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

On 19 September Lovecraft went to Loveman’s apartment at 78 Columbia Heights and met Crane. He reports that ‘Crane is writing a long poem on Brooklyn Bridge in a modern medium’:³⁹ this would, of course, be Crane’s masterpiece, The Bridge

(1930), on which he had begun work as early as February 1923. Crane was rather less charitable to Lovecraft in his various letters than Lovecraft was to Crane. Writing on 14 September to his mother and grandmother, Crane notes Loveman’s arrival in the city but says that he has not spent much time with him because he has been occupied with his many friends:

Miss Sonia Green [ sic] and her piping-voiced husband, Howard Lovecraft, (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there) kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway!⁴⁰

The former ‘invalid’ Lovecraft had already become famous for outwalking all his friends!

Kleiner, in a memoir, supplies a partial answer to a question that has perhaps occurred to nearly everyone reading of Lovecraft’s long walks all around Manhattan at night, whether alone or with others: how is it that he escaped being the victim of a crime? Kleiner writes:

In Greenwich Village, for whose eccentric habitants he had little use, he was fond of poking about in back alleys where his companions preferred not to go. In prohibition years, with murderous affrays among bootleggers and rum-runners likely to break out anywhere, this was a particularly dangerous business. Every other house in this neighborhood was open to suspicion as a speakeasy. I recall that at least once, while stumbling around old barrels and crates in some dark corner of this area, Lovecraft found a doorway suddenly illuminated and an excited foreigner, wearing the apron that was an almost infallible sign of a speakeasy bartender, enquiring hotly what he wanted. Loveman and Kirk went in after Lovecraft and got him safely out. None of us, surely, was under any illusion as to what might very well happen in such an obscure corner of the city.⁴¹

Lovecraft was certainly fearless—perhaps a little foolhardy—on these jaunts. He was, of course, at this time a fairly imposing physical specimen at nearly six feet and 200 pounds; but physical size means nothing when one is faced with a knife or gun, and many criminals are also not put off by a prospective victim’s apparent lack of prosperity. Lovecraft was, in effect, simply lucky in not coming to harm on these peregrinations.

On the evening of 26 September there was a Blue Pencil Club meeting, and the prescribed topic for literary contributions was ‘The Old Home Town’. It was a theme close to Lovecraft’s heart, and he produced the thirteen-stanza poem ‘Providence’ for the occasion—virtually the first creative writing he had done since writing ‘Under the Pyramids’ in February. It was published in the Brooklynite

for November 1924 and, some time in November, in the Providence Evening Bulletin, for which he received $5.00.

Early October saw his first visit to Elizabeth, New Jersey (which Lovecraft persistently calls by its eighteenth-century name of Elizabethtown). He was alerted to the existence of colonial antiquities there by an editorial in the New York Times, and he was entirely captivated. His visit proved to be the catalyst for his first story in eight months, ‘The Shunned House’. He had come upon ‘a terrible old house—a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds’⁴² (no longer standing) and it made him think of a house in Providence at 135 Benefit Street, where Lillian had resided in 1919–20 as a companion for Mrs C. H. Babbit. This house had been built around 1763, and is a magnificent structure—with basement, two storeys, and attic—built on the rising hill, with shuttered doors in the basement leading directly out into the sidewalk. It has been considerably restored since Lovecraft’s day, but at that time it must have been a spectral place. Lovecraft spent the whole of 16–19 of October writing a draft of the story, making considerable ‘eliminations & rearrangements’ and doing more revision the next day after having read it to Frank Long. (It was in the evening of this day that Sonia was stricken with her gastric attack and had to be taken to the hospital.)