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

Not having a job at least meant that Lovecraft could go out with the boys at almost any time and also indulge in modest travels. His diary and letters are full of accounts of trips to Van Cortlandt Park, Fort Greene Park, Yonkers, and elsewhere; there were the usual walks through the colonial parts of Greenwich Village, and any number of walks across the Brooklyn Bridge.

On the night of 11 April Lovecraft and Kirk, wishing to take advantage of a special $5 excursion fare to Washington, D.C., boarded the night train at Pennsylvania Station at midnight and arrived at dawn in the capital. They would have only a single morning and afternoon in the city, so they intended to make the most of it. Thanks to the presence of two colleagues who could act as tour guides, Anne Tillery Renshaw (who had a car) and Edward L. Sechrist, the group saw an astonishing number of sites in a few hours: the Library of Congress, the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, Georgetown (the colonial town founded in 1751), Christ Church (an exquisite late Georgian structure in Alexandria), Mount Vernon (Washington’s home), Arlington (the manor of the Custis family), and the enormous Memorial Amphitheatre completed in 1920, which Lovecraft considered ‘one of the most prodigious and spectacular architectural triumphs of the Western World’.¹¹

They caught the 4.35 train back to New York just in time.

During Sonia’s long stay Lovecraft did some travelling with her. The two of them went to Scott Park in Elizabeth on 13 June. On the 28th they went to the Bryn Mawr Park section of Yonkers, where they had attempted to purchase property the previous year. With Long, Lovecraft again visited the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, in the far northwest tip of Manhattan.

On 2 July Sonia and Lovecraft took a trip to Coney Island, where he had cotton candy for the first time. On this occasion Sonia had a silhouette of herself made by a black man named Perry; Lovecraft had had his own silhouette done on 26 March. This silhouette has become very well known in recent years, and its very faithful (perhaps even a little flattering) rendition has caused Lovecraft’s profile to become an icon; the silhouette of Sonia, on the other hand, is so little known that few have had any idea of its very existence.

Now that Sonia was out of the way and his amateur work apparently finished (he managed to get out the July 1925 United Amateur only a few weeks late, and also helped set up the next editorial board through a mail election), Lovecraft felt that the time had come to buckle down to some real creative work. On 1 and 2 August he wrote ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, which he describes in a letter to Long (who was away on vacation) as follows: ‘it deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much. The tale is rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good; but it represents at least an attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness.’¹²

Lovecraft is sadly correct in his analysis of the merits of the story, for it is one of the poorest of his longer efforts.

Red Hook is a small peninsula of Brooklyn facing Governor’s Island, about two miles southwest of Borough Hall. Lovecraft could easily walk to the area from 169 Clinton Street, and seems to have done so on several occasions. It was then and still remains one of the most dismal slums in the entire metropolitan area. In the story Lovecraft describes it not inaccurately, although with a certain jaundiced tartness; but of course it is not merely the physical decay that is of interest to him:

The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.

Here, in essence, is the heart of the story; for ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is nothing but a shriek of rage and loathing at the ‘foreigners’ who have taken New York away from the white people to whom it presumably belongs.

Sonia in her memoir claims to supply the inspiration for the tale: ‘It was on an evening while he, and I think Morton, Sam Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner were dining in a restaurant somewhere in Columbia Heights that a few rough, rowdyish men entered. He was so annoyed by their churlish behavior that out of this circumstance he wove ”The Horror at Red Hook”.’¹³ Lovecraft may have mentioned this event in a letter to her; but I am not entirely convinced that it was any one incident that gave birth to the story, but rather the cumulative depression of New York after a year and a half of poverty and futility.