Arsenic, Ulcers, and Boxers in S. T. Joshi's HPL: A Life
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 6:19 pm
A Partial Discussion of Some Matters in S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Life:
1) On page 5 of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, S. T. Joshi quotes from an account of H. P. Lovecraft’s mother by Clara Hess, (first recorded by August Derleth, and later quoted by L. Sprague de Camp), to the effect that Susie Lovecraft, who was described when young as being “very pretty and attractive, with a beautiful and unusually white complexion”, got her pale complexion, “it was said, by eating arsenic, although whether there was any truth to this story, I do not know.” (CANNON, Lovecraft Remembered, 32)
Although S. T. Joshi seems confused by this account (“What to make of the arsenic story- and whether this had anything to do with Susie’s later physical and psychological maladies- I have no idea” [JOSHI 5]), it would seem that this “arsenic” which Susie Lovecraft used to maintain her pallor was probably either “Dr. Rose’s French Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, or “Dr. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, both of which were available from the Sears-Roebuck catalog and Good Housekeeping magazine classifieds from this period, respectively, and which apparently operated by deoxygenating the blood, killing red blood cells, thus guaranteeing “a sure cure“, as one ad says, for “rough, yellow, or muddy skin.”
It is perhaps significant, then that “rough,” “yellow,” an “muddy” skin are likewise aspects of Lovecraft’s caricatural hybrids and degenerate humans throughout his fiction -cf. the “yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments” in “Nyarlathotep” (Lovecraft‘s aesthetic concerns here reinforcing his quasi-Spenglerian, apocalyptic fears); the “squamous” and “scaly” serpentine snake-creature in “The Curse of Yig”; and, most especially, Lovecraft’s description of the Innsmouth-Deep One hybrids in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth“, i.e. those with the “’Innsmouth look‘” (DH 325), particularly the women among them.
There, Lovecraft says, those with the “Innsmouth look” have “queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shriveled or creased up”. ([DH]) This is also true, too, Lovecraft tells us, of the females among them (cf. Lovecraft’s, “One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman…” [DH])
These descriptions -“Rough and scabby”, “shriveled or creased”- are particularly important, especially given the fact that they are almost diametrically the opposite of descriptions of the intended results of such patent-medicines as Dr. Rose’s “French Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, as well as of Clara Hess’s contemporary description of Lovecraft’s own mother. An advertisement for Dr. Rose’s “French Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, for example, states that it:
“possesses the ‘wizard’s touch’ in producing, preserving and enhancing beauty of form and person in male and female by surely developing a transparency and pellucid clearness of complexion, shapely contour of form, brilliant eyes, soft and smooth skin, where by nature the reverse exists.”
And, according to the same ad, although previous internally-taken arsenic solutions proved to be dangerous, “the most astounding transformation in personal appearance [was] brought about by their steady use. Even the coarsest and most repulsive skin and complexion, marred by freckles and other disfigurements, slowly change into an unrivalled purity of texture, free from any spot or blemish whatever, the pinched features become agreeable, the form angular gradually transforms itself into the perfection of womanly grace and beauty. Used by men, the favorable results are the same.”
Needless to say, that Lovecraft’s polemical caricature of his Deep One/Innsmouth hybrids, should take on a precisely opposite form to that possessed/desired/promulgated by his mother, further indicates the extent to which Lovecraft’s socio-political commentary -much like his love for cats (a love which also, as Lovecraft’s essay “Cats & Dogs” makes clear, ultimately has its socio-political aspects)- was based upon/influenced/determined by his mother.
2) In his Lovecraft: A Life, S. T. Joshi, while discussing Winfield Lovecraft’s deteriorating physical condition while in Butler Hospital, observes that by late 1896, Lovecraft’s father Winfield evidently “developed an ulcer on his penis, possibly from masturbation (the initial sign of syphilis is such an ulcer, but Winfield was long past this stage).” (JOSHI 15) (One hopes it is only excessive masturbation to which Joshi is referring, here...)
According to the book Syphilis: Modern Diagnosis and Treatment (1961), however, published by the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, such ulcers are a characteristic of syphilis, even in its late stages. “…demonstrable late lesions of syphilis can be classified into….gummatous reactions that may occur at any time during the late stage- even 30 to 40 years after infection” (42) the guide explains, such gummatous reactions being able to occur “anywhere” on the body, often as “solitary gummas (ulcers) or nodular-ulcerative syphilides.” (44)
3) In one particularly racist section of Lovecraft’s early serial, “Herbert West: Reanimator“, Lovecraft’s physician narrator and Dr. Herbert West are called to a “surreptitious and ill-conducted” boxing match held by a bunch of Polish mill-workers, where one of the boxers lies motionless, seemingly knocked out (Lovecraft describes him as “a silent black form on the floor.“) The boxer on the floor, apparently knocked-out, but actually dead, is a Black man named “Buck Robinson, ‘The Harlem Smoke’.” (Lovecraft describes the body of Robinson lying in repose as being “a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life--but the world holds many ugly things.”) The other boxer, meanwhile, is an Irishman named “Kid O’Brien- a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose-”. S. T. Joshi, in his notes to the Penguin edition of “Reanimator”, suggests that “Kid O’Brien”, the ostensibly Irish boxer in this tale, is actually “not in fact Irish, but perhaps Jewish, and is attempting to capitalize on the fame of the great Irish-American boxer of the 1880’s, John L. Sullivan.” (PENGUIN/JOSHI 377)
It may be, however, that Lovecraft was likewise influenced in his characterization of Kid O’Brien, by the famous play Abie’s Irish Rose, a contemporary Broadway comedy by Anne Nichols, full of ethnic humor, which debuted in 1922, a year before the writing of the third part of Lovecraft’s story. (JOSHI, HPL: A Life, 268) The play, which was hugely successful and ran for a record 2,300 performances, deals with two families, one Irish, one Jewish, and the conflicts that arise when the Jewish son of one family marries the Irish daughter of the other, the couple first meeting in Europe during WWI where the Irish daughter served as a nurse, the Jewish son serving as a U.S. soldier. Although much of the humor of the play is apparently not quite politically-correct by today’s often overly-stringent standards, the play ends on a note of reconciliation, acceptance, and tolerance, with twins being born to the happily married Irish-Jewish couple, with one child to be raised in the Jewish faith, the other as a Roman Catholic (much to the pleasure of the young couple’s previously-warring in-laws.)
Given Lovecraft’s well-documented and fanatical/obsessive views on racial intermarriage /miscegenation, especially during this early period, as well as his dislike of both the Irish (called “Micks” by the young Lovecraft) and the Jews (called “Orientals,“ and associated with effeminacy, weakness, and a “slave mentality”), one can imagine how Lovecraft would have reacted to such a message of reconciliation, tolerance and intermarriage in the play -Kid O’Brien, perhaps, with his “a most un-Hibernian hooked nose”, being Lovecraft’s satirical, alternative view of the resolution of Anne Nichols’ comedic narrative. (It is significant, too, that the marriage between the two families in Nichols‘ play, Irish and Jewish, should have taken place in the context of the WWI conflict, which was likewise associated with the first stirrings of labor and civil rights agitation in the U.S., as well as with an increasing immigration of Eastern European Jews to the U.S. -the WWI conflict likewise reappearing throughout the works of Lovecraft, where it seems to function as a symbol or indicator of a cataclysmic upheaval [or “beheading”] of the traditional hierarchical social order.)
Lovecraft’s association of the boxers in “Reanimator” with degeneracy and hybridism, is paralleled by Lovecraft’s depiction of boxers elsewhere in “Arthur Jermyn.” In this case, Arthur Jermyn‘s father, Sir Alfred Jermyn, dies during a “boxing match” with his “favorite” “light-colored gorilla” in Chicago -(the same city, Joshi notes, “where Lovecraft’s father had the nervous breakdown that led to his confinement at Butler Hospital.” [JOSHI/PENGUIN 366] ) Lovecraft describes Alfred Jermyn’s end, too, as being, (like Lovecraft’s own father‘s end), “very revolting” ---Alfred Jermyn and a female gorilla engaging in mutual cannibalism after “rehearsing an exceedingly clever boxing match” ----the thematic interrelationships here of cannibalism and hybridism in relation to boxing, mirroring those in “Herbert West: Reanimator”, in which the reanimated Black boxer, Buck Robinson, is described in a climactic passage as: “a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand” -i.e., the hand of kidnapped Italian child.
Lovecraft’s apparent dislike of boxing seemingly extended to his real-life, as well. In a letter written to Robert H. Barlow, for example, L. Sprague de Camp observes, “Lovecraft criticized a story that Barlow had written about an artist who develops a strong attachment to a prizefighter. Lovecraft found this incredible: ‘There is not the slightest reason in the world why any sane & mature artist should wish to see or talk with a cheap & undistinguished prize fighter.’” (deCAMP [PB] 204) And, given Lovecraft’s almost obsessive love for and identification with ancient Rome, Lovecraft’s antipathy to modern boxing is very curious- the ancient Romans themselves being obsessed with all manner of bloodsports and gladiatorial contests. As Keith Hopkins explains in the second volume of his Sociological Studies in Roman History (1985), the Romans had a “cultural obsession with fighting, bloodshed, ostentation, and competition” (20) -nor was this obsession limited, either to the lower classes, or solely to men. As Hopkins observes, the Emperor “Commodus was not alone” in fighting as a gladiator: “At least seven other emperors (Caligula, Titus, Hadrian, Lucius Verus, Didius Julianus, Caracella, Geta) practiced or fought in gladiatorial contests. And so did senators and knights, occasionally but repeatedly.” As Hopkins concludes, “Gladiatorial fighting was more popular among the Roman upper classes than modern scholars readily admit.” (21) Of course, this was during Rome’s later Imperial, “decadent” period: but even so, Lovecraft himself was not averse to joking about his modern interest in Roman bloodsports, observing in one letter, for instance: “In their day, I shou’d probably have liked gladiatorial sports with real killings. Habet! Habet! Neca, Siphax, neca! Sanguinine bibe!” (SL IV 14)
It may be, therefore, that Lovecraft’s focus on boxing in these stories of hybridism, degeneration, and cannibalism, may have less to do with boxing’s innate roughness and physicality, and more to do the rise of the figure of the Black boxer in the contemporary sports world during this period -a heroic symbol, which Lovecraft cleverly, if not too tastefully or subtly, inverts in these stories.
For example, there was the figure of the Black boxer Jack Johnson, whose career, as Lawrence Levine observes in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness(1977), “was profoundly shaped by the fact that he was not merely a fighter but a symbol” -Johnson‘s victories against his (sometimes very racist) white opponents being seen by some blacks (and some very fearful whites, like Jack London) as victories against “‘Race Hatred‘, ‘Prejudice‘, and ‘Negro Persecution’.”(LEVINE 430) As Levine recounts, “Like a number of black heavyweights before him, Johnson had difficulty getting a championship fight [with the reigning white champs]”, although when he finally did, as in his matches with Tommy Burns in 1908 and Jim Jeffries in 1910, Johnson literally decimated his white competition -this despite the fact that- as some newspapers at the time asserted- while the white “Jeffries had Runnymeade and Agincourt behind him”, his black opponent “had nothing but the jungle.” (LEVINE 430) (Note, in this regard, that the Black boxer, Buck Robinson, had “been knocked out” by his white opponent in “Reanimator.“) This “jungle” language, above, meanwhile, has its direct parallel in Lovecraft’s association, in “Reanimator”, above, of the face of Buck Robinson with “unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.” (Lovecraft will likewise associate the Congo with cannibalism in “The Picture in the House”, in the form of the cannibalistic plate in “Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo” -a plate in which we find, as I argue elsewhere, the first appearance of Lovecraft’s fictional degenerative entity, Cthulhu.)
Other white critics, however, of Black boxer Jack Johnson’s victory over the White Jeffries were less articulate than Lovecraft, with his veiled, symbolic critique in his horror fiction ---both the “afternoon and evening” after Johnson’s victory over his White opponent seeing several “deaths and injuries” being reported “in every state in the South as well as in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.” due to “white anger and frustration”. (LEVINE 431-32) Jack Johnson’s 1910 victory over White opponent Jim Jeffries likewise led to government intervention and censorship by America’s White capitalistic elite --as film pioneer Albert E. Smith describes in his account of his company’s filming of the fight, in his memoir, Two Reels and a Crank(1952), a history of the Vitagraph corporation:
“...The crushing defeat of old Jim was for us a mere prelude to a knockout blow of a different and greater intensity.
The black man had won over the white. For the first time the heavyweight titleholder was a Negro; there were rumblings in the deep South.
Hastily Congress passed a law making it a crime to ship motion pictures of prize fights from one state to another.
On the day the law became effective our Jeffries-Johnson films were in the processing laboratory in New York. They could be exhibited only in the state of New York! General Films’ loss was close to two hundred thousand dollars.” (SMITH 222)
Lovecraft’s caricatural use of boxers and boxing in relation to hybrids, beasts, and cannibalism, etc., is interesting, too, in that the leader of the 1914 coal miners’ strike against John D. Rockefeller in Ludlow, Colorado -during which an Innsmouth-style military action was undertaken by both private and public militias against the miners- was likewise led by “A former boxer named John R. Lawson. [emphasis mine]” (CALEB CRAIN 80, “There Was Blood,” The New Yorker) -the aristocratic Lovecraft’s sympathies, of course, being on the side of the owners and the masters, and not on the side of the “besotted beasts,” i.e. the immigrant workers, who will reappear in various degenerative and hybrid disguises throughout Lovecraft’s fiction.
1) On page 5 of H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, S. T. Joshi quotes from an account of H. P. Lovecraft’s mother by Clara Hess, (first recorded by August Derleth, and later quoted by L. Sprague de Camp), to the effect that Susie Lovecraft, who was described when young as being “very pretty and attractive, with a beautiful and unusually white complexion”, got her pale complexion, “it was said, by eating arsenic, although whether there was any truth to this story, I do not know.” (CANNON, Lovecraft Remembered, 32)
Although S. T. Joshi seems confused by this account (“What to make of the arsenic story- and whether this had anything to do with Susie’s later physical and psychological maladies- I have no idea” [JOSHI 5]), it would seem that this “arsenic” which Susie Lovecraft used to maintain her pallor was probably either “Dr. Rose’s French Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, or “Dr. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, both of which were available from the Sears-Roebuck catalog and Good Housekeeping magazine classifieds from this period, respectively, and which apparently operated by deoxygenating the blood, killing red blood cells, thus guaranteeing “a sure cure“, as one ad says, for “rough, yellow, or muddy skin.”
It is perhaps significant, then that “rough,” “yellow,” an “muddy” skin are likewise aspects of Lovecraft’s caricatural hybrids and degenerate humans throughout his fiction -cf. the “yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments” in “Nyarlathotep” (Lovecraft‘s aesthetic concerns here reinforcing his quasi-Spenglerian, apocalyptic fears); the “squamous” and “scaly” serpentine snake-creature in “The Curse of Yig”; and, most especially, Lovecraft’s description of the Innsmouth-Deep One hybrids in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth“, i.e. those with the “’Innsmouth look‘” (DH 325), particularly the women among them.
There, Lovecraft says, those with the “Innsmouth look” have “queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shriveled or creased up”. ([DH]) This is also true, too, Lovecraft tells us, of the females among them (cf. Lovecraft’s, “One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman…” [DH])
These descriptions -“Rough and scabby”, “shriveled or creased”- are particularly important, especially given the fact that they are almost diametrically the opposite of descriptions of the intended results of such patent-medicines as Dr. Rose’s “French Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, as well as of Clara Hess’s contemporary description of Lovecraft’s own mother. An advertisement for Dr. Rose’s “French Arsenic Complexion Wafers”, for example, states that it:
“possesses the ‘wizard’s touch’ in producing, preserving and enhancing beauty of form and person in male and female by surely developing a transparency and pellucid clearness of complexion, shapely contour of form, brilliant eyes, soft and smooth skin, where by nature the reverse exists.”
And, according to the same ad, although previous internally-taken arsenic solutions proved to be dangerous, “the most astounding transformation in personal appearance [was] brought about by their steady use. Even the coarsest and most repulsive skin and complexion, marred by freckles and other disfigurements, slowly change into an unrivalled purity of texture, free from any spot or blemish whatever, the pinched features become agreeable, the form angular gradually transforms itself into the perfection of womanly grace and beauty. Used by men, the favorable results are the same.”
Needless to say, that Lovecraft’s polemical caricature of his Deep One/Innsmouth hybrids, should take on a precisely opposite form to that possessed/desired/promulgated by his mother, further indicates the extent to which Lovecraft’s socio-political commentary -much like his love for cats (a love which also, as Lovecraft’s essay “Cats & Dogs” makes clear, ultimately has its socio-political aspects)- was based upon/influenced/determined by his mother.
2) In his Lovecraft: A Life, S. T. Joshi, while discussing Winfield Lovecraft’s deteriorating physical condition while in Butler Hospital, observes that by late 1896, Lovecraft’s father Winfield evidently “developed an ulcer on his penis, possibly from masturbation (the initial sign of syphilis is such an ulcer, but Winfield was long past this stage).” (JOSHI 15) (One hopes it is only excessive masturbation to which Joshi is referring, here...)
According to the book Syphilis: Modern Diagnosis and Treatment (1961), however, published by the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, such ulcers are a characteristic of syphilis, even in its late stages. “…demonstrable late lesions of syphilis can be classified into….gummatous reactions that may occur at any time during the late stage- even 30 to 40 years after infection” (42) the guide explains, such gummatous reactions being able to occur “anywhere” on the body, often as “solitary gummas (ulcers) or nodular-ulcerative syphilides.” (44)
3) In one particularly racist section of Lovecraft’s early serial, “Herbert West: Reanimator“, Lovecraft’s physician narrator and Dr. Herbert West are called to a “surreptitious and ill-conducted” boxing match held by a bunch of Polish mill-workers, where one of the boxers lies motionless, seemingly knocked out (Lovecraft describes him as “a silent black form on the floor.“) The boxer on the floor, apparently knocked-out, but actually dead, is a Black man named “Buck Robinson, ‘The Harlem Smoke’.” (Lovecraft describes the body of Robinson lying in repose as being “a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life--but the world holds many ugly things.”) The other boxer, meanwhile, is an Irishman named “Kid O’Brien- a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose-”. S. T. Joshi, in his notes to the Penguin edition of “Reanimator”, suggests that “Kid O’Brien”, the ostensibly Irish boxer in this tale, is actually “not in fact Irish, but perhaps Jewish, and is attempting to capitalize on the fame of the great Irish-American boxer of the 1880’s, John L. Sullivan.” (PENGUIN/JOSHI 377)
It may be, however, that Lovecraft was likewise influenced in his characterization of Kid O’Brien, by the famous play Abie’s Irish Rose, a contemporary Broadway comedy by Anne Nichols, full of ethnic humor, which debuted in 1922, a year before the writing of the third part of Lovecraft’s story. (JOSHI, HPL: A Life, 268) The play, which was hugely successful and ran for a record 2,300 performances, deals with two families, one Irish, one Jewish, and the conflicts that arise when the Jewish son of one family marries the Irish daughter of the other, the couple first meeting in Europe during WWI where the Irish daughter served as a nurse, the Jewish son serving as a U.S. soldier. Although much of the humor of the play is apparently not quite politically-correct by today’s often overly-stringent standards, the play ends on a note of reconciliation, acceptance, and tolerance, with twins being born to the happily married Irish-Jewish couple, with one child to be raised in the Jewish faith, the other as a Roman Catholic (much to the pleasure of the young couple’s previously-warring in-laws.)
Given Lovecraft’s well-documented and fanatical/obsessive views on racial intermarriage /miscegenation, especially during this early period, as well as his dislike of both the Irish (called “Micks” by the young Lovecraft) and the Jews (called “Orientals,“ and associated with effeminacy, weakness, and a “slave mentality”), one can imagine how Lovecraft would have reacted to such a message of reconciliation, tolerance and intermarriage in the play -Kid O’Brien, perhaps, with his “a most un-Hibernian hooked nose”, being Lovecraft’s satirical, alternative view of the resolution of Anne Nichols’ comedic narrative. (It is significant, too, that the marriage between the two families in Nichols‘ play, Irish and Jewish, should have taken place in the context of the WWI conflict, which was likewise associated with the first stirrings of labor and civil rights agitation in the U.S., as well as with an increasing immigration of Eastern European Jews to the U.S. -the WWI conflict likewise reappearing throughout the works of Lovecraft, where it seems to function as a symbol or indicator of a cataclysmic upheaval [or “beheading”] of the traditional hierarchical social order.)
Lovecraft’s association of the boxers in “Reanimator” with degeneracy and hybridism, is paralleled by Lovecraft’s depiction of boxers elsewhere in “Arthur Jermyn.” In this case, Arthur Jermyn‘s father, Sir Alfred Jermyn, dies during a “boxing match” with his “favorite” “light-colored gorilla” in Chicago -(the same city, Joshi notes, “where Lovecraft’s father had the nervous breakdown that led to his confinement at Butler Hospital.” [JOSHI/PENGUIN 366] ) Lovecraft describes Alfred Jermyn’s end, too, as being, (like Lovecraft’s own father‘s end), “very revolting” ---Alfred Jermyn and a female gorilla engaging in mutual cannibalism after “rehearsing an exceedingly clever boxing match” ----the thematic interrelationships here of cannibalism and hybridism in relation to boxing, mirroring those in “Herbert West: Reanimator”, in which the reanimated Black boxer, Buck Robinson, is described in a climactic passage as: “a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand” -i.e., the hand of kidnapped Italian child.
Lovecraft’s apparent dislike of boxing seemingly extended to his real-life, as well. In a letter written to Robert H. Barlow, for example, L. Sprague de Camp observes, “Lovecraft criticized a story that Barlow had written about an artist who develops a strong attachment to a prizefighter. Lovecraft found this incredible: ‘There is not the slightest reason in the world why any sane & mature artist should wish to see or talk with a cheap & undistinguished prize fighter.’” (deCAMP [PB] 204) And, given Lovecraft’s almost obsessive love for and identification with ancient Rome, Lovecraft’s antipathy to modern boxing is very curious- the ancient Romans themselves being obsessed with all manner of bloodsports and gladiatorial contests. As Keith Hopkins explains in the second volume of his Sociological Studies in Roman History (1985), the Romans had a “cultural obsession with fighting, bloodshed, ostentation, and competition” (20) -nor was this obsession limited, either to the lower classes, or solely to men. As Hopkins observes, the Emperor “Commodus was not alone” in fighting as a gladiator: “At least seven other emperors (Caligula, Titus, Hadrian, Lucius Verus, Didius Julianus, Caracella, Geta) practiced or fought in gladiatorial contests. And so did senators and knights, occasionally but repeatedly.” As Hopkins concludes, “Gladiatorial fighting was more popular among the Roman upper classes than modern scholars readily admit.” (21) Of course, this was during Rome’s later Imperial, “decadent” period: but even so, Lovecraft himself was not averse to joking about his modern interest in Roman bloodsports, observing in one letter, for instance: “In their day, I shou’d probably have liked gladiatorial sports with real killings. Habet! Habet! Neca, Siphax, neca! Sanguinine bibe!” (SL IV 14)
It may be, therefore, that Lovecraft’s focus on boxing in these stories of hybridism, degeneration, and cannibalism, may have less to do with boxing’s innate roughness and physicality, and more to do the rise of the figure of the Black boxer in the contemporary sports world during this period -a heroic symbol, which Lovecraft cleverly, if not too tastefully or subtly, inverts in these stories.
For example, there was the figure of the Black boxer Jack Johnson, whose career, as Lawrence Levine observes in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness(1977), “was profoundly shaped by the fact that he was not merely a fighter but a symbol” -Johnson‘s victories against his (sometimes very racist) white opponents being seen by some blacks (and some very fearful whites, like Jack London) as victories against “‘Race Hatred‘, ‘Prejudice‘, and ‘Negro Persecution’.”(LEVINE 430) As Levine recounts, “Like a number of black heavyweights before him, Johnson had difficulty getting a championship fight [with the reigning white champs]”, although when he finally did, as in his matches with Tommy Burns in 1908 and Jim Jeffries in 1910, Johnson literally decimated his white competition -this despite the fact that- as some newspapers at the time asserted- while the white “Jeffries had Runnymeade and Agincourt behind him”, his black opponent “had nothing but the jungle.” (LEVINE 430) (Note, in this regard, that the Black boxer, Buck Robinson, had “been knocked out” by his white opponent in “Reanimator.“) This “jungle” language, above, meanwhile, has its direct parallel in Lovecraft’s association, in “Reanimator”, above, of the face of Buck Robinson with “unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.” (Lovecraft will likewise associate the Congo with cannibalism in “The Picture in the House”, in the form of the cannibalistic plate in “Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo” -a plate in which we find, as I argue elsewhere, the first appearance of Lovecraft’s fictional degenerative entity, Cthulhu.)
Other white critics, however, of Black boxer Jack Johnson’s victory over the White Jeffries were less articulate than Lovecraft, with his veiled, symbolic critique in his horror fiction ---both the “afternoon and evening” after Johnson’s victory over his White opponent seeing several “deaths and injuries” being reported “in every state in the South as well as in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.” due to “white anger and frustration”. (LEVINE 431-32) Jack Johnson’s 1910 victory over White opponent Jim Jeffries likewise led to government intervention and censorship by America’s White capitalistic elite --as film pioneer Albert E. Smith describes in his account of his company’s filming of the fight, in his memoir, Two Reels and a Crank(1952), a history of the Vitagraph corporation:
“...The crushing defeat of old Jim was for us a mere prelude to a knockout blow of a different and greater intensity.
The black man had won over the white. For the first time the heavyweight titleholder was a Negro; there were rumblings in the deep South.
Hastily Congress passed a law making it a crime to ship motion pictures of prize fights from one state to another.
On the day the law became effective our Jeffries-Johnson films were in the processing laboratory in New York. They could be exhibited only in the state of New York! General Films’ loss was close to two hundred thousand dollars.” (SMITH 222)
Lovecraft’s caricatural use of boxers and boxing in relation to hybrids, beasts, and cannibalism, etc., is interesting, too, in that the leader of the 1914 coal miners’ strike against John D. Rockefeller in Ludlow, Colorado -during which an Innsmouth-style military action was undertaken by both private and public militias against the miners- was likewise led by “A former boxer named John R. Lawson. [emphasis mine]” (CALEB CRAIN 80, “There Was Blood,” The New Yorker) -the aristocratic Lovecraft’s sympathies, of course, being on the side of the owners and the masters, and not on the side of the “besotted beasts,” i.e. the immigrant workers, who will reappear in various degenerative and hybrid disguises throughout Lovecraft’s fiction.