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

Lovecraft’s spring travels commenced on 4 April. On that day Vrest Orton drove him up to a home in Yonkers which he was occupying with his wife, child, and grandmother. The place, built around 1830 and set in an idyllic rural area, charmed Lovecraft. He spent his time visiting the gang in New York, going to various literary gatherings arranged by Orton, and generally enjoying his freedom from responsibility and work.

On 1 May Lovecraft’s travels began in earnest. He went right down to Washington, stayed overnight at a cheap hotel (he got a room for $1.00), then caught the 6.45 a.m. bus the next morning to Richmond, Virginia. He stayed in Virginia for only four days but took in an astonishing number of sites—Richmond, Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Fredericksburg, and Falmouth. All were delightful. Richmond, although it had no one colonial section, nevertheless revealed substantial traces of antiquity to the diligent searcher; of course, it had suffered terrible damage during the Civil War, but was rapidly rebuilt shortly thereafter, and Lovecraft— sympathetic as he always was to the Confederate cause—found the frequent monuments to the Confederate heroes heartwarming. And, of course, he saw a number of sites relating to Poe, including the Poe Shrine (now the Edgar Allan Poe Museum), which had opened only recently. On 3 May Lovecraft saw Williamsburg (then only in the early stages of its restoration as a colonial village), Jamestown, and Yorktown all in a single day.

On 6 May Lovecraft was back in Washington, where he looked up both old and new friends (Edward Lloyd Sechrist and Elizabeth Toldridge) and explored several museums. Returning to New York on the 9th, Lovecraft found that the Longs were planning a fishing trip upstate, so that they could conveniently take him right to the doorstep of Bernard Austin Dwyer, who was at this time occupying a house at 177 Green Street in Kingston. They left the next morning, reaching Kingston in the early afternoon. For the next several evenings Lovecraft and Dwyer sat up discussing literature and philosophy till far into the night. On the 14th Lovecraft visited the neighbouring towns of Hurley and New Paltz, both of them full of Dutch colonial remains.

After a brief stay with Cook in Athol, Lovecraft returned home around the 18th. It had been a great trip, with ten states plus the District of Columbia traversed; and it had given Lovecraft his first fleeting taste of the South, although in later years he would see far more of it. As with his previous year’s travels, he wrote up his 1929 jaunt in a tremendous eighteen-thousand-word travelogue entitled ‘Travels in the Provinces of America’, which, however, was not published until 1995.

On 13 August the Longs drove through Providence on their way to Cape Cod and picked up Lovecraft to accompany them. New Bedford was explored that day, as well as other towns in the vicinity—Chatham, Orleans, Hyannis, Sandwich. But the best part of the journey for Lovecraft was on the 17th, when he took his first ride in an aeroplane. It was only $3.00, and would fly passengers all over Buzzard’s Bay. It proved no disappointment: ‘The landscape effect was that of a bird’s eye view map—& the scene was such as to lend itself to this inspection with maximum advantage … This aeroplane ride (which attained a pretty good height at its maximum) adds a finishing touch to the perfection of the present outing.’¹³ For someone with so cosmic an imagination as Lovecraft, it is scarcely to be wondered that a ride in an aeroplane would be a powerful imaginative stimulus; and only poverty prevented his ever repeating the experience.

One more trip occurred on 29 August. Lovecraft and Annie Gamwell took yet another sojourn to the ancestral Foster region, renewing their acquaintances of three years earlier and extending their explorations still further. This time they investigated the area called Howard Hill, where Asaph Phillips had built his homestead in 1790. They met several people who recalled Whipple Phillips and Robie Place, saw old Phillips gravestones, and consulted genealogical records that helped Lovecraft fill in details of his ancestry. Later they returned to Moosup Valley, the site of their 1926 trip.

In the fall of 1929 Lovecraft and Derleth engaged in a debate over the best weird stories ever written. This may have been part of the honours thesis Derleth was writing (‘The Weird Tale in English Since 1890’, completed in 1930 and published in W. Paul Cook’s late amateur journal, the Ghost, for May 1945), but, whatever the case, the discussion ended up having an unexpectedly wider audience. Bertrand K. Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, who ran a column called ‘The Sideshow’, published a list of the best weird tales that Lovecraft found so tame that he sent in the lists prepared by Derleth and Frank Long, as well as his own.