3,166 words

David J. Goodwin
Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft In Gotham
Fordham University Press, 2023

Part 2 (Read Part 1 here)

So this is the first angle to Goodwin’s book: Lovecraft’s abhorrent views crop up not only in conversations and private letters, but in his published fiction.

Although this will not be a study of Lovecraft and race, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, his reactions to people of different colors, cultures, and national origins partially defined his life in New York. These will be documented and explored throughout the narrative, primarily utilizing Lovecraft’s own words from his letters and other private writings. Likewise, several of his New York stories explicitly capture and dramatize his beliefs on these subjects, and they will be analyzed with attention to such elements.

The other related angle brought up here is exploring Lovecraft’s ability to be civil toward, and even befriend, members of groups he otherwise would deplore. This seems typical of “reactionaries” who tend to be rather gentlemanly, as part of their adherence to old-fashioned customs (sometimes to the frustration of the more “militant” of their colleagues); and is of course puzzling only to the “progressive” who feels it would only be natural to hate hate hate any haters who don’t love as much as they do. [1] A simpler explanation is that their hatred is projected onto The Other (as they would say), thus clearing their self-image and providing justification as well.[2]

While it may be tempting to dismiss Lovecraft’s ideas as simply products of his upbringing or his own era, recent American history and events, such as the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the ongoing mainlining of bigoted thinking in conservative politics demonstrate that such deep hatred pervades much of our society, culture, and media. Reading Lovecraft’s letters and reflecting on his life—if only his New York chapter—might contribute to the ongoing national discourse concerning the position of artists and thinkers demonstrating values purportedly antithetical to our contemporary national ideals and mores and how we might appreciate the creative and intellectual output of such figures.

It would seem that Goodwin hates at least half the American population – but only because he hates those who don’t love as much as he does. Of course, by “ongoing national discourse” such writers mean “find badthinking internet posts and cancel” or, more generally, “re-educate the stupid masses by constant reiteration of Our Message.”

Perhaps we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves: Greene and Lovecraft haven’t even gotten married yet, and Lovecraft hasn’t written his greatest tales; the two will prove to be related.

Within the course of several months, Lovecraft’s life had changed markedly. The death of his mother seemed to liberate him from his family’s suffocating expectations and cloistered domesticity and from his own isolation and insecurities. Lovecraft marked his thirty-first birthday on August 20, 1921, and he demonstrated a willingness to make up for lost time. He reveled in the big-city excitement and play of Boston. He hobnobbed with literary acquaintances and basked in their applause. He juggled the attentions of accomplished and attractive women. Now, he heard New York calling.

What’s Eating H.P. Lovecraft?

One is tempted to diagnose Lovecraft as a “high functioning autiste” – he is, after all, published in the Library of America! – but the failure of his literary career during his lifetime, and the failure of his life itself, make things more complex. A clue is his failure to attain his dream of attending Brown University and becoming an astronomer; as it turned out, he did not even finish high school, instead apparently suffering a mental breakdown and spending the next decade at home, cared for by his mother and aunts, and occasioning “sculking” around the streets (an early form of the flaneurism he would manifest in New York[3]). Although he invented many stories to account for this, the plain fact was that he realized that despite his scientific interests, he was simply not very good at the required math. His uniquely powerful imagination was not accompanied by any more than ordinary mathematical skills, leading him to become an Ignatius Reilly, living in an imaginary, perfect past of his own devising, rather than a Sheldon Cooper.[4]

Schopenhauer’s description of genius seems to fit Lovecraft rather well:

It is only the highest intellectual power, what we call genius, that attains to this degree of intensity, making all time and existence its theme, and striving to express its peculiar conception of the world, whether it contemplates life as the subject of poetry or of philosophy. Hence, undisturbed occupation with himself, his own thoughts and works, is a matter of urgent necessity to such a man; solitude is welcome, leisure is the highest good, and everything else is unnecessary, nay, even burdensome.

This is the only type of man of whom it can be said that his centre of gravity is entirely in himself; which explains why it is that people of this sort—and they are very rare—no matter how excellent their character may be, do not show that warm and unlimited interest in friends, family, and the community in general, of which others are so often capable; for if they have only themselves they are not inconsolable for the loss of everything else. This gives an isolation to their character, which is all the more effective since other people never really quite satisfy them, as being, on the whole, of a different nature: nay more, since this difference is constantly forcing itself upon their notice they get accustomed to move about amongst mankind as alien beings, and in thinking of humanity in general, to say they instead of we. (The Wisdom of Life, Chapter II, “Personality, or What a Man Is.”)

And indeed, Schopenhauer emphasizes “a disinclination for mathematics” as a characteristic of genius, indeed, it is “repugnant to genius,” concluding that “Experience has also confirmed that men of great artistic genius have no aptitude for mathematics; no man was ever very distinguished in both at the same time.”[5]

Of course, it would not be fair, or accurate, to say that Lovecraft was immune to the charms of family and friends, we’ve seen that his visits to, and rambles with, his many friends in New York were often – almost always – at the expense of his wife’s company and needs, and ultimately he was just as content with maintaining his network of friends through an extensive correspondence that might be characterized as “graphomania;” thus we might grant that it lacked “warm and unlimited interest.”

Moreover, and in general, Lovecraft’s powerful imagination accounts not only for his ability to wander the streets of New York while imagining himself in a colonial town, but also for such odd behavior as his sudden, unannounced marriage and move to New York: for such men, having planned out and indeed lived such events in anticipation, makes the event as good as done, without bothering about the concrete mechanism to bring it about in “reality.”[6] (Having a mother, aunts and a wife to handle the details helps).[7]

Lovecraft – Unstoppable Sex Machine?

Then as now, another way to account for Lovecraft’s oddly disinterested treatment of his wife is to assume or assert that he was asexual or sexless.

Many biographers and commentators on Lovecraft depict him as largely uninterested in sex and devoid of physical desire. Presumably a virgin until his marriage, he availed himself of various publications on sex to prepare for his future role as a husband. Greene complained about his disinclination toward displays of affection and his hesitancy to speak of love. His own friends sometimes needled him about his squeamish in discussing women and sex.

Goodwin cites at least a couple of anecdotes to the contrary; consider:

However, an episode fondly—maybe even proudly—remembered by Greene might undercut this image of him as a cold and frigid individual: Lovecraft enjoyed watching her dance seductively to a recording of “Danse Macabre” by Camille Saint-Saëns:

“I danced a very slow cake walk … at first slowly, lifting my legs, with bent knees in imitation of walking more slowly and quietly…. I [danced], slow or fast, as the music prompted…. At the end of the music and my dance, H.P. L. was enchanted.”

“Enchanted” may have alluded to other sensations—longing or lust— aroused in Lovecraft by his attractive spouse.

Then there’s this:

After sleeping through Sonia Greene’s departure after a one-day visit from her in mid-September, Lovecraft next saw his spouse when she traveled to the city for a three-day weekend in October. When he spotted Greene waiting at a table in a restaurant near Grand Central Terminal, he stopped to stare at her looking stylish and becoming in a new brown dress. His wife’s ability to draw the attention of strangers with her fashion sense always excited Lovecraft. In fact, Greene recalled him being “so pleased whenever men—as well as women—used to admire” her. As a husband and a man, Lovecraft was not entirely devoid of desire. [8]

Another anecdote leads Goodwin to suggest a more plausible theory than asexuality:

[On an occasion when Lovecraft encouraged her to develop a story idea,] Greene longed to show her appreciation for his support. “Right then and there,” she kissed him. Later, she playfully recounted his reaction to such an unequivocal romantic and physical declaration: “He was so flustered that he blushed, then he turned pale. When I chaffed him about it he said that he had not been kissed since he was a very small child and that he was never kissed by any woman, not even by his mother or aunts, since he grew to manhood, and that he would probably never be kissed again. (But I fooled him.)”

This attempt at intimacy revealed the deep extent of emotional repression in Lovecraft. Minor physical affection—a peck on the cheek, a comforting embrace, a reassuring pat on the arm—was likely absent in his family’s household, and he never grew comfortable expressing feelings of tenderness. Lovecraft’s admitting that Greene was his first kiss also clarified his past relationship with Winifred Virginia Jackson. If it was romantic or pursued in the hope for such, it had remained physically platonic.

In short:

Contrary to popular and scholarly conceptions of him, Lovecraft might have avoided avowals of passion and conversations about sex because they evoked feelings of discomfort and insecurity. That is, he simply could have wished to not air publicly such matters and to keep them within the private sphere of his life.

During her stay, Greene asked him to read If Winter Comes, a novel by A. S. M. Hutchinson, hoping that they would discuss it. The plot of the 1922 bestseller involved emotional adultery, divorce, and suicide through a lens of moral and religious idealism. The book “excellently sooth’d” Lovecraft “to sleep.”

Gay or Just WASP?

An alternative theory would be that Lovecraft was homosexual, which he either denied or repressed to the extent of being completely asexual. On a jaunt to Cleveland in 1922, “Lovecraft encountered openly gay people for the first time,” and his reaction lets us infer how he would react to such inclinations in himself:

One such person was the composer Gordon Hatfield. His comments on meeting Hatfield revealed his own discomfort and hostility. Lovecraft later referred to him as “that precious sissy” and remembered that he “didn’t know whether to kiss it or kill it.” His repeated usage of “it” dehumanized Hatfield, classifying the composer as a creature of sorts, something lesser than a man. He mocked the musician’s wardrobe and appearance as effeminate, poking fun at his “little white sailor’s cap” and “sport shirt open at the neck.”

Lovecraft also met Hart Crane, another gay man, that summer. Samuel Loveman, who would hold long friendships with both men, recalled Lovecraft “sardonically and not without mimicry” decrying the poet’s “morality” (clearly a codeword for sexuality). Since Loveman himself was a gay man, yet likely not “out,” Lovecraft’s indictment of Crane must have pained him.

Indeed, Lovecraft never suspected his lifelong friend, the amusingly and confusingly named Loveman, was gay, even though his choice of friends and locales was a bit odd.

On many evenings and often well into the night, Lovecraft joined his fellow tenant Kirk, fellow Brooklyn Heights resident Loveman, or other Kalem Club confidants for winding conversations at diners or cafés. One mainstay of the group that winter was the Double R Coffee House at 112 West Forty- Fourth Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, an establishment owned by former President Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Theodore Jr., Archibald, and Kermit, his daughter Ethel and her husband Richard Derby, and Roosevelt’s cousin Philip. The aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans wafted through the seating area of the Double R. House letterhead and envelopes sat in small caddies at each table, and a small library of dictionaries and encyclopedias was available for perusal by word-minded customers. The Kalems, specifically Kirk, Kleiner, and Loveman, found the atmosphere “exceeding[ly] dear” to their aesthetic sense. Inspired by the setting, the friends occasionally wrote poetry while sipping their coffee. Lovecraft penned two poems at the Double R’s tables, including an untitled ode to the café itself.[9]

As a gay man, Samuel Loveman might have perceived the Double R to be welcoming and refreshing for a reason distinctly different than that of his friends. The coffeehouse reportedly offered a tolerant environment for queer men and women. George Kirk mentioned its reputation in a letter to his fiancée: “If you had been longer in NYC you’d know that there are many boys and many girls both male and female. My dear Double R is claimed to be a hangout for these half and halfers.”

Throughout the 1920s, all-night coffee shops and eateries often presented queer men—conservatively dressed professionals and flamboyant drag queens alike—with safe third spaces. Since Lovecraft and his friends frequented such spots at late hours, they likely witnessed these men mingling, cruising, or simply chatting over coffee. Needless to say, Lovecraft would have refrained from including such unexpected observations and encounters in his letters to his aunts.

Notes

[1] “According to my own observations and from the polls I’ve seen, Leftists are far more adamant about refusing to share bodily fluids with the other side than those who lean Right, and women are far more likely to dry up at the prospect of coitus with a male conservative than men are prone to going limp at the thought of humping a liberal chick.” Jim Goad, “Using Politics to Segregate the Sexes.”

[2] This often produces casually Orwellian comments as this, from Irish Green Party Sen. Pauline O’Reilly: “We are restricting freedom, but we’re doing it for the common good.” Tobias Langdon (“Fingernails and Fascism: The Nastiness and Noxiousness of Jewish Ethnocentrism”) notes: “Indeed, the war between Israel and Hamas has granted British Whites the richly comic sight of an ethnocentric Jew demanding arrests for thought-crime while using an image of George Orwell to proclaim his own virtue.”

[3] Goodwin compares the Baudelairian flaneur to Lovecraft the rambler, but with his own unique twist: “While living in New York, Lovecraft relished nothing more than rambling through it, often at odd hours of the night. Nonetheless, he differed from the accepted characterization of the flaneur in a concrete and important feature: the crowd, the people of the city going about their adventures and routines, held little interest for him. The physical tissue of the city—its buildings, its parks, its places—drew his obsessive gaze. Signs and symbols of the urban past, not the intricate daily play of street life, fascinated him.”

[4] Lovecraft would have deplored Ignatius as just another filthy Catholic immigrant, detracting from any charm he might have found in an imaginary Olde World New Orleans. However, it’s interesting to note that Ignatius conducts an epistolatory relationship with a New York Jewess, who, at the end of the novel, whisks him away to New York, where she hopes the more intellectual environment will save him. One imagines the denouement will be much the same as in the case of Lovecraft.

[5] WWR 1, Section 36. Why this should be is an interesting question, but beyond the scope of this review.

[6] In Neville’s favorite, repeated example, “How Abdullah Taught Neville the Law,” his desire to visit his family in Barbados for Christmas, despite being penniless in New York City, results in his brother “suddenly deciding” to have a family reunion, for which he sends Neville a steamship ticket and money for clothes, drinks, and tips along the way. As Neville wanders the streets of Manhattan, imagining himself on the little streets of Barbados, one recalls Lovecraft’s rambles: “I said to Abdullah, in the month of October, late October, “Ab, you know I’ve been gone from Barbados for almost twelve years… I came here in ’22. And it’s almost 12 years, and I’ve never had a desire to go back. But now I have a hungry desire, a haunting desire, to go to Barbados. Not a thing stops me but a lack of money. I have no money.”

He said to me, “You are in Barbados.”

I said, “I am in Barbados?”

He said, “Yes. You are now in Barbados. And so… you see Barbados, and you see America from Barbados, and you can smell the tropical land of Barbados, see only the little homes of Barbados, and that’s all you do. You just simply sleep this night in Barbados.”

Well, I thought him insane, really… I mean, at the moment, it seemed so… stupid. Because… 72nd Street, we still had 50- and 60-story buildings. And little Barbados with a little three-story building almost the tallest that you’d find. And narrow little streets and no sidewalks. And I’m walking on a sidewalk that is wider than the widest street in Barbados on 72nd Street.

Well, nevertheless, that night I slept in Barbados. I assumed that I’m in Barbados in my mother’s home, and that I saw America relative to Barbados, and it wasn’t under me that night… it was north of me, about two thousand miles.”

[7] “Concerning the more practical questions of the sudden proposal [to move back to Providence], Lovecraft left those matters to his family. Mundane, yet crucial details such as selecting a date, finding an apartment, or hiring movers existed beyond his capabilities. He was ready for his aunts to manage his life again.”

[8] One suspects the author might be hinting at some kind of sexual kink here, and one recalls that Lovecraft’s father’s psychotic break was accompanied by delusions of his wife being “outrag[ed]” (i.e., sexually assaulted) by multiple men” in their hotel while they were in fact travelling alone.

[9] I don’t know why Goodwin calls this ode “untitled” since it presumably is “On The Double-R Coffee House.” Haden, op. cit., quotes this and briefly discusses the Double-R’s history; he notes that it “seems to have been” the inspiration for the Double-R Diner in Twin Peaks. For more on the coffeehouse, see this podcast transcript.