In a recent biography of I. F. Stone, there is mention that Stone went to NYC to visit the poet Sam Loveman. It also notes that Stone liked the works of Hart Crane. Can anyone find if HPL ever was in that loop, even if at a distance with Loveman mentioning this lad he knew or if HPL had comments on Stone's politics?

J. B. Post

Joshi's biography of Lovecraft doesn't mention Stone, so far as I can recall, but there are several references to Crane, about whom Lovecraft made some amusing but politically incorrect observations that I won't repeat here.

I wish you would!


Cathexis

Actually, my apologies. I was wrong in my reference. The remarks I am thinking of are ones that Lovecraft made about the composer Gordon Hatfield, and not about Crane. Lovecraft does remark upon Crane frequently in letters that Joshi quotes in the biography, and his opinion of Crane is surprisingly favorable--more so than Crane's about Lovecraft, of course.

J. B. Post Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In a recent biography of I. F. Stone, there is
> mention that Stone went to NYC to visit the poet
> Sam Loveman. It also notes that Stone liked the
> works of Hart Crane. Can anyone find if HPL ever
> was in that loop, even if at a distance with
> Loveman mentioning this lad he knew or if HPL had
> comments on Stone's politics?
>
> J. B. Post

That's interesting about Samuel Loveman and I. F. Stone; Loveman sure got around: Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, H. P. Lovecraft, Walker Evans, and now I. F. Stone were all among his friends.

I think Lovecraft’s probable views on I. F. Stone, if he knew him, should be obvious: Jewish, Socialist, an activist for civil rights, (and a possible Soviet agent) ------Lovecraft’s views on Stone would no doubt have been very similar to those which Lovecraft expressed in his short didactic parable, “The Street” -a view which Lovecraft enlarged upon, but never significantly changed, throughout his later writings.

As Lovecraft once observed about Samuel Loveman:

“I’m glad you found pleasure in The Hermaphrodite--which of course must be read wholly for imagery and not for ideas, as must every other work of art. Great Scott-- if Loveman and I judged each other by our ideas, we’d have long ago suffered the fate of the Kilkenny cats. According to my social and political theories he ought to be shot or in gaol, whilst according to his, I ought to be guillotined! But since we deal in art and not in ideas, we get along with the utmost cordiality. Didacticism can never be more, in art, than an inconspicuous excuse for displaying a processional wealth of colour and atmospheric splendour…” (SL II 118-19)

Samuel Loveman, for example, was the author of a lovely nine-stanza poem (unpublished until 2004) about the socialist/union activist and co-founder of the IWW, Eugene V. Debs, entitled “Debs in Prison.“ In this poem, Loveman associates Debs with a list of other revolutionary figures from the past whom Loveman, at least, regards as “heroes”, including:

-“Louis Lingg“ ([1864-1887], a German anarchist-terrorist who died by suicide in an English jail);
-“Jesus“ and “Socrates” (both need no introduction);
-“Bruno” (Giordano Bruno [1548-1600], Italian scientist, murdered by the Roman Catholic Church, and considered the first martyr for science);
-“he from Osawatomie” (i.e. John Brown, fiery Christian Abolitionist and terrorist);
-and “Casement” (Roger D. Casement [1864-1916] executed by the English crown for treason in August 1916 due to his Irish Republican and separatist political opinions).

All of these people, (for Samuel Loveman, at least), were heroes, because of their work on behalf of what Loveman called “the naked, the despoiled, abhorred”.

Needless to say, anarchists and terrorists like Lingg will appear as villains in works like Lovecraft’s “The Street”, where Lovecraft will contrast them with America’s rightful conservative White majority, and their “stalwart“ (Puritan) forefathers. Such “swarthy and sinister” villains, along with their bestial, hybrid followers, will reappear (in increasingly loathsome and animalistic disguises) in works like Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Loveman's poem was written during a period, too, when, figures like Eugene Debs and other American progressive leaders were regarded by many as being helpful to "the Kaiser" -an idea which has added significance if one considers Lovecraft’s own wildly militaristic pro-war poetry from the WWI period.

Loveman’s reference here to abolitionist John Brown is significant, too, given Lovecraft’s vehemently pro-Confederacy and pro-slavery stance (Lovecraft even citing Christian theology to bolster his own pro-slavery position in such early poems as “De Triumpho Naturae“, in which Lovecraft incongruously argues that Whites enslaved Blacks by divine right.)

Roger Casement’s own anti-Imperialist stance, meanwhile, was apparently provoked by Casement’s experiences with English atrocities in the Congo during the Boer War in Africa; and, needless to say, if one also considers Casement’s Irish-separatist philosophy, it is hard to think of a figure more diametrically opposed to Lovecraft’s own views and philosophy. (Not to mention that the youthful Lovecraft’s favorite epithet for the Irish was “Micks.”)

It is not hard to see, then, why Lovecraft would have thought that Samuel Loveman “ought to be shot or in gaol” (like "Debs in Prison"), or why Loveman, for his part, would have gladly seen Lovecraft “guillotined”.

That Stone’s views were basically the same as Loveman’s is clear. As far as I know, however, Stone was not possessed of the leavening virtue of Samuel Loveman’s considerable poetic talent, which made Loveman so palatable to Lovecraft. For Lovecraft, then, I. F. Stone would have represented yet another alien (albeit an “assimilated” one) from an “Oriental” cultural strain, foreign to that of Lovecraft’s beloved Teutonic aristocratic elite, and therefore a Shoggothian agent of the West‘s racial-cultural decline.

Whether Lovecraft would have been OPENLY critical of Stone, however, I highly doubt. Indeed, Samuel Loveman himself was apparently unaware of Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism until after the publication of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters -a revelation which (rightly, I think) made Loveman furious.

Incredibly, Peter Cannon did not see fit to print Loveman’s final (and apparently highly-critical) essay on Lovecraft in Lovecraft Remembered, observing instead,

“In his old age, sad to say, Loveman was deeply hurt when he learned of Lovecraft’s apparent anti-Semitism from the published letters, and in an angry piece not included here denounced him for his racism and for his ill treatment of Sonia.“ (CANNON 177)

That Cannon could exclude so important a piece from an otherwise definitive collection of memoirs suggests, I think, the degree of hero-worship which surrounds Lovecraft to this day. (Was Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism only “apparent”, for instance?) On the other hand, one finds it equally incredible that Loveman could not have understood or decoded on his own the clear nativist/anti-Semitic meanings of Lovecraft’s fiction.

Elsewhere, in his biography of H. P. Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi goes so far as to suggest that Samuel Loveman’s anecdote, printed in L. Sprague de Camp’s 1970’s biography of Lovecraft, that Lovecraft threatened suicide by carrying a “phial of poison” around with him in New York City, is “preposterous”, Joshi flatly believing “that Loveman has made up this story -whether to blacken Lovecraft’s reputation or for some other reason, I cannot say.“ (JOSHI, HPL: A Life 388)

On the contrary, suicide -whether in response to adolescent trauma, or to the death of his mother, or to general ennui- was never, I think, very far from Lovecraft’s mind -Lovecraft’s own writings, whether poetry or prose, being full of intimations of it. Indeed, as Lovecraft himself wrote, shortly after his marriage to Sonia, Sonia rescued him from having

“no goal but a phial of cyanide when my money should give out. I had formerly meant to follow this latter course, and was fully prepared to seek oblivion whenever cash should fail or sheer ennui grow too much for me; when suddenly, our benevolent angel S.H.G. stepped into my circle of consciousness and began to combat the idea with the opposite one of effort, and the enjoyment of life through the rewards which effort will bring.” (deCAMP, Lovecraft: A Biography 212-13)

Significantly, Lovecraft here associates his own suicide with a “phial of CYANIDE“ ---thereby confirming the substance of Samuel Loveman’s disputed anecdote. The question then is not whether Samuel Loveman sought to “blacken Lovecraft’s reputation”, as Joshi puts it, but whether Lovecraft scholars, intentionally or not, are seeking to blacken the reputation of Samuel Loveman.

I do have a question about Samuel Loveman, if anyone on this forum can help me; in de Camp's HPL bio., he mentions that Loveman had a wife who died in childbirth. Anyone know the name of this lady, the name of the child (if it survived), etc.?

Quote:

the degree of hero-worship which surrounds Lovecraft to this day.

And thank the Dark Gods that we have unbiased, objective, lone heroic figures such as Gavin to combat this evil tendency!

That was a very intriguing and informative post, Gavin. Thanks.

I've been a Lovecraftian (and Smithian) forever, and, as a completist, am interested in the mole-hill of negative assessments along with the mountain of positive ones. I'd love to read Loveman's later thoughts on his old friend, as well as Ursula Le Guin's and others' pans of HPL that are hard to track down. (Though, inconsistently, I rather dislike attacks on Smith, whose stories transport me in a way that Lovecraft's don't. I especially can't stand the damning-with-faint-praise approach of second-raters like Jeff Vandermeer in those lamentable intros to the Bison reprints of Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds.)

BTW, has the Loveman been reprinted anyplace? I wonder if readers would buy a collection that counters Peter Cannon's? Loveman, early Colin Wilson, Le Guin, Keller... Maybe the editor would be lynched!

Re: HPL's suicidal bent, I wonder if that's not overblown? It's always been hard for me to reconcile Lovecraft's obvious engagement with life (via the incomparable letters) with his apparent (or stated) ennui/depression. I've always felt his realization of an indifferent universe and "meaningless" existence didn't stop him at all from enjoying life and his circle of friends. The letters are so full of life.

Re: Loveman again. I read the de Camp bio so long ago that I can't recall mention of him having a wife. Other sources have always claimed he was gay (like others among HPL's friends and acquaintances). Columbia University has a box of Loveman's letters from 1911-1976 in their archives. Here's their description of him (from their website):

Samuel Loveman was born in 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. An aspiring poet, Loveman left the Midwest in order to pursue his career as a writer and to live an openly gay lifestyle. He moved to New York City in the early 1920s where he made the acquaintance of several prominent authors including Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and H.P. Lovecraft. Loveman owned a bookstore named the Bodley Bookshop in Manhattan with his partner David Mann. He wrote two books, The Hermaphrodite was a poem published in July 1926 and subsequently republished with additional poems in 1936 and Twenty-One Letters, a collection of letters sent to him by Ambrose Bierce. He also published The Sphinx in 1944. Loveman died in relative obscurity at the Jewish Home and Hospital in 1976.

Gary

Quote:

am interested in the mole-hill of negative assessments along with the mountain of positive ones.

I find this to be utterly fascinating. I can count on one hand the serious assessments I have read of Lovecraft that do not contain some negative component, be it whining about "adjectivitis", or self-righteous finger-wagging over Lovecraft's political views. I maintain that the alleged overwhelmingly positive response to Lovecraft and his writings exists solely in certain individuals' imaginations.

@ Gavin: Thanks for such an illuminating post. Much appreciated!


Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> “In his old age, sad to say, Loveman was deeply
> hurt when he learned of Lovecraft’s apparent
> anti-Semitism from the published letters, and in
> an angry piece not included here denounced him for
> his racism and for his ill treatment of Sonia.“
> (CANNON 177)
>
> That Cannon could exclude so important a piece
> from an otherwise definitive collection of memoirs
> suggests, I think, the degree of hero-worship
> which surrounds Lovecraft to this day. (Was
> Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism only “apparent”,
> for instance?) On the other hand, one finds it
> equally incredible that Loveman could not have
> understood or decoded on his own the clear
> nativist/anti-Semitic meanings of Lovecraft’s
> fiction.

While I think there is little doubt that Lovecraft was a anti-Semite, I've always felt (perhaps naively) that his racism was more theoretical than applied as such. After all he married a Jewish woman, which slightly puts his white-supremacist credentials in doubt. Apart from his writings I've not read of Lovecraft being involved in any actual action that can be called racist, although if someone knows different I'd like to know of it. Indeed, for someone who seemed genuinely repelled by otherness, Lovecraft seems surprisingly tolerant for an intolerant man. When you think of all their opposing and strongly held opinions, I find it interesting to think that the Lovecraft circle managed to get on as well as they did with such respect and love for each other.

Out of interest can anyone recommend me a good bio of Lovecraft other than Joshi's - maybe one slightly more critical?

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> I find this to be utterly fascinating. I can count
> on one hand the serious assessments I have read of
> Lovecraft that do not contain some negative
> component, be it whining about "adjectivitis", or
> self-righteous finger-wagging over Lovecraft's
> political views. I maintain that the alleged
> overwhelmingly positive response to Lovecraft and
> his writings exists solely in certain individuals'
> imaginations.

I agree. The constant sniping about adjectives and the posturing-outrage over his racism is tiresome and lazy. It seems to me that Lovecraft's views on race were widely, if wrongly, held by many, from the intellectual elite to the masses, and should be considered in a historical context. I think that his racism is actually vital to his fiction: Lovecraft's fear of degeneration manifests itself as an almost tangible and highly personal repulsion of all Otherness like no other horror writer I can think of. It is this fear of the Other which, to my mind, defines horror as a genre. However, I often wondered if his anti-Semitism would have been rocked should he have survived long enough to see the death camp footage after the fall of the Reich?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12 Nov 09 | 05:35AM by The English Assassin.

Quote:

While I think there is little doubt that Lovecraft was a anti-Semite, I've always felt (perhaps naively) that his racism was more theoretical than applied as such.

Your view is not naive; it is precisely right. Let's not forget that Lovecraft also merely held and parroted the conventional views of his era and his social class. Unfortunately, Lovecraft happened to be more articulate and voluble on the subject than others, and he also became famous. These facts about Lovecraft--that Lovecraft was almost always courteous, kind, and personally inoffensive in his dealings with others, and the fact that he merely held the prejudices of his time----are why I find Gavin's anti-Lovecraft campaign so ludicrous.

Further, anyone who considers himself (as Gavin appears to) as some kind of lone iconoclast, bravely breasting a tsunami of uncritical Lovecraft idolaters, is simply delusional.

For a much more critical, but also much more superficial and inaccurate biography of Lovecraft, see Sprague de Camp.

As to your remarks about Lovecraft's anti-Semitism (a sentiment shared by Clark Ashton Smith, by the way), Joshi, I believe, relates an anecdote about Lovecraft's hearing from a neighbor who visited Germany about the persecutions occurring in that country. According to Joshi, Lovecraft found all of this very disturbing, and there were no further "I like the boy"-type comments forthcoming from Lovecraft on the subject of Hitler and the Nazis.

With regard to Lovecraft's alleged complete fear of "otherness", this is a point about which I'd quibble. The matter is much more complex than that. Lovecraft held such a fear, to be sure, but otherness also held an attraction for Lovecraft. Where I differ with the PC Gestapo, led by types such as Gavin, is the weight I would accord Lovecraft's xenophobia in the construction of both his character and his fiction. There are many who feel the defining and motivating feature of the work is Lovecraft's horror of the alien in any form. I don't think, however, that Lovecraft's work can be reduced to that dimension.

One aspect, in particular, that such a reductive view overlooks is perhaps an even stronger motivational force in Lovecraft: His sense of wonder at the extra-terrestrial and the extra-human, which is the root of the cosmic dimension of his horror (As you know, Lovecraft also wrote a fair number of non-horror fantasies--though some have horrific elements--in the Dunsanian vein). I would even call it a compensating xenophilia. Forgive the length of the following quotation from a letter by Lovecraft, but it gives, I think, a far more nuanced idea of Lovecraft's emotional motivations and his attraction to horror, wonder, and fantasy as a means of expressing himself:

"The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, & to satisfy aesthetically the sincere & burning curiosity & sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring & provocative abysses of unplumbed space & unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities & in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, & consciousness. This curiosity & sense of awe, I believe, are quite basic amongst the sensitive minority in question; & I see no reason to think that they will decline in the future—for as you point out, the frontier of the unknown can never do more than scratch the surface of eternally unknowable infinity. But the truly sensitive will never be more than a minority, because most persons—even those of the keenest possible intellect & aesthetic ability—simply have not the psychological equipment or adjustment to feel that way. I have taken some pains to sound various persons as to their capacity to feel profoundly regarding the cosmos & the disturbing & fascinating quality of the extra-terrestrial & perpetually unknown; & my results reveal a surprisingly small quota. [...] It is not every [...] writer who feels poignantly & almost intolerably the pressure of cryptic & unbounded outer space. [...]

As for me, I think I have the actual cosmic feeling very strongly. In fact I know that my most poignant emotional experiences are those which concern the lure of unplumbed space, the terror of the encroaching outer void, & the struggle of the ego to transcend the known & established order of time, (time, indeed, above all else, & nearly always in a backward direction) space, matter, force, geometry, & natural law in general".

--H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930

These are hardly the remarks of a simple xenophobe, on any level.

Finally, if, as it appears, Loveman's memoir of Lovecraft was little more than a personal attack based primarily on hurt feelings, then Cannon was right to omit it from his collection. Indeed, let that essay be part of a compilation containing the bilge and bile of others, such as LeGuin, Edmund Wilson, and the like. Such a collection would at least have the merit of stripping the scales from the eyes of those who feel that Lovecraft's reception has been unthinkingly and unanimously positive.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12 Nov 09 | 03:29PM by Kyberean.

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
[lots snipped -- I don't have the stamina to comment on everything]]
>
> Incredibly, Peter Cannon did not see fit to print
> Loveman’s final (and apparently highly-critical)
> essay on Lovecraft in Lovecraft Remembered,
> observing instead,
>
> “In his old age, sad to say, Loveman was deeply
> hurt when he learned of Lovecraft’s apparent
> anti-Semitism from the published letters, and in
> an angry piece not included here denounced him for
> his racism and for his ill treatment of Sonia.“
> (CANNON 177)
>
> That Cannon could exclude so important a piece
> from an otherwise definitive collection of memoirs
> suggests, I think, the degree of hero-worship
> which surrounds Lovecraft to this day.

You assume that it was deliberately excluded. I heard that there were copyright problems. You may have noticed that The Occult Lovecraft, in which "Of Gold and Sawdust" appeared, has never been reprinted.

> Elsewhere, in his biography of H. P. Lovecraft, S.
> T. Joshi goes so far as to suggest that Samuel
> Loveman’s anecdote, printed in L. Sprague de
> Camp’s 1970’s biography of Lovecraft, that
> Lovecraft threatened suicide by carrying a
> “phial of poison” around with him in New York
> City, is “preposterous”, Joshi flatly
> believing “that Loveman has made up this story
> -whether to blacken Lovecraft’s reputation or
> for some other reason, I cannot say.“ (JOSHI,
> HPL: A Life 388)
>
> On the contrary, suicide -whether in response to
> adolescent trauma, or to the death of his mother,
> or to general ennui- was never, I think, very far
> from Lovecraft’s mind -Lovecraft’s own
> writings, whether poetry or prose, being full of
> intimations of it. Indeed, as Lovecraft himself
> wrote, shortly after his marriage to Sonia, Sonia
> rescued him from having
>
> “no goal but a phial of cyanide when my money
> should give out. I had formerly meant to follow
> this latter course, and was fully prepared to seek
> oblivion whenever cash should fail or sheer ennui
> grow too much for me; when suddenly, our
> benevolent angel S.H.G. stepped into my circle of
> consciousness and began to combat the idea with
> the opposite one of effort, and the enjoyment of
> life through the rewards which effort will
> bring.” (deCAMP, Lovecraft: A Biography 212-13)
>
> Significantly, Lovecraft here associates his own
> suicide with a “phial of CYANIDE“ ---thereby
> confirming the substance of Samuel Loveman’s
> disputed anecdote.

That's confirmation?!

Winfield Townley Scott heard it from Benjamin Crocker Clough who heard it from Loveman, but Clough admits that "'Phial' I'm not sure of." And why emphasise "cyanide" -- Loveman's anecdote doesn't mention cyanide, does it? Besides, Joshi gives pretty clear reasons for his opinion, which you omitted.

Martinus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That's confirmation?!


Confirmation, surely, that it wasn't "preposterous", as Joshi said?


Martinus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> And
> why emphasise "cyanide" -- Loveman's anecdote
> doesn't mention cyanide, does it?


My thinking: "cyanide" = synonym for poison, with the marked use of "vial" or "phial" in the phrase being the lynchpin of identification.

As I read him, Joshi does not claim it is preposterous that Lovecraft, like nearly every human being at one time or another in his or her life, had occasional suicidal thoughts.

Rather, Joshi claims that it is preposterous to assert as a proven fact that Lovecraft carried a vial of poison on his person, and that he specifically "threatened" suicide to anyone, in particular. It is equally preposterous to assume, merely from melodramatic remarks in a personal letter to someone else, that those remarks specifically corroborate Loveman's assertion. Joshi, unlike others, offers reasons for believing as he does, and I have little doubt that Joshi is right.

Alas, this means it is time to find another avenue for smearing Lovecraft. I have faith, however, in our little resident Oedipus!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12 Nov 09 | 07:19PM by Kyberean.

Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>I have little doubt that Joshi is
> right.
>

Except that Samuel Loveman, unlike Joshi, or myself, (or our resident Lovecraft hero-worshipper here), had the advantage of actually being there. Indeed, not only being there, but seeing Lovecraft on a daily (and nightly) basis throughout his lengthy (and troubled) New York City-period. Who is more likely to be right?

It's interesting how defending Lovecraft against scurrilous innuendo and against absurd attacks that take the cheap guise of fifth-rate literary criticism makes one a "worshiper".

Anyway, to answer the rhetorical question: I'd say the one who is more likely to be right is the one who didn't write a memoir long after the fact on the basis of wounded feelings, and the one who has read letters from Lovecraft to all of Lovecraft's friends and relatives of the period, and who gauged Lovecraft's relative degree of intimacy with each. I can see why little Oedipus sides with Loveman, though: In addition to politics, they both have in common the fact that Lovecraft upsets and threatens them terribly, and therefore they attack and try to discredit him.

As for whom to believe, don't take my word for the matter: Everyone should read Joshi's arguments and decide for himself. At least Joshi manages to offer arguments and reasons for believing as he did, arguments that are a little more sophisticated than "Loveman was there, and, oh, by the way, he was an extreme Leftist, and therefore one of the good guys, and therefore he must be right".



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 13 Nov 09 | 06:13PM by Kyberean.