Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Dreamer on the Nightside. Frank Belknap Long

      

      ALSO BY FRANK BELKNAP LONG

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      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      This book has been prepared and published with the kind permission and assistance of Lily Doty, Mansfield M. Doty, and the family of Frank Belknap Long.

      Copyright © 1975 by Frank Belknap Long.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      TO LYDA

      A gift from the far-off days

      Of my still stubbornly recurrent youth

      And—A gift from tomorrow

      PREFACE

      Aside from the associational ties inseparable from family relationships and childhood friendships, I have always felt that I knew Howard Phillips Lovecraft better than anyone else. From the early 1920s to the year of his death, I exchanged numerous letters with him, and met and talked with him at length at least 500 times—in New York, in Providence, and in the New England seacoast towns of great historical or antiquarian interest.

      There are others, however, whose gifts of scholarship and capacity to devote long hours to patient research would make them better equipped to write a full-scale biography of HPL. Even if I were capable of undertaking such a task, I would be compelled to leave out many of the personal recollections set down in these pages. There is such an abundance of material which, objectively considered, no biographer would be justified in omitting, that he would have to impose upon himself a rigid standard of selectivity long before he reached the final chapter.

      For several years now I have wanted to assemble a portrait of HPL which would be based largely upon my memories of him during those fifteen years of close and treasured friendship. I use the word “assemble” advisedly, being mindful of the fact that it is not always considered a wise approach in the realm of portraiture. It is not an easy task to take a series of random memories and fit them together in such a way that the portrait becomes all one piece with few, if any, irregularities. Whether I have succeeded or not, I shall leave to the judgment of the reader. I can think of no more important criterion, for success or failure must always be determined by a fairly large number of objective appraisals.

      While not omitting all strictly biographical material, I have confined myself just to those periods of his childhood and early youth which he frequently discussed with me in detail, or those later periods which preceded the beginning of our correspondence but which seemed to me to possess some unusual relevance.

      There must of necessity be omissions, even in a book of this nature. I could perhaps have shed a bit more of a revolving-prism light on some of HPL’s meetings with his other friends of the period at which I was also present. But in many instances that light would have been minimal, for those meetings were often of brief duration and far less important, in a general way, than the longer Kalem Club gatherings at which all of his friends were present. Other aspects of those years which would bulk very large in a full-scale biography have been omitted for a different reason—they are fully and accurately preserved elsewhere, either in previous Arkham House volumes or in periodical articles about HPL, and thus no purpose would be served by including them.

      Two of these accounts are typical of the others. W. Paul Cook of Athol, Massachusetts was also one of HPL’s oldest friends and correspondents, and a companion on many occasions. But although Cook published my first volume of verse, A Man from Genoa, I exchanged no more than a few brief letters with him, and I met him only twice. HPL was not present at those encounters, and while he often mentioned Paul in his correspondence, the tribute he paid to him was invariably a simple one: “a gentleman of great scholarly attainments and one of the shining lights of amateur journalism.” From meeting and talking with Cook I could have added merely that he was slightly stoutish and balding, and a brilliant conversationalist. In his own privately printed reminiscence, Cook provided an admirable portrayal of HPL—discerning, warmly sympathetic, and graced by no small measure of literary skill. But that memoir also is on record elsewhere, having been reprinted more than once.

      The other instance I have characterized as typical of the omissions in general—and to discuss them all would run this preface to inordinate length!—concerns August Derleth’s keen perception in encouraging Zealia Bishop to write an article about HPL for the 1953 Arkham House volume, The Curse of Yig. Mrs. Bishop was the most important of HPL’s several revision clients, and his ghost-writing activities on her behalf are fully treated in that article. She discusses at length her first meeting with HPL and the most memorable of the stories which appeared under her name in Weird Tales. There is little I could have added to that account beyond calling attention to the fact that her memory appears to have failed her just once: I had nothing whatever to do with the writing of The Mound. That brooding, somber, and magnificently atmospheric story is Lovecraftian from the first page to the last. I could mention one thing more, however, which can hardly be considered of minor importance. Mrs. Bishop was a woman of great charm and quite exceptional beauty.

      August Derleth’s own biographical study of HPL contains much material of absorbing interest which I have not included in this volume because, as with the other instances cited, the reader has but to turn to it for several hours of the most rewarding enlightenment. This memoir is unique in that the number of dedicated Lovecraftians unfamiliar with it might be counted on one of those fringed and primitive adding devices that contain no more than ten or twelve beads.

      I have made no deliberate effort to keep a few of these pages from verging on what a post-impressionistic painter might well have felt was the only proper way of depicting HPL, if only because no earlier school of painting could have done justice to his nightside genius. But in the main I have tried to keep in mind the more classic schools, and in no instance have I altered an actual occurrence, even in the smallest of particulars. However uncannily in accord with Jung’s theory of synchronicity as two or three of these occurrences may seem, they actually happened. And I have resisted every impulse to parallel, on a verbal plane, the further extensions of pictorial art which gave birth to cubism, surrealism, and pre-World War I Germanic expressionism—except in three or four brief paragraphs!

      —Frank Belknap Long

      CHAPTER ONE

      There possibly may be some readers of this volume who are unfamiliar with all but two or three of Lovecraft’s most widely anthologized stories, or who know of him only through screen adaptations which thus far have tragically failed to do his writing justice. Other readers may be unacquainted with even the bare, skeletal outlines of his life apart from his writing, despite the far from scanty biographical material concerning him which has appeared in both Europe and America in the past few years. Such readers would feel justifiably cheated if I failed to devote at least one chapter to a generalized summary of the peak aspects of his growing fame.

      There are some writers so closely linked to the legends which their lives have created that a kind of umbilical cord unites both aspects of their renown. Although cutting it would perhaps not diminish their actual literary stature, it is only when both aspects are considered as a totality that a figure of extraordinary fascination emerges. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the dreamer and myth-maker of Providence, Rhode Island, was such a writer.

      Interest in Lovecraft today is sweeping American