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

Lovecraft came in direct contact with Loveman in 1917. Loveman was at this time stationed at an army base, Camp Gordon, in Georgia, where he was in Company H of the 4th Infantry, Replacement Regiment. According to the UAPA membership lists, he remained there until the middle of 1919, when he returned to his native Cleveland. Loveman had, however, been out of organized amateurdom for some years, and he attests that Lovecraft’s first letter was essentially a query as to whether Loveman was in fact still in the land of the living.¹⁴ Loveman, finding the antique diction of the letter both charming and faintly ridiculous, duly relieved Lovecraft’s doubts on this score. For several years their association was largely conducted on paper, but in 1922 they met in Cleveland and then, in 1924–26, they became close friends in New York.

Alfred Galpin (1901–83) is an entirely different case. This brilliant individual—as gifted in pure intellect as Loveman was in aesthetic sensitivity—would eventually become a philosopher, composer, and teacher of French, although perhaps his rapid alterations in intellectual aspirations prevented him from distinguishing himself in any one of them. Galpin first came to Lovecraft’s attention in late 1917, when he was appointed to the new position of 4th Vice-President, in charge of recruiting high-school students into amateurdom. This appointment was very likely suggested by Maurice W. Moe, since Galpin was at that time already emerging as a star pupil in the Appleton (Wis.) High School and specifically in Moe’s Appleton High School Press Club. By January 1918, the date of the first surviving letter by Lovecraft to Galpin, the two were already cordial correspondents.

Galpin’s most profound effect upon Lovecraft may have been philosophical, for as early as August 1918 Lovecraft is announcing that Galpin’s ‘system of philosophy … comes nearest to my own beliefs of any system I have ever known’, and in 1921:

he is intellectually exactly like me save in degree. In degree he is immensely my superior—he is what I should like to be but have not brains enough to be. Our minds are cast in precisely the same mould, save that his is finer. He alone can grasp the direction of my thoughts and amplify them. And so we go down the dark ways of knowledge; the poor plodding old man, and ahead of him the alert little link-boy holding the light and pointing out the path.¹⁵

This obviously is meant half in jest, although Lovecraft clearly believes there is more than a grain of truth to it; and perhaps Galpin did indeed help to give shape to Lovecraft’s still nebulous philosophical conceptions, helping this ‘old man’ of thirty-one to hone his mechanistic materialism. But it is not that that I wish to study here; rather, Galpin had a more immediate effect upon Lovecraft’s literary work, and it involved the production of some delightfully playful poetry.

Lovecraft of course wrote some more or less conventional tributes to Galpin, especially on his birthday. Galpin appears to have had amorous inclinations toward various girls in his high school, and Lovecraft has great fun with the whole subject, especially in such poems as ‘Damon and Delia, a Pastoral’ (Tryout, August 1918), ‘To Delia, Avoiding Damon’ (Tryout, September 1918), ‘Damon—a Monody’ (United Amateur, May 1919), and perhaps ‘Hylas and Myrrha’ (Tryout, May 1919) and ‘Myrrha and Strephon’ (Tryout, July 1919), if these latter two are in fact about Galpin. Damon in these poems is clearly Galpin; the name is derived from the shepherd who is featured in the eighth eclogue of Virgil. Many of these poems are very amusing, and some of the best of Lovecraft’s parodic love poetry is found in letters to Galpin.

Lovecraft’s final word on Galpin’s schoolboy crushes occurs in the delightful two-act play in pentameter blank verse entitled Alfredo: A Tragedy, the manuscript of which declares it to be ‘By Beaumont and Fletcher’ and which is dated 14 September 1918. This date makes it clear that two of the chief characters—Rinarto, King of Castile and Aragon, and Alfredo, the Prince Regent—are meant to be Kleiner and Galpin, since Kleiner was president of the UAPA and Galpin was 1st vice-president during the 1918–19 term. Other obviously recognizable characters are Mauricio (= Maurice W. Moe), a cardinal, and Teobaldo (= Lovecraft), the prime minister.