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

One notable event was Lovecraft’s first appearance in hardcover, in a volume entitled The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag. Hoag was the ancient poet (born 1831) in Troy, New York, for whom Lovecraft had been writing annual birthday odes since 1918. Now he wished to see a bound book of his verse, and enlisted Lovecraft to gather, revise, and publish his work. Lovecraft in turn called upon Loveman and Morton to aid him. Hoag was clearly footing the bill for the entire enterprise—a point worth emphasizing, since it has long been believed that Lovecraft himself helped to subsidize the book, a highly unlikely prospect given the leanness of his purse. The finished book emerged late in the spring; incredibly, Lovecraft waived ‘all monetary remuneration for my share of the editing’

² in exchange for twenty copies of the book!

Meanwhile there was much more travel in the offing. Lovecraft visited the Salem–Marblehead area at least three times early in 1923—in early February, in March, and again in April. On the third trip he went to Danvers—the town, once called Salem-Village, founded in 1636 by some members of the original settlement of 1626, and where the 1692 witch trials had taken place—and thoroughly explored the Samuel Fowler house (1809), occupied by two hideous old crones who were descendants of the original owner. He then proceeded out into the countryside, seeking the farmhouse built by Townsend Bishop in 1636—the place where Rebekah Nurse lived in 1692 when she was accused of witchcraft by the slave woman Tituba and, at the age of seventy, hanged on Gallows Hill. He found both the farmhouse and Rebekah Nurse’s grave some distance away. Unlike the Fowler place, the farmhouse was of a cramped seventeenth-century design with low rooms and massive wooden beams.

The next day (14 April) Lovecraft set out for Merrimac, where his young amateur friend Edgar J. Davis (age fifteen) lived. The two of them visited graveyards in nearby Amesbury (where the poet Whittier had lived), and the next day they headed for Newburyport. This coastal town has now been made into a yuppie resort, but in 1923 it was a quiet little backwater that preserved its antiquities in almost as complete a state as Marblehead. So little life did the town have that Lovecraft and Davis rode the trolley car all the way through it without realizing that they had passed through the centre of town, which was their destination. Returning on foot to the central square, Lovecraft and Davis revelled in the atmosphere of the past of a once-thriving colonial seaport.

Sonia paid Lovecraft a call in Providence on 15–17 July. This is the first we hear of the two meeting since Lovecraft’s visit to New York the preceding September, but Sonia makes clear that in the two years preceding their marriage in March 1924 they engaged in ‘almost daily correspondence—H. P. writing me about everything he did and everywhere he went, introducing names of friends and his evaluation of them, sometimes filling 30, 40 and even 50 pages of finely written script’.³ What a shame that Sonia felt the need to burn all those letters! The visit in July was a joint business-pleasure trip on her part: on Monday the 16th Lovecraft showed Sonia the customary antiquities of Providence; then, on Tuesday the 17th, the two of them went to the coastal town of Narragansett Pier, in the southern part of the state overlooking the ocean, passing through Apponaug, East Greenwich, and Kingston along the way. On the return trip Sonia continued on to Boston while Lovecraft went home.

On 10 August occurred no less momentous an event than Lovecraft’s first personal visit with his longtime friend Maurice W. Moe, who was making a tour of the East. Lovecraft met him at the Providence YMCA that morning, showing him all the local sites before boarding a bus to Boston, where they would meet Cole, Albert A. Sandusky, and Moe’s wife and two children, Robert (age eleven) and Donald (age nine). The next day Lovecraft performed his customary tour-guide act, as Cole relates in a memoir:

I recall vividly the Saturday afternoon … when Lovecraft, Maurice Moe, Albert Sandusky, and I went to Old Marblehead to visit the numerous Colonial houses and other places of interest with which Howard was thoroughly familiar. He was so insistent that our friend from the West should not miss a single relic or point of view over lovely town and harbor that he walked us relentlessly for miles, impelled solely by his inexhaustible enthusiasm until our bodies rebelled and, against his protests, we dragged ourselves to the train. Lovecraft was still buoyant.⁴ So much for the sickly recluse of a decade before!