of a new, but reasonably settled, kind of existence in New York City which would enable him to continue with his writing and make new contacts in a rewarding, leisurely manner. And despite all that has been said to the contrary, there was just enough adventurousness, even somewhat reckless daring, in HPL’s nature to have made such a prospect far from lacking in appeal.
Although New York at first enchanted him, his sojourn (which lasted only until April 1926) quickly turned into a nightmare. He could not abide the crowds, the high-pressure activity, the feeling that he was adrift and cut off from virtually everything he most treasured. The actual deterioration of his marriage took place a little more slowly than his disillusionment with the city itself, for the person who now had become Mrs. Sonia Lovecraft, a divorcee of thirty-nine with a grown daughter, was a woman of great understanding and very much in love with him. But Sonia totally failed to comprehend that nothing which happened to HPL in New York could possibly transform him into a young, alert, and eminently successful wage-earner of the 1920s.
What Lovecraft missed most was his removal from all aspects of the past that were intimately associated with the city of his birth—not only with his ancestral heritage, but with every cherished memory that went back to his earliest childhood. No longer could he take long, solitary walks through the streets which he felt could be found only on the Ancient Hill; no longer could he watch the play of sunlight and shadow on ancient steeples and sequestered churchyards where “dead leaves whisper of departed days, longing for sights and sounds that are no more,” or pause occasionally to pat a stray cat before returning home. (He was inordinately fond of cats, but paradoxically enough, did not regard them as in any way allied to the Black Arts, regardless of their color. There was also an abundance of stray cats in New York, of course, but few other compensations for all that he had lost by breaking so abruptly with the past.)
In one of HPL’s best-known short stories, which appears to verge slightly upon the autobiographical, the central character is depicted not only as an outsider but as something of a monster. It apparently gave Lovecraft a kind of whimsically ironic pleasure to picture himself in this manner because his love for the past was so deep-seated and ineradicable that it embraced both the vistas of light and grace and loveliness, and the dark crypts below the earth which cannot be explored with artistic fidelity unless one assumes the identity of a tomb-dweller.
But at least in one respect HPL was an outsider—his kindliness and his ability to relate to others without the faintest trace of self-seeking were extraordinary. I have encountered not a few men and women who would have been incapable of any ego-bolstering meanness, but in Howard it seemed to go just a little beyond even that. It is hard to explain or analyze, but it was a difference which could be sensed by everyone who knew him.
A short while after his return to Providence his marriage was terminated by a quietly arranged divorce. No two people could have parted more amicably, and though the stated cause was “desertion,” there can be no doubt that the excuse was a mutually agreed upon one to outwit the outrageously barbaric statutes pertaining to divorce in almost every state at that time.
During this period HPL now resided with Mrs. Clark at 10 Barnes Street and then in 1933 moved to his final home, a Georgian dwelling at 66 College Street. He returned to New York a half-dozen times, and ceased to be quite the hermit as he had been before his marriage. He journeyed to New Orleans and Charleston and other cities where nocturnal excursions into the past could be pursued in so variegated a way that his escape from Time’s tyranny might be constantly reinforced by beckoning ghosts from earlier centuries. Weed-choked patio gardens hidden from view by rusting iron grill-work particularly fascinated him, as did unbroken rows of old houses with blankly-staring windows dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Although Lovecraft was later to be haunted by a poverty even more extreme than he had endured toward the end of his New York years, he still possessed a dwindling inheritance which he managed to supplement by ghost-writing for eight or ten revision clients and through the occasional sale of a story. (During at least five years, story sales added considerably to his always small income, despite the low rate of payment which prevailed at the time.) This enabled him to avoid stripping his traveling expenses to a wholly fleshless kind of bone, an unpleasantness which can mar every planned excursion to some extent, even when it does not appreciably shorten it.
In outward appearance HPL remained unchanged even when he seemed to be journeying back through time, until the colonial period dimmed and vanished, and was replaced by a crowded Roman marketplace or a stone column close to the Forum. Poe’s most striking feature, a forehead so high and broad it verged on the idiosyncratic, was not possessed by Lovecraft, who rather had a brow of moderate expanse. (I never asked him, but he was too well-versed in physiognomy on a sound scientific level to believe that such an incredible expanse of forehead had anything to do with Poe’s intellectual endowments or his poetic genius, since it has been established beyond dispute that quite low brows are to be found in many men of genius and quite high ones are not at all unlikely in idiots.)
Below his brow, a nose (with perhaps just enough curvature to justify describing it as aquiline and a little on the bony side) and a rather elongated lower jaw gave him somewhat the aspect of a medieval scholar who has spent long hours poring over illuminated manuscripts, his features lengthening a little year by year until that prolonged concentration has caused him to blink more often than the unscholarly are ever likely to do, all apart from the eyestrain factor. It was an expressive, kindly face, the opposite of handsome, but animated by alert and perceptive eyes that occasionally could assume a look of piercing intensity.
During his periodic trips to New York he would sometimes bring his newest story with him and read it aloud while seated in a comfortable chair. Once in bleak midwinter before a crackling log fire, I was the first to hear The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, and three or four other stories of novelette length, with their dramatization on the screen, radio, and television many years in the future.
Although he lacked an accomplished actor’s stage presence, HPL was an extremely gifted mimic, and the change which came over him on these occasions was astounding. His voice deepened and became more resonant; as he entered his inner world of cosmic strangeness and alien dimensions, he became the protagonist of the story without ceasing to be H. P. Lovecraft. Despite its increased resonance, his voice never lost its conversational tone and never once verged on the oratorical (and that, in a way, made the entire recital more convincing). By combining the tone of a cultivated New Englander with the rustic accents of a fictional character of dark and terrifying antecedents, he created, particularly in The Whisperer in Darkness, a kind of paradoxical double image which made those readings unforgettable. He did not, of course, combine the two impressions in an overlapping way at any point in the story, but the overall impression still remained as I have described.
If HPL had written only stories of supernatural horror dealing with malign, tomb-dwelling presences of destructiveness and dread, his writing would nevertheless have challenged comparison with the best of Bierce, Blackwood, A. E. Coppard, M. R. James, Saki, and Walter de la Mare, to mention just six masters of the macabre among perhaps ten writers of comparable stature after Poe who excelled in that particular realm. But the cycle of stories which has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos not only sets Lovecraft apart from all other writers in the genre; it is simply without parallel in the whole of literature.
Recently described as “the myth that has captured a generation,” the Mythos presents an entire pantheon of Elder Gods and of eon-banished entities which come terrifyingly to life through their unfolding genealogy. Long before the birth of the solar system, these “Old Ones” were cast into outer darkness by forces less powerful than themselves through a cataclysm of undreamed of violence, and someday they will awaken from slumber to reclaim the whole of their lost heritage, which includes the entire universe of stars. Already they have begun to stir and creep back into human consciousness in night-shadowed dreams of madness and death. Cthulhu, a creature of nightmare dimensions whom Lovecraft wisely chose not to describe beyond hinting that he was vaguely fishlike and terrible beyond belief, is the dominant entity in this cosmic assemblage. His frightfulness becomes wholly believable because HPL has succeeded in maintaining, in every story in the Mythos, the total “suspension of disbelief” that is the hallmark of truly imaginative myth-making.
There