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

Well—the train sped on, & I experienced silent convulsions of joy in returning step by step to a waking & tridimensional life. New Haven—New London—& then quaint Mystic, with its colonial hillside & landlocked cove. Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air—nobler roofs & steeples, with the train rushing airily above them on its lofty viaduct—Westerly—in His Majesty’s Province of RHODEISLAND & PROVIDENCE-PLANTATIONS! GOD SAVE THE KING!! Intoxication follow’d—Kingston—East Greenwich with its steep Georgian alleys climbing up from the railway —Apponaug & its ancient roofs—Auburn—just outside the city limits—I fumble with bags & wraps in a desperate effort to appear calm—THEN—a delirious marble dome outside the window—a hissing of air brakes—a slackening of speed— surges of ecstasy & dropping of clouds from my eyes & mind—HOME—UNION STATION—

PROVIDENCE!!!!¹³

The printed text cannot tell the whole story, for as Lovecraft approaches the triumphant conclusion his handwriting begins to grow larger and larger, until that final word is nearly an inch high. It is symmetrically balanced by four exclamation marks and four underscores. W. Paul Cook made a celebrated remark that the rest of this book will, I trust, instantiate: ‘He came back to Providence a human being—and what a human being! He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.’¹⁴

Cook has another imperishable account of Lovecraft’s settling in:

I saw him in Providence on his return from New York and before he had his things all unpacked and his room settled, and he was without question the happiest man I ever saw— he could have posed for an ‘After Taking’ picture for the medical ads. He had taken it and shown that he could take it. His touch was caressing as he put his things in place, a real love-light shone in his eyes as he glanced out of the window. He was so happy he hummed—if he had possessed the necessary apparatus he would have purred.

¹⁵

We do not know much of what Lovecraft was doing during the first few months of his return to Providence. In April, May, and June he reports seeing several parts of the city he had never seen before, at least once in the company of Annie Gamwell. He expresses the wish to do more reading and collecting of Rhode Island matter, and claims that a special corner of the reference room of the Providence Public Library will now be among his principal haunts.

Providence enters into several of the tales he wrote in the year after his return; indeed, this period—from the summer of 1926 to the spring of 1927—represents the most remarkable outburst of fiction-writing in Lovecraft’s entire career. Only a month after leaving New York he wrote to Morton: ‘It is astonishing how much better the old head works since its restoration to those native scenes amidst which it belongs. As my exile progressed, even reading and writing became relatively slow and formidable processes.’¹⁶

Now things were very different: two short novels, two novelettes, and three short stories, totalling some 150,000 words, were written at this time, along with a handful of poems and essays. All the tales are set, at least in part, in New England.

First on the agenda is ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, written probably in August or September. This story had, as noted previously, been plotted a full year earlier, on 12–13 August 1925. The plot of this well-known tale does not need elaborate description. The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, tells of the peculiar facts he has learned, both from the papers of his recently deceased grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, and from personal investigation. The upshot of his investigations is the revelation that an awesome cosmic entity, Cthulhu, had come from the stars in the dawn of time and established a stone city, R’lyeh, which then sank into the Pacific Ocean. In early March 1925, the city rose from the waters as the result of an earthquake, and Cthulhu momentarily emerges; but, presumably because the stars are not ‘ready’, the city sinks again, returning Cthulhu to the bottom of the ocean. But the mere existence of this titanic entity is an unending source of profound unease to Thurston because it shows how tenuous is mankind’s vaunted supremacy upon this planet.

It is difficult to convey by this bald summary the rich texture of this substantial work: its implications of cosmic menace, its insidiously gradual climax, its complexity of structure and multitude of narrative voices, and the absolute perfection of its style—sober and clinical at the outset, but reaching at the end heights of prose-poetic horror that attain an almost epic grandeur.