This really is pretty remarkable. First, if Lovecraft’s statement here is true, it certainly makes his ‘romance’ with Winifred Jackson an exceptionally platonic one. Second, the matter of his not being kissed even by his aunts or mother since he was a young man makes us wonder about the degree of reserve in this old New England family. Lovecraft’s affection for his aunts—and theirs for him—is unquestioned; but such an unusual lack of physical intimacy is anomalous even for the time and for their social milieu. No wonder Lovecraft was so slow to respond to a woman who so openly expressed affection for him. His emotions had clearly been stunted in this direction.
This week-long trip with Sonia was, as far as I can tell, the first time Lovecraft had spent any considerable amount of time alone in the company of a woman to whom he was not related. Sonia was keen on pursuing matters and managed to get up to Rhode Island again on Sunday 16 July, when she and Lovecraft went to Newport.
Ten days later, on Wednesday 26 July, we find Lovecraft writing again from Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn: somehow she had managed to persuade him to undertake a trip to Cleveland to see Galpin and Loveman. He spent only three days in a stopover in New York, for on Saturday 29 July, at 6.30 p.m., he boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Grand Central Station for the long train ride to Cleveland. The ride took sixteen hours, and Lovecraft arrived in Cleveland at 10.30 a.m. on the 30th.
Lovecraft stayed until 15 August, mostly at Galpin’s residence at 9231 Birchdale Avenue (the building is now no longer standing). Their habits were roughly in accord with Lovecraft’s own behaviourpatterns at home: ‘We rise at noon, eat twice a day, and retire after midnight.’ An interesting note on the state of Lovecraft’s physical and psychological health is recorded in a later letter to Lillian:
As for the kind of time I am having—it is simply great! I have just the incentive I need to keep me active & free from melancholy, & I look so well that I doubt if any Providence person would know me by sight! I have no headaches or depressed spells—in short, I am for the time being really alive & in good health & spirits. The companionship of youth & artistic taste is what keeps one going!23
Freedom from his mother’s (and, to a lesser degree, his aunts’) stifling control, travel to different parts of the country, and the company of congenial friends who regarded him with fondness, respect, and admiration will do wonders for a cloistered recluse who never travelled a hundred miles away from home up to the age of thirty-one.
Naturally, they met Samuel Loveman (staying at the Lonore Apartments around the corner) frequently, and it was through Loveman that Lovecraft met several other distinguished littérateurs —George Kirk (1898–1962), the bookseller who had just published Loveman’s edition of Ambrose Bierce’s Twenty-one Letters (1922), and, most notably, the young Hart Crane (1899–1932) and his circle of literary and artistic friends. Lovecraft reports attending a meeting of ‘all the members of Loveman’s literary circle’:
It gave me a novel sensation to be ‘lionised’ so much beyond my deserts by men as able as the painter Summers [sic], Loveman, Galpin, &c. I met some new figures—Crane the poet, Lazar [sic], an ambitious young literary student now in the army, & a delightful young fellow named Carroll Lawrence, who writes weird stories & wants to see all of mine.24
I shall have more to say about both Kirk and Crane later, since Lovecraft would meet them again during his New York period; for now we can note this brief meeting with William Sommer, the watercolourist and draughtsman; William Lescaze, later to become an internationally known architect; Edward Lazare (whom Lovecraft would meet again in New York, and who in later years would become a long-time editor of American Book-Prices Current); and others of Crane’s circle. Crane had just begun to publish his poetry in magazines, although his first volume, White Buildings, would not appear until 1926. Lovecraft must, however, have read Crane’s ‘Pastorale’ (in the Dial for October 1921), for he wrote a parody of it entitled ‘Plaster-All’. While an amusing take-off of what Lovecraft believed to be the formless free verse of the modernists, the poem is really a sort of impressionistic—dare one say imagistic?—account of his Cleveland trip.
Another person with whom Lovecraft came into contact at this time, although only by correspondence, was Clark Ashton Smith. Loveman and Smith were long-time correspondents, and the former showed Lovecraft Smith’s paintings and sketches, while Galpin and Kirk, respectively, presented Lovecraft with copies of Smith’s early collections of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) and Odes and Sonnets (1918). So taken was Lovecraft with both the pictorial and literary material that he forthwith wrote Smith a fan letter toward the end of his Cleveland stay. This almost effusively flattering letter initiated a fifteen-year correspondence that would end only with Lovecraft’s death.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) has suffered an anomalous fate precisely because his work is so distinctive and unclassifiable. His early collections of poetry are in a fin-de-siècle vein somewhat in the manner of Swinburne or George Sterling (Smith’s early mentor), but very distinctively Smith’s own. Indeed, upon the publication of that first volume, at the age of nineteen, Smith—a native of California who was born in Long Valley and lived most of his life in Auburn—was hailed by local reviewers as a new Keats or Shelley. These accolades were perhaps not far from the truth. To my mind, Smith’s early poems are quite superior to the ‘cosmic’ poetry of George Sterling, although he has clearly learnt much from Sterling’s The Testimony of the Suns (1903) and A Wine of Wizardry (1907). The problem for Smith—or, rather, for his recognition as a significant poet—is that the tradition of weird or fantastic poetry is not very deep or substantial; moreover, modern enthusiasts (and critics) of weird literature seem uncomfortable with poetry, so that the tremendous body of Smith’s verse has been ignored by exactly those readers who might be expected to champion it and keep it alive. And although Smith wrote some free verse, much of his work is written both in formal metres and in a very elevated, metaphor-laden diction in utter contrast to the flat, conversational, and (in my judgment) entirely prosaic work of the ‘poets’ who, following the dreary example of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, are currently fashionable. Is it any wonder that Smith’s poetry, after its initial praise on the West Coast, fell on deaf ears and remains one of the lost jewels of twentieth-century literature?
Smith did not help his cause by churning out reams of fantasy and science fiction tales in the late 1920s and early 1930s, some (perhaps much) of it written under Lovecraft’s encouragement. This body of work hangs on after a fashion as a very acquired taste, but to me it is much inferior to his verse; I shall have more to say of it later. If Smith did any good work in prose, it is in the prosepoems, some of which Lovecraft read and admired in the volume Ebony and Crystal (1918). This work is toweringly impressive, and it could be maintained quite plausibly that Smith is the best prosepoet in English; but this form is too recondite to inspire much of a following or much critical attention.
As for Smith’s art work, I find it quite amateurish and crude, and have no idea why Lovecraft so rhapsodized over it. Smith was a self-taught artist, and it shows; this work is, to be sure, reminiscent of primitive art, and occasionally some startlingly weird effects are produced, but much of it—in pen and ink, crayon, watercolour, and oil—is imaginatively powerful but technically very backward. His small sculptures and figurines are somewhat more interesting. Lovecraft, however, never ceased to admire Smith as another Blake who could both write great work and illustrate it.