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

A few months before he moved to 66 College, around 11 March, Lovecraft had taken a trip to Hartford, Connecticut—on what he tells one correspondent was ‘a job of research which a client was conducting at the library there’.² Again Lovecraft has prevaricated, and again the reason is connected with his ex-wife; for this was the last time he and Sonia saw each other face to face. After she returned from her European tour, Sonia took a trip to the Hartford suburbs of Farmington and Wethersfield; she was so captivated with the colonial antiquities in these towns that she wrote to Lovecraft and asked him to join her. He did so, spending a day and a night there.

That evening, before they parted for the night, Sonia said, ‘Howard, won’t you kiss me goodnight?’ Lovecraft replied, ‘No, it is better not to.’ The next morning they explored Hartford itself, and that evening, as they bade each other adieu, Sonia did not ask for a kiss.³ They never saw each other again nor, so far as I can tell, corresponded.

The new household at 66 College got off, literally, on the wrong foot when, on 14 June, Annie fell down the stairs and broke her ankle. She remained in Rhode Island Hospital for three weeks in a cast and returned home on 5 July, essentially bedridden and with a nurse in attendance; the cast was removed on 3 August, but Annie had to continue using crutches until well into the fall. All this could not have helped the finances of the household, and in an unguarded moment Lovecraft makes note of the ‘financial strain utterly ruinous to us at the present juncture!’⁴

There was some relief, however. On 30 June the peripatetic E.

Hoffmann Price paid Lovecraft a four-day call in Providence in the course of an automobile tour across the country in a 1928 Ford that Lovecraft deemed the Juggernaut. This handy vehicle allowed Lovecraft to see parts of his own state that he had never visited before, in particular the so-called Narragansett Country or South County—the stretch of countryside on the western and southern side of Narragansett Bay, where in the colonial period actual plantations resembling those in the South had existed.

Harry Brobst joined in some of the festivities. On one occasion, when Price was preparing a feast of Indian curry, Brobst made the faux pas of bringing a six-pack of beer. Lovecraft had apparently never seen such a quantity of alcoholic beverages before. Let Price again tell the story:

‘And what,’ he asked, out of scientific curiosity, ‘are you going to do with so much of it?’

‘Drink it,’ said Brobst. ‘Only three bottles a-piece.’

I’ll never forget HPL’s look of utter incredulity … And he watched us with unconcealed curiosity, and with a touch of apprehension, as we drank three bottles a-piece. I’m sure he made a detailed entry in his journal to record this, to him, unusual feat.⁵

Lovecraft’s third and last trip to Quebec occurred in early September, when Annie gave Lovecraft a belated birthday present of a week’s vacation from nursing. He prefaced the trip by visiting Cook in Boston on 2 September, then crammed as much into the next four days as possible, seeing all the sights he had seen on his two previous visits. Lovecraft also managed one day in Montreal, which he found appealing if entirely modern.

In late summer 1933 Samuel Loveman spoke with an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Allen G. Ullman, about Lovecraft’s stories. On Ullman’s request, Lovecraft sent in a total of twenty-five stories— nearly all the work he had not repudiated.

Sympathetic as I generally am to Lovecraft’s relentlessly uncommercial stance, I have difficulty refraining from a strong inclination to kick him in the seat of the pants for the letter he wrote to Ullman accompanying these stories. Throughout the letter Lovecraft repeatedly denigrates his own work out of what he fancies to be gentlemanly humility but which Ullman probably took to be lack of confidence in his own work. For example: ‘The Tomb’ is ‘stiff in diction’; ‘The Temple’ is ‘nothing remarkable’; ‘The Outsider’ is ‘rather bombastic in style & mechanical in climax’; and on and on.⁶ For some reason, perhaps because they were not published, Lovecraft did not send At the Mountains of Madness or ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, two of his strongest works.

It is scarcely a surprise that Ullman ultimately rejected the collection, sending Lovecraft on another round of self-recrimination. And yet, in this case the rejection was not entirely the fault of Lovecraft’s lack of salesmanship. Ullman had asked Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales whether he could dispose of a thousand copies of a proposed collection of Lovecraft’s stories through the magazine; Wright said he could not guarantee such a sale, and Ullman promptly turned down the stories.