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

‘Cool Air’ is the last and perhaps the best of Lovecraft’s New York stories. It is a compact exposition of pure physical loathsomeness, dealing with what happens when a Dr Muñoz, who requires constant coolness in his New York apartment, finds his air conditioning unit malfunctioning, and the narrator is unable to find anyone to fix it. The result is that Muñoz, who is actually dead but is trying to keep himself alive by artificial preservation, ends as a ‘kind of dark, slimy trail [that] led from the open bathroom to the hall door’ and that ‘ended unutterably’.

The apartment house that serves as the setting of the tale is based on the brownstone occupied by George Kirk both as a residence and as the site of his Chelsea Book Shop at 317 West 14th Street in Manhattan for two months during the late summer of 1925. In regard to literary influences, Lovecraft later admitted that the chief inspiration was not Poe’s ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ but Machen’s ‘Novel of the White Powder’ (an episode from The Three Impostors),³²

where a hapless student unwittingly takes a drug that reduces him to a loathsome mass of liquescence. And yet, one can hardly deny that M. Valdemar, the man who, after his presumed death, is kept alive after a fashion for months by hypnosis and who at the end collapses ‘in a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity’, was somewhere in the back of Lovecraft’s mind in the writing of ‘Cool Air’. This story, much more than ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, is Lovecraft’s most successful evocation of the horror to be found in the teeming clangour of America’s only true megalopolis.

Farnsworth Wright incredibly and inexplicably rejected ‘Cool Air’, even though it is just the sort of safe, macabre tale he would have liked. Perhaps, as with ‘In the Vault’, he was afraid of its grisly conclusion. In any event, Lovecraft was forced to sell the story for $18 to the short-lived Tales of Magic and Mystery, where it appeared in the March 1928 issue.

Meanwhile Lovecraft finally secured some employment, even if it was of a temporary and, frankly, ignominious sort. In September Loveman had secured work at the prestigious Dauber & Pine bookshop at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, and he convinced his superiors to hire Lovecraft as an envelope-addresser for three weeks, probably beginning on 7 March. Lovecraft had helped Kirk out at this task on several occasions in 1925, doing the work for free because of Kirk’s many kindnesses to him. The pay at the Dauber & Pine job would be $17.50 per week. Lovecraft speaks of the enterprise as a lark (‘Moriturus te saluto! Before the final plunge into the abyss I am squaring all my indebtedness to mankind’³³), but he probably found the work highly tedious, as he never relished repetitive, mechanical tasks of this sort.

Lovecraft himself does not say anything to Lillian about liking or disliking the job. Perhaps he did not wish to seem unwilling to earn a living; but perhaps, by 27 March, he had other things on his mind. His letter to Lillian of that date begins:

Well!!! All your epistles arrived & received a grateful welcome, but the third one was the climax that relegates everything else to the distance!! Whoop! Bang! I had to go on a celebration forthwith, … & have now returned to gloat & reply. A E P G’s letter came, too—riotous symposium!! … And now about your invitation. Hooray!! Long live the State of Rhode-Island & Providence-Plantations!!!³⁴ In other words, Lovecraft had at last been invited to return to Providence.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Paradise Regain’d (1926)

The saga of Lovecraft’s efforts to return to Providence can be said to commence around April 1925, when he writes to Lillian that ‘I couldn’t bear to see Providence again till I can be there for ever’.¹ Lillian had clearly suggested that Lovecraft pay a visit, perhaps to relieve the tedium and even depression that his lack of work, his dismal Clinton Street room, and the rocky state of his marriage had engendered.

When Lovecraft stated in November 1925 that ‘My mental life is really at home’²

in Providence, he was not exaggerating. For the entirety of his New York stay, he subscribed to the Providence Evening Bulletin, reading the Providence Sunday Journal (the Bulletin published no Sunday edition) along with the New York Times on Sunday. He mentally attempted to stay in touch with Providence in other ways, specifically by reading as many books on Providence history as he could.