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

Again, there is nothing here that need surprise us. And yet, in spite of what his previous biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, has suggested, comments on aliens are relatively rare in the correspondence to his aunts during this period. A long letter in early January goes on at length about the fundamental inassimilability of Jews in American life, maintaining that ‘vast harm is done by those idealists who encourage belief in a coalescence which never can be’. When he goes on to note that ‘On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types’,¹⁹

he is unwittingly reaching the heart of the issue, at least as far as he himself is concerned: in spite of Lovecraft’s talk about cultural inassimiliability, what he really finds offensive about foreigners (or, more broadly, non-’Aryans’, since many of the ethnics in New York were already first- or secondgeneration immigrants) is the fact that they look funny to him.

Of course, Lovecraft’s hostility was exacerbated by his increasingly shaky psychological state as he found himself dragging out a life in an unfamiliar, unfriendly city where he did not seem to belong and where he had few[ prospects for work or permanent comfort. Foreigners made convenient scapegoats, and New York City, then and now the most cosmopolitan and culturally heterogeneous city in the country, stood in stark contrast to the homogeneity and conservatism he had known in the first thirtyfour years of his life in New England. The city that had seemed such a fount of Dunsanian glamour and wonder had become a dirty, noisy, overcrowded place that dealt repeated blows to his selfesteem by denying him a job in spite of his abilities and by forcing him to hole up in a seedy, mice-infested, crime-ridden dump where all he could do was write racist stories like ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ as a safety-valve for his anger and despair.

Lovecraft was, however, not finished with creative work. Eight days after writing the story, on 10 August, he began a long, lone evening ramble that led through Greenwich Village to the Battery, then to the ferry to Elizabeth, which he reached at 7 a.m. He purchased a 10-cent composition book at a shop, went to Scott Park, and wrote the story ‘He’. It is interesting that in this instance Lovecraft had to leave New York in order to write about it. ‘He’, while much superior to ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, is as heartwrenching a cry of despair as its predecessor—quite avowedly so. Its opening is celebrated:

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.

In this story Lovecraft presents a kind of sociology of New York: the immigrants who have clustered there really have no ‘kinship’ with it because the city was founded by the Dutch and the English, and these immigrants are of a different cultural heritage altogether. This sophism allows Lovecraft to conclude that ‘this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life’. The immigrants are now considered to be on the level of maggots.