Although he once said he loved New York and that henceforth it would be his ‘adopted state’, I soon learned that he hated it and all its ‘alien hordes’. When I protested that I too was one of them, he’d tell me I ‘no longer belonged to these mongrels’. ’You are now Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft of 598 Angell St., Providence, Rhode Island!’16
Let it pass that Lovecraft and Sonia never resided at 598 Angell Street. A later remark is still more telling: ‘Soon after we were married he told me that whenever we have company he would appreciate it if there were “Aryans” in the majority.’17 This must refer to the year 1924, as they would not have done much entertaining in 1925. Sonia’s final remark on the matter is still more damning. Sonia claims that part of her desire to have Lovecraft and Loveman meet in 1922 was to ‘cure’ Lovecraft of his bias against Jews by actually meeting one face to face. She continues:
Unfortunately, one often judges a whole people by the character of the first ones he meets. But H. P. assured me that he was quite ‘cured’; that since I was so well assimilated into the American way of life and the American scene he felt sure our marriage would be a success. But unfortunately (and here I must speak of something I never intended to have publicly known), whenever he would meet crowds of people—in the subway, or, at the noon hour, on the sidewalks in Broadway, or crowds, wherever he happened to find them, and these were usually the workers of minority races—he would become livid with anger and rage.18
Again, there is nothing here that need surprise us. And yet, in spite of what his previous biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, has suggested, comments on aliens are relatively rare in the correspondence to his aunts during this period. A long letter in early January goes on at length about the fundamental inassimilability of Jews in American life, maintaining that ‘vast harm is done by those idealists who encourage belief in a coalescence which never can be’. When he goes on to note that ‘On our side there is a shuddering physical repugnance to most Semitic types’,19 he is unwittingly reaching the heart of the issue, at least as far as he himself is concerned: in spite of Lovecraft’s talk about cultural inassimiliability, what he really finds offensive about foreigners (or, more broadly, non-’Aryans’, since many of the ethnics in New York were already first- or secondgeneration immigrants) is the fact that they look funny to him.
Of course, Lovecraft’s hostility was exacerbated by his increasingly shaky psychological state as he found himself dragging out a life in an unfamiliar, unfriendly city where he did not seem to belong and where he had few[ prospects for work or permanent comfort. Foreigners made convenient scapegoats, and New York City, then and now the most cosmopolitan and culturally heterogeneous city in the country, stood in stark contrast to the homogeneity and conservatism he had known in the first thirtyfour years of his life in New England. The city that had seemed such a fount of Dunsanian glamour and wonder had become a dirty, noisy, overcrowded place that dealt repeated blows to his selfesteem by denying him a job in spite of his abilities and by forcing him to hole up in a seedy, mice-infested, crime-ridden dump where all he could do was write racist stories like ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ as a safety-valve for his anger and despair.
Lovecraft was, however, not finished with creative work. Eight days after writing the story, on 10 August, he began a long, lone evening ramble that led through Greenwich Village to the Battery, then to the ferry to Elizabeth, which he reached at 7 a.m. He purchased a 10-cent composition book at a shop, went to Scott Park, and wrote the story ‘He’. It is interesting that in this instance Lovecraft had to leave New York in order to write about it. ‘He’, while much superior to ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, is as heartwrenching a cry of despair as its predecessor—quite avowedly so. Its opening is celebrated:
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.
In this story Lovecraft presents a kind of sociology of New York: the immigrants who have clustered there really have no ‘kinship’ with it because the city was founded by the Dutch and the English, and these immigrants are of a different cultural heritage altogether. This sophism allows Lovecraft to conclude that ‘this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life’. The immigrants are now considered to be on the level of maggots.
The narrator, like Lovecraft, seeks out Greenwich Village in particular; and it is here, at two in the morning one August night, that he meets ‘the man’, who leads him to an ancient manor-house and shows him spectacularly apocalyptic visions of past and future New York through a window. Can the specific locale of the story be identified? At the end of the tale the narrator finds himself ‘at the entrance of a little black court off Perry Street’; and this is all we need to realize that this segment of the tale was inspired by a similar expedition to Perry Street that Lovecraft took on 29 August 1924, inspired by an article in the New York Evening Post for that day, in a regular column entitled ‘Little Sketches About Town’. The exact site is 93 Perry Street, where an archway leads to a lane between three buildings. What is more, according to an historical monograph on Perry Street, this general area was heavily settled by Indians (they had named it Sapohanican), and, moreover, a sumptuous mansion was built in the block bounded by Perry, Charles, Bleecker, and West Fourth Streets sometime between 1726 and 1744, being the residence of a succession of wealthy citizens until it was razed in 1865.20 Lovecraft almost certainly knew the history of the area, and he has deftly incorporated it into his tale.
Farnsworth Wright accepted ‘He’ in early October, and it appeared in Weird Tales for September 1926. Strangely enough, Lovecraft had not yet submitted ‘The Shunned House’ to Wright, but when he did so (probably in early September) Wright eventually turned it down on the grounds that it began too gradually. Lovecraft does not make any notable comment on this rejection, even though it was the first rejection he had ever had from Weird Tales.
The writing of ‘He’, however, did not put an entire end to Lovecraft’s fictional efforts. The Kalem meeting on Wednesday, 12 August, broke up at 4 a.m.; Lovecraft immediately went home and mapped out ‘a new story plot—perhaps a short novel’ which he titled ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.21 Although he confidently reports that ‘the writing itself will now be a relatively simple matter’, it would be more than a year before he would write this seminal story. It is a little sad to note how Lovecraft attempts to justify his state of chronic unemployment by suggesting to Lillian that a lengthy story of this sort ‘ought to bring in a very decent sized cheque’; he had earlier noted that the projected Salem novelette or novel, ‘if accepted, would bring in a goodly sum of cash’.22 It is as if he is desperately seeking to convince Lillian that he is not a drain on her (and Sonia’s) finances in spite of his lack of a regular position and his continual cafeteria-lounging with the boys.