Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Dreamer on the Nightside. Frank Belknap Long

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ