary assemblage. She is a pleasant blonde person, not especially young or good-looking, but apparently a highly congenial partner for the carefree and irresponsible Georgius. The household served tea, crackers and cheese.” Congenial as George and Lucy seemed to Lovecraft, they were often dsiappointed and exasperated with each other. They loved each other, yes, but financial problems prevented the hoped for marital bliss. What to do?
—Mara Kirk Hart, So Many Lovely Days: The Greenwich Village Years 37 (cf. LFF2.644)

This final book is not essential to Lovecraft studies in the way thatLovecraft’s New York Circlewas—but then, she had written that book. This is a book about the struggles of two people trying to have a marriage, raise kids, and run a business in the busiest city in the United States during a tumultuous period. It’s about love and affection being tested in a thousand ways, from government officials raiding the shop for illicit copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Lucy’s anger at George’s drinking habits. Lovecraft’s letter—almost the only time he mentions Lucy Kirk, and never by name—shows how scarce accounts of wives and partners can be in the standard sources that scholars rely on. This book, at least, gives a fuller appreciation of one member of the Kalem Club, his wife, and their life together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Memories of Lovecraft II” by Helen V. Sully

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

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

That night, after dinner, he took me into a graveyard associated with Poe. . . . It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.That night, after dinner, he took me down into a graveyard near where Edgar Allan Poe had lived, or was he buried there? I can’t remember. It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eery light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began running out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.
The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 119Ave Atque Vale 365-366

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brown Digital Repository

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

Providence Journal, 4 Dec 1949, p110

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

Fantasy Advertiser #6 (Jan 1947)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The heart ceases to beat.

The last breath is released.

The countdown begins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975) by Samuel Loveman

Antisemitism

The following article deals explicitly with antisemitism in a historical context. Frank discussion of these matters requires the reproduction of at least some samples of antisemitic speech from historical sources (e.g. Lovecraft’s letters). As such, please be advised before reading further.

“American literature has produced three great writers of terror fiction: Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. It has been my good fortune—certainly, no inconsiderable one—to have been on intimate terms with tow of these: Ambrose Bierce and Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
—Samuel Loveman, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in The Arkham Sampler (Summer 1948)

For a matter of three years and more I was actually in daily association with him—years of plenitude and literary activity; years of happiness. I can safely assert that Lovecraft’s conversation takes its place among the masters of that brilliant but difficult art.
—Samuel Loveman, “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist” in the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Memorial Symposium (1958)

During that period I believed Howard was a saint. Of course, he wasn’t. What I did not realize (or know) was that he was an arrant anti-Semite who concealed his smouldering hatred of me because of my taint of Jewish ancestry. It would be impossible for me to describe the smug, cloaked hypocrisy of H.P.L.
—Samuel Loveman, “Of Gold and Sawdust” in The Occult Lovecraft (1975), 22

H. P. Lovecraft came into contact with Samuel Loveman (1887-1976) in 1917; the two shared a love of poetry and Classical themes, and with their correspondence, Loveman was drawn back into amateur journalism.

Loveman has become reinstated in the United through me. Jew or not, I am rather proud to be his sponsor for the second advent to the Association. His poetical gifts are of the highest order, & I doubt if the amateur world can boast his superior.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 8 Nov 1917, LRK 93

Lovecraft’s antisemitism, so adamant when speaking about the faceless, anonymous mass of Jews as a people, often broke down at the individual level. Loveman and Lovecraft became close friends, and their acquaintence brought Lovecraft into contact with the poet Hart Crane and his circle. In her memoir, Sonia H. Greene claimed that when she wished to prove to Lovecraft that his antisemitic prejudices were bunk, she invited both HPL and Loveman to New York. During the period of Lovecraft’s marriage and inhabitation of New York (1924-1926), the two were closely associated, sometimes seeing one another on a daily business, and for a time were neighbors at 169 Clinton Street. When thieves broke into Lovecraft’s apartment and stole his clothes and his wife’s suitcase, they also stole an expensive radio set that Loveman had secured with HPL.

Loveman and Lovecraft did not always move in exactly the same circles, however. For one, Loveman was a working bookman, always either employed or operating as a bookseller on his own account, while Lovecraft perpetually failed to find gainful employment. For two, Loveman was gay, a fact that Lovecraft never directly alludes to (and possibly was ignorant of); Loveman’s homosexual affairs are absent in Lovecraft’s letters, and largely only became more widely written about in later decades. After Lovecraft left New York, their lives drew apart, though they seem to have remained in correspondence until Lovecraft’s death.

For the next few decades, Loveman was a bookman. He developed a somewhat infamous reputation for his fanciful catalogues and a few inept attempts at forgery. As Lovecraft’s posthumous star waxed, Loveman produced three memoirs of his friend: the largely laudatory “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1948) that barely mentions Lovecraft’s xenophobia in New York, the anecdotal “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist” (1958), and the much more barebones and critical “Gold and Sawdust” (1975), written near the end of his life and addressing, for essentially the first time in print, his reaction to Lovecraft’s antisemitism.

So what changed Loveman’s attitude?

During Lovecraft’s lifetime, he had several Jewish correspondents, including Sonia H. Greene, Adolphe de Castro, Robert Bloch, Julius Schwartz, and Kenneth Sterling. While Lovecraft was an antisemite, these people were still his friends and loved ones; as such, his letters to them are notably absent of anti-Jewish sentiments. Even when Lovecraft was discussing the Nazis with a teenaged Robert Bloch in late 1933, HPL was careful to talk around certain issues, never once mentioning Jews or the Nazis’ antisemitic policies directly, e.g.:

Regarding the defeat of disproportionate cultural & standard-building influence by sharply-differentiated minority-groups—here again we have a sound principle misinterpreted & made a basis for ignorant, cruel, & fatuous action. There is of course no possible defence of the policy of wholesale confiscation, de-industrailisation, & (in effect) expulsion pursued toward groups of citizens on grounds of ancestral origin. Not only is it barbaric in the hardship it inflicts, but it involves a faulty application of ethnology & anthropology. However—this does not obscure the fact that there is always a peril of the concentration of disproportionate power & articulateness in the hands of non-representative & alien-minded minorities—whether or not of alien birth or blood. Cases are very numerous where small groups of especially active & powerful thinkers have tacitly & gradually secured a “corner” on expression & value-definition in nations widely different from themselves in natural instincts, outlook, & aspirations.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [late October 1933], LRB 82-83

Lovecraft’s surviving letters to Loveman are few and end in 1927, so we don’t know exactly how or if HPL discussed the Nazis with his other Jewish friend, but based on his letters to Bloch et al., it seems reasonable to assume that HPL was careful to never give his friend offence on account of his Jewish ethnicity. It is quite possible that at the time of Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Loveman had no idea of Lovecraft’s real thoughts about the Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power, or the discussions he had with others as the antisemitic policies began to go into effect. If Loveman did have any idea about Lovecraft’s antisemitism, it likely came from his friendship with Sonia H. Davis, Lovecraft’s ex-wife.

In the mid-1940s, as WW2 was coming to a close, Loveman was contacted by early Lovecraft biographer Winfield Townley Scott, who was looking for data. Loveman pointed Scott at Sonia, and between Scott’s article and Sonia’s memoir, she seems to have come into correspondence with Loveman again; at least, there are some letters between the two dated 1947. Sonia had been in correspondence with August Derleth, who attacked her memoir and claims of Lovecraft’s prejudice, keeping in mind that this was in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Sonia vented her spleen a little to Loveman:

In his Marginalia he is all wrong in stating how much older I am than HP, also that our divorce was the result of HP’s inability to write for money or his lack of desire to write for money. None of this is true. I carried a handsome salary at the time and provided many things for him. I did not leave him on account of non-providence, but chiefly on account of his harping hatred of J__s.
—Sonia Davis to Samuel Loveman, 4 Jan 1948, JHL

This is likely why Loveman wrote:

Her treatment by H.P. L. was, whether consciously or unconsciously, cruel. His anti-Semitism formed the basis for their eventual divorce. Howard’s monomania about race was about as close to insanity as anything I can think of.
—Samuel Loveman, “Of Gold and Sawdust” in The Occult Lovecraft (1975), 22

Elsewhere, Sonia wrote:

But I told him this very soon after we met; especially when he remarked that it was too bad that Samuel Loveman was a Jew.
—Sonia Davis to Winfield Townley Scott, 24 Sep 1948, JHL

This is presumably the source for when Loveman wrote:

Lovecraft had a hypocritical streak to him that few were able to recognize. Sonia, his wife, was indubitably his innocent victim. her love for him blinded her to many things. Among the things he said to her was, “Too bad Loveman’s a Jew; he’s such a nice guy.”
—Samuel Loveman, “Of Gold and Sawdust” in The Occult Lovecraft (1975), 22

This kind of context was important because Loveman had relatively little save his own memories of Lovecraft to go by when he wrote his first memoir of Lovecraft, published in 1948. He wrote to Derleth:

I look forward to the publication of the letters [of Lovecraft] with a great deal of eagerness. I have practically nothing at all, or I would have tend[er]ed them to you. All my material was either destroyed or confiscated when I left Cleveland for New York.
—Samuel Loveman to August Derleth, 1 Dec 1949,
quoted in Letters to Maurice W. Moe & Others 29

How Loveman lost most of his letters from Lovecraft isn’t clear, but in the 1940s Loveman purchased several hundred pages of letters that Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had received from Lovecraft; HPL’s letters were already becoming collectors’ items. When Loveman wrote his second memoir of Lovecraft in 1958, this material was presumably available, but perhaps Loveman had not taken the time to read through several hundred pages of his friend’s infamous handwriting when approached for a brief memoir.

So what happened between 1958 and 1975 that caused Loveman to write:

The one last letter of his I have fills the bill, and a hundredfold more! It advocates the extinction of the Jews and their exclusion from colleges. The letter was written to a partner of W. Paul Cook, who published my books, “The Sphinx” and “The Hermaphrodite.”
—Samuel Loveman, “Of Gold and Sawdust” in The Occult Lovecraft (1975), 22

The unnamed “partner” would be Walter J. Coates, an amateur journalist and small press publisher during the 30s; Coates’ letters from Lovecraft had apparently also passed through Loveman’s hands. Several of Lovecraft’s letters to Coates appear to be in private hands or lost, so the exact statements that Loveman found so damnable are not widely available. However, a letter from Lovecraft to Coates contains several of these sentiments:

Undeniably—all apart from the effects of natural change and altered philosophic-scientific-psychological perspective—the world of American taste & opinion is distinctly & lamentably Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups. Some of this influence certainly seeps into Anglo-Saxon critical & creative writing to an unfortunate extent; so that we have a real problem of literary & aesthetic fumigation on our hands. The causes are many—but I think the worst factor is a sheer callous indifference which holds the native mind down to mere commercialism & size & speed worship, allowing the restless & ambitious alien to claim the centre of the intellectual stage by default In a commercialized civilization publicity & fame are determined by economic causes alone—& there is where the special talents of Messrs. Cohen & Levi count. Before we can put them in their place, we must de-commercialise the culture—& that, alas, is a full-sized man’s job! Some progress could be made, though, if all the universities could get together & insist on strictly Aryan standards of taste. They could do much, in a quiet & subtle way, by cutting down the Semite percentage in faculty & student body alike.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Walter John Coates, [mid-October? 1929], LWH 121

The date is uncertain, but the sentiments are in keeping with some of Lovecraft’s other letters. It followed Lovecraft’s time in New York, when he was most vociferous about the city and its Jewish population. The idea that Jews exerted an outsized influence on national media was one that Lovecraft apparently picked up in New York and retained in follow years, and unfortunately dovetailed with Nazi propaganda. Similar-though-not-identical statements appear in some of Lovecraft’s letters from 1933 and ’34, though this is the most explicit instance where Lovecraft suggests censorship of Jews from universities and academia.

The title of Loveman’s final essay, “Of Gold and Sawdust,” echoes a famous statement from W. Paul Cook’s “In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1941), on Lovecraft’s return to Providence after his stint in New York—a frustrating period which had seen Lovecraft married, separated, failed to find employment, robbed, and utterly miserable by the end of it, but had matured somewhat as a writer with his best work ahead of him, still to be written—”He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.”

These were happy days when I believed H.P.L. was pure gold—not sawdust!
—Samuel Loveman, “Of Gold and Sawdust” in The Occult Lovecraft (1975), 21

What Loveman’s final essay—really, his final word—on Lovecraft captures is the sense of betrayal. These were two men who had been intimate friends, through thick and thin, who had dedicated poems to each other (cf. “To Mr. Theobald” (1926) by Samuel Loveman), who were, if far from agreeing on every subject, at the least open and accepting of differences of opinion. In the 1920s and 30s, when antisemitism was so rife in the United States and rising abroad, there was likely a bit of trust there, that at least Lovecraft was different. Maybe (we don’t know, unless Loveman’s letters to Sonia surface), he even doubted Sonia’s initial claims regarding Lovecraft’s antisemitism, since they didn’t match his own memories.

Then the letters came into his hands that gave undeniable proof.

There is a broader context that Loveman missed, having not lived long enough to see the publication of more of Lovecraft’s correspondence than the first volumes of the Selected Letters from Arkham House. He did not see where Lovecraft’s antisemitism began or where it ended, did not see how and why Lovecraft’s prejudices changed over time and in response to personal and world events. Would it have made any difference? “Of Gold and Sawdust” is the cry of a wounded soul, of memories forever poisoned by the thought that in his heart, Lovecraft had hated Loveman just because he was a Jew.

Lovecraft’s letters do not speak of hatred for his friend Sam Loveman. Imperfect as Lovecraft was, he was loyal in his appreciation for Loveman as a friend and poet. That makes “Of Gold and Sawdust” especially bittersweet; there is no reply that Lovecraft could make, no apology, no way to mend the hurt he had inadvertently caused. While Lovecraft’s friends are all dead, it is a feeling that echoes in the lives of many fans who, wanting to learn more about this Lovecraft person and their stories, finds out about his prejudices. It is something we all have to come to terms with, each in our own way.

“Of Gold and Sawdust” was published in The Occult Lovecraft (1975). It has not been reprinted.

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

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

“A Lovecraft Postscript” (9 Jan 1944) by Philomena Hart

Winfield, do you ever think of Philomena Hart? She used to be so interested in H.P.L. and many’s the letters we exchanged…re: him. I always had the greatest of respect for BOTH the Harts … B.K.H. was HPL’s good friend. (By mail, at least. HPL used to adore BKH’s column.)
—Muriel E. Eddy to Winfield Townley Scott, 23 Sep 1947, Brown Digital Repository

Mary Philomena Hart (née Kelly) (1894-1944), journalist and book reviewer, was the wife of Bertrand K. Hart (1892-1941), who for many years was the literary editor of the Providence Journal. Betrand Hart had a long-running article series titled “The Sideshow,” known colloquially in Providence as “bekes” according to H. P. Lovecraft, because he would sign each article “B. K. H.” Sideshow articles tended to be relaxed, positive, and centered on small affairs local to Providence and Massachusetts (where the Harts made their home).

H.P.L. and B.K.H. became friends by mail. In 1929, “The Sideshow” had a discussion about the weirdest tales, and Lovecraft couldn’t resist writing in. Letters went back and forth, and excerpts from some of them ended up in “The Sideshow”; these are all reproduced in Miscellaneous Letters. Following B.K.H.’s death in 1941, his widow Philomena edited a collection of these columns into book form, published as The Sideshow of B. K. Hart (1941).

She didn’t stop there.

It is the business of the living to keep on living, and so Philomena Hart continued her own column in the Providence Journal. On 9 January 1944, a few months before her own death, she published an article on H. P. L. and B. K. H.:

A Lovecraft Postscript Based on Barnes Street Letters.—The Providence Poe and His Decade of Mail to “The Sideshow”

Of all the fascinating mail which made its way through the years to the desk of “The Sideshow” there was nothing more exciting than the frequent postcards and letters that carried the initials, “H. P. L.” Winfield Scott and I talked at length about them when he was preparing his rewarding paper on Mr. Lovecraft for the Book Page a fortnight ago. They were written in tiny, clear script, their message was always pertinent to something that had appeared in B. K. H.’s column and usually they dealt with the eldritch, the supernatural, the oblique.

Mr. Lovecraft hoped one day to compile an anthology of horror-tales meeting his own exact requirements. “I fight shy,” he wrote in a long letter on the theme, “of tales dependent on a trick ending. Best horror dwells in atmosphere—even in language itself—and not in obviously stage-managed denouments and literary cap-pistol shots.” Once he wrote for B. K. H. a Providence ghost story of such eerie wonder that speaking of it the next morning in the Journal B. K. H. said “Personally I congratulate him up on the dark spirits he has evoked in Thomas Street but I shall not be happy until joining league with wraiths and ghouls I have plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost by way of reprisal upon his own doorstep on Barnes Street. I think I shall teach it to moan in a minor dissonance every morning at three o’clock sharp with a clanking of chains.

* * *

Only a couple of days later came Mr. Lovecraft’s answer to this threat in the form of a sonnet dedicated to B. K. H.

“The Thing, he said, would come that night at three
From the old churchyard on the hill below.
And, crouching by an oak-fire’s wholesome glow
I tried to tell myself it could not be.
Surely, I mused, it was a pleasantry
Devised by one who did not truly know
The Elder Sign bequeathed from long ago
That sets the trailing forms of darkness free.
He had not meant it—no—but still I lit
Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
Out of the Seekonk and a steeple chimed
THREE—and the firelight faded bit by bit—
Then at the door that cautious rattling came
And the mad truth devoured me like a flame.”

* * *

It was an oddly enduring friendship, that of B. K. H. and Lovecraft, for they met only through correspondence. There was never through the years even a telephone conversation though they must have often been at shouting distance from one another. Sometimes there would be post-cards nearly every day, occasionally two long arresting letters in one week coming from Barnes Street, then when matters discussed in “The Sideshow” were out of the range of Mr. Lovecraft’s particular interests there would be a spell of silence. Then suddenly some allusion in the column, some provocative line would start the welcome flood in motion again.

B. K. H. always valued Lovecraft highly, always felt that one day our Providence Poe would meet the recognition he so richly deserved. B. K. H. would have been delighted indeed that the present literary editor of the Journal saw fit to devote an article to the personality and the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.

The correspondence did not last a decade; Lovecraft was only at 10 Barnes Street from 1926-1933, when he moved to 66 College Street, and the last “Sideshow” to mention Lovecraft was published in 1931. The excerpts from Lovecraft’s letters, and the poem “The Messenger,” are all borrowed from B. K. H.’s columns.

Winfield Townley Scott, the literary editor of the Providence Journal, had published “The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, R. I.” on 26 Dec 1943, an extensive review of the first two volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction from Arkham House, The Outsider and Others (1939) and Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943). Scott would go on to write the first extensive biographical treatment of H.P.L.: “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944).

It is always the unexpected that jars loose old memories, and sometimes sets one to sit down and write it out before they are forgotten again. So it seems to have been with Philomena Hart, who recalled happier days when her husband was still alive, and strange letters and postcards would come in the mail to brighten their life.

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

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

“Mrs. Hinckley’s Providence” (4 Jun 1967) by Anita W. Hinckley

While going through the letters from Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, one passage caught my eye:

Dear August Derleth,

The moment I saw this article I knew I had to send it to you! Her memories of H. P. L. do not coincide with ours—neighter of us remember that H. P. L. wore a black cloak (shades of Dracula!) or a wide-brimmed hat! Also, that he sat often in the railway station. (Only when he was about to meet one of his literary friends!)

—Muriel E. Eddy to August Derleth, 4 Jun 1967, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The brief description was unfamiliar; I knew of no such published account of Lovecraft. The enclosure did not survive in the file, however Muriel often sent Derleth clippings from local papers. An online search quickly located the article she discussed: “Mrs. Hinckley’s Providence,” which ran in the 4 Jun 1967 issue of the Providence Sunday Journal. Running for six pages (with ads and photographs), this article consists of a slightly rambling memoir of Rhode Island native Anita Wheelwright Hinckley (1884-1972), who wrote a number of memoirs of Rhode Island, including Wickford Memories (1972).

Lovecraft fans will note many familiar street names as Mrs. Hinckley reflects on the changes that the city went through over the course of her life, including Angell St. and Benefit St. She was most definitely familiar with the same geography of where Lovecraft lived and worked, and reference to the Providence Art Club suggests their families probably moved within the same general social circles.

But what did Mrs. Hinckley have to say about Lovecraft?

Before I forget it I want to write about Mr. Lovecraft. He was an unusual person, medium height, always dressed in black, with a cape coat and a wide-brimmed hat winter and summer. He wrote gruesome stories rather like Edgar Allan Poe, and some charming poetry.

Dorothy Walter, a member of our Short Story Club, said Mr. Lovecraft used to call on her when she was young. About 20 years ago a stranger came from Baltimore and asked Miss Walter and me many questions. I only remember that my father knew Mr. Lovecraft and always spoke to him. When we came from Wickford to go to school, Mr. Lovecraft was usually sitting in the Providence railway station, probably because it was nice and warm there.

It isn’t clear when Mrs. Hinckley saw H. P. Lovecraft. The 1910 Federal Census has her living in North Kingston, Rhode Island; but that same year she married Frank Hinckley of Providence, and their first child was born there in 1911. On the face of it, Mrs. Hinckley’s residence in Providence seems to have covered most of Lovecraft’s adult life. Yet the recollection “When we came from Wickford to go to school” recalls one of her other memoirs:

One day a week [George Cranston] would go to Providence to replenish his stock. He went on the early train, the one we children took to go to school spring and fall, and the one my father always took as long as we lived in Wickford. Winters, when the weather was bad, we had governesses and studied at home.
—Anita W. Hinckley, “Wickford Tales” (1965)

This suggests that a school-age Hinckley saw Lovecraft at the train station in Providence sometime in the 1890s or early 1900s (her father died in 1906, and she would have graduated high school in 1902). The problem is that Hinckley is older than Lovecraft; unless she saw him hanging out at the train station when he was 10-12, it seems unlikely.

When comparing Mrs. Hinckley’s account, written thirty years after Lovecraft was in his grave and probably at least 60 years after she saw him, we can confirm very little and might wonder at the accuracy of her memory. Lovecraft wasn’t known to go about in a cape coat and wide-brimmed hat, though a 1905 photograph does show Lovecraft in a dark coat and hat, so it isn’t improbable that he could have been wearing something similar.

Lovecraft at Jim Boudin’s club house in East Providence.

Dorothy C. Walter (1889-1967) was the author of “Lovecraft and Benefit Street,” which appeared in The Ghost and Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945), and “Three Hours with Lovecraft” in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959). Walter doesn’t mention Hinckley in those pieces, but there’s not necessarily any reason why she would. Nor is there any mention in Lovecraft’s letters of David Sherman Baker (1852-1906), whom Mrs. Hinckley claims knew Lovecraft—but, then again, since Mr. Baker died when HPL was only 16, before we have many letters, that might be understandable. The inquisitive stranger might have been science fiction fan and Lovecraft scholar George T. Wetzel (1921-1983) of Baltimore, although the description is scanty.

Ultimately, there is very little we can confirm from Mrs. Hinckley’s brief memoir. Yet there is no reason to think it is a deliberately false or exaggerated account, as with “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach. While Mrs. Hinckley may not have had much insight to give on Lovecraft’s life, tidbits like this are an example of the little invisible connections and influences that folks have on each other all the time.

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

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

Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024) by Sonia H. Davis & Monica Wasserman (ed.)

In the small village of Itchno, which is on the outskirts of the town of Konotop, in the small Province of Chernigov, on the cold and wintry night of March 16, 1883, with the temperature several degrees below zero, an infant girl was born.
—Sonia H. Davis, Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024) 1

In February 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, I noted the news as the invaders moved through Konotop, the birthplace of Sonia H. Davis, who had once been Sonia H. Lovecraft. In 2019, when I prepared my notes for a panel at NecronomiCon on Lovecraft’s ex-wife, I had wondered if there were any records of her early life still there in the city. As the Russians overran the city, any hope I had of some original documents about Sonia or her family surviving to fill in the gaps in her early life faded.

It was mid-October 2022 when I got in touch with Monica Wasserman (The Papers of Sonia H. Davis), and to my surprise found there were better sources closer at hand than Konotop. We shared a common interest in the former Sonia H. Greene, who had become Mrs. Lovecraft. However, Monica’s dedication to the subject far outstripped mine. Her considerable research on Sonia’s life included access to the papers of Sonia and her third husband at Brown University, tracking down some of Sonia’s books and the extremely scarce second issue of The Rainbow, and scouring newspaper archives and genealogical databases. She even managed to access photographs of Sonia that had never been published, and contacted Sonia’s living relatives for family lore.

My own research was more modest, though complementary: while Monica had focused on her subject, I’d been focused on everything else around Sonia. I had been meticulously reading H. P. Lovecraft’s letters for references to Sonia, and had obtained access to other correspondence from or related to Sonia in various archives. Monica had unearthed the goods: I could offer a bit of context and insight from the Lovecraftian side of things. When Monica followed through on her project of actually publishing Sonia’s autobiography, unearthed from the archive and supplemented by additional autobiographical materials like The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, she was very gracious in allowing me to be a beta reader and to comment on it before publication. Because a few of my suggestions found their way into the final product, I’m listed as a contributor.

Which is a very long way to say, I’m biased when it comes to Two Hearts That Beat As One.

Most readers come to Sonia H. Davis as an adjunct to their interest in her second husband, H. P. Lovecraft. Her memoirs of their marriage shed light on a critical period of Lovecraft’s life, and fans and scholars alike sought her out for what she could give them about him. Yet that interest never manifested in any profitable form. Lovecraftian scholarship and publishing in the 1930s-early 1970s was almost entirely a small-scale endeavor, dominated by amateurs and small presses like Arkham House that sometimes seemed more labors of love than businesses that could produce actual revenue. There was no major biography of Lovecraft released during Sonia’s lifetime, though every major biography since has depended at least in part on her memoirs.

Pretty much no one seemed interested in Sonia’s own story. Until Monica Wasserman, that is.

Sonia’s autobiographical manuscript is, first and foremost, the story of her life. Born to Jewish parents in Ukraine (then a part of the Russian Empire), the loss of her father, her travels to the United Kingdom and then the United States, the new family her mother made, her need to work at a young age, marry at a young age, to become a mother, a successful businesswoman, an amateur journalist…long before she met Lovecraft, Sonia lived a life worth telling about. Her story is the story of many immigrants that came to the United States, living by her wits and the sweat of her brow, striving for education to better herself, dreaming of her own business and financial freedom, and yes, even of love.

While Sonia is very honest in her autobiography, there are things she doesn’t talk about very much. This is where Monica added footnotes, stitched-in material from The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft and other autobiographical writings, to fill in some of the gaps. The result is more complete than just the individual works by themselves would be; the formatting by Helios is carefully done so it is easy to see at a glance when another text is “pasted-in,” and perhaps most importantly, in a way that preserves the intent of the book:

To tell Sonia’s story in her own words.

To appreciate Monica’s work, it is important to realize that Sonia desperately needed an editor. While some of her autobiographical writings proceed in a fairly linear manner, she had a tendency to hop around in time, or to put down sudden thoughts and recollections as they occurred to her, and there is much that might be forgotten (or omitted) when writing for a general audience decades later. We see little of her daughter, Florence Carol Greene, who grew up to be the journalist Carol Welde, for example, though we know their relationship was fraught and eventually irrevocably sundered. Endings seemed to be particularly difficult for Sonia; she struggled to wrap things up. The raw manuscripts aren’t unreadable, but they benefit immensely from someone taking the time and care to put them in order and to clarify a few obtuse points with cogent endnotes.

Monica put in the work so that the reader can access Sonia’s story more easily.

Two Hearts That Beat As One is, as of the moment it saw print, the definitive text on Sonia’s life. In a format accessible to both scholars and casual readers, it provides a unique glimpse into the life of a woman who suffered, strove, and finally achieved much of what she hoped for—love, a degree of economic comfort, and purpose—with her third husband, Nathaniel Davis. In time, old age would take this all away. All lives end, and the last chapters are rarely pleasant. Here, at last, Sonia is the star and subject of her own story, not a brief and shadowy chapter in H. P. Lovecraft’s.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Two Hearts That Beat As One is available both as a standard edition and a collector’s edition (with handsome slipcase). Helios House has made a beautiful, well-laid out project that does great service to Sonia’s text and Monica’s scholarship and hard work bringing this project together.

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

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

“Hyborian Africa” (1980) & “To Kush and Beyond: The Black Kingdoms of the Hyborian Age” (1980) by Charles R. Saunders

South of Stygia are the vast black kingdoms of the Amazons, the Kushites, the Atlaians and the hybrid empire of Zembabwe.
—Robert E. Howard, “The Hyborian Age”

The Hyborian Age of Conan the Cimmerian was no mythical white space, occupied only by pale Caucasians. In formulating the adventures of the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard drew on everything he knew: Conan’s travels encompass not just a fantasy geography, but chronologies and genres. The barbarian might find himself leading a battle of European-style medieval knights; on the deck of a ship whose pirates could have stepped out of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island; in a frontier wilderness fort reminiscent of pioneer Texas; in a stone temple that might have stood in some fantastic vision of ancient Egypt—and in a fantasy equivalent of Africa, populated by Black people, who were to Conan’s friends, allies, enemies, and lovers.

The Conan stories, while fantasy and aimed at Weird Tales, grew out of Howard’s love for history and adventure fiction, and writing historical adventure stories for magazines like Oriental Stories. The conceit of the Hyborian Age is that by setting it before any known period, Howard had a free hand to invent details that would otherwise trip him up if trying to write a realistic historical yarn.

For pulps like Adventure, accuracy was paramount; the magazine prided itself on publishing stories from people who knew their subject, who had gone out and lived in exotic lands, and returned to tell the tale. To that end, Adventure invited readers to write in with their questions, for Adventure’s stable of writers to answer. In September 2024, scholar Patrice Louinet came across a letter printed in a copy of Adventure (30 December 1923):

White Man and Native of West Africa

HAUSAS—trading-factory terms—marriage ceremonies and customs:

Question:—”I am writing to get some information in regard to the customs, habits, etc., of the natives of that part of Africa which is included in your section in ‘Ask Adventure.’

  1. Are the natives of a war-like stock? That is, did they come from a fighting race?
  2. How much authority does the superintendent of a trading-post possess?
  3. Do the whites interfere with the natives in dealing with native criminals?
  4. What are some of the punishments of native wrong-doers by the whites? By the natives themselves?
  5. What are some marriage customs among the natives? Am I right in supposing a native has full power to punish his wife in any way he pleases?
  6. Have the morals of the African natives been raised by the rule of the white men or have they decreased in standard?
  7. Is the ceremony of Mumbo-Jumbo—or something of some name like that—for the correcting of disobedient women used in that part of Africa? If so, how is it carried out?
  8. What is the customary costume of the natives?

I apologize for asking so many questions, but I am very much interested in Africa. If by any chance this letter should be published in Adventure, please do not print my name.”
—R.E.H., Cross Plains, Texas.
Text from REH.world.

This would be Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas—and if the questions of a 17-year-old boy seem somewhat ignorant, it must be remembered that knowledge of Africa was by no means widespread in the rural United States during the 1920s and 30s. For many years and even decades to come, Africa would be the metaphorical “dark continent,” whose peoples, geography, and history were intermixed with fantasy, racism, and plain ignorance. Howard’s questions were honest ones, and it is to his credit that he sought out answers instead of immediately falling back to stereotypes and fantasy when he wrote his first few African stories.

The Conan boom in the 1960s and 70s brought with it not just an increased admiration for Robert E. Howard as a writer and Conan the Cimmerian as a character, but new criticism and new sensibilities. As Marvel Comics adapted Howard’s character and stories to a new medium, they had to face the reality that this was a new world: the Civil Rights movement had won victories with the decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954) and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Black Pride and other movements raised awareness of the roots of the African diaspora in the United States and surrounding countries.

Adaption to this new reality was, at first, slow. “The Vale of Lost Women”(1967) by Robert E. Howard is one example of how 1930s stereotypes and prejudice found an unwelcome audience in the 1960s and 70s, and how later writers and artists worked to make this work acceptable to a contemporary audience of all races. Not every creator was so conscientious; in 1975, Black fan Charles R. Saunders wrote “Die Black Dog! A Look At Racism in Fantasy Literature.” While it was one thing for something Robert E. Howard, who died in 1936 and never lived to see the changes in US society, to rely on racial stereotypes the essay specifically called out latter-day creators of Conan pastiche for continuing to use such lazy and biased storytelling nearly four decades later.

Just because Charles R. Saunders called out writers of heroic fantasy doesn’t mean he stepped away from the genre; quite the opposite. In 1980, Saunders published two related essays: “Hyborian Africa” was published in the fanzine Paragon #1 (May 1980), and “To Kush and Beyond: The Black Kingdoms of the Hyborian Age” was published in Savage Sword of Conan #56 (Sep 1980). Both essays deal with similar subject matter: an exploration of the “Black Kingdoms” mentioned in Howard’s essay “The Hyborian Age,” references to which are sprinkled throughout Conan’s adventures. However, the purpose and approach of each essay is different.

The historical derivation of the lands south of Stygia, the Black Kingdoms, are less obvious. Nonetheless, a look at any reference work on African history quickly exposes Howard’s inspirations for the names of some of his Black Kingdoms, if not their cultural backgrounds [.] Kush, Punt, Darfar, Zembabwei and Amazon are names as familiar to African scholars as those of Poland, France, Spain and Italy are to students of the European past.
—Charles R. Saunders, “Hyborian Africa,” Paragon #1 (1980), 27

“Hyborian Africa” looks at the historical sources and inspiration behind Howard’s stories. Given that this was a fanzine and that Howard studies was in its infancy, the usual apparatus of scholarly writing is neither present nor expected: no footnotes, no bibliography. However, Saunders’ care in the article is evident. He addresses only the stories written by Robert E. Howard, not later pastiches or derivative material from the Marvel comic books. It is brief, at only a little over two pages, but the history offered is largely accurate…and if Saunders criticizes some of Howard’s depictions of these fantasy versions of African kingdoms, he also offers a parting observation:

Although Howard’s depictions of Hyborian Age blacks consisted primarily of stock racist stereotypes, he did do more research into African history than such contemporaries as Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even today, the mention of the wor[d] “Kush’ would draw only blank stares from most people. With the exception of Darfar, Howard’s historical foundations for his Black Kingdoms were as solid as those of the rest of Conan’s world. And this is to his credit.
—Charles R. Saunders, “Hyborian Africa,” Paragon #1 (1980), 29

“To Kush and Beyond: The Black Kingdoms of the Hyborian Age” was published as a literary exploration of the Black Kingdoms as they appear in the broader Conan mythology, which includes not just Howard’s stories but also stories that were completed or re-written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter like “Hawks over Shem,” “The Snout in the Dark,” and “The City of Skulls.” In adapting Conan stories to comics, Marvel had included some of de Camp and Carter’s creations, including Conan’s ally Juma the Kushite, and so Saunders incorporates that lore into his survey of the Black Kingdoms of the Hyborian Age. Saunders’ work provided an explanation and codification of lore on the world of Conan that both readers and writers could reference.

Being published in a comics magazine, Saunders’ essay was illustrated by Conan artists John Buscema and Gene Day, and being of a scholarly character includes a page of endnote citations, for a total of 7 pages. Saunders’ interest in African history is still present, though less explicit. In the closing paragraph, for example, he writes:

The cataclysm that formed the outlinees of the modern world separated the land south of the River Styx from the rest of the world, and raised up from the sea the entire west coast of what is now Africa. Much of the history and lore of the Black Kingdoms perished in the disaster—yet the Black Kingdoms did not truly die. Kush, Darfar and Punt rose again in historical times, and the West African Kingdom of Dahomey boasted a formidable corps of Amazon warriors. Like so many other nations and races, the African can trace their history “back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian Age….”
—Charles R. Saunders, Savage Sword of Conan #56 (1980), 54

While the two essays have very different purposes, considered together gives the sense that Charles R. Saunders wasn’t just chronicling the lore of the Hyborian world and glossing it to make it fit. Saunders was studying the work of Howard and other writers to see how they used Black characters and African history in their stories, for good or for ill—and he used those lessons when he wrote his own fiction, the kind of heroic fantasy series that he wanted to read.

Saunders combined his interests in African history and heroic fantasy in his own fiction, including the Dossouye stories about fantasy warrior-women that were first published in the anthology Amazons! (1979), and the Nyumbani setting stories that feature his hero Imaro—who would star in Saunder’s first novel, Imaro (1981). These are the critical early stories of Sword & Soul (see Milton J. Davis’ A Sword and Soul Primer), and they represent a desire to look beyond what other people have written to what stories have not been written, that need to be written, and to write them.

“Hyborian Africa” has not been reprinted. “To Kush and Beyond” has been reprinted in the Savage Sword of Conan Omnibus vol. 4.

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

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