Back in New York on 20 May, Lovecraft was excited to read one interesting piece of forwarded mail—a letter from Clifton P. Fadiman of Simon & Schuster encouraging Lovecraft to submit a novel. He immediately responded by saying that, although he might write a novel later (clearly The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was not even considered as a submission), he would like to submit a collection of short stories. A few days later Lovecraft’s enthusiasm waned considerably: he discovered that the letter was merely a mimeographed form-letter sent to everyone who had appeared on the ‘Honor Roll’ of the O’Brien short story annuals; moreover, Fadiman had responded by saying: ‘I am afraid that you are right in that our interest in a collection of short stories would not be very vivid. I hope, however, that you will buckle down & do that novel you speak of. If it is good, its subject matter will be a help rather than a hindrance.’24 It is interesting to note that mainstream publishers’ now inveterate reluctance to publish weird short story collections was already evident in 1930.
Otherwise the two weeks spent in New York included additional museum-going (Metropolitan, Brooklyn, and also the newly opened Nicholas Roerich Museum) as well as the usual round of catching up on old friendships. One unexpected acquaintance whom Lovecraft met was Hart Crane, who came to Loveman’s apartment on the evening of 24 May when Lovecraft was there. The Bridge had been published that spring, making him ‘one of the most celebrated & talked-of figures of contemporary American letters’. Lovecraft’s portrait of him is simultaneously admiring and pitying:
Poor devil—he has ‘arrived’ at last as a standard American poet seriously regarded by all reviewers & critics; yet at the very crest of his fame he is on the verge of psychological, physical, & financial disintegration, & with no certainty of ever having the inspiration to write a major work of literature again. After about three hours of acute & intelligent argument poor Crane left—to hunt up a new supply of whiskey & banish reality for the rest of the night!25 Lovecraft was sadly correct in his prediction, for Crane would commit suicide two years later.
Lovecraft’s return home on 13 or 14 June ended another recordbreaking sojourn, but it was by no means the end of his year’s travels. On 3–5 July he decided to take in the NAPA convention in Boston—only the second national amateur convention he had ever attended, the other being the NAPA convention of 1921. But even this was not the end of his travels. On 30 August we find him boarding a train north—to Quebec. It would be his first and last time out of the United States, aside from two further visits there in later years. Lovecraft had come upon a remarkably cheap $12.00 excursion fare to Quebec, and could not pass up the chance to see a place of whose antiquarian marvels he had so long heard. The sight of the Canadian countryside—with its quaint old farmhouses built in the French manner and small rustic villages with picturesque church steeples—was pleasing enough, but as he approached the goal on the train he knew he was about to experience something remarkable. And he did:
Never have I seen another place like it! All my former standards of urban beauty must be abandoned after my sight of Quebec! It hardly belongs to the world of prosaic reality at all—it is a dream of city walls, fortress-crowned cliffs, silver spires, narrow, winding, perpendicular streets, magnificent vistas, & the mellow, leisurely civilisation of an elder world … Horse vehicles still abound, & the atmosphere is altogether of the past. It is a perfectly preserved bit of old royalist France, transplated to the New World with very little loss of atmosphere.26
He stayed only three days, but by keeping constantly on the move saw almost everything there was to see—City Hall Square, Montmorency Park, Notre Dame des Victoires, Chateau Frontenac, the Ursuline Convent, and much more. A side trip to the falls of the Montmorency River capped the visit.
The travels of 1930 had again surpassed their predecessors, and were highlighted by two transcendent sites—Charleston and Quebec. In later years Lovecraft returned to both these havens of antiquity as often as his meagre funds would allow. In the meantime he could at least write about them, both in rapturous letters and postcards to his friends and in formal travelogues; and he did just that. ‘An Account of Charleston’, which I have already discussed, is undated, but was probably written in the fall. But Quebec impelled an even more heroic work, which occupied much of the fall and winter. A Description of the Town of Quebeck was the longest single work Lovecraft would ever write. After a very comprehensive history of the region, there is a study of Quebec architecture (with appropriate drawings of distinctive features of roofs, windows, and the like), a detailed hand-drawn map of the principal sites, and a detailed walking tour of both the town itself and ‘suburban pilgrimages’. That Lovecraft could have absorbed enough of the town in three days to have written even the travelogue portion (the historical section was clearly learned later through much reading) is a sufficient indication of what those three crowded days must have been like. The Quebec travelogue also lay in manuscript until long after Lovecraft’s death, and was not published until 1976.
But beginning early in the year and continuing all through the spring, summer, and early autumn, Lovecraft was at work on a document that was actually designed to be read by the general public: ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. Although this would be among the most difficult in its composition of any of his major stories, this 25,000-word novelette—the longest of his fictions up to that time aside from his two ‘practice’ novels—conjures up the hoary grandeur of the New England countryside even more poignantly than any of his previous works, even if it suffers from some flaws of conception and motivation.
The tale focuses on the correspondence that develops between Albert N. Wilmarth, a professor of literature at Miskatonic University, and a Vermont recluse named Henry Wentworth Akeley, who soberly reports the existence of a colony of extraterrestrials from the planet Yuggoth dwelling in the region, who, by means of a complicated mechanical device, can remove the brains of human beings from their bodies and to take them on fantastic cosmic voyagings. Wilmarth is naturally sceptical of Akeley’s tale, but subsequent events—including the aliens’ attacks on Akeley—appear to confirm it. Wilmarth is then invited up to Vermont by Akeley, although the letter written by the recluse sounds peculiar and uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, Wilmarth makes the journey, where he meets an Akeley who seems both physically and psychologically changed. Akeley is now reconciled to the prospect of his brain being removed and taken to Yuggoth and beyond, for he will thereby acquire cosmic knowledge made available only to a handful of human beings since the beginning of civilization. Numbed with astonishment, Wilmarth retires to bed, but hears a disturbing colloquy in Akeley’s room with several of the buzzing voices and other, human voices. But what makes him flee from the place is a very simple thing he sees as he sneaks down to Akeley’s room late at night: ‘For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.’
Without the necessity of stating it, Lovecraft makes clear the true state of affairs: the last, reassuring letter by ‘Akeley’ was in fact a forgery by the alien entities, written as a means of getting Wilmarth to come up to Vermont with all the evidence of his relations with Akeley; the speaker in the chair was not Akeley—whose brain had already been removed from his body and placed in one of the machines—but one of the aliens, perhaps Nyarlathotep himself, whom they worship.
The genesis of the tale is nearly as interesting as the tale itself; Steven J. Mariconda has studied the matter in detail, and in large part I am echoing his conclusions.27 The Vermont background of the tale is clearly derived from Lovecraft’s visits of 1927 and 1928; indeed, whole passages of ‘Vermont—A First Impression’ have been bodily inserted into the text, but they have been subtly altered in such a way as to emphasize both the terror and the fascination of the rustic landscape. It is also evident that Henry Wentworth Akeley is based in part on the rustic Bert G. Akley whom Lovecraft met on the 1928 trip. Akeley’s secluded farmhouse seems to be a commingling of the Orton residence in Brattleboro and Goodenough’s home farther to the north. And, of course, Lovecraft has ingeniously incorporated the discovery of the planet Pluto (announced in the New York Times for 14 March), identifying it with his mythical Yuggoth.