These accounts are among the most illuminating as to Lovecraft’s life—and his relations with his mother—in this period. Both Cook and Kleiner are united on the extreme solicitude exercised by Susie and Lillian over Lovecraft. Cook notes: ‘Every few minutes Howard’s mother or his aunt, or both, peeped into the room to see if he had fainted or shown signs of strain.’ Kleiner tells a more remarkable story: ‘I noticed that at every hour or so his mother appeared in the doorway with a glass of milk, and Lovecraft forthwith drank it.’ It is this constant babying of Lovecraft by Susie and Lillian that no doubt helped to foster in Lovecraft’s own mind a sense of his ‘invalidism’.
Kleiner suggested that they go out for a stroll, and Lovecraft took him to see the colonial antiquities of Providence—a tour he invariably gave to all his out-of-town guests, for he never tired of showing off the wondrous remains of the eighteenth century in his native city. But Lovecraft’s unfamiliarity with normal social conduct is made evident when Kleiner states:
On our way back to his home, and while we were still downtown, I suggested stopping in at a cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He agreed, but took milk himself, and watched me dispose of coffee and cake, or possibly pie, with some curiosity. It occurred to me later that this visit to a public eating-house—a most unpretentious one—might have been a distinct departure from his own usual habits.
This is very likely to be the case: not only because of the family’s dwindling finances, but because of Lovecraft’s continuing hermitry in spite of his ever-growing correspondence, a trip to a restaurant was at this time not likely to have been a common occurrence.
That correspondence, however, did lead at this time to Lovecraft’s contact with two individuals, each remarkable in their own way, who would become lifelong friends—Samuel Loveman and Alfred Galpin. Loveman (1887–1976)—a friend of three of the most distinctive writers in American literature (Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and H. P. Lovecraft) and also well acquainted with George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith—appears to be merely a sort of hanger-on to the great. But he was himself an accomplished poet—a greater poet than any in the Lovecraft circle except, perhaps, Clark Ashton Smith, and vastly superior to Lovecraft himself. His infrequently issued amateur journal, The Saturnian, contained his own exquisite, neo-Grecian, fin-de-siècle poems as well as translations from Baudelaire and Heine; and he scattered his poetry in other amateur or little magazines with insouciance. His greatest work is a long poem, The Hermaphrodite (written perhaps in the late teens and published in 1926 by W. Paul Cook), a gorgeous evocation of the spirit of classical Greece.
Lovecraft came in direct contact with Loveman in 1917. Loveman was at this time stationed at an army base, Camp Gordon, in Georgia, where he was in Company H of the 4th Infantry, Replacement Regiment. According to the UAPA membership lists, he remained there until the middle of 1919, when he returned to his native Cleveland. Loveman had, however, been out of organized amateurdom for some years, and he attests that Lovecraft’s first letter was essentially a query as to whether Loveman was in fact still in the land of the living.14 Loveman, finding the antique diction of the letter both charming and faintly ridiculous, duly relieved Lovecraft’s doubts on this score. For several years their association was largely conducted on paper, but in 1922 they met in Cleveland and then, in 1924–26, they became close friends in New York.
Alfred Galpin (1901–83) is an entirely different case. This brilliant individual—as gifted in pure intellect as Loveman was in aesthetic sensitivity—would eventually become a philosopher, composer, and teacher of French, although perhaps his rapid alterations in intellectual aspirations prevented him from distinguishing himself in any one of them. Galpin first came to Lovecraft’s attention in late 1917, when he was appointed to the new position of 4th Vice-President, in charge of recruiting high-school students into amateurdom. This appointment was very likely suggested by Maurice W. Moe, since Galpin was at that time already emerging as a star pupil in the Appleton (Wis.) High School and specifically in Moe’s Appleton High School Press Club. By January 1918, the date of the first surviving letter by Lovecraft to Galpin, the two were already cordial correspondents.
Galpin’s most profound effect upon Lovecraft may have been philosophical, for as early as August 1918 Lovecraft is announcing that Galpin’s ‘system of philosophy … comes nearest to my own beliefs of any system I have ever known’, and in 1921:
he is intellectually exactly like me save in degree. In degree he is immensely my superior—he is what I should like to be but have not brains enough to be. Our minds are cast in precisely the same mould, save that his is finer. He alone can grasp the direction of my thoughts and amplify them. And so we go down the dark ways of knowledge; the poor plodding old man, and ahead of him the alert little link-boy holding the light and pointing out the path.15
This obviously is meant half in jest, although Lovecraft clearly believes there is more than a grain of truth to it; and perhaps Galpin did indeed help to give shape to Lovecraft’s still nebulous philosophical conceptions, helping this ‘old man’ of thirty-one to hone his mechanistic materialism. But it is not that that I wish to study here; rather, Galpin had a more immediate effect upon Lovecraft’s literary work, and it involved the production of some delightfully playful poetry.
Lovecraft of course wrote some more or less conventional tributes to Galpin, especially on his birthday. Galpin appears to have had amorous inclinations toward various girls in his high school, and Lovecraft has great fun with the whole subject, especially in such poems as ‘Damon and Delia, a Pastoral’ (Tryout, August 1918), ‘To Delia, Avoiding Damon’ (Tryout, September 1918), ‘Damon—a Monody’ (United Amateur, May 1919), and perhaps ‘Hylas and Myrrha’ (Tryout, May 1919) and ‘Myrrha and Strephon’ (Tryout, July 1919), if these latter two are in fact about Galpin. Damon in these poems is clearly Galpin; the name is derived from the shepherd who is featured in the eighth eclogue of Virgil. Many of these poems are very amusing, and some of the best of Lovecraft’s parodic love poetry is found in letters to Galpin.
Lovecraft’s final word on Galpin’s schoolboy crushes occurs in the delightful two-act play in pentameter blank verse entitled Alfredo: A Tragedy, the manuscript of which declares it to be ‘By Beaumont and Fletcher’ and which is dated 14 September 1918. This date makes it clear that two of the chief characters—Rinarto, King of Castile and Aragon, and Alfredo, the Prince Regent—are meant to be Kleiner and Galpin, since Kleiner was president of the UAPA and Galpin was 1st vice-president during the 1918–19 term. Other obviously recognizable characters are Mauricio (= Maurice W. Moe), a cardinal, and Teobaldo (= Lovecraft), the prime minister.
I don’t know that we need read a great deal into all these mocklove poems about Galpin: certainly Lovecraft’s beloved Georgians had made a specialty of it, and The Rape of the Lock is only the bestknown example. But by consistently deflating the emotion of love in these and other poems, Lovecraft may be shielding himself from falling under its influence. The probability that he would so fall was, at the moment, comparatively small, but he was not taking any chances. During his involvement with the Providence Amateur Press Club in 1914–16 a few of the members decided to play a rather malicious joke on him by having one of the female members call him up and ask him to take her out on a date. Lovecraft stated soberly, ‘I’ll have to ask my mother’, and of course nothing came of the matter.16 In a letter to Galpin Lovecraft notes in passing that ‘so far as I know, no feminine freak ever took the trouble to note or recognise my colossal and transcendent intellect’.17 Whether this was exactly true or not is something I shall take up later.