The Midnight Society: — Subium • Bluesky web client

"The worship of fat women was certainly comic—as seen in retrospect. Personally, I think I prefer ibis-headed monstrosities to the types suggested in the Maltese carvings!" - H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [25 Jul 1935], DS 612

Thicc thighs save lives, Howard.

Howard is canceled² now.

What, again? I hope he's been getting his card punched, he must be due for a free cancelling by now.

It’s amazing how each and every factoid I learn about Lovecraft reveals him to be an even worse person. Did he ever donate to charity? Pet a puppy? I need *something* here 😃

Lovecraft consoled a bereaved mother, a woman whose fiance had blown his head off, and discouraged a young woman from suicide. Living in genteel poverty his adult life, his Christmas gifts were often poems written just for them. He encouraged all manner of writing. deepcuts.blog/her-letters-...

Her Letters To Lovecraftdeepcuts.blog H. P. Lovecraft was renowned during his lifetime as a prolific correspondent, ranging from simple postcards from his travels to voluminous letters that sometimes reached 70 or 100 handwritten pages. H...

Wow, thanks for the link. I didn’t know about any of this.

He had a pet cat...

When Lovecraft was a child, he had a pet black cat. He was at least 5 years old, maybe younger. We don't know who named the cat, although none of the adults seemed to have a problem - the N-word was a common name for black-colored animals throughout Lovecraft's lifetime and beyond in the US.

In 1914, Lovecraft's grandfather died. The family finances were in crisis, the family home was broken up. The black cat disappeared. It was Lovecraft's last pet. While he would enjoy playing with neighborhood cats, even name them, write poems about them, he couldn't afford to take one in after that.

In memory of his beloved pet, who represented the golden period of his youth before everything went to shit, he placed the cat in two stories - "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." None of the contemporary readers commented on the cat's name; it was that common.

As an adult, Howard would sometimes refer to black kittens as "n-words," but for names he usually chose names like Samuel Perkins. Although he once convinced a friend to name their snow-white kitten Crom, after Robert E. Howard's fictional deity. (Crom later disappeared, alas.)

It's not entirely 'of the time' too - my niece's former cat was called "Moortje"...

In Florida in the late 60s - early 70s we had neighbors who named their black dog that way, and called him home in the evenings with great enthusiasm.

Not a lot know this but in fact his full name was Howard Puppy Lovecraft. It actually somehow makes his awfulnesss worse though.

...Don't look up his cat's name.

his cat featured prominently in one of his shorter stories and was mentioned by name like twice a page

Uhhh… he became less racist when he got older? When he took a trip through Canada, he wrote very highly of the First Nations people. He was still racist, just, you know, less so. Oh, and unlike most WASPs of his day and age, he liked and thought highly of the Irish. That’s the best I’ve got.

Lovecraft & the Irish is complicated. HPL was an ardent Anglophile & opposed the creation of the Irish Free State, and evinced some prejudice against the Irish in that regard. However, he calmed down in the later 20s & came to very much appreciate Robert E. Howard, who identified as Irish-American.

That makes sense if it was in the later 20s, considering his very positively portrayed Irish protagonist in The Horror at Red Hook (which is ironically one of his most racist stories) in 1925. I remember in my annotated Lovecraft book a citation of a letter he wrote praising the Irish by and large.

Later in life he became aware that he was in fact a terrible person and all his prejudices were a "him" problem and tried to be better but he died before he could do much about it.

It's more complicated. Lovecraft's prejudices were never static throughout his life, he continually revisited and restated positions based on his travels, new experiences, world events, and arguments with friends. Yet he was never "not racist" by any stretch; the late-in-life turn was political.

He loved cats. That's... about all I know about him that isn't really, really 😱 And even that involves the things he NAMED those cats...

Why not both? The world may not have been ready for the sheer voluptuous avicephalic beauty

I kind of want to draw this, just to see what it would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would end up being uncomfortably porn-adjacent.

There was just no way in that Howie wasn't a cringe dork, was there?

Those exact lines had popped into my head.

The same anxiety, paranoia and xenophobia that gives his stories atmosphere makes him a huge scary bigot. Super sucks. Dammit, Howard.

Don't make us summon an Italian, Howard

The real horror of Lovecraft is what a horrible person he was.

So, he *did* have a "type."

Lovecraft never said a bad word about his wife; she was described by some contemporaries as "Junoesque."

HPL measured by his actions towards friends and acquaintances is a considerably better man than HPL measured by his writings. A complicated, timid man, and I try to bear in mind that however awful he was, he died early, hungry and in considerable pain, and left quite a body of work.

Lovecraft is beyond problematic; its tempting to cast him as an absolute villain, or, for those of use of a certain age who grew up with it, to handwave "he was a man of his times," but both are too simple. The Cthulhu Mythos has outlived him, and outgrew him even in his own day.

It is personally uncomfortable to look back on my midwestern, 1960s-70s childhood reading and how easily I shrugged off his prejudices, very like those of most adults around me. It was wrong then; it was wrong when he wrote it; and at least that is widely recognized now.

But I don't have the slightest idea what else to do about it other than acknowledge it. I can't unread the stories. I'm not going to burn the books. Nor will I gloss over their horrendous flaws.

Lovecraft was not some secular saint of weird fiction, nor was he the monstrous caricature of a racist he is often made out to be. Time and fame have often misrepresented his nature and prejudice, so Lovecraft is often made a dead horse to whip, regardless of his true prejudices.

Not in public, perhaps. But he and Sonia had words on many occasions. They divorced because he was an asshole.

We mostly have only Sonia's memoir of the marriage to go by, but like most break-ups, the causes were complicated - issues of money, temperament, health, etc. HPL always emphasized the financial reasons, but Sonia focused on other issues. deepcuts.blog/2020/06/17/t...

The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davisdeepcuts.blog I’ve heard from various sources in town that Lovecraft’s wife has suddenly put in an appearance and is causing somewhat of a rumpus. Is this true, or is it, as usual, the kind of ill thought out gossi...

Incidentally, Sonia's full autobiography which details her life outside of marriage to HPL is finally being published: www.helios.house/books/twohea...

Two Hearts That Beat As One — Helios House Presswww.helios.house

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