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

Before examining these accounts, let us now turn to Rheinhart Kleiner’s meeting with Lovecraft, which also occurred some time in 1917—presumably after Cook’s visit. Kleiner tells the story as follows: ‘I was greeted at the door of 598 Angell Street by his mother, who was a woman just a little below medium height, with graying hair, and eyes which seemed to be the chief point of resemblance between herself and her son. She was very cordial and even vivacious, and in another moment had ushered me into Lovecraft’s room.’¹¹

Why the very different responses by his mother to Cook and Kleiner? I believe that the overriding factor is social snobbery. Cook’s unkempt appearance could not have sat well with either Susie or Lillian, and they were manifestly going to make it as difficult as possible for Cook to pass through their door. Lovecraft confesses in a candid moment that ‘Of amateurdom in general her [Susie’s] opinion was not high, for she had a certain aesthetic hypersensitiveness which made its crudenesses very obvious and very annoying to her’.¹² Elsewhere he goes on to admit that Lillian also did not care for amateurdom—’an institution whose extreme democracy and occasional heterogeneity have at times made it necessary for me to apologise for it’.¹³ If these were the reasons why Lillian did not like amateurdom, then it is very clear that social considerations weighed heavily in her mind: ‘democracy and occasional heterogeneity’ can scarcely stand for anything but the fact that people of all classes and educational backgrounds were involved in the amateur movement. Kleiner, a polished and debonair Brooklynite, was cordially received because his social standing was, in Susie’s eyes, at least equal to Lovecraft’s.

These accounts are among the most illuminating as to Lovecraft’s life—and his relations with his mother—in this period. Both Cook and Kleiner are united on the extreme solicitude exercised by Susie and Lillian over Lovecraft. Cook notes: ‘Every few minutes Howard’s mother or his aunt, or both, peeped into the room to see if he had fainted or shown signs of strain.’ Kleiner tells a more remarkable story: ‘I noticed that at every hour or so his mother appeared in the doorway with a glass of milk, and Lovecraft forthwith drank it.’ It is this constant babying of Lovecraft by Susie and Lillian that no doubt helped to foster in Lovecraft’s own mind a sense of his ‘invalidism’.

Kleiner suggested that they go out for a stroll, and Lovecraft took him to see the colonial antiquities of Providence—a tour he invariably gave to all his out-of-town guests, for he never tired of showing off the wondrous remains of the eighteenth century in his native city. But Lovecraft’s unfamiliarity with normal social conduct is made evident when Kleiner states:

On our way back to his home, and while we were still downtown, I suggested stopping in at a cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He agreed, but took milk himself, and watched me dispose of coffee and cake, or possibly pie, with some curiosity. It occurred to me later that this visit to a public eating-house—a most unpretentious one—might have been a distinct departure from his own usual habits.

This is very likely to be the case: not only because of the family’s dwindling finances, but because of Lovecraft’s continuing hermitry in spite of his ever-growing correspondence, a trip to a restaurant was at this time not likely to have been a common occurrence.

That correspondence, however, did lead at this time to Lovecraft’s contact with two individuals, each remarkable in their own way, who would become lifelong friends—Samuel Loveman and Alfred Galpin. Loveman (1887–1976)—a friend of three of the most distinctive writers in American literature (Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and H. P. Lovecraft) and also well acquainted with George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith—appears to be merely a sort of hanger-on to the great. But he was himself an accomplished poet—a greater poet than any in the Lovecraft circle except, perhaps, Clark Ashton Smith, and vastly superior to Lovecraft himself. His infrequently issued amateur journal, The Saturnian, contained his own exquisite, neo-Grecian, fin-de-siècle poems as well as translations from Baudelaire and Heine; and he scattered his poetry in other amateur or little magazines with insouciance. His greatest work is a long poem, The Hermaphrodite (written perhaps in the late teens and published in 1926 by W. Paul Cook), a gorgeous evocation of the spirit of classical Greece.