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

As for guests, first on the agenda was Maurice W. Moe, who had not seen Lovecraft since the latter’s fat days of 1923. Moe came with his son Robert for a visit on 18–19 July, and, since Robert had come in his car, they had convenient transport for all manner of sightseeing. They went to the old fishing village of Pawtuxet (then already absorbed into the Providence city limits), drove through Roger Williams Park, and visited the Warren–Bristol area that Robert and Lovecraft had seen in March of the previous year. At Warren they had an all-ice-cream dinner.

On 28 July no less important a guest arrived than R. H. Barlow, who was forced to leave his Florida home because of family disruptions that ultimately sent him to live with relatives in Leavenworth, Kansas. Barlow stayed more than a month in Providence, taking up quarters at the boarding-house behind 66 College and not leaving until 1 September. During this time he was quite unremitting in his demands on Lovecraft’s time, but the latter felt obliged to humour him in light of the superabundant hospitality he himself had received in Florida in 1934 and 1935.

Still another visitor descended upon Providence on 5 August— Adolphe de Castro, who had just been to Boston to scatter his wife’s ashes in the sea. By now a broken man—in his seventies, with no money, and his beloved wife dead—de Castro was still trying to foist various unrealistic projects upon Lovecraft. Trying to cheer the old boy up, Lovecraft and Barlow took him on 8 August to St John’s Churchyard in Benefit Street, where the spectral atmosphere—and the fact that Poe had been there courting Sarah Helen Whitman ninety years before—impelled the three men to write acrostic ‘sonnets’ on the name Edgar Allan Poe. (These were, of course, one line shorter than an actual sonnet.) Of these three Barlow’s may well be the best. But de Castro was the canniest of the bunch, for he later revised his poem and submitted it to Weird Tales, where it was quickly accepted. When Lovecraft and Barlow learnt this, they too submitted their poems—but Farnsworth Wright wanted to use only one. Lovecraft and Barlow were forced to dump their pieces on a fan magazine, the Science-Fantasy Correspondent, where they appeared in the March–April 1937 issue.

Another literary project on which Lovecraft and Barlow probably worked during his stay in Providence was ‘The Night Ocean’. We are now in a position to gauge the precise degree of Lovecraft’s contribution to this tale, as the manuscript has recently resurfaced. It shows that Lovecraft only touched up the prose here and there, making substantial improvements but basically merely ‘copy editing’ the text; as it stands, the story is at least 90 per cent Barlow’s. Barlow had been progressing remarkably as a writer: his ‘A Dim-Remembered Story’ (Californian, summer 1936) is a superbly crafted tale but one that does not seem to bear any revisory hand by Lovecraft at all. Lovecraft waxed enthusiastic about it when he read it in manuscript. ‘The Night Ocean’—published in the winter 1936 Californian—is an even finer work. Of all the tales written by Lovecraft’s colleagues, it comes the closest to capturing the essential spirit of the weird tale, as Lovecraft wrote of some of Blackwood’s works in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’: ‘Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note … Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.’

Lovecraft’s old amateur colleague Anne Tillery Renshaw, who had gone from being a professor to running her own school, The Renshaw School of Speech, in Washington, D.C., resurfaced at this time. In early 1936 she wished him to do revision and editing on a booklet she was writing entitled Well Bred Speech, designed for her adult education classes. Lovecraft was eager to work on the project, not only because it would be intrinsically interesting but because it would presumably bring in revenue at a time when revision work was fairly lean and sporadic.