Tag: R. Alain Everts

Lovecraft’s Daughter (1983) by R. Alain Everts

Imagine yourself in the United States of America, 1965. The children born of the baby boom in World War II are teenagers now. A television in nearly every home. The pulp magazines have been dead for a decade. Garish paperbacks reprint the contents of old Weird Tales. Arkham House celebrates its 26th year of operation—and a long-promised project finally saw fruition. The first volume of the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft was shipped out to connoisseurs of the weird, like you. The kind of project normally reserved for much more important and successful authors. It was, though few understood it at the time, the birth of Lovecraft scholarship. Readers could finally learn something more about Lovecraft’s life, in his own words. One passage might have raised a moment of interest:

But one thing Mme. Greene says quite desolates me—she avers that her fair and frivolous offspring is not to be captivated by the charms of any highbrow, not even the otherwise irresistible Bolingbroke!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 30 Aug 1921, Selected Letters 1.149

Thirty-one pages later, you would have found out her name:

At dinner—about one-thirty—were Loveman, Theobald, Long, Mme. Greene, and the latter’s flapper offspring, yclept Florence—pert, spoiled, and ultra-independent infant rather more hard-boiled of visage than her benignant mater.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 18 May 1922, Selected Letters 1.180

That would, very likely, be the last that you would have read about Florence Carol Greene (19 Mar 1903 – 31 Mar 1979), the daughter of Sonia H. Greene, for another decade. She does not appear in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters again, not even after Howard and Sonia married. L. Sprague de Camp in Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), describes her as the sole surviving child of Sonia’s first marriage; Frank Belknap Long in Howard Phillips Lovecraft—Dreamer on the Nightside (1975) gives a little anecdote from when they met:

Sonia’s daughter was very pretty, with freckles that met across the bridge of her nose, and blonde hair and a waist so slim it seemed a little unreal. Unfortunately she was soon to leave New York, to be with a young man to whom she had recently become engaged. (50)

Sonia herself was reticent in writing about her daughter; her memoir of her marriage with Lovecraft barely mentioned the child, never the woman she became. In part, this is understandable: by the time Sonia and Howard married in 1924, Florence was apparently out of the house, living on her own, and she and her mother had some fundamental break that never really mended. Astute readers would have realized that H. P. Lovecraft had, at least technically, a step-daughter from his brief marriage—but who was she?

R. Alain Everts had cultivated a friendship with Sonia H. Davis, the former wife of H. P. Lovecraft, in her later years. Their correspondence, interviews, conversations, as well as written material and photographs from her formed the basis for several of Everts’ essays, articles, and publications, including “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1973), “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974), Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft’s Lost Romance (1976), and Alcestis: A Play (1985) by Sonia H. Greene & H. P. Lovecraft, the latter published by Everts’ imprint The Strange Company.

Readers never really get an idea of how much material from Sonia that Everts had; whether those represent all he had gathered and was willing to share, or if there was more unpublished, possibly because it was of little interest outside a specialized circle of Lovecraft fans and scholars.

That specialized circle had a name: the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association. Modeled on the same amateur press associations that Lovecraft had been a member of, the EOD was (and as of this writing, still is) an organization where a select group of Lovecraftian fans and scholars connect and share their latest writings, discoveries, and analyses through periodic zines. Everts was a member for a long time, and while he is best known to fans through the works he published through The Strange Company and articles that were published in commercially-available magazines, the zines he put together for EOD are an often fascinating look at what was the bleeding edge of Lovecraftian research.

In 1983, Everts issued three thin stapled pamphlets titled Lovecraft’s Daughter, Lovecraft’s Daughter II, and Lovecraft’s Daughter III as part of his contributions to the EOD mailings, summarizing and synthesizing his research on Florence Carol Greene—better known in her adult and professional life as Carol Weld. These pamphlets were never collected, never reprinted, never made available to the wider public, except when a member of the EOD sold part of their collection or died, and their heirs offered it for sale. They are hen’s teeth, and it is difficult to assess their impact. Certainly, later biographies of Lovecraft like S. T. Joshi’s I Am Providence have a bit more to say about her, but her connection to Lovecraft is so tangential and tenuous that tracing her life may seem a digression.

Monica Wasserman, who edited Sonia’s autobiography Two Hearts That Beat As One (2024), doesn’t think so. In her own page on Florence Carol Greene, Wasserman correlated the contents. The only child of immigrant parents in the U.S.; her father out of the picture, her mother raising Florence by herself as a single mother, with the aid of her own mother (who was busy raising two half-siblings). Florence was intelligent, probably feisty, likely stubborn, and independent. What she thought of Lovecraft or her mother’s remarriage is unknown, but Florence’s relationship with her nominal stepfather appears to have been nonexistent.

Everts’ pamphlet Lovecraft’s Daughter is relatively accurate on the biographical details, and some of his information came directly from Sonia:

Sonia recalled to me various dinners at her apartment with both Lovecraft and Samuel Loveman present, where she and Florence would host them for an evening of food and conversation. On some occasions, Sonia and Florence would disagree so strongly that they would fight in front of their guests.

The break between mother and daughter was apparently total. Everts noted that:

When I wrote on Sonia’s behalf in 1967 to Carold Weld (as she then styled herself), the letter was returned to me, opened, with a handwritten message that the envelope had been opened by mistake. I will never forget Sonia’s expression when I showed her this enveloped, and she replied sadly that the handwriting was Florence’s.

There are many reasons why adult children might go “no contact” with their parents, and we don’t have Carol Weld’s side of the story. We only indirectly have Sonia’s through a few writings and Everts’ account in Lovecraft’s Daughter. Unfortunately, the latter is responsible for at least one rumor that has proven hard to kill:

Some years earlier, I believe Sonia mentioned to me that Florence was about 18, she had fallen in love with a nice man with background credentials of impeccable quality – they should have been, for the man was Sonia’s half-brother, by her mother’s second marriage.

Monica Wasserman noted that this was probably a point of confusion, as Sonia’s half-brother Sydney married a young woman named Florence Stone in 1923, and Everts may have easily mistaken one Florence for another, especially with Long’s comment about an engagement, which may have hinted that her daughter was intending to marry, either to someone Sonia didn’t approve of or simply to escape her mother’s household. Whatever the truth, Florence Carol Greene would marry John Weld in 1927, and thereafter be known as Carol Weld.

Today, Lovecraft’s Daughter and its sequels, rare and obscure, aren’t of much interest for its raw information on Carol Weld. Digital genealogical records, newspaper archives, and the collections of the mother and daughter’s papers in their respective archives give access to more information than Everts had access to in 1983. Its interest lies in its expression of Everts’ continued use of his time with Sonia, how he found ways to express that information to an audience of Lovecraftian fans and scholars. This is how information got promulgated before the dawn of the internet, and this is also how rumors start.

Which is why it is important not to rely exclusively on these old fanzines, but to try and view them in their appropriate historical context, and with a critical eye toward not only their sources for information, but how they are synthesizing that information and presenting it to others. Historical data is valuable, but it must also be re-assessed, especially when new information becomes available. Lovecraft’s Daughter was a step on the path of gaining greater insight into who Carol Weld was, and how her story and Lovecraft’s connected; it is an essential part in understanding Sonia’s life and the realities she faced as a single mother in New York. That it has been superseded by later sources isn’t a surprise or a detraction.

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.

Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft’s Lost Romance (1976) by R. Alain Everts & George T. Wetzel

Or had Lovecraft been casting sheep’s eyes upon some young woman whom he lacked the nerve to approach openly? Could it have been his fellow-amateur and ghosting client Winifred Virginia Jackson, with whom he had quite—for him—a close friendship?
—L. Sprague de Camp, H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) 123

In 1943, Arkham House published Beyond the Wall of Sleep, the second collection of Lovecraft’s fiction. It was the first book publication of “The Crawling Chaos” (1921) and “The Green Meadow” (1927), two stories co-written by H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred V. Jackson—there credited as “Elizabeth Berkeley.” Fans deciphered the pseudonym; George T. Wetzel correctly identified Winifred Virginia Jackson as one of Lovecraft’s collaborators in The Lovecraft Collector’s Library, vol. VII (1955). Details about Lovecraft’s collaborators, however, were thin on the ground. Aside from a few references in the first volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters and a brief bit of speculation by de Camp, there was nothing available on their relationship or the stories they wrote together.

In 1976, you had to be an exceptional Lovecraft fan to know much about Winifred Virginia Jackson.

R. Alain Everts and George T. Wetzel were two exceptional Lovecraft fans. Everts had interviewed many surviving friends and associates of Lovecraft, including developing a friendship with the former Mrs. Lovecraft, Sonia H. Davis, and written such essays as “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1973) and “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974). In the process, Everts had also alienated many people (see The Curse of Cthulhu [PDF]). Wetzel likewise distinguished himself as a fan-scholar and publisher; the seven volumes of his Lovecraft Collector’s Library were a starting point, collecting many of Lovecraft’s early amateur writings and writings about Lovecraft (which Everts would later publish the collected edition through his imprint The Strange Company in 1979), along with several other articles and miscellaneous publications. Wetzel was also considered a bigot by fellow fans, and accused of writing poison pen letters (“In Memoriam: George Wetzel” in Ibid 45 [PDF]).

Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft’s Lost Romance (1976) combined Everts’ and Wetzel’s respective skills, interests, and prejudices. Counting the covers, it is a small 8.5″ x 11″ stapled pamphlet of 11 sheets (which technically makes 18 pages, although some of those are blank), which includes a mix of biographical essay, black-and-white reproductions of photographs, and photostatic copies of some of Jackson’s poetry from amateur journals. A fairly typical fan-product of the period, a touch more scholarly and influential than most, if only because information on Jackson would remain scarce for decades, until the greater availability of digital records and the digitization of books, newspapers, and ‘zines made it possible to obtain greater information and accuracy about her life…with some caveats.

To give an idea of what this means, here is a quick sketch of WVJ’s life based on readily available documents just on ancestry.com:

While this seems like a lot of specific information, there’s a lot that isn’t shown here: where she went to school and college; her career in amateur journalism; the books she wrote, edited, and published; her work as co-founder and then owner of the B. J. Brimmer Company with William Stanley Braithwaite; etc. The records we do have are rife with inaccuracies: the 1880 Federal Census lists her as “son” rather than daughter; the ages given in later census records are always incorrect, which led one researcher, Charles Trombee, to conclude she habitually lied about her age (Lovecraft Collaborator–Winifred Virginia Jackson), and even Ancestry.com and Findagrave disagree on her exact birth date. Certain records are missing, possibly lost or never digitized—so we know she divorced her husbands, but don’t necessarily know when exactly.

So keep that in mind: Everts and Wetzel were working with incomplete data. While reporting what they had discovered, not all of what they report would be accurate, and not all of their speculations would be accurate either. Even today, a biographer would have a lot of work to do to fill in the gaps of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s life.

Some of what was reported was, frankly, gossip. For example, the idea that Lovecraft and WVJ shared any romantic interest arises from Wetzel’s correspondence with amateur journalist Willametta Keffer:

Mrs. Keffer wrote to Wetzel on 23 January 1956 stating that everybody in Amateur Journalism thought Lovecraft would marry Winifred Jordan. She added: “Now don’t you go encoraching on my territory here, this is an aspect that hasn’t been touched and I’m working it up […] A long time member of NAPA who knew and met both HPL and Winifred Virginia told me of the ‘romance’.”

Writing to Wetzel again, twenty years later:

She also added that Mrs. Jordan was “supposed to have had a torrid affair with an editor and I found some substantiation in a Year Book of the Bibliotheque Society of Boston.”

Taking this gossip as gospel, and combined with less-than-complete biographical information, Everts and Wetzel made a couple of deductive leaps which, in hindsight, are unfortunate:

Her marriage was brief and ended in divorce about early 1919. Her husband Horace Jordan was a Negro – in fact Winifred Virginia Jackson had always been a champion of the Negro – today at least one of her descendants is also married to a Black. By the time she had met Lovecraft, her marriage was over and she was the msitress of the celebrated Negro author William Stanley Braithwaite. His marriage prevented him from marrying Winifred, but for ma[n]y years she remained his mistress. However, this affair did not prevent Winifred Jackson from becoming very attracted to the single HPL. […] It is doubtful if Lovecraft himself knw of her former husband and her liaison (although Lovecraft did enjoy gossip) with Braithwiate [sic], – but even if he had he might not have cared anyway. […] What is known as fact is that many older Ajays have told Everts that they were surprised that Lovecraft had not married Winifred Jackson. It is a fact that Lovecraft took a snapshot of Winifred Jackson at the seaside, and it is known that she and HPL were romantically linked by the 1921 Boston National Amateur Press Ass[o]ciation convention. In the words of Sonia Lovecraft to Everts in 1967, “I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson.”

There is a lot to unpack there. Let’s start at the beginning: Horace Wheeler Jordan was, according to census records and his WWI draft card, white:

Was Winifred Virginia Jackson a champion of Black rights and culture, despite being white? Probably. Trombee notes that she had poems published in The Brownie Book (aimed at Black children) and The Crisis, a Black literary magazine, and was mistakenly listed among Black poets in Colored girls and boys’ inspiring United States history, and a heart to heart talk about white folks (1921) by William Henry Harrison, Jr. and Negro Poets and their Poems (1923) by Robert Thomas Kerlin. Winifred Virginia Jackson co-founded the B. J. Brimmer Company with mixed-race poet, author, and editor William Stanley Braithwaite, which company published various works by Black authors, including Sidelights on Negro Soldiers (1923) by Charles H. Williams. She does not appear to have had any children, so it’s not clear who her “descendants” were in this specific case; probably the children of her surviving cousins.

The accusation that Winifred Virginia Jackson carried out an extramarital affair with William Stanley Braithwaite is, so far as I have been able to determine, unsubstantiated. If Wetzel is to be trusted, the rumor began in amateur journalism, but it first hit print with Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft’s Lost Romance. No private letter from Jackson or Braithwaite has emerged that hints at any kind of sexual relationship between the two (although given that Braithwaite was married and that interracial relationships were taboo in the 1920s, this may not be so unusual). Scholarly works like The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader (1972) make no mention of such an affair, nor was it mentioned in any of Braithwaite’s autobiographical essays (although again, this isn’t surprising).

Of their friendship (and Braithwaite’s admiration of Jackson as a poet) we can be fairly certain. Braithwaite’s Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921 devotes a chunk of space to Jackson; Braithwaite wrote an introduction to her book Backroads: Maine Narratives—with Lyrics (1922); and in the Twentieth Anniversary Number (1921 annual of the Bibliophile Society in Boston), Braithwaite wrote an introduction, “The Poetry of Winifred Virginia Jackson,” to give three examples. Perhaps it was the latter that Keffer was thinking of when she said the “Year Book of the Bibliotheque Society of Boston,” since the Bibliophile Society of Boston did issue an annual, often titled a Year Book. Yet there is nothing in that introduction the least scandalous or suggestive of a romantic or sexual relationship. Nor did Keffer ever produce the tell-all article she hoped to.

Everts’ comment on “stealing” Lovecraft from Jackson is more interesting; as discussed in “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex” (1974) by R. A. Everts, we don’t have any way to really prove or disprove this, as Everts is reporting a private communication that was is only ever published here and nowhere else. We are dependent on his memory and his trustworthiness as a source. Still, the idea that the bachelor Lovecraft might be hypothetically paired with various single women in amateur journalism, especially those he worked closely with, such as Jackson, isn’t far-fetched. After all, when Lovecraft did eventually marry, it was to an eligible single woman in amateur journalism with whom he worked closely, Sonia H. Greene.

There is a little more in Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft’s Lost Romance, such as a reproduction of the photo Lovecraft took of Jackson, but not much else of real consequence. Everts and Wetzel based their idea of a romance (real, potential, or imagined) on the 30-40-year-old memories of gossiping amateur journalists. Some of the facts about Winifred Virginia Jackson they got right, others wrong; the sources being what they are, this isn’t surprising or even a substantial criticism. Mistakes happen all the time in genealogical and biographical research, and the misidentification of a single individual in an error-filled record can lead even the most well-meaning researcher off into a chain of fantasy. The affair with Braithwaite remains unproven, though perhaps some love letter will surface one day to give it substance. The uncritical repetition of the claim decade after decade shows the dangers that can come from relying on a single unreliable source.

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.

“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 20th 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.