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

When you perceive the foregoing temporary address, and correlate it with what I have quite frequently expressed as my unvarnished sentiments toward the New York region, you will probably appreciate the extent of the combined burdens and nerve-taxes which have, through malign coincidence, utterly disrupted my programme this spring, and brought me to the verge of what would be a complete breakdown if I did not have a staunch and brilliant colleague—my young ‘adopted grandchild’ Frank B. Long—to whom to lean for coöperation and assistance in getting my tasks in shape.²²

What could be the meaning of this? The address at the head of this letter—395 East 16th Street, Brooklyn, New York—tells part of the story; the other part—which Lovecraft told almost none of his colleagues (those, at any rate, who did not already know the situation)—is that Sonia had called him back to New York.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Fanlights and Georgian Steeples (1928–30)

Lovecraft arrived in New York no later than April 24. Sonia writes in her memoir: ‘Late that spring (1928) I invited Howard to come on a visit once more. He gladly accepted but as a visit, only. To me, even that crumb of his nearness was better than nothing.’¹ How ‘gladly’ Lovecraft accepted this invitation we have already seen in the letter to Zealia Bishop. To his old friend Morton he is a little more expansive: ‘The wife had to camp out here for quite a spell on account of business, and thought it only fair that I drop around for a while. Not having any snappy comeback, and wishing to avoid any domestick civil war, I played the pacifist … and here I am.’²

The ‘business’ referred to is Sonia’s attempt to set up a hat shop in Brooklyn—368 East 17th Street, in the very next block from where she was living. Sonia had invested $1000 of her own money to set up the shop, which formally opened on Saturday the 28th. Lovecraft helped Sonia on ‘sundry errands’ on several occasions, including one stint of addressing envelopes from 11.30 p.m. to 3.30 a.m. one night.

But let us not be deceived; Lovecraft was by no means resuming his marriage any more than was necessary. Sonia writes with considerable tartness: ‘But while visiting me, all I saw of Howard was during the few early morning hours when he would return from his jaunts with either Morton, Loveman, Long, Kleiner, or with some or all of them. This lasted through the summer.’³ Indeed it did; and his gallivanting began almost as soon as he came to town. And yet, although he did do some exploring of the region with friends—a drive along the Hudson River with Long; a visit to James F. Morton’s museum in Paterson; a trip to Talman’s home in Spring Valley, in Rockland County just above the New Jersey border—Lovecraft and Sonia did manage to go on 13 May to Bryn Mawr Park, the area in Yonkers where they had purchased property in 1924.

On 7 June Lovecraft unexpectedly received an invitation from Vrest Orton that changed his travel plans significantly. He had been planning to visit Bernard Austin Dwyer in West Shokan, then head south for perhaps a week to Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.; but Orton—although living in the pleasant Riverdale section of the Bronx—was disgusted with New York and wished to move out to a farm near Brattleboro, Vermont, which he had just purchased. He insisted that Lovecraft come along, and it took little persuasion for Lovecraft to accede.

Lovecraft’s faint taste of Vermont in 1927 had only whetted his appetite; now he would spend a full two weeks in quaint rusticity, and he made the most of it. Orton was, of course, not coming alone, but brought his whole family—wife, infant son, parents, and maternal grandmother, Mrs Teachout, an eighty-year-old woman whose recollections of the past Lovecraft found fascinating. The entire party arrived around 10 June, and Lovecraft stayed till the 24th.

It is charming to read of the simple chores Lovecraft performed (‘I have learned how to build a wood fire, & have helped the neighbours’ boys round up a straying cow’⁴)—no doubt he could momentarily indulge in the fantasy of being a grizzled farmer. Orton’s farm, indeed, had few modern amenities—no plumbing except for a lead pipe to lead in the spring water, and no illumination except with oil lamps and candles.