Here I take a brief look at Samuel Loveman’s “young” friend Gervaise Butler. H.P. Lovecraft him met several times in short succession in Boston in early 1929, in the company of Loveman. Later that springtime Lovecraft remarked in April 1929 that he had been “seeing” young Gervaise, seemingly without Loveman, and a year later he recalled that this had been in New York City. Lovecraft also refers to him as being a “find” made by Loveman. “Find” being an amateur journalism term, used in terms of recruitment. Lovecraft calls Butler “young” several times, but the footnotes to the Letters to Family have him as born in 1888, making him two years older than Lovecraft. That didn’t seem quite right to me. Why would he repeatedly refer to someone older than himself as “young”, and do so across multiple letters? He did occasional use the term “good old”, mostly for old men, but that is not the sense he is using “young” here. Could there have been another Gervaise Butler? Indeed there was. Here are the two candidates, then…

1. There was a Gervaise Butler who left Bloomington High School, Illinois, in 1922. He was an boy actor with the local troupe, able to play “the comic bell boy” in 1923, and by 1927 he was film critic of the Bloomington Pantagraph. Bloomington is about 60 miles SW of Chicago. The dates would make him “young”, if he had left High School at 18 that would place his birth date at around 1904. Nearly 15 years younger than Lovecraft, and aged 25 if they had met in Boston in 1929. A short partially accessible biography in Trend reveals more and confirms the 1904 date and suggests a writer…

GERVAISE BUTLER. Born in 1904 at Bloomington, Illinois. Mr. Butler has, since that time, pretty well covered the United States and Europe. He studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; he reviewed books for the San …

My feeling is that the “studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley” covers his 1924-26 period.

2. There was another Gervaise Butler, from Muscatine, Iowa. He was the manager of the Doubleday bookshop (Greybar Building, Manhattan, NYC) in 1932 (Publishers Weekly). One F. Minot Weld (poss. b. 1910) and Gervaise Notley Butler opened their own bookshop in 1933. The shop closed in 1955 when F. Minot Weld retired. (Publishers Weekly). A Publishers Weekly profile of Weld and Butler (only very partially available online) states he had been writing from childhood in Iowa, had seen publication in The Century magazine and others. In the 1930s he “became owner and editor of Decorative Furniture” magazine. Given the “N.” this seems likely to be the same Gervaise N. Butler who later wrote extensively as a dance critic for the Dance Observer (1934-) and who served on the board of the title. He it must be who has the 1888 birth date given in Letters to Family.

Either would be fitted to be Loveman’s friend. But Lovecraft’s repeated “young” does rather suggest that Loveman’s friend could be the other Gervaise Butler, born 1904 and picked up by Loveman as a 24 year-old amateur journalism protégé and “find” — most likely on his coming to New York City circa 1928.