Following yesterday’s post, here is a little more about Lovecraft’s friend James F. Morton. Recently on Archive.org, The American Mercury for August 1943. This issue ran the innocuous-sounding article “Brook, Farm, Wild West Style”. This was actually a brisk and vivid history of the ‘Home’ anarchist colony, written little more than 20 years after the colony failed. Morton had been a leading light, teacher and editor of the Home colony newspaper. Lovecraftians will note the classes in Theosophy and the wild accusations of “horrible sex orgies” which occurred during Morton’s time…
As well as espousing various forms of ‘free love’, many anarchists of the time were militant atheists. But the Home colony was very different. The historian Laurence R.R. Veysey noted this in The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America (University of Chicago Press, 1978) stating that… “At Home, Theosophy and spiritualism gained widespread, persistent attention” and he remarked that Morton “lectured in [nearby] Tahoma on the unity of purposes between Theosophy and anarchism”. Veysey, having access to runs of the relevant paper and journals, also noted that “one encounters surprisingly frequent references” to Theosophy in the wider anarchist publications of the period. The “sex orgies” accusations were evidently hysteria, of the false sort that have since become wearyingly familiar. But the Theosophy was clearly fact and was being personally pushed by Morton. Since he was also the colony’s teacher, we might plausibly assume he was the one leading the classes in Theosophy.
Is there confirmation to be found in the Morton-Lovecraft Letters? Not unless you were digging for it and, even then, hardly anything. I have the book as a Kindle ebook and a search there for theosophist brings nothing and theosophy brings just one result. At the back of the book Morton looks back on his intellectual career and he remarks, very much in passing and without any precision about years, that… “For a much longer period I clung to Theosophy, and for a number of years engaged in the different aspects of what is called Occultism”. “Occultism” seems to indicate Blavatskian Theosophy, then.
There is another interesting though more tenuous parallel with Lovecraft’s work, re: “The Shunned House” (1924). A deranged gunman, claiming to be an anarchist though with no discoverable connections to them, assassinated U.S. President McKinley in 1901. This caused a great deal of trouble for the Home colony and Morton. At the assassin’s funeral… “The remains of the murderer were buried and destroyed by means of a carboy of commercial sulphuric acid poured upon the body in the lowered coffin.”
Home failed in 1921, and it was in 1922 that Morton and Lovecraft began to know each other. [Update: I mean, know each other beyond their initial acquaintanceship]. If Morton verbally conveyed much about Blavatskian Theosophy must remain doubtful, though. Since in February 1933 Lovecraft did not recognise what his fellow weird writer Smith was then using to develop some new tales…
What you say of your new tale, and of the [new] myth-cycle which you have dug up, interests me to fever heat; and I am tempted to overwhelm you with questions as to the source, provenance, general bearings, and bibliography of all this unknown legendry? Where did you find it? How can one get hold of it? What nation or region developed it? Why isn’t it mentioned in ordinary works on comparative folklore? What — if any — special cult (like the Theosophists, who have concocted a picturesque tradition of Atlanteo-Lemurian elder world stuff, well summarised in a book by W. Scott-Elliott) cherishes it? [Later…] I’m quite on edge about that Dzyan-Shamballah stuff, the cosmic scope of it — Lords of Venus, and all that — sounds so especially and emphatically in my line!
Evidently Lovecraft had read little more than W. Scott-Elliott, and probably not much of that. He had either skipped large sections of the book(s) or had simply forgotten by 1933 that Scott-Elliott had much to say about the Lords of Venus and the Book of Dzyan and related notions.
Certainly Lovecraft could not have had his memory jogged about such things in summary from a key book on his shelves, since Spence’s An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920) discusses Theosophy at a fairly high ‘spiritual’ level and does not offer any of the cranky details. Nor, obviously, had Lovecraft been hearing “all that” from Morton in the early and mid 1920s. Which is not to say that Morton was not able to draw on those old ‘cosmic’ ideas at that time, perhaps presenting them as story possibilities in his discussions and without any obvious Theosophist hallmarks. That is speculation but it does offer one interesting possibility for a tangential influence of occult ‘knowledge’ on Lovecraft, if one needs to find such things.
A modern readable history of Home can be easily found the short book, Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound, Oregon State University Press, 2014. Original title: Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Colony on Puget Sound. Presumably the title was changed when the word “Colony” caused shrieking and wailing among anarchist reviewers.
