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

On the 29th Wandrei finally left, but Lovecraft’s own travels were by no means over. In August, after visits to Worcester, Athol, Amherst, and Deerfield, Lovecraft and Cook went to Vermont to visit the amateur poet Arthur Goodenough. A decade before, Goodenough had praised Lovecraft in a poem (‘Lovecraft—an Appreciation’) containing the grotesque image, ‘Laurels from thy very temples sprout’. Lovecraft had thought Goodenough was spoofing him, and only with difficulty was he prevented by Cook from writing some devastating reply; instead, he wrote a poem in return, ‘To Arthur Goodenough, Esq.’ (Tryout, September 1918). Now, when meeting him, Lovecraft was captivated by Goodenough, and especially by the archaic and rustic charm of his dress and demeanour. Lovecraft later wrote a rhapsodic essay on his entire Vermont visit, ‘Vermont—A First Impression’, which appeared in Walter J. Coates’s regional magazine Driftwind for March 1928.

On 25 August Lovecraft visited Portland, Maine. He spent two days there and enjoyed the town immensely: although it was not as rich in antiquities as Marblehead or Portsmouth, it was scenically lovely—it occupies a peninsula with hills at the eastern and western ends, and has many beautiful drives and promenades— and at least had things like the two Longfellow houses (birthplace and principal residence), which Lovecraft explored thoroughly. Travels to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Haverhill, Gloucester, and Ipswich in Massachusetts concluded Lovecraft’s two-week trek.

Meanwhile various prospects for the book publication of Lovecraft’s stories were developing. One possibility began taking shape late in 1926 when Farnsworth Wright broached the idea of a collection. This project would keep Lovecraft dangling for several years before finally collapsing. The reasons for this are perhaps not far to seek. In 1927 Weird Tales (under its official imprint, the Popular Fiction Publishing Company) issued The Moon Terror by A. G. Birch and others. For whatever reason, the book was a complete commercial disaster, remaining in print nearly as long as Weird Tales itself was in existence. And, of course, the onset of the Depression hit the magazine very hard, and for various periods in the 1930s it appeared only once every two months; at this time the issuance of a book was the last thing on the publishers’ minds. Nevertheless, in late December 1927 negotiations were still serious enough for Lovecraft to write a long letter giving his own preferences as to the contents. Lovecraft concludes with an interesting remark: ‘As for a title

—my choice is The Outsider and Other Stories. This is because I consider the touch of cosmic outsideness—of dim, shadowy nonterrestrial hints—to be the characteristic feature of my writing.’

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One story Lovecraft did not offer for the collection (probably just as well, as Wright had already rejected it for the magazine) was ‘The Shunned House’, which W. Paul Cook wished to publish as a small book. Cook had initially conceived of including it in The Recluse, but presumably held off because the magazine had already attained enormous size. Then, around February 1927, he first broached the idea of printing it as a chapbook, uniform in format with two other publications, Frank Long’s slim collection of poetry The Man from Genoa and Samuel Loveman’s The Hermaphrodite

, both issued in 1926. The issuance of The Recluse delayed work on the book project, but in the spring of 1928 things began to move. Lovecraft read proofs in early June, even though he was then on another extensive series of travels. By the end of June The Shunned House was printed but not bound. About three hundred copies were printed.

Unfortunately, things soured at this very moment. Both Cook’s finances and his health were in a very shaky state. The Shunned House—which Cook was financing, without any contribution by Lovecraft—had to be put on the back burner. In January 1930 Cook’s wife died and Cook suffered another and severer nervous breakdown. The depression completed his devastation, and The Shunned House’s emergence became increasingly remote. By the summer of 1930 Lovecraft heard that the sheets had been sent to a binder in Boston, but the book still did not come out. The matter hung fire all the way to Lovecraft’s death.