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

The result cannot by any means be called satisfactory. Whereas ‘The Silver Key’ is a poignant reflection of some of Lovecraft’s innermost sentiments and beliefs, ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ is nothing more than a fantastic adventure story with awkward and laboured mathematical and philosophical interludes. Price has remarked that ‘I estimated that [Lovecraft] had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words’,¹⁹ a comment that has led many to believe that the finished version of ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ is radically different from Price’s original; but Lovecraft in fact adhered to the basic framework of Price’s tale as best he could. Price submitted the story to Weird Tales on 19 June, but Farnsworth Wright turned it down. True to his contrary ways, however, he later accepted it. It appeared in the issue for July 1934.

Late in 1932 Lovecraft was pained by the death on 23 November of Henry S. Whitehead, who finally succumbed to the gastric ailment that had enfeebled him for years. Lovecraft pays unaffected tribute to him in a letter to E. Hoffmann Price.²⁰

I have already mentioned Lovecraft’s revision of Whitehead’s ‘The Trap’. There are two other stories on which he gave some assistance, although it is my belief that he contributed no actual prose to either of them. One is ‘Cassius’, which is clearly based upon an entry in Lovecraft’s commonplace book about a man who has a miniature Siamese twin. Whitehead has followed the details of this entry fairly closely in his tale (Strange Tales, November 1931), except that he transfers it to his customary West Indian locale. Lovecraft later admitted that his own development of the idea would have been very different from Whitehead’s.²¹

The other story on which Lovecraft had been assisting Whitehead was called ‘The Bruise’, but he was uncertain whether it had ever been completed. This matter first comes up in April 1932, when Lovecraft notes that ‘I’m now helping Whitehead prepare a new ending and background for a story Bates had rejected’. The story involves a man who suffers a bruise to the head and—in Lovecraft’s version—’excite[s] cells of hereditary memory causing the man to hear the destruction and sinking of fabulous Mu 20,000 years ago!’²² Some have believed that Lovecraft may have actually written or revised this story, but from internal evidence it seems to me that none of the writing is Lovecraft’s, although he does appear to have provided a synopsis of some sort. The story was not published until it appeared in Whitehead’s second Arkham House volume, West India Lights (1946).

Lovecraft wrote a two-page obituary of Whitehead and sent it to Farnsworth Wright, urging that it be used as a quarry for an announcement in Weird Tales. Wright ran the piece as a separate unsigned article—’In Memoriam: Henry St. Clair Whitehead’—in the March 1933 issue, but used only about a quarter of what Lovecraft had sent him, and, since Lovecraft kept no copy of his original, the full text has now been lost.

One very strange piece of writing Lovecraft did at this time was ‘European Glimpses’, dated on the manuscript to 19 December 1932. This is a very conventionalized travelogue of the principal tourist sites in western Europe (chiefly in Germany, France, and England), and is nothing less than a ghostwriting job for Sonia, although Lovecraft—on the few occasions when he spoke of the assignment to correspondents—went out of his way to conceal the fact. Sonia remarks in her memoir:

In 1932 I went to Europe. I was almost tempted to invite him along but I knew that since I was no longer his wife he would not have accepted. However, I wrote to him from England, Germany and France, sending him books and pictures of every conceivable scene that I thought might interest him … I sent a travelogue to H. P. which he revised for me.²³

‘European Glimpses’ itself is by far the least interesting of Lovecraft’s travelogues—if, indeed, it can even be called such—on account of its very hackneyed descriptions of very hackneyed tourist sites that no bourgeois traveller ever fails to visit. Perhaps its only interesting feature is its record of Sonia’s glimpse of Hitler in the flesh in Wiesbaden.

At the very end of 1932 Lovecraft instituted what would become another travelling ritual, as he spent the week or so after Christmas in New York with the Longs. Naturally, he spent Christmas with Annie in Providence, but the very next day he caught a bus for New York and arrived at 230 West 97th Street for a visit of seven or eight days. Loveman and Kirk were dumbfounded to see Lovecraft in the city, but Morton proved to be away from his museum for more than a week, so that no meeting could be arranged. Lovecraft stayed in the city until 3 January.