Not having a job at least meant that Lovecraft could go out with the boys at almost any time and also indulge in modest travels. His diary and letters are full of accounts of trips to Van Cortlandt Park, Fort Greene Park, Yonkers, and elsewhere; there were the usual walks through the colonial parts of Greenwich Village, and any number of walks across the Brooklyn Bridge.
On the night of 11 April Lovecraft and Kirk, wishing to take advantage of a special $5 excursion fare to Washington, D.C., boarded the night train at Pennsylvania Station at midnight and arrived at dawn in the capital. They would have only a single morning and afternoon in the city, so they intended to make the most of it. Thanks to the presence of two colleagues who could act as tour guides, Anne Tillery Renshaw (who had a car) and Edward L. Sechrist, the group saw an astonishing number of sites in a few hours: the Library of Congress, the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, Georgetown (the colonial town founded in 1751), Christ Church (an exquisite late Georgian structure in Alexandria), Mount Vernon (Washington’s home), Arlington (the manor of the Custis family), and the enormous Memorial Amphitheatre completed in 1920, which Lovecraft considered ‘one of the most prodigious and spectacular architectural triumphs of the Western World’.11 They caught the 4.35 train back to New York just in time.
During Sonia’s long stay Lovecraft did some travelling with her. The two of them went to Scott Park in Elizabeth on 13 June. On the 28th they went to the Bryn Mawr Park section of Yonkers, where they had attempted to purchase property the previous year. With Long, Lovecraft again visited the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, in the far northwest tip of Manhattan.
On 2 July Sonia and Lovecraft took a trip to Coney Island, where he had cotton candy for the first time. On this occasion Sonia had a silhouette of herself made by a black man named Perry; Lovecraft had had his own silhouette done on 26 March. This silhouette has become very well known in recent years, and its very faithful (perhaps even a little flattering) rendition has caused Lovecraft’s profile to become an icon; the silhouette of Sonia, on the other hand, is so little known that few have had any idea of its very existence.
Now that Sonia was out of the way and his amateur work apparently finished (he managed to get out the July 1925 United Amateur only a few weeks late, and also helped set up the next editorial board through a mail election), Lovecraft felt that the time had come to buckle down to some real creative work. On 1 and 2 August he wrote ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, which he describes in a letter to Long (who was away on vacation) as follows: ‘it deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much. The tale is rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good; but it represents at least an attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness.’12 Lovecraft is sadly correct in his analysis of the merits of the story, for it is one of the poorest of his longer efforts.
Red Hook is a small peninsula of Brooklyn facing Governor’s Island, about two miles southwest of Borough Hall. Lovecraft could easily walk to the area from 169 Clinton Street, and seems to have done so on several occasions. It was then and still remains one of the most dismal slums in the entire metropolitan area. In the story Lovecraft describes it not inaccurately, although with a certain jaundiced tartness; but of course it is not merely the physical decay that is of interest to him:
The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.
Here, in essence, is the heart of the story; for ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is nothing but a shriek of rage and loathing at the ‘foreigners’ who have taken New York away from the white people to whom it presumably belongs.
Sonia in her memoir claims to supply the inspiration for the tale: ‘It was on an evening while he, and I think Morton, Sam Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner were dining in a restaurant somewhere in Columbia Heights that a few rough, rowdyish men entered. He was so annoyed by their churlish behavior that out of this circumstance he wove ”The Horror at Red Hook”.’13 Lovecraft may have mentioned this event in a letter to her; but I am not entirely convinced that it was any one incident that gave birth to the story, but rather the cumulative depression of New York after a year and a half of poverty and futility.
The plot of ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is simple, and is presented as an elementary good-versus-evil conflict between Thomas Malone, an Irish police detective working out of the Borough Hall station, and Robert Suydam, a wealthy man of ancient Dutch ancestry who becomes the focus of horror in the tale. What strikes us about this tale, aside from the hackneyed supernatural manifestations, is the sheer poorness of its writing. The perfervid rhetoric that in other tales provides such harmless enjoyment here comes off sounding forced and bombastic. Lovecraft cannot help ending the story on a note of dour ponderousness (‘The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant’) and with a transparent indication that the horrors that were seemingly suppressed by the police will recur at some later date. It is a fittingly stereotyped ending for a story that does nothing but deal in stereotypes—both of race and of weird fictional imagery.
The figure of Malone is of some interest in relation to the possible genesis—or, at any rate, the particular form—of the story. Some time before writing ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ Lovecraft had submitted ‘The Shunned House’ to Detective Tales, the magazine that had been founded together with Weird Tales and of which Edwin Baird was the editor. In spite of the fact that Detective Tales did occasionally print tales of horror and the supernatural, Baird rejected the story. By late July Lovecraft is speaking of writing a ‘novel or novelette of Salem horrors which I may be able to cast in a sufficiently “detectivish” mould to sell to Edwin Baird for Detective Tales’,14 but he does not appear to have begun such a work. What this all suggests, however, is that Lovecraft is attempting to develop, however impractically, an alternative market to Weird Tales—and is calling upon the man who, as editor of Weird Tales, accepted all his stories to aid him in the attempt. Sure enough, in early August Lovecraft speaks of planning to send ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ to Detective Tales; whether he actually did so is unclear, but, if he did, the tale was obviously rejected. Lovecraft would later remark that the story was consciously written with Weird Tales in mind,15 and sure enough it appeared in the January 1927 issue.
‘The Horror at Red Hook’ presents as good an opportunity as any for discussing the development (if it can be called that) of Lovecraft’s racial attitudes during this period. There is no question that his racism flared to greater heights at this time—at least on paper (as embodied in letters to his aunts)—than at any subsequent period in his life. There is no need to dwell upon the seeming paradox of Lovecraft’s marrying a Jewess when he exhibited marked anti-Semitic traits, for Sonia in his mind fulfilled his requirement that aliens assimilate themselves into the American population, as did other Jews such as Samuel Loveman. Nevertheless, Sonia speaks at length about Lovecraft’s attitudes on this subject. One of her most celebrated comments is as follows: