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

an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the publick at first-hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.²⁵

There is certainly much truth in this, and anyone can tell the difference between the cocksure Lovecraft of 1914 and the mature Lovecraft of 1930. What he does not say here, however, is that one of the chief motivations for his correspondence was simple courtesy. Lovecraft answered almost every letter he ever received, and he usually answered it within a few days. He felt it was his obligation as a gentleman to do so. This is how he established strong bonds of friendship with far-flung associates, many of whom never met him; it is why he became, both during and after his lifetime, a revered figure in the little worlds of amateur journalism and weird fiction.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mental Greed (1931–33)

The year 1931 was, of course, not an entire disaster for Lovecraft, even though the rejections of some of his best work stung him. His now customary late spring and summer travels reached the widest extent they would ever achieve in his lifetime, and he returned home with a fund of new impressions that well offset his literary misfortunes.

Lovecraft began his travels on Saturday, 2 May, the day after he finished the back-breaking work of typing At the Mountains of Madness. His customary stop in New York was very brief, and he caught a bus for Charleston via Washington, D.C., Richmond, Winston-Salem and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina. The total time of this bus ride was thirty-six hours.

Lovecraft found Charleston pretty much the same as the year before. On the 6th Lovecraft took a bus for Savannah, and from there caught another bus for Jacksonville (saving a night’s hotel or YMCA bill), arriving at 6 a.m. on the 7th. Jacksonville was a modern town and hence had no appeal for Lovecraft; it was only a way station to a more archaic place—nothing less than the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, St Augustine, Florida.

In the two weeks Lovecraft spent in St Augustine he absorbed all the antiquities the town had to offer. The mere fact of being in such an ancient place delighted him, although the town, with its predominantly Hispanic background, did not strike so deep a chord as a town of British origin such as Charleston did. Nevertheless, he was marvellously invigorated by St Augustine—both spiritually and physically, since the genuine tropicality of the town endowed him with reserves of strength unknown in the chilly North. He stayed at the Rio Vista Hotel on Bay Street for $4.00 a week.

Lovecraft canvassed the entire town—including the Post Office (housed in a 1591 mansion), Fort San Marcos, the Fountain of Youth, the Bridge of Lions, the Franciscan monastery, and what is presumed to be the oldest house in the United States, built in 1565 —as well as nearby Anastasia Island, which offers a spectacular view of the archaic skyline.

Lovecraft finally did break away around 21 May, as his new correspondent Henry S. Whitehead insisted that he come and visit for an extended period in Dunedin, a small town on a peninsula north of St Petersburg and Clearwater. We do not know much about this visit, but Lovecraft found both the environment and his host delightful. Lovecraft and Whitehead were of almost exactly the same build, and the latter lent Lovecraft a white tropical suit to wear during especially hot days, later making a present of it.

Either while at Dunedin or when he returned home a month or two later, Lovecraft assisted Whitehead on the writing of a story, ‘The Trap’. He notes in one letter that he ‘revised & totally recast’¹ the tale, and in another letter says that he ‘suppl[ied] the central part myself’.² My feeling is that the latter three-fourths of the story is Lovecraft’s. ‘The Trap’ is an entertaining if insubstantial account of an anomalous mirror that sucks hapless individuals into a strange realm where colours are altered and where objects, both animate and inanimate, have a sort of intangible, dreamlike existence. Whitehead’s and Lovecraft’s styles do not seem to me to meld very well, and the urbanely conversational style of Whitehead’s beginning gives way abruptly to Lovecraft’s long paragraphs of dense exposition. The tale was published in the March 1932 issue of Strange Tales, under Whitehead’s name only, Lovecraft having refused a collaborative byline.