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

There was George Kirk himself (1898–1962), who had of course met Lovecraft in Cleveland in 1922 and arrived in New York in August (just before Samuel Loveman, who came in early September) to pursue his bookseller’s trade, settling at 50 West 106th Street in Manhattan. His one venture into publishing was Twentyone Letters of Ambrose Bierce (1922), Loveman’s edition of Bierce’s letters to him. He had become engaged to Lucile Dvorak in late 1923 but did not wish to marry until he had established himself as a bookseller in New York; this took nearly three years, and in the interim he wrote letters to Lucile that rival Lovecraft’s letters to his aunts in their detailed vignettes of ‘the gang’. They are the only other contemporaneous documents of the sort that we have, and they are of considerable help in filling in gaps in Lovecraft’s own letters and in rounding out the general picture of the group.

The Kalem Club existed in a very rudimentary—and nameless— form prior to Lovecraft’s arrival in the city; Kleiner, McNeil, and perhaps Morton appear to have met occasionally at each other’s homes. But clearly the group—whose chief bond was their correspondence and association with Lovecraft—fully solidified as a club only with Lovecraft’s arrival. Frank Long provides a piquant glimpse at Lovecraft’s conduct at these meetings:

Almost invariably … Howard did most of the talking, at least for the first ten or fifteen minutes. He would sink into an easy chair—he never seemed to feel at ease in a straightbacked chair on such occasions and I took care to keep an extremely comfortable one unoccupied until his arrival— and words would flow from him in a continuous stream.

He never seemed to experience the slightest necessity to pause between words. There was no groping about for just the right term, no matter how recondite his conversation became. When the need for some metaphysical hair-splitting arose, it was easy to visualize scissors honed to a surgical sharpness snipping away in the recesses of his mind …

In general the conversation was lively and quite variegated. It was a brilliant enough assemblage, and the discussions ranged from current happenings of a political or sociological nature, to some recent book or play, or to five or six centuries of English and French literature, art, philosophy, and natural science.³⁵

This may be as good a place as any to explore the question of Lovecraft’s voice, since several of Lovecraft’s New York colleagues have given us their impressions of it. There seems general consensus that his voice was somewhat high-pitched. Sonia has the most detailed discussion:

His voice was clear and resonant when he read or lectured but became thin and high-pitched in general conversation, and somewhat falsetto in its ring, but when reciting favorite poems he managed to keep his voice on an even keel of deep resonance. Also his singing voice, while not strong, was very sweet. He would sing none of the modern songs, only the more favored ones of about a half century ago or more.³⁶ Wilfred Blanch Talman offers a less flattering account:

His voice had that flat and slightly nasal quality that is sometimes stereotyped as a New England characteristic. When he laughed aloud, a harsh cackle emerged that reversed the impression of his smile and to the uninitiated might be considered a ham actor’s version of a hermit’s laughter. Companions avoided any attempt to achieve more than a smile in conversation with him, so unbecoming was the result.³⁷

The Kalem Club began meeting weekly on Thursday nights, but later shifted to Wednesdays. It was after one such meeting that Lovecraft began the diligent if unsystematic discovery of the antiquities of the metropolitan area. On Thursday 21 August, there was a gang meeting at Kirk’s place at 106th Street. The meeting broke up at 1.30 a.m. and the group started walking down Broadway, leaving successively at various subway or elevated stations on their respective ways home. Finally only Kirk and Lovecraft remained, and they continued walking all the way down Eighth Avenue through Chelsea into Greenwich Village, exploring all the colonial remnants (still existing) along Grove Court, Patchin and Milligan Places, Minetta Lane, and elsewhere. It was now almost dawn, but they continued walking, down the (now largely destroyed) ‘colonial expanse’ of Varick and Charlton Streets to City Hall. They must have covered at least seven or eight miles on this entire trip. Finally they broke up around 8 a.m., Lovecraft returning home by 9. (So much for his coming home early so that he and Sonia could retire together. On a slightly earlier all-night excursion with Kleiner and Leeds, he returned home at 5 a.m., and, ‘having successfully dodged the traditional fusilade of conjugal flatirons and rollingpins, I was with Hypnos, Lord of Slumbers’.³⁸ One assumes Lovecraft is being whimsical and not literal here.)