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

The narrator, like Lovecraft, seeks out Greenwich Village in particular; and it is here, at two in the morning one August night, that he meets ‘the man’, who leads him to an ancient manor-house and shows him spectacularly apocalyptic visions of past and future New York through a window. Can the specific locale of the story be identified? At the end of the tale the narrator finds himself ‘at the entrance of a little black court off Perry Street’; and this is all we need to realize that this segment of the tale was inspired by a similar expedition to Perry Street that Lovecraft took on 29 August 1924, inspired by an article in the New York Evening Post for that day, in a regular column entitled ‘Little Sketches About Town’. The exact site is 93 Perry Street, where an archway leads to a lane between three buildings. What is more, according to an historical monograph on Perry Street, this general area was heavily settled by Indians (they had named it Sapohanican), and, moreover, a sumptuous mansion was built in the block bounded by Perry, Charles, Bleecker, and West Fourth Streets sometime between 1726 and 1744, being the residence of a succession of wealthy citizens until it was razed in 1865.²⁰

Lovecraft almost certainly knew the history of the area, and he has deftly incorporated it into his tale.

Farnsworth Wright accepted ‘He’ in early October, and it appeared in Weird Tales for September 1926. Strangely enough, Lovecraft had not yet submitted ‘The Shunned House’ to Wright, but when he did so (probably in early September) Wright eventually turned it down on the grounds that it began too gradually. Lovecraft does not make any notable comment on this rejection, even though it was the first rejection he had ever had from Weird Tales

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The writing of ‘He’, however, did not put an entire end to Lovecraft’s fictional efforts. The Kalem meeting on Wednesday, 12 August, broke up at 4 a.m.; Lovecraft immediately went home and mapped out ‘a new story plot—perhaps a short novel’ which he titled ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.²¹ Although he confidently reports that ‘the writing itself will now be a relatively simple matter’, it would be more than a year before he would write this seminal story. It is a little sad to note how Lovecraft attempts to justify his state of chronic unemployment by suggesting to Lillian that a lengthy story of this sort ‘ought to bring in a very decent sized cheque’; he had earlier noted that the projected Salem novelette or novel, ‘if accepted, would bring in a goodly sum of cash’.²²

It is as if he is desperately seeking to convince Lillian that he is not a drain on her (and Sonia’s) finances in spite of his lack of a regular position and his continual cafeteria-lounging with the boys.

Some time in August Lovecraft received a plot idea from C. W. Smith, editor of the Tryout. The resulting tale, ‘In the Vault’, written on 18 September, is poorer than ‘He’ but not quite as horrendously bad as ‘The Horror at Red Hook’; it is merely mediocre. This elementary supernatural revenge tale, recounting what happens to George Birch, a careless and thick-skinned undertaker, who finds himself trapped in the receiving-tomb of the cemetery he runs, is a curiously conventional tale for Lovecraft to have written at this stage of his career. He attempts to write in a more homespun, colloquial vein, but the result is not successful. August Derleth developed an unfortunate fondness for this tale, so that it still stands embalmed among volumes of Lovecraft’s ‘best’ stories.

The tale’s immediate fortunes were not very happy, either. Lovecraft dedicated the story to C. W. Smith, and it appeared in Smith’s Tryout

for November 1925. Of course Lovecraft also sought professional publication; and although it would seem that ‘In the Vault’, in its limited scope and conventionally macabre orientation, would be ready-made for Weird Tales, Wright rejected it in November. The reason for the rejection, according to Lovecraft, is interesting: ‘its extreme gruesomeness would not pass the Indiana censorship’.²³ The reference, of course, is to the banning of Eddy’s ‘The Loved Dead’. Here then is the first—but not the last—instance where the apparent uproar over ‘The Loved Dead’ had a negative impact upon Lovecraft.