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

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) has suffered an anomalous fate precisely because his work is so distinctive and unclassifiable. His early collections of poetry are in a fin-de-siècle vein somewhat in the manner of Swinburne or George Sterling (Smith’s early mentor), but very distinctively Smith’s own. Indeed, upon the publication of that first volume, at the age of nineteen, Smith—a native of California who was born in Long Valley and lived most of his life in Auburn—was hailed by local reviewers as a new Keats or Shelley. These accolades were perhaps not far from the truth. To my mind, Smith’s early poems are quite superior to the ‘cosmic’ poetry of George Sterling, although he has clearly learnt much from Sterling’s The Testimony of the Suns (1903) and A Wine of Wizardry (1907). The problem for Smith—or, rather, for his recognition as a significant poet—is that the tradition of weird or fantastic poetry is not very deep or substantial; moreover, modern enthusiasts (and critics) of weird literature seem uncomfortable with poetry, so that the tremendous body of Smith’s verse has been ignored by exactly those readers who might be expected to champion it and keep it alive. And although Smith wrote some free verse, much of his work is written both in formal metres and in a very elevated, metaphor-laden diction in utter contrast to the flat, conversational, and (in my judgment) entirely prosaic work of the ‘poets’ who, following the dreary example of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, are currently fashionable. Is it any wonder that Smith’s poetry, after its initial praise on the West Coast, fell on deaf ears and remains one of the lost jewels of twentieth-century literature?

Smith did not help his cause by churning out reams of fantasy and science fiction tales in the late 1920s and early 1930s, some (perhaps much) of it written under Lovecraft’s encouragement. This body of work hangs on after a fashion as a very acquired taste, but to me it is much inferior to his verse; I shall have more to say of it later. If Smith did any good work in prose, it is in the prosepoems, some of which Lovecraft read and admired in the volume Ebony and Crystal (1918). This work is toweringly impressive, and it could be maintained quite plausibly that Smith is the best prosepoet in English; but this form is too recondite to inspire much of a following or much critical attention.

As for Smith’s art work, I find it quite amateurish and crude, and have no idea why Lovecraft so rhapsodized over it. Smith was a self-taught artist, and it shows; this work is, to be sure, reminiscent of primitive art, and occasionally some startlingly weird effects are produced, but much of it—in pen and ink, crayon, watercolour, and oil—is imaginatively powerful but technically very backward. His small sculptures and figurines are somewhat more interesting. Lovecraft, however, never ceased to admire Smith as another Blake who could both write great work and illustrate it.

For the time being, however, it was the benefits and delights of travel that were in the forefront of Lovecraft’s mind. Leaving for New York on 15 August, he spent at least two months as Sonia’s guest in Brooklyn, making an unheard-of total of nearly three solid months away from 598 Angell Street. This long trip was made possible by the unstinting generosity of Lovecraft’s friends: just as Loveman, Galpin, and Kirk insisted on picking up many of his expenses (especially meals) in Cleveland, so did Long (or, more precisely, his parents) frequently have Lovecraft over for lunch or dinner, and no doubt Sonia made or paid for many meals as well. I do not believe there was any condescension in this: Lovecraft’s friends surely knew of his lean purse, but their hospitality was a product of both their own kindness and genuine fondness for Lovecraft and their desire to have him stay as long as possible. We shall find this becoming a repeated pattern in all Lovecraft’s peregrinations for the rest of his life.

How did the aunts take this extended departure of their only nephew? As early as 9 August, in Cleveland, Lovecraft writes to Lillian, rather touchingly: ‘I am sorry you miss me—though much flattered that you should do so!’ In September Sonia and Lovecraft attempted to persuade one or both of the aunts to come and join them in New York; the staid Lillian declined, but Annie—who in her younger days was very much the socialite—accepted.

On the evening of 16 September Lovecraft and Kleiner explored the exquisite Dutch Reformed Church (1796) on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, quite near to Sonia’s apartment. This magnificent structure contains a sinister old churchyard at its rear, full of crumbling slabs in Dutch. What did Lovecraft do?

From one of the crumbling gravestones—dated 1747—I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write—& ought to suggest some sort of a horror-story. I must some night place it beneath my pillow as I sleep … who can say what thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb?²⁵

True enough, the incident led directly to the writing of ‘The Hound’, probably in October after he returned home. This story involves the escapades of the narrator and his friend St John (based very loosely on Kleiner, whom Lovecraft referred to in correspondence as Randolph St John, as if he were a relative of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke) in that ‘hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing’.

‘The Hound’ has been roundly abused for being wildly overwritten; but it has somehow managed to escape most critics’ attention that the story is clearly a self-parody. This becomes increasingly evident from obvious literary allusions as well as from such grotesque utterances as ‘Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count’. And yet, the story is undeniably successful as an experiment in sheer flamboyance and excess, so long as one keeps in mind that Lovecraft was clearly aiming for such an effect and was doing so at least partially with tongue in cheek.

Lovecraft finally returned home in mid-October. Houtain was already asking him for another serial, this time to run in four parts. Lovecraft dawdled on the task through mid-November, but— perhaps because Houtain finally paid up for ‘Herbert West— Reanimator’ and advanced him half the payment for the new story—finally got down to work and wrote ‘The Lurking Fear’ later in the month. Since this story was written in a far more condensed period of time than ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, it presents a somewhat greater impression of unity than its predecessor, in spite of the need to provide a shocking conclusion at the end of each segment.

No one is likely to regard ‘The Lurking Fear’ as one of Lovecraft’s masterworks, even among his early tales; and yet, it is not as contemptible a tale as many critics have deemed it, and once again it contains many foreshadowings of techniques and devices used to better advantage in later works. The tale moves briskly in its account of the narrator’s search for the unknown entity that had wreaked havoc amongst the squatters of the Catskills near the Martense mansion. In the end we learn that there is not a single entity, but a legion of mutants who are nothing less than the result of centuries of interbreeding among members of the ancient and formerly aristocratic Martense family.

‘The Lurking Fear’ appeared in Home Brew from January to April 1923. Presumably at Lovecraft’s request, Clark Ashton Smith was commissioned to illustrate the serial, supplying two illustrations per instalment. The last issue announces that the magazine will change its name to High Life; after this change of name the magazine folded in 1924. No doubt Lovecraft was glad to be rid of the ‘vile rag’.²⁶

Although it was late in the year and Lovecraft’s sensitivity to cold would not allow him to venture abroad very much, his travels for 1922 were not quite over. In mid-December he visited Boston to participate in a Hub Club meeting with Edith Miniter and others. Afterward he decided to do some solitary antiquarian exploration of some of the towns on the North Shore, specifically Salem. Salem was certainly a delight—it was Lovecraft’s first true experience of the seventeenth century, and he canvassed the Witch House (1642), the House of the Seven Gables, and other celebrated sites— but while there he learnt from natives that there was another town a little farther up the coast called Marblehead that was even quainter. Taking a bus there, Lovecraft was ‘borne into the most marvellous region I had ever dream’d of, and furnished with the most powerful single aesthetick impression I have receiv’d in years’.²⁷

Marblehead was—and, on the whole, today remains—one of the most charming little backwaters in Massachusetts, full of wellrestored colonial houses, crooked and narrow streets, and a spectral hilltop burying-ground from which one can derive a magnificent panoramic view of the city and the nearby harbour. In the old part of town the antiquity is strangely complete, and very little of the modern intrudes there. It was this that so captivated Lovecraft. More than seven years later Lovecraft was still attesting to the poignancy of his initial witnessing of the place:

God! Shall I ever forget my first stupefying glimpse of MARBLEHEAD’S huddled and archaick roofs under the snow in the delirious sunset glory of four p.m., Dec. 17, 1922!!! I did not know until an hour before that I should ever behold such a place as Marblehead, and I did not know until that moment itself the full extent of the wonder I was to behold. I account that instant—about 4:05 to 4:10 p.m., Dec. 17, 1922—the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence. In a flash all the past of New England—all the past of Old England—all the past of Anglo-Saxondom and the Western World—swept over me and identified me with the stupendous totality of all things in such a way as it never did before and never will again. That was the high tide of my life.²⁸

What exactly was it about Marblehead that so struck him? Lovecraft clarifies it himself: with his tremendous imaginative faculty—and with the visible tokens of the present almost totally banished for at least a short interval—Lovecraft felt himself united with his entire cultural and racial past. As he said in another context: ‘The past is real—it is all there is.’²⁹

It would take Lovecraft nearly a year—and several more trips to Marblehead—to internalize his impressions and transmute them into fiction; but when he did so, in ‘The Festival’ (1923), he would be well on his way to revivifying New England in some of the most topographically and historically rooted weird fiction ever written. He had begun haltingly to head in this direction, with ‘The Picture in the House’; but New England was still relatively undiscovered territory to him, and it would take many more excursions for him to imbibe the essence of the area—not merely its antiquities and its history, but its people and their intimate and centuried relations with the soil—and render it fit for fictional use. And it would also take those two years away from New England to make him realize how much he really was moulded of its flesh, so that he could express both the terror and the beauty of this ancient land.

CHAPTER TEN

For My Own Amusement (1923–24)

At just the time when Lovecraft’s activity in the UAPA seemed on the wane, his involvement with the NAPA took on a sudden and wholly unforeseen turn: it was nothing less than his appointment, on 30 November, as interim President to replace William J. Dowdell, who was forced to resign. It is not clear what led to Dowdell’s decision: Lovecraft later commented that Dowdell ‘ran off with a chorus girl in 1922’.¹

Lovecraft made the first of five official reports (four ‘President’s Messages’ and a ‘President’s Annual Report’) for the issue of the National Amateur dated November 1922–January 1923. The report, written on 11 January 1923, is an eloquent plea for the resumption of activity in light of the confusion involving the official board and the general apathy apparently overtaking all amateurdom; Lovecraft himself promised to issue another number or two of his Conservative, and came through on the promise. Most incredible of all, given his chronic poverty, Lovecraft himself contributed $10 (the equivalent of a week’s rent in his New York period) to the official organ fund. Approaching the completion of his ninth year of amateur activity, Lovecraft found himself still drawn to the cause.

As early as February, Edward H. Cole was urging Lovecraft to run for President for the 1923–24 term. Lovecraft blanched at the idea, for he profoundly disliked the tedious administrative burdens that went with the office; in any event, his re-election as Official Editor of the UAPA in July 1923 compelled him to turn his attention back to his original amateur organization. It would be a decade before he would resume ties with the NAPA.

One notable event was Lovecraft’s first appearance in hardcover, in a volume entitled The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag. Hoag was the ancient poet (born 1831) in Troy, New York, for whom Lovecraft had been writing annual birthday odes since 1918. Now he wished to see a bound book of his verse, and enlisted Lovecraft to gather, revise, and publish his work. Lovecraft in turn called upon Loveman and Morton to aid him. Hoag was clearly footing the bill for the entire enterprise—a point worth emphasizing, since it has long been believed that Lovecraft himself helped to subsidize the book, a highly unlikely prospect given the leanness of his purse. The finished book emerged late in the spring; incredibly, Lovecraft waived ‘all monetary remuneration for my share of the editing’² in exchange for twenty copies of the book!

Meanwhile there was much more travel in the offing. Lovecraft visited the Salem–Marblehead area at least three times early in 1923—in early February, in March, and again in April. On the third trip he went to Danvers—the town, once called Salem-Village, founded in 1636 by some members of the original settlement of 1626, and where the 1692 witch trials had taken place—and thoroughly explored the Samuel Fowler house (1809), occupied by two hideous old crones who were descendants of the original owner. He then proceeded out into the countryside, seeking the farmhouse built by Townsend Bishop in 1636—the place where Rebekah Nurse lived in 1692 when she was accused of witchcraft by the slave woman Tituba and, at the age of seventy, hanged on Gallows Hill. He found both the farmhouse and Rebekah Nurse’s grave some distance away. Unlike the Fowler place, the farmhouse was of a cramped seventeenth-century design with low rooms and massive wooden beams.

The next day (14 April) Lovecraft set out for Merrimac, where his young amateur friend Edgar J. Davis (age fifteen) lived. The two of them visited graveyards in nearby Amesbury (where the poet Whittier had lived), and the next day they headed for Newburyport. This coastal town has now been made into a yuppie resort, but in 1923 it was a quiet little backwater that preserved its antiquities in almost as complete a state as Marblehead. So little life did the town have that Lovecraft and Davis rode the trolley car all the way through it without realizing that they had passed through the centre of town, which was their destination. Returning on foot to the central square, Lovecraft and Davis revelled in the atmosphere of the past of a once-thriving colonial seaport.

Sonia paid Lovecraft a call in Providence on 15–17 July. This is the first we hear of the two meeting since Lovecraft’s visit to New York the preceding September, but Sonia makes clear that in the two years preceding their marriage in March 1924 they engaged in ‘almost daily correspondence—H. P. writing me about everything he did and everywhere he went, introducing names of friends and his evaluation of them, sometimes filling 30, 40 and even 50 pages of finely written script’.³ What a shame that Sonia felt the need to burn all those letters! The visit in July was a joint business-pleasure trip on her part: on Monday the 16th Lovecraft showed Sonia the customary antiquities of Providence; then, on Tuesday the 17th, the two of them went to the coastal town of Narragansett Pier, in the southern part of the state overlooking the ocean, passing through Apponaug, East Greenwich, and Kingston along the way. On the return trip Sonia continued on to Boston while Lovecraft went home.

On 10 August occurred no less momentous an event than Lovecraft’s first personal visit with his longtime friend Maurice W. Moe, who was making a tour of the East. Lovecraft met him at the Providence YMCA that morning, showing him all the local sites before boarding a bus to Boston, where they would meet Cole, Albert A. Sandusky, and Moe’s wife and two children, Robert (age eleven) and Donald (age nine). The next day Lovecraft performed his customary tour-guide act, as Cole relates in a memoir:

I recall vividly the Saturday afternoon … when Lovecraft, Maurice Moe, Albert Sandusky, and I went to Old Marblehead to visit the numerous Colonial houses and other places of interest with which Howard was thoroughly familiar. He was so insistent that our friend from the West should not miss a single relic or point of view over lovely town and harbor that he walked us relentlessly for miles, impelled solely by his inexhaustible enthusiasm until our bodies rebelled and, against his protests, we dragged ourselves to the train. Lovecraft was still buoyant.⁴ So much for the sickly recluse of a decade before!

Although he was scarcely aware of it at the time, the summer of 1923 brought a radical change in Lovecraft’s literary career— perhaps as radical as his discovery of amateur journalism nine years previously. Whether the change was all for the good is a matter we shall have to consider at a later stage. In March of 1923 the first issue of Weird Tales appeared, and a month or two later Lovecraft was urged—initially by Everett McNeil (an author of boys’ books whom Lovecraft had met in New York) and Morton, but probably by Clark Ashton Smith and others as well—to submit to it.

Weird Tales was the brainchild of Jacob Clark Henneberger, who with J. M. Lansinger founded Rural Publications, Inc., in 1922 to publish a variety of popular magazines. Henneberger had already achieved great success with the magazine College Humor, and he now envisioned founding a line of varied periodicals in the detective and horror field. Henneberger had received assurances from such established writers as Hamlin Garland and Ben Hecht that they would be willing to contribute stories of the ‘unconventional’ which they could not land in the ‘slicks’ or other magazines, but they failed to come through when the magazine was actually launched.⁵ As later events will show, Henneberger founded Weird Tales not out of some altruistic goal of fostering artistic weird literature but largely in order to make money by featuring big-name writers; and when this did not happen, he quickly freed himself of his creation. Weird Tales never made any significant amount of money, and on several occasions—especially during the Depression—it came close to folding; but somehow it managed to hang on for thirty-one years and 279 issues, an unprecedented run for a pulp magazine.

Henneberger selected Edwin Baird (1886–1957) as editor, with assistance from Farnsworth Wright and Otis Adelbert Kline. Baird did not appear to have any great sensitivity to the weird. The first several issues—which varied in dimensions from 6 by 9 inches to an ungainly ’bedsheet’ size, all with very crude and amateurish covers—are a decidedly mixed bag: the March 1923 issue featured a striking novelette, ‘Ooze’ by Anthony M. Rud, which Lovecraft enjoyed, but otherwise contained a rag-tag farrago of amateurish and outlandish stories largely written by beginning writers. Few established writers, even from the pulp field, appeared in the early issues: Harold Ward, Vincent Starrett, Don Mark Lemon, and Francis Stevens are the only recognizable names. Throughout its run Weird Tales was much more congenial to new writers than other pulps, a policy that had both advantages and drawbacks.

Lovecraft no doubt read those early issues of Weird Tales, finding some of the tales quite powerful. Indeed, even if Morton and others had not advised him to submit to Weird Tales, he might eventually have done so on his own; for he was clearly making efforts—naive and clumsy as they may have been—to break into professional print on a higher grade than Home Brew. As early as 1919, at the urging of one of his aunts, he submitted ‘The Tomb’ to the Black Cat;⁶ at some later date he submitted ‘Dagon’ to Black Mask. Both stories were rejected. This was perhaps not the wisest choice in either instance. Although Lovecraft had read some of the early issues of Black Cat around the turn of the century, the magazine was not primarily devoted to weird fiction and published, proportionately, much less of it than the Munseys. As for Black Mask, it was founded in 1920 as an all-purpose fiction magazine; but by the mid–1920s the earliest stories by Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett were appearing in it, and under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw, who took over in November 1926, Black Mask would become the nurturing ground for the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. The occasional ghost story did appear, but such an excursion into archaic, Poe-esque horror as ‘The Tomb’ was not likely to find a home there.

What is more, when Lovecraft did submit to Weird Tales, he sent five tales simultaneously—’Dagon’, ‘Arthur Jermyn’, ‘The Cats of Ulthar’, ‘The Hound’, and ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’— along with a cover letter that took pains to point out the rejection of ‘Dagon’ by Black Cat. Baird replied to Lovecraft in a personal letter, saying that he would consider accepting these tales if they were typed double-spaced. (Lovecraft, used to the relatively informal policies of the amateur journals and probably wanting to save paper, had typed them single spaced.) For one whose loathing of the typewriter would in later years reach phobic proportions, the prospect of having to undergo such a labour for what he believed to be a not entirely certain assurance of acceptance was formidable; but he finally typed ‘Dagon’, which was accepted, as were the other four.

It is one of the many anomalies of Lovecraft’s involvement with Weird Tales that his first published work in the magazine was not a story but a letter. With a certain impishness, Baird printed the bulk of Lovecraft’s cover letter accompanying his five tales; this letter appeared in the September 1923 issue, by which time his tales had been accepted. Here are some extracts:

My Dear Sir: Having a habit of writing weird, macabre, and fantastic stories for my own amusement, I have lately been simultaneously hounded by nearly a dozen well-meaning friends into deciding to submit a few of these Gothic horrors to your newly-founded periodical …

I have no idea that these things will be found suitable, for

I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself …

I like Weird Tales very much, though I have seen only the April number. Most of the stories, of course, are more or less commercial—or should I say conventional?—in technique, but they all have an enjoyable angle …

No wonder Baird added at the end of this letter: ‘Despite the foregoing, or because of it, we are using some of Mr. Lovecraft’s unusual stories.’ One would like to think that the letter was in some senses a self-parody, but it does not appear to be. Highbrow and condescending as it may appear, it quite accurately reflects the aesthetic theory Lovecraft had by this time evolved.

Lovecraft quickly became a fixture with Weird Tales, appearing in five of the six issues from October 1923 to April 1924 (there was no issue for December 1923). He might even be thought to have appeared in all six, if the publication of Sonia Greene’s ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ (retitled, to Lovecraft’s chagrin, ‘The Invisible Monster’) in the November 1923 issue can count as one of his appearances.

Lovecraft no doubt found the money he received from the magazine a small but welcome relief from poverty. Weird Tales paid upon publication, not (as the better grade of pulps and all the ‘slicks’ did) on acceptance; and, judging from the evidence of his early payments, he appears initially to have received much better than the standard 1 cent a word. For ‘Dagon’, a story of scarcely 2500 words, he received $55, a rate of more than 2 cents a word. Later this rate would decline, but Lovecraft would still receive Weird Tales’ ‘highest’ rate of 1¹⁄₂ cents a word.

Another event of the summer of 1923 that significantly affected Lovecraft’s weird fiction was the discovery of the great Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863–1947; pronounced MACK-en). As with his discoveries of Ambrose Bierce and Lord Dunsany in 1919, it is a wonder that he had not read him earlier, for Machen’s greatest celebrity had been in the 1890s and by 1923 he was already regarded as having done his best work long before. Machen had attained not merely fame but actual notoriety with such works as The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894), The Three Impostors (1895), The House of Souls (1906), and The Hill of Dreams (1907), which many believed to be the outpourings of a diseased mind. In fact, Machen himself subscribed to the same Victorian sexual pruderies he so seemingly flouted; and the covert intimations of aberrant sex in such tales as ‘The Great God Pan’ and ‘The White People’ were as horrifying to him as they were to his audience. Temperamentally Machen was not at all similar to Lovecraft: an unwavering Anglo-Catholic, violently hostile to science and materialism, seeking always for some mystical sense of ‘ecstasy’ that might liberate him from what he fancied to be the prosiness of contemporary life, Machen would have found Lovecraft’s mechanistic materialism and atheism repugnant in the extreme. They may have shared a general hostility to the modern age, but they were coming at it from very different directions. And yet, because Machen so sincerely feels the sense of sin and transgression in those things that ‘religion brands with outlawry and horror’,⁷ he manages to convey his sentiments to the reader in such a way that his work remains powerful and effective. Lovecraft himself came to regard ‘The White People’ as second to Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ as the greatest weird tale of all time; he may well be right.

Although Lovecraft dutifully read as much of Machen as he could, it was the horror tales that remained closest to his heart. In particular, a whole series of works—including ‘The White People’, ‘The Shining Pyramid’, ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ (a segment of the episodic novel The Three Impostors), and others—make use of the old legends of the ‘Little People’, a supposedly pre-Aryan race of dwarfish devils who still live covertly in the secret places of the earth and occasionally steal human infants, leaving one of their own behind. Lovecraft would transform this topos into something even more sinister in some of his later tales.

Lovecraft seems to have owed the discovery of Machen to Frank Long. I cannot detect any Machen influence on Lovecraft’s tales prior to 1926, but the Welshman’s work clearly filtered into Lovecraft’s imagination and eventually emerged in a quite transformed but still perceptible manner in some of his best-known stories.

Lovecraft had, indeed, not written any stories since ‘The Lurking Fear’ in November 1922; but then, in a matter of two or three months, he wrote three in quick succession—’The Rats in the Walls’, ‘The Unnamable’, and ‘The Festival’. All three are of considerable interest, and the first is without question the greatest tale of Lovecraft’s early period.

The plot of ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (probably written in late August or early September) is deceptively simple. A Virginian of British ancestry, a man named Delapore, decides to spend his latter years in refurbishing and occupying his ancestral estate in southern England, Exham Priory, whose foundations go disturbingly far back in time, to a period even before the Roman conquest of the first century A.D. Delapore hears of some strange legends attached to the house—including the tale of a huge army of rats that devoured everything in its path in the Middle Ages—but dispenses them as pure myth. A variety of weird manifestations (many of them sounding like rats scurrying in the walls of the castle) then begin to appear following Delapore’s occupation of the place on 16 July 1923, culminating in an exploration (with a number of learned scientists) of the cellar of the castle. There the explorers come upon an immense expanse of bones, and it becomes evident that Delapore’s own ancestors were the leaders of a cannibalistic witch-cult that had its origins in primitive times. Delapore goes mad, descends the evolutionary scale (heralded by the increasing archaism of the oaths he utters at the end), and is found bent over the half-eaten form of his friend, Capt. Norrys.

It is difficult to convey the richness and cumulative horror of this story in any analysis; next to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it is Lovecraft’s greatest triumph in the old-time ‘Gothic’ vein—although even here the stock Gothic features (the ancient castle with a secret chamber; the ghostly legendry that proves to be founded on fact) have been modernized and refined so as to be wholly convincing. And the fundamental premise of the story—that a human being can suddenly reverse the course of evolution—could only have been written by one who had accepted the Darwinian theory.

Certain surface features of the tale—and perhaps one essential kernel of the plot—were taken from other works. As Steven J. Mariconda has pointed out,⁸ Lovecraft’s account of the ‘epic of the rats’ appears to be derived from a chapter in S. Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1869). Some portions of Delapore’s concluding cries were lifted directly from Fiona Macleod’s ‘The SinEater’, which Lovecraft read in Joseph Lewis French’s anthology, Best Psychic Stories (1920).

More significantly, the very idea of atavism or reversion to type seems to have been derived from a story by Irvin S. Cobb, ‘The Unbroken Chain’, published in Cosmopolitan for September 1923 (the issue, as is still customary with many magazines, was probably on the stands at least a month before its cover date). Lovecraft admits that Long gave him the magazine in 1923.⁹ This tale deals with a Frenchman who has a small proportion of negroid blood from a slave brought to America in 1819. When he is run down by a train, he cries out in an African language—’Niama tumba!’—the words that his black ancestor shouted when he was attacked by a rhinoceros in Africa.

‘The Rats in the Walls’ was first submitted, not to Weird Tales, but to the Argosy All-Story Weekly, a Munsey magazine whose managing editor, Robert H. Davis, rejected it as being (in Lovecraft’s words) ‘too horrible for the tender sensibilities of a delicately nurtured publick’.¹⁰ Lovecraft then sent the story to Baird, who accepted it and ran it in the March 1924 issue.

‘The Unnamable’ and ‘The Festival’, Lovecraft’s two other original stories of 1923, return to New England in their different ways. The former is slight, but could be thought of as a sort of veiled justification for the type of weird tale Lovecraft was evolving; much of it reads like a treatise on aesthetics. At the beginning there is a lengthy discussion on the weird between Randolph Carter and Joel Manton (clearly based upon Maurice W. Moe). Manton does not believe that there can be anything in life or literature that could be ‘unnamable’; but he finds out differently when such an entity attacks them as they are sitting in a New England churchyard.

Aside from its interesting aesthetic reflections, ‘The Unnamable’ fosters that sense of the lurking horror of New England history and topography which we have already seen in ‘The Picture in the House’, and which would become a dominant trope in Lovecraft’s later work. The tale is set in Arkham, but the actual inspiration for the setting—a ‘dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb’ and, nearby, a ‘giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab’—is the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem, where just such a tree-engulfed slab can be found.

‘The Festival’ (written probably in October) can be considered a virtual three-thousand-word prose-poem for the sustained modulation of its prose. The first-person narrator comes back to Kingsport and is led into an underground chamber beneath a church and encounters spectacular winged horrors that fly off into the unknown, bearing the inhabitants of the town on their backs. This is the first story in which the mythical town of Kingsport (first cited in ‘The Terrible Old Man’) is definitively identified with Marblehead. Much of the topography cited in the story corresponds exactly with that of Marblehead, although some of the actual sites mentioned have only recently been identified by Donovan K. Loucks. For example, the church that is the focal point of the tale is probably not St Michael’s Episcopal Church, as has long been thought. If Lovecraft had a specific church in in mind, he may have been referring either to the First Meeting House (built in 1648 on Old Burial Hill) or the Second Congregational Church (built in 1715 at 28 Mugford Street), or a fusion of the two.

There is, in addition to the topography of Marblehead, a literary (or scientific) influence to the story. In 1933 Lovecraft stated in reference to the tale: ‘In intimating an alien race I had in mind the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers who preserved primitive rites like those of the witch-cult—I had just been reading Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.’¹¹ This landmark work of anthropology by Margaret A. Murray, published in 1921, made the claim (now regarded by modern scholars as highly unlikely) that the witch-cult in both Europe and America had its origin in a pre-Aryan race that was driven underground but continued to lurk in the hidden corners of the earth. Lovecraft— having just read a very similar fictional exposition of the idea in Machen’s stories of the ‘Little People’—was much taken with this conception, and would allude to it in many subsequent references to the Salem witches in his tales; as late as 1930 he was presenting the theory seriously.

Meanwhile Lovecraft had actually met a writer of weird fiction in his own hometown—Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr (1896–1971), who with his wife Muriel became fairly close to Lovecraft in the year or two preceding his marriage. The Eddys were at that time residents of East Providence, across the Seekonk River, and, after an initial round of correspondence and a few telephone calls, Lovecraft walked three miles to visit them at their home in August 1923.

But how did Lovecraft come into contact with the Eddys at all? There is some doubt on the matter. Muriel Eddy wrote two significant memoirs of Lovecraft, one published in 1945, the other in 1961. The first memoir seems on the whole quite reliable; the second, written in a gushing and histrionic manner, makes many statements not found in the first, including the claim that Lovecraft’s mother and Eddy’s mother (Mrs Grace Eddy) had become friends by meeting at a women’s suffrage meeting and that at this time (probably in in 1918, although Muriel Eddy supplies no date) the two of them discovered their their sons were both enthusiasts of the weird.¹² This is a remarkable assertion, and I am frankly sceptical of it. There is no other indication that Susie Lovecraft was interested in women’s suffrage. Lovecraft does not, to my knowledge, mention the Eddys in correspondence prior to October 1923, at which time he refers to Eddy as ‘the new Providence amateur’.¹³ He certainly gives no indication that he had once been in touch with the Eddys and was only now re-establishing contact. My feeling, then, is that the whole story about Susie Lovecraft and Grace Eddy—and about the Eddys’ early association with Lovecraft—is a fabrication, made by Muriel so as to augment the sense of her and her husband’s importance in Lovecraft’s life.

In any event, C. M. Eddy was already a professionally published author by this time. He was working on stories to submit to Weird Tales, whose editor, Edwin Baird, he knew. Two of these—’Ashes’ and ‘The Ghost-Eater’—had already been rejected, but Lovecraft ‘corrected’¹⁴ them and Baird thereupon accepted them. ‘Ashes’ (Weird Tales, March 1924) is perhaps the single worst tale among Lovecraft’s ‘revisions’, and no one would suspect his hand in it if he had not admitted it himself. This maudlin and conventional story about a mad scientist who has discovered a chemical compound that will reduce any substance to fine white ashes contains a nauseously fatuous romance element that must have made Lovecraft queasy. ‘The Ghost-Eater’ (Weird Tales, April 1924) is a little better, although it is nothing but a stereotypical werewolf story. Here again I cannot detect much actual Lovecraft prose, unless he was deliberately altering his style to make it harmonize with Eddy’s more choppy, less prose-poetic idiom.

In late October Eddy was working on another story, entitled ‘The Loved Dead’. Lovecraft clearly had a greater hand in this story than in the two previous ones; indeed, the published version (Weird Tales, May–June–July 1924) reads as if Lovecraft wrote the entire thing. The tale is, of course, about a necrophile who works for one undertaking establishment after another so as to secure the intimacy with corpses he desires. ‘The Loved Dead’ seems to be a parody, both of itself and of this sort of lurid, sensationalist fiction. But, as we shall see, when it was published not everyone found it quite so amusing. Lovecraft revised one final story for Eddy, ‘Deaf, Dumb, and Blind’ (Weird Tales, April 1925), around February 1924, just prior to his move to New York.

In 1929 Lovecraft made the following evaluation of the progression of his aesthetic thought:

I can look back … at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.¹⁵

Simply put, these two phases (which would then be followed by a third and final phase combining the best features of both the previous two, and which might best be called ‘cosmic regionalism’) are Classicism and Decadence. The classical phase I have treated already: Lovecraft’s early absorption of the Augustan poets and essayists and the Graeco-Roman classics (either in the original or in translations deriving from the Augustan age), and his curious sense of psychic union with the eighteenth century, fostered a classicism that simultaneously condemned his poetry to antiquarian irrelevance and made him violently opposed to the radical aesthetic movements emerging in the early part of the century.

How, then, does an individual who professed himself, for the first thirty years of his life, more comfortable in the periwig and smallclothes of the eighteenth century suddenly adopt an attitude of ‘revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity’? How does someone who, in 1919, maintained that ‘The literary genius of Greece and Rome … may fairly be said to have completed the art and science of expression’ come to write, in 1923: ‘What is art but a matter of impressions, of pictures, emotions, and symmetrical sensations? It must have poignancy and beauty, but nothing else counts. It may or may not have coherence’?¹⁶ The shift may seem radical, but there are many points of contact between the older and the newer view; and in many ways the change of perspective occurring in Lovecraft’s mind was a mirror of the change occurring in Anglo-American aesthetics in general. Much as he might have found the idea surprising or even repellent, Lovecraft was becoming contemporary; he was starting to live, intellectually, in the twentieth, not the eighteenth, century.

I do not wish to underestimate the extent and significance of the shift in Lovecraft’s aesthetic; clearly he himself thought that something revolutionary was occurring. No longer was he concerned with antiquated notions of ‘metrical regularity’ or the ‘allowable rhyme’; broader, deeper questions were now involved. Specifically, Lovecraft was attempting to come to terms with certain findings in the sciences that might have grave effects upon artistic creation, in particular the work of Sigmund Freud. Consider a revealing statement in ‘The Defence Reopens!’ (January 1921):

Certainly, they [Freud’s doctrines] reduce man’s boasted nobility to a hollowness woeful to contemplate … we are forced to admit that the Freudians have in most respects excelled their predecessors, and that while many of Freud’s most important details may be erroneous … he has nevertheless opened up a new path in psychology, devising a system whose doctrines more nearly approximate the real workings of the mind than any heretofore entertained.

Although Lovecraft rejects Freud’s central notion of the libido as the principal motivating factor in human psychology—something he would have found difficult to comprehend, since his own libido seems to have been so sluggish—he nevertheless accepts the view that many of our beliefs and mental processes are the result not of disinterested rationalism, but of aggression (Nietzsche’s will to power), ego-assertion, and in some cases pure irrationalism. Under the placid-seeming façade of civilized bourgeois life teem powerful emotional forces that social restraints are ill-equipped to control. The effect on art will necessarily be telling. Lovecraft expounds his view in ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work’ (1922):

Modern science has, in the end, proved an enemy to art and pleasure; for by revealing to us the whole sordid and prosaic basis of our thoughts, motives, and acts, it has stripped the world of glamour, wonder, and all those illusions of heroism, nobility, and sacrifice which used to sound so impressive when romantically treated. Indeed, it is not too much to say that psychological discovery, and chemical, physical, and physiological research, have largely destroyed the element of emotion among informed and sophisticated people by resolving it into its component parts—intellectual idea and animal impulse. The so-called ‘soul’ with all its hectic and mawkish attributes of sentimentality, veneration, earnestness, devotion, and the like, has perished on analysis This is an intensely interesting utterance. In spite of Lovecraft’s claim of intellectual independence from his time, it is clear that he had absorbed enough of the Victorian belief in ‘heroism, nobility, and sacrifice’ to be shaken by the revelation, via Freud and Nietzsche, of their ‘sordid and prosaic basis’. For the moment he adopted a sort of aesthetic Decadence that might allow these illusions to be preserved after a fashion precisely by recognizing their artificiality. We cannot regain that blissful ignorance of our triviality in the cosmic scheme of things and of the hollowness of our lofty ideals which allowed prior ages to create the illusion of significance in human affairs. The solution—for now—is to ‘worship afresh the music and colour of divine language, and take an Epicurean delight in those combinations of ideas and fancies which we know to be artificial’. If there is any literary source for any of these views, it is Oscar Wilde. It is not likely that Wilde actually generated Lovecraft’s views; rather, Lovecraft found Wilde a highly articulate spokesman for the sort of views he was nebulously coming to adopt.

There are two general caveats that should be borne in mind when studying Lovecraft’s Decadent stance: first, he clearly wished to believe that his position did not commit him entirely, or at all, to the avant-garde; and second, he had no wish to follow the Decadents in the repudiation of Victorianism on the level of personal conduct. As to the first point, let me quote in full that statement from ‘In the Editor’s Study’ of July 1923 which I cited earlier:

What is art but a matter of impressions, of pictures, emotions, and symmetrical sensations? It must have poignancy and beauty, but nothing else counts. It may or may not have coherence. If concerned with large externals or simple fancies, or produced in a simple age, it is likely to be of a clear and continuous pattern; but if concerned with individual reactions to life in a complex and analytical age, as most modern art is, it tends to break up into detached transcripts of hidden sensation and offer a loosely joined fabric which demands from the spectator a discriminating duplication of the artist’s mood.

This statement—particularly the remark about ‘life in a complex and analytical age’—is remarkably similar to T. S. Eliot’s celebrated definition and justification of modernism, as expressed in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), especially the point that ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult’.¹⁷ But Lovecraft pulls back at the last; perhaps aware that his amateur audience would be dumbfounded by the perception of the antiquated fossil Lovecraft becoming avant-garde, he hastily adds that he is ‘no convert to Dadaism’, concluding:

Nothing, on the contrary, seems more certain … than that the bulk of radical prose and verse represents merely the extravagant extreme of a tendency whose truly artistic application is vastly more limited. Traces of this tendency, whereby pictorial methods are used, and words and images employed without conventional connexions to excite sensations, may be found throughout literature; especially in Keats, William Blake, and the French symbolists. This broader conception of art does not outrage any eternal tradition, but honours all creations of the past or present which can shew genuine ecstatic fire and a glamour not tawdrily founded on utterly commonplace emotions.

Lovecraft is slowly carving out a place for himself between Victorian conventionality and modernist radicalism: in this way he can continue to fulminate against such things as free verse, streamof-consciousness, or the chaoticism of Eliot and Joyce as illegitimate extensions of his Decadent principles.

The second point in this entire issue—Decadence as a mode of conduct—is clarified in Lovecraft’s discussion with Frank Long in 1923–24 about the merits of Puritanism. This discussion occasionally becomes a little frivolous, and Lovecraft seems at times to be uttering hyperbole in a deliberate attempt to tease Long. After condemning ‘Bohemians’ for their ‘wild lives’,¹⁸ he goes on to say:

An intellectual Puritan is a fool—almost as much of a fool as is an anti-Puritan—but a Puritan in the conduct of life is the only kind of man one may honestly respect. I have no respect or reverence whatever for any person who does not live abstemiously and purely—I can like him and tolerate him, and admit him to be a social equal as I do Clark Ashton Smith and Mortonius and Kleiner and others like that, but in my heart I feel him to be my inferior—nearer the abysmal amoeba and the Neanderthal man—and at times cannot veil a sort of condescension and sardonic contempt for him, no matter how much my aesthetick and intellectual superior he may be.¹⁹

Of course, the various code words in this utterance (‘abstemiously’, ‘purely’) are a thin veil for restraint in sexual behaviour; the mentions of Smith and Kleiner-—both of whom were openly fond of female companionship and boasted of their conquests of various women, single or married—are also telling. Lovecraft had, therefore, sloughed off (or, in reality, never really adopted) the aesthetics of Victorianism but could not—or did not wish to—relinquish the sexual Puritanism he had no doubt gained at his mother’s knee.

And yet, Lovecraft was by no means in the modernist camp. Several intensely interesting documents of this period bear this out with much emphasis. It is certainly odd that the two great landmarks of modernism—Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land— appeared in the same year, 1922; but their fortuitously joint appearance compelled Lovecraft to address them in some fashion or other. He read The Waste Land in its first American appearance, in the Dial for November 1922 (it had appeared in England in Eliot’s magazine, the Criterion, for October). Shortly thereafter, he wrote one or both of his responses to the poem. The first is an editorial in the March 1923 Conservative headed ‘Rudis Indigestaque Moles’ (taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘A rough and unfinished mass’). Lovecraft asserts: ‘The old heroics, pieties, and sentimentalities are dead amongst the sophisticated; and even some of our appreciations of natural beauty are threatened.’ The Waste Land is one result of this state of confusion and turbulence:

We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold th[e] public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as ‘a poem of profound significance,’ to quote its sponsors.

This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence of Lovecraft’s supposed insensitivy to modernism and of his innate aesthetic conservatism; but it is difficult to see what other reaction he could have made at this stage of his development. It should also be pointed out that many other reviewers—not merely stodgy Victorians like J. C. Squire but level-headed modernists like Conrad Aiken—also found the poem incomprehensible or at least ambiguous and incoherent, although some did not think it a bad poem on that account. As for Lovecraft, he may by this time have given up his literal adherence to eighteenth-century forms—or, at least, his requirement that all other poets do so—but the outward form of The Waste Land with its free verse and its seemingly random progression so offended him that he saw in the poem an actual instance of the aesthetic fragmentation of modern civilization that other reviewers felt it to be expressing.

I think too much has been made of the supposed similarities in philosophy and temperament of Eliot and Lovecraft: to be sure, they may both have been classicists (of a sort) and believed in continuity of culture; but Lovecraft rightly scorned Eliot’s later royalism as a mere ostrich-act and heaped even more abuse on Eliot’s belief in religion as a necessary foundation or bulwark of civilization.

But Lovecraft’s other response to The Waste Land—the exquisite parody ‘Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance’—merits greater attention; for this is his best satirical poem. One wishes, therefore, that there was even the least bit of evidence as to when this poem was written and when it appeared in ‘the newspaper’, as Lovecraft casually notes a decade later.²⁰ This is the only occasion, so far as is known, that Lovecraft even mentions his poem; searches have been made in several of the Providence papers of the period with no results.

What Lovecraft very simply seeks to do in this work is to carry to a reductio ad absurdum his own claim in the Conservative editorial that The Waste Land is a ‘practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general’. In many parts of this quite lengthy poem (135 lines) he has quite faithfully parodied the insularity of modern poetry—its ability to be understood only by a small coterie of readers who are aware of intimate facts about the poet. The ending can only be quoted:

Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Good night, good night, the stars are bright I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight

Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.

Nobody home

In the shantih.

That delightful final pun ‘confirms the jerrybuilt quality of modern life and art’, as Barton L. St Armand and John H. Stanley remark; and as for the poem as a whole, its ‘scraps of twentieth-century conversations, news bulletins, public announcements, newspaper headlines, and advertising jingles reflect the mundane tawdriness of the present as contrasted to the epic grandeur of the past’.²¹

Meanwhile Lovecraft had simultaneously been hammering out a theory of the weird tale that would, with some modifications, serve him his entire life. This theory is, like his aesthetics in general, an intimate outgrowth of his entire philosophical thought, especially his metaphysics and ethics. The central document here is the In Defence of Dagon essays—a series of three articles he wrote to an Anglo-American correspondence group, the Transatlantic Circulator, in defence of his philosophical and aesthetic views. He begins by dividing fiction, somewhat unorthodoxly, into three divisions— romantic, realistic, and imaginative. The first ‘is for those who value action and emotion for their own sake; who are interested in striking events which conform to a preconceived artificial pattern’. The second ‘is for those who are intellectual and analytical rather than poetical or emotional … It has the virtue of being close to life, but has the disadvantage of sinking into the commonplace and the unpleasant at times.’ Lovecraft does not provide an explicit definition of imaginative fiction, but implies that it draws upon the best features of both the other two: like romanticism, imaginative fiction bases its appeal on emotions (the emotions of fear, wonder, and terror); from realism it derives the important principle of truth—not truth to fact, as in realism, but truth to human feeling. As a result, Lovecraft comes up with the somewhat startling deduction that ‘The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense.’

The attack on what Lovecraft called ‘romanticism’ is one he never relinquished. The term must not be understood here in any historical sense—Lovecraft had great respect and fondness for such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge—but purely theoretically, as embodying an approach not only to literature but to life generally:

The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound, charlatanic, and valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant, and meaningless—is that mode of handling human events and values and motivations known as romanticism. Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd! Here is sheer puerility— the concoction of false glamours and enthusiasms and events out of an addled and distorted background which has no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings, and experiences of evolved and adult mankind.²²

This remark, although made in 1930, makes clear that his enemy here is his whipping-boy of 1923, Victorianism. It was this approach—the instilling of ‘glamour’ or significance into certain phases of human activity (notably love)—that Lovecraft believed to be most invalidated by the findings of modern science. And yet, his vehemence on this issue may stem from another cause as well: the possibility that his very different brand of weird fiction might conceivably be confused with (or be considered an aspect of) romanticism. Lovecraft knew that the weird tale had emerged in the course of the romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so that, in the eyes of many, weird fiction itself was a phase of Romanticism and might be thought to have ‘no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings, and experiences of evolved and adult mankind’.

Accordingly, Lovecraft always strove to ally weird fiction with realism, which he knew to be the dominant mode of contemporary expression. This realism extended not merely to technique (‘a tale should be plausible—even a bizarre tale except for the single element where supernaturalism is involved’, he says in a letter of 1921²³), but in terms of philosophical orientation. Of course, it cannot be realistic in terms of events, so it must be realistic in terms of human emotions. Lovecraft again contrasts romanticism (an ‘overcoloured representation of what purports to be real life’) with fantasy: ‘But fantasy is something altogether different. Here we have an art based on the imaginative life of the human mind, frankly recognised as such; and in its way as natural and scientific—as truly related to natural (even if uncommon and delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism.’²⁴

When asked by A. H. Brown, a Canadian member of the Transatlantic Circulator, why he didn’t write more about ‘ordinary people’, since this might increase the audience for his work, Lovecraft replied with towering scorn:

I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.

This is Lovecraft’s first explicit expression of the view he would later call ‘cosmicism’. Cosmicism is at once a metaphysical position (an awareness of the vastness of the universe in both space and time), an ethical position (an awareness of the insignificance of human beings within the realm of the universe), and an aesthetic position (a literary expression of this insignificance, to be effected by the minimizing of human character and the display of the titanic gulfs of space and time). The strange thing about it is that it was so late in being articulated, and also that it was so feebly exhibited in his weird fiction up to this time—indeed, really up to 1926. One interesting development in Lovecraft’s pure metaphysics occurred in May of 1923:

I have no opinions—I believe in nothing … My cynicism and scepticism are increasing, and from an entirely new cause— the Einstein theory. The latest eclipse observations seem to place this system among the facts which cannot be dismissed, and assumedly it removes the last hold which reality or the universe can have on the independent mind. All is chance, accident, and ephemeral illusion—a fly may be greater than Arcturus, and Durfee Hill may surpass Mount Everest—assuming them to be removed from the present planet and differently environed in the continuum of spacetime. There are no values in all infinity—the least idea that there are is the supreme mockery of all. All the cosmos is a jest, and fit to be treated only as a jest, and one thing is as true as another.²⁵

The history of the acceptance of the theory of relativity would make an interesting study in itself. The theory was propounded by Einstein in 1905 but was the source of much scepticism on the part of philosophers and scientists; some merely ignored it, perhaps hoping it would go away. Lovecraft’s mentor Hugh Elliot dismisses Einstein in a nervous footnote in Modern Science and Materialism. The theory indeed remained largely deductive until the results of observations of a total solar eclipse on 21 September 1922 were finally reported in the New York Times on 12 April 1923, leading many scientists to accept relativity and inspiring Lovecraft’s comment.

It is hardly worth remarking that Lovecraft’s wild conclusions from Einstein, both metaphysical and ethical, are entirely unfounded; but his reaction is perhaps not atypical of that of many intellectuals—especially those who could not in fact understand the precise details and ramifications of relativity—at the time. We will see that Lovecraft fairly quickly snapped out of his naive views about Einstein and, by no later than 1929, actually welcomed him as another means to bolster a modified materialism that still outlawed teleology, theism, spirituality, and other tenets he rightly believed to be outmoded in light of nineteenth-century science. In so doing he evolved a metaphysical and ethical system not at all dissimilar to that of his two later philosophical mentors, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana.

Some words about Lovecraft’s political views might be in order. American entry into the world war had relieved him of the burden of fulminating against the ‘craven pacifism’ of Woodrow Wilson. I find little mention in Lovecraft’s letters of the aftermath of the war, especially in regard to the harsh penalties imposed upon Germany by the Allies: Lovecraft later came to believe the terms of the Versailles treaty unjust, although he thought them more of a tactical error than a matter of abstract ethics.

In the relative political tranquillity of a Republican-dominated decade, Lovecraft reflected more abstractly on the issues of government. ‘Nietzscheism and Realism’ contains a lot of cocksure aphorisms on the subject, largely derived from Nietzsche but with a sort of Schopenhauerian foundation. For example: ‘I believe in an aristocracy, because I deem it the only agency for the creation of those refinements which make life endurable for the human animal of high organization.’ Lovecraft naturally assumed that he was one of those animals of high organisation, and it was entirely logical for him, when speaking abstractly of the ideal government, to look for one that would suit his own requirements. What he seems to imagine is a society like that of Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, or Augustan England, where the aristocracy both symbolized refinement and culture (if they did not always practise it) and provided enough patronage of artists to produce those ‘ornaments of life’ that result in a rich and thriving civilization. It is, certainly—at least in the abstract—an appealing system, but Lovecraft surely did not fancy that it could have much relevance to present-day concerns.

When he does address such concerns, it is in tones of magisterial condemnation. Democracy earns his wholesale scorn. Consider a letter of February 1923: ‘democracy … is a false idol—a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries, and dying civilisations’.²⁶ This is manifestly Nietzschean: ‘I have … characterised modern democracy … as the decaying form of the state.’²⁷ I do not know that Lovecraft ever espoused democracy, but certainly his reading of Nietzsche just after the war seems to have given him the intellectual backbone to support his view.

The letter in which the above comment is imbedded occurs in a discussion of Mussolini and fascism. No one should be surprised that Lovecraft supported Mussolini’s takeover of Italy (completed in late October 1922) and that he was attracted by the fascist ideology—or, at any rate, what he took it to be. I doubt that Lovecraft had any real understanding of the internal political forces that led to Mussolini’s rise. Fascism was, at its base, opposed both to conventional liberalism and to socialism; its popularity grew rapidly after the end of the war when the socialists, winning a majority in 1919, could accomplish little to restore Italian society. Mussolini’s takeover of the government was indeed supported, as Lovecraft would later remark, by a majority of the Italian populace; but each group wished different benefits from it, and, when after several years these benefits were not forthcoming, there was so much discontent that very repressive measures had to be adopted.

For the time being, however, Lovecraft could revel in the fact that here was a ‘strong’ ruler who scorned liberalism and could ‘get the sort of authoritative social and political control which alone produces things which make life worth living’.²⁸ It cannot, certainly, be said that fascism produced any sort of artistic renaissance; but that was not of much concern to Lovecraft at the moment.

The end of 1923 saw still more small travels—to the new private museum of George L. Shepley on Benefit Street, and (in the company of C. M. Eddy and James F. Morton) to the exquisite First Baptist Church (1775) on North Main Street. Here Lovecraft ascended to the organ loft and attempted to play ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ but was foiled ‘since the machine is not a self-starter’.²⁹

Weird Tales , meanwhile, was throwing a lot of work in Lovecraft’s direction, in particular a rush ghostwriting job for Harry Houdini. But in the midst of all this literary activity we find an anomalous change of personal circumstances. On 9 March 1924, Lovecraft writes a letter to his aunt Lillian from 259 Parkside Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. Was this another visit of longer or shorter duration, as the two New York trips of 1922 had been? Not exactly. On 3 March, at St Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Vesey Streets in lower Manhattan, H. P. Lovecraft had married Sonia Haft Greene.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ball and Chain (1924)

New York in 1924 was an extraordinary place. Far and away the largest city in the country, its five boroughs totalled (in 1926) 5,924,138 in population, of which Manhattan had 1,752,018 and Brooklyn (then and now the largest of the boroughs both in size and in population) had 2,308,631. A remarkable 1,700,000 were of Jewish origin, while the nearly 250,000 blacks were already concentrating in Harlem (extending from 125th to 151st Streets on the west side and 96th Street northward on the east side of Manhattan) because of the severe prejudice that prevented their occupying many other areas of the city. The subway system, begun in 1904, was allowing easy access to many regions of the metropolis, and was supplemented by the extensive above-ground or elevated lines, now nearly all eliminated. Lovecraft, on some of his more remote jaunts around the area in search of antiquarian oases, nevertheless found it necessary to take the more expensive trolleys rather than the 5-cent subways or elevateds. The Hudson Tubes (now called the PATH trains) were constructed in 1908–10 to link Manhattan with the commuter terminals in Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey; ferry service was also common between the two states. The remoter areas of the region—Long Island to the east, or Westchester County to the north of the Bronx—were less easy of access, although the N.Y.N.H.&H. (New York, New Haven, and Hartford) railway lines brought in commuters from Connecticut. The mayor of the city was John F. Hylan; but he was ousted in 1925, and James J. Walker was elected in 1926. The governor was the Democrat Alfred E. Smith (1923–28).

It is difficult to convey in capsule form any impression of the vast metropolis, which then as now was as diverse as any place on the globe. The city’s character can change in a single block, and the whole region defies neat generalization. When we speak of Harlem or Hell’s Kitchen or Greenwich Village, we are in danger of letting stereotypes take the place of realities. Lovecraft discovered the city gradually over two years of peregrinations, but his heart was in those surprisingly numerous pockets of antiquity (many of them now sadly obliterated) that still remained even in the heart of Manhattan. Some of the outer boroughs also preserved such pockets, and Lovecraft sought them out with the zeal of desperation. The Flatbush section of Brooklyn where he and Sonia settled was then on the outskirts of the borough, and was then (as it is not now) the residence of choice for the well-to-do in the area. It was not Providence, but neither was it a wholly inferior substitute.

There is no question that, at least for the first few months, the euphoria of his marriage and of his residence in the nation’s centre of publishing, finance, art, and general culture helped to ward off any doubts about the precipitancy of his departure from Providence. With a new wife, many friends, and even reasonably good job prospects Lovecraft had reason to believe that a promising new phase of his life was beginning.

Lovecraft’s marriage seems to have produced, among his friends and associates, reactions ranging from surprise to shock to alarm. Rheinhart Kleiner writes:

I do remember very well that it was while riding in a taxi with Mr. and Mrs. Houtain … that the news of the Lovecraft– Greene marriage was imparted to me. At once, I had a feeling of faintness at the pit of my stomach and became very pale. Houtain laughed uproariously at the effect of his announcement, but agreed that he felt as I did.¹

The silence that Lovecraft maintained about his marriage plans up to—and, indeed, beyond—the last minute is attested by one of the most remarkable letters ever written by Lovecraft: the letter to his aunt Lillian announcing his marriage—six days after the fact. It is manifestly obvious that he simply boarded the 11.09 train on Sunday morning, 2 March, married Sonia the next day, began settling in at 259 Parkside, and finally decided to spill the news to his elder aunt. Indeed, Lovecraft sent Lillian several postcards on 4 and 5 March from both New York and Philadelphia (where the couple honeymooned), but without any indication of the true state of affairs.

Some parts of the laborious preamble to the actual announcement in this letter are astounding:

[A] more active life, to one of my temperament, demands many things which I could dispense with when drifting sleepily and inertly along, shunning a world which exhausted and disgusted me, and having no goal but a phial of cyanide when my money should give out. I had formerly meant to follow the latter course, and was fully prepared to seek oblivion whenever cash should fail or sheer ennui grow too much for me; when suddenly, nearly three years ago, our benevolent angel S. H. G. stepped into my circle of consciousness and began to combat that idea with the opposite one of effort and the enjoyment of life through the rewards which effort will bring.

Well, perhaps marriage and a move to the big city is better than suicide from poverty or boredom. But what about the critical issue of the pair’s affection for each other?

meanwhile—egotistical as it sounds to relate it—it began to be apparent that I was not alone in finding psychological solitude more or less of a handicap. A detailed intellectual and aesthetic acquaintance since 1921, and a three-months visit in 1922 wherein congeniality was tested and found perfect in an infinity of ways, furnished abundant proof not only that S. H. G. is the most inspiriting and encouraging influence which could possibly be brought to bear on me, but that she herself had begun to find me more congenial than anyone else, and had come to depend to a great extent on my correspondence and conversation for mental contentment and artistic and philosophical enjoyment.²

This is, certainly, one of the most glaring examples of Lovecraft’s inability to speak of ‘love’ or anything remotely connected to it. His natural reserve in talking of such matters to his aunt should certainly be taken into account; but we will also have to deal later with Sonia’s own admission that Lovecraft never said the word ‘love’ to her.

What were Sonia’s feelings on the whole matter? In speaking of the year or two prior to their marriage, she writes: ‘I well knew that he was not in a position to marry, yet his letters indicated his desire to leave his home town and settle in New York.’³ The first part of the statement presumably refers merely to financial capability; as for the second, although of course we do not have access to Lovecraft’s letters to Sonia, I have to believe that this is somewhat of an exaggeration. Sonia goes on to say that she requested Lovecraft to inform his aunts of the marriage plans before the ceremony, but that he preferred to surprise them. ‘In the matter of securing the marriage license, buying the ring and other details incumbent upon a marriage, he seemed to be so jovial. He said one would think that he was being married for the nth time, he went about it in such a methodical way.’⁴

What Sonia does not say is that she had written to Lillian a full month before the marriage, and in a manner that should clearly have signalled to Lillian that something was afoot. In a letter dated 9 February 1924, Sonia writes:

I have nothing in life to attract me to Life and if I can help the good and beautiful soul of Howard Lovecraft find itself financially as it has found itself spiritually, morally and mentally, my efforts shall not have been in vain …

Therefore little Lady, fear nothing. I am just as desirous of his success for his own sake as you are, and I am just as anxious, perhaps more so, that you should live to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the honors that will be heaped upon his beautiful and blessed name, as you may be.⁵

That ‘fear nothing’ must have been in response to some letter by Lillian, perhaps asking Sonia bluntly what her ‘intentions’ toward her nephew actually were.

Lovecraft’s jovality during the ceremony is borne out by several amusing letters to his closest friends. To James Morton he writes, after another long and teasing preamble about the seeming strangeness of his residence at 259 Parkside:

Yes, my boy, you got it the first time. Eager to put Colonial architecture to all of its possible uses, I hit the ties hither last week; and on Monday, March the Third, seized by the hair of the head the President of the United—S. H. G.—and dragged her to Saint Paul’s Chapel, … where after considerable assorted genuflection, and with the aid of the honest curate, Father George Benson Cox, and of two less betitled ecclesiastical hangers-on, I succeeded in affixing to her series of patronymics the not unpretentious one of Lovecraft. Damned quaint of me, is it not? You never can tell what a guy like me is gonna do next!⁶

It is as if Lovecraft is regarding the whole thing as a lark; and, indeed, we will see increasing evidence that he was quite taken with the charm and novelty of being married but was simply not aware of the amount of effort it takes to make a marriage actually work. Lovecraft was, in all honesty, not emotionally mature enough for such an undertaking.

It is worth pausing to ponder the sources for Lovecraft’s attraction for Sonia. It seems facile to say that he was looking for a mother replacement; and yet the emergence of Sonia into his life a mere six weeks after his mother’s death is certainly a coincidence worth noting. Granted that the affection may initially have been more on Sonia’s side than his—she came to Providence far more frequently than he came to New York—Lovecraft may nevertheless have felt the need to confide his thoughts and feelings to someone in a way that he does not seem to have done with his aunts.

Sonia was, of course, nothing like Susie Lovecraft: she was dynamic, emotionally open, contemporary, cosmopolitan, and perhaps a little domineering (this is the exact term Frank Belknap Long once used in describing Sonia to me), whereas Susie, although perhaps domineering in her own way, was subdued, emotionally reserved, even stunted, and a typical product of American Victorianism. But let us recall that at this moment Lovecraft was still in the full flower of his Decadent phase: his scorn of Victorianism and his toying with the intellectual and aesthetic avantgarde may have found a welcome echo in a woman who was very much an inhabitant of the twentieth century.

Sonia has made one further admission that is of some interest. In a manuscript (clearly written after the dissolution of the marriage, as it is signed Sonia H. Davis) entitled ‘The Psychic Phenominon [sic] of Love’ she has incorporated a part of one of Lovecraft’s letters to her. In a note on the manuscript she has written: ‘It was Lovecraft’s part of this letter that I believe made me fall in love with him; but he did not carry out his own dictum; time and place, and reversion of some of his thoughts and expressions did not bode for happiness.’⁷ The letter was published as ‘Lovecraft on Love’. It is a very strange document. Going on for about 1200 words in the most abstract and pedantic manner, Lovecraft thoroughly downplays the erotic aspect of love as a product of the fire of extreme youth, saying instead that

By forty or perhaps fifty a wholesome replacement process begins to operate, and love attains calm, cool depths based on tender association beside which the erotic infatuation of youth takes on a certain shade of cheapness and degradation. Mature tranquillised love produces an idyllic fidelity which is a testimonial to its sincerity, purity, and intensity.⁸

And so on. There is actually not much substance in this letter, and some parts of it should have made Sonia a little nervous, as when he says that ‘True love thrives equally well in presence or in absence’ or that each party ‘must not be too antipodal in their values, motive-forces, perspectives, and modes of expression and fulfilment’ for compatibility.

But the months preceding and following the marriage were sufficiently hectic that neither had much time for reflection. In the first place, Lovecraft had to finish the ghostwriting job for Weird Tales. The magazine was not doing well on the newsstands, and in an effort to bolster sales owner J. C. Henneberger enlisted the services of the escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss, 1874–1926), then at the height of his popularity, to write a column and other items. Henneberger also enlisted Lovecraft to write up a strange tale that Houdini was attempting to pass off as an actual occurrence that purportedly took place in Egypt. Lovecraft quickly discovered that the account was entirely fictitious, so he persuaded Henneberger to let him have as much imaginative leeway as he could in writing up the story, which as it stands seems to be entirely Lovecraft’s in its prose and largely in its conception. By 25 February he had not yet begun to write it, even though it was due on 1 March. Somehow he managed to finish it just shortly before he boarded the train to New York on 2 March; but in his rush he left the typescript behind somewhere in Union Station in Providence. Although he took out an advertisement that appeared the next day in the lost and found column of the Providence Journal (in which the story is titled ‘Under the Pyramids’), the typescript was never recovered. It appeared as ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ in the first anniversary issue (May–June–July 1924) of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft’s concern at the moment, however, was to get a newly typed version to Henneberger as quickly as possible. Fortunately, he had brought along the autograph manuscript, so the morning of the 3rd found him at the office of ‘The Reading Lamp’ (on which more later) frantically retyping the long story; but he was only half done when it was time to go to St Paul’s Chapel for the service. They completed the typing job one or two evenings later in Philadelphia. The story was sent to Weird Tales immediately, and Lovecraft received payment of $100—the largest sum he had hitherto earned as a fiction-writer—on 21 March. It was the only occasion on which he was paid by Weird Tales in advance of publication.

‘Under the Pyramids’ is quite an able piece of work, and it remains a much undervalued tale, even if some of the earlier parts read like a travelogue or encyclopedia. Some of the imagery of the story probably derives from Théophile Gautier’s superb nonsupernatural tale of Egyptian horror, ‘One of Cleopatra’s Nights’. Lovecraft owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882).

One bizarre postscript to this entire affair concerns C. M. Eddy’s ‘The Loved Dead’, which appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales. Lovecraft had, of course, revised this tale. When the issue appeared, it was promptly banned on the grounds that ‘The Loved Dead’ was about necrophilia (true enough, indeed) and apparently considered obscene. It is not entirely clear what actually happened, but it seems that the magazine was banned only in the state of Indiana.⁹ To what degree the notoriety of the banning affected sales of Weird Tales is also in doubt: it can certainly not be said that this banning somehow ‘saved’ the magazine by causing a run on the issue, especially since it would be four months before the next issue appeared. We may discover, however, that less fortunate consequences occurred—at least, as far as Lovecraft was concerned—in later years.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft was becoming very much involved with Weird Tales—perhaps more than he would have liked. In midMarch he reports that Henneberger ‘is making a radical change in the policy of Weird Tales, and that he has in mind a brand new magazine to cover the field of Poe–Machen shudders. This magazine, he says, will be “right in my line”, and he wants to know if I would consider moving to CHICAGO to edit it!’¹⁰ There is a certain ambiguity in this utterance, but I believe the sense is not that Henneberger would start a ‘brand new magazine’ but that Weird Tales itself would be made over into a ‘new’ magazine featuring Poe–Machen shudders. Lovecraft had earlier noted that Baird had been ousted as editor and that Farnsworth Wright had been placed in his stead;¹¹ this was only a stop-gap measure, and Lovecraft was indeed Henneberger’s first choice for editor of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft has frequently been criticized for failing to take up this opportunity just at the time when, as a new husband, he needed a steady income; the thinking is that he should have overcome his purely aesthetic distaste of the modern architecture of Chicago and accepted the offer. But the matter is more complicated than this scenario suggests. First, although Sonia was in favour of the move, it would have meant either Sonia’s search for uncertain job prospects in Chicago or the couple’s having to live a thousand miles away from each other merely for the sake of employment. Second, Lovecraft knew that Henneberger was deeply in debt: Henneberger had lost $51,000 on his two magazines, Weird Tales and Detective Tales, and there was no guarantee that either enterprise would continue in operation much longer. If Lovecraft had therefore left for Chicago, he might after a few months have been stranded there with no job and with little prospect of getting one. Lovecraft was, in my view, wise to decline the offer. In any case, even in the most ideal financial circumstances, he might not have made the best editor of a magazine such as Weird Tales. His fastidious taste would have rejected much that was actually published in its pages: there was simply not enough artistically polished weird fiction to fill what was really nothing more than a cheap pulp magazine paying a penny a word.

What actually happened to Weird Tales in this crisis was that Henneberger sold off his share of Detective Tales to the co-founder of Rural Publications, J. M. Lansinger (who retained Baird as editor of that magazine), appointed Farnsworth Wright as permanent editor of Weird Tales (he would retain that position until 1940), and then—as the only way to make up the $40,000 debt he had accrued—came to an agreement with B. Cornelius, the printer of the magazine, as follows: ‘Cornelius became chief stockholder with an agreement that if the $40,000 owed him was ever repaid by profits from the magazine, Henneberger would be returned the stock.’¹² A new company, the Popular Fiction Publishing Co., was formed to issue the magazine, with the stockholders being Cornelius, Farnsworth Wright, and William Sprenger (Weird Tales’ business manager); after a several-month hiatus Weird Tales resumed publication with the November 1924 issue. Although Henneberger retained a minor interest in the new company, Weird Tales never made sufficient profits for him to buy it back; in any case, he seems to have lost interest in the venture after a few years and finally drifted entirely out of the picture.

Farnsworth Wright (1888–1940) deserves some mention, as Lovecraft would eventually develop a very curious relationship with him. He had been the magazine’s first reader from the very beginning, and had several undistinguished stories in early issues. He had served in the First World War and afterwards was music critic for the Chicago Herald and Examiner, continuing in this latter activity for a time even after he took over the editorship of Weird Tales. By early 1921 he had contracted Parkinson’s disease, and the illness worsened throughout the rest of his life, so that by the end of the decade he could not sign his name.

It is difficult to gauge Wright’s success as editor of Weird Tales, especially since very different yardsticks can be used to measure ‘success’ in something of this kind. It is, certainly, something in his favour that he managed to keep the magazine going even during the worst years of the Depression; but there can similarly be no denying that he published an appalling amount of trite, hackneyed, and simply bad fiction that would never have appeared elsewhere and should never have been published in the first place. Lovecraft felt that Wright was erratic, capricious, and even a little hypocritical, at least as regards his handling of Lovecraft’s own work; and, in spite of those who have come to Wright’s defence on this score, this view seems plausible. Lovecraft may have had excessively high expectations of his success with Wright, so that rejections came with added bitterness. In some senses his irritation stemmed from what he eventually realized was a naive view that aesthetically meritorious work should be rewarded commensurately. It would be years before he learned that writing for the pulps was simply a business, and that Wright looked upon the matter in that light. If most of Weird Tales’ readership wanted cheap, formularidden hackwork, Wright would make sure to give it to them.

In the short term, however, Lovecraft and Sonia had a household to set in order. The first thing to do was to persuade aunt Lillian (and perhaps Annie as well) to come to New York to live with them. This seems to have been an entirely sincere desire on the part of both Lovecraft and Sonia. Lillian was, however, at this time almost sixty-six years old and probably in declining health; it is clear that she herself had no desire to move—especially after her nephew failed to take her into his confidence regarding the most dramatic change in his personal circumstances.

One occupant the couple would not have to worry about was Sonia’s daughter. Florence Carol Greene appears to have had a falling out with her mother a few years previously: she had fallen in love with her half-uncle Sydney (only five years her elder), and Sonia, enraged, had adamantly refused to allow her to marry him. (Such a marriage would, in any event, have been prohibited by the tenets of Orthodox Judaism.) This dispute led to a schism which, unfortunately, lasted the duration of both women’s lives. Florence left Sonia’s apartment some time after she came of age (19 March 1923), although continuing to remain in New York. There are reports that she herself did not care for Lovecraft and did not approve of her mother’s marrying him. Florence’s later life is both distinguished and tragic: she married a newspaperman named John Weld in 1927 but divorced him in 1932; she herself went to Europe and became a reporter, attaining celebrity as the first reporter to cover the romance of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) and Mrs Wallis Simpson. Returning to America, she worked for newspapers in New York, later moving to Florida and becoming a film publicist. She died on 31 March 1979. But in all that time she refused to speak to her mother. And aside from a passing reference in her memoir, Sonia never speaks of her. Lovecraft too alludes to her only twice in all the correspondence I have seen.

In the meantime, however, Lovecraft had to think of work. Sonia had been making $10,000 per year at Ferle Heller’s—a princely sum considering that the ‘minimum health and decency’ wages for a family of four in the 1920s was $2000—but had already lost this position, evidently, by February 1924. Nevertheless, she had savings in five figures,¹³ so perhaps there was no immediate need to replenish the coffers.

A likely prospect seemed in the offing in something called ‘The Reading Lamp’. So far as I can tell, this was a magazine (although no file of it exists in any library in the world) as well as a literary agency that would generate commissioned articles or books on behalf of its clients; it was run by one Gertrude E. Tucker. Edwin Baird had recommended Lovecraft to Tucker in January 1924; Sonia, learning of this, took it upon herself to see Tucker and bring a sheaf of Lovecraft’s manuscripts to her. On 10 March Lovecraft interviewed at the Reading Lamp office, with the following result:

Miss T. thinks a book of my antiquarian & other essays would be quite practicable, & urges me to prepare at least three as samples at once. Also, she thinks she can get me a contract with a chain of magazines to write minor matter to order. And more—as soon as my MSS. arrive, she wants to see all of them, with a view to a weird book … What Miss T. wants in the way of essays is quaint stuff with a flavour of the supernatural.¹⁴

All this sounds promising, and at one point Lovecraft even reports the possibility that The Reading Lamp might be able to secure him a regular position at a publishing house, although this clearly did not happen. Later in the month he reports working on several chapters of a book on American superstitions; the idea evidently was that he would do three chapters and Tucker would then try to get a contract from a book publisher for the project. But since on 1 August he reports the ‘non-materialisation of sundry literary prospects’,¹⁵ the obvious inference is that the Reading Lamp business came to nothing.

But Lovecraft always had Bush to rely on. He met him on 25 May, and reports doing ‘Bush work’ in July. Bush published at least eight books in 1924 and 1925 (all of them psychology manuals—he had evidently given up poetry), and no doubt Lovecraft derived at least a modest income from revising them. Cheques from Weird Tales were no doubt trickling in also—for ‘The Hound’ (February), ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (March), ‘Arthur Jermyn’ (April), and ‘Hypnos’ (May–June–July) along with JuUnder the Pyramids’, although I have no information on how much any of these stories aside from the Houdini job actually brought in.

The couple, indeed, felt so relatively prosperous that in May they placed a down payment on two pieces of property in Bryn Mawr Park, a development in Yonkers. In her autobiography Sonia declares that a home for Lovecraft, herself, and his two aunts was planned for the larger property and that the other would be used for speculation. Yonkers is the city immediately north of the Bronx in lower Westchester County, and within easy commuting distance of Manhattan by trolley or train. Since the turn of the century it had become a fashionable bedroom community for New Yorkers; but it was still an idyllic small town with plenty of greenery and a sort of New England feel to it, and might have been the ideal place for Lovecraft to have settled so long as he needed to remain in the New York area for purposes of employment. However, by late July Lovecraft wrote to the real estate company that he could no longer afford to pay the monthly fees for the lots. What exactly had happened to the couple’s finances?

Sonia had apparently attempted to start her own hat shop. This strikes me as an extremely risky undertaking. In days when all men and women wore hats in public, the millinery business was an extraordinarily competitive one: the 1924–25 city directory for Manhattan and the Bronx lists at least 1200 milliners. My only thought is that Sonia, as a married woman, did not wish to do the extensive amount of travelling that her position at Ferle Heller’s evidently required her to do, and wished to open a shop of her own so as to remain in the city as much as possible. But if this was the case, the ironic circumstance is that Sonia remained out of work for much of the rest of the year and was then forced to take a series of jobs in the Midwest, separating her far more from her husband than her Ferle Heller’s position would have been likely to do. She says nothing about this whole matter at all in her memoir; but Lovecraft, writing to Lillian on 1 August, makes clear reference to ‘the somewhat disastrous collapse of S. H.’s independent [my emphasis] millinery venture’, with the result that there is now ‘something of a shortage in the exchequer’.¹⁶

The upshot of all this was that Lovecraft was forced to look much more vigorously for a job—any job—than before. Now, and only now, begins the futile and rather pathetic hunting through the classified ads every Sunday in the New York Times for any position that might conceivably be available; but Lovecraft came face to face with a realization as true then as now: ‘Positions of every kind seem virtually unattainable to persons without experience …’¹⁷ What Lovecraft says is the job that ‘came nearest to materialisation’ was a salesman’s position with the Creditors’ National Clearing House, located at 810 Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey. This was a bill collecting agency, and Lovecraft would be responsible not for actually collecting bills but for selling the agency’s services amongst wholesalers and retailers in New York City. He appears to have been hired on a trial basis in late July, but it was painfully evident that Lovecraft simply did not have the brazenness or suavity to be a successful salesman, and he quickly resigned.

This whole episode—as well as a later one in which Lovecraft tried to secure a job in the lamp-testing department of an electrical laboratory—shows how difficult it was for Lovecraft to secure the job that most suited him, namely something in the writing or publishing business. There is no reason why, with his experience, he should not have been able to secure some such position; but he was unable to do so. Several of his friends have commented on a notorious letter of application that he sent out around this time, the first paragraph of which reads as follows:

If an unprovoked application for employment seems somewhat unusual i n these days of system, agencies, & advertising, I trust that the circumstances surrounding this one may help to mitigate what would otherwise be obtrusive forwardness. The case is one wherein certain definitely marketable aptitudes must be put forward in an unconventional manner if they are to override the current fetish which demands commercial experience & causes prospective employers to dismiss unheard the application of any situation-seeker unable to boast of specific professional service in a given line.¹⁸

And so on for six more paragraphs, commenting pointedly that he has, in the last two months, answered over a hundred advertisements without a single response.

To be sure, this may not have been the ideal letter, but standards of business writing were different seventy years ago. Nevertheless, Kleiner remarks of this letter, and others like it: ‘I think I am justified in saying that they were the sort of letters a temporarily straitened English gentleman might have written in an effort to make a profitable connection in the business world of the day before yesterday.’¹⁹

Then, in the classified section of the New York Times for Sunday 10 August, appeared the following advertisement in the ‘Situations Wanted—Male’ category:

WRITER AND REVISER, free-lance, desires regular and permanent salared connection with any responsible enterprise requiring literary services; exceptionally thorough experience in preparing correct and fluent text on subjects assigned, and in meeting the most difficult, intricate and extensive problems of rewriting and constructive revision, prose or verse; would also consider situation dealing with such proofreading as demands rapid and discriminating perception, orthographical accuracy, stylistic fastidiousness and a keenly developed sense of the niceties of English usage; good typist; age 34, married; has for seven years handled all the prose and verse of a leading American public speaker and editor. Y 2292 Times Annex.

This advertisement—taking many phrases from his application letter—is rather more open to criticism than the letter itself, for it is far longer than any other one in this section and really does go on at needless length when a more compact notice would have conveyed many of the same points far more cheaply. The expense was, indeed, quite considerable: the rate for ads in the ‘Situations Wanted’ section was 40 cents per word, and this ad—99 words— cost a full $39.60. This would be the equivalent of a month’s rent in the one-room apartment Lovecraft would occupy in 1925–26. I am amazed that Sonia let Lovecraft take out an ad of this length, for surely she paid for it.

Then, in September, an old friend reappeared on the scene—J. C. Henneberger. Lovecraft states that Henneberger had hired him for a ‘new magazine’ at the rate of $40 per week. What kind of magazine was it? College Humor, founded in 1922, was going strong and was not likely to need a new editor; but there was another magazine called the Magazine of Fun that Henneberger started about this time, and, incredible as it seems, the editorship of this magazine or something like it is what Henneberger appears to have been offering. Lovecraft speaks of Henneberger telephoning him and ‘want[ing] me to turn out some samples of my adapting of jokes for his proposed magazine’.²⁰ It was on the basis of these samples that Henneberger ‘hired’ Lovecraft in mid-September.

Of course, nothing came of the plans. The promised pay for Lovecraft’s editorial work metamorphosed into a $60 credit at the Scribner Book Shop; and although Lovecraft tried to get this credit converted to cash, he was unable to do so and finally, on 9 October, he took Long to the bookstore to purchase a sheaf of books, mostly weird. Frank Long treats the whole episode engagingly in his memoir,²¹ but seems under the impression that the credit was a payment for stories in Weird Tales, when in fact it was for this editorial job that never materialized.

Lovecraft accordingly returned to answering the want ads, although by this time the strain was becoming severe for someone who had no particular business sense and may perhaps have felt the whole activity somewhat beneath his dignity. He writes to Lillian in late September: ‘That day [Sunday] was one of gloom and nerves—more advertisement answering, which has become such a psychological strain that I almost fall unconscious over it!’²² Anyone who has been out of work for any length of time has felt this way.

Meanwhile Lovecraft’s friends were trying to lend a hand. Houdini was impressed with ‘Under the Pyramids’, and in late September put Lovecraft in touch with one Brett Page, the head of a newspaper syndicate; but Page had no actual position to offer. In mid-November Samuel Loveman attempted to set up Lovecraft with the head of the cataloguing department of a bookshop on 59th Street, but this too proved fruitless.

Sonia was not, to be sure, unemployed during this entire period; no doubt she was also answering want ads, and she had been employed in either a milliner’s or a department store for a few weeks in September. But she felt that this position was insecure and was looking around for something better. But then things took a turn very much for the worse. On the evening of 20 October Sonia was stricken with ‘sudden gastric spasms … whilst resting in bed after a day of general ill-feeling’.²³ Lovecraft took her in a taxicab to Brooklyn Hospital, only a few blocks away. She would spend the next eleven days there, finally being released on the 31st.

There can hardly be any question but that Sonia’s illness was in large part nervous or psychological in origin. She must have been acutely worried over the many disasters, financial and otherwise, that had overtaken the couple, and no doubt sensed Lovecraft’s increasing discouragement at his failed job-hunting efforts and perhaps his belief that his entire life had taken a wrong turn. Lovecraft never makes any such statement in his letters of the period, but I have trouble believing that something of the sort was not going through his mind.

Lovecraft was unusually solicitous to Sonia in the hospital: he visited her every day (this representing his first time he had actually set foot in a hospital), bringing her books, stationery, and— what must have been a great sacrifice in the name of married bliss—relearned the game of chess so that he could play it with Sonia. She beat him every time. In turn he began learning to be more independent in the running of a household: he made coffee, a twenty-minute egg, and even spaghetti from Sonia’s written instructions, and showed obvious pride in keeping the place well cleaned and dusted for her return. These remarks on cooking suggest that he had never made a meal for himself up to this time.

One of Sonia’s doctors, Dr Westbrook, actually recommended an operation for the removal of her gall bladder; but Lovecraft—quite consciously remembering that his mother had died of just such an operation—strongly urged Sonia to get a second opinion, and another doctor advised against surgery; either this doctor or Dr Kingman, a nerve specialist, then recommended six weeks’ rest in the country before Sonia resumed work. Accordingly, she checked into a private rest home in New Jersey on 9 November, planning to stay for six days. This was actually a farm run by a Mrs R. A. Craig and her two sons near Somerville, New Jersey, in the central part of the state. Lovecraft himself stayed overnight at the farm, then left the next morning to spend the rest of the week in Philadelphia examining colonial antiquities. Returning on the 15th, he was surprised to find that Sonia had come home the day before, one day early; evidently she had not found the place entirely to her liking. She felt, however, good enough after only six days to resume jobhunting efforts.

Almost immediately after Sonia’s return, a dramatic decision was made: Sonia would leave for a job in the Midwest while Lovecraft would relocate to a smaller apartment in the city. The couple planned to move out of 259 Parkside as early as the end of November, but as it happened the dispersal did not occur until the end of December. Lovecraft’s first choice for a place to settle was Elizabeth, New Jersey, which he had visited earlier in the year and found a delightful haven of colonial antiquity. If this could not be managed, then Lovecraft would opt for Brooklyn Heights, where Loveman and Hart Crane lived.

Lillian came to New York around 1 December to help in the transition. The month of December is a blank, since Lillian stayed the entire month and into early January, so naturally Lovecraft wrote no letters to her; no letters to others have come to light either. The one thing that remains unclear is exactly when or how Sonia secured her job in the Midwest. Neither she nor Lovecraft has anything of consequence to say on the subject.

It should be pointed out that this separation was not—at least outwardly—anything other than an economic move; there is no real indication that any dispute or emotional crisis had occurred. Are we permitted to wonder whether Lovecraft was secretly pleased at this turn of events? Did he prefer a marriage by correspondence rather than one in person? It is time to backtrack and see what we can learn about the actual personal relations between Sonia and Lovecraft.

Sonia’s dry remark that, after typing the Houdini manuscript, they were ‘too tired and exhausted for honey-mooning or anything else’ is surely a tactful way of referring to the fact that she and Lovecraft did not have sex on their first night together. The matter of Lovecraft’s sexual conduct must inevitably be addressed, although the information we have on the subject is very sparse. We learn from R. Alain Everts, who interviewed Sonia on the matter, that: first, he was a virgin at the time he married; second, prior to his marriage he had read several books on sex; and third, he never initiated sexual relations, but would respond when Sonia did so.²⁴

None of these, except the second, is a surprise. One wonders what books Lovecraft might have read (one hopes it was not David Van Bush’s Practical Psychology and Sex Life (1922)!—quite possibly he may have read some of James F. Morton’s writings on the subject). His Victorian upbringing—especially from a mother whose husband died under distasteful circumstances—clearly made him very inhibited as far as sex is concerned; but there is also every reason to believe that Lovecraft was simply one of those individuals who have a low sex drive, and for whom the subject is of relatively little interest. It is mere armchair psychoanalysis to say that he somehow sublimated his sex urges into writing or other activities.

Sonia herself has only two comments on the matter. ‘As a married man he was an adequately excellent lover, but refused to show his feelings in the presence of others. He shunned promiscuous association with women before his marriage.’²⁵ I do not know what an ‘adequately excellent’ lover is. The other remark is a trifle more embarrassing: ‘H. P. was inarticulate in expressions of love except to his mother and to his aunts, to whom he expressed himself quite vigorously; to all other[s] it was expressed by deep appreciation only. One way of expression of H. P.’s sentiment was to wrap his “pinkey” finger around mine and say “Umph!”’²⁶ Move over, Casanova! The note about ‘appreciation’ leads to one of the most celebrated passages in her memoir: ‘I believe he loved me as much as it was possible for a temperament like his to love. He’d never mention the word love. He would say instead “My dear, you don’t know how much I appreciate you.” I tried to understand him and was grateful for any crumbs from his lips that fell my way.’²⁷ Again, none of this is entirely surprising given what we know about Lovecraft’s upbringing.

If Sonia could not make Lovecraft perform sexually quite as much as she would like, she could change him in other ways. First there was his diet. Although he had put on considerable weight in the 1922–23 period, Sonia nevertheless remarks:

When we were married he was tall and gaunt and ‘hungrylooking’. I happen to like the apparently ascetic type but H. P. was too much even for my taste, so I used to cook a well-balanced meal every evening, make a substantial breakfast (he loved cheese soufflé—rather an untimely dish for breakfast) and I’d leave a few (almost Dagwoodian) sandwiches for him, a piece of cake and some fruit for his lunch (he loved sweets), and I’d tell him to be sure to make some tea or coffee for himself.²⁸

Elsewhere she says: ‘Living a normal life and eating the food I provided made him take on much extra weight, which was quite becoming to him.’²⁹ She may have thought so, but Lovecraft didn’t: he would later refer to himself as a ‘porpoise’,³⁰ and indeed he ballooned to nearly 200 pounds, which is certainly overweight for someone of his general build. Another thing Sonia didn’t like about Lovecraft, aside from his lean and hungry look, was his attire.

I remember so well when I took him to a smart haberdashery how he protested at the newness of the coat and hat I persuaded him to accept and wear. He looked at himself in the mirror and protested, ‘But my dear, this is entirely too stylish for “Grandpa Theobald”; it doesn’t look like me. I look like some fashionable fop!’ To which I replied, ‘Not all men who dress fashionably are necessarily fops.’³¹

To someone in the fashion business, the conservative clothing customarily worn by Lovecraft must have been irritating indeed. Sonia adds with some tartness, ‘I really think he was glad that this coat and the new suit purchased that day were later stolen.’

This simple incident may go far in suggesting what went wrong with the marriage. Although in later years Lovecraft charitably claimed that the marriage’s failure was ‘98% financial’,³² in reality both Sonia and Lovecraft had deceived themselves into thinking that they shared a ‘congeniality’ (as Lovecraft stated in his marriageannouncement letter to Lillian) that went beyond intellectual and aesthetic matters and covered actual modes of behaviour and basic values. Granting that financial considerations were indeed of considerable—even paramount—importance, these differences in values would have emerged in time and doomed the marriage sooner or later. In some senses it was better—at least for Lovecraft—that it occurred sooner than later.

But in those first few months the euphoria of being married, the excitement of the big city (and of fairly promising job prospects), the fortuitous arrival of Annie Gamwell at the end of March, and of course his many friends in the area kept Lovecraft in a buoyant mood. Amateur work was still taking up some time: Sonia, as President, and Lovecraft, as Official Editor of the UAPA, managed to issue a United Amateur for May 1924, although it must have been a month or so late, as Sonia’s ‘President’s Message’ is dated 1 May.

Social activity with amateurs still remained on the agenda. Sonia took Lovecraft frequently to the monthly meetings of the Blue Pencil Club (a NAPA group) in Brooklyn; Lovecraft did not much care for this group but would go to please his wife, and in 1925–26, when he was alone, he would skip meetings except when Sonia happened to be in town and made him go. There was some group called The Writers’ Club whose meetings Lovecraft attended in March, although this does not seem to have been an amateur organization. When asked by Morton if he would attend a meeting in May, he writes: ‘It all depends on the ball-and-chain.’ However we are to take the ‘ball-and-chain’ remark (one hopes it is meant in genial flippancy), Lovecraft adds rather touchingly: ‘She generally has to hit the hay early, and I have to get home in proportionate time, since she can’t get to sleep till I do.’³³ The couple did share a double bed, and no doubt Sonia had already become accustomed to having her husband beside her and felt uncomfortable when he was not there.

Lovecraft found the support of his friends indispensable for maintaining emotional equilibrium during this entire period, when the many changes in his social and professional life and, later, the successive disappointments and hardships threatened to disrupt his own mental stability. The most heart-warming portions of his letters to his aunts of 1924 are not those involving Sonia (she is mentioned with remarkable infrequency) but those dealing with his surpisingly numerous outings with friends old and new. This was, of course, the heyday of the Kalem Club, although that term was not coined until early the next year.

Some of these men (and they were all men) we have met already—Kleiner (then a bookkeeper at the Fairbanks Scales Co. and living somewhere in Brooklyn), Morton (living in Harlem; I am not sure of his occupation at this time), and Long (living at 823 West End Avenue in the upper West Side of Manhattan with his parents and studying journalism at New York University). Now others joined ‘the gang’.

There was Arthur Leeds (1882–1952?), a kind of rolling stone who had been with a travelling circus as a boy and now, at the age of roughly forty, eked out a bare living as a columnist for Writer’s Digest and occasional pulp writer for Adventure and other magazines; he had two stories in Weird Tales. He was perhaps the most indigent of this entire group of largely indigent aesthetes. At this time he was living at a hotel in West 49th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.

There was Everett McNeil (1862–1929), who like Morton earned an entry in Who’s Who in America, on the strength of sixteen novels for boys published between 1903 and 1929, mostly for E. P. Dutton. The majority of these were historical novels in which McNeil would sugarcoat the history with stirring tales of action on the part of explorers or adventurers battling Indians or colonizing the American frontier. The most popular was perhaps In Texas with Davy Crockett (1908), which was reprinted as late as 1937. George Kirk describes him in a letter to his fiancée as ‘an oldster—lovely purely white hair, writes books for boys and does not need to write down to them, he is quite equal mentally’.³⁴ Kirk did not mean that last remark at all derogatorily. Lovecraft—who had already met McNeil on one of his New York trips of 1922—felt the same way and cherished McNeil’s naive simplicity, even though gradually McNeil fell out of favour with the rest of the gang for being tiresome and intellectually unstimulating. He was living, as in 1922, in Hell’s Kitchen, not far from Leeds.

There was George Kirk himself (1898–1962), who had of course met Lovecraft in Cleveland in 1922 and arrived in New York in August (just before Samuel Loveman, who came in early September) to pursue his bookseller’s trade, settling at 50 West 106th Street in Manhattan. His one venture into publishing was Twentyone Letters of Ambrose Bierce (1922), Loveman’s edition of Bierce’s letters to him. He had become engaged to Lucile Dvorak in late 1923 but did not wish to marry until he had established himself as a bookseller in New York; this took nearly three years, and in the interim he wrote letters to Lucile that rival Lovecraft’s letters to his aunts in their detailed vignettes of ‘the gang’. They are the only other contemporaneous documents of the sort that we have, and they are of considerable help in filling in gaps in Lovecraft’s own letters and in rounding out the general picture of the group.

The Kalem Club existed in a very rudimentary—and nameless— form prior to Lovecraft’s arrival in the city; Kleiner, McNeil, and perhaps Morton appear to have met occasionally at each other’s homes. But clearly the group—whose chief bond was their correspondence and association with Lovecraft—fully solidified as a club only with Lovecraft’s arrival. Frank Long provides a piquant glimpse at Lovecraft’s conduct at these meetings:

Almost invariably … Howard did most of the talking, at least for the first ten or fifteen minutes. He would sink into an easy chair—he never seemed to feel at ease in a straightbacked chair on such occasions and I took care to keep an extremely comfortable one unoccupied until his arrival— and words would flow from him in a continuous stream.

He never seemed to experience the slightest necessity to pause between words. There was no groping about for just the right term, no matter how recondite his conversation became. When the need for some metaphysical hair-splitting arose, it was easy to visualize scissors honed to a surgical sharpness snipping away in the recesses of his mind …

In general the conversation was lively and quite variegated. It was a brilliant enough assemblage, and the discussions ranged from current happenings of a political or sociological nature, to some recent book or play, or to five or six centuries of English and French literature, art, philosophy, and natural science.³⁵

This may be as good a place as any to explore the question of Lovecraft’s voice, since several of Lovecraft’s New York colleagues have given us their impressions of it. There seems general consensus that his voice was somewhat high-pitched. Sonia has the most detailed discussion:

His voice was clear and resonant when he read or lectured but became thin and high-pitched in general conversation, and somewhat falsetto in its ring, but when reciting favorite poems he managed to keep his voice on an even keel of deep resonance. Also his singing voice, while not strong, was very sweet. He would sing none of the modern songs, only the more favored ones of about a half century ago or more.³⁶ Wilfred Blanch Talman offers a less flattering account:

His voice had that flat and slightly nasal quality that is sometimes stereotyped as a New England characteristic. When he laughed aloud, a harsh cackle emerged that reversed the impression of his smile and to the uninitiated might be considered a ham actor’s version of a hermit’s laughter. Companions avoided any attempt to achieve more than a smile in conversation with him, so unbecoming was the result.³⁷

The Kalem Club began meeting weekly on Thursday nights, but later shifted to Wednesdays. It was after one such meeting that Lovecraft began the diligent if unsystematic discovery of the antiquities of the metropolitan area. On Thursday 21 August, there was a gang meeting at Kirk’s place at 106th Street. The meeting broke up at 1.30 a.m. and the group started walking down Broadway, leaving successively at various subway or elevated stations on their respective ways home. Finally only Kirk and Lovecraft remained, and they continued walking all the way down Eighth Avenue through Chelsea into Greenwich Village, exploring all the colonial remnants (still existing) along Grove Court, Patchin and Milligan Places, Minetta Lane, and elsewhere. It was now almost dawn, but they continued walking, down the (now largely destroyed) ‘colonial expanse’ of Varick and Charlton Streets to City Hall. They must have covered at least seven or eight miles on this entire trip. Finally they broke up around 8 a.m., Lovecraft returning home by 9. (So much for his coming home early so that he and Sonia could retire together. On a slightly earlier all-night excursion with Kleiner and Leeds, he returned home at 5 a.m., and, ‘having successfully dodged the traditional fusilade of conjugal flatirons and rollingpins, I was with Hypnos, Lord of Slumbers’.³⁸ One assumes Lovecraft is being whimsical and not literal here.)

On 19 September Lovecraft went to Loveman’s apartment at 78 Columbia Heights and met Crane. He reports that ‘Crane is writing a long poem on Brooklyn Bridge in a modern medium’:³⁹ this would, of course, be Crane’s masterpiece, The Bridge (1930), on which he had begun work as early as February 1923. Crane was rather less charitable to Lovecraft in his various letters than Lovecraft was to Crane. Writing on 14 September to his mother and grandmother, Crane notes Loveman’s arrival in the city but says that he has not spent much time with him because he has been occupied with his many friends:

Miss Sonia Green [ sic] and her piping-voiced husband, Howard Lovecraft, (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there) kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway!⁴⁰ The former ‘invalid’ Lovecraft had already become famous for outwalking all his friends!

Kleiner, in a memoir, supplies a partial answer to a question that has perhaps occurred to nearly everyone reading of Lovecraft’s long walks all around Manhattan at night, whether alone or with others: how is it that he escaped being the victim of a crime? Kleiner writes:

In Greenwich Village, for whose eccentric habitants he had little use, he was fond of poking about in back alleys where his companions preferred not to go. In prohibition years, with murderous affrays among bootleggers and rum-runners likely to break out anywhere, this was a particularly dangerous business. Every other house in this neighborhood was open to suspicion as a speakeasy. I recall that at least once, while stumbling around old barrels and crates in some dark corner of this area, Lovecraft found a doorway suddenly illuminated and an excited foreigner, wearing the apron that was an almost infallible sign of a speakeasy bartender, enquiring hotly what he wanted. Loveman and Kirk went in after Lovecraft and got him safely out. None of us, surely, was under any illusion as to what might very well happen in such an obscure corner of the city.⁴¹

Lovecraft was certainly fearless—perhaps a little foolhardy—on these jaunts. He was, of course, at this time a fairly imposing physical specimen at nearly six feet and 200 pounds; but physical size means nothing when one is faced with a knife or gun, and many criminals are also not put off by a prospective victim’s apparent lack of prosperity. Lovecraft was, in effect, simply lucky in not coming to harm on these peregrinations.

On the evening of 26 September there was a Blue Pencil Club meeting, and the prescribed topic for literary contributions was ‘The Old Home Town’. It was a theme close to Lovecraft’s heart, and he produced the thirteen-stanza poem ‘Providence’ for the occasion—virtually the first creative writing he had done since writing ‘Under the Pyramids’ in February. It was published in the Brooklynite for November 1924 and, some time in November, in the Providence Evening Bulletin, for which he received $5.00.

Early October saw his first visit to Elizabeth, New Jersey (which Lovecraft persistently calls by its eighteenth-century name of Elizabethtown). He was alerted to the existence of colonial antiquities there by an editorial in the New York Times, and he was entirely captivated. His visit proved to be the catalyst for his first story in eight months, ‘The Shunned House’. He had come upon ‘a terrible old house—a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds’⁴² (no longer standing) and it made him think of a house in Providence at 135 Benefit Street, where Lillian had resided in 1919–20 as a companion for Mrs C. H. Babbit. This house had been built around 1763, and is a magnificent structure—with basement, two storeys, and attic—built on the rising hill, with shuttered doors in the basement leading directly out into the sidewalk. It has been considerably restored since Lovecraft’s day, but at that time it must have been a spectral place. Lovecraft spent the whole of 16–19 of October writing a draft of the story, making considerable ‘eliminations & rearrangements’ and doing more revision the next day after having read it to Frank Long. (It was in the evening of this day that Sonia was stricken with her gastric attack and had to be taken to the hospital.)

‘The Shunned House’ deals with a house that has exercised a fascination upon the first-person narrator since boyhood. After conducting exhaustive historical research on the place, he comes to suspect that some nameless object or entity is causing the frequent deaths in the place by somehow sucking the vitality out of the house’s occupants. With his uncle, Elihu Whipple, the narrator spends a night in the house, during which the uncle dies hideously. The next day the narrator brings six carboys of sulphuric acid to the house, digs up the earth where a doubled-up anthropomorphic shape lies, and pours the acid down the hole—realizing only then that the shape was merely the ‘titan elbow’ of some huge and hideous monster.

What is remarkable about ‘The Shunned House’ is the exquisite linkage of real and imagined history throughout the tale. Much of the history of the house is real, as are other details. But on the other hand, there are sly insertions of fictitious events and connections into the historical record. The most interesting elaboration upon history in the story is the figure of Etienne Roulet, a kind of vampire from the seventeenth century who is discovered to have caused the haunting of the house. This figure is mythical, but his purported descendant, Jacques Roulet of Caude, is very real. Lovecraft’s brief mention of him is taken almost verbatim from the account in John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (1872), which we have already seen was a significant source of Lovecraft’s early views on the anthropology of religion.

The most interesting part of the story—in terms of Lovecraft’s future development as a writer—is a passage in which the narrator attempts to come to grips with the exact nature of the malevolent entity. He comes to believe that the peculiar entity ‘was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action’. This remarkable passage suddenly transforms ‘The Shunned House’ into a sort of proto-science-fiction story, in that it enunciates the crucial principle of a scientific rationale for a seemingly supernatural occurrence or event. A year and a half after he had expressed bafflement and perturbation at the Einstein theory, Lovecraft is making convenient use of it in fiction. The reference to ‘intra-atomic action’ is some sort of bow to the quantum theory, although I have not found any discussions of it at this time in letters. Whether this scientific account is at all convincing or plausible is not quite to the point; it is the gesture that is important. That the entity is killed not by driving a stake through its heart but by sulphuric acid is telling.

Lovecraft read the story to the gang on 16 November and was heartened at their enthusiastic response. Loveman was particularly keen, and wanted Lovecraft to type it by the 19th so that he could show it to a reader at Alfred A. Knopf. This did not happen, as Lovecraft did not finish typing the story until the 22nd, but Loveman continued throughout the next year to try to promote the story. We shall discover, indeed, that its experiences in print were not very happy.

Lovecraft moved to a one-room apartment (with two alcoves) at 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights on 31 December, the same day that Sonia caught a train to Cincinnati. The couple had cohabited for only ten continuous months; the occasions on which Sonia returned to New York from the Midwest over the next year and a quarter amounted to a net total of about thirteen weeks. It is too early to pass judgment on Lovecraft as a husband; we must first examine what the next fifteen months would bring. He may or may not have been secretly pleased at Sonia’s departure; but if he thought that 1924 was a year he would rather forget, he had no idea what 1925 would be like.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Moriturus Te Saluto (1925–26)

Lovecraft found the first-floor apartment at 169 Clinton Street pleasing, since the two alcoves—one for dressing and the other for washing—allowed him to preserve a study-like effect in the room proper. There were no cooking facilities in the apartment. The only thing he found disappointing, at least initially, was the seediness of the general area; but he knew that beggars could not be choosers. At $40 a month the place was a pretty good deal, especially since Sonia—during her infrequent visits there—could be accommodated well enough, as the sofa could be unfolded into a double bed. When Sonia was not there, Lovecraft would frequently lie on the couch without opening it, or sometimes doze in the morris chair.

Let us first examine the precise degree to which, in the year 1925, Lovecraft was alone. Sonia’s job at Mabley & Carew’s, the Cincinnati department store, evidently allowed her to make monthly trips of a few days to New York. But as early as late February Sonia had either lost or had resigned from this position. She also spent a short time on two separate occasions in a private hospital in Cincinnati. Accordingly, Sonia returned to Brooklyn for an extended period in February and March, deciding belatedly to take the six weeks’ rest recommended by her doctors. She spent most of the period from late March to early June in the home of a woman physician in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York.

Sonia spent another extended period in June and July in Brooklyn. In mid-July she secured some sort of position with a hat shop or department store in Cleveland, leaving on the 24th. By mid-October, however, she had again either lost or given up this position (which was on a commission basis). By mid-November at the latest, and probably somewhat earlier, Sonia had secured a new position, this time with Halle’s, then (and, up to about a decade ago, when it went out of business) the leading department store in Cleveland. This position appears to have lasted well into 1926.

The upshot of all this is that Sonia was at 169 Clinton Street for a total of only 89 days in 1925, on nine different occasions as follows: 11–16 January; 3–6 February; 23 February–19 March; 8–11 April ; 2–5 May; 9 June–24 July; 15–20 August; 16–17 September; 16–18 October. She had wanted to come during the Christmas holidays, but work at Halle’s was too heavy to permit it. In the three and a half months that Lovecraft spent in Brooklyn in 1926, Sonia was there for a period of about three weeks, from roughly 15 January to 5 February. In other words, for the fifteen and a half months of Lovecraft’s stay at 169 Clinton Street in 1925–26, Sonia was present for a net total of just over three months at widely scattered intervals; the six weeks in June and July constituted the longest single visit.

If Sonia’s record of employment during this period was chequered, Lovecraft’s was completely hopeless. There are, in the 160,000 words of correspondence to Lillian for 1925–26, only three references to looking through the Sunday Times want ads for work; none of these came to anything. It is evident that, with Sonia out of the way, Lovecraft simply stopped looking very hard for work. I am not sure there is anything to criticize in this: many individuals who suffer prolonged unemployment become discouraged, and, in spite of the clumsiness and inexperience with which Lovecraft attempted to find work in 1924, he did make the attempt with determination and zeal.

Lovecraft’s job attempts in 1925 were largely a product of various tips he received from his friends. The one that seemed most promising was freelance work on a trade journal in which Arthur Leeds was involved with another man named Yesley. This does not exactly sound like work for which Lovecraft would be suited, but all it really took is facility at writing, which he certainly had. Difficult as it may be to imagine Lovecraft writing advertising copy, we have the evidence in front of us in the form of five such pieces found among his effects (evidently unpublished). R. H. Barlow bestowed upon them the generic title of ‘Commercial Blurbs’. Sadly, the venture did not pan out, and through no fault of Lovecraft’s. In February Morton secured his position with the Paterson Museum; it would last the rest of his life. By mid-July Lovecraft was talking about the possibility that Morton might hire him as an assistant, and this rather dim prospect continued to be bruited about sporadically all the way up to Lovecraft’s departure from New York in April 1926.

There was, of course, money trickling in from Weird Tales. Lovecraft had five stories published in the magazine in 1925. We know the amounts received for three of these: $35 for ‘The Festival’ (January), $25 for ‘The Unnamable’ (July), and $50 for ‘The Temple’ (September); we do not know the amounts for the other two (‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ (February) and ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ (May)), but they each probably averaged in the $30 range. These five sales make a rough total of $170 for the year—barely equivalent to four months’ rent.

Where was the other money—for food, laundry, modest travel, clothing, household items, and of course the other eight months’ rent—coming from? Clearly Sonia was largely supporting him, and his aunts were contributing as best they could. Sonia, however, speaks very bitterly on this subject in a letter to Samuel Loveman: ‘When we lived at 259 Parkside, his aunts sent him five dollars ($5) a week. They expected me to support him. When he moved to Clinton St., they sent him $15 a week. His rent was $40 a month. Food, carfare, and laundry and writing materials cost more than $5 a week. It was this “more” that I supplied.’¹ And yet, Sonia has perhaps exaggerated a little. Lovecraft frequently acknowledges receipt of (mostly unspecified) sums from Lillian, and Annie was paying for his daily subscription to the Providence Evening Bulletin. In other words, there is every reason to believe that the aunts were contributing as best they could, although no doubt Sonia was still bearing the lion’s share of Lovecraft’s expenses.

The absence of remunerative work, of course, simply left Lovecraft that much more time to hang around with his friends. The year 1925 is the real pinnacle of the Kalem Club. Lovecraft and Kirk continued to be close; although Kirk was nominally employed as the owner of a bookstore, he could essentially set his own hours, and so made very congenial company for Lovecraft the night owl.

There is scarcely a day in the entire year when Lovecraft did not meet with one or the other of his friends—either as they came over to his place or as they met at various cafeterias in Manhattan or Brooklyn or at the formal Wednesday meetings. So busy was he with these social obligations—as well as apparently voluminous correspondence relating to the UAPA—that he wrote almost nothing during the first seven months of the year save a handful of poems, and many of these were written to order for meetings of the Blue Pencil Club.

Kirk writes to his fiancée on 6 February about the actual naming of the club: ‘Because all of the last names of the permanent members of our club begin with K, L or M, we plan to call it the KALEM KLYBB. Half a dozen friends are to be here tonight. Mostly they’re bores. All but me and HPL …’² I wonder whether the exact form of the name had anything to do with an old film company of 1905 called Kalem, formed on exactly the same principle by George Kleine, Samuel Long, and Frank Marion. It is possible that one or more of the members subconsciously recollected this name in forming the name of their club. Lovecraft, however, never refers to the group as the Kalems in the correspondence of this period, citing it merely as ‘the gang’ or ‘The Boys’.

Lovecraft at first did make the attempt to spend time with Sonia on her infrequent visits into town: he notes that he skipped a meeting of the Boys on 4 February because she was not feeling well. But as time went on—and especially during Sonia’s long stay in June and July—he became less conscientious. Even during her stay in February–March Lovecraft would stay out so late that he would come home well after Sonia was asleep and wake up late in the morning (or even early in the afternoon) to find that she had already gone out.

The one thing Lovecraft could do during Sonia’s absence is control his eating habits. He told Moe that after passing 193 pounds he refused to mount a pair of scales; but in January his reducing plan began in earnest. The upshot is that in a few months Lovecraft went from close to 200 pounds to 146; from a 16 collar to 14¹⁄₂. All his suits had to be retailored, and each week he bought smaller and smaller collars. What was the reaction by his friends, family, and wife to this radical reduction?

As you may imagine, my wife protested fearfully at what seemed an alarming decline. I received long scolding letters from my aunts, and was lectured severely by Mrs. Long every time I went up to see Little Belknap. But I knew what I was doing, and kept on like grim death … I now publickly avow my personal mastery of my diet, and do not permit my wife to feed me in excess of it.³ Lovecraft’s letters to his aunts elaborate considerably upon this account. He writes in April:

Diet & walking are the stuff—which reminds me that tonight I’ve begun my home dining programme, having spent 30 cents for a lot of food which ought to last about 3 meals: 1 loaf bread ....................................................... 0.06⁴ 1 medium can beans ......................................... 0.14^{4 1}⁄₄ lb cheese ........................................................ 0.10⁴ Total ................................................................... 0.30⁴

Lovecraft seems to have written the above in an effort to prove his skill at economizing during lean times, and he no doubt expected to be praised for his frugality; but his next letter suggests that the response was very different:

As to my dietary programme—bosh! I am eating enough! Just you take a medium-sized loaf of bread, cut it in four equal parts, & add to each of these ¹⁄₄ can (medium) Heinz beans & a goodly chunk of cheese. If the result isn’t a fullsized, healthy day’s quota of fodder for an Old Gentleman, I’ll resign from the League of Nations’ dietary committee!! It only costs 8 cents—but don’t let that prejudice you! It’s good sound food, & many vigorous Chinamen live on vastly less. Of course, from time to time I’ll vary the ‘meat course’ by getting something instead of beans—canned spaghetti, beef stew, corned beef, &c. &c. &c.—& once in a while I’ll add a dessert of cookies or some such thing. Fruit, also, is conceivable.⁵

This is surely one of the most remarkable passages in all Lovecraft’s correspondence. It suggests many things at once—the crippling poverty under which he was at this time living (and, although under somewhat less straitened circumstances, he would continue to live for the rest of his life, even back in Providence); the fact that he had largely abandoned restaurant meals in the interest of economy; and the rather schoolboyish tone of the entire passage, as if he were a teenager attempting to justify his behaviour to his parents.

There is a still more depressing note in all this. In October Lovecraft was forced to buy an oil heater for the winter, since the heat provided by his landlandy, Mrs Burns—especially in the wake of a nationwide coal strike organized by the United Mine Workers and lasting from September 1925 to February 1926—was insufficient. The heater came with a stove-top attachment, so that Lovecraft could now indulge in the luxury of ‘the preparation of hot dinners. No more cold beans & spaghetti for me …’⁶ Does this mean that, for the first nine and a half months of the year, Lovecraft was eating cold meals, mostly out of cans? In spite of an earlier remark about heating beans on a ‘sterno’ (a tin of a waxlike flammable substance), this seems to be a dismal probability—else why would he boast about the prospect of hot dinners?

The room at 169 Clinton Street really was rather dismal—in a run-down neighbourhood, with a dubious clientele, and infested with mice. For this last problem Lovecraft purchased 5-cent mousetraps, as recommended by Kirk, ‘since I can throw them away without removing the corpus delicti, a thing I should hate to do with a costlier bit of mechanism’.⁷ (Later he found even cheaper traps at two for 5 cents.) Lovecraft has been ridiculed for this squeamishness, but I think unjustly. Not many of us would wish to handle the corpses of mice.

The final insult came on the morning of Sunday 24 May. While Lovecraft was sleeping on the couch after an all-night writing session, his dressing alcove was broken into from the connecting apartment and he was robbed of nearly all his suits, along with sundry other abstractions. The thieves removed three of his suits (dating from 1914, 1921, and 1923), one overcoat (the fashionable 1924 coat that Sonia had purchased for him), a wicker suitcase of Sonia’s (although the contents were later found in the thieves’ apartment), and an expensive $100 radio set that Loveman had been storing in the alcove. All that Lovecraft was left with, in terms of suits, was a thin 1918 blue suit hanging on a chair in the main room, which the thieves did not enter. Lovecraft did not discover the robbery until 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday the 26th, since he had had no previous occasion to enter the alcove.

The property was of course never recovered, although a police detective came over and promised to do his best. And yet, after an initial outburst of anger and frustration, Lovecraft managed to respond to the whole situation with surprising good humour, for only two days later he wrote a long letter to Lillian on the matter and in the process made light of the situation:

Alas for the robes of my infancy, perennial in their bloom, & now cut off—or snatched off—in the finest flowering of their first few decades! They knew the slender youth of old, & expanded to accomodate [sic] the portly citizen of middle life—aye, & condensed again to shroud the wizened shanks of old age! And now they are gone—gone—& the grey, bent wearer still lives to bemoan his nudity; gathering around his lean sides as best he may the strands of his long white beard to serve him in the office of a garment!⁸

What now transpired was a five-month hunt for the cheapest but most tasteful suits Lovecraft could endure to wear; in the process Lovecraft gained a considerable knowledge of discount clothing stores and even the rudiments of haggling. He could not feel comfortable without four suits—two light and two dark, one each for summer and winter. He really did not think it possible— based on conversations with Long, Leeds, and others—to get a good suit for under $35, but in early July, when Sonia was in town, he found a good suit for $25 at Monroe Clothes, a chain store. This was a summer suit, and Lovecraft began wearing it immediately. In October he decided to buy a heavy suit for winter, since the weather was turning colder. This, he knew, would be a considerably more difficult proposition, for really good winter suits can rarely be secured at bargain prices. To his dismay he found, on his weary peregrinations, that ‘In this age of well-heated houses men have stopped wearing the heavy clothing they used to wear … so that the unhappy victim of a menage in which the name Burns applies to the family instead of the fuel is very literally left out in the cold!’⁹

Finally he seemed to come across just what he wanted, at the Borough Clothiers in Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Lovecraft was very shrewd in dealing with the salesman: he said that he really wanted only a provisional suit until he could get a better one, therefore implying that he might buy another suit from the place later (not mentioning that it might be more than a year before he did so); the salesman, accordingly, consulted with a superior and showed him a more expensive suit but priced it at only $25. Lovecraft bought it, and took to calling it ‘the triumph’.

But he quickly came to the conclusion that he would need to buy a cheap winter suit in order not to wear out the good one, so in late October he undertook yet another long quest for a suit under $15 for everyday wear. The first place Lovecraft went was the row of stores on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan, then (as now) the haven of discount clothing in the city. What he found, after trying ‘a dozen coats of varying degrees of impossibility’, was a coat that was ‘a limp rag; crushed, dusty, twisted, & out-of-press, but I saw that cut, fabric, & fit were just right’. It was part of a $9.95 sale; but the problem was that there was no exactly matching set of trousers. Accompanying it were one trouser that was too long and two that were too short. The salesman was trying to get Lovecraft to accept the short trousers, but Lovecraft wanted the long one; after considerable haggling Lovecraft persuaded the salesman to sell him the coat, the long trousers, and one of the short trousers, all for $11.95. This was all pretty clever on Lovecraft’s part, and a tailor repaired the coat and trousers the next day. This entire adventure, too, is narrated by Lovecraft in a long and piquant letter to Lillian; in the course of which he indulges in a long tirade on the subject:

in general I think I have developed an eye for the difference between the clothing a gentleman wears & that which a gentleman doesn’t. What has sharpened this sense is the constant sight of these accursed filthy rabbles that infest the N.Y. streets, & whose clothing presents such systematic differences from the normal clothing of real people along Angell St. & in Butler Ave. or Elmgrove Ave. cars that he comes to feel a tremendous homesickness & to pounce avidly on any gentleman whose clothes are proper & tasteful & suggestive of Blackstone Boulevard rather than Borough Hall or Hell’s Kitchen … Confound it, I’ll be either in good Providence taste or in a bally bathrobe!! Certain lapel cuts, textures, & fits tell the story. It amuses me to see how some of these flashy young ‘boobs’ & foreigners spend fortunes on various kinds of expensive clothes which they regard as evidences of meritorious taste, but which in reality are their absolute social & aesthetic damnation—being little short of placards shrieking in bold letters: ’I am an ignorant peasant’, ‘I am a mongrel gutter-rat’, or ’I am a tasteless & unsophisticated yokel.’

To which he adds, with complete ingenuousness, ‘And yet perhaps these creatures are not, after all, seeking to conform to the absolute artistic standard of gentlefolk.’¹⁰ This remarkable passage testifies to Lovecraft’s inability to dissociate himself from the codes of attire and general social behaviour inculcated in him in youth. But now Lovecraft had his four suits, and he need think no more about the matter.

Not having a job at least meant that Lovecraft could go out with the boys at almost any time and also indulge in modest travels. His diary and letters are full of accounts of trips to Van Cortlandt Park, Fort Greene Park, Yonkers, and elsewhere; there were the usual walks through the colonial parts of Greenwich Village, and any number of walks across the Brooklyn Bridge.

On the night of 11 April Lovecraft and Kirk, wishing to take advantage of a special $5 excursion fare to Washington, D.C., boarded the night train at Pennsylvania Station at midnight and arrived at dawn in the capital. They would have only a single morning and afternoon in the city, so they intended to make the most of it. Thanks to the presence of two colleagues who could act as tour guides, Anne Tillery Renshaw (who had a car) and Edward L. Sechrist, the group saw an astonishing number of sites in a few hours: the Library of Congress, the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, Georgetown (the colonial town founded in 1751), Christ Church (an exquisite late Georgian structure in Alexandria), Mount Vernon (Washington’s home), Arlington (the manor of the Custis family), and the enormous Memorial Amphitheatre completed in 1920, which Lovecraft considered ‘one of the most prodigious and spectacular architectural triumphs of the Western World’.¹¹ They caught the 4.35 train back to New York just in time.

During Sonia’s long stay Lovecraft did some travelling with her. The two of them went to Scott Park in Elizabeth on 13 June. On the 28th they went to the Bryn Mawr Park section of Yonkers, where they had attempted to purchase property the previous year. With Long, Lovecraft again visited the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, in the far northwest tip of Manhattan.

On 2 July Sonia and Lovecraft took a trip to Coney Island, where he had cotton candy for the first time. On this occasion Sonia had a silhouette of herself made by a black man named Perry; Lovecraft had had his own silhouette done on 26 March. This silhouette has become very well known in recent years, and its very faithful (perhaps even a little flattering) rendition has caused Lovecraft’s profile to become an icon; the silhouette of Sonia, on the other hand, is so little known that few have had any idea of its very existence.

Now that Sonia was out of the way and his amateur work apparently finished (he managed to get out the July 1925 United Amateur only a few weeks late, and also helped set up the next editorial board through a mail election), Lovecraft felt that the time had come to buckle down to some real creative work. On 1 and 2 August he wrote ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, which he describes in a letter to Long (who was away on vacation) as follows: ‘it deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much. The tale is rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good; but it represents at least an attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness.’¹² Lovecraft is sadly correct in his analysis of the merits of the story, for it is one of the poorest of his longer efforts.

Red Hook is a small peninsula of Brooklyn facing Governor’s Island, about two miles southwest of Borough Hall. Lovecraft could easily walk to the area from 169 Clinton Street, and seems to have done so on several occasions. It was then and still remains one of the most dismal slums in the entire metropolitan area. In the story Lovecraft describes it not inaccurately, although with a certain jaundiced tartness; but of course it is not merely the physical decay that is of interest to him:

The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.

Here, in essence, is the heart of the story; for ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is nothing but a shriek of rage and loathing at the ‘foreigners’ who have taken New York away from the white people to whom it presumably belongs.

Sonia in her memoir claims to supply the inspiration for the tale: ‘It was on an evening while he, and I think Morton, Sam Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner were dining in a restaurant somewhere in Columbia Heights that a few rough, rowdyish men entered. He was so annoyed by their churlish behavior that out of this circumstance he wove ”The Horror at Red Hook”.’¹³ Lovecraft may have mentioned this event in a letter to her; but I am not entirely convinced that it was any one incident that gave birth to the story, but rather the cumulative depression of New York after a year and a half of poverty and futility.

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

Again, there is nothing here that need surprise us. And yet, in spite of what his previous biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, has suggested, comments on aliens are relatively rare in the correspondence to his aunts during this period. A long letter in early January goes on at length about the fundamental inassimilability of Jews in American life, maintaining that ‘vast harm is done by those idealists who encourage belief in a coalescence which never can be’. When he goes on to note that ‘On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types’,¹⁹ he is unwittingly reaching the heart of the issue, at least as far as he himself is concerned: in spite of Lovecraft’s talk about cultural inassimiliability, what he really finds offensive about foreigners (or, more broadly, non-’Aryans’, since many of the ethnics in New York were already first- or secondgeneration immigrants) is the fact that they look funny to him.

Of course, Lovecraft’s hostility was exacerbated by his increasingly shaky psychological state as he found himself dragging out a life in an unfamiliar, unfriendly city where he did not seem to belong and where he had few[ prospects for work or permanent comfort. Foreigners made convenient scapegoats, and New York City, then and now the most cosmopolitan and culturally heterogeneous city in the country, stood in stark contrast to the homogeneity and conservatism he had known in the first thirtyfour years of his life in New England. The city that had seemed such a fount of Dunsanian glamour and wonder had become a dirty, noisy, overcrowded place that dealt repeated blows to his selfesteem by denying him a job in spite of his abilities and by forcing him to hole up in a seedy, mice-infested, crime-ridden dump where all he could do was write racist stories like ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ as a safety-valve for his anger and despair.

Lovecraft was, however, not finished with creative work. Eight days after writing the story, on 10 August, he began a long, lone evening ramble that led through Greenwich Village to the Battery, then to the ferry to Elizabeth, which he reached at 7 a.m. He purchased a 10-cent composition book at a shop, went to Scott Park, and wrote the story ‘He’. It is interesting that in this instance Lovecraft had to leave New York in order to write about it. ‘He’, while much superior to ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, is as heartwrenching a cry of despair as its predecessor—quite avowedly so. Its opening is celebrated:

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.

In this story Lovecraft presents a kind of sociology of New York: the immigrants who have clustered there really have no ‘kinship’ with it because the city was founded by the Dutch and the English, and these immigrants are of a different cultural heritage altogether. This sophism allows Lovecraft to conclude that ‘this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life’. The immigrants are now considered to be on the level of maggots.

The narrator, like Lovecraft, seeks out Greenwich Village in particular; and it is here, at two in the morning one August night, that he meets ‘the man’, who leads him to an ancient manor-house and shows him spectacularly apocalyptic visions of past and future New York through a window. Can the specific locale of the story be identified? At the end of the tale the narrator finds himself ‘at the entrance of a little black court off Perry Street’; and this is all we need to realize that this segment of the tale was inspired by a similar expedition to Perry Street that Lovecraft took on 29 August 1924, inspired by an article in the New York Evening Post for that day, in a regular column entitled ‘Little Sketches About Town’. The exact site is 93 Perry Street, where an archway leads to a lane between three buildings. What is more, according to an historical monograph on Perry Street, this general area was heavily settled by Indians (they had named it Sapohanican), and, moreover, a sumptuous mansion was built in the block bounded by Perry, Charles, Bleecker, and West Fourth Streets sometime between 1726 and 1744, being the residence of a succession of wealthy citizens until it was razed in 1865.²⁰ Lovecraft almost certainly knew the history of the area, and he has deftly incorporated it into his tale.

Farnsworth Wright accepted ‘He’ in early October, and it appeared in Weird Tales for September 1926. Strangely enough, Lovecraft had not yet submitted ‘The Shunned House’ to Wright, but when he did so (probably in early September) Wright eventually turned it down on the grounds that it began too gradually. Lovecraft does not make any notable comment on this rejection, even though it was the first rejection he had ever had from Weird Tales.

The writing of ‘He’, however, did not put an entire end to Lovecraft’s fictional efforts. The Kalem meeting on Wednesday, 12 August, broke up at 4 a.m.; Lovecraft immediately went home and mapped out ‘a new story plot—perhaps a short novel’ which he titled ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.²¹ Although he confidently reports that ‘the writing itself will now be a relatively simple matter’, it would be more than a year before he would write this seminal story. It is a little sad to note how Lovecraft attempts to justify his state of chronic unemployment by suggesting to Lillian that a lengthy story of this sort ‘ought to bring in a very decent sized cheque’; he had earlier noted that the projected Salem novelette or novel, ‘if accepted, would bring in a goodly sum of cash’.²² It is as if he is desperately seeking to convince Lillian that he is not a drain on her (and Sonia’s) finances in spite of his lack of a regular position and his continual cafeteria-lounging with the boys.

Some time in August Lovecraft received a plot idea from C. W. Smith, editor of the Tryout. The resulting tale, ‘In the Vault’, written on 18 September, is poorer than ‘He’ but not quite as horrendously bad as ‘The Horror at Red Hook’; it is merely mediocre. This elementary supernatural revenge tale, recounting what happens to George Birch, a careless and thick-skinned undertaker, who finds himself trapped in the receiving-tomb of the cemetery he runs, is a curiously conventional tale for Lovecraft to have written at this stage of his career. He attempts to write in a more homespun, colloquial vein, but the result is not successful. August Derleth developed an unfortunate fondness for this tale, so that it still stands embalmed among volumes of Lovecraft’s ‘best’ stories.

The tale’s immediate fortunes were not very happy, either. Lovecraft dedicated the story to C. W. Smith, and it appeared in Smith’s Tryout for November 1925. Of course Lovecraft also sought professional publication; and although it would seem that ‘In the Vault’, in its limited scope and conventionally macabre orientation, would be ready-made for Weird Tales, Wright rejected it in November. The reason for the rejection, according to Lovecraft, is interesting: ‘its extreme gruesomeness would not pass the Indiana censorship’.²³ The reference, of course, is to the banning of Eddy’s ‘The Loved Dead’. Here then is the first—but not the last—instance where the apparent uproar over ‘The Loved Dead’ had a negative impact upon Lovecraft.

There was, however, better news from Wright. Lovecraft had evidently sent him ‘The Outsider’ merely for his examination, as it was already promised to W. Paul Cook—apparently for the Recluse, which Cook had conceived around September. Wright liked the story so much that he pleaded with Lovecraft to let him print it. Lovecraft managed to persuade Cook to release the story, and Wright accepted it some time around the end of the year; its appearance in Weird Tales for April 1926 would be a landmark. The rest of the year was spent variously in activity with the Kalems, in receiving out-of-town guests, and in solitary travels of an increasingly wider scope in search of antiquarian oases. Lovecraft took pleasure in acting as host to the Kalems on occasion, and his letters display how much he enjoyed treating his friends to coffee, cake, and other humble delectables on his best blue china. On 29 July he bought for 49 cents an aluminum pail with which to fetch hot coffee from the deli at the corner of State and Court Streets.

Some new colleagues emerged on Lovecraft’s horizon about this time. One, Wilfred Blanch Talman (1904–1986), was an amateur of Dutch ancestry who was attending Brown University. The two met in late August, and Lovecraft took to him immediately. Talman went on to become a reporter for the New York Times and later an editor of the Texaco Star, a paper issued by the oil company. He made random ventures into professional fiction, and would later have one of his stories subjected to (possibly unwanted) revision by Lovecraft. Talman was perhaps the first addition to the core membership of the Kalem Club, although he did not begin regular attendance until after Lovecraft had left New York.

A still more congenial colleague was Vrest Teachout Orton (1897–1986). Orton was a friend of W. Paul Cook, and at this time worked in the advertising department of the American Mercury. Later he would achieve distinction as an editor at the Saturday Review of Literature and, still later, as the founder of the Vermont Country Store. Orton became perhaps the second honorary member of the Kalems, although his attendance at meetings was also irregular until after Lovecraft’s departure from New York. Orton did a little literary work of his own—he compiled a bibliography of Theodore Dreiser, Dreiserana (1929), founded the Colophon, a bibliophiles’ magazine, and later founded the Stephen Daye Press in Vermont, for which Lovecraft would do some freelance work— but he had little interest in the weird. Nevertheless, their mutual New England background and their loathing of New York gave the two men much to talk about.

Aside from activities with friends, Lovecraft engaged in much solitary travel in the latter half of 1925. One of his most extensive trips of the season was a three-day trip to Jamaica, Mineola, Hempstead, Garden City, and Freeport on Long Island. Jamaica was then a separate community but is now a part of Queens; the other towns are in Nassau County, east of Queens. On 27 September Lovecraft went to Jamaica, which ‘utterly astonisht’ him: ‘There, all about me, lay a veritable New-England village; with wooden colonial houses, Georgian churches, & deliciously sleepy & shady streets where giant elms & maples stood in dense & luxurious rows.’²⁴ Things are, I fear, very different now. Thereafter he went north to Flushing, also once separate and also now part of Queens. This was a Dutch settlement, and it too retained gratifying touches of colonialism. One structure—the Bowne house (1661) at Bowne Street and 37th Avenue—particularly delighted him.

The 29th, however, was his great Long Island journey. Reaching Garden City, he saw the extensive college-like brick buildings of Doubleday, Page & Co., now (after many years as Doubleday, Doran) simply Doubleday; the publisher has moved its editorial offices to Manhattan but still retains a considerable presence in its city of origin. Continuing southward on foot, he came to Hempstead, which captivated him utterly. Once again it was the churches that delighted him—St George’s Episcopal, Methodist, Christ’s First Presbyterian, and others. He spent considerable time in Hempstead, then continued south on foot to Freeport, which he found pleasant but undistinguished from an antiquarian point of view. All this walking must have covered close to ten miles.

The importance of these expeditions to Lovecraft’s psyche can scarcely be overestimated. The shimmering skyscrapers of Manhattan had proved, upon closer examination, to be an oppressive horror; as he had noted when refusing the offer to edit Weird Tales in Chicago, ‘it is colonial atmosphere which supplies my very breath of life’.²⁵ Lovecraft had, indeed, developed an uncanny nose for antiquity, whether it be in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or in the further reaches of the metropolitan area.

After September Lovecraft lapsed again into literary quiescence. Then, in mid-November, he announces that ‘W. Paul Cook wants an article from me on the element of terror & weirdness in literature’²⁶ for his new magazine, the Recluse. He goes on to say that ‘I shall take my time about preparing it’, which was true enough: it would be close to a year and a half before he put the finishing touches on what would become ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.

Lovecraft began the actual writing of the article in late December; by early January he had already written the first four chapters and was reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights preparatory to writing about it at the end of Chapter V; by March he had written Chapter VII, on Poe; and by the middle of April he had gotten ‘half through Arthur Machen’ (Chapter X).²⁷ It is not entirely clear from his initial mention that Cook actually wished an historical monograph—an essay ‘on the element of terror & weirdness’ could just as well have been theoretical or thematic— but Lovecraft clearly interpreted it this way.

Lovecraft had, of course, read much of the significant weird literature up to his time, but he was still making discoveries. Two of the writers whom he would rank very highly were encountered only at about this time. He had first read Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) as early as 1920, at the recommendation of James F. Morton, but did not care for him at all at this time. Then, in late September 1924, he read The Listener and Other Stories (1907), containing ‘The Willows’, ‘perhaps the most devastating piece of supernaturally hideous suggestion which I have beheld in a decade’.²⁸ In later years Lovecraft would unhesitatingly (and, I think, correctly) deem ‘The Willows’ the single greatest weird story ever written, followed by Machen’s ‘The White People’.

As with Machen and Dunsany, Blackwood is an author Lovecraft should have discovered earlier than he did. His first book, The Empty House and Other Stories (1906), is admittedly slight, although with a few notable items. John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908) became a bestseller, allowing Blackwood to spend the years 1908–14 in Switzerland, where he did most of his best work. Incredible Adventures (1914)—the very volume toward which Lovecraft was so lukewarm in 1920—is one of the great weird collections of all time.

Blackwood was frankly a mystic. In his autobiography, Episodes Before Thirty (1923), he admits to relieving the heavy and conventional religiosity of his household by an absorption of Buddhist philosophy, and he ultimately developed a remarkably vital and intensely felt pantheism that emerges most clearly in his novel The Centaur (1911), the central work in his corpus and the equivalent of a spiritual autobiography. In a sense Blackwood sought the same sort of return to the natural world as Dunsany. But because he was, unlike Dunsany, a mystic, he would see in the return to Nature a shedding of the moral and spiritual blinders which in his view modern urban civilization places upon us; hence his ultimate goal is an expansion of consciousness that opens up to our perception the boundless universe with its throbbing presences. Several of his novels deal explicitly with reincarnation, in such a way as to suggest that Blackwood himself clearly believed in it. Philosophically, therefore, Blackwood and Lovecraft were poles apart; but the latter never let that bother him, and there is much in Blackwood to relish even if one does not subscribe to his world view.

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) is a much different proposition. Weird writing represents a quite small proportion of his writing, and was indeed merely a diversion from his work as educator, authority on medieval manuscripts, and Biblical scholar. His edition of the Apocryphal New Testament (1924) long remained standard. James took to telling ghost stories while at Cambridge, and his first tales were recited at a meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893. He later became Provost of Eton and began telling his tales to his young charges at Christmas. They were eventually collected in four volumes: Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904); More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); A Thin Ghost and Others (1919); and A Warning to the Curious (1925). This relatively slim body of work is none the less a landmark in weird literature. If nothing else, it represents the ultimate refinement of the conventional ghost story. James was a master at short story construction; he also was one of the few who could write in a chatty, whimsical, and bantering style without destroying the potency of his horrors. Like Lovecraft and Machen, James has attracted a somewhat fanatical cadre of devotees. But in all honesty, much of James’s work is thin and insubstantial: he had no vision of the world to put across, as Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and Lovecraft did, and many of his tales seem like academic exercises in shudder-mongering. Lovecraft seems first to have read James in mid-December 1925. Although his enthusiasm for him was high at the time, it would later cool off. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ he would rank James as a ‘modern master’, but by 1932 he declared that ‘he isn’t really in the Machen, Blackwood, & Dunsany class. He is the earthiest member of the “big four”’.²⁹

There was not much criticism of weird fiction up to this time upon which Lovecraft could draw for his treatise. He read Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921), a landmark study of Gothic fiction, in late November; it is quite clear that he borrowed heavily from this treatise in his chapters (II–V) on the Gothics, both in the structure of his analysis and in some points of evaluation. Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927) came out just about the time of Lovecraft’s own essay; it is a very penetrating historical and thematic study that Lovecraft later read with appreciation. Conversely, the only exhaustive study of modern weird fiction was Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917), which Lovecraft would not read until 1932; but, when he did so, he rightly criticized it as being overly schematic in its thematic analyses and hampered by an amusing squeamishness in the face of the explicit horrors of Stoker, Machen, and others.

Lovecraft’s essay, accordingly, gains its greatest originality as an historical study in its final six chapters. His lengthy chapter on Poe is, I think, one of the most perceptive short analyses ever written, in spite of a certain flamboyancy in its diction. Lovecraft could not summon up much enthusiasm for the later Victorians in England, but his lengthy discussions of Hawthorne and Bierce in Chapter VIII are illuminating. And his greatest achievement, perhaps, was to designate Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M. R. James as the four ‘modern masters’ of the weird tale; a judgment that has been justified by subsequent scholarship. Indeed, the only ‘master’ lacking from this list is Lovecraft himself.

Lovecraft admitted that the writing of this essay produced two good effects; first: ‘It’s good preparation for composing a new series of weird tales of my own’;³⁰ and second: ‘This course of reading & writing I am going through for the Cook article is excellent mental discipline, & a fine gesture of demarcation betwixt my aimless, lost existence of the past year or two & the resumed Providence-like hermitage amidst which I hope to grind out some tales worth writing.’³¹ The second effect is one more in a succession of resolutions to cease his all-day and all-night gallivanting with the gang and get down to real work; how successful this was, it is difficult to say, in the absence of a diary for 1926. As for the first effect, it came to fruition in late February, when ‘Cool Air’ was apparently written.

‘Cool Air’ is the last and perhaps the best of Lovecraft’s New York stories. It is a compact exposition of pure physical loathsomeness, dealing with what happens when a Dr Muñoz, who requires constant coolness in his New York apartment, finds his air conditioning unit malfunctioning, and the narrator is unable to find anyone to fix it. The result is that Muñoz, who is actually dead but is trying to keep himself alive by artificial preservation, ends as a ‘kind of dark, slimy trail [that] led from the open bathroom to the hall door’ and that ‘ended unutterably’.

The apartment house that serves as the setting of the tale is based on the brownstone occupied by George Kirk both as a residence and as the site of his Chelsea Book Shop at 317 West 14th Street in Manhattan for two months during the late summer of 1925. In regard to literary influences, Lovecraft later admitted that the chief inspiration was not Poe’s ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ but Machen’s ‘Novel of the White Powder’ (an episode from The Three Impostors),³² where a hapless student unwittingly takes a drug that reduces him to a loathsome mass of liquescence. And yet, one can hardly deny that M. Valdemar, the man who, after his presumed death, is kept alive after a fashion for months by hypnosis and who at the end collapses ‘in a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity’, was somewhere in the back of Lovecraft’s mind in the writing of ‘Cool Air’. This story, much more than ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, is Lovecraft’s most successful evocation of the horror to be found in the teeming clangour of America’s only true megalopolis.

Farnsworth Wright incredibly and inexplicably rejected ‘Cool Air’, even though it is just the sort of safe, macabre tale he would have liked. Perhaps, as with ‘In the Vault’, he was afraid of its grisly conclusion. In any event, Lovecraft was forced to sell the story for $18 to the short-lived Tales of Magic and Mystery, where it appeared in the March 1928 issue.

Meanwhile Lovecraft finally secured some employment, even if it was of a temporary and, frankly, ignominious sort. In September Loveman had secured work at the prestigious Dauber & Pine bookshop at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, and he convinced his superiors to hire Lovecraft as an envelope-addresser for three weeks, probably beginning on 7 March. Lovecraft had helped Kirk out at this task on several occasions in 1925, doing the work for free because of Kirk’s many kindnesses to him. The pay at the Dauber & Pine job would be $17.50 per week. Lovecraft speaks of the enterprise as a lark (‘Moriturus te saluto! Before the final plunge into the abyss I am squaring all my indebtedness to mankind’³³), but he probably found the work highly tedious, as he never relished repetitive, mechanical tasks of this sort.

Lovecraft himself does not say anything to Lillian about liking or disliking the job. Perhaps he did not wish to seem unwilling to earn a living; but perhaps, by 27 March, he had other things on his mind. His letter to Lillian of that date begins:

Well!!! All your epistles arrived & received a grateful welcome, but the third one was the climax that relegates everything else to the distance!! Whoop! Bang! I had to go on a celebration forthwith, … & have now returned to gloat & reply. A E P G’s letter came, too—riotous symposium!! … And now about your invitation. Hooray!! Long live the State of Rhode-Island & Providence-Plantations!!!³⁴ In other words, Lovecraft had at last been invited to return to Providence.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Paradise Regain’d (1926)

The saga of Lovecraft’s efforts to return to Providence can be said to commence around April 1925, when he writes to Lillian that ‘I couldn’t bear to see Providence again till I can be there for ever’.¹ Lillian had clearly suggested that Lovecraft pay a visit, perhaps to relieve the tedium and even depression that his lack of work, his dismal Clinton Street room, and the rocky state of his marriage had engendered.

When Lovecraft stated in November 1925 that ‘My mental life is really at home’² in Providence, he was not exaggerating. For the entirety of his New York stay, he subscribed to the Providence Evening Bulletin, reading the Providence Sunday Journal (the Bulletin published no Sunday edition) along with the New York Times on Sunday. He mentally attempted to stay in touch with Providence in other ways, specifically by reading as many books on Providence history as he could.

But reading books was clearly not enough. One of the most remarkable passages in Lovecraft’s letters to his aunts is on the subject of personal possessions, and it is an accurate gauge of his temper during the worst of his New York period. Lillian had made the comment (perhaps as a consequence of Lovecraft’s long-winded account of purchasing his best suit) that ‘possessions are a burden’; Lovecraft, in August 1925, flung this remark back in her face:

It so happens that I am unable to take pleasure or interest in anything but a mental re-creation of other & better days— for in sooth, I see no possibility of ever encountering a really congenial milieu or living among civilised people with old Yankee historic memories again—so in order to avoid the madness which leads to violence & suicide I must cling to the few shreds of old days & old ways which are left to me. Therefore no one need expect me to discard the ponderous furniture & paintings & clocks & books which help to keep 454 always in my dreams. When they go, I shall go, for they are all that make it possible for me to open my eyes in the morning or look forward to another day of consciousness without screaming in sheer desperation & pounding the walls & floor in a frenzied clamour to be waked up out of the nightmare of ‘reality’ & my own room in Providence. Yes— such sensitivenesses of temperament are very inconvenient when one has no money—but it’s easier to criticise than to cure them. When a poor fool possessing them allows himself to get exiled & sidetracked through temporarily false perspective & ignorance of the world, the only thing to do is to let him cling to his pathetic scraps as long as he can hold them. They are life for him.³

A treatise could be written on this poignant passage. How Lillian reacted to her only nephew speaking with apparent seriousness— or, at least, with extreme bitterness—about suicide and screaming and pounding the walls, it is not possible to say.

There is a very curious sidelight to this entire matter. Winfield Townley Scott claims that, according to Samuel Loveman, Lovecraft during the latter part of his New York period ‘carried a phial of poison with him’ (Loveman’s words) so as to be able to put an end to his existence if things became too unbearable.⁴ In all honesty, I find this notion preposterous. I flatly believe that Loveman has invented this story. Loveman turned against Lovecraft’s memory later in life, largely on the belief that Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism (about which he learned from Sonia as early as 1948) made him a hypocrite. It is also possible that Loveman simply misunderstood something that Lovecraft had said—perhaps something meant as a sardonic joke. There is certainly no independent confirmation of this anecdote, and no mention of it by any other friend or correspondent; and one suspects that Lovecraft would have confided in Long more than in Loveman on a matter of such delicacy. I think it is quite out of character for Lovecraft to have come so close to suicide even during this difficult period; indeed, the general tenor of his letters to his aunts, even taking into consideration such passages as I have quoted above, is by no means uniformly depressed or lugubrious.

The subject of Lovecraft’s return was broached again in December. At this time he says that ‘S H fully endorses my design of an ultimate return to New England, & herself intends to seek industrial openings in the Boston district after a time’, then proceeds to sing Sonia’s praises in a very touching way in spite of its almost bathetic tone:

S H’s attitude on all such matters is so kindly & magnanimous that any design of permanent isolation on my part would seem little short of barbaric, & wholly contrary to the principles of taste which impel one to recognise & revere a devotion of the most unselfish quality & uncommon intensity. I have never beheld a more admirable attitude of disinterested & solicitous regard; in which each financial shortcoming of mine is accepted & condoned as soon as it is proved inevitable, & in which acquiescence is extended even to my statements … that the one essential ingredient of my life is a certain amount of quiet & freedom for creative literary composition … A devotion which can accept this combination of incompetence & aesthetic selfishness without a murmur, contrary tho’ it must be to all expectations originally entertained; is assuredly a phenomenon so rare, & so akin to the historic quality of saintliness, that no one with the least sense of artistic proportion could possibly meet it with other than the keenest reciprocal esteem, respect, admiration, & affection.⁵

What I believe has inspired this long-winded passage is a suggestion by Lillian that Lovecraft simply come home and forget about Sonia, leading Lovecraft to counter that he cannot countenance ‘any design of permanent isolation’ from her given her boundlessly patient and understanding attitude.

But after December, the issue of Lovecraft’s return was evidently dropped, perhaps because all parties concerned were waiting to see about the possibility of his securing employment at Morton’s museum in Paterson. Three more months passed with no prospect of work for Lovecraft except a temporary job as envelopeaddresser; and so, on 27 March, he finally received the invitation to come home.

What, or who, was behind the invitation? Was it merely Lillian’s decision? Did Annie add her vote? Were there others involved? There is conflicting evidence on the point. Frank Long told Winfield Townley Scott that he had written to Annie ‘urging that arrangements be set in motion to restore [Lovecraft] to Providence’;⁶ but in his 1975 memoir Long noted that his mother wrote a letter to the aunts.⁷ So who wrote the letter, Long or his mother? The latter theory is not at all improbable: during Lillian’s month or so in New York during December 1924 and January 1925, she and Lovecraft visited the Longs frequently; and it seems that a bond was established between these two elderly women whose son and nephew, respectively, were such close friends. Still, Long’s earlier mentions that he wrote the letter may perhaps be more reliable; or perhaps both Long and his mother did so.

After making the preliminary invitation, Lillian had evidently suggested Boston or Cambridge as a more likely place for Lovecraft to find literary work. Lovecraft grudgingly admitted the apparent good sense of this idea, but then, in words both poignant and a little sad, made a plea for residing in Providence:

To all intents & purposes I am more naturally isolated from mankind than Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, who dwelt alone in the midst of crowds, & whom Salem knew only after he died. Therefore, it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape & scenery … My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical & architectural … I am always an outsider—to all scenes & all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence … Providence is my home, & there I shall end my days if I can do so with any semblance of peace, dignity, or appropriateness … Providence would always be at the back of my head as a goal to be worked toward—an ultimate Paradise to be regain’d at last.⁸

Lillian shortly afterward decided that her nephew should come back to Providence. She found a place for the two of them at 10 Barnes Street, north of the Brown University campus, and asked Lovecraft whether she should take it. He responded with another near-hysterical letter: ‘Whoopee!! Bang!! ‘Rah!! For God’s sake jump at that room without a second’s delay!! I can’t believe it—too good to be true! … Somebody wake me up before the dream becomes so poignant I can’t bear to be waked up!!!’⁹

I have quoted these letters at such length—and several of them go on for pages in this vein—to display how close to the end of his tether Lovecraft must have been. He had tried for two years to put the best face on things—had tried to convince Lillian, and perhaps himself, that his coming to New York was not a mistake—but when the prospect of going home was held out, he leaped at it with an alacrity that betrays his desperation.

The big question, of course, was where Sonia fitted in—or, perhaps, whether she fitted in. Although Sonia would return from the Midwest to help Lovecraft pack and accompany him home to get him ensconced in his new quarters, there was certainly no thought at this juncture of her actually living in Providence or working there. And yet, such a course was clearly considered at some point—at least by Sonia, and perhaps by Lovecraft as well. In her memoir she remarks: ‘He wanted more than anything else to go back to Providence but he also wanted me to come along, and this I could not do because there was no situation open there for me; that is, one fitting my ability and my need.’ Perhaps the most dramatic passage in her entire memoir relates to this critical period:

When he no longer could tolerate Brooklyn, I, myself, suggested that he return to Providence. Said he, ‘If we could but both return to live in Providence, the blessed city where I was born and reared, I am sure, there I could be happy.’ I agreed, ‘I’d love nothing better than to live in Providence if I could do my work there but Providence has no particular niche that I could fill.’ He returned to Providence himself. I came much later.

H. P. lived in a large studio room at that time, where the kitchen was shared with two other occupants. His aunt, Mrs. Clark, had a room in the same house while Mrs. Gamwell, the younger aunt, lived elsewhere. Then we had a conference with the aunts. I suggested that I would take a large house, secure a good maid, pay all the expenses and have the two aunts live with us at no expense to them, or at least they would live better at no greater expense. H. P. and I actually negotiated the rental of such a house with the option to buy it if we found we liked it. H. P. was to use one side of it as his study and library, and I would use the other side as a business venture of my own. At this time the aunts gently but firmly informed me that neither they nor Howard could afford to have Howard’s wife work for a living in Providence. That was that. I now knew where we all stood. Pride preferred to suffer in silence; both theirs and mine.¹⁰

This account is full of difficulties. First, it is clear that Sonia was not the one who ‘suggested that he return to Providence’, else Lovecraft would not have told Lillian repeatedly that she was merely ‘endorsing’ the move. Second, it is cannot be ascertained exactly when this ‘conference’ in Providence took place. It may have occurred in early summer; then again, Sonia’s mention that she came to Providence ‘much later’ may mean that she came only years later—perhaps as late as 1928, for it was only then that actual divorce proceedings—undertaken at her insistence—were instituted.

The critical issue is the ‘pride’ cited by Sonia. We here see the clash of cultures and generations at its clearest: on the one side the dynamic, perhaps domineering businesswoman striving to salvage her marriage by taking things into her own hands, and on the other side the Victorian shabby-genteel matrons who could not ‘afford’ the social catastrophe of seeing their only nephew’s wife set up a shop and support them in the very town where the name of Phillips still represented something akin to an aristocracy. The exact wording of Sonia’s comment is of note: it carries the implication that the aunts might have countenanced her opening a shop somewhere other than Providence.