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HPL AND JFK
H. P. Lovecraft has been compared with
many men of his own time and earlier, but so far the critics have overlooked
someone (perhaps because he's too obvious) whose life and work when juxtaposed
with HPL's illuminate both of these outstanding twentieth century figures in
fresh ways. I believe much insight is to be gained from an examination of the
finest American supernaturalist since Poe together with the martyred
thirty-fifth President of the United States. What follows only touches on the
highlights of their parallel lives. . . .
Both HPL and JFK were white males, born
and raised in New England within forty miles of one another, the former in
Providence, the latter in Boston. As young men, each set out to become a writer.
Married in their thirties (late in life in those days), both had troubled
relations with their respective wives. And of course both died tragically at
forty-six and one-half years old, taking on mythic proportions after their
deaths --- Lovecraft in the horror-fantasy field, Kennedy in the world-political
arena.
JFK was born in 1917, the year HPL
wrote "Dagon" and "The Tomb" and effectively began his
fiction writing career. HPL died in 1937 while JFK was a freshman at Harvard,
where he would write his thesis "Why England Slept", later to become
his first book. Lovecraft died in his hometown of Providence, while Kennedy
expired on a trip to the South. Had Lovecraft succumbed to his disease less than
a mere two years earlier, he might also have died in the South --- visiting R.
H. Barlow in Florida (the state Kennedy toured only a few days before his
assassination). Interestingly, if one takes the year 1963 and reverses the final
two digits one gets 1936, the year Lovecraft's good friend and fellow Weird
Tales contributor, Robert E. Howard, died violently --- by a gunshot
wound to the head while sitting in a car in Texas!
But there are contrasts, too, let's not
forget. JFK enjoyed tremendous family wealth and never lacked for the finer
things in life. He spent Florida vacations at his father's mansion in Palm
Beach. Lovecraft was impoverished most of his adult life. When he went to
Florida he stayed in a shack by a swamp with the Barlow family. HPL was an only
child, while JFK had lots of siblings. Kennedy was a member of one of the
"Inferior races", the Irish, that the Anglo-Saxon Lovecraft looked
down upon.
JFK was handsome. HPL wasn't
particularly good-looking, indeed had a grotesque appearance (by his own
admission). JFK was oversexed, a chronic womanizer, while HPL was
"blessed", if one accepts his view of it, with "sluggish
eroticism". Kennedy graduated from Harvard; Lovecraft never made it to
Brown (though JFK, Jr., has spurned the former for the latter institution).
Lovecraft died in comparative obscurity, though his dying was reported in The
New York Times (the scrawling notes in pencil to the end story). Kennedy's
death received much more coverage, not only in the Times but in many
other papers here and abroad as well.
There's no evidence that HPL and JFK
ever met. Still, I like to imagine that perhaps young Jack, to pass his free
time at Choate, every now and then picked up an issue of Weird Tales and
read with pleasure the Old Gentleman's stories. And had Lovecraft survived to
old age he would have welcomed the New Frontier with as much enthusiasm as he
gave the New Deal promulgated by that other great Democratic President of this
century, FDR. Who knows? Patron of the arts JFK might have invited the venerable
HPL (who living in the 1960s would very likely have been recognized as a
distinguished American author) to the White House, even had him read an
occasional poem at his second inaugural in 1965 (Robert Frost was no longer
available having passed on during the first term), had he not been killed in
1963. Ah, those tantalizing almost might-have-beens of history!
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