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

There was, however, better news from Wright. Lovecraft had evidently sent him ‘The Outsider’ merely for his examination, as it was already promised to W. Paul Cook—apparently for the Recluse, which Cook had conceived around September. Wright liked the story so much that he pleaded with Lovecraft to let him print it. Lovecraft managed to persuade Cook to release the story, and Wright accepted it some time around the end of the year; its appearance in Weird Tales for April 1926 would be a landmark. The rest of the year was spent variously in activity with the Kalems, in receiving out-of-town guests, and in solitary travels of an increasingly wider scope in search of antiquarian oases. Lovecraft took pleasure in acting as host to the Kalems on occasion, and his letters display how much he enjoyed treating his friends to coffee, cake, and other humble delectables on his best blue china. On 29 July he bought for 49 cents an aluminum pail with which to fetch hot coffee from the deli at the corner of State and Court Streets.

Some new colleagues emerged on Lovecraft’s horizon about this time. One, Wilfred Blanch Talman (1904–1986), was an amateur of Dutch ancestry who was attending Brown University. The two met in late August, and Lovecraft took to him immediately. Talman went on to become a reporter for the New York Times and later an editor of the Texaco Star, a paper issued by the oil company. He made random ventures into professional fiction, and would later have one of his stories subjected to (possibly unwanted) revision by Lovecraft. Talman was perhaps the first addition to the core membership of the Kalem Club, although he did not begin regular attendance until after Lovecraft had left New York.

A still more congenial colleague was Vrest Teachout Orton (1897–1986). Orton was a friend of W. Paul Cook, and at this time worked in the advertising department of the American Mercury

. Later he would achieve distinction as an editor at the Saturday Review of Literature and, still later, as the founder of the Vermont Country Store. Orton became perhaps the second honorary member of the Kalems, although his attendance at meetings was also irregular until after Lovecraft’s departure from New York. Orton did a little literary work of his own—he compiled a bibliography of Theodore Dreiser, Dreiserana (1929), founded the

Colophon, a bibliophiles’ magazine, and later founded the Stephen Daye Press in Vermont, for which Lovecraft would do some freelance work— but he had little interest in the weird. Nevertheless, their mutual New England background and their loathing of New York gave the two men much to talk about.

Aside from activities with friends, Lovecraft engaged in much solitary travel in the latter half of 1925. One of his most extensive trips of the season was a three-day trip to Jamaica, Mineola, Hempstead, Garden City, and Freeport on Long Island. Jamaica was then a separate community but is now a part of Queens; the other towns are in Nassau County, east of Queens. On 27 September Lovecraft went to Jamaica, which ‘utterly astonisht’ him: ‘There, all about me, lay a veritable New-England village; with wooden colonial houses, Georgian churches, & deliciously sleepy & shady streets where giant elms & maples stood in dense & luxurious rows.’²⁴ Things are, I fear, very different now. Thereafter he went north to Flushing, also once separate and also now part of Queens. This was a Dutch settlement, and it too retained gratifying touches of colonialism. One structure—the Bowne house (1661) at Bowne Street and 37th Avenue—particularly delighted him.

The 29th, however, was his great Long Island journey. Reaching Garden City, he saw the extensive college-like brick buildings of Doubleday, Page & Co., now (after many years as Doubleday, Doran) simply Doubleday; the publisher has moved its editorial offices to Manhattan but still retains a considerable presence in its city of origin. Continuing southward on foot, he came to Hempstead, which captivated him utterly. Once again it was the churches that delighted him—St George’s Episcopal, Methodist, Christ’s First Presbyterian, and others. He spent considerable time in Hempstead, then continued south on foot to Freeport, which he found pleasant but undistinguished from an antiquarian point of view. All this walking must have covered close to ten miles.

The importance of these expeditions to Lovecraft’s psyche can scarcely be overestimated. The shimmering skyscrapers of Manhattan had proved, upon closer examination, to be an oppressive horror; as he had noted when refusing the offer to edit Weird Tales in Chicago, ‘it is colonial atmosphere which supplies my very breath of life’.²⁵ Lovecraft had, indeed, developed an uncanny nose for antiquity, whether it be in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or in the further reaches of the metropolitan area.