Live From Salt Lake Comic Con FanX: H.P. Lovecraft

Writer H.P. Lovecraft created worlds and stories that continue to be influential more than 80 years after his death. His life story is at turns odd, sad, problematic and utterly fascinating.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we
recently spent a weekend at Salt Lake Comic Con Fanics,
and we sat on some panels and we had a

(00:23):
live stuff you Missed in History Class show. We sure did.
This particular show has been requested a number of times,
often at Halloween time, but we did it as a
live show at a science fiction and fantasy pop culture
you kind of convention instead. Plus every day is every
day is Halloween in my books, that's true. It's also
been on Holly's wish list for a while. So we

(00:44):
dived into the odd, sad, fascinating life of HP Lovecraft. Yep,
and this one ran a little bit long. I was
actually worried that we would run over our panel time
and not get finished, but we managed. So we'll hop
right into it and let the listeners that were not
at Panic get to hear it. Hi, you guys are awesome,

(01:08):
Thank you for being here. Yes, oh I should. I
want to take your picture. But the there's a lot
of light, that glary light. It's not gonna do so sure,
that's great. Okay, So we're gonna give you a warning
up front to in fact one, if you love love Craft,
which I'm presuming a lot of you do, we're not
going to talk a lot about his writing because his

(01:29):
life is fascinating and weird. Um, and you'll kind of
I don't know how much how much of any of
you know about his life story and his biography, but
if you start looking at that, it really becomes a
parent where his writing comes from. So we're focusing on
his life because that's the thing. Uh. Second, I wrote
this outline for today and it runs a little bit long,

(01:50):
so we're gonna have to buzz through and hopefully we'll
have time for questions at the end. But if we don't,
I'm sorry, and it's my fault, and you can chase
me and pelt me with garbage. Also, if you got
that reference, I love you anybody, No old old letterman. Um,
they've pelted at us with rocks and garbage. No okay, Um,
that came on past my bedtime. I didn't have a bedtime.

(02:13):
Much like HP Lovecraft, laves are different. We're going to
talk about that. My life was like the opposite of
HP Lovecraft. It's in terms of rules and structure and nutrition. Yeah,
all of which no joke, y'all. Um, we're going to
talk about that in a minute. So we will hop
right in. Should we say the thing about Hello and
welcome to the podcast? Yes, Hello and welcome to the podcast.

(02:36):
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm
going to take off my glasses because I'm a little
bit blund and I can't read up close, and I'm
old and I don't want to admit it. Um. They
have a thing called bifocals. I have two pair. I'm
young and vibrant. It's not bifocals time. It's totally bifocals time.
I'm hagging out. But I have special ones that are
just for the computer. Uh So, we're gonna hop right

(03:01):
in and start talking about the amazing, astonishing, weird, troubling,
and we're going to talk about the difficult stuff. Um,
there's some racism dot coming, so brace uh So. Howard
Phillips Lovecraft was born on August eighteen ninety two Winfield
Scott Lovecraft and Susie Phillips Lovecraft, and when he was
still a toddler in things already started to get weird

(03:25):
because his father, Winfield, began having very intense hallucinations. And
he first evidenced this problem when he was on a
business trip in Chicago and he was in his hotel
room and started crying out that a maid had insulted him.
There was no maid there, and that his wife was
being assaulted on the next floor up. But Susie had
not traveled with him on this trip. There was no
maid in the room. None of this was his wife

(03:47):
was not there. Over the course of the next five years,
Winfield loved Craft's illness waxed and Wayne and the family
lawyer Albert eve Baker, assumed legal guardian ship over him.
He was placed in a mental institution and he remained
institutionalized until his death on July nineteenth of eighteen nine.

(04:09):
And there have been lots of theories about what was
behind his hallucinations and his obvious mental illness, and a
lot of doctors and historians believe that though his cause
of death was listed as general parissus, that he really
died of syphilis. And so Susie and Howard, now with
no husband or father, moved in with Susie's parents, Whipple

(04:31):
and Robie Phillips at four fifty four Angel Street in Providence,
Rhode Island, and Howard had actually been born in this house. Uh.
Susie had traveled there to her parents home when she
was due, even though she and Winfield at the time
we're living just south of Boston. So weird for me
to think of him as Howard as I did this
research and started talking about him, like to my husband

(04:53):
or friends, as I was discovering things would be like
and then Howard did this, and they would be like,
who's Howard about hpl crap? They're like, he said, love
grabbed Mike. He's Howard to me. So so, the stress
of losing her husband caused Susie's own mental health to
also decline. She became really obsessed with her son as
all that she had left in the world, and she

(05:15):
was also not the only adult to be doating on him.
His aunts and his grandparents also really indulged him and
cherished him. Yes, Susie had two sisters, and she's routinely
described as sort of the dippy one um, which is
kind of sad and cute at the same time, but
Susie's adoration of young Howard definitely crossed into really extreme territory.

(05:40):
For example, she allowed him to eat whatever he wanted,
and she should never do with a child. Um. So
like if you ask a five year old what they
want to eat, the cake and ice cream, which is
exactly what he ate a great deal of as a child,
so his nutrition really suffered. Uh. And he also had
no set schedule for sleeping, so no bedtime, no wake
up time. He just kind of lived on his own

(06:01):
little vampire hours. She also kept his hair. I like
that you said, vampire hours. She also kept his hair
and long curls until he was six, although he asked
to have them cut off way before that. And then
once she did cut off his hair, she would talk
about how ugly it made him, which bothered him understandably

(06:22):
for the rest of his life. If you ever read
accounts of neighbors there, I'll be all kind of discuss
how Susie just constantly told them how ugly her child was,
which is such a terrible thing to do to a
kid about his hair. It will even beyond that. She
would describe his face and be like, oh, it's long
and pointy and which is Susie did it wrong. She
is not a model of parenthood. But this lack of

(06:45):
structure and emotional stability in his life, I think he
said stability. What he said stability? I said, what stability
should I not have? It was instability? Well, I said,
the lack of structure. So I'm told this happens in
the studio every time. Uh, normally it's the opposite. I
got overconfident, right, yeah, sometimes it's mean, it gets overconfident.

(07:09):
It's good, that's good. So, yeah, he didn't have stability.
He didn't have structure. But the good news, I suppose,
is that it did not keep him from developing into
a really incredibly bright child. He was sort of a
sponge for information. He started reading allegedly around age three, uh,
and his grandparents books. Their book collection was extensive. They

(07:29):
had a really lovely library and he basically burned through
that as a kid. He also started writing as a
at a really young age. One of the first stories
that he wrote he did when he was five or six,
and it was around the same time that his grandmother died.
He called it The Little Glass Bottle. And in this story,
a sea captain finds a distress note floating in a bottle,

(07:51):
and he follows the map that's included in there to
try to find the person who's in distress. When he
gets there, he finds another bottle with another out, and
that note says, quote, dear searcher, excuse me for the
practical joke I have played on you, but it serves
you right. And then the captain says that he would
like to kick the prankster's head off the end. Uh So,

(08:15):
while we said we were going to talk about his writing,
you know, it's a five or six year old. That's
some pretty impressive work, I suppose. Uh. He only attended
school with other children for a year initially before his
mother withdrew him, So he was also missing out on
some pretty important formative social interaction with peers during this time.
And the precise reason that he stayed out of school
is not entirely clear. Uh. He stayed out for two years,

(08:40):
and he was a very nervous child, and usually that
anxiety that manifested in a number of physical ways is
referenced as the reason he was probably not going to school.
But it is also just as possible that Susie was
really struggling with this idea of separation and letting her
son go off to school and be an entity outside
of herself that did not depend on her. Uh, particularly

(09:02):
after her husband's breakdown in death. This was all I mean,
within a few years of her husband dying, And so
in any case, he was during that time schooled at
home and tutored both by professional tutors and by his relatives.
During these two years of home schooling, he discovered Edgar
Allan Poe, and he also learned about sex from medical textbooks,

(09:24):
which made him decide it was completely unappealing. He did
not like that idea at all, and he started writing
longer and more developed pieces of pros. He went back
to school in nineteen o two when he was twelve. Yeah.
That uh, that learning set about sex from medical texts
really really messed with his head for the rest of
his life. But the next big thing that happened at

(09:47):
this point was when he was fourteen, his grandfather, who
he really adored, died suddenly. And his grandfather really is
often credited as the person that introduced him to like
stories of the supernatural and ghost stories and taught him
not to be afraid of the dark, and so they
had this relationship that then was suddenly severed, and the family,
which was already struggling financially, then had to sell the

(10:08):
large house that they were living in, and for the
first time in his life, as he remembered it, Howard,
who moved into another, much smaller home with his mother,
then had to experience life without just vast expanses of
square footage to explore and play in, and with no
servants to attend to him. He really dreaded going to

(10:28):
high school, but once he got there, he actually kind
of enjoyed it. He got along with most of his peers,
and he did relatively well scholastically, despite having a constant
struggle with getting to school on time, maybe because he
didn't have a bad time, and his writing took another
leap forward, his literary voice started to really develop. Yeah

(10:49):
nineteen o five, he wrote a piece called The Beast
in the Cave, and this told the story of a
man who's lost in a cave and he is being
tailed by some sort of creature and this person eventually killed.
Is this eight like beast that's following him, only to
realize that it was actually something that had once been human,
And then he wrote the picture in nineteen o seven,
which is about this artist that paints this monstrous beast

(11:12):
and then has later found killed, presumably by the same
beast that he had created on canvas. And then in
nineteen o eight he penned a twenty word tale which
was titled The Alchemist, in which a French aristocrat inherited
a cursed castle. And in each of these posed influences
really really evident, but Lovecraft's own literary voice really can

(11:35):
be seen in its infancy. Lovecrafts schooling continued to be
kind of inconsistent. He stayed out of high school for
a year following the nineteen o four nine to five
school year, and that later was attributed to having a
nervous breakdown. But that year is also when he started
producing his first published writing, although it wasn't fiction yet. Yeah.

(11:56):
First he had two letters published, one in the Evidence
Journal in which he condemned astrology and another in Scientific
American calling for the cooperation of the astronomy community in
the hunt for objects beyond Neptune. And then he began
writing a series of astronomy articles for the Pawtuxet Valley

(12:17):
Gleaner and for the Providence Evening Tribune. When he got
back to high school, he didn't take a full course load.
He took chemistry, algebra, and physics only, although he wound
up dropping his algebra course after the first quarter. That
was his last year of school. He never actually graduated,
and although he later wrote as though he h as

(12:38):
though he did, saying quote, I suffered a nervous collapse
immediately after graduating, which prevented altogether my attending college. And
he would also later write that quote A cultivated family
is the best school, and that he was unconcerned about
those gaps in his formal education, but that sentiment was
going to change as he aged. Bixt up, we will

(12:59):
talk about Lovecrafts poor health, but first we will take
a sponsor break. So the precise nature of love Crafts
delicate health is pretty unclear. So he complained a lot
of a variety of physical maladies throughout his life, such

(13:19):
as chronic indigestion and headaches and fatigue in addition to
his depression and nervousness, and the jumble of symptoms that
he described really could be attributed to any number of problems,
but no doctor ever gave a comprehensive diagnosis uh So,
theories after the fact have mentioned everything from hypochondria to
something like hyperinsulinism. He kept complaining of just a general

(13:42):
weakness of health throughout his life, although he didn't usually
go to the doctor to get medical attention for it,
and it's possible that his poor health was at least
partially psychological. Yeah, I mean, when you have a mother
who's telling you you're delicate and infirm from day one
of your life, you might start to believe that you
are delicate and infirm. Uh. And he also never adopted

(14:03):
a healthy diet, a consequence of that lack of nutritional
guidance as a child, which almost certainly contributed to a
general feeling of unwellness. He ate a lot of sweets
even into his adult life. But what's really kind of
odd and surprising maybe is that he did not over indulge.
He was super weight conscious, so even though he uh
he was five eleven, he tried to stay under a

(14:27):
hundred and fifty pounds, which is quite them because he
thought that he would look more aristocratic if he stayed
really slender. So he's gonna have cake for dinner, but
not much, A small morsel, that's all. He gets Lovecraft's
years immediately after high school or kind of a blank slate.
He didn't do much between nineteen o six and nineteen
fourteen except for taking a correspondence coursing chemistry. Yeah, he

(14:49):
was obviously into science, but he realized that while he
loved particularly both chemistry and astronomy for their quote glamour
and mystery and impressiveness, uh he didn't really have the
discipline that it was going to take to do the
hard work that is required of scientists should they pursue
that as a career. Uh So. He also toyed with

(15:09):
illustration during this time, but he thought he was terrible
and abandoned it, and according to his own recollections, he
read a lot during this time. He wrote as in fiction,
he was reclusive, not really leaving the house often or
socializing with anyone other than his mother. And for her part,
Susie was also growing increasingly eccentric and really reclusive, and

(15:33):
she encouraged this shut in behavior. And he later wrote
that this solitude that he chose as a young man
stemmed in part from embarrassment and social anxiety. He said, quote,
I shunned all human society, deeming myself too much of
a failure in life to be seen socially by those
who had known me as a youth and had foolishly

(15:53):
expected great things of me. Eventually, though, by the time
he was in his mid twenties, Lovecraft started to grow
out of this aimless, loafing period of his life, and
he once again became interested in the world outside of
his house. He started writing astronomy articles again and joined
the amateur journalism movement, which afforded him some social connections

(16:14):
that his life had really been missing before this point. Yeah,
he has had some friends as a kid, but what
I always found interesting in researching him is that most
of the people that talk about him as though he
was a friend are actually adults in his circle, So
he really was not getting other other peers of his age.
And the United Amateur Press Association, of which he became

(16:35):
a member, had its own wild dramas that could be
a whole episode on its own, because there was some
crazy things going down. But Lovecraft, who had this odd
habit of favoring eighteenth century vocabulary and grammar, uh managed
to become pretty well known and actually quite influential in
this group, and he also learned at this time the

(16:56):
hard lesson that criticism is a part of every writer's
life is just a natural thing you have to accept.
But while he claimed that it did not trouble him, uh,
everyone that he knew said it privately affected him very deeply.
Even the faintest critique of his work really would upset him.
He also started corresponding a lot during this time, and
he cultivated a wide range of friends he knew, primarily

(17:19):
through letters. This was a practice that he would continue
throughout his life. In many cases, he preferred this friendship
through letters to having to actually deal with people face
to face. And he also started using pseudonyms in his
writing uh for a really silly reason. In my opinion,
it was in part so that he could have multiple
pieces published in any given amateur journal at one time

(17:42):
without being accused of hogging the space. Um. He just
wanted people to publish everything he wrote, and he didn't
want to get in trouble for it in a community
that was largely about like sharing and helping one another. Uh.
But these were not paying gigs. You should be very
very clear, Like this was this whole idea of a
whture journalism at the time was built on people writing

(18:03):
for their friends and other like minded peers, but not
really for the broader audience of the public. He would
have fit right in on the internet. Yeah, oh yeah.
In nineteen fifteen, he published a series of articles about
planets and constellations in the Asheville, North Carolina paper Gazette News,
and each of these he combined scientific facts with the

(18:23):
mythology around the figures for which each astronomical object had
been named. That's me, I'm so sorry, what a jerky
If it helps, it's one of our colleagues from house
to works. It happened right in the pause, and I
was like, what's happening now, it's Matt Frederick texting me.

(18:43):
So he took advantage of this platform to include quotes
of verse from a quote recent writer. That recent writer
was in fact himself, although he never said so in
the text of the articles. Again he yeah, I love that.
He just will keep putting himself out there in new
ways and quote himself as a different source. I think
what Whitman used to write this glowing reviews of his

(19:06):
own poetry. This is not an unheard of practice. Uh.
And he also during this time started self publishing a
periodical called The Conservative, and he started that in nineteen fifteen,
and he would put out this paper on and off
for eight years. So he really was pretty committed to it,
and he used it as a sort of pulpit from
which he could preach against the evils of spelling reform,

(19:27):
which he thought was terrible. Again, he was really into
eighteenth century spelling and grammar. But he also extolled the
superiority of the white race as he published his papers.
There were some problems, Yeah, love Craft biographer Else Bragg
the camp makes the case that for somebody like love Craft,
he was felt himself to be a failure who was

(19:49):
not living up to his potential. It was really easy
to buy into white supremacy. This was a belief that
comfort in him and made him feel superior. So we're
gonna loop back to this obviously racist worldview a little later. Yeah,
he's a complex person. Uh. In an effort to gain
some sort of independence from his mother, Lovecraft made this

(20:11):
really odd move. In nineteen seventeen, he applied to enlist
in the National Guard after the US declared war on Germany.
So everything you've heard up to this point, I'm sure
you like me or like this is not for you, kid,
um like how he thought he was going to be
able to endure this is an utter mystery. They make
you get up early. If they make you get up early,

(20:31):
they make you not eat cake all the time, and
they make you do physical things which he didn't like. Uh.
So Fortunately, a family friend who was serving as the
local head of the draft board and was also a doctor,
talked him out of it. Uh. He really was like, you,
you're not going to hack this, although Lovecraft later wrote
quote it would have either killed or cured me. I

(20:53):
think the odds are in favor of one of those
two things. Uh. Not long after that pretty bad idea, though,
things started to pick up for Lovecraft as a writer.
He started revising the work of some of the other
members of the United Amateur Press Association and getting actually
paid to do so. Then this really remained his career
for the rest of his life. So while he developed

(21:15):
his own stories, ghost writing became his primary literary occupation,
and in some ways this was the absolute perfect fit
for Howard Lovecraft. It made use, of course, of his
literary talents, and he had a wide network of potential
clients that he had cultivated both through being parts of
part of these amateur press groups and through his correspondence

(21:36):
with other writers. But it was also not lucrative for
him because unfortunately he took way too much time with
every single assignment. Plus he thought it was unbecoming to
even discuss money. He had this whole weird gentleman complex
and like his personal rules of life, and you never
talked about money, which when he was never ever collecting

(21:57):
on his invoices, he would just let them go and
ever pursue them if somebody refused to pay him. In
Howard's mother's Susie, whose mental health had continued to decline,
was committed to the Butler Hospital for the Insane, and
that was where her husband had died more than two
decades earlier. Lovecraft visited his mother often, although never inside

(22:18):
the hospital, and she died two years after having been
admitted in one due to complications from a gallbladder surgery. Yeah,
there's a lot of noise in history, uh, historical pieces
and biographies about him about how he would not go
in the hospital. His mother had to come out to
the hospital's garden and they would visit there, but he
refused to enter the building. Um and after Susie's moved

(22:41):
to the hospital, so he is kind of out from
under his mother's constant um, you know, clucking at that point,
for the first time in his life, he actually started
to venture out beyond Providence thanks to conventions that were
arranged by his fellow amateur journalists. So he first traveled
to Boston in July of nineteen twenty and an Actually
he intended this was like a week long event that

(23:03):
that they had put together, and he intended to commute
back to Providence every night, which sounds crazy to me. Uh,
But his friends eventually convinced him to just stay in
the city and they arranged places for room to stay,
and he ended up really really enjoying the trip, and
he started to make regular trips to Boston to spend
time with the friends that he had there. They're not
that far apart. I'm imagining this was happening on a train.

(23:27):
Uh yeah, I would imagine. But even so, I mean,
you know, like I would, what do you want to
go like to Park City every night to back and forth,
like so I thought a commune I would want to do.
But like they're they're not on opposite ends of their
everything in New England is close to everything else in
New England. UH. At a similar meeting in February, Lovecraft

(23:53):
spoke at a panel theme quote, what have you done
for amateur journalism? And what has amateur journalism done for you?
Reading from a paper that he had written on the topic,
he said, quote, what I have done for amateur journalism
is probably very slight, but I can at least declare
that it represents my best efforts towards toward aids the
aspiring writer. What amateurdom has brought me is a circle

(24:17):
of persons among I am not altogether an alien. What
I have given amateur journalism is regrettably little. What amateur
journalism has given me is life itself. It's just sort
of charming. And apparently the crowd erupted in thunderous applause.
So they were I think Howard was like their pet
project in some ways, Like they saw that he was

(24:38):
a little socially awkward, and they really tried to, like,
you know, bring him along into their groups. So they
were very happy. It felt very validating to know that
he felt he had found his life there good because
that sentiment is kind of like I haven't done anything
for y'all. But she sure, I haven't given me a lot.
I think it was. It was, you know, he was
trying to be a gentleman about it. Uh So, when
his mother died, which was of course this dating, his

(25:00):
aunt Lilian came to live in the house with him
that he and his mother had been living in. So
his other aunt Annie also stayed there from time to time,
so when she wasn't traveling for work or vacation. So
while he had kind of gotten out from under the
influence of his mother, he was then coddled by his
aunts in place of Susie. And all three of them
were living largely off of the small estate he had inherited.

(25:22):
And this was not, we should be clear, a lot
of money. The three of them weren't really bringing in
an income of any sort at any sustaining rate, so
they just chipped away at this relatively small inheritance. Yeah,
and aside from the loss of his mother, this was
really a massive period of change for Howard Lovecraft. For one,
he had met a woman named Sonya Greene at an

(25:45):
amateur journalism conference when the two of them struck up
a correspondence, since that was his preferred mode of communicating
with people. Sonja was a milliner who lived in New York.
She made hats if you didn't know what a milliner does, uh,
And she was an immigrant from Ukraine who had moved
to the US when she was nine. She had been
married briefly before, but she was on her own and
she was making really, really good money by the time

(26:07):
that she met Howard, so she was a completely independent woman.
The two of them started meeting for visits and providence,
and in Boston she met Howard's aunts, who liked her,
and he wrote that it was quote despite a racial
and social chasm. During this early stage of friendship that
was turning into a courtship, Lovecraft turned out a significant

(26:29):
amount of work in the form of stories and prose poems,
but he was still also working as a ghostwriter, and
he also, during all of this, seemed to have no
clue that Sonia was interested in him. Why he would
think a woman would want to travel back and forth
to visit him constantly without liking him is beyond me.
But uh. When she actually kissed him for the first time,

(26:49):
it was after he had had written a piece that
was based on an outline she had had prepared, which
was one of the things he did as a ghostwriter.
She was so excited and or I don't know if
he had written it yet her if he had seen
the outline and really loved it, but she was so
excited that she kissed him spontaneously, and he was completely flustered,
and she kind of teased him and asked him what
it was about, and he told her at that point

(27:10):
that he had not been kissed since his infancy. So,
in addition to all that other weirdness, he was not
really getting regular affection. So he really didn't know how
to deal with human being. He had a number of
issues and another big change that happened in his life
at this time was his first paid writing publication. A
publisher named J. C. Hanneburger had started a new magazine

(27:34):
called Weird Tales, and Lovecraft's friend of friends all wanted
him to submit his work to it, and up until
this point he had considered his own writing to be
something that he produced for his friends, a hobby for
a gentleman. But he finally gave in. Weird Tales bought
Dagon first, and then others, including The Hound and the
Rats and the Walls. Yeah, he apparently didn't want to

(27:57):
submit in the proper format, like he submitted the ings
and they wrote back and said, hey, you got a
double spice spaces or something, and he's like, so, he
probably could have made a lot more money right off
the bat, but he didn't want to do it. Uh.
And we're about to get into Lovecraft's marriage, but first
we're going to pause for another sponsor break and then
we'll jump in. So Lovecraft's relationship with Sonia had progressed.

(28:24):
She was, according to her own account, the aggressor in this.
It's unclear when the two of them started to talk
about marriage and him moving to New York, but they
did apparently talk about it, and that's exactly what happened.
On March third, four. They were married in St. Paul's
Chapel in New York's Financial District, and that was chosen

(28:45):
by Lovecraft because it dated back to seventeen seventy six
and notable men of the Revolutionary era had attended services there. Yeah,
he wasn't particularly religious, he didn't have any interest in it,
but he just liked the history of it. And I
will give you a little bit of a spoiler alert
because the reason we don't know when they started talking
about marriage and really how their romance progressed is because

(29:06):
it didn't last. And when it ended, Sonya burned all
of her letters. So we have a big gap where
we don't know what happened between the two of them. Uh.
And they were a really odd couple. Sonia was Howard's
absolute opposite. So while he was this sort of you know, odd,
awkward quiet, didn't love to talk to people, she was outgoing,
she was super determined, she was confident. She was a

(29:27):
businesswoman that was running her own show. Uh. And it
has long been debated what exactly they saw in one another,
but for a brief time, they really did seem genuinely
happy together. Howard actually wrote to a friend right after
they got married to quote two or one another bears
the name Lovecraft, a new household is founded. He was

(29:47):
really inspired by Sonia, and he claimed that she had
prevented him from a plan to quote seek oblivion, i e.
Commit suicide. So it didn't last. Sonya claimed that Howard
was a particularly loving husband she had to initiate any
romantic contact and found him adequate in that regard, but

(30:09):
rather undemonstrative and having any feelings for her. He never
used the word love in any way. Additional stress on
the marriage came from a drop in income for Sonya.
She was basically supporting Howard and he was only occasionally
selling stories basically when he felt like it. So instead
of supporting just herself, she was supporting two people without

(30:31):
a lot of contribution from the other one. Yeah, when
that's a person who says things like I appreciate you
and never says I love you, I would not enjoy
that marriage at all. Everybody's got their own dynamic. But
I can see why she eventually kind of wearied of
there's a bit that you're going to say next. Yeah,
So here's the other problem. He had a lot of
rants against immigrants and Jews, and she would remind him

(30:54):
that he had in fact married an immigrant Jew himself.
But what he would tell her in these moments was
you are now Mrs hp Lovecraft. Like somehow in marrying
him and taking his name, he had wiped away her
ethnicity and she was now part of his his okay group.
What jerk is he? Pretty jerky like that plus never

(31:16):
saying I love you, plus like plus all the other
things that we're gonna talk about a little bit problem.
I see why she left. So before she left, though
they first downgraded to a smaller apartment, she took it,
took a job in Cincinnati, and he didn't follow her
when she did that. Um, when she she left for that.
At the end of this was the first of several

(31:36):
jobs that would keep the two of them separated. He
was no longer enthralled by living in New York and
was actually starting to hate it. Shy, I can get
how that might happen, but he ended up returning to
Rhode Island, rapturous once again to be in Providence, and
before long the marriage was basically over. Yeah, he while

(31:57):
they were living in New York, they had they had
always been living in Brooklyn, but they downgraded to what
he considered to be a gross immigrant neighborhood. Um. And
that really, in some ways, some historians will say, fueled
a lot of his sort of next phase of writing
and kind of the weirder, more disturbing stuff. And also
because there was a point at which, while he was
living in the apartment by himself, the apartment was completely

(32:19):
robbed and all he was left with was the were
the clothes on his back, and so he just was like,
this place sucks. All of these immigrants suck. I hate
it here. Everything is horrible. I Am going back to white,
wealthy Providence, Rhode Island. So he's a charmer, basically, is
what I'm saying. Yeah. Uh. The next phase of his

(32:39):
life from n to nineteen thirty seven would actually though,
produce his most famous works, probably the ones we all
fell in love with if we're Lovecraft fans, including Call
of Cathulu, in which Weird Tales paid up whopping hundred
and sixty five dollars for, which is not small potatoes
at that point, and as he started to develop this
impressive body of stories which were interconnected in both obvious

(33:01):
and subtle ways, he was really truly hitting his stride
in terms of creativity. He also made some really interesting
acquaintances in the nineteen thirties, including a friendship that started
with a letter from a fan in nineteen thirty one.
When Howard went to visit this fan, a man named
Robert Barlow, in nineteen thirty four, he discovered that Barlow
was only sixteen, But in spite of the oddness of

(33:24):
all that, Lovecraft stayed with Barlow and his mother, but
for seven weeks that summer and the two of them
became friends. Yeah, he would return on subsequent summers, and
as Lovecraft's creative star really rose in the nineteen thirties
and he actually started to garner this following of fans
from his weird fiction, his financial star was completely sputtering out, so,

(33:46):
having never managed to make any sort of consistent income,
his capital his in what he had been willed by
his his father and then his mother was dwindling really quickly,
and his ghostwriting and his editing work barely an abled
him to scrape by, and then rather abruptly, it all
came to an end. Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer in

(34:07):
March of nineteen thirty seven, at the age of forty six.
The cancer had already spread throughout his body by the
time he saw a doctor. Then only four friends attended
his funeral. Yeah, there's basically a pretty um consistent opinion
among historians and biographers that if he had not been
foolish and waited so long, he possibly could have have

(34:28):
really been treated for his cancer and potentially survived much longer.
But because he didn't want to go to doctors, he
missed out on that opportunity. Uh. And it wasn't until
Lovecraft's friends August Derleth and Donald Wandre began publishing collected
Lovecraft stories in book form in the nineteen forties that
Lovecraft gained this much wider audience outside of all of

(34:48):
his little niche followers and his friends, and his work
quickly became famous in ways he could never have imagined.
So it's a safe bet that's seeing things like Kissilu
plushies and his image on T shirts. Uh, you know,
his work being adapted into films, and Gamma del Toro
working forever on Mountains of Madness, which better come out
at some point. Um. It would blow his mind. I mean,

(35:10):
there's no way he could have conceived of this level
of popularity. So there was a great deal of affectation
to HP Lovecraft's personality. When his father died, Howard had
inherited the somber wardrobe, and he weren't as an adult,
even though the clothes at that point we're really pass a.
He only gave up wearing his father's old clothes when

(35:31):
they became threadbare to the point of just being unwearable,
and growing up in a world of adults more than
children with few rules. In this endless supply of reading material,
you really start to see that Lovecraft sort of developed
this patchwork of ideas about the world that really stayed
with him long past his formative years. Like he loved
the classical world, he became an avid Anglophile, even taking

(35:53):
up the side of the British in any discussions of
the U S Revolutionary War. He often lobbied for New
England to rejoin the British Empire. I don't I don't
think that New England would go for that. Uh. And
he would sink God Save the King rather than the
star spangled banner, which I'm sure annoyed no one. He

(36:17):
adopted eighteenth century century colloquialisms and his speech and his writing,
and he also had this deep, unending love of Republican Rome.
And after reading about a book by a proponent of
temperance named John B. Gaw as a child, Howard swore
he would never ever drink, and he actually did remain
sober his entire life. But this is one of several
areas where the assertion of his personal the assertions in

(36:40):
his personal writing really don't always line up with reality.
And we're going to talk about a lot more of
that in a moment. But while he claimed that he
was quote nauseated by even the distant stink of any
alcoholic liquor, it was known there are records of him
attending parties where alcohol was certainly served. So there's a
disparity between what he claimed was his belief system and
his sort of life rules and how he actually lived.

(37:02):
In many ways. There's also, as most people know, and
as we mentioned a little bit ago, some really unpleasant
racism in Lovecraft's life story. Even his beloved cat that
he had as a child he named a racist slur.
And the most problematic aspect of his life is that
the racism that colored most of his thinking about it. Yes,

(37:26):
so there were times in his life, most of his
life until quite near the end, he thought anyone who
was not white was inferior, and he used language to
describe anyone who was not a white dude as along
the lines of quote twisted rat like vermin from the ghetto,
uh and mongrels when he would describe them. But this

(37:46):
is another area that is really contradictory in his life.
For example, he spoke extremely openly of having disdain for Jews,
even when writing sets criticisms as quote. But the very
spirituality which gives elevation to the Semitic mind particularly unfits
it for the consideration of tastes and trends and Aryan

(38:07):
thoughts and writings. But in spite of that, he married
a Jewish woman. But then she wasn't a Jewish immigrant
anymore when she became Mrs Lovecraft. I don't know, question mark. Uh,
this really horrified me when I found it, so I'm
sorry that I'm sharing it, but it's really it's important. Uh.
When one of his friends in New York when he
had lived there, hinted that he had been romantically linked

(38:30):
with a black woman, Lovecraft was completely appalled and disgusted,
and he said that any white man who did so
should have the word Negro branded on his forehead. But
not so cool. No, But in his dealings with actual
individual human members in the many ethnicities and religions that

(38:50):
he spoke ill of, they described him as a man
who was kind, generous, and unselfish, which really contradicts all
the vile things. He would stay and right all the time,
and to explain his on kin congruity, Sony Green would
later say in something that we couldn't stop laughing about
at dinner last night. I think he hated humanity in

(39:11):
the abstract. Yeah, he could write this horrible stuff and actually,
confronted with a human he did try to be a
gentleman and was like, oh, you're interesting and nice, So
he just couldn't. There was a big disparity. Uh, And
even in ninety three is he called Hitler a clown.
He also said that he sort of liked him and

(39:32):
understood his position, but he was also at the same time.
This is what was mind blowing to me, Like, I
don't know how he did the math in his head
to reconcile all of this. He was a huge supporter
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and he
became a Democrat at the same time, and he said
that socialism was inevitable, but also wrote quote, I am
an unreserved fascist. Um. This was all in the same year.

(39:56):
He was a very busy year for him, and it
really seemed it starts to seem as though maybe he
really liked to rile people up while simultaneously playing this
role of the fragile, kind gentleman. So it's It's one
of those things that's very hard to kind of knit
together in one's head. Like how these two sort of
disparate concepts assisted in one person. I wonder that in

(40:17):
terms of racial justice, like the political parties that exist
today have been through multiple shifts. Yeah, so like, But
at the same time, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. No,
his stuff was very He was wacky, wacky, gent, but
in his last few years he softened considerably, which is
also sometimes novel one would expect. Politically, he had started

(40:38):
out as a youth being ultra conservative, but over time
he shifted his thinking to a point that he said
he became a socialist liberal. And he of course changed
his tune on both Hitler and fascism in that same year.
So by late nineteen thirty three, uh, he was completely
against them and continued to write against them vehemently for
the remainder of his life, which is only three years.

(41:00):
His stance against Hitler may have played a part in
his turnaround on Judaism as well, because shortly before he died,
he actually attended a New Deal rally, and he wrote
glowing praise of the Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was that
event's main speaker. At the very end of his life,
it appeared that Lovecraft had some very real regrets about

(41:22):
his very idle youth that he spent being coddled and
encouraged to be a gentleman but not getting any practical education.
He wrote in a letter to a friend in ninety six, quote,
if I were young again, I would take some clerical training,
fitting me for more lucrative work. It's my mistake that
I never thought about money when I was young, and
I just wanted to end on a slightly positive note,

(41:43):
since we have a rule about nothing too sad when
we do these live shows, no bummer. So for as
problematic as he was all of those really problematic personality traits,
what really is perhaps most surprising about uh HP Lovecraft
is how much people that actually met him and spent
time with him seemed to just genuinely like him. Uh

(42:05):
and fellow writer George Julian Hutaine said of Lovecraft, quote,
Somehow I had never been ambitious to meet Lovecraft. I
had an impression that he was very heavy and ponderous.
He is apparently all those things I detest. Yet from
the minute I met him, I liked HP. Lovecraft immensely
so that that's so hard to imagine, given like all

(42:28):
the things we just described about his but that's kind
of part of the appeal, right. The complexity of humanity
is what makes it fascinating and sort of beautiful. So
thank you so so much to Salt Like Comic Con
for inviting us, and particularly to Ryan Call who wrangled
all of the details of our appearance there. And it's

(42:49):
just a generally fabulous chap. Yeah. I can't stress enough
that is one of my favorite cons to go to. Yeah,
And they're just they're really well organized and it's it's
an enjoyable event all the time, Salt Lake City. As
we've said before, it's beautiful and I had a good
time both times. At this point, you've gone three times.
I've gone twice. Yeah. And I had a friend meet

(43:12):
me out there from l A who I don't get
to see enough. And she was saying, like she's been
to other cons sometimes with me, even though it's not
really always her gam, but she was really like, this
is a really low stress because everything is really well
organized and it's nice and close together and there's not
She was like, this isn't a few cons where I
never felt frantic. I agree, that's like perfect, it's great,

(43:35):
It's not like. Comic Con is also going to be
releasing some of the other panels from the show as podcasts,
so we'll be sure to include the links to that
podcast feed in our show notes so that you can
listen to them if you're interested, and then ones that
Holly and I are on we will be sure to
tell folks about on our social media. Yeah. Uh. And now,
because we are still in the month of March, I

(43:57):
think this is our last episode that will appear in March.
We are still in tripod months for people to try
out new podcasts. So because they're the last one and
I still have, I have more than one to go,
I'm recommending to this time very different. Uh. The first
one is called Return Home, and it is a um,
you know, fictional narrative podcast that is a little bit creepy,

(44:20):
a little bit funny. Um, it's got a really interesting cast.
Sometimes it's campy, sometimes it's spooky, but it's basically the
story of a person who returns to their hometown to
realize that that place is got some unique characteristics and
and it plays out from there. And I have really,
really enjoyed following it. It's gone several short seasons now

(44:43):
and it's super fun. Uh. The other one that I love,
Love Love is called It came from the Depths of Netflix,
which is a bad movie review podcast, but it's really
unique and that most podcasts like that are just kind
of about ripping on the movie. But this is interesting
because the break down the entire uh premise and the
plot of any given movie that they have watched, and

(45:06):
then they will talk about what could have improved that
movie and made you know, both the narrative and the
actual production better, whether or not they would suggest it
to friends for a fun viewing, etcetera. And it's just
it's got kind of a fun, positive spin. I highly
recommend it. So those two podcasts again our return Home
and it came from the Depths of Netflix. And we
bet that you have podcasts that you love or maybe

(45:28):
you don't love, but you think they would be perfect
for a person that you know that maybe hasn't gotten
in on podcasts yet, you should recommend it to them.
Like open people up to the world of information and
entertainment that's available to them through podcasting, and you can
do that. You can spread your word on social media
using the hashtag tripod that's try t r y p
o D So try out a podcast, uh and yeah

(45:50):
share it that way everybody can enjoy hearing your recommendations.
I also have listener mail. This listener mail is from
our listener David, who has a couple of connections to
previous topics that we talked about, and he says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy. I've been listening to the podcast for
a couple of years and it's become one of my
staples for my daily commute to work. Being history geek,

(46:12):
I find him in formative and fascinating, but I never
thought I would find personal connections to the subjects you
talk about on the show until recently. The first was
your podcast on Ira Aldridge. I work at the Folder
Shakespeare Library, where, among the many items in our vast collection,
we have a few artifacts on Mr Aldridge. One is
a playbill dated eighteen thirty three announcing his first appearance

(46:33):
at Covent Garden in the role of Othello. Last year
we put it on public display as part of an
exhibition at the Folder on Shakespeare in America. This particular
playbill has an etching of Ira Aldridge in costume on it.
I should note that the term playbill refers to a
poster like item and not the ubiquitous playbill programs that
you get in theaters today. He sent us a link

(46:53):
to a digitized version of it, and he says, we
also have a manuscript of lines from act three, Scene
three of Othello, written by Idra Aldridge himself. That manuscript
has unfortunately not yet been digitized. But we have other
items as well. If you want to explore our collection,
check out our web website, which is folder dot e
du And then he says, but the episode that struck

(47:13):
me the most was the recent one about the Atlanta
Temple bombing. My grandfather was one of the FBI agents
who investigated the bombing and arrested the perpetrator. It's one
of the many stories he had about his FBI days,
But the when my mother thinks affected him the most.
Not long after the bombing, he took her and her
siblings to the temple so they would always remember the
destruction that prejudice could produce. After his passing, in and

(47:38):
his eulogy, my uncle recounted a mon a moment when
my grandfather gave him a picture of the bombings aftermath
and told him it was quote a symbol of stupidity.
When I mentioned the podcast to my mother, she said
my grandfather never got over being upset that the perpetrator
was acquitted. My uncle suggested I read one of the
books that Holly used for research, titled The Temple Bombing
by Melissa Green, for a good history on the bombing.

(48:00):
My grandfather is sadly not mentioned in the book, likely
due to Hoover's dislike of the press, but knowing my grandfather,
he was likely more than fine with the anonymity. From
what my mother tells me, agents were instructed never to
talk to the press during Hoover's reign. A reporter from
the a j C, which I believe at the time
was called The Atlantic Constitution yet used to be two papers,
the Atlantic Constitution in the Atlanta Journal, and then they

(48:22):
merged into the Atlanta Journal Constitution. UH found my grandfather
and tried to interview him after the bombing. As the
family story goes, my grandfather replied with no comment, which
when those exact words were published in the article, Hoover
became angry that one of his agents was identified, and
he transferred him to make in Georgia. It wasn't the
brightest spot in our family history, but it was a

(48:42):
big event. Nonetheless, your episode on the bombing brought back
a lot of memories of my grandfather, for which I
must express my gratitude. UH, David, thank you so much
for sharing that with us. It's always really amazing to
hear people's personal connections to any of the stories that
we talked about, UH, and it's quite moving. As well
as the cool ira Aldrich stuff. I encourage everyone go

(49:03):
check out folder dot e d u and look at
their archives because some of the stuff they have online
is really amazing. I poked around there for a bit
and lost some time, but not in a bad way. UH.
If you would like to write to us, you can
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(49:26):
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(49:47):
So please come and visit us at missed in History
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