“Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974) by R. A. Everts

If anyone speculated about Lovecraft’s sexuality while he was alive, they were polite enough not to publish about it. It wasn’t until Lovecraft was safely dead that the lockpicks of biographers went for his underwear drawer. When Winfield Townley Scott published “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in The Providence Journal for 26 Dec 1943, he wrote:

His stories are sexless and one supposes the man was nearly so, all but mothered into impotency. One can say that almost all of his adult relationships were homosexual, if the word is intended in the blandest sense: there is no sign of strong sexual impulse of any kind. He was “not at ease” with women. His marriage was a mistake and a quick failure. He was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing. When he bought pulps at Douglass Dana’s Old College Book Shop, at the foot of College Street, he tore off the more lurid covers lest friends misunderstand his interests.

Speculation on Lovecraft’s sexuality picked up during the period of the Lavender Scare. Attention on that front shifted to his ex-wife, Sonia H. Davis, who was perhaps uniquely in a position to know. Her memoir does not go into any detail, but suggests Lovecraft was reserved, e.g.:

When I parted for the night, I said “Howard, won’t you kiss me goodnight?” His reply was, “No, it is better not to.”
—Sonia H. Davis, “The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft” in Ave Atque Vale 143

This scene has been interpreted as an invitation to resume marital relations and Lovecraft’s decline; the morality involved is old-fashioned these days. But certainly Sonia implied that she and Howard engaged in normal heterosexual relations as a married couple. She implied further in the “pinkey” anecdote and the “asequately excellent lover” comments in Memories of Lovecraft (1969), and once, August Derleth asked her directly about it:

A propos your piece on Lovecraft, the question of HPL and sex had been bothering me for some time, especially in view of his violent reaction against Oscar Wilde as a person, however much he admired his work; so in 1953 when I was in Los Angeles, I asked Sonia Davis—the ex-Mrs. Lovecraft—rather bluntly about HPL’s sexual adequacy. She assured me that he had been entirely adequate sexually, and since she impressed me as a well-sexed woman, not easily satisfied, I concluded that HPL’s “aversion” was very probably nothing more than a kind of puritanism—that is, it was something “gentlemen” didn’t discuss, and so on.
—August Derleth, Haunted vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1968), 114.

The idea of Lovecraft as prudish, sexually repressed, asexual, or homosexual thus developed further in the literature; L. Sprague de Camp would synthesize several of these lines of thought in “Sonia & H. P. L.” (1973) and his biographical essay “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman” (1971), where he wrote:

He abhorred sexual irregularities and deviations, yet his own approach to sex was so prissy and inhibited as to make some wonder whether he, too, had a touch of lavender.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman” part 1, Fantastic Stories (Aug 1971) 98

Writers have described Lovecraft as “sexless,” which does not seem to have been really the case. During the early months of his marriage, he seems to have performed his husbandly duties adequately if without great enthusiasm. The charge of “latent homosexual tendencies” has, however, becomes such a fad that it is leveled at almost any notable, including Lovecraft, whose love life is the lease unusual. As far as the evidence goes, it is probably true that Lovecraft had a low sexual drive. Otherwise, there is nothing to support the “latent homosexual” charge.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman” part 2, Fantastic Stories (Oct 1971)

Comments like this may have been what inspired R. Alain Everts to write up “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman” for Nyctalops #9 (1974), an article based on Sonia’s memories of her long-dead second husband and H. P. Lovecraft’s sexuality:

During the course of my friendship with Sonia Lovecraft, the topic of her sexual relationship with Howard Phillips Lovecraft came up not once—due more to the young age at that time of this author, than to the lack of his scholarship. Fortunately for me, however, several times Mrs. Lovecraft brought up the subject herself and this scholar duly recorded and filed away the pertinent data.

In several unpublished recollections of HPL, Sonia mentioned in passing that aspect of their relationship—of course, as was HPL, she was also a Victorian prude when it came to sex and sexual relations; however Sonia lived into an age of greater liberties regarding sexual matters and the revelation of them in publick. And, she also had given birth to two children prior to her 20^th birthday, children by her first husband, only one of which survived. This experience, although somewhat traumatic and repressing to her at the time, was certainly much more than Howard had ever had, for he was a virgin at their marriage in 1924. His bride was hardly blushing, and although both were not enthusiastic in any sexual sense of the word, both were able to sustain satisfying sexual relations.

There are two immediate issues with this piece: first, the degree to which it tracks with (and thus was likely informed by) earlier works like Winfield Townley Scotts’s influential biographical essay make it suspect, and second, the source documents and conversations that Everts cites have never been published. While we know he was in contact with an elderly Sonia H. Davis for several years, this means that everything he’s reporting is being filtered through his own viewpoints and in his own words, and the veracity of the material is qualified by how trustworthy Everts himself is as a scholar and journalist (see The Curse of Cthulhu for some potential issues).

Even if Everts accurately presented Sonia’s comments on Lovecraft’s sexual reticience, she herself may have been influenced by posthumous publications on HPL. For example, when Everts quotes her as saying:

Sonia also reaffirmed a statement that I have heard from various sources—that when HPL was growing to young manhood, “his mother’s admonitions to him were ‘devastating.’” This possibly pertains to HPL’s looks—his mother did tell him that he was “grotesque” and that he should not go out at daytime for fear of scaring the neighbours. No doubt some sexual admonitions arose also, for the entire family, according to what Sonia recalls Annie Gamwell telling her, knew of Winfield Lovecraft’s paresis, and the adventures with prostitutes and women on his lengthy travels that gave him his affliction. In fact, Annie told Sonia prior to her marrying HPL that they could not have children—in fact this was a warning that Annie was giving to Sonia, and to me her choice of words was interesting—could not instead of should not.

The idea that Susan Lovecraft was concerned about her son’s appearance first appeared in the letters of Clara Lovrien Hess to Winfield Townley Scott, and were reported in his column in the Providence Journal. Sonia was in correspondence with Scott at the time (some of their letters remain at the John Hay Library) and would have learned of this; Scott’s research and speculations may well have influenced her memories. The story of Annie Gamwell confessing that HPL’s father had syphilis, for example, was written after Scott revealed Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s diagnosis and cause of death. It is impossible to tell, at this distance, how much if at all Sonia’s memories were fitted to the facts as reported, rather than straight recollections, with all their inherent inconsistencies and errors.

If this skepticism seems extreme, it is because the evaluation of historical evidence demands a certain amount of rigorous questioning of the sources: who is writing? When did they write it? Why did they write it? What sources influenced the writing? Both Everts and Sonia had their own biases when expressing views on Lovecraft’s sexuality, explicit and implicit, and this has to be understood when reading the essay. Without access to Everts’ source materials, we cannot tell if he was censoring Sonia by leaving out recollections that didn’t fit his theme (that of Lovecraft as heterosexual, capable of sexual intercourse, but of low sex drive), or if he was presenting everything she said and adding his own interpretation based on the then-current state of Lovecraft scholarship. The emphasis on Winfield Lovecraft’s syphilis, for example, appears to be an addendum to the discussion on WSL and syphillis in Dr. David H. Keller’s “Shadows over Lovecraft” (1948), Dr. Kenneth Sterling’s “A Reply to Keller’s Article on Lovecraft” (1951), and Arthur S. Koki’s “H. P. Lovecraft: An Introduction to His Life and Writings” (1962).

The degree to which “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” parallels or is in conversation with Lovecraft scholarship of the 1970s cannot really be overstated. While the quotes from Sonia’s unpublished memoirs or interviews are unique and original, the actual content strongly follows existing lines of thought. For example, when Everts quotes her as saying:

He was reared more like a girl evidently instead of being reared like a man; yet he was far from unsexed as someone has stated. But it was this sort of up-bringing, I believe, that made him squeamish and prudish about perfectly natural functions.

The “reared like a girl” comment dovetails some anecdotes in Sonia’s account that Susan Lovecraft had hoped to give birth to a girl, and that a young Lovecraft (who, as many infants in the 1890s, wore dresses and kept long hair) “looked like a beautiful little girl” and his mother cried bitterly when the long locks were cut off (Ave Atque Valley 121). Sonia and Lovecraft didn’t begin their relationship until after Susan Lovecraft’s death, so Sonia was reporting at best second-hand recollections, which were then quoted (hopefully accurately) by Everts—but the photographs of the infant Lovecraft in a dress were published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945), and Lovecraft’s own recollections of his earliest years were published in the first volumes of the Selected Letters.

The degree to which Sonia’s memories were affected by such post-Lovecraft materials is unknown; that she speculated on such things seems clear, based on material that didn’t pass through Everts’ hands. Everts’ motivation for adding it in this essay seems clear enough: it’s relevant, even if speculative, and it helps sell the narrative of a young Lovecraft who was prudish and dominated by his mother, “all but mothered into impotency” as Winfield Townley Scott put it.

An interesting question to ask is: what is not in “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex?” There is no reference to any speculations about Lovecraft as a homosexual or transgender. This was not a strong theme in Lovecraft scholarship at the time, although it would swiftly become one when L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) came out the following year. While Winfield Townley Scott had given short shrift to the idea of Lovecraft as a homosexual, de Camp would devote an entire chapter to Lovecraft’s sex life and speculation of HPL as a closeted homosexual. Whether this was a deliberate choice on Everts’ part (in some private correspondence, Everts evinced some homophobia), or simply accurate reporting of Sonia’s thoughts is unknown.

The idea of Lovecraft as transgender is relatively recent, and mostly based on the same evidence that was presented for HPL as a closeted homosexual; e.g. the idea that his mother attempted to raise him as a girl, as Sonia speculates in this essay. This harkens back to an older perspective on homosexuality that muddled sexuality and gender identity, with the idea that homosexual men were necessarily effiminate and possibly overly-influenced by women when young. Contemporary understanding of transgender identity does not follow this line of thought, but when reading older material out of context, misunderstandings can happen.

Also absent are any quotes from Lovecraft’s letters on the subject of sex. This may be more understandable as HPL’s more extensive discussions on the subject weren’t published until the later Selected Letters volumes published after this article came out. Some of Sonia’s further comments on Lovecraft and sex in her letters to August Derleth are also not present, but there is no reason to believe Everts would have had access to those letters and she may never have repeated those comments to him.

Today, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” is probably more interesting for the snippets from Sonia H. Davis than for Everts’ speculations and interpretations on Lovecraft’s sexuality. Some of the estimations have held up as more evidence has been presented: the idea of Lovecraft having a low sex drive seems well-supported based on his letters, the impressions of friends, and especially Sonia’s estimation quoted here. Lovecraft the prude has shown to be more complicated; his correspondence doesn’t include any frankly explicit or erotic material, but he was not otherwise reticient in writing about sex, even if he never went into anatomical detail. There is some supporting evidence in the memoirs of Mara Kirk Hart for Lovecraft’s reticience in discussing sex verbally.

“Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman” by R. A. Everts is ultimately a nonfiction work representative of a particular historical period and context, and understanding what works that Everts and Sonia were influenced by and responding to changes how we read and understand the essay. Its historical impact on Lovecraft studies hasn’t been dramatic; there are no terrific revelations here, mostly quite confirmations of ideas that had already been passed around before. However, it is one of the first works to discuss Lovecraft and Sonia’s sex life openly, quoting some of Sonia’s own words on the subject, and for that, at least, it has a place in the study of the lives of both H. P. Lovecraft and Sonia H. Davis.

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

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“Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1973) by R. Alain Everts v. “Sonia & H. P. L.” (1973) by L. Sprague de Camp

During my recent visit to Los Angeles over the Christmas hollidays [sic], I telephoned the Diana Lynn Lodge where Mrs. Sonia Lovecraft Davis had been living for the past 8 years. I phoned on 22 December and spoke with Mrs. Davis’ nurse, who informed me that Sonia was quite ill and deteriorating rapidly. She no longer read – that used to give her the greatest pleasure – as did writing, which she also no longer did. For the most part she watched television and slept – and of course died alone in that particularly horrible manner that we condemn the old to.
—R. Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Nyctalops #8 (Apr 1973), 45

Sonia H. Davis, the former wife of H. P. Lovecraft, was seldom mentioned in his letters after the divorce was filed in 1929. She largely disappeared from his life after the editing of “European Glimpses” in 1933. Was not informed of his death in 1937, and did not learn of it until 1946. Many of Lovecraft’s friends and correspondents did not know he was married, or if they knew, did not know Sonia’s name or where she was. When Winfield Townley Scott published “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in The Providence Journal for 26 Dec 1943, he wrote honestly:

Then a quite astonishing thing happened—I don’t know how else to describe this sudden outbreak of a semi-invalid tangled with apron strings; Lovecraft in 1924 went to New York and married. So far I have not discovered either the woman’s name or her present whereabouts.

The next year, in “His Own Most Fantastic Creation” in Marginalia (1944, Arkham House), the first extensive biographical essay on Lovecraft, Scott had at least learned Sonia’s name and some basic account of the marriage, though he added:

It is very difficult—and so I think I shall not bury this somewhat footnote-ish aside in an actual footnote but, without apology, keep it up here in larger print—to write of Lovecraft’s marriage. This is principally because the former Mrs. Lovecraft is inaccessible; one hears that she is remarried and that she is probably living out West, but even old friends of Lovecraft who knew his wife are unable to establish communication with her because they are denied, by her relatives, knowledge of her present name and whereabouts. To write of the marriage from others’ reminiscences and speculations is under the circumstances certainly permissible, and as certainly embarrassing. One can only hope, in view of Lovecraft’s increasing fame and the consequent importance of his biography and of the need for fairness all around, that this one woman who ever lived intimately with him will tell her story. Until then, one can only piece the story together form the fragments offered by outsiders—human outsiders! (ibid. 321)

Sonia did finally get in contact with Winfield Townley Scott, and with his assistance, she did write her memoir of the marriage, and he also helped her to get it published, in abridged and edited form. This led to Sonia meeting August Derleth, the eventual publication of “Four O’Clock” (1949), and many other things—but relatively little from or about Sonia herself made it to print. She had some scattered references in mid-century amateur journals, including attempts to sell books associated with Lovecraft. In 1961, when Scott revised his biographical essay for his collection Exiles and Fabrications, he included material from Sonia’s memoir, but new material on or about Sonia was almost nil.

Fans eager for data could look to “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968) by Muriel E. Eddy, but would scarcely learn anything not already in Sonia’s memoir. August Derleth put together Memories of Lovecraft (1969) from some of Sonia’s letters, but again, this is fairly thin. New facts about Sonia, and new information on her marriage with Lovecraft wasn’t really made public until after her death.

I heard later that Sonia had died on 26 December 1972 – I had the pleasure of her acquaintance for nearly 5 years, and of her family for the same length of time. it was on her 85th birthday in 1968 that I first met her personally although I had corresponded with her from some time previously. I was more than anxious to meet her, to try and persuade her to talk about her second husband, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, which she was at first extremely reticent to do – she was now the widowed Mrs. Nathaniel Abraham Davis, and owed most of her final good memories ot him. However, during the course of our personal acquaintance, in which I visited her several dozen times, to talk with her, to tape record her reminiscences of Howard Lovecraft, and her own life, to take her out to lunch and on special errands, and simply to visit this lonely and charming, and until her decline into senility, vibrant lady.
—R. Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Nyctalops #8 (Apr 1973), 45

Everts’ article was the first really new information on Sonia H. Davis’ life and background available to fandom, and it must have derived from his communications with Sonia and her family. Later authors, like L. Sprague de Camp in Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), either Drew on Everts’ piece or similar sources when writing about her birth in what is now Ukraine, her parents, her early history as a young immigrant to the United Kingdom and then the United States, apprenticeship as a milliner, and all the events that led up to her marriage with Lovecraft and carried on afterwards. Everts, at least, had read Sonia’s autobiography in manuscript, later published as Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024), edited by Monica Wasserman.

Scholarship is not just the accumulation of evidence, the piling together of facts, the collection of books and manuscripts to cite and quote with uncritical acceptance. Today, we can compare Everts’ article with Sonia’s autobiography and other sources and conclude it is largely accurate. However, there is a lot that Everts doesn’t say in this short piece as well. Everts’ relationship with Sonia was not always completely friendly; Everts developed a negative reputation in fandom, partially covered in The Curse of Cthulhu (2002), whereby he alienated several fans by action or inaction, such as the failure to return a photograph of Robert E. Howard lent by Novalyne Price Ellis, accusations of other borrowings, etc. A photocopy of a letter from Everts to Sonia dated 24 Apr 1969 survives among the August Derleth papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which includes admission of borrowing material without permission, and responses to some allegations apparently levied against Everts by Sonia, though in that letter Everts states his intention to return everything and his belief that the true sources of the allegations are August Derleth and Muriel E. Eddy.

Which is a long way to say, we have to read this piece with the understanding that it is not Sonia H. Davis expressing herself directly to the reader, but is filtered and edited through Everts, and Everts does not include anything in the article that speaks to their possible contretemps.

From 1946 until about 1960, Sonia worked at various jobs – she broke her hip that year and had to go to live in a rest home in southern Los Angeles. In 1965, she was transferred to the Diana Lynn Lodge in Sunland, on the north rim of the San Fernando Valley, where she died just after Christmas of 1972.
—R. Alain Everts/ 21 January 1973
—R. Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in Nyctalops #8 (Apr 1973), 45

“Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” has been superseded as a source of information about Sonia’s life by later works, the only really unique information in there concerns her relationship with Everts (which, again, not the whole story) and the end of her life. It holds a place in historical scholarship because when we ask how we know certain information and when did we know it, Everts’ article stands out as a point where new biographical information on Sonia became publicly available, where fans and scholars could read and cite it. The snapshot it offers of the end of Sonia’s life, with Everts as one of her few points of contact outside the rest home, is poignant but necessarily brief.

Yet it is also at this point that Everts takes a hand in shaping the narrative of Sonia and her marriage to Lovecraft. He would go on to create his own publishing imprint, The Strange Company, whose publications include material borrowed or copied from Sonia’s files, including Alcestis: A Play (1985) by Sonia H. Greene & H. P. Lovecraft. We can only speculate why Everts waited until after Sonia was dead; perhaps the money wasn’t there earlier, or life got in the way; such things happen. Sadly, his correspondence and interviews with Sonia have never been transcribed and published or made accessible, save in brief essays like “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”

Yet there was another essay on Sonia H. Davis published in 1973, and one that showcases a different approach to the same material. This was “Sonia & H. P. L.” by L. Sprague de Camp, one of the items in The Normal Lovecraft (1973, Gerry de la Ree), a magazine-sized chapbook published by fans for fans. To understand de Camp’s approach, we need to wind back a little:

For five years I had been writing short articles for [George] Scither’s Amra on authors of heroic fantasy, such as Pratt, Howard, and Lovecraft. In 1970 I decided to expand the series by rewriting these pieces as regular magazine articles and eventually to combine them into a book. The only market for the articles was the now defunct Fantastic Stories, which paid badly and often neglected to register copyrights. […] The book, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, which resulted from these labors, was slow to become airborne. I tried a sample and synopsis on a prospective new agent; no results, so for a few years I put it aside. In 1974 I sold the book to Arkham House; it appeared in 1976 and is still in print. Meanwhile my book-length biography of Lovecraft had been published.
—L. Sprague de Camp, Time & Chance: An Autobiography, 366-367

The first biographical article on Lovecraft, “Eldritch Yankee Gentleman,” ran in two parts in Fantastic Stories August and October 1971; Sonia appears in the second part, which covers 1921-1937. For sources, de Camp leaned heavily (or exclusively) on Sonia’s memoir and Lovecraft’s letters at the John Hay Library in Providence, RI, where they had been deposited after Lovecraft’s death. There is no indication that de Camp contacted Sonia directly—and given the timing, this might be understandable; by the time de Camp got seriously into writing about Lovecraft, Sonia was in her twilight years, in a rest home in California, health declining. By the time de Camp decided to expand his biographical essay of Lovecraft into a full-blown book, Sonia was already dead.

So what did de Camp have to write about in “Sonia & H. P. L.” that wasn’t already published?

Five years later, Lovecraft wrote Derleth: “My one venture into matrimony ended in the divorce-court for reasons 98 per cent financial”. This ignores other weighty factors, such as his topomania (his fantastic attachment to Providence), his xenophobia, and his strong anti-sexual bias, which he probably got from his mother and which made him at best a tepid and half-unwilling lover.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Sonia & H. P. L.” in The Normal Lovecraft 25

It would be fair to say that de Camp was correlating the contents; he could take Sonia’s memoir, combine that material with Lovecraft’s letters, and use the ideas from Winfield Townley Scott’s biographical essay as a framework to build his own image of Lovecraft, Sonia, and their relationship. When de Camp sticks to just the facts, this has the overall benefit of combining Sonia and Lovecraft’s different perspectives of the marriage and relationship; however, whenever de Camp gets into analysis, his own biases show through more strongly:

Lovecraft never pretended to be other than he was. Sonia had taken the initiative in their courtship, although he had tried to warn her of what she was getting into. And if the episode left him looking hardly heroic, he would not have looked much more so, according to the mores of the time, if he had gone on letting Sonia support him.

Over the next few years, Lovecraft and Sonia visited each other every times. Although Sonia was a full-blooded woman, Lovecraft declined to renew martial relations. For reasons that we can guess at but cannot really know, he let his maternal tabu against sex prevail, even though it would have been perfectly legal and moral. Although his organs and instincts, as far as is known, were normal, he had been early inclucated with the ideas that sex was “sordid” and “bestial”. Young persons might be subject to irrepressible animal urges, but middle-aged persons like himself and Sonia ought to be “all though” with it. (To him, middle age began at thirty.)

Then came the divorce and Sonia’s move to California. Poor strenuous, generous, passionate, managerial, loving Sonia! The moral would seem to be: girls, don’t marry a man with the ideas of “making a man of him” or otherwise drastically changing him. It won’t work.
—L. Sprague de Camp, “Sonia & H. P. L.” in The Normal Lovecraft 27

This was the kind of psychologizing that de Camp would receive considerable criticism for when Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) came out, but more than that, there’s a great deal of rampant speculation and characterization on de Camp’s part in those few paragraphs. It was Winfield Townley Scott who had first emphasized that Lovecraft’s relationship with his mother was unhealthy and speculated on Lovecraft’s sexuality, on fairly weak evidence, and de Camp doubled down on both ideas.

The characterization of Sonia as “a full-blooded woman” was a counterpoint to that; de Camp built her up as a sexual entity in opposition to Lovecraft’s apparent asexuality. In this, de Camp was not alone—August Derleth had famously cornered Sonia in 1953 and asked about her sex life with Lovecraft. As he put it:

A propos your piece on Lovecraft, the question of HPL and sex had been bothering me for some time, especially in view of his violent reaction against Oscar Wilde as a person, however much he admired his work; so in 1953 when I was in Los Angeles, I asked Sonia Davis—the ex-Mrs. Lovecraft—rather bluntly about HPL’s sexual adequacy. She assured me that he had been entirely adequate sexually, and since she impressed me as a well-sexed woman, not easily satisfied, I concluded that HPL’s “aversion” was very probably nothing more than a kind of puritanism—that is, it was something “gentlemen” didn’t discuss, and so on.
—August Derleth, Haunted vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1968), 114.

This interest in Sonia and Lovecraft’s sexual life can be seen in the historical context of the Lavender Scare as an effort on the part of some scholars to establish Lovecraft as heterosexual; Sonia’s confirmation of heterosexual relations would help immensely in that regard. De Camp would bring up the possibility of Lovecraft as a closeted homosexual in Lovecraft: A Biography (Derleth was, at the time of its publication dead and thus past the ability to protest). Both de Camp and Derleth seemed fixated on the idea of Sonia as sexually aggressive, though never to the point of suggesting she was promiscuous, and make this part of their characterization.

When de Camp did finally write Lovecraft: A Biography, he had more to say about Sonia than he did in “Sonia & H. P. L.”; the bibliography includes both Everts’ “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” Derleth’s letter in Haunted, and “Misc. unpublished autobiographical MSS. in the John Hay Library” (479), in addition to Sonia’s memoir and Memories of Lovecraft (1969). Yet it is easy to see how, in 1973, not long after Sonia H. Davis passed away, her memory was already being shaped and fitted to the purpose of would-be Lovecraft biographers, her words selectively used to convey the impression they wished to give rather than presented unaltered.

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.

“The Man Who Came At Midnight” (1949) by Ruth M. Eddy

Ruth Muriel Eddy Bell (27 May 1921 – 21 May 2009) was not the last living person to have met H. P. Lovecraft—but with her passing went one of the last living memories of the Old Gent. Fortunately for us, she recorded her impressions in a brief memoir, “The Man Who Came At Midnight,” first published in The Fantasy Commentator, Vol. III, no. 3 (Summer-Fall 1949).

How much Ruth might remember, and how accurate are those recollections? We know from Lovecraft’s correspondence with her mother Muriel E. Eddy that HPL first visited the Eddys in 1923. Ruth was the youngest of the three children, only about two years old when Lovecraft supposedly came at midnight. These early impressions were very likely influenced in later years by Muriel’s various memoirs of Lovecraft, her stories told and retold until they became part of family lore. So what we have is not a “pure” memoir, but a memoir that was expanded, shaped, and influenced by the other things written about Lovecraft by his friends and possibly critics. This was a step in the process of building Lovecraft’s legend.

※

THE MAN WHO CAME AT MIDNIGHT
by
Ruth M, Eddy

Gaslight flickered eerily through the crack in my bedroom door. It was Hallowe’en, night of the supernatural, and long past midnight, I had drifted off to sleep with visions of hobgoblins and Jack-o’-lanterns drifting through my childish mind. Suddenly, as in a dream, I heard a sepulchral voice saying, “Slithering…sliding…squealing…the rats in the walls!”

Half-asleep, half-awake, I lay in the darkness for a moment, and then shouted for my mother as loudly as I could. She came into my room and spoke softly, “Everything’s all right, dear. It’s just Mr. Lovecraft telling us about the new story he’s writing. Don’t be afraid. Go back to sleep.” Her warm tones were reassuring, and I was comforted as she leaned down to kiss me.

But sleep was impossible, for little as I was then, I lay listening to the strange-sounding story our nocturnal visitor was reading. As I was to find out years later, not only was Howard Phillips Lovecraft an expert writer of weird, spooky and uncanny tales, but he was also something of an actor. He made his fictional characters come truly alive through reciting his manuscripts aloud. And this he did in the wee sma’ hours of the morning as my parents listened attentively.

Lovecraft did not like daylight. He preferred darkness, always. Even when doing creative writing at home, if it was daytime he would draw the heavy curtains and write by artificial light. He did not like to leave his house during the day, but he and my father would often explore dark, unlighted alleys after midnight, walking along wharves and dimly-silhouetted bridges on the edge of the swamplands. It is not hard to imagine H.P.L. postulating unknown entities in these dark places, and from such nocturnal jaunts would often come ideas for his future stories.

In case I could stay awake long enough, I would sometimes listen to these tales, drifting off to sleep however before the story had ended. I grew accustomed to his voice, though I never quite got up enough courage to peek past the bedroom door at the reader himself. Yet in later years, as my father and mother discussed this friend of theirs, I could not help feeling that I had really known him, too.

How Lovecraft loved coal-black cats! He always had one near him. Cats sat in his lap while he wrote and they followed him out on his lone midnight explorings. His beloved black cat played a prominent part in ’’The Rats in the Walls,” and when one day this cat disappeared he became heartsick.

I feel H.P.L. would have been astounded, indeed, had he heard his “Dunwich Horror” broadcast two years ago on Hallowe’en. Never a lover of modern days and ways, using even such a common device as a telephone annoyed this gentleman and scholar of a different world! He preferred writing by hand to typing, and my parents often typed his manuscripts to relieve him of a hated task.

The shy and reticent Howard Lovecraft gained encouragement from my father and mother because of their interest and enthusiasm in his work, and soon after that Hallowe’en night he sold his macabre “Rats in the Walls” to a well-known magazine. Not a Hallowe’en has passed since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 without my family gathering for the reading aloud of a weird story by our favorite author—now internationally famous as a writer in the genre—although our eloquence cannot compare with his masterful interpretations.

And even though I never saw Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I shall always remember him as the man who came at midnight!

※

Muriel wrote several times about Lovecraft reading “The Rats in the Walls” (Weird Tales Mar 1924) in manuscript to the Eddys, including in “Message in Stone” (1956), and the accounts of mother and daughter are consistent, though Ruth offers her own viewpoint and details. There are other details in the account that show things a young Ruth could not have known and picked up later—the bit about Lovecraft’s pet cat, for example. The idea of Lovecraft loving the darkness speaks to early myth-making; as with most aspects of Lovecraft’s legend, the reality is more complicated, with his letters often painting him as both a night owl and enjoying sunlit walks and writing outdoors in the daylight.

It is fun to imagine what it might have been like, to lie awake in the dark and hear a sonorous voice read off a dark tale, probably filled with words she did not yet understand…and only later coming to understand who she had been listening to. There is no indication that Ruth Eddy was being dishonest in this account, only that she was being influenced by more than her childhood memories. She was so young, after all; and was writing of events twenty-five years in the past. No surprise, then, to find that her adult mind may have shaped whatever impressions she had from those sleepless nights of long ago.

“The Man Who Came at Midnight” by Ruth M. Eddy has been reprinted in The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001), A Weird Writer in Our Midst (2010), and Ave Atque Vale (2018).

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

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

“In Memoriam” (1937) by Hazel Heald

Hazel Heald had three letters published in the pages of Weird Tales.

The first was published in the more-or-less immediate aftermath of Lovecraft’s death. Lovecraft died on 15 March 1937; in May 1937, “The Horror in the Burying-Ground” was published in Weird Tales, the last of the stories attributed to Heald and probably ghosted by Lovecraft, and then in the month after that, we get her acknowledgement of his death:

From Mrs. Heald
Hazle Heald writes from Newtonville, Massachusetts: “I want to express my sorrow in the passing of H. P. Lovecraft. He was a friend indeed to the struggling author, and many have started to climb the ladder of success with his kind assistance. To us who really knew him it is a sorrow that mere words cannot express. His was the helping hand that started me in the writers’ game and gave me the courage to carry on under the gravest difficulties. But we must try to think that he is ‘just away’ on one of his longest journeys and that some day we will meet him again in the Great Beyond.”
—Weird Tales (June 1937)

While stopping short of acknowledging that Lovecraft was a collaborator or ghostwriter, this was Heald’s first public acknowledgement that the woman praised as “veritably a female Lovecraft” (Weird Tales Jun 1935) owed more than a debt of inspiration to the man himself.

The second letter, published a couple months later, is effectively a memoir of her time and relationship with Lovecraft that Heald; the longest piece on Lovecraft by Heald that would be published during her lifetime:

In Memoriam
Mrs. Hazel Heald writes from Newtonville, Massachusetts: “A brain like H. P. Lovecraft’s seldom was found—uncanny in its intelligence. he was ever searching for more knowledge, gleaning by endless hours of study a richer and fuller understanding of people and of life. Being a great traveler, he reveled in the study of old cities and their hidden lore and would walk many miles to inspect some historic spot. he was a real friend to all who knew him, always ready to give his valuable time to aid some poor struggling author—a true guiding star. He was very partial to dumb animals, especially cats, signifying that interest in several of his tales. He would step out of his way to pat some forlorn alley cat and give it a friendly word, and the kittens of a neighbor furnished him unbounded enjoyment. He was an ardent lover of architecture and all the fine arts, and a day spent in a museum with him was time well spent. by endless hours of toil he worked far into the night giving the world masterpieces of weird fiction, sacrificing his health for his work. Lovecraft was a gift to the world who can never be replaced—Humanity’s Friend.”
—Weird Tales (August 1937)

In an era when fans and scholars tend to highlight Lovecraft’s cosmicism, and even his supposed misanthropism, the characterization of the benevolent, friendly Lovecraft might strike many readers as odd—yet this was part of his immediate legacy. Those who wrote about Lovecraft in the wake of his death weren’t his harshest critics or his most bitter foes, but his friends, those whom he had loved, even when he had argued with them; whom he had helped and corresponded with over years, even when they disagreed on many subjects.

Hazel Heald had corresponded with Lovecraft, he had visited her at her home and eaten dinner at her table, they had gone to view museums together. She wasn’t writing from ignorance of Lovecraft, but from personal experience.

Weird Tales would change. In 1938, the magazine was sold to the publisher of Short Stories, a more general fiction pulp headquartered in New York City. Editor Farnsworth Wright went with the magazine, and Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of Short Stories, also became his assistant editor at Weird Tales. The geographic shift caused other changes: Margaret Brundage’s delicate pastels had to be shipped under glass, an expensive option that meant the disappearance of her characteristic covers. With the death of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft and the virtual retirement of Clark Ashton Smith from writing, new authors needed to be found. The look and feel of the magazine was shifting; and though none of the readers knew it, Farnsworth Wright would soon be fired and McIlwraith would take over as editor.

In February 1939, WT changed size, moving from 128 pages to 160 pages and using a cheaper, thicker pulp paper. Hazel Heald’s final letter is a concise comment:

Mrs. Hazel Heald writers from Somerville, Massachusetts: “Your improved and larger magazine contains a feast of reading enjoyment.”
—Weird Tales, Aug 1939

This was the last word Hazel Heald published in Weird Tales.

The first two letters (“From Mrs. Heald” and “In Memoriam”) were republished in H. P. Lovecraft in “The Eyrie” (1979), and “In Memoriam” was republished as a standalone mini-essay alongside other memoirs in Lovecraft Remembered (1998). Its inclusion in the latter volume might feel like filler; there aren’t many facts to latch onto, no dates or places. With Lovecraft’s letters, her letters to August Derleth, and Muriel Eddy’s fond memories, we have enough context to say that Heald was no doubt recalling her own museum visit with Lovecraft, and the carefully-worded emphasis on support for struggling authors maintains the fiction of Lovecraft as a teacher or reviser rather than a ghostwriter.

Yet this is the most Heald published about Lovecraft, and this memoir—brief as it may be—is at least a genuine expression of her view of Lovecraft, the Lovecraft that she knew and wanted other people to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Memories of Lovecraft II” by Helen V. Sully

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

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

That night, after dinner, he took me into a graveyard associated with Poe. . . . It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.

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

The Arkham Collector (Winter 1969) 119

Ave Atque Vale 365-366

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

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