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

In August Lovecraft received a small augmentation to his selfesteem. Harold S. Farnese (1885–1945), a composer who was then Assistant Director of the Institute of Musical Art at Los Angeles, wished to set two of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets, ‘Mirage’ and ‘The Elder Pharos’ (both in Weird Tales for February– March 1931) to music. Having done so shortly thereafter, Farnese then proposed that Lovecraft write the libretto of an entire opera or music drama based generally on his work; but Lovecraft declined the offer, citing his complete lack of experience in dramatic composition (evidently his 1918 squib

Alfredo did not qualify). It is difficult to imagine what such a work would have been like.

Lovecraft’s travels for 1932 were by no means over. On 30 August he went to Boston to spend time with Cook. The next day the two of them went to Newburyport to see the total solar eclipse, and were rewarded with a fine sight. From there Lovecraft proceeded to Montreal and Quebec, spending four full days in the two towns (2–6 September). Lovecraft tried to persuade Cook to come along, but Cook did not relish the ascetic manner in which his friend travelled (sleeping on trains or buses, scant meals, nonstop sightseeing, etc.). Cook did, however, see Lovecraft on his return, and his portrait is as vivid a reflection of Lovecraft’s manic travelling habits as one could ask for:

Early the following Tuesday morning, before I had gone to work, Howard arrived back from Quebec. I have never before nor since seen such a sight. Folds of skin hanging from a skeleton. Eyes sunk in sockets like burnt holes in a blanket. Those delicate, sensitive artist’s hands and fingers nothing but claws. The man was dead except for his nerves, on which he was functioning … I was scared. Because I was scared I was angry. Possibly my anger was largely at myself for letting him go alone on that trip. But whatever its real cause, it was genuine anger that I took out on him. He needed a brake; well, he’d have the brake applied right now.¹³

Cook immediately took Lovecraft to a Waldorf restaurant and made him have a plentiful meal, then took him back to his rooming house so that he could rest. Cook, returning from work at five, forced Lovecraft to have another meal before letting him go. How Lovecraft could actually derive enjoyment from the places he visited, functioning on pure nervous energy and with so little food and rest, it is difficult to imagine; and yet, he did so again and again.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1932 a promising new revision client emerged—promising not because she showed any talent or inclination to become a writer in her own right but because she gave Lovecraft regular work. She was Hazel Heald (1896–1961), a woman about whom I know almost nothing. She was born and apparently spent most of her life in Somerville, Massachusetts, and so far as I know published nothing aside from the five stories Lovecraft revised or ghostwrote for her. Unlike Zealia Bishop, she wrote no memoir of Lovecraft, so that it is not clear how she came in touch with him and what their professional or personal relations were like.

There is good reason to believe that several, of not all five, of the stories Lovecraft revised for Heald were written in 1932 or 1933, even though the last of them did not appear in print until 1937. The first of them appears to have been ‘The Man of Stone’ (Wonder Stories, October 1932). Heald told Derleth that Lovecraft merely touched up an existing manuscript,¹⁴ but to me the tale’s prose reads like Lovecraft throughout. He must have worked on the story by the summer of 1932 at the latest in order for it to have appeared in the October Wonder Stories

. It is in the end a conventional story about Daniel ‘Mad Dan’ Morris, who finds in his ancestral copy of the Book of Eibon a formula to turn any living creature into a stone statue, and attempts to do so to both his wife and a man he suspects of dallying with his wife, but in the end is turned to stone himself.

The next tale, ‘Winged Death’, is not much of an improvement. This preposterous story tells of an insect called the ‘devil-fly’ that purportedly takes over the soul or personality of its victim. Sure enough, a scientist is bitten by the creature, and his soul enters its body; absurdly enough, he writes a message on the ceiling of his room by dipping his insect body in ink and walking across the ceiling. This grotesque and unintentionally comical conclusion— which Lovecraft admitted was his own invention—is clearly intended to be the acme of horror, but ends up being merely bathetic.