New on Librivox is a free audiobook reading of the book A Study of British Genius (1904) by the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis. This led me to undertake a short survey of what’s known about Lovecraft and Ellis.
First, the book on British genius had originally been published in serial form in 1901 in Popular Science Monthly. It was the sort of serial item that (we might assume) would have caught the attention of the ardently pro-British 11 year-old Lovecraft, perhaps on the newsstands or in the periodicals room of the Providence Public Library. If he actually read it or not at that age is another matter. Though we know that Lovecraft’s uncle had published hypnosis articles in Popular Science Monthly, albeit back in 1876, so Lovecraft could have thought well of the title.
How did A Study of British Genius come to be written? Well, the comprehensive DNB had then recently been issued and thus provided the authoritative data for Ellis’s book…
UNTIL now it has not been possible to obtain any comprehensive view of the men and women who have chiefly built up English civilization. It has not, therefore, been possible to study their personal characteristics as a group. The sixty-three volumes of the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’ of which the last has been lately issued, have for the first time enabled us to construct an authoritative and well balanced scheme of the persons of illustrious genius …
Its appearance was thus a general part of the ‘tightening up’ of general knowledge, and also the affordable public dissemination of such. It forms part of the background of Lovecraft’s early intellectual development circa 1902-1922, in which thinkers sought to “correlate the contents” of the world.
But perhaps he overlooked the book. Such things were, after all, rather taken for granted and uncontroversial before 1914, as the British Empire bestrode the world. More difficult to imagine is that Lovecraft also overlooked Ellis’s substantial book on dreams and dream-worlds, The World of Dreams (1911, reprinted 1926). However, Lovecraft appears not to reference the title in any book I have access too, either pre-war or in the 1926/27 period when it was re-issued and (while writing Dream-quest) he might have been most receptive to it.
Ellis, like most of the early birth-control advocates and sundry leftists and social reformers of the period, was also a strong supporter of eugenic breeding for health. His introduction to the book on British genius positions it as a furtherance of the investigation of the topic undertaken by Sir Francis Galton, for instance. Though this aspect of his work also goes unmentioned by Lovecraft.
Therefore, so far as I know, by the 1920s Lovecraft evidently thought of Ellis only as a pioneering sexologist rather than an ethnographer of British genius and as a fellow explorer of the dreamlands. For instance, in a corrective to Woodburn Harris’s belief in a general female “coldness” on sexual matters, Lovecraft pointed the Harris toward Havelock Ellis and others…
read Havelock Ellis or Bertrand Russell or Lindsey or Fore! or Robie or somebody who knows something about the question! … For Pete’s sake get an intelligible slice of data by seeing what competent specialist physicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, biologists, etc. have to say from their wide, deep, careful, & accurate observations! That tendency to go only by what you can smell & touch in your own farmyard will be the philosophic ruin of you if you don’t shake it off pretty soon — take off the blinders, boy, & see what the world is thinking & discovering — read, read. (Selected Letters III)
Joshi’s I Am Providence observes that, later in the same mammoth letter, Lovecraft referenced Havelock Ellis’s book “Little Essays in Love and Virtue” (1922, actual title Little Essays of Love and Virtue). Lovecraft could also have imbibed the gist of Ellis’s sexological findings in long conversations with Morton, who had been an ardent public polemicist for such causes — though rather surprisingly the name of Ellis is not to be found in the published Morton letters. Perhaps it was a settled question between them. Lovecraft would of course also have found book reviews and discussion of Ellis’s work in newspapers and magazines.
To Moe in January 1930 he talks of the wider impacts of “Havelock Ellis, Forel, Kraft-Ebing, Freud, etc.” in terms of having helped to brush away cobwebbed Victorian prudery, opening the doors to a less censorious portrayal of ‘modern’ life in literature. (Selected Letters III, also the Moe letters although there “Ellis” is un-indexed).
But that was the 1920s. By the mid 1930s he was rather more interested in debating political-economic matters. Lovecraft continued to mention Ellis as an authority on sex matters, but in May 1935 he told Barlow that he would “be the last to choose” a discussion of Ellis and sexology as a topic of conversation. By then he was more interested in keeping his young proteges away from hard communism, than in nudging them toward the soft cheeks of lovers.
Possibly he also knew from experience that, by the mid 1930s, he would encounter only a mish-mash of formulaic “parrot” talk on the subject. For instance, in 1933 Lovecraft wrote to R.E. Howard…
I always find your arguments full of meat and rich in starting-points for various trains of significant thought — a thing I could never say of the glib, ready-made harangues of those who merely echo Croce or Santayana or Briffault or Marx or Russell or Ellis or some other authority. … These fashion-followers forget that the authorities whom they parrot did not derive their original opinions in this easy [second or third-hand] way. An opinion which is serious with its first-hand creator ceases to be serious when it is mimicked without sufficient basis in experience.
