I am still engaged in a project involving a book about the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft. I originally mentioned this just over a month ago, in a post called Researching Lovecraft… This as you may have guessed is a follow on from that post, as people liked it and because I failed my sanity rolls, so had to crack on with writing the book….

Part of the brief is a short biography of Howard, between 5k and 10k, which covers his life from birth to death and everything in-between. While I have a copy of S T Joshi’s biography on old tenacle hugger (which I recommend for those of an academic lint), somewhere in the upper library, otherwise known as the spare bedroom where men fear to tread. It has been some years since I read it and I felt it would be cheating to borrow heavily from it. it felt more important to start afresh, keep it lighter than Joshi, while not skipping over anything important. I have my own style which any reader of my non-fiction will recognize. One perhaps less worthy in an academic sense, but one would hope more readable.

Besides which, a short biography is supposed to lean into the ‘short’.

That all said, there has been no shortage of research involved. What is included in the final cut maybe 20% at most of the notes I took double checking things I already know and fresh research into anything I didn’t. There were some fun little facts thrown up along the way, which may make the cut in one way or another but the rabbit holes were deep, the warrens winding and there was many a twist back on oneself along the way. So here are some of the more… unusual notes, or entertaining little factoids, depending on the way you look at them.

Young Howard wore a dress, this was not unusual, it was in fact very normal for young boys in the 1890’s, even if it does seem a little odd from a modern perspective… He also wore pink which was considered a very manly colour. Any conclusions you draw from this says more about you than it does about Howard…

Lovecraft’s maternal Grandfather had the wonderful name, Whipple Van Buran Phillips.

Whipple was a freemason and successful businessman. He also owned much of the land around a small town called Greene in the west of Rhode Island state.

When Lovecraft first met his later wife Sonia Greene, he defiantly didn’t say , “Ma Grand pa Whipple used to own him a town called Greene.”

The above is not because it would have been a terrible chat up line… But because it would have made Howard sound like a backwoods racoon-hunter, which would have horrified him.

When he got himself appointed as chairman of the UAPA’s Department of Public Criticism he embarked on a campaign to advocate the use of ‘British English’ over ‘American English’ which he believed, in his typically xenophobic way, to be a bastardised version of the language, watered down by immigrants from Russia, the Slavic nations and Jews.

Irony flag: American English is far closer to the English of Shakespeare than modern British English…

This was also why ‘The Colour from Outer Space’, using the British spelling, because xenophobia…

Second Irony flag: Sonia Greene, Lovecraft’s wife, until he died as he never filed the papers for his devoice, was actuality a Ukrainian of Jewish stock, though she came to New York as a young child. She was therefore exactly the kind of immigrate he thought were ruining New England.

Speaking of Sonia , Howards aunts disapproved of her, not because of her heritage, or even that she was a widow with a teenage daughter, but because they thought she was a gold digger…

Third irony flag: Once they were married Sonia Greene supported Howard finically for years, as he was quite unable to get a job…

Sonia became an unintentional bigamist when she remarried in 1936, because she believe Howard had filed the devoice papers. he had, but he had field them in his desk draw rather than with the county clerks office. She did not learn she had still been married to him until 1945, when she also found out he had been dead for eight years…

Sonia later wrote a short memoir entitled ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft‘ in which she said he performed ‘satisfactorily’ as a lover. Damn girl…