LITMIR.BIZ

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neighboring youngsters in forming a firefighting brigade which moved up and down the streets of the Ancient Hill with hook-and-ladder equipment of miniature size which they had managed to put together from wooden crates and garden hoses.

      Very much on record in previous Arkham House books and elsewhere, is HPL’s involvement with astronomy in his teenage years, leading to a column under his byline in the Providence Evening Tribune which one Providence elder refused to believe he could have authored, even when he produced a volume of cuttings (he always called them “cuttings,” never “clippings”) to prove it.

      I do not know whether Howard ever engaged in that most universal of boyhood hobbies, stamp collecting, and my failure ever to ask him surprises me a little, because I was the most ardent of stamp collectors between the ages of nine and twelve. I do know that he collected coins, for in his New York period his knowledge of Roman numismatics was as extensive as his familiarity with ancient bronze and baked-clay Roman lamps, and he once helped me pick out magnificent examples of both “coinage and lampage” at an old-coin shop on Fulton Street. (I still possess a Roman silver coin as large as a fifty-cent piece, uneven about the edges, which I purchased on that occasion for the incredible sum of two dollars, but perhaps it is of some base alloy that merely looks like silver. I have never bitten into it to make sure.)

      At the age of thirty, HPL’s views in many areas would have stunned anyone unfamiliar with the New England character at its most puritanical. The image he had of himself was that of a man of stern moral principles, ultraconservative in outlook, and opposed to any kind of bohemianism. Yet this was precisely the opposite of a hypocritical self-image; holding such views seemed to him both natural and necessary, and entirely in accord with the code of a gentleman.

      It seemingly cost him no apparent effort or misgivings to be that kind of a person. He not only would have failed to derive the slightest emotional satisfaction from going contrary to such a code, but would have felt he had betrayed the highest instincts of his being. Howard believed there was nothing in that code which could keep a man from being both poet and dreamer, or from admiring the best that has been said and thought in the world. In the realm of aesthetics, the great poets meant as much to him as they did to me, and although out of fealty to his beloved eighteenth century he preferred Pope and Dryden to Keats and Shelley, he would instantly have conceded that the major romantic poets, from Coleridge to Swinburne, were of considerably greater stature.

      Before concluding the somewhat statistical aspects of this record and passing on to personal memories, there is a matter of great importance which the reader must constantly keep in mind, or otherwise the way HPL refers to himself in many of the conversations which follow will seem bewildering and difficult to understand. I am uncertain precisely when Howard became convinced that he was “the old gentleman from Providence-Plantations,” but I strongly suspect the feeling that he was at least two and a half times his calendar age first began to take shape in his mind before he was twenty-five. I only know that when he arrived in New York it had become so settled a conviction that he referred to me and to his other young correspondent, Alfred Galpin, as his “grandsons”; to James F. Morton, who was just as much of an inner-circle correspondent and was almost twice his age, as “my son”; and to one of his aunts, Mrs. Gamwell, as “my daughter.”

      He sometimes spoke of me as “Sonny”—a designation which I found provoking, but since he more often addressed me as “Belknapius,” (My middle name was used by my family to distinguish me from my father since I was a “Jr.”) I did not wish to offend him by protesting too vigorously whenever he engaged in that silly-sounding lapse, which he seemed unable totally to avoid. I did protest once or twice, but it did no good. He went right on calling me “Sonny” in an occasional letter and more often in his communications to others until I began to feel, at thirty or so, that the absurdity of it exceeded all bounds. No one had ever called me “Sonny” before—even at the age of fifteen—because all apart from its juvenile implications, the name suggests a buoyant, cheerful, jack-in-the-box disposition which I emphatically never possessed. But it was impossible to stay angry with HPL for long, and since I am certain he would have dropped the appellation instantly and forever had I been sufficiently insistent in my protests, I have only myself to blame for what would have become even more of an absurdity if at my present age of a hundred and ten, he could have continued to address me—if only on rare occasions—as the “Sonny” of that long vanished segment of Space and Time.

      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

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