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

Edgar Hoffmann Price (1898–1989) was certainly an unusual individual. A man of many talents—he knew Arabic and he also knew how to fence—he wrote some fine stories for Weird Tales and other pulps in the early 1920s, including the superb ‘Stranger from Kurdistan’ (Weird Tales

, July 1925). But the depression hurt Price in more than one way: in May 1932 he was laid off from the wellpaying job he had held with the Prestolite Company, and he decided to try his hand at making a living by writing. He felt he could do so only by writing exactly what the editors wanted, so he began catering quite coldbloodedly to market requirements in many different realms of pulp fiction—weird, ‘Oriental’, ‘weird menace’, and the like. The result was that throughout the 1930s and 1940s Price landed a flood of very slick but literarily valueless material in such magazines, spelling his aesthetic damnation and relegating the vast majority of his work to the oblivion it deserves. Price has an affecting account of his first meeting with Lovecraft:

he carried himself with enough of a slouch to make me underestimate his height as well as the breadth of his shoulders. His face was thin and narrow, longish, with long chin and jaw. He walked with a quick stride. His speech was quick and inclined to jerkiness. It was as though his body was hard put to it to keep up with the agility of his mind …

Twenty-eight hours we gabbled, swapping ideas, kicking fancies back and forth, topping each other’s whimsies. He had an enormous enthusiasm for new experience: of sight, of sound, of word pattern, of idea pattern. I have met in all my time only one or two others who approached him in what I call ‘mental greed.’ A glutton for words, ideas, thoughts. He elaborated, combined, distilled, and at a machine gun tempo.¹¹

As if it were not evident in so many other ways, this first encounter with Price goes far in showing how Lovecraft had matured as a human being over the past fifteen years.

One curious myth that has somehow developed from Lovecraft’s New Orleans trip is the belief that Price took Lovecraft to a whorehouse where the women proved to be avid readers of Weird Tales

and were especially fond of Lovecraft’s stories. In fact, this story actually applies to Seabury Quinn (assuming it is not entirely apocryphal); it appears that the women offered Quinn ‘one on the house’ in honour of his illustrious status. Price explicitly and rather drily remarks in his memoir that, out of deference to Lovecraft’s sensibilities, ‘I skipped concubines entirely.’

From New Orleans Lovecraft finally moved on to Mobile, Alabama, then to Montgomery and Atlanta, although the latter city was modern and had no attractions for him. He then proceeded up the Carolinas to Richmond, which he reached toward the end of June. After canvassing the usual sites relating to Poe and the Confederacy, Lovecraft stopped briefly at Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and Philadelphia, finally ending up back in New York around 25 June. This time he stayed in an apartment a few doors away from Loveman in Brooklyn Heights. He expected to linger in the city for more than a week, but a telegram from Annie on 1 July called him suddenly home.

Lillian was critically ill and not expected to survive. Lovecraft caught the first train to Providence, arriving late on the 1st. He found Lillian in a semi-coma, from which she would not awaken until her death on 3 July. She was seventy-six years old. The cause of death was given on her death certificate as atrophic arthritis. Lovecraft had spoken over the years of her various ailments— chiefly neuritis and lumbago—the general effect of which was to limit her mobility severely and render her largely housebound. These various maladies now finally caught up with her.

Lovecraft was not given to expressing extreme emotions in his correspondence, and that was his right; but his remarks to friends about Lillian’s passing scarcely mask the deep grief he felt:

The suddenness of the event is both bewildering and merciful—the latter because we cannot yet realise, subjectively, that it has actually occurred at all. It would, for example, seem incredibly unnatural to disturb the pillows now arranged for my aunt in the rocker beside my centre-table—her accustomed reading-place each evening.¹²