3,079 words
David J. Goodwin
Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft In Gotham
Fordham University Press, 2023
Part 3 (Read Part 1 here. Read Part 2 here.)
Excursus: Midnight at the Naked Automat?
Though no Bohemian (another group he relentlessly mocked) and even a teetotaler, and with New York, despite Lovecraft’s loathing, not quite as degenerate as it would later become, Lovecraft’s midnight rambles interspersed with long nights in coffeehouses and Automats amid not just fellow writers of dubious sexuality but the “beastly scum” of the city of night suggest an unexpected association with the hardboiled world later made famous by William Burroughs in such books as Naked Lunch and, especially, the earlier Junky. This anecdote from a crawl through Greenwich Village recalls a scene from the former:
Strange men poking into the nooks and crannies of buildings and public spaces at a late hour always attracts suspicion. While Lovecraft and Kirk were strolling along Minetta Street, a police cruiser slowly trailed the pair and even stopped to monitor them for a moment. After the police resumed their patrol, the two friends ducked into a narrow alley and came upon a “cryptical” moonlit courtyard. Evading the attention of authorities and Lovecraft’s infectious enthusiasm emboldened Kirk. No dark alleyways, shadowy stairwells, or questionable characters would temper his desire to follow the man from Providence.[1]
Perhaps emboldened by eluding the flatfoots, Lovecraft and Kirk embark on what might have become a life of crime!
On Cherry Street, they discovered a courtyard with a uniquely diamond-shaped streetlamp. Wanting to gain a fuller view of both, Lovecraft and Kirk entered one of the presumably inhabited buildings facing the space and climbed “curious, winding stairs” to its roof. These intrepid urban explorers displayed no hesitation in trespassing. That is, breaking the law.
At least once this world surfaces in his published writing:
Sonia Greene claimed that “The Horror at Red Hook” was inspired by Lovecraft’s unpleasant observation of “rough, rowdyish men” at a Brooklyn restaurant where the couple was dining with friends. Disgusted by the men’s public behavior, he wove caricatures of them into his writing. The possibility of real danger seemed to lie just beneath the surface of Lovecraft’s everyday life, underscoring the sometimes gritty and marginal nature of the buildings and neighborhoods affordable to him and his literary companions.
Lovecraft and Burroughs, tall and gaunt, downwardly mobile scions of the WASP elite, eking out a marginal existence in the New York underworld. If only they had met![2]
That line about “the sometimes gritty and marginal nature of the buildings and neighborhoods affordable to him and his literary companions” deserves some comment as well; it links another theme in Goodwin’s book: marginal buildings providing housing and meeting space for marginal men.
Much like many struggling artists and creative individuals in any era, these writers embraced impecunious and often unpredictable lifestyles. They were always scouting for cheap rents in cheap buildings—luxuries often impossible to find in “respectable” areas of New York or, for that matter, any desirable city.
The men Lovecraft spend most of his time with, in preference to his wife, were a group that called itself the Kalem Club, from the initials of founding members: Rheinhart Kleiner, George Kirk, Arthur Leeds, Frank Belknap Long, Samuel Loveman, Everett McNeil, James F. Morton, and H. P. Lovecraft. (Lovecraft actually never used the name himself, always referring to them by the rather sinister phrase “the gang.”). These were a motley crew indeed, providing the kind of “diversity” Lovecraft could tolerate: from those with postgraduate degrees (Morton) to high school dropouts (Lovecraft),[3] from wealthy (Long) to gainfully employed (Loveman[4]) to never employed (Lovecraft, again).[5] But otherwise White, male and straight (or at least, closeted in Loveman’s case).
Goodwin notes that there were many New Yorks and New Yorkers:
During the first decades of the twentieth century in New York, the more famed and dominant artistic circles and movements existed alongside closely intertwined and mutually exclusive counterparts…. Lovecraft and his friends’ small coterie of scribblers, booksellers, and intellectuals stand as one such largely independent and overlooked group. While Dorothy Parker held court with the Algonquin Round Table, while F. Scott Fitzgerald drank at the Plaza Hotel, and while Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney hosted artists in her Greenwich Village studio, Lovecraft’s literary gang crowded into rented rooms in unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhoods to discuss genre fiction and pulp magazines well into the night. These men experienced a very different New York.
Lovecraft may have been “overlooked” and “marginal” to these folks at the top and bottom of New York – and thus American – society, but the feeling was mutual:
As a committed Anglophile fascinated by the eighteenth century, experimental literature could not seduce him. As a teetotaler, hedonistically ignoring the bans of Prohibition held no attraction for him. As a chronically impoverished writer, sampling the glamour of stylish hotels and swank nightclubs never was even an option. That is, Lovecraft was not a participant in the storied bohemian scene. He was an outsider even among outsiders.
It is a delicious irony that while Lovecraft looked for survivals, or perhaps “relics” would be the better term, of colonial times throughout the city, and even as far afield as Elizabeth, New Jersey, his favorite site for midnight rambling was Greenwich Village, then beginning its reign as the home of the hip and the beat:
Unbeknownst to Lovecraft, the realist painter Edward Hopper, now famous for manifesting scenes of alienation and isolation in a dreamy, yet modern cityscape, lived at 3 Washington Square North. This is only one example of the fertile creative world thriving in New York at that moment. Lovecraft inhabited a sphere of that world—just not one shared by Hopper.
***
Although Loveman himself lauded Lovecraft’s penchant for overlooking the “peccadilloes” of his friends, [6] he was not above indulging in a bit of amateur psychoanalysis of Lovecraft’s libido:
Much later in his own life and in correspondence not intended for publication, Loveman interpreted Lovecraft’s view toward Hatfield, Crane, and gay men in general as a possible act of self-deflection over his own hidden insecurities: “H. P. L., in his mockery of the tribe, had much more of this attribute in him than he would conceivably have cared to acknowledge—his vent about the virility of the Romans, his awkwardness before women, etc. No? Think it over. I admit that it was completely subconscious.”
Although discounting such claims, Alfred Galpin conceded that Lovecraft’s “high-pitched voice” coupled with his “mincing manners” might have been misinterpreted by “any outsider.”
As with Lovecraft’s purported asexuality, Goodwin himself rejects such easy answers and politically correct attempts to avoid dealing a complex artist:
Speculation aside, no strong evidence exists of Lovecraft himself doubting or testing his sexuality identity. This fact has yet to stymy conjecture or fictionalizations of the subject.
Lovecraft: Bigot or Prophet?
This of course leads us to the most controversial aspect of Lovecraft’s life and work: his unmistakable, unrepentant, and at times violent “racism,” including “anti-immigrant” – and indeed, anti-non-New Englander — views as well.
While Goodwin admits that Lovecraft’s views were, though a bit extreme, well with upper-class WASP parameters —
Anti-immigrant anxiety was a dominant current in American political and public life in the early decades of the twentieth century. A year before Lovecraft wrote this story, the Immigration Act of 1924 barred all immigrants from Asia and severely restricted those from Eastern and Southern Europe. The act’s chief author, Washington [State] Republican congressman and chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization Albert Johnson, lauded the ill as saving America’s “cherished institutions” from “a stream of alien blood.” The door to the United States had closed to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses. Covers of pulp magazines, such as Lovecraft’s main outlet Weird Tales, often showcased illustrations of white women threatened by creatures bearing stereotypical racial or ethnic features. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the quintessential literary novel of America in the 1920s, the wealthy and boastful character Tom Buchanan openly fears the downfall of the white race and cites a pseudo-scientific monograph as evidence.[7]
— he finds it disheartening:
What might be most disappointing and damaging about Lovecraft’s bigotry is that he was an author. Artists, musicians, scholars, and writers are often presumed to be open-minded and tolerant of other cultures, identities, and peoples and to serve as the vanguard for expanding rights and equality for those standing at the margins of mainstream society. Lovecraft proves this to be fallacious thinking.
If you can’t depend on pulp horror writers, who can you trust?
In Lovecraft’s case, he chose to ignore or reject arguments and evidence pushing against his ideology on ethnicity and race. During his years in New York City, some of his contemporaries in the larger cultural world attempted to honestly challenge the dominant societal norms in these areas and to consider much different stances. … Anthropologist Franz Boas was assiduously dismantling the concept of scientific racism itself with his pioneering ethnographic work.
Goodwin wants to use The Science to challenge Lovecraft’s ethnic loyalty, an especially good tactic because not only does he expect his readers to be, or to think of themselves, as modern and up to date, but Lovecraft himself was quite science fan himself, in a 18th century materialistic sort of way.
However, things are not so neat and tidy, and Goodwin either doesn’t know, or thinks you don’t know, (I will charitably assume the former), that Boas’ work, along with his epigones such as Mead and Malinowski, has been decisively critiqued, debunked, and exposed as, at best, a Judeocentric mythos.[8]
While Lovecraft rightly disdained Boasian pseudo-science, his meticulous concern with facts, a key component in his fantasy writing, enabled him to assess his surroundings and make up his own mind about The Others.[9] Goodwin himself adduces two examples of the sort of experiences– attention to detail, or “noticing” — that we might call red-pilling. First, as Lovecraft continues his desultory look for employment:
That July, his only notable foray was a probationary stint as a salesperson at a Newark, New Jersey, branch of a collection agency. After being introduced to the general manager, Lovecraft characterized him as “a crude but well-meaning fellow” with “traces of a Levantine heritage.” Only five days into the job, he was dismayed to learn that the lion’s share of potential clients for the firm’s services were “the most impossible sort of persons” operating and owning businesses in New York’s garment trade. There is no mistaking this reference: Jewish immigrants and Jewish Americans locally had dominated that industry since the Civil War. Lovecraft resigned that same day. His career in sales did not last even a full week.
I suppose some might insist that it was Lovecraft’s “prejudice” and Eeyore-like pessimism that prevented him from wading into the deadbeats of the garment district, but one might well wonder about how the “lion’s share” just happened to be Jews. But another incident involves fellow-tribe member Sonia herself, whose marriage to Lovecraft proved unlucky in business as well as love, as it was followed by a number of setbacks and disasters, such as:
She found a salaried position at Bruck-Weiss Millinery on West Fifty-Seventh Street and just off Fifth Avenue, Manhattan’s most exclusive high-end shopping district. Bruck-Weiss was promoted as “the largest exclusive millinery shop” in both the United States and Europe. Coincidentally, and most likely unknown to Lovecraft and Greene, it was partially owned by Sadie Weiss, the wife of Harry Houdini’s estranged brother Leopold Weiss and the ex-wife of his other brother, Nathan. Possibly referring to Sadie Weiss, Lovecraft maligned the head of the firm as “a dour, capricious, and uncultivated woman.” Early into her new job, Greene was asked for a list of her longtime clients and was instructed to convince them to shift their business to Bruck-Weiss. After being furloughed because of a purported lack of sales several weeks later, she suspected that she was hired solely to obtain her customer list and that she soon would be summarily dismissed. [Emphasis mine]
Notes
[1] In Junky, the narrator, “Lee,” is learning how to roll lushes on the subway when one target wakes up and they must flee off the elevated platform to the streets below. “’There’s sure to be an alarm out for us,’ Roy said. ‘Keep a lookout for cars. We’ll duck into the bushes if any come along.’… ‘Here comes a car,’ I said. “Yellow lights, too.’ We crawled into the bushes at the side of the road and crouched down behind a signboard. The car drove slowly by. We started walking again. I was getting sick and wondered if I would get home to the morphine sulphate I had stashed in my apartment.”
[2] Lovecraft, of course, died in 1937. But consider: He had appointed one of his many correspondents, the young (and homosexual) Robert H. Barlow as his literary executor, but August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, the empresarios behind Arkham House, quarreled with him and spread rumors about him looting Lovecraft’s books and papers, so he quit the weird fiction scene and became an anthropologist, specializing in Mayan culture. One of his students at Mexico City College was: William S. Burroughs. Did he plant the idea for Burroughs’ telepathic Mayan priests? See here for more.
[3] Lovecraft deigned to pity Morton, who had never made much of himself in the world; he also deplored his pro-African American views, even living in a Harlem townhouse, on “a street now overrun by niggers of the cleaner” and “less offensive sort,” which Lovecraft accepted due to its luxurious furnishings and books: “his bibliomania easily overpowered his racial animus.”
[4] Not counting an overnight job Loveman gave Lovecraft, addressing envelopes for his new bookstore’s catalog.
[5] Long’s family were rich, and their swanky UWS apartment – right out of a Salinger story – was “marginal” only in being elite. Lovecraft, of course, enjoyed visiting – and especially dining – with these folks he considered examples of the sort of aristos he imaged himself “naturally” belonging among. “The formality and order of the meal [at the Longs’ apartment] impressed Lovecraft, a staunch defender of etiquette. Each dish was served in its proper order.” He made sure to have his aunts meet the Longs on their first visit to New York: “The Longs were, like he and [aunt Annie] Gamwell, ‘real’ Americans.”
[6] “Although Lovecraft expressed disappointment with Crane’s penchant for drunkenness and discomfort with his sexuality, he held nothing but high regard for his literary talent and artistic taste. Throughout their acquaintanceship—they certainly were never friends—Lovecraft displayed a surprising tolerance and sympathy toward Crane: he worried that the poet was squandering his natural gifts and drinking himself to an early grave. Crane voiced a much lower opinion of Lovecraft, referring to him as the ‘piping-voiced husband’ of ‘Miss Sonia Green’ [sic] and a ‘queer’ individual.” Crane’s use of “queer” has an ironic ring today, but “piping-voiced” is also interesting, as Lovecraft liked to attribute sounds of such timbre to creatures like Nyarlathotep or the sub-Antarctic shuggoths.
[7] For more on this, see Robert Hampton’s review of Daniel Okrent’s 2019 book, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (also, like Gatsby, published by Scribner). Hampton writes: “The ‘villains’ of Okrent’s story are not cranks and outsiders. They weren’t relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party, nor were they upset immigrants ‘took their jobs.’ They were some of the most respected and well-connected men in America, and they all shared a desire to see the historic American nation preserved. For that sin, they are branded as unredeemable bigots in official history. Yet the smears cannot obscure their elite pedigrees and high intelligence.” Nor was it restricted (no pun intended) to the elite: “It was … even considered ‘progressive.’ [Indeed,] the idea was immensely popular within the labor movement. Unions saw immigrants as scabs who took their jobs for lower pay.” However, Hampton, reviewing another book (E. Digby Baltzell’s famous The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America [New York: Random House, 1964], puts this in perspective: “Unfortunately, they were not like this in real life. The WASPs may have harbored prejudices against Jews, blacks, and others in their country clubs and summer retreats, but they didn’t act on these beliefs. While Baltzell argues the club and fraternity were the real power centers, the Ellis Islanders took over America’s culture and politics. The WASPs were powerless to resist anti-discrimination claims against their enclaves and the subversion of their culture. They were able to make a lot of money and have influence over their immediate surroundings, but they weren’t in control of the country. Moreover, many WASPs, like Baltzell, championed their own dispossession. The author was one of many fellow class traitors who had forsaken their clubbiness to stand with Ellis Islanders. The WASP elite never bothered to justify themselves to the new Americans. This ultimately led to their dispossession.”
[8] Again, one regrets that Goodwin ignores Haden’s similar book (op. cit.), where these issues are given a well-informed discussion. For example, he writes: “On the apparent tendency for these new anthropologist ethnographers to distort and mislead, see the later hot debates over Malinowski’s diaries, and the fieldwork of Margaret Mead, among others. Boas also faked some of his Eskimo photographs. There was also criticism of the scholarship of Margaret Murray from the early 1960s. [T]here does seem to be support for Lovecraft’s skepticism from at least one modern scholar of the history of such ideas in America: ‘its central methodological values have long been sustained by stories and beliefs that have something of the character of myth.’” See my review here. This is just another example of information you will only find here, on Counter-Currents. Please consider donating during our current fundraiser, here.
[9] I discuss the perhaps paradoxical observation, that intense realism becomes indistinguishable from surrealism, in many places, perhaps for the first time here: “What Guénon, Evola, and Spengler seek to do deliberately, what Lovecraft did fictionally or even accidentally, what James’s mind was ‘too fine’ to do at all, is to not see mere facts, or see a lot of them, or even see them very very intently, but to see through them and thus acquire metaphysical insight, and, through the method of obsessive accumulation of detail, share that insight by inducing it in others.” In “The Lesson of the Monster; or, The Great, Good Thing on the Doorstep,” reprinted in The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture; ed. by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014)