Lovecraft managed to write two other stories while working desultorily on ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, and they are very different propositions altogether. ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ appears to have been written in late 1921, probably December. The first of its many appearances was in the National Amateur for March 1922. The story—recounting the tale of Erich Zann, a mute viol-player who dwells in a lofty garret in Paris and apparently plays his bizarre music in order to ward off some nameless entity lurking just outside his window—justifiably remained one of Lovecraft’s own favourite stories, for it reveals a restraint in its supernatural manifestations (bordering, for one of the few times in his entire work, on obscurity), a pathos in its depiction of its protagonist, and a general polish in its language that Lovecraft rarely achieved in later years.
The other story of this period is ‘Hypnos’, probably written in March 1922 and first published in the National Amateur for May 1923. It is a curious but quite substantial tale that has not received the attention it deserves, perhaps because Lovecraft himself in later years came to dislike it. ‘Hypnos’ tells of a sculptor who encounters another man at a railway station, becomes fascinated with him, and apparently undertakes weird dream-travels through space and time in his company. After a particularly horrifying experience, the two men strive to stay awake as much as possible, in an attempt to ward off the strange dreams. Later the friend disappears, and all that is left is an exquisite bust of him in marble, with the Greek word HYPNOS (sleep) inscribed at the base.
It would seem that the interpretation of this story rests on whether the narrator’s friend actually existed or not; but this point may not affect the analysis appreciably. What we have here, ultimately, is, as with ‘The Other Gods’, a case of hybris, but on a much subtler level. At one point the narrator states: ‘I will hint— only hint—that he had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his.’ This sounds somewhat extravagant, but in the context of the story it is powerful and effective, even though not much evidence is offered as to how the person could have effected this rulership of the universe. In the end, ‘Hypnos’ is a subtilization of a theme already broached in several earlier tales, notably ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’—the notion that certain ‘dreams’ provide access to other realms of entity beyond that of the five senses or waking world.
Shortly after writing ‘Hypnos’ Lovecraft began a series of peregrinations that would not end until October. First on the agenda was Lovecraft’s first trip out of New England—his New York jaunt of 6– 12 April. The trip was, of course, arranged by Sonia. She had visited Cleveland on business some time in late 1921 or early 1922, and there met both Samuel Loveman and Alfred Galpin, who had temporarily settled there after finishing his work at Lawrence College. Developing the idea of convening a group of Lovecraft’s best friends in New York, Sonia persuaded Loveman to come to the metropolis to look for work. Loveman arrived on 1 April but had little success in job-hunting. As a way of keeping him in the city— and, coincidentally, of uprooting Lovecraft from his hermitry— Sonia telephoned Lovecraft and urged him to come down to meet his longtime correspondent. Loveman, Morton, and Kleiner added their encouragement, and Lovecraft’s new protégé Frank Long was also likely to be on hand. These massed invitations did the trick, and Lovecraft caught the 10.06 train from Providence on the 6th.
Five hours later he saw the ‘Cyclopean outlines of New-York’17 for the first time. There followed an endless round of discussion with his friends, along with museum visiting, sightseeing (they ascended to the top of the Woolworth Building, then the tallest structure in the city), bookstore-hunting, and all the other things that most tourists of a bookish sort do when they hit the big city. Sonia magnanimously turned over her own apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn to Loveman and Lovecraft, herself sleeping in a neighbour’s apartment. She reports in her memoir at being ‘amazed at myself’ for her ‘boldness’18 in inviting two men to be guests in her flat.
Certainly the high point for Lovecraft was meeting two of his closest friends, Loveman and Long. Of course, he met often with Sonia, and even once met her ‘flapper offspring’ Florence—a ‘pert, spoiled, and ultra-independent infant rather more hard-boiled of visage than her benignant mater’.19 Sonia cooked several meals for the gang at her place, which even the ascetic Lovecraft admitted to enjoying. One of the most provocative passages in her memoir relates to an event toward the end of Lovecraft’s stay:
Soon S. L. returned to Cleveland and H. P. remained. My neighbor who so kindly made room for me had a beautiful Persian cat which she brought to my apartment. As soon as H. P. saw that cat he made ‘love’ to it. He seemed to have a language that the feline brother understood, for it curled right up in his lap and purred contentedly.
Half in earnest, half in jest I remarked, ‘What a lot of perfectly good affection to waste on a mere cat, when some woman might highly appreciate it!’ His retort was, ‘How can any woman love a face like mine?’ My counter-retort was, ‘A mother can and some who are not mothers would not have to try very hard.’ We all laughed while Felis was enjoying some more stroking.20
At this point one hardly need belabour Lovecraft’s inferiority complex about his appearance. But Sonia’s intentions were already becoming clear, although perhaps she herself was not yet wholly aware of them.
In late May he visited Myrta Alice Little again in New Hampshire. In early or mid-June was the Cambridge trip to hear David Van Bush lecture. Later that month Sonia, striking while the iron was hot, found a way to spend time in New England and do much visiting with Lovecraft, taking him to Magnolia, Massachusetts, a fashionable watering-place north of Boston. Sonia persuaded Lovecraft to spend several days with her in Magnolia and Gloucester in late June and early July. One evening, while they were strolling along the esplanade on the cliffs of Magnolia, the view of the moon reflecting its light upon the ocean so struck Sonia that she evolved the plot of a horror tale. Encouraged by Lovecraft, she presently wrote it, and Lovecraft revised it. The result was ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’, a wild and improbable story about a sea monster that appeared in Weird Tales for November 1923 (under Sonia’s name only) as ‘The Invisible Monster’.
Another story that may have been written at this time is a short macabre tale called ‘Four O’Clock’. In a letter to Winfield Townley Scott, Sonia declares that Lovecraft only suggested changes in the prose of the tale;21 hence I concluded that it does not belong in the Lovecraft corpus and did not include it in the revised version of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989). Judging, however, from her later memoir, Sonia does not seem to have been a very skilled, polished, or even coherent writer, so that Lovecraft probably did contribute something to this story, which is even slighter than its predecessor. Sonia adds a startling note about what happened the day after ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ was conceived:
His continued enthusiasm the next day was so genuine and sincere that in appreciation I surprised and shocked him right then and there by kissing him. He was so flustered that he blushed, then he turned pale. When I chaffed him about it he said he had not been kissed since he was a very small child and that he was never kissed by any woman, not even by his mother or aunts, since he grew to manhood, and that he would probably never be kissed again. (But I fooled him.)22