I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft by Joshi S. T

Author:Joshi, S. T. [Joshi, S. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2013-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

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. Some guests had come earlier in the year: John Russell, Lovecraft’s erstwhile Argosy nemesis and now a cordial friend, came for several days in April; Albert A. Sandusky showed up for a few days in early June. Now, on August 18, Alfred Galpin’s wife, a Frenchwoman whom Galpin had married the year before while studying music in Paris, arrived; she would stay until the 20th, when she would move on to Cleveland. Sonia was in town, so the two of them took her out to dinner and a play before returning to 169 Clinton, where Mrs Galpin had agreed to take a room during her stay. The next morning, however, she complained bitterly of bedbugs, and in the evening moved to the Hotel Brossert in Montague Street. But she took in the Kalem meeting that day, as did Sonia: evidently the presence of an overseas guest caused a suspension of the “stag rule.”

Lovecraft continued to act conscientiously 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. Indeed, McNeil had complained that some of the other hosts did not serve refreshments even though he always did, and Lovecraft was determined not to be lax in this regard. On July 29 he bought an aluminum pail for 49¢ with which to fetch hot coffee from the deli at the corner of State and Court Streets. He was forced to do this because he could not make coffee at home—either because he did not know how or because he had no heating apparatus. He also invested in apple tarts, crumb cake (which Kleiner liked), and other comestibles. On one occasion Kleiner did not show up, and Lovecraft lugubriously noted: “The amount of crumb-cake remaining is prodigious, & there are four apple tarts—in fact, I can see my meals mapped out for me for two days!! Ironic circumstance—I got the crumb-cake especially for Kleiner, who adores it, & in the end he was absent; so that I, who don’t particularly care for it at all, must swallow unending quantities of it in the interest of oeconomy!”[92] If any further indication of Lovecraft’s poverty is needed, this must surely be it.

Some new colleagues emerged on Lovecraft’s horizon about this time. One, Wilfred Blanch Talman (1904–1986), was an amateur who, while attending Brown University, had subsidised the publication of a slim volume of poetry entitled Cloisonné and Other Verses (1923)[93] and sent it to Lovecraft in July. (No copy of this book has, to my knowledge, surfaced.) The two met in late August, and Lovecraft took to him immediately: “He is a splendid young chap—tall, lean, light, & aristocratically clean-cut, with light brown hair & excellent taste in dress. . . . He is

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