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

How did the aunts take this extended departure of their only nephew? As early as 9 August, in Cleveland, Lovecraft writes to Lillian, rather touchingly: ‘I am sorry you miss me—though much flattered that you should do so!’ In September Sonia and Lovecraft attempted to persuade one or both of the aunts to come and join them in New York; the staid Lillian declined, but Annie—who in her younger days was very much the socialite—accepted.

On the evening of 16 September Lovecraft and Kleiner explored the exquisite Dutch Reformed Church (1796) on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, quite near to Sonia’s apartment. This magnificent structure contains a sinister old churchyard at its rear, full of crumbling slabs in Dutch. What did Lovecraft do?

From one of the crumbling gravestones—dated 1747—I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write—& ought to suggest some sort of a horror-story. I must some night place it beneath my pillow as I sleep … who can say what thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb?²⁵

True enough, the incident led directly to the writing of ‘The Hound’, probably in October after he returned home. This story involves the escapades of the narrator and his friend St John (based very loosely on Kleiner, whom Lovecraft referred to in correspondence as Randolph St John, as if he were a relative of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke) in that ‘hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing’.

‘The Hound’ has been roundly abused for being wildly overwritten; but it has somehow managed to escape most critics’ attention that the story is clearly a self-parody. This becomes increasingly evident from obvious literary allusions as well as from such grotesque utterances as ‘Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count’. And yet, the story is undeniably successful as an experiment in sheer flamboyance and excess, so long as one keeps in mind that Lovecraft was clearly aiming for such an effect and was doing so at least partially with tongue in cheek.

Lovecraft finally returned home in mid-October. Houtain was already asking him for another serial, this time to run in four parts. Lovecraft dawdled on the task through mid-November, but— perhaps because Houtain finally paid up for ‘Herbert West— Reanimator’ and advanced him half the payment for the new story—finally got down to work and wrote ‘The Lurking Fear’ later in the month. Since this story was written in a far more condensed period of time than ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, it presents a somewhat greater impression of unity than its predecessor, in spite of the need to provide a shocking conclusion at the end of each segment.

No one is likely to regard ‘The Lurking Fear’ as one of Lovecraft’s masterworks, even among his early tales; and yet, it is not as contemptible a tale as many critics have deemed it, and once again it contains many foreshadowings of techniques and devices used to better advantage in later works. The tale moves briskly in its account of the narrator’s search for the unknown entity that had wreaked havoc amongst the squatters of the Catskills near the Martense mansion. In the end we learn that there is not a single entity, but a legion of mutants who are nothing less than the result of centuries of interbreeding among members of the ancient and formerly aristocratic Martense family.

‘The Lurking Fear’ appeared in Home Brew from January to April 1923. Presumably at Lovecraft’s request, Clark Ashton Smith was commissioned to illustrate the serial, supplying two illustrations per instalment. The last issue announces that the magazine will change its name to High Life

; after this change of name the magazine folded in 1924. No doubt Lovecraft was glad to be rid of the ‘vile rag’.²⁶

Although it was late in the year and Lovecraft’s sensitivity to cold would not allow him to venture abroad very much, his travels for 1922 were not quite over. In mid-December he visited Boston to participate in a Hub Club meeting with Edith Miniter and others. Afterward he decided to do some solitary antiquarian exploration of some of the towns on the North Shore, specifically Salem. Salem was certainly a delight—it was Lovecraft’s first true experience of the seventeenth century, and he canvassed the Witch House (1642), the House of the Seven Gables, and other celebrated sites— but while there he learnt from natives that there was another town a little farther up the coast called Marblehead that was even quainter. Taking a bus there, Lovecraft was ‘borne into the most marvellous region I had ever dream’d of, and furnished with the most powerful single aesthetick impression I have receiv’d in years’.²⁷