Some time in August Lovecraft received a plot idea from C. W. Smith, editor of the Tryout. The resulting tale, ‘In the Vault’, written on 18 September, is poorer than ‘He’ but not quite as horrendously bad as ‘The Horror at Red Hook’; it is merely mediocre. This elementary supernatural revenge tale, recounting what happens to George Birch, a careless and thick-skinned undertaker, who finds himself trapped in the receiving-tomb of the cemetery he runs, is a curiously conventional tale for Lovecraft to have written at this stage of his career. He attempts to write in a more homespun, colloquial vein, but the result is not successful. August Derleth developed an unfortunate fondness for this tale, so that it still stands embalmed among volumes of Lovecraft’s ‘best’ stories.
The tale’s immediate fortunes were not very happy, either. Lovecraft dedicated the story to C. W. Smith, and it appeared in Smith’s Tryout for November 1925. Of course Lovecraft also sought professional publication; and although it would seem that ‘In the Vault’, in its limited scope and conventionally macabre orientation, would be ready-made for Weird Tales, Wright rejected it in November. The reason for the rejection, according to Lovecraft, is interesting: ‘its extreme gruesomeness would not pass the Indiana censorship’.23 The reference, of course, is to the banning of Eddy’s ‘The Loved Dead’. Here then is the first—but not the last—instance where the apparent uproar over ‘The Loved Dead’ had a negative impact upon Lovecraft.
There was, however, better news from Wright. Lovecraft had evidently sent him ‘The Outsider’ merely for his examination, as it was already promised to W. Paul Cook—apparently for the Recluse, which Cook had conceived around September. Wright liked the story so much that he pleaded with Lovecraft to let him print it. Lovecraft managed to persuade Cook to release the story, and Wright accepted it some time around the end of the year; its appearance in Weird Tales for April 1926 would be a landmark. The rest of the year was spent variously in activity with the Kalems, in receiving out-of-town guests, and in solitary travels of an increasingly wider scope in search of antiquarian oases. Lovecraft took pleasure in acting as host to the Kalems on occasion, and his letters display how much he enjoyed treating his friends to coffee, cake, and other humble delectables on his best blue china. On 29 July he bought for 49 cents an aluminum pail with which to fetch hot coffee from the deli at the corner of State and Court Streets.
Some new colleagues emerged on Lovecraft’s horizon about this time. One, Wilfred Blanch Talman (1904–1986), was an amateur of Dutch ancestry who was attending Brown University. The two met in late August, and Lovecraft took to him immediately. Talman went on to become a reporter for the New York Times and later an editor of the Texaco Star, a paper issued by the oil company. He made random ventures into professional fiction, and would later have one of his stories subjected to (possibly unwanted) revision by Lovecraft. Talman was perhaps the first addition to the core membership of the Kalem Club, although he did not begin regular attendance until after Lovecraft had left New York.
A still more congenial colleague was Vrest Teachout Orton (1897–1986). Orton was a friend of W. Paul Cook, and at this time worked in the advertising department of the American Mercury. Later he would achieve distinction as an editor at the Saturday Review of Literature and, still later, as the founder of the Vermont Country Store. Orton became perhaps the second honorary member of the Kalems, although his attendance at meetings was also irregular until after Lovecraft’s departure from New York. Orton did a little literary work of his own—he compiled a bibliography of Theodore Dreiser, Dreiserana (1929), founded the Colophon, a bibliophiles’ magazine, and later founded the Stephen Daye Press in Vermont, for which Lovecraft would do some freelance work— but he had little interest in the weird. Nevertheless, their mutual New England background and their loathing of New York gave the two men much to talk about.
Aside from activities with friends, Lovecraft engaged in much solitary travel in the latter half of 1925. One of his most extensive trips of the season was a three-day trip to Jamaica, Mineola, Hempstead, Garden City, and Freeport on Long Island. Jamaica was then a separate community but is now a part of Queens; the other towns are in Nassau County, east of Queens. On 27 September Lovecraft went to Jamaica, which ‘utterly astonisht’ him: ‘There, all about me, lay a veritable New-England village; with wooden colonial houses, Georgian churches, & deliciously sleepy & shady streets where giant elms & maples stood in dense & luxurious rows.’24 Things are, I fear, very different now. Thereafter he went north to Flushing, also once separate and also now part of Queens. This was a Dutch settlement, and it too retained gratifying touches of colonialism. One structure—the Bowne house (1661) at Bowne Street and 37th Avenue—particularly delighted him.
The 29th, however, was his great Long Island journey. Reaching Garden City, he saw the extensive college-like brick buildings of Doubleday, Page & Co., now (after many years as Doubleday, Doran) simply Doubleday; the publisher has moved its editorial offices to Manhattan but still retains a considerable presence in its city of origin. Continuing southward on foot, he came to Hempstead, which captivated him utterly. Once again it was the churches that delighted him—St George’s Episcopal, Methodist, Christ’s First Presbyterian, and others. He spent considerable time in Hempstead, then continued south on foot to Freeport, which he found pleasant but undistinguished from an antiquarian point of view. All this walking must have covered close to ten miles.
The importance of these expeditions to Lovecraft’s psyche can scarcely be overestimated. The shimmering skyscrapers of Manhattan had proved, upon closer examination, to be an oppressive horror; as he had noted when refusing the offer to edit Weird Tales in Chicago, ‘it is colonial atmosphere which supplies my very breath of life’.25 Lovecraft had, indeed, developed an uncanny nose for antiquity, whether it be in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or in the further reaches of the metropolitan area.
After September Lovecraft lapsed again into literary quiescence. Then, in mid-November, he announces that ‘W. Paul Cook wants an article from me on the element of terror & weirdness in literature’26 for his new magazine, the Recluse. He goes on to say that ‘I shall take my time about preparing it’, which was true enough: it would be close to a year and a half before he put the finishing touches on what would become ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.
Lovecraft began the actual writing of the article in late December; by early January he had already written the first four chapters and was reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights preparatory to writing about it at the end of Chapter V; by March he had written Chapter VII, on Poe; and by the middle of April he had gotten ‘half through Arthur Machen’ (Chapter X).27 It is not entirely clear from his initial mention that Cook actually wished an historical monograph—an essay ‘on the element of terror & weirdness’ could just as well have been theoretical or thematic— but Lovecraft clearly interpreted it this way.
Lovecraft had, of course, read much of the significant weird literature up to his time, but he was still making discoveries. Two of the writers whom he would rank very highly were encountered only at about this time. He had first read Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) as early as 1920, at the recommendation of James F. Morton, but did not care for him at all at this time. Then, in late September 1924, he read The Listener and Other Stories (1907), containing ‘The Willows’, ‘perhaps the most devastating piece of supernaturally hideous suggestion which I have beheld in a decade’.28 In later years Lovecraft would unhesitatingly (and, I think, correctly) deem ‘The Willows’ the single greatest weird story ever written, followed by Machen’s ‘The White People’.