A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The plot of ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is simple, and is presented as an elementary good-versus-evil conflict between Thomas Malone, an Irish police detective working out of the Borough Hall station, and Robert Suydam, a wealthy man of ancient Dutch ancestry who becomes the focus of horror in the tale. What strikes us about this tale, aside from the hackneyed supernatural manifestations, is the sheer poorness of its writing. The perfervid rhetoric that in other tales provides such harmless enjoyment here comes off sounding forced and bombastic. Lovecraft cannot help ending the story on a note of dour ponderousness (‘The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant’) and with a transparent indication that the horrors that were seemingly suppressed by the police will recur at some later date. It is a fittingly stereotyped ending for a story that does nothing but deal in stereotypes—both of race and of weird fictional imagery.

The figure of Malone is of some interest in relation to the possible genesis—or, at any rate, the particular form—of the story. Some time before writing ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ Lovecraft had submitted ‘The Shunned House’ to Detective Tales, the magazine that had been founded together with Weird Tales

and of which Edwin Baird was the editor. In spite of the fact that Detective Tales did occasionally print tales of horror and the supernatural, Baird rejected the story. By late July Lovecraft is speaking of writing a ‘novel or novelette of Salem horrors which I may be able to cast in a sufficiently “detectivish” mould to sell to Edwin Baird for Detective Tales’,¹⁴

but he does not appear to have begun such a work. What this all suggests, however, is that Lovecraft is attempting to develop, however impractically, an alternative market to Weird Tales—and is calling upon the man who, as editor of Weird Tales, accepted all his stories to aid him in the attempt. Sure enough, in early August Lovecraft speaks of planning to send ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ to Detective Tales

; whether he actually did so is unclear, but, if he did, the tale was obviously rejected. Lovecraft would later remark that the story was consciously written with Weird Tales in mind,¹⁵ and sure enough it appeared in the January 1927 issue.

‘The Horror at Red Hook’ presents as good an opportunity as any for discussing the development (if it can be called that) of Lovecraft’s racial attitudes during this period. There is no question that his racism flared to greater heights at this time—at least on paper (as embodied in letters to his aunts)—than at any subsequent period in his life. There is no need to dwell upon the seeming paradox of Lovecraft’s marrying a Jewess when he exhibited marked anti-Semitic traits, for Sonia in his mind fulfilled his requirement that aliens assimilate themselves into the American population, as did other Jews such as Samuel Loveman. Nevertheless, Sonia speaks at length about Lovecraft’s attitudes on this subject. One of her most celebrated comments is as follows:

Although he once said he loved New York and that henceforth it would be his ‘adopted state’, I soon learned that he hated it and all its ‘alien hordes’. When I protested that I too was one of them, he’d tell me I ‘no longer belonged to these mongrels’. ’You are now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft of 598 Angell St., Providence, Rhode Island!’¹⁶

Let it pass that Lovecraft and Sonia never resided at 598 Angell Street. A later remark is still more telling: ‘Soon after we were married he told me that whenever we have company he would appreciate it if there were “Aryans” in the majority.’¹⁷ This must refer to the year 1924, as they would not have done much entertaining in 1925. Sonia’s final remark on the matter is still more damning. Sonia claims that part of her desire to have Lovecraft and Loveman meet in 1922 was to ‘cure’ Lovecraft of his bias against Jews by actually meeting one face to face. She continues:

Unfortunately, one often judges a whole people by the character of the first ones he meets. But H. P. assured me that he was quite ‘cured’; that since I was so well assimilated into the American way of life and the American scene he felt sure our marriage would be a success. But unfortunately (and here I must speak of something I never intended to have publicly known), whenever he would meet crowds of people—in the subway, or, at the noon hour, on the sidewalks in Broadway, or crowds, wherever he happened to find them, and these were usually the workers of minority races—he would become livid with anger and rage.¹⁸