An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The story reads as if HPL had written it from beginning to end, although it clearly was based on a draft by Eddy. The tale is manifestly a self-parody and in its florid language brings to mind “The Hound.” Some passages are remarkably explicit for their day: “One morning Mr. Gresham came much earlier than usual—came to find me stretched out upon a cold slab deep in ghoulish slumber, my arms wrapped about the stark, stiff, naked body of a foetid corpse! He roused me from my salacious dreams, his eyes filled with mingled detestation and pity.”

When the tale was published in WT,it elicited a protest from authorities in Indiana, who sought to have the issue banned. Subsequently, editor Farnsworth Wright became hesitant to accept any stories from HPL that featured explicitly gruesome passages of the kind found in “The Loved Dead,” and as a result several of HPL’s later tales were rejected.

See David E.Schultz, “On ‘The Loved Dead,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 25–28. Loveman, Samuel (1889–1976),

poet, playwright, and longtime friend of HPL. Loveman, a native of Cleveland, joined amateur journalism around 1905 and published much of his verse—most of it of a classicist, fin-de-sièclecast —in the amateur press and, later, in little magazines. He wrote to Ambrose Bierce in 1908 and later sent him his first book, the slim self-published volume Poems(1911). He published Bierce’s letters to him as Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce(Cleveland: George Kirk, 1922), with a preface that HPL quoted extensively in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” He later got in touch with George Sterling (1869–1926) and Clark Ashton Smith. HPL had been reading Loveman’s poetry in old amateur papers since at least 1915; at that time he wrote the poem, “To Samuel Loveman, Esq., on His Poetry and Drama, Writ in the Elizabethan Style” ( Dowdell’s Bearcat,December 1915). In 1917 HPL wrote to Loveman (then stationed in Fort Gordon, Georgia) expressing admiration for his verse. At HPL’s urging Loveman began contributing again to the amateur press, publishing three issues of his own little magazine, The Saturnian(June–July 1921, August–September 1921, March 1922), containing his own poems as well

< previous page page_156 next page > < previous page page_157 next page >

Page 157

as his translations from Heine, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. In December 1919 HPL had a dream involving himself and Loveman, which he wrote almost verbatim into the story “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). About a year later Loveman figured in another dream, which HPL wrote as the prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920). HPL first met Loveman in April 1922 in New York. In August 1922 HPL visited him and Alfred Galpin in Cleveland; by this time Loveman had become a close friend of the young Hart Crane, and he introduced HPL to Crane’s friends, including William Sommer, William Lescaze, Edward Lazare, and Gordon Hatfield, whose homosexuality offended HPL. The manuscript of HPL’s “Hypnos” (1922) bears a dedication “To S.L.” In 1922–23 Loveman assisted HPL in editing The Poetical Works of Jonathan E.Hoag(1923). Loveman appeared occasionally in later issues of HPL’s Conservative,notably with the controversial poem “To Satan,” printed on the front page of the July 1923 issue. HPL had anonymously praised Loveman’s poetry effusively in the “Bureau of Critics” column of the National Amateur(March 1922); this review served as the springboard for an attack on Loveman himself by the amateur critic Michael Oscar White in an installment of his series “Poets of Amateur Journalism” ( Oracle,December 1922). In turn, White was attacked and Loveman defended by Frank Belknap Long (“An Amateur Humorist,” Conservative, March 1923) and Alfred Galpin (“A Critic of Poetry,” Oracle,August 1923). HPL himself responded to White in the “In the Editor’s Study” column of the Conservative,July 1923.