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

His continued enthusiasm the next day was so genuine and sincere that in appreciation I surprised and shocked him right then and there by kissing him. He was so flustered that he blushed, then he turned pale. When I chaffed him about it he said he had not been kissed since he was a very small child and that he was never kissed by any woman, not even by his mother or aunts, since he grew to manhood, and that he would probably never be kissed again. (But I fooled him.)²²

This really is pretty remarkable. First, if Lovecraft’s statement here is true, it certainly makes his ‘romance’ with Winifred Jackson an exceptionally platonic one. Second, the matter of his not being kissed even by his aunts or mother since he was a young man makes us wonder about the degree of reserve in this old New England family. Lovecraft’s affection for his aunts—and theirs for him—is unquestioned; but such an unusual lack of physical intimacy is anomalous even for the time and for their social milieu. No wonder Lovecraft was so slow to respond to a woman who so openly expressed affection for him. His emotions had clearly been stunted in this direction.

This week-long trip with Sonia was, as far as I can tell, the first time Lovecraft had spent any considerable amount of time alone in the company of a woman to whom he was not related. Sonia was keen on pursuing matters and managed to get up to Rhode Island again on Sunday 16 July, when she and Lovecraft went to Newport.

Ten days later, on Wednesday 26 July, we find Lovecraft writing again from Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn: somehow she had managed to persuade him to undertake a trip to Cleveland to see Galpin and Loveman. He spent only three days in a stopover in New York, for on Saturday 29 July, at 6.30 p.m., he boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Grand Central Station for the long train ride to Cleveland. The ride took sixteen hours, and Lovecraft arrived in Cleveland at 10.30 a.m. on the 30th.

Lovecraft stayed until 15 August, mostly at Galpin’s residence at 9231 Birchdale Avenue (the building is now no longer standing). Their habits were roughly in accord with Lovecraft’s own behaviourpatterns at home: ‘We rise at noon, eat twice a day, and retire after midnight.’ An interesting note on the state of Lovecraft’s physical and psychological health is recorded in a later letter to Lillian:

As for the kind of time I am having—it is simply great! I have just the incentive I need to keep me active & free from melancholy, & I look so well that I doubt if any Providence person would know me by sight! I have no headaches or depressed spells—in short, I am for the time being really alive & in good health & spirits. The companionship of youth & artistic taste is what keeps one going!²³

Freedom from his mother’s (and, to a lesser degree, his aunts’) stifling control, travel to different parts of the country, and the company of congenial friends who regarded him with fondness, respect, and admiration will do wonders for a cloistered recluse who never travelled a hundred miles away from home up to the age of thirty-one.

Naturally, they met Samuel Loveman (staying at the Lonore Apartments around the corner) frequently, and it was through Loveman that Lovecraft met several other distinguished littérateurs —George Kirk (1898–1962), the bookseller who had just published Loveman’s edition of Ambrose Bierce’s Twenty-one Letters (1922), and, most notably, the young Hart Crane (1899–1932) and his circle of literary and artistic friends. Lovecraft reports attending a meeting of ‘all the members of Loveman’s literary circle’:

It gave me a novel sensation to be ‘lionised’ so much beyond my deserts by men as able as the painter Summers [sic], Loveman, Galpin, &c. I met some new figures—Crane the poet, Lazar [sic

], an ambitious young literary student now in the army, & a delightful young fellow named Carroll Lawrence, who writes weird stories & wants to see all of mine.²⁴

I shall have more to say about both Kirk and Crane later, since Lovecraft would meet them again during his New York period; for now we can note this brief meeting with William Sommer, the watercolourist and draughtsman; William Lescaze, later to become an internationally known architect; Edward Lazare (whom Lovecraft would meet again in New York, and who in later years would become a long-time editor of American Book-Prices Current); and others of Crane’s circle. Crane had just begun to publish his poetry in magazines, although his first volume, White Buildings, would not appear until 1926. Lovecraft must, however, have read Crane’s ‘Pastorale’ (in the Dial for October 1921), for he wrote a parody of it entitled ‘Plaster-All’. While an amusing take-off of what Lovecraft believed to be the formless free verse of the modernists, the poem is really a sort of impressionistic—dare one say imagistic?—account of his Cleveland trip.