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

Helen V. Sully (1904–97) met Lovecraft in person before corresponding with him. The daughter of Genevieve K. Sully, a married woman in Auburn, California, with whom Clark Ashton Smith carried on a long-time affair, Sully decided to explore the eastern seaboard in the summer of 1933, and Smith urged her to look up Lovecraft in Providence. She did so, arriving in the city in early July and being shown all the sites in Providence as well as Newport, Newburyport, and elsewhere. Lovecraft paid for all of Sully’s expenses—meals, trips, lodging at the boarding house across the street from 66 College—while he was her host; she could not have known what a severe burden this must have placed upon his own perilous financial condition. One evening Lovecraft took her to one of his favourite haunts, the hidden churchyard of St John’s Episcopal Church:

It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought that I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.⁸

What a ladies’ man! It should be noted that Sully was indeed an exceptionally attractive woman. When she went to New York after visiting Lovecraft, she bowled over the entire weird fiction crowd there: Lovecraft drily reports having to keep Frank Long and Donald Wandrei from fighting a duel over her.

Herman C. Koenig (1893–1959) was, like Searight, well beyond his teen years when he wrote to Lovecraft in the fall of 1933. An employee of the Electrical Testing Laboratories in New York City, Koenig had an impressive private collection of rare books, and he had asked Lovecraft about the Necronomicon

and how it could be procured. Lovecraft, disillusioning Koenig about the reality of the volume, nevertheless continued to stay in touch with him, and Koenig would lend him a significant number of weird books that would affect Lovecraft strongly over the next several years. In particular, in the summer of 1934, Koenig began circulating around the Lovecraft circle copies of the forgotten work of William Hope Hodgson, whose novels and tales—particularly The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land

(1912)—are prodigious feats of the imagination. August Derleth would later reprint much of Hodgson’s work with Arkham House.

The post-Christmas season of 1933–34 again found Lovecraft in New York, and this time he ended up meeting an unusual number of colleagues old and new, among them Desmond Hall (associate editor of Astounding Stories) and Donald Wandrei’s superlatively talented brother, the weird artist Howard Wandrei.

On the 31st Lovecraft saw the old year out at Samuel Loveman’s flat in Brooklyn Heights, where he renewed his acquaintance with Hart Crane’s mother, whom he had met in Cleveland in 1922. Crane, of course, had committed suicide in 1932. It was on this occasion, evidently—if Loveman’s word can be trusted—that Loveman’s roommate Patrick McGrath spiked Lovecraft’s drink, causing him to talk even more animatedly than he usually did.⁹

Lovecraft gives no indication of any such thing, and one would imagine that someone so sensitive to alcohol (its mere smell was nearly a purgative) would have detected the ruse. I am half inclined to doubt this anecdote, engaging as it is.

The rest of the winter and early spring of 1934 passed uneventfully, until in mid-March R. H. Barlow made a momentous announcement: he invited Lovecraft for an indefinite visit to his family’s home in De Land, Florida. Lovecraft, whose last trip to Florida and its energizing heat had been in 1931, was anxious to accept the invitation, and the only obstacle was money. But the money does seem to have come in, for by mid-April Lovecraft was making definite plans to head south.

The trip began around 17 April, and after the usual few days in New York he reached Charleston on the 24th, where he spent almost a week. Finally he boarded a bus and arrived at De Land just after noon on 2 May. Barlow and his family actually lived a good eighteen miles southwest of that city along what is now State Road 44; the residence was probably closer to the small town of Cassia than to De Land. There was a lake on the property, and the nearest neighbour was three miles away.¹⁰