Читать книгу Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Dreamer on the Nightside - Frank Belknap Long - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

I might never have met HPL had I not entered an essay contest conducted by a magazine which I believe was called Boys’ World. I won first prize and Paul Campbell, a wildcat oil well promoter residing in the Southwest, saw the story and invited me to join the United Amateur Press Association.

Campbell was not just an oil well promoter. He was a widely read man of scholarly tastes, and the United Amateur Press Association, along with the National Amateur Press Association, occupied a unique role in the early development of small, privately owned presses not too different from the present-day ones which are everlastingly in motion turning out science fiction and fantasy fan magazines from coast to coast.

I immediately enrolled in the UAPA, and a short while later my first published story, The Eye Above the Mantel, appeared in The United Amateur, the association’s official journal. As a member of this organization, HPL saw the story and wrote me a quite long letter about it. Although it was written on a penny postal, the calligraphy was so minute that it must have run almost to the equivalent of two manuscript pages, so “quite long letter” is not a misnomer.

He praised the story highly, and I have sometimes let myself believe that the praise was not wholly undeserved, because it was one of those freak occurrences which can only happen to the very young, who come so totally under the spell of a writer of genius at times that they are seized by an imitative exuberance which results in something a little on the special side. It was wholly imitative, and I had followed, in an almost slavish way, in the footsteps of a master—and that master happened to be Edgar Allan Poe.

The story was so much like Poe’s Shadow—A Parable in the cadenced solemnity of its prose, that it could probably have passed for an undiscovered story by this author. I think it could have gotten by as such, because it was just different enough from the Shadow to give it the appearance of not having been inked out, phrase by phrase, on a sheet of transparent tracing paper.

At least Howard liked it, and we started a correspondence that must have run to fifty letters in a two-way exchange until that day in April 1922 when I answered the phone and discovered that HPL was in New York, no further away from my Manhattan address at the time than the Prospect Park’s Flatbush-encroaching extremity.

“Belknapius?” he asked. It would probably have been: “Hello. May I speak to Mr. Long, please?” if the youthful tone of my voice had not made it seem unlikely that it could have been my father, who had a very brisk, professional-sounding voice as well. Howard had never heard him speak, but I am quite certain my voice, then as now, does not conjure up visions of a cool, efficient surgeon-dentist pausing in the midst of a tooth extraction to answer the telephone. And HPL was extremely perceptive about the kind of voice he correctly attributed to the majority of men who deal with emergencies on any level, and who lack the outward exuberance of a free-wheeling young imaginative fiction writer.

On that particular morning I had been reading a book that had greatly enchanted me, and would have answered any phone call in the same exuberant manner, even if it had been a call from our local grocer. Curiously enough, my memory of what HPL said on the wire during the ensuing conversation remains on the almost total recall level. I can remember him saying, with amusing formality: “This is Howard Phillips Lovecraft.”

And I think I said: “Well, I’ll be damned!” or “This is terrific!” or something of the sort. “Where are you phoning from?”

“I’m at Mrs. Greene’s home in Brooklyn,” he said. “It’s very far out, on Parkside Avenue. She invited me to be her guest for a few days.”

There was a long pause before he continued. “As I believe I mentioned briefly in one of my letters, we met last year at a Boston convention. She’s a very prominent amateur journalist and publishes and edits a magazine of her own—The Rainbow. I intended to send you a copy, but now that won’t be necessary. You’ll be impressed when you see it.”

There was another pause before he continued. “I must confess I didn’t expect to meet anyone at the convention quite so congenial. We have a great many interests in common, and she seems able to ignore the reserve which has sometimes been attributed to me, probably justly, since I’m so much the opposite of a well-traveled person and feel just a little ill at ease in gatherings of this nature. She made me forget my years whenever we engaged in conversation. I’ve never felt capable of forgetting my age for very long, and I’m afraid I’ve never wanted to be thought of as the kind of impetuous elderly gentleman who allows himself to be flattered when such a mistake is made by an attractive young lady.”

The phone conversation was not interrupted at this point by yet another pause, but for a moment so many incredible thoughts were passing through my mind that I failed to pay strict attention to what he was saying.

At that time Howard was only thirty-two and Sonia was seven years older—and he had mentioned her age in his letter! But it was not in the least unusual for anyone, elderly or otherwise, to refer to a woman of thirty-nine as an “attractive young lady.” Young as I was in the early 1920s, that sort of gallantry was so common that I occasionally found myself thinking of stunningly beautiful women older than Sonia in precisely that way—and not always out of gallantry. This did not mean I was attracted more by older women than by younger ones, but to me a stunningly beautiful woman has always seemed ageless.

No—it was not that which set my thoughts whirling, for by this time I was thoroughly familiar through our correspondence with Howard’s “old gentleman” pretense. What seemed incredible to me was the indisputable fact that Howard, despite his puritanical scruples, had become the invited guest of an “unchaperoned” young lady at her Brooklyn apartment!

I had no way of knowing that she was “unchaperoned,” but the assumption seemed warranted somehow, and when one jumps to that kind of conclusion it can sometimes carry as much conviction as an established fact. If I had paid just a little more attention to his words at this point, enlightenment would have come more quickly than it did. But it came quickly enough.

“Samuelus is sharing the apartment with me, and Sonia is staying with a neighbor in another apartment on the same floor. He’s also here on a temporary visit, to explore some employment prospects which Sonia feels should be looked into. He has been planning to leave Cleveland—he isn’t as attached to that burg as I am to Providence—and settle in New York permanently. It would be a very sensible move and I’ve told him so.”

I had never met Samuel Loveman, but Howard had corresponded with him for several years. Since there was no amateur journalist whose name HPL failed to Latinize after the exchange of several letters, the “Samuelus” did not surprise me. At that time I knew of Loveman only as a gifted young poet, although for Howard he had attained the extremely advanced age which sets a man in his middle thirties quite apart from such youngsters as myself.

Howard was talking very rapidly now.

“Why don’t you come over! Samuelus is out now, making an inspection tour of Prospect Park. But he’ll be back in time for dinner. Sonia is doing some shopping and also some marketing, in preparation for a five-course meal that she may feel has gone unappreciated when she glances at my platter. The old gentleman eats sparingly at all times. But Samuelus has a hearty appetite and consumes nearly everything that is placed before him. I encourage him in this, and hope that Sonia will not notice how much food goes back to the kitchen unconsumed. Her cooking is so excellent and she devotes so much time to the preparation of a meal that I try to make up for what I lack in gustatory appreciation with the most effusive kind of praise. Effusive it may be, but that does not mean that it is not sincere. But you will soon discover for yourself what a superb cook she is.”

Quite obviously Howard was not the kind of man a woman could hope to ensorcell through her culinary gifts alone!

Although I did not pause in my reply, I must do so here to elaborate a bit on what passed through my mind when he informed me without preamble that he had become the guest of a woman he had only recently met. Such thoughts had occurred to me only because he had made clear in his letters exactly how he felt about the setting aside of all conventional attitudes in the realm of sex. What Calvin Coolidge once said about sin, “I am not for it,” would have been just as applicable to the way Howard felt about what has sometimes been called a Victorian hangup in that particular realm. Only with Howard, it was not precisely a hangup.

Actually Howard had no hangups whatsoever in a strict sense, because his standards of deportment were basic to his very nature. Puritan traditions he respected and adhered to, but the prudish trappings of Victorian convention he regarded as quite laughable—at least insofar as they were prudish. When Victorian conventions were completely in accord with his inner convictions, defying them would have made no sense to him. But in his correspondence he made his dislike for the entire Victorian era—including its residual spillover in America as late as the early 1920s—so unmistakably plain that my testimony is not needed to confirm it. It is too much a matter of firmly established biographical record.

But I was not concerned with such matters that morning, for they had little to do with HPL’s totally unexpected phone call.

“I’ll start right off,” I told him. “I should be there in about one hour.”

“Sonia’s out now, as I’ve said, but she’ll be back well before two-thirty at the latest. She’s looking forward to meeting you,” he added. “She’s read two of your stories.”

“I hope you didn’t talk her into liking them, against her better judgment.”

“There was no need. She thought they were splendid,” Howard said, and then continued: “She has a daughter about your age. I was careful not to tell her I have two grandsons who have the foolish idea they are young Casanovas.”

“I’ll be careful to give her the contrary impression,” I assured him. “That’s not such a good idea with some girls, though. Is she stunningly beautiful?”

“What a decadent generation this is! Is that the first thing you think about when you meet a very sensible, attractive young lady?”

I had not intended to end that phone call on a note of levity. But HPL had surprised me a little by engaging in the amiable sort of chiding which up to that time was of fairly rare occurrence in his letters. One never knows anyone well until one has met him in person, and from that moment his correspondence will often take on a more exuberant kind of informality.

Parkside Avenue is far out in Brooklyn, almost as far as the more distant regions of historic Flatbush and the sea-bright traceries of Coney Island which never fail to bring to mind some New England seacoast town. I have never otherwise cared too much for Brooklyn, but have always preferred it to the vast, sprawling wasteland of the Bronx, where there is little of an associational nature that appeals to me. Just the thought of meeting HPL for the first time, however, blurred all distinctions between the boroughs.

Sonia resided in a four room, first floor apartment in a red brick building not more than four stories in height, and Howard was sitting on one of the two stone walls that ran from the entrance to the street and enclosed a small garden of flowering plants.

As I approached the apartment house there was no one else in sight, and I was certain it was HPL even before I was close enough to recognize him from the two photographs he had sent me. At that time he had grown quite stout, for a normally lean man about five-eleven in height. (He often referred to his weight at that period as ridiculous and was glad that he had succeeded in becoming lean again some two years later.) He looked a great deal older than thirty-two, and his rather settled, fortyish aspect struck me as at least more in accord with his “elderly gentleman” pretense than the distinctly collegiate look which not a few men manage to retain until the onset of middle age.

It was only when he rose and grasped my hand in greeting that I realized there was still a certain boyishness about him that could not be concealed. It was particularly noticeable in the region of his eyes, and his voice was not that of a middle-aged man.

“Belknapius!” he said, quite simply, just as he had done on the phone. “Well…well! You look just as I thought you would.” He paused to pass his hand across his brow. “I guess we’d better get away from this glare. Soaking up the sun’s rays to saturation point is just what my old bones need. But I’ve been sitting here reading for half an hour and it has given me a slight headache. Sonia thinks I should wear reading glasses, but I hate the feel of them on my nose. I’ll wait a few more years, when I’ll probably go stumbling around anyway.” (He had worn glasses once, I remembered, from the first photograph of him I had ever seen, but I did not remind him of that.)

I wish I could say that the book he had just set down on the red brick neo-Colonial wall was some forbidden volume hoary with age, dating back at least to Nyarlathotep’s Cthulhu-contending reign. But unhappily it was leather bound and as modern looking as the wall—a guidebook to the historical antiquities of Brooklyn which Sonia had recently given him.

“We may as well go inside,” he reiterated, gesturing toward the apartment house entrance, which had a coolly inviting look. “Sonia was delighted when I told her Parkside Avenue was just a stone’s throw away to you…”

“I never seem able to keep an appointment on time,” he added, self-castigatingly. “Usually I’m a half-hour late—or more.” (He could sometimes be two hours late, as I discovered subsequently when his failure to arrive at the American Museum of Natural History at an early hour in the afternoon forced me to phone him twice, and despair of seeing him before the shadows lengthened in the Hall of Man and made the glass-encased, fossilized skulls assume a more ominous aspect.)

“I’ve never been able to rush,” he said. “It makes some people here justifiably angry and it’s something I’ll have to remedy. But long-established habits are difficult to overcome when you’ve been so long out of touch with the rushing about people can’t seem to avoid in a city like New York. No one in Providence would think of rushing so much—at least, no one on the Hill. Boston is bad enough in that respect, but New York—”

“You get accustomed to it,” I said. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But there are some things you have to take in stride, or the enormity of having everyone go into a rage will begin to wear on your nerves.”

“Some people take offense so easily—and for trivial reasons,” he said. “But I know that my lateness is not trivial, and I’ll have to make more of an effort to get to places on time.”

“What did you think of the Manhattan skyline?” I asked. It was the most trite of the many unnecessary questions which visitors from elsewhere have to endure. But I really wanted to know.

“I’ve seen it before, in some of my earliest dreams,” he said. “When I first read the Arabian Nights I was sure that pinnacles so shiningly splendid had to exist somewhere. And that made me see them, almost as they are. The reality is just a little more breathtaking, but the very shape of many of the towers against the sky is no different from the way they looked when I just shut my eyes and tried to recapture what I’d seen in dreams. I usually succeeded so well that the skyline brought back a feeling of familiarity when I saw it from the train window for the first time.”

“It’s not exactly Arabian,” I said.

“But that’s just it. It’s fabulously Arabian, in a superior way. More magnificent, more strange than any Middle Eastern skyline could possibly be. But oriental notwithstanding. It would have widened the eyes of a desert wayfarer, I’m sure, even without a jinni towering over it. I could have seen a jinni with very little additional effort. But it wasn’t necessary for me to conjure one up.”

“Well I suppose you could say all that about it,” I conceded. “But to a native-born New Yorker it doesn’t have quite that kind of associational aspect. It even depresses me a little at times, because it dwarfs the individual so much. When I think of all that massed impersonal wealth and power, my identity as an individual has a tendency to shrivel to the dimensions of a gnat.”

“I don’t give that part of it a thought,” Howard said. “I can separate the things that please me from this decadent industrial age. In Prospect Park and in what little I’ve seen of Manhattan there are scenic vistas of pure enchantment. White stone pillars and weaving boughs against a sunset sky—elm-shaded streets that could just as easily be in Providence, with just as many Georgian houses that have defied the years.”

If the conversation I am quoting seems distinctly long-winded and rather remote from the pleasure he had clearly experienced on greeting me in person for the first time, it was no different from the manner Howard usually spoke when he was carried away by anything that enabled him to travel into the past on monorails of his own imagination. And my question had provided him with an opportunity to do just that, despite his stated intention to retreat indoors from the glaring sun.

“I caught just a glimpse of those streets when we arrived yesterday, before we descended into the subway,” he went on, after a pause. “The photographs in the guidebooks I studied don’t begin to do them justice. Street after street of dwellings virtually unchanged, with no new, ugly buildings towering over them as they do further uptown. Nothing but small-paned windows and fan-lighted doorways greeted my ancient eyes for ten or twelve blocks.”

I very much wanted to meet Sonia. But I felt that if I remained silent and looked a little unhappy, the sun glare would get to him again. He had begun to blink and suddenly he was gesturing toward the apartment entrance for the second time.

“Well, we’d better go inside,” he said. “My eyes seldom give me any trouble. But today I don’t know—the sun’s hot enough to burn holes in the pavement, so I suppose that has something to do with it.”

The apartment looked just as I had imagined it would—modest but very tastefully furnished, with some interesting family portraits on the walls. Sonia was not in the living room, but I could hear her moving about in either the adjoining room or kitchen. A faint clattering sound, as if a cup or spoon had just been set down, suggested that it was probably the kitchen.

I sat down on a sofa by the window and we talked for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes longer. Then Howard vanished for an instant, and when he reappeared he was accompanied by Sonia. She was still wearing a sun-shielding straw hat and was attired in a simple print dress that set off her dark beauty in an extremely becoming way. She was far more attractive than I had thought she might be, for her amateur journalism activities alone could have made Howard overlook plainness in a woman who was able to convince him that they had many interests in common.

She came straight toward me across the room, smiling graciously, and I seem to recall that I was the first to extend my hand—an inexcusable lapse of etiquette which I doubt if I shall ever be able to overcome on rare occasions, when self-consciousness makes me unable to avoid a reflex action of that kind.

“Belknapius,” she said, taking my hand and warmly pressing it. “Howard has told me all about you. His other grandson, Alfred Galpin, I met last year. He looks just a little older than you do, but I guess that’s because he’s read Nietzsche.”

“I’ve read Nietzsche too,” I said. “Is that supposed to age you beyond your years?”

“Sonia thinks so,” Howard said. “Alfredus wrote an article about him for The Rainbow that she finds it hard to believe could have been written by anyone younger than thirty-five or forty. Even by someone the same age as the old gentleman.”

“Old gentleman!” Sonia said. “Did he always write about himself in that way in his letters to you?”

“I’m afraid so,” I told her.

“Well, he’s got to get over that. It’s just plain silly.”

“She knows how old I am,” Howard said. “Thirty-two can be quite an advanced age if you’re born aged.”

“He was no different from other children,” Sonia said. “I know, because both of his aunts told me he could go into temper tantrums and make as much trouble for people as any other perfectly normal, sweet little child.”

It was at this point that something which at first had been a mere suspicion began to lodge itself more firmly in my mind. During the brief talk by the window Howard had dwelt at some length on Sonia’s meeting with his aunts and on two other occasions when they had spent considerable time together on New England terrain, with the Boston convention several weeks in the past.

Could it be possible—It was possible, of course, and if Howard’s phone call had not made everything else seem of lesser importance than meeting him in person for the first time, I would have realized sooner that his relationship with Sonia had taken on what could only be thought of as a just-short-of-engagement character. It still was only at the friendship stage perhaps, but with the distinct possibility that it might soon become something more.

What she had just said went a long way toward confirming this, for she had assumed a kind of proprietorship over his childhood years, as if reliving them with him might well become an almost daily occurrence in the years ahead. And the instant Howard had returned into the room with Sonia at his side, I could not dismiss the feeling that he was perfectly willing to have her regard him as just a little more than a temporary—if cordially welcomed—guest. Temporary on that particular occasion, of course. But occasions of that nature can very quickly undergo a change.

The change was less swift than it might have been, for it took almost two years for the accuracy of my surmise to be confirmed in every respect. But in a letter to his aunts written shortly after his return to New York as a married man, he confessed that it could—and should—have happened at an earlier date and only his extreme conservatism had led him to put it off, a fault which Sonia had graciously forgiven, but which he found it hard to forgive in himself.

Sonia was an extraordinarily attractive woman, of such striking dark beauty that it would have made her stand out in a social gathering with at least four or five only slightly less attractive competitors drifting about. I am not exaggerating here. Although she was thirty-nine at the time, she did not appear a day older than Howard’s actual age, and about thirty years younger than the fictitious age which he agreed was peculiar to himself, perhaps, but which could not be brushed off as lightly as she had just attempted to do.

She was of Jewish ancestry and Russian-born. There was a very competent, practical side to her nature, and she had a lively sense of humor and a keenly observant mind. But despite her success as a millinery shop executive in the early 1920s, she was not in any basic way a worldly-minded or very sophisticated woman. She at times could be quite sentimental to an utterly naive extent, a trait of course which was not at all shared by Howard. But she had several qualities in common with him, not the least of which was a puritanical bias almost as pronounced as his own. I have often thought this may have been the quality which most appealed to him when they met in Boston for the first time. The four qualities which seem to me today to have been most pronounced in Sonia were kindliness, warmth, generosity, and graciousness. And if there are any more admirable qualities—apart from high artistic achievement which is on another plane—they have so far escaped my notice.

Sonia could sometimes dramatize some particular event in her life out of all reason, in a wholly melodramatic way. I am indebted to Alfred Galpin for the following amusing story, which she related to him when they met in Madison, Wisconsin the year before.

When she was in her early twenties a young admirer succeeded in convincing himself that her virtue was not unassailable. When she invited him to her home following a theater engagement for a cup of Russian tea, he made a daring proposal, with seduction uppermost in his mind. She had just turned from the window after throwing the casement wide, and the apartment was several stories above the street.

Her immediate response was: “Ivan Ivanowich”—or whatever his name was!—“if you take one step nearer I shall hurl myself from this window!”

I have never doubted that she might well have carried out the threat, and one can readily imagine into what a state of agitation that particular suitor must have been plunged. Allowance must be made, of course, for the sort of wildly melodramatic behavior that appears to have been far more common at one time in continental Europe than it has ever been in America, and the fact that Sonia had spent her childhood in Russia and had not arrived in the United States before the age of eight or ten.

I cannot quite recall what we talked about for the remainder of that afternoon. I do remember leafing through The Rainbow and admiring its distinct literary flavor—it was a quite exceptional amateur journalism magazine—and I am certain we discussed Howard’s stories. I probably also quoted at least a hundred lines of Swinburne, since at that period I could seldom resist letting those wonderful, alliterative lines roll over me in great oceanic waves.

Then Loveman and Sonia’s daughter returned from opposite ends of the Brooklyn compass at about the same time, and we sat around a long table while Sonia placed before us the kind of banquet Howard had mentioned over the phone. Sonia’s daughter was very pretty, with freckles that met across the bridge of her nose, and blonde hair and a waist so slim it seemed a little unreal. Unfortunately she was soon to leave New York, to be with a young man to whom she had recently become engaged.

When Howard returned to the city again Sonia invited all of his friends who were in New York at the time to a Park-side Avenue housewarming that did not terminate until the early morning hours. Just who those friends were the next chapter will disclose.