he carried himself with enough of a slouch to make me underestimate his height as well as the breadth of his shoulders. His face was thin and narrow, longish, with long chin and jaw. He walked with a quick stride. His speech was quick and inclined to jerkiness. It was as though his body was hard put to it to keep up with the agility of his mind …
Twenty-eight hours we gabbled, swapping ideas, kicking fancies back and forth, topping each other’s whimsies. He had an enormous enthusiasm for new experience: of sight, of sound, of word pattern, of idea pattern. I have met in all my time only one or two others who approached him in what I call ‘mental greed.’ A glutton for words, ideas, thoughts. He elaborated, combined, distilled, and at a machine gun tempo.11
As if it were not evident in so many other ways, this first encounter with Price goes far in showing how Lovecraft had matured as a human being over the past fifteen years.
One curious myth that has somehow developed from Lovecraft’s New Orleans trip is the belief that Price took Lovecraft to a whorehouse where the women proved to be avid readers of Weird Tales and were especially fond of Lovecraft’s stories. In fact, this story actually applies to Seabury Quinn (assuming it is not entirely apocryphal); it appears that the women offered Quinn ‘one on the house’ in honour of his illustrious status. Price explicitly and rather drily remarks in his memoir that, out of deference to Lovecraft’s sensibilities, ‘I skipped concubines entirely.’
From New Orleans Lovecraft finally moved on to Mobile, Alabama, then to Montgomery and Atlanta, although the latter city was modern and had no attractions for him. He then proceeded up the Carolinas to Richmond, which he reached toward the end of June. After canvassing the usual sites relating to Poe and the Confederacy, Lovecraft stopped briefly at Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and Philadelphia, finally ending up back in New York around 25 June. This time he stayed in an apartment a few doors away from Loveman in Brooklyn Heights. He expected to linger in the city for more than a week, but a telegram from Annie on 1 July called him suddenly home.
Lillian was critically ill and not expected to survive. Lovecraft caught the first train to Providence, arriving late on the 1st. He found Lillian in a semi-coma, from which she would not awaken until her death on 3 July. She was seventy-six years old. The cause of death was given on her death certificate as atrophic arthritis. Lovecraft had spoken over the years of her various ailments— chiefly neuritis and lumbago—the general effect of which was to limit her mobility severely and render her largely housebound. These various maladies now finally caught up with her.
Lovecraft was not given to expressing extreme emotions in his correspondence, and that was his right; but his remarks to friends about Lillian’s passing scarcely mask the deep grief he felt:
The suddenness of the event is both bewildering and merciful—the latter because we cannot yet realise, subjectively, that it has actually occurred at all. It would, for example, seem incredibly unnatural to disturb the pillows now arranged for my aunt in the rocker beside my centre-table—her accustomed reading-place each evening.12
In August Lovecraft received a small augmentation to his selfesteem. Harold S. Farnese (1885–1945), a composer who was then Assistant Director of the Institute of Musical Art at Los Angeles, wished to set two of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets, ‘Mirage’ and ‘The Elder Pharos’ (both in Weird Tales for February– March 1931) to music. Having done so shortly thereafter, Farnese then proposed that Lovecraft write the libretto of an entire opera or music drama based generally on his work; but Lovecraft declined the offer, citing his complete lack of experience in dramatic composition (evidently his 1918 squib Alfredo did not qualify). It is difficult to imagine what such a work would have been like.
Lovecraft’s travels for 1932 were by no means over. On 30 August he went to Boston to spend time with Cook. The next day the two of them went to Newburyport to see the total solar eclipse, and were rewarded with a fine sight. From there Lovecraft proceeded to Montreal and Quebec, spending four full days in the two towns (2–6 September). Lovecraft tried to persuade Cook to come along, but Cook did not relish the ascetic manner in which his friend travelled (sleeping on trains or buses, scant meals, nonstop sightseeing, etc.). Cook did, however, see Lovecraft on his return, and his portrait is as vivid a reflection of Lovecraft’s manic travelling habits as one could ask for:
Early the following Tuesday morning, before I had gone to work, Howard arrived back from Quebec. I have never before nor since seen such a sight. Folds of skin hanging from a skeleton. Eyes sunk in sockets like burnt holes in a blanket. Those delicate, sensitive artist’s hands and fingers nothing but claws. The man was dead except for his nerves, on which he was functioning … I was scared. Because I was scared I was angry. Possibly my anger was largely at myself for letting him go alone on that trip. But whatever its real cause, it was genuine anger that I took out on him. He needed a brake; well, he’d have the brake applied right now.13
Cook immediately took Lovecraft to a Waldorf restaurant and made him have a plentiful meal, then took him back to his rooming house so that he could rest. Cook, returning from work at five, forced Lovecraft to have another meal before letting him go. How Lovecraft could actually derive enjoyment from the places he visited, functioning on pure nervous energy and with so little food and rest, it is difficult to imagine; and yet, he did so again and again.
Sometime in the spring or summer of 1932 a promising new revision client emerged—promising not because she showed any talent or inclination to become a writer in her own right but because she gave Lovecraft regular work. She was Hazel Heald (1896–1961), a woman about whom I know almost nothing. She was born and apparently spent most of her life in Somerville, Massachusetts, and so far as I know published nothing aside from the five stories Lovecraft revised or ghostwrote for her. Unlike Zealia Bishop, she wrote no memoir of Lovecraft, so that it is not clear how she came in touch with him and what their professional or personal relations were like.
There is good reason to believe that several, of not all five, of the stories Lovecraft revised for Heald were written in 1932 or 1933, even though the last of them did not appear in print until 1937. The first of them appears to have been ‘The Man of Stone’ (Wonder Stories, October 1932). Heald told Derleth that Lovecraft merely touched up an existing manuscript,14 but to me the tale’s prose reads like Lovecraft throughout. He must have worked on the story by the summer of 1932 at the latest in order for it to have appeared in the October Wonder Stories. It is in the end a conventional story about Daniel ‘Mad Dan’ Morris, who finds in his ancestral copy of the Book of Eibon a formula to turn any living creature into a stone statue, and attempts to do so to both his wife and a man he suspects of dallying with his wife, but in the end is turned to stone himself.
The next tale, ‘Winged Death’, is not much of an improvement. This preposterous story tells of an insect called the ‘devil-fly’ that purportedly takes over the soul or personality of its victim. Sure enough, a scientist is bitten by the creature, and his soul enters its body; absurdly enough, he writes a message on the ceiling of his room by dipping his insect body in ink and walking across the ceiling. This grotesque and unintentionally comical conclusion— which Lovecraft admitted was his own invention—is clearly intended to be the acme of horror, but ends up being merely bathetic.