New HPL Henry S. Whitehead Connection?

[mej]

I don't know if anyone else has made this connection, but Henry S. Whitehead wrote a short story in 1910 that seems a clear inspiration for Arthur Jermyn. 

The story is called Williamson, and the premise is simple.  An upper-crust young man finds out that a friend of his is in fact a human/orangutan hybrid, conceived in the rape of his mother by a neighbor's pet orangutan. The story is well-written, with one unforgettable image revealing why Williamson will never be seen without his shoes. 

In this instance, Williamson's paternity is more of a shameful family secret, rather than a cause for self-immolation, which says a great deal about HPL's horror of miscegenation with respect to the age he lived. 

While I haven't read the story in ages, I don't recall the narrator buckling under the weight of horrifying knowledge, but ending the story more in a state of awed disbelief.  Maybe I'm projecting, but I didn't get the feeling the narrator would even drop Williamson as a friend. 

And as I recall, the  name Williamson is a cruel joke played on the title character by his angry stepfather. "Williamson" isn't a family name, but the patronymic version of Orangutan's name, "Billy".

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Wow. That sounds like a freakish story and I ...almost want to read it. To compare to HPL but also to see how someone else would handle that subject material. And here I thought HPL was off in left field with the Jermyn story.

[JulieH]

There's an interesting grey area...

According to the Wikipedia article on Henry S. Whitehead, "Williamson" was published posthumously in 1946 (he died in 1932).  (He wrote/published his first story in 1924.)  And he was a friend of Lovecraft's.

Another source cites the story as being written around 1910, but since it was never published in his lifetime, he would have had to share it directly with HPL for any influence to carry over.

It's almost as likely that there was some event around that time - some speculative article on evolution or something - that inspired both of them.

[T. Kelly Lee]

I think Lovecraft, Whitehead, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan) as well as a whole host of writers were responding to the same thing: the discovery of the Piltdown Man fossil in England in 1912.  At the close of the 19th century the study of evolution was making predictions about the predicted appearence of so-called "missing links" or transitional fossils that represented the bridging of the gap between species.  Neaderthal and Cro Magnon had been discovered over the last century, and scientists were predicting the discovery of a new missing link fossil with a ape-like body and a human-like brain.  Voila - Charles Dawson produced such a fossil at Piltdown in 1912.

Now, the whole thing turned out to be a hoax.  It ran contra to what we later learned of human development.  But it was HOT news at the time...and appealed greatly to the racist tendencies of the time.  Dawson's find, if accurate, would prove that the cradle of human development was proper Anglo-Saxon Britain. Not, as some were already correctly guessing, "primitive" Africa.  So the concept of ape men and missing links was hot off the presses at the time these authors were writing. 

Also, I think the date of 1910 for authorship of Williamson is an estimate - as was pointed out it didn't come out until after Whitehead had died. 

But if we're looking for a source for interest in this type of writing - I think Piltdown Man is your ur-tale as it were.