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

By early June Lovecraft was ready to return north, but two timely revision cheques allowed him to prolong the trip to its ultimate destination, Key West. This was the farthest south Lovecraft would ever reach, although on this and several other occasions he yearned to hop on a boat and get to Havana, but never had quite enough money to make the plunge.

Key West, the most remote of the Florida Keys, was reached by a succession of ferries and bus rides, since the Depression had not allowed the state to construct the continuous series of causeways that now connects all the Keys. Lovecraft wished to explore this place not only because of its remoteness but because of its genuine antiquity: it had been settled in the early nineteenth century by Spaniards, who called it Caja Huesco (Bone Key); later the name was corrupted by Americans to Key West. Lovecraft spent only a few days in Key West, but he canvassed the place thoroughly.

By 16 June he was back in St Augustine. He gradually moved north, exploring Charleston, Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Philadelphia. After a week in New York and a weekend with the Longs at the seaside resort of Asbury Park, New Jersey, Lovecraft accepted Talman’s offer to spend a week in his large Flatbush apartment. On 6 July a gang meeting at Talman’s featured, as a special guest, Seabury Quinn, the Weird Tales hack. Lovecraft, although taking a dim view of his endless array of clichéd stories (most revolving around the psychic detective Jules de Grandin), found him ‘exceedingly tasteful & intelligent’,³

although more a businessman than an aesthete. Lovecraft finally returned home on 20 July.

Random travels in New England occupied him in October and early November, but the increasing cold curtailed any further outings that required extensive outdoor travel.

Lovecraft’s financial situation was not getting any better, although for the moment it was not getting any worse. The publication of ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ in the August 1931 Weird Tales

enriched him by $350.00—a sum that, given his boast that he had now reduced his expenses to $15.00 per week, could have lasted him for more than five months. Here is how he did it:

$15.00 per week will float any man of sense in a very tolerable way—lodging him in a cultivated neighbourhood if he knows how to look for rooms, (this one rule, though, breaks down in really megalopolitan centres like New York —but it will work in Providence, Richmond, or Charleston, & would probably work in most of the moderate-sized cities of the northwest) keeping him dressed in soberly conservative neatness if he knows how to choose quiet designs & durable fabrics among cheap suits, & feeding him amply & palatably if he is not an epicurean crank, & if he does not attempt to depend upon restaurants. One must have a kitchen-alcove & obtain provisions at grocery & delicatessen prices rather than pay cafes & cafeterias the additional price they demand for mere service.⁴

Of course, this is predicated on Lovecraft’s habit of eating only two (very frugal) meals a day. He actually maintained that ‘my digestion raises hell if I try to eat oftener than once in 7 hours’.⁵

But original fiction—especially now that he was writing work that was not meeting the plebeian criteria of pulp editors—was not going to help much in making ends meet. Reprints brought in very little: he received $12.25 from Selwyn & Blount in mid-1931 (probably for ‘The Rats in the Walls’ in Christine Campbell Thomson’s Switch On the Light (1931)), and another $25.00 for ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931); but, aside from ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ and $55.00 for ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’ from Weird Tales, that may have been all for original fiction sold for the year. Of course, after his double rejections of the summer, Lovecraft was in no spirit to hawk his work about. In the fall Lovecraft sent Derleth several stories he had asked to see, including ‘In the Vault’. On his own initiative Derleth retyped the story (Lovecraft’s typescript was becoming tattered to the point of disintegration), and then badgered Lovecraft into resubmitting it to Wright; Lovecraft did so, and the tale was accepted in early 1932 for $55.00.