“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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“When Sonia Sizzled” (1973) by Gerry de la Ree

Immediately after “Sonia & H. P. L.” by L. Sprague de Camp in The Normal Lovecraft (1973) is an essay by Gerry de la Ree titled “When Sonia Sizzled” that also takes as its subject Sonia H. Davis, the former wife of H. P. Lovecraft. De la Ree was a noted collector who managed to procure an enviable number of original letters and artwork connected with pulp writers of the 1930s, including original art from Clark Ashton Smith, and he used part of this collection as the basis for a series of publications, of which The Normal Lovecraft was one example.

“When Sonia Sizzled” is one of several essays and articles that he wrote on pulp matters. Like much of The Normal Lovecraft, it has never been reprinted. The essay begins, thus:

Except for a repeated general distaste for life in New York City, H P. Lovecraft in general restricted commentary on his two years of married life with Sonia Shifirkin Greene. His brief autobiographical sketch, published in 1963 by Arkham Hosue and written some 30 years earlier, makes no mention of this period.

Likewise, in “Ec’h-Pi-El Speaks”, an autobiographical sketch written in 1929 and published by this writer last year, H. P. L. again skipped over the period of his marriage as if it had never existed.

Lovecraft’s closest associates have often testified to his apparent lack of interest in the opposite sex, and both his fiction and his countless letters seem to bear out this contention.
—Gerry de la Ree, “When Sonia Sizzled” in The Normal Lovecraft 28

In context, by 1973 Arkham House had published the first three volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, which covered a period up to 1931—the entirety of his New York period (1924-1926) and marriage leading up to the divorce decree (1924-1929). August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, editors of those volumes, had selected, excerpted, and in places edited Lovecraft’s letters to emphasize information value and points of interest. Sonis is mentioned in ~45 pages of Selected Letters I and ~14 pages of Selected Letters II, mostly in letters to his aunts or to mutual friends and amateur journalists. But it is a paltry account of the marriage; whether the editors did this deliberately or it fell out like that as they prioritized Lovecraft’s fiction isn’t clear.

Today, with so many of Lovecraft’s unabridged letters published thanks to Hippocampus Press, we have a better sense for how often Lovecraft mentioned Sonia in his letters, and to whom. In fact, he did mention her much more frequently and in greater detail in letters to his aunts than anyone else, and to some correspondents—especially later ones—he does not mention his marriage at all. There was nothing particularly nefarious in this omission; Lovecraft was under no obligation to bare his soul to everyone he wrote a letter to, and the failure of his marriage must have been a source of personal disappointment and embarrassment.

However, it does mean that when scholars in the 1970s were trying to reconstruct Lovecraft’s marriage and find out more about his wife, they hit a wall. Sonia’s memoir was available in some formats, and small articles like “Lovecraft’s Marriage and Divorce” (1968) by Muriel E. Eddy, Memories of Lovecraft (1969) by Sonia H. Davis, and “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1973) by R. Alain Everts were available, but that was pretty much it, except for sporadic mentions in Lovecraft’s letters and in a few memoirs by friends who had known both Sonia and Howard.

Gerry de la Ree knew this. And with diligence and no doubt money, he bought Sonia’s letters to Samuel Loveman from the 1940s. “When Sonia Sizzled” consists mostly of excerpts from these letters, which date from after Sonia had been informed of Lovecraft’s death and when she had come into contact with Derleth, but before she published her memoir. In one letter, Sonia enclosed a letter she had received from August Derleth dated 21 November 1947, to get Loveman’s opinion on it. De la Ree quotes an excerpt:

I have so far had no reply to my letter of 18 September. Meanwhile, I hope you are not going ahead regardless of our stipulations to arrange for publication of anything containing Writings of any kind, letters or otherwise, of H. P. Lovecraft, thus making it necessary for us to enjoin publication and ale, and to bring suit, which we will certainly do if any manuscript containing works of Lovecraft does not pass through our office for the executor’s permission.

You will be interested to know that we know have in Lovecraft’s own letters to his aunts a complete and detailed account of how things went during his entire married life.
—Quoted in The Normal Lovecraft 29

Derleth was not the executor of Lovecraft’s estate. He was not even the literary executor; that was R. H. Barlow, who died in 1951. Arkham House had an agreement with Lovecraft’s surviving aunt Annie Gamwell to publish HPL’s writings before her death in 1941, and on this basis Derleth often pretended to complete authority over Lovecraft’s copyrighted work, and occasionally threatened legal action against those who published or republished anything by Lovecraft without Arkham House’s blessing. In hindsight, this can be seen as a deliberate bluff, a means for Derleth to concentrate and maintain control of the Lovecraft material, if not an actual monopoly.

However, at the time, this would not have been easy to discern; if Derleth had ever sued and been forced to go through discovery by someone calling his bluff, things might have gone very differently for Arkham House and Lovecraft’s legacy. Sonia’s follow-up to this was a letter to Loveman dated 1 Jan 1948; it mostly continues repeats assertions that appeared in her memoir, particularly that she financially supported Lovecraft during the New York period, which Derleth had flatly denied.

Readers in 1973 might have appreciated the peek behind the scenes, which led to the publication of Sonia’s memoir in 1948; although there was much more drama to it than these few letter excerpts state. The actual details of how much financial assistance Lovecraft received from his wife and aunts during that period is interesting for those who would like to reconstruct Lovecraft’s parsimonious budget; it was obviously sufficient to live on, but not thrive, or else he wouldn’t have left.

The third and final letter snippet de la Ree quotes from is dated 16 Nov 1949, after the publication of Something About Cats and Other Pieces by Arkham House, which contains a version of Sonia’s memoir, “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923), and “Four O’Clock” (1949). By this point, Sonia and Derleth had achieved détente, which would grow into amicability in later years. De la Ree quotes her as writing to Loveman:

Yes, Derleth sent me a copy of “Cats”. He paid me a modicum for the H. P. L. story as well as for the two revisions, and while not much, it helped last year when I wasn’t earning anything while I was sick.
—Quoted in The Normal Lovecraft 31

None of these letters has ever been published in full, and aren’t likely to be anytime soon. If they still survive, it is in someone’s private collection. When read in conjunction with letters from Sonia and Derleth that survive at the John Hay Library and Wisconsin Historical Society, we can get a fuller picture of the tumultuous period in the late 1940s when Sonia stumbled into the complicated literary legacy of her deceased husband, and had to contend with one of the biggest fish in that small pond that was Lovecraft publishing.

Still, this was when Sonia was hot—or as de la Ree put it, when she sizzled—when her memoir was the hottest thing to hit Lovecraft fans since Arkham House had begun publishing in 1939. We know now, because of access to Derleth’s letters, that he was more concerned with Sonia’s portrayal of Lovecraft as antisemitic than with how much money she gave to Lovecraft to live on in New York, and his efforts to discredit and downplay her memoir probably reflect Derleth’s own interests in Lovecraft’s legacy as much as his friendship with the late HPL.

In 1973, “When Sonia Sizzled” was a peek behind the curtain of Lovecraft publishing in the 1940s, and was probably safe to publish because both Sonia and Derleth were safely deceased. Searchers after more data on Sonia herself were no doubt disappointed, but even if this isn’t the most substantial piece, it is still a piece of the puzzle that was her life, both with and after her marriage to H. P. Lovecraft. It wasn’t the whole story, nor did it pretend to be, but it added a bit of context to how Sonia came to publish her memoir. Today, with more of the pieces of the puzzle, we have a better picture of what happened.

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

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

“Mrs. 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.

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.