A Nice Place to Visit
Lovecraft as the Original Midnight Rambler

4,122 words

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

Part 1

“Come on ramblers, let’s ramble.” – Joe, Reservoir Dogs

 “So if you ever meet the midnight rambler/Coming down your marble hall
Well he’s pouncing like a proud black panther/Well, you can say I, I told you so”
– “Midnight Rambler”

Hey, did you hear about that alt-Right icon who dropped out of high school, never had a job or kissed a girl, lived with his aunts, then moved to New York City and married a Jew? Yeah, a Ukrainian Jew! He musta been a Fed; that’s probably why he kept hanging around Federal Hill.

Howard Philip Lovecraft was not, of course, an “alt-Right” figure, except in our amused retrospect; however, it continues to be fascinating to contemplate how closely he prefigures many of the modern “alt” milieus: his career in the “amateur journalism” movement, including publishing his own journal, prefigures the ’zine scene of the 90s, ^[1] and his extensive correspondence with a circle of friends, collaborators and fans echoes the “online communities” of today.[2]

If I may be allowed to appropriate an appreciation of a very different figure: “[Lovecraft’s work] has always managed to overleap the usual confinement of time and space in a fashion that would surely have warmed the curious old heart of its creator if he had been able to foresee it.” [3]

The book under review also explores a paradox: Lovecraft, the proto-incel,[4] enemy of modernity, and angry anti-Semite, who marries a Jewish immigrant and winds up living, for a while at least, in the capital of the modern world, New York City.[5]

Another Lovecraft book! Do we need this one? Yes: although it’s relatively short, at a little over 200 pages (but with as many pages of endnotes, challenging Your Humble Author himself in the annotations racket), and deals mostly with Lovecraft’s two years in New York City, it provides extensive documentation from sources both primary and secondary, at times in minute detail,[6] and deals with the larger implications of Lovecraft’s currently unpopular worldview. It’s also well-written, and well-illustrated, with lots of photos from now and then.

This book will focus on a specific time and place in the life of H. P. Lovecraft. It will not serve as an encyclopedic or close study of his biography and literary output. Instead, it will attempt to structure a thorough telling of his relationship with New York City. Readers will be invited to walk through its streets and neighborhoods with Lovecraft and experience them as they appeared in his thoughts and imagination.[7] Primary sources—published and unpublished letters, memoirs, diaries, ephemera, and documents—serve as the foundation of the text.

He also provides a handy one-paragraph synopsis:

The narrative in Chapter 1 begins with the death of Lovecraft’s mother, Sarah Susan, in the spring of 1921 and his meeting with Sonia H. Greene, his future wife, later that year. This pair of events arguably propelled him to envision a life beyond Providence. Chapter 2 chronicles Lovecraft’s first trip to New York City in April 1922, and Chapter 3 recounts his successive trips there during that same year. Lovecraft relocated from his hometown to New York in March 1924, and he lived in the city until April 1926. His life and literary output during those two years will be examined between Chapter 4 and Chapter 9. Additionally, Chapter 9 will discuss his return to Providence, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1937. The conclusion summarizes the remainder of Lovecraft’s life and speculates on what could be learned from considering his New York experiences.

This “chronological micro-biography of Lovecraft’s New York years,” as the publishers call it, begins in media res, as the author, in 1936, renews his correspondence with a friend in New York after a dozen or so years.

He was forty-five years old and a failure by almost every conventional societal measure of his time (and our own): he was an impoverished, solitary, and divorced high-school dropout. He was an obscure author virtually unknown even among Providence’s intellectuals and literati. He shared an apartment with his elderly aunt, and he relied upon her for the management of his domestic affairs. He possessed few social outlets in his native city, and he seldom ventured from his home during the winter months.

A career as a lone gunman seems to beckon. But over a decade before, he had begun a strange odyssey into something like normal life:

In April 1922, Lovecraft first visited [Brooklyn] as a houseguest of Sonia H. Greene, a Brooklyn milliner and fashion industry professional whom he had met at a literary convention in Boston, Massachusetts, during the previous year. The two soon began exchanging letters, and then Greene traveled to Providence to see him in September 1921. Without notifying family or friends, the couple wed in March 1924. This was possibly his only realized romantic relationship.

 Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn for the next two years, attempting and largely failing to secure a niche for himself in the publishing and literary world of New York City. During that time, he found himself within a tight circle of friends, all immersed in the life of books, writing, and the mind. The group happily whiled away countless hours rummaging through bookstalls, nursing cups of coffee while chatting at Automats, and embarking upon midnight rambles in Manhattan. He would never again possess such a gift of constant companionship.

But those “midnight rambles” with his “tight circle of friends” were not the stuff of the usual cliché about the young man from the provinces finally finding a home among some big city jetsetters who “finally understand me, man.”

Although the historic figures and narratives of culture in Jazz Age New York continually fascinate scholars, captivate readers, and haunt creative individuals, Lovecraft intersected with them only minimally—if at all—during his two years in the city. 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.

 Lovecraft was satisfied with his own trench coat mafia, and had no desire to sit at the cool kids’ table:

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.

And when the ramblers rambled, it was not in search of the Latest Thing, neither hot new night spots (certainly not ethnic restaurants) nor the cool new architecture.

Lovecraft saw his cultural and intellectual identity inextricably linked with New England’s colonial and early American heritage. While living in New York, he embarked on leisurely treasure hunts for buildings and structures dating from those favored historic periods throughout all the city’s five boroughs and as far afield as New Jersey, Long Island, and the Hudson River Valley. He discovered a rich vein of such sites in Greenwich Village. The neighborhood’s architecture, not its artists, lured him to its streets. Through these remainders in the city, he sought a physical and imaginative connection to a past and largely vanished New York.

Lovecraft’s “tight little circle” of outsiders who were too outside for the Outside – another foreshadowing of Cobain-style anomie or the Dissident Right – and his search for the past in the heart of Modernity – not unlike the doomed archeologists in many a Lovecraft tale – will form two of the most interesting themes in this book.

Meanwhile, Greene, his wife, struggled with financial and health challenges, leaving to work in a Cincinnati, Ohio, department store in December 1924. Lovecraft moved into a rooming house in Brooklyn Heights, resumed a bachelor lifestyle, and ultimately crumpled beneath the pressure of fending for himself in the city. Failing to adjust to its modern urbanity, he described himself as “an unassimilated alien.” On April 17, 1926, he boarded a train in Grand Central Terminal and returned to Providence. Ecstatically, he joined the ranks of artists frustrated, exhausted, and broken by New York who have exclaimed, “Goodbye to all that.” Although Lovecraft still visited the city to see friends over the years, he typically expressed nothing but contempt and revulsion for it. The density, rush, and diversity filled him with dread. He remained in Providence for the rest of his life. 

And so, this is the story of Lovecraft’s midnight rambles… a cautionary tale to be sure.

***

However proud Lovecraft may have been of his Anglo-Saxon ancestry, his immediate heritage was hardly promising, and seems like a setup for one of his, or Poe’s, tales of hereditary doom:

On April 21, 1893, before Lovecraft was even three years old, his fathersuffered a violent psychotic break while staying at a Chicago hotel during a business trip.[8]

For an indeterminate number of years, Sarah Susan Lovecraft had
exhibited symptoms of severe mental illness. Speculation exists that she
might have contracted syphilis from her late husband.[9]

Sinking into an identity as “a failure in life” and a physical invalid during his
young adulthood, Lovecraft withdrew into his own solitary world and
allowed his mother and, to a lesser extent, his aunts to fuss over all his
needs.

Unbeknownst to him, but knownst to us, thanks to Goodwin’s research, his downward trajectory was about to take a surprising turn. But for now, let’s rejoin Goodwin in 1936.

By the time he sat down to write to Rheinhart Kleiner in May 1936, he was dealing with his own worrisome health issues… Most troubling for him as a man of letters, Lovecraft grew despondent over his inability to compose fiction commensurate with his own high standards for his art and craft. … He was suffering from the most painful, agonizing, and humiliating condition dreaded by any literary artist and practitioner: his imagination— his ability to spin tales—had fallen silent. He was no longer writing.[10]

And now Goodwin foreshadows what we will find:

Lovecraft might have been exchanging memories of New York with Kleiner for another reason: His time there, albeit brief, shaped him as a writer and as a man far more than he would readily confess. Those years solidified the importance of place to his writing, imagination, and very outlook on life. After abandoning his New York dalliance for the security of Providence, Lovecraft imbued his fiction with a strong and unique sense of local color. New England—its architecture, landscape, and geography— became a character itself in his stories.

 As Houellebecq says, “New York helped him.”[11]

The last time Lovecraft experienced such a period of melancholy and inability to write was in the aftermath of his mother’s death, [12] and Goodwin does a good job of sketching in the life and personality of Sarah Susan Lovecraft, remembered by him as “a person of unusual charm and force of character, accomplished in literature and the fine arts; a French scholar, musician, and painter in oils,” but with whom he engaged in shouting matches which he explained to the neighbors as rehearsals of Shakespearian plays, and who would die in a mental hospital, like his father had earlier.[13]

His aunts, who had taken over his household during Sarah’s decline (and continued to during the rest of his life, outside of the New York period), encouraged Lovecraft to get out more, and one of his jaunts was to the annual convention of the National Amateur Press Association held in Boston, where he had his fateful meeting with Sonia H. Greene, a divorced, Ukrainian Jew,[14] trained milliner working in New York City, and fellow amateur writer.[15] Again, Goodwin provides a brief but detailed account of her own troubled life, up to the fateful moment:

Kleiner recalled Greene navigating him toward Lovecraft and unsubtly pushing past his friend’s rumored paramour, Winifred Virginia Jackson, on that July afternoon.[16] Just as he introduced the two to one another, a photographer took a picture of the three of them together. Wearing a stylishly embroidered dress and a large, round hat, both possibly of her own design, Greene flashes a flirtatious, inviting grin and stares directly at the camera with half-closed eyes. She appears to be locking arms with both men. With his formal winged collar shirt and pocket watch charms, Lovecraft appears self-consciously foppish and offers a solemn visage to the photographer. Upon first meeting him, Greene “admired his personality but frankly, at first, not his person.” Lovecraft remembered being “bored” by the tour of Boston Harbor.

This is one of many interesting photos provided throughout the book; another immediately follows:

Later during that same boat ride, George Julian Houtain, an attorney and a Brooklyn-based amateur journalist and publisher, encouraged Greene, the New York contingent’s “official vamp,” to sneak behind Lovecraft and “get a half-moon clutch on his august form.” Houtain then snapped a photograph of the two with his Kodak Brownie camera. Greene’s arm rests around Lovecraft’s shoulder, and their heads are close together. He appears to be restraining laughter; she looks rapturous with joy. Lovecraft jokingly accused his friends of attempted blackmail and Greene as being their willful accomplice. This photograph remains the only known existing one of the pair alone together (Figure 4). Recounting that moment, Greene claimed that was when she “stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson.”[17]

Talk about getting out of the house. Foppishly dressed, restraining laughter and being fought over by two women, even if somewhat playfully or imaginatively, this not the Lovecraft of legend! And soon things become ever stranger – weirder, perhaps, if not eldritch – when Lovecraft decides to marry this doxy – without informing anyone — and move to New York!

But first, Goodwin finds something in Lovecraft’s correspondence that triggers his liberal reflexes and brings up his angle on Lovecraft in this book:

Shortly after their meeting in Boston, Lovecraft began mentioning Greene in his letters. Writing to Kleiner later that July, he praised her intelligence, albeit in a strange, xenophobic manner. Although she had read two of his recently published pieces, the prose poem “Nyarlathotep” and the short story “Polaris,” she deemed both “incomprehensible.” Lovecraft professed little surprise that his writings stumped her, remarking that “Teutonic mysticism is too subtle for Slavs.” [18] However, he did declare Greene to be “a welcome addition” to the realm of amateur journalism.

This exchange is notable for several reasons. Throughout his entire adult life, Lovecraft espoused—sometimes quite proudly and crudely— nativist, anti-Semitic, and racist beliefs. This was not some youthful mistake or a onetime late-night rant: this was part of his personality, character, and worldview. This was Lovecraft. Throughout his voluminous correspondence and personal writings, this bigoted mentality appears in the most incongruous and odd moments. Lovecraft would share a warm, even touching impression or memory of a friend, pet, landscape, or place only to follow that sentiment with a racist comment or aside. A reader might interpret such remarks as acts of compulsion or, at best, obliviousness. This letter to Kleiner adhered to that pattern. Lovecraft heaped praise upon Greene and then maligned her purportedly foreign mental capacities. This episode and his entire relationship with Greene and other close acquaintances and boon companions present one of the trickiest questions about him. Regardless of his vocal and reprehensible beliefs, Lovecraft made exceptions for individuals falling into his negative categories. Although he expressed loathing for immigrants, white ethnics, and Jews, he would correspond with, mentor, and befriend both select men and women belonging to those demographic groups.

A reader “might interpret such remarks” as signs of crude bigotry combined with social retardation, but a reader might also interpret such remarks as expressions of what Lovecraft, and most people, believed then, some still believe, and which might actually be true and obvious. I’m not sure Lovecraft is right about this particular piece of folk psychology, but that differences exist between various human groups seems to be true in general; otherwise, how is diversity supposed to enrich and strengthen us? Perhaps that’s why Ms. Greene would be a “welcome addition” to the group; [19] indeed, it will be Goodwin’s thesis that however much Lovecraft abhorred immigrants, modernity, and New York City, it was his encounters with them that matured him as a writer with a unique vision.

Notes

[1] “After the pulp magazine Argosy published a series of his letters and poems critiquing and satirizing one of its popular authors, Fred Jackson, in 1913, Lovecraft become involved in amateur journalism, an international association of nonprofessional writers publishing, printing, and exchanging their own work and periodicals, not unlike the culture of zines during the 1980s and 1990s or of blogs in the 2000s and 2010s.” For more on Lovecraft’s early adventures in amateur journalism, see my review of a compilation of his homemade journal, The Conservative.

[2] “A compulsive and prolific letter writer, Lovecraft jotted brief postcards and fashioned lengthy epistles to geographically distant acquaintances and friends whenever he had a free moment. He maintained an exhaustive and far-flung correspondence with fellow authors and forged strong relationships through it. Over the course of his writing life, Lovecraft composed between an estimated 88,000 and 100,000 postcards and letters. Presently, roughly 10,000 of these documents sit in archives, libraries, and private collections. Some run dozens of pages filled with tight, cramped handwriting. Almost no topic was off-limits, and Lovecraft demonstrated openness, humor, curiosity, and empathy in many of his exchanges. For him, letters— both written and received—were ‘the breath of life.’ Maurice W. Moe, a Wisconsin English teacher and longtime epistolary friend, argued that any ‘survey to determine the greatest letter-writer in history’ must consider Lovecraft for inclusion.” However, like the early internet, that “no topic was off-limits” feature is something of a bug for Goodwin: his letters “painfully reveal his calcified and casual racism and xenophobia. [He] exhibited little restraint in maligning people of color, religious minorities, immigrants, and new Americans—effectively any individual or group not fitting neatly into the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic category. Occasionally, he set a passage in a mock Black dialect or sketched a racist caricature in a page’s margins.” Memes? We’ll have to examine all this, as Goodwin sedulously notes it again and again.

[3] Elmer O’Brien, S. J., The Essential Plotinus (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1975), p. 13. Compare: “When we see the fascination exerted in modern popular culture by stylized figures of alienation (James Dean, Kurt Cobain, et. al.) it becomes clearer who this Greta Garbo of the fictional universe fits into a longer cultural history of marginals and misfits suddenly recentered as apropos icons, who conform by their very marginality to the ideas of a youth culture….” Nicholas White, “Introduction” to Huysmans’ Against Nature (Oxford World Classics, 1998).

[4] A Substacker writes: “The term incel refers to a man who is a romantic failure, but more broadly, it is a pejorative for a whole swath of men who are generally unsuccessful, alienated, and alone.” Sounds like Lovecraft.

[5] Our author is subject to bursts of uncritical adulation when the topic of modernity or its capital, New York City, arise, such as this: “By the time of Lovecraft’s arrival in Brooklyn in 1924, New York stood as the cultural dynamo of the United States, and Manhattan was its main generator. While the city’s avant-garde movements pushed the perimeters of arts and letters, its creative industries established the national discourse. Tin Pan Alley songwriters composed the music for America’s theaters, concert halls, and homes. New York magazines filled display racks in drug-stores and newsstands in towns and cities across the country, documenting current affairs, setting taste standards, and sharing shopping tips. The city’s book publishers dominated the trade, educating and entertaining the reading public. Broadway dazzled audiences with its plays, musicals, and performances ready for export to regional stages. Meanwhile, émigré and largely Jewish intellectuals argued about drama, philosophy, and politics in cafes and restaurants in the Lower East Side. Modernist poets and painters rubbed shoulders in Greenwich Village galleries and speakeasies. Black writers and thinkers nurtured a cultural outpouring in Harlem. Art, music, and literature belonged to both big business and scrappy bohemia in New York City in the 1920s.”

[6] “H. P. Lovecraft missed his train at Providence’s Union Station on the morning of March 2, 1924. After buying a ticket for the 11:09 A.M. departure to Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan, he found a telegraph office and cabled ahead that he would be arriving behind schedule and at a different destination. The original plan was for him to take the earlier 10:09 A.M. New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad train to Pennsylvania Station.”

[7] Curiously, the author, judging from his extensive bibliography, is not familiar with David Haden, Walking With Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26, published as an Amazon Kindle in 2011, which I reviewed here. Though there is some overlap in the “walking” department, Goodwin’s book, as mentioned, is more broadly focused.

[8] “He burst from his room, screaming that a maid had insulted him and that his wife was being ‘outrag[ed]’ (i.e., sexually assaulted) by multiple men on a different floor. Winfield Scott Lovecraft was traveling alone and not with Sarah Susan.³³ The accusation directed at a maid might suggest that he unsuccessfully attempted to solicit sexual favors from a female hotel employee or that he argued with a prostitute whom he invited back to his room. Several days later, Winfield Scott Lovecraft was escorted to Providence under sedation, where he was committed to Butler Hospital, a well-regarded psychiatric institution on the city’s eastern edge on April 25. He died on July 19, 1898, of general paresis, a terminal neurological disease caused by late-stage syphilis, roughly a month before his son’s eighth birthday.”

[9] Interestingly, for Lovecraft’s future subject matter, “A former neighbor, Clara Hess, recalled … Sarah Susan Lovecraft … confided in Hess about spotting ‘weird and fantastic creatures’ hurriedly emerging from dark corners and buildings. While conversing with Hess, she fearfully glanced about as if expecting a sudden attack from these imagined monsters.”

[10] Although he abstained from even alcohol, and barely tolerated something as plebian as typing, we might recall Hunter S. Thompson in a similar situation: “For anyone who even occasionally turns his hand to writing, the relentless chronicle of his irreversible decline — visitors would find him sitting in front of the typewriter, motionless, sometimes crying, sometimes muttering, ‘I used to know how to do this. Why can’t I do this?’ — is less boring than terrifying.” See “Hunter S. Thompson, The Father of Fake News, Part III.” We’ll later consider some more unexpected similarities between these two very different writers.

[11] “This man, who did not succeed at life, did indeed succeed at writing. New York helped him. He who was so gentle, so courteous, discovered hatred there.” Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, intro. Stephen King, trans. Dorna Khazeni (New York: Cernunnos, 2019), 138.

[12] “Lovecraft was unmoored. He could not sleep. He could not write. He could not concentrate. He thought of suicide.”

[13] The father died from general paresis, undoubtedly from syphilis, and Goodwin agrees with speculation that Susan had been infected as well.

[14] “Born Sonia Haft Shafirkin in Ichnya, a village approximately one hundred miles east of Kyiv [sic], the capital city of Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) on March 16, 1883, to Racille (née Haft) and Simyon Shafirkin, both Jewish.”

[15] For more on Lovecraft’s early adventures in amateur journalism, see my review of a compilation of his homemade journal, The Conservative.

[16] Lovecraft had a purely epistolatory and apparently Platonic relationship with Ms. Jackson just before and a little after his mother’s death (when Greene later gives Lovecraft what he claimed was his first kiss since childhood, Goodwin notes that his relations with Ms. Jackson were “romantic or pursued in the hope for such, it had remained physically platonic”). He sent her a photo of Sarah after her death and remarked on their resemblance. This, along with the shouting matches with his mother, is another proto-Psycho moment; the novel Psycho was written by Robert Bloch, later one of Lovecraft’s circle of correspondents.

[17] “Kleiner himself might have harbored a slight disappointment. On the boat ride, he—an ‘unattached young bachelor’—conspicuously had ‘linger[ed] near Mrs. Greene for most of the time.’”

[18] I think Lovecraft is referring to “Polaris,” as there is an article from a Lovecraft scholar, which I have lost the reference to, analyzing the influence of Schopenhauer on this story. S. T. Joshi traces his influence on Lovecraft’s philosophy in H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West.

[19] After they began an intense correspondence, Greene “unveil[ed] her philosophical worldview, a softened adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the Übermensch or superman,” which must have somewhat smoothed over any doubts about her suitability.