The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  Loveman’s separate worlds—the worlds of amateur journalism and weird fiction, represented by Lovecraft, and the world of the aesthetic avant-garde, represented by Crane and his associates—would meet for the first, but not the last, time in the spring and summer of 1922. Sonia H. Greene, the dynamic Russian Jewess who had met Lovecraft at an amateur journalism convention in 1921, clearly wished to see more of him (they would marry in 1924), and she managed to persuade both him and Loveman to come to New York for a visit, although for Loveman it was at least in part a working vacation, as he sought to make contacts among New York booksellers. This “convention of freaks and exotics”[85] gathered on April 6–12 and included such figures as James F. Morton, Rheinhart Kleiner, Everett McNeil, Arthur Leeds, Frank Belknap Long, and other members of what would become the Kalem Club of 1924–26, but in many ways Loveman and Lovecraft were the stars of the show. Two months before meeting him, Lovecraft painted a portrait of that would remain an accurate depiction of this sensitive soul:

  Loveman himself is a romantic figure, about whose poverty, sufferings, genius, and divine melancholy one might write a moving volume. He is today almost destitute—has been forced to sell some of his treasured books, including rare incunabulae extending back to 1482—yet will not accept the loan of a farthing. He is one step in advance of his beloved vagabonds and bohemians—for he has pride, honour, and character. A glorious pagan—and a Jew by race.[86]

  Loveman’s own first impression of New York is expressed piquantly in a letter to Smith:

  It was one continual round of museums, theatres and sight-seeing—without a chance for employment—and I got home minus about ten pounds with enough cynicism to start a cyanide factory, and eyes that were full of forfeited sleep. It’s a hell of a fine place, but the people are impossible. The women paint like hetaira’s, one and all. The men carry canes. Both sexes lead poodles and bulls, although it would better become them to raise families and trundle baby-carriages.[87]

  Loveman was not at this time successful in securing employment in New York, so he returned to Cleveland. Lovecraft was, however, hot on his trail, for after another visit to New York in July he boarded a train to Cleveland, arriving there on July 30 and remaining until August 15. His purpose was to meet not only Loveman but also his young correspondent Alfred Galpin (1901–1983), who had struck up a friendship with Loveman and decided to spend the summer with him. It was in this way that Lovecraft first became acquainted with Hart Crane and the rest of his circle; indeed, Lovecraft felt somewhat embarrassed that he seemed to be the centre of attention:

  It gave me a novel sensation to be “lionised” so much beyond my deserts by men as able as the painter Summers [sic], Loveman, Galpin, &c. I met some new figures—Crane the poet, Lazar [sic], an ambitious young literary student now in the ary, & a delightful young fellow named Carroll Lawrence, who writes weird stories & wants to see all of mine.[88]

  Lovecraft paid the Crane circle the unusual tribute of writing a free-verse poem, “Plaster-All” (a play on Crane’s poem “Pastorale,” Dial, October 1921), supplying an impressionistic account of his Cleveland visit in general and of Loveman in particular. (Steven J. Mariconda is, however, correct in believing that the narrator of the poem is Crane himself.)

  Soon I met and succeeded

  In surrounding myself

  With a few of the intelligentsia

  That Cleveland affords.

  Loveman, Sommer, Lescaze, Hatfield, Guenther. . . .

  But Loveman

  Left the fold early—pity, yes!

  I might have made much of him,

  In spite of his Hebraism,

  Which (sibilantly whispered)

  I did not recognize,

  Even on my mother’s hearsay—

  But there was much of the rebel,

  Inborn and instinctive,

  (As in all Jews)

  In Loveman.

  And so, after a perfectly wild argument

  With him one lovely night, late July,

  With the syringas in full blossom

  On 115th Street,

  We parted

  To meet no more—at least as friends.[89]

  Loveman’s literary career was at last progressing to some degree. He had begun his exotic prose drama, The Sphinx, in 1918,[90] working sporadically on it for the next several years. In February 1921 he started his best-known poem, The Hermaphrodite.[91] It is not clear when this work was finished, but Lovecraft appears to have read the complete poem (also the complete Sphinx) in April 1922. Loveman also published three issues of his little magazine, The Saturnian (June–July [1920], August–September [1920], and March 1922). In the first issue he had promised to publish a lengthy appreciation of both the poetry and the artwork of Clark Ashton Smith, but failed to carry out the promise. He did, however, publish in the third issue his twenty-four translations from Heinrich Heine, on which he had been at work since at least 1909,[92] along with superb translations from Baudelaire and Verlaine. In the summer of 1922 another Cleveland friend, the bookseller George Kirk (1898–1962), issued his one and only book publication, Loveman’s edition of Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce. This slim booklet is perhaps more impressive for its typography and design than for its contents, for Bierce’s letters to Loveman are quite insubstantial; Mencken was being perhaps only a bit too harsh when he wrote in a brief review: “The result was a polite exchange of letters, but there is scarcely a word in any of them that justifies printing them. To them the editor prefixes a bombastic preface containing some gratuitous and nonsensical criticism of Hergesheimer and Cabell.”[93]

  It was at this time that an amusing contretemps over Loveman’s poetry roiled the amateur press for well over a year. In an unsigned review of the first issue of Sonia Greene’s Rainbow (October 1921), Lovecraft waxed eloquent about Loveman’s “The Triumph in Eternity,” writing:

  Samuel Loveman is the last of the Hellenes—a golden god of the elder world fallen upon pygmies. Genius of the most poignant authenticity is his, opening in his mind a diamond-paned window which looks out clearly upon rarefied realms of dreams and scenes of immortal beauty seldom and dimly glimpsed by the modern age.[94]

  But the poem’s expression of certain pagan and possibly anti-Christian sentiments aroused the stodgy amateur critic Michael Oscar White, who in a critical article on Loveman criticised Lovecraft’s review (although White was unaware of his authorship of it) for praising a poet whose “insincere misanthropic” views taint his work, and whose use of pagan gods is not only antiquated but sacrilegious; remarking specifically of “A Triumph of Eternity,” he wrote: “In anyone but an amateur poet with an amateur perception of things held sacred in a Christian country the whole piece would be considered blasphemous.”[95] This excursion into fatuity elicited some predictable responses from Loveman’s partisans, including Galpin and Long, both of whom wrote vitriolic attacks on White.[96] Lovecraft himself replied with a certain understated cynicism in “In the Editor’s Study” (Conservative, July 1923), while Loveman himself stayed entirely above the fray.

  Sometime in 1923 Loveman apparently secured a job at Eglin’s, a leading bookstore in Cleveland, but by November of that year he had lost the position.[97] As a result, when Hart Crane moved to New York in August 1924, Loveman followed him the following month, thinking his chances of finding a job in New York no worse than in Cleveland. Just prior to leaving, he and Don Bregenzer had assembled an anthology of essays on James Branch Cabell, A Round-Table in Poictesme, published by the Colophon Club of Cleveland. Evidently Loveman had gotten over his initial hostility to Cabell to the point of saying that “comparatively little has been done in appreciation of the life-long sacrifice and assiduity of James Branch Cabell to creative literature.”[98] In any event, Loveman was this time successful in securing employment in the book trade: he was hired by Dauber & Pine, booksellers, at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, a position he retained into the 1930s.

  Of Loveman’s multifarious meetings with
both the “Lovecraft circle” and the “Crane circle” during 1924–26 it is difficult to speak in small compass. Perhaps the most pungent occasions were when the two groups—specifically, Lovecraft and Crane—encountered each other, as they did a surprising number of times. Crane’s letter in the fall of 1924 is well known: “Miss Sonia Green [sic] and her piping-voiced huband, Howard Lovecraft . . ., kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway!”[99] A later comment is no less piquant:

  Sam, as I wrote before, has been working in a bookstore. For nearly two weeks I didn’t see him at all. Then last Saturday I called on him at his shop and invited him over for Sunday evening. He brought that queer Lovecraft person with him, so we had no particularly intimate conversation. Just as well, of course, as I am sure they would have been the same disparagements of everything and almost everybody, as usual. He isn’t getting along any better with his boss than he did with Eglin in Cleveland, and despite my reminding him of this and other examples of the past he still feels himself the eternal martyr and longs for his bed and home, his mending and home-washed laundry and home cooked food.[100]

  Loveman at this time was pursuing an interest in the American writer Edgar Saltus (1855–1921), a once-popular but now forgotten writer of cynical society novels and eccentric works such as Imperial Purple (1892), a series of evocative prose-poems on the Roman emperors. Loveman once declared to Smith that he had “undivided respect” for only four American writers—Smith himself, George Sterling, Saltus, and (oddly) Sherwood Anderson.[101] He pursued his Saltus interest for years, getting in touch with Saltus’s widow, Marie, and writing an entire monograph on the author. Although Lovecraft states that this monograph was actually scheduled for publication by Brentano’s,[102] it never appeared and does not appear to survive; all Loveman had to show for his efforts was a collection of the poems by Edgar and Marie Saltus, Poppies and Mandragora (1926), to which he contributed a brief preface. Crane scoffed at Loveman’s interest in Saltus,[103] and Mencken is probably right in declaring that of all Saltus’s books

  only “Imperial Purple” holds up. A certain fine glow is still in it; it has gusto if not profundity; Saltus’s worst faults do not damage it appreciably. I find myself, indeed, agreeing thoroughly with the literary judgment of Dr. [Warren G.] Harding. “Imperial Purple” remains Saltus’s best book. It remains, also, alas, his only good one![104]

  Otherwise, Loveman was contributing poetry sporadically to the amateur press, although so far as is known he published only two original poems in 1927, none in 1928, two in 1929, and none in 1930 and 1931. W. Paul Cook issued The Hermaphrodite as a slim pamphlet in 1926, as one of the first publications of his Recluse Press. Loveman also contributed a lively essay on the fin-de-siècle British writer Hubert Crackanthorpe to Cook’s one-shot magazine, the Recluse.[105]

  Loveman’s activities in the later 1920s are not entirely clear. He continued to live in New York and work in the book business, and his association with Crane flourished. Lovecraft’s departure from New York and return to Providence in 1926 by no means ended their relationship, and Loveman not only met Lovecraft frequently in Providence or Boston on book-hunting trips, but he did Lovecraft the somewhat dubious favour of putting him in touch with such revision clients as Zealia Bishop and Adolphe de Castro. No correspondence to or from Lovecraft (or, for that matter, to Smith) for this period appears to survive.

  In 1932 Loveman helped to establish the literary magazine Trend, and although he is listed on the editorial board for only the first issue (March–April–May 1932), he contributed poems, essays, and reviews to the first several issues. At last, in 1936, a significant collection of his poems appeared: The Hermaphrodite and Other Poems, issued by the Caxton Press of Caldwell, Idaho. It contains 72 poems, or well under half his extant corpus of poetic work, and it is not clear that it featured all his best work. In particular, it included none of his poetic dramas, certainly a striking phase of his writing. Some of the poems had appeared in Hyman Bradofsky’s amateur journal, the Californian, for Summer 1935.

  For Loveman’s later career there is little evidence. Sterling had died in 1926, Crane in 1932, Lovecraft in 1937. Loveman later told John Unterecker that Crane was “the best friend I ever had . . . the most charming, the most alive human being that life has ever given me, barring none.”[106] It may well be that the deaths of these colleagues had something to do with the drying up of Loveman’s own literary voice. He wrote numerous memoirs of Crane, most of them saying much the same thing. In the 1940s he established the Bodley Book Shop, a mail order book business,[107] and under the imprint of the Bodley Press he published three books in the late 1940s, including Brom Weber’s Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study (1948). W. Paul Cook finally issued The Sphinx in a limited edition in 1944. Loveman continued to work in the book business in New York into an advanced age, including such venues as the Gotham Book Mart; he also established his own bookstore, which was discontinued a few years before his death.[108]

  In the later 1940s Loveman reestablished contact with Sonia Greene, who had divorced Lovecraft in 1929 and married Dr. Nathaniel Davis in 1935. In their letters (surviving at the John Hay Library) there is much discussion of Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism—something that was apparently a revelation to Loveman. The matter seemed to fester in Loveman’s mind; although his first two memoirs, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1948) and “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist” (1958), are on the whole respectful (although in the latter he refers tartly to Lovecraft’s letters as “verbal vomit”), Loveman’s resentment at what he believed to be Lovecraft’s hypocrisy flared out unexpectedly late in life. In the brief memoir “Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975) he writes bitterly of his years with Lovecraft in New York:

  What I did not realize (or know) was that he was an arrant anti-Semite who concealed his smouldering hatred of me because of my taint of Jewish ancestry. It would be impossible for me to describe the smug, cloaked hypocrisy of H. P. L. . . . Lovecraft had a hypocritical streak to him that few were able to recognize.[109]

  It would take a volume of commentary to explain the fallacies in Loveman’s position; all we can do is express sympathy that his later years were marred with this kind of hatred. And yet, his aesthetic sensibility never fell into abeyance; a month or so before his death he wrote his last poem, “John Clare in 1864,” one of several poems about the British poet he championed; and it is difficult not to read in the final stanza an awareness of his own imminent departure from this life:

  John Clare stares up, his dull eyes bright.

  Someday I’ll follow in his flight.

  Samuel Loveman died on May 14, 1976, at the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged. He had not published any poetry, so far as is known, for forty years, and it has taken another three decades for his work to be resurrected, chiefly as ancillary to Lovecraft’s. But Loveman’s work deserves study and appreciation on its own, for it is scarcely to be doubted that he possessed poetic gifts of a high order.

  To characterise the poetical work of Samuel Loveman is a more difficult procedure than it might seem on the surface. Although, with the recent publication of Loveman’s Out of the Immortal Night (2004), we are now in possession of his collected poetry, verse and prose dramas (including The Sphinx), verse translations (chiefly of Heine, Baudelaire, and Verlaine), short stories and prose poems, and selected essays and reviews, Loveman remains an elusive figure. For large stretches of his long life, the facts of his biography are murky at best, and the relative paucity of surviving letters (we have some of his letters to Ambrose Bierce and Sterling, a good many to Clark Ashton Smith, only scraps to H. P. Lovecraft and none at all to Hart Crane) makes it difficult to gain a true grasp of his character and of his poetic ideals. The poetry itself, exquisitely crafted as it is, is occasionally marred by obscurity of diction and focus that makes its inter­pretation more a mat
ter of conjecture than of certainty.

  Lovecraft himself sheds perhaps the greatest light on Loveman’s character, and indirectly upon his art. That Loveman had, without the least self-consciousness or theatricality, adopted the persona of the hypersensitive, hyperaesthetic poet ill at ease in the modern world—a kind of Shelley or Swinburne transplanted inexplicably to the slums of Brooklyn—is made evident in Lovecraft’s word-portrait, written just after his first meeting with Loveman in New York in the spring of 1922:

  Concerning the personality of S: Loveman, Esq., I believe you are right in assuming that he seeks to cover his aesthetick predilections with a masque of the commonplace. In externals, it may be said that he succeeds to no mean extent; but the penetrating vision is not slow to discover the sensitive artist beneath his worldly robes. . . . The underlying sensitiveness of our colleague was many times display’d during our sojourn, largely in connexion with apprehensions regarding the impression he produced upon others. He was at great pains to inquire how well he fulfill’d my expectations of him, and was a whole day miserable because of the seeming indifference of young [Frank Belknap] Long; who in truth, however, entertain’d the most ardent regard and admiration for him. Loveman undoubtedly suffers very keenly from small things which scarce perturb the generality of mankind. . . . It is this sensitive desire to escape comment which impels him to adopt the disguise of commonplace demeanour . . .[110]