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

Many of the surface details of the plot were taken directly from Hanns Heinz Ewers’s ‘The Spider’, which Lovecraft read in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931). This story involves a man who becomes fascinated with a strange woman he sees through his window in a building across from his own, until finally he seems to lose hold of his own personality.

A great proportion of the landmarks described in the story are based upon actual sites. The view from Blake’s study, as is well known, is nothing more than a poignant description of what Lovecraft saw out of his own study at 66 College Street. The church that figures so prominently in the tale is (or, rather, was) also real: it is St John’s Catholic Church on Atwell’s Avenue in Federal Hill, destroyed in 1992. It was, in Lovecraft’s day, very much a going concern, being the principal Catholic church in the area. The description of the interior and belfry of the church is quite accurate. Lovecraft heard that the steeple had been destroyed by lightning in late June of 1935 (he was not there at the time, being in Florida visiting Barlow); and instead of rebuilding the steeple, the church authorities decided merely to put a conical cap on the brick tower. This incident no doubt started his imagination working.

The end of 1935 saw Lovecraft’s fourth—and last—Christmas visit to Frank Long and the rest of the New York gang. Amid the usual round of socializing with old friends, he met some new figures. He met Seabury Quinn for the first time since 1931, and attended a dinner of the American Fiction Guild, an organization that Hugh B. Cave had for years been trying to get him to join. On two occasions Lovecraft went to the new Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. Barlow surprised him with a unique Christmas gift—a forty-two-copy printing of The Cats of Ulthar.

Another booklet that seems to have emerged at this time is Charleston. This is a mimeographed pamphlet that exists in two ‘editions’, if such they can be called. H. C. Koenig was planning a trip to Charleston in early 1936 and asked Lovecraft for a brief description of some of the highlights of the place. Lovecraft wrote a long letter on 12 January that combined a potted history of Charleston with a specific walking tour. This letter merely paraphrases and abridges Lovecraft’s superb unpublished 1930 travelogue, ‘An Account of Charleston’, leaving out the archaic usages and also some of the more interesting but idiosyncratic personal asides. Koenig was so taken with this letter that he typed it up and mimeographed it, running off probably fewer than twenty-five copies. When Lovecraft received the item, he found a number of mistranscriptions which he wished to correct; meanwhile Koenig had asked Lovecraft to rewrite the beginning and ending so as to transform the piece from a letter into an essay. After these corrections and changes were made, Koenig ran off about thirty to fifty copies of the new version, ‘binding’ it (as he had done with the first version) in a cardboard folder.

Not long after returning from New York, Lovecraft—although overwhelmed by revision work, a growing feud in the NAPA, and (ominously) a severe case of what he called ‘grippe’—still managed to find time to lapse into one more collaborative fiction venture— this time with Kenneth Sterling (1920–95), a young fan who had introduced himself to Lovecraft in March 1935. The result is the interesting if insubstantial science fiction tale ‘In the Walls of Eryx’.

Sterling has stated that the idea of the invisible maze was his, and that this core idea was adapted from Edmond Hamilton’s celebrated story (which Lovecraft liked), ‘The Monster-God of Mamurth’ (Weird Tales, August 1926), which concerns an invisible building in the Sahara Desert. Sterling wrote a draft of six to eight thousand words; Lovecraft entirely rewrote the story (‘in very short order’, Sterling declares), making it about twelve thousand words in the process.⁷ Sterling’s account suggests that the version as we have it is entirely Lovecraft’s prose, and indeed it reads as such; but one suspects (Sterling’s original draft is not extant) that, as with the collaborated tales with Price and Lumley, Lovecraft tried to preserve as much of Sterling’s own prose, and certainly his ideas, as possible.

The authors have made the tale amusing by devising nasty injokes on certain mutual colleagues (e.g., farnoth-flies = Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales; effjay weeds and wriggling akmans = Forrest J Ackerman); I suspect these are Lovecraft’s jokes. The narrative, however, turns into a conte cruel when the hapless protagonist, trapped in the invisible maze whose opening he can no longer locate, reveals his deteriorating mental and physical condition in the diary he writes as he vainly seeks to escape.