This is part two of a post arising from the latest Voluminous podcast, in which some of Lovecraft’s public letters are read. Sent to a Haldeman-Julius publication in 1923, his letters followed the editor’s call for lists of ‘the top 10 greatest names of all time’. In my first post I looked at Lovecraft’s naming of Remy de Gourmont, and also the use of the perennial alarmist’s “inevitable decline of civilisation, starting now” notion, of the sort which can look so ridiculous 30 years later.

In this second post I look at the links with Haldeman-Julius as a publisher.

A 1925 ‘Houdini’ special-issue of the Monthly version, with interview.

Lovecraft was sending for Haldeman-Julius ‘blue books’ by mail-order in 1923. Since we know he early on obtained a copy of Schopenhauer’s “Art of Controversy” and many others that way. He soon acquired even more, because we know he packed a pocket-full for light-relief when he hiked the New Jersey Palisades with Sonia. That was shortly before their marriage. One might then wonder if some of these ‘blue books’ might have been of the type then referred to as ‘marital hygiene’ advice, which were to be found among the Haldeman-Julius line. Though perhaps he was not thinking quite that far ahead.

He tells Moe that he did not intend the 1923 letter — as read in the Voluminous podcast linked above — to be published…

I’ve been having a bit of fun with the Haldeman-Julius Weekly, which is the old socialistic Appeal to Reason partly turned sane under a new name. … [the editor printed] an 8-page letter of mine, not meant for the vulgar eye. Ho hum… not that it matters.

How had Lovecraft come into contact with Haldeman-Julius and the magazine? Via Morton would be my guess, or maybe David V. Bush suggesting it as being of possible interest as a market. As an anarchist pamphleteer Morton would have had an interest in the political angle of the enterprise, and Bush an interest in the ‘hygiene’ and sexology side. But perhaps the publisher just sent a free copy of Haldeman-Julius Weekly with Lovecraft’s order, on the sound principle that anyone brave enough to tackle Schopenhauer also deserved some lighter reading matter along with it. The title in question only sold a few hundred copies in 1923. Four years later it was re-issued with the snappier title “How to Argue Logically” and sold 30,000.

By 1925 Lovecraft can be found telling his aunt that he is buying up Blue Books in bulk, because he has heard that the 5-cent and 10-cent prices are to double. He reads them to pass the time on the longer New York City subway journeys. At one point he hears (again wrongly) that Haldeman-Julius has ceased publishing, then that he is about to cease. Somewhere near Grand Central Station he discovers a ‘Little Blue Book Store’, apparently stocked with nothing but the Blue Books. Possibly this store is the source of the false rumours, designed to boost panic bulk buying. Tentaclii readers who have paywall access can find the newspaper article on this store, titled “Pay as You Go Out, 5 Cents a Copy, in the New Cafeteria Bookshop” (New York Times, 24th February 1924). At that time Lovecraft picked up many of the line’s science booklets, and three weirder booklets featuring tales by Poe, Kipling and E.F. Benson’s ghost stories respectively. According to Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library these three were the only Blue Books thought to be worth noting in his Library at his death, though he owned far more. In his mid 1920s letters he later comments that the New York store had closed down, and bemoans that he will have to go back to the ‘old method’ of ordering by mail from Kansas.

In 1928 he comments in passing on the Haldeman-Julius organisation’s ‘militant atheist’ stance…

I cannot sympathise with the violent anti-Christian agitators and “debunkers” of the Truth-Seeker and Haldeman-Julius Weekly type.

Many of Morton’s pamphlets were issued by “The Truth Seeker Co.” in New York, but I’m uncertain of its connections if any with the later Truth-Seeker magazine.

Lovecraft did not have a collection of these magazines, and his comment implies that the strident atheism of the 1920s and 30s was just as simultaneously boring and as dangerous as today (i.e.: Christians relentlessly depicted in movies and popular novels as sadists, bigots, perverts, sentimental milksops, hypocrites, dogmatic, anti-science etc). But Lovecraft did own the Blue Books in quantity by the early 1930s. He talks of a tall “stack” of them balanced up against one wall of his personal library. In 1933 he signs off a letter to Morton with… “Now to get my Haldeman-Julius booklets tied together to avoid shuffling”, which suggests he has a substantial collection of all the titles he might want from the publisher. The context of “avoid shuffling” was his house move to No. 66.

Yet in a letter to Shea of early 1934 he affects not to be familiar with their current catalogue and their newer titles… “I suppose there must be dozens of Haldeman-Julius booklets about the matter [active homosexuality] now”. He may just be trying to give a casual hint to the lad about where such helpful reading might be ordered. Or he may have no longer been receiving the annual catalogue. Probably the former, since… why would be not be on the mailing-list for this cheap and interesting catalogue?

“Hygiene” was then a euphemism for sex matters.

In 1936 he talks discreetly of the “Brobst H-J” stuff which Barlow had presumably borrowed during his long visit to Lovecraft in August 1936, and by then had with him at home in Fort Leavenworth. “H-J” being “Haldeman-Julius”. Lovecraft advises that this “stuff” should be returned directly to Brobst. The implication is that the Providence asylum nurse Brobst had his own large collection of the Blue Books, most likely especially relating to mental illness and eccentricity and suchlike. As a trained and qualified nurse Brobst would have been able to order the riskier psychology and sexology titles without having to fear postal or parental censorship.

The latest Voluminous podcast reads some of Lovecraft’s public letters. Sent to Haldeman-Julius publications in 1923, the letters follow a call for lists of ‘the top 10 greatest names of all time’. Haldeman-Julius was the publisher of several magazines and the semi-notorious “Little Blue Books” pocket-paperback series. Operating from a large printing plant in remotest Kansas he became ‘the Henry Ford’ of cheap mail-order books, running a business that usefully and affordably punctured censorship throughout the 1920s and 30s.

An offline .MP3 download of the episode can be had via the Podbean listing.

Two things are immediately interesting in the letters.

The first is that it might seem that Lovecraft is pushing a Spenglerian view of imminent civilisational decline, but at that date he had not yet read Spengler. The famous 1918 The Decline of the West… “appeared in its English edition in 1926” in both the USA and UK. Obviously Lovecraft was well able to have his own ideas on the matter, but may have picked up enough from discussion and reviews to have an outline of Spengler’s gloomy ideas by early 1923. He writes to Galpin in 1932 that he read the first volume of Spengler in English… “some years ago with much attention & a great degree of acquiescence”. Joshi puts this reading at spring 1927, after having read a review of the book in 1926. But consider that Lovecraft also paid close attention to British ideas, and by 1923 the anti-colonial movement had taken up the cultural pessimism of many of the late Victorians — the idea that all Empires have natural cycles and that the British Empire could not last and would inevitably go the way of Rome. Hence, ‘better to quietly divest the Empire in an orderly way now, while we have the chance’, etc. Thus such arguments might be an alternative pre-Spenglerian source for such pessimistic ideas, paired with the general cultural pessimism of Schopenhauer, the French decadents, Nietzsche etc. At this point, recall, Lovecraft was still in the last part of his ‘decadent’ phase.

The second is of course the names on his ‘greatest of all time’ list. Most seem fairly sound choices for early 1923, and for what he admits is a rather sixth-form exercise not worth spending much time on. I won’t spoil the podcast’s letters by giving the names here, but they run thus…

Poet.
Philosopher.
Military general with cultural interests.
Military general and letter writer.
Poet and playwright.
Novelist.
Poet and story-writer.
Modern philosopher.
Modern philosopher.
Poet.

The last is the only really puzzling choice to English speakers today, since the French decadent / symbolist writer and editor Remy de Gourmont is almost unknown outside France. Lovecraft’s touchstone for Gourmont might be initially thought to have been the coy translation by Arthur Ransom (Swallows and Amazons) of A Night in the Luxembourg. But the dates don’t match. In September 1923, at the very end of his decadent phase, we know that Lovecraft read the book A Night in the Luxembourg (1919) (Selected Letters I, page 250). But this was after the letters he sent to Haldeman-Julius. What de Gourmont could he have read before that time?

Well, he had remarked to Galpin in June 1922 that… “Some day I guess I’ll give the immortal Remy the once-over — he sounds interesting.” Thus Galpin had read de Gourmont and told Lovecraft about it in glowing terms. The logical starter book for philosophic Paris-yearning Galpin to have been urging on Lovecraft would be the English translation of Philosophic Nights in Paris (1920). This had been issued in English by Luce, in Boston, a year after A Night in the Luxembourg and in a uniform edition with it. My guess would be that Lovecraft read Philosophic Nights in Paris late in 1922. He later quoted a line in English from the book, about beauty. Which admittedly is very slim evidence that he had read it, and especially since he undoubtedly owned the cheap Haldeman-Julius booklet The Epigrams of Remy de Gourmont (November 1923, translation of a 1919 book).

In early September 1923 Lovecraft tells Long that he’s been dibbling about with some random summer reading and that he has recently read the English-translation of A Night in the Luxembourg. This was after the letters he sent to Haldeman-Julius, and would thus not have influenced the ‘top 10’ list. He would have found this book equally well-suited to his own already-developed philosophy. Being a philosophical fantasy with play-like dialogue and “Epicurean interludes”, indeed “a crystalline Epicureanism” as translator Ransom explains. I would suggest that another part of the general appeal of de Gourmont may have been the idea that it was possible for an iconoclastic fantasy writer to strongly impact a nation’s intellectual thought. Lovecraft evidently saw this facially-disfigured hermit-writer as a Nietzsche-like kindred-spirit, a man apparently able to reduce a whole culture to rubble with a few strokes of his pen. Since Lovecraft-the-Nietzschian gleefully states, in the essay “Lord Dunsany and His Work” (December 1922), that through his writing… “Remy de Gourmont has brought a wholesale destruction of all values” to France. This is not hyperbole as de Gourmont does indeed appear to have had such a strong impact, being deemed the man who “spoke for his generation” while he was alive. But by the early 1920s the glittering game-players of French intellectual life had moved on.

Lovecraft barely mentions de Gourmont elsewhere, and I suspect the infatuation may have been short-lived. He didn’t read the man’s novel A Virgin Heart before he made a birthday present of it to Belknap Long in 1925. That must have been the 1921 New York edition. Admittedly, that he did not read it may not be proof of anything — it was a fat and apparently semi-erotic novel in translation. Even the most careful browsing of it might invite ribald joshing from Long that Lovecraft had ‘peeked at the naughty bits’ before giving the gift.

For those interested, a translated English sampler of de Gourmont’s fantastical fiction is From a Faraway Land (2019) by the indefatigable Brian Stableford. But I suspect that Lovecraft only knew the English translations of Philosophic Nights in Paris and A Night in the Luxembourg. The latter also gets a name-check in the European travelogue he ghost-wrote for Sonia… “I took care not to miss the splendid Luxembourg Gardens — reminiscent of Remy de Gourmont and countless other writers — which lie across the Boulevard St. Michel.”

What of influence? The first edition of Joshi’s Decline of the West does see a parallel between ideas in Luxembourg and “The Quest of Iranon” (February 1921), but no de Gourmont work was read by Lovecraft until after June 1922. One might also think of the Parisian setting of “The Music of Erich Zann”, but again that story was written in 1921.

Tomorrow, a look at the links with Haldeman-Julius.