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

Some months earlier, at the very beginning of 1920, Lovecraft came in touch with an individual who would play a very large role in his life: Frank Belknap Long, Jr (1901–94). At this time Long, a lifelong New Yorker, was not quite nineteen, and would enter New York University that fall to study journalism, transferring two years later to Columbia. His family was quite well-to-do—his father was a prominent New York dentist—and resided in comfortable quarters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 823 West End Avenue. Long had developed an interest in the weird, and he exercised his talents both in prose and in poetry. He joined the UAPA around the end of 1919.

It is not difficult to see why Lovecraft took to Long, and why he saw in him a sort of pendant to his other young disciple, Alfred Galpin. Long may not have had Galpin’s incandescent brilliance as a philosopher, but he was an aesthete, fictionist, and poet; and it was exactly at this time that Lovecraft’s own creative focus was shifting from arid antiquarian poetry and essays to weird fiction. Long’s early Poe-esque work (including the striking tale ‘The Eye Above the Mantel’, United Amateur, March 1921), by no means markedly inferior to Lovecraft’s, no doubt helped convince the latter that the new direction in which he was heading was a potentially fruitful one.

Toward the end of 1919 Lovecraft and Kleiner began a desultory discussion of women, love, and sex. Kleiner, apparently, had always been susceptible to the temptations of the fair, and Lovecraft looked upon his varied involvements with a mixture of mild surprise, amusement, and perhaps a certain lofty contempt. At one point he remarks:

Of course, I am unfamiliar with amatory phenomena save through cursory reading. I always assumed that one waited till he encountered some nymph who seemed radically different to him from the rest of her sex, and without whom he felt he could no longer exist. Then, I fancied, he commenced to lay siege to her heart in businesslike fashion, not desisting till either he won her for life, or was blighted by rejection.⁵

But is it really the case that Lovecraft was ‘unfamiliar with amatory phenomena’? There is perhaps some small reason for doubt on the matter; and it centres upon an individual who has been mentioned sporadically during the last chapter—Winifred Virginia Jackson (1876–1959).

According to research done by George T. Wetzel and R. Alain Everts, Jackson had married Horace Jordan, a black man, around 1915; at that time she resided at 57 Morton Street in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Wetzel and Everts believe that she divorced in early 1919,⁶ although she continued to be listed in the UAPA membership list under her married name until September 1921. By January 1920 she was living, along with two other female amateurs, at 20 Webster Street in Allston.

Jackson and Lovecraft certainly do seem to have done a considerable amount of amateur work together. Along with several others, they edited and published three issues of The United Cooperative (1918–21), and she was associate editor of The Silver Clarion at a time when Lovecraft was giving a certain amount of attention to that journal. Jackson was Second Vice-President of the UAPA for three consecutive years (1917–20), when Lovecraft was President (1917–18) and Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism (1918–19). Then, of course, there are the two stories cowritten by Jackson and Lovecraft.

None of this would suggest that Lovecraft and Jackson were anything but occasionally close working colleagues were it not for some remarks made by Willametta Keffer, an amateur of a somewhat later period, to George T. Wetzel in the 1950s. According to Wetzel, Keffer told him that (and here Wetzel is paraphrasing a letter by Keffer) ‘everybody in Amateur Journalism thought Lovecraft would marry Winifred Jordan’; Keffer herself stated to Wetzel, ‘A long time member of NAPA who knew and met both HPL and Winifred Virginia told me of the “romance”’.

It is difficult to know what to make of this. Lovecraft must have met Jackson in person no later than the summer of 1920, since she was then residing at 20 Webster Street in Allston, where Lovecraft stopped on at least two occasions; but, strangely enough, he does not mention her in any of his various accounts of his trips there. He did write an effusive article, ‘Winifred Virginia Jackson: A “Different” Poetess’, in the United Amateur for March 1921; and he spent Christmas Day of 1920 writing a quaint poem upon receiving a photograph of her—presumably her Christmas gift to him, ‘On Receiving a Portraiture of Mrs. Berkeley, ye Poetess’.