The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 3

  Seeing, as a child with even the possibility of World War I almost totally absent from my thoughts, that long peaceful street suddenly fill with men in uniform, with wagons lumbering past overladen with military equipment, and even cannons on wheels and officers with shoulder straps shouting orders… This has remained so visibly recapturable a memory for me across the years that I can still bring it sharply into focus just as it was, with no need to embellish a single one of the details.

  It was only later on, when a dreadful word was whispered and the lengthy casualty lists began appearing in the Canadian newspapers, that I could have wished for a memory recall that would, in the years to come, fail me utterly. That word was Verdun, and its aftermath could hardly have been more in tragic evidence in a French or English village than on that long street in Cananoque. At one time wounded soldiers seemed almost to outnumber civilians, and there were more amputees than accounts of that period ordinarily record. If some one thing were needed to bring home to a child the horror and fiendish irrationality of war—all wars everywhere—that was it.

  It is perhaps better to begin rather than to end with a tragic memory if only because, while nothing can diminish the tragedy in any way, it is more sanity-preserving to follow it with some happier ones.

  I was never entirely sure whether it was hunting or fishing that had the most appeal for my father, for he liked both enormously. He was the kindest of men, and I’m quite sure that if he had met someone with the views so prevalent today as to the cruelty involved in shooting birds and small mammals with a rifle—instead of with a camera—he would have stared at them in totally honest incomprehension. It was simply something that was done, by the overwhelming majority of sportsmen, and is, of course, still very widely a popular sport today, as a brief glance at a current outdoorsman-type magazine will confirm. There are severe penalties attached today to the shooting of native songbirds—and other native birds as well, the laws varying in different states—but otherwise duck shooting is as popular as ever, and if you shoot a deer in open season you can still join a wildlife preservation club.

  My father never shot a robin, thrush or woodpecker—not to mention the more snowy-crested birds—but he did seem to have a fondness for bringing down chicken hawks, buzzards and great, rather resplendent-looking birds in the predatory hawk range.

  I can remember accompanying him back through the woods to the inn three or four times, with at least ten such birds dangling from his shoulder on a string, all dead, and encrimsoned masses a few of them were. I was a little squeamish about it, but it never occurred to me to wish that he had used a camera instead. Bird watching with the aid of a camera was, of course, an extreme rarity in those days.

  In the St. Lawrence small-mouth black bass—the most likely of all freshwater fish to give a sportsman a real run for his money—were twenty times as common as the large-mouth variety and my father must have caught an astronomical number of them at various favored fishing spots on the Canadian shore, along, of course, with perch and pike. The perch he usually unhooked and threw back, although they are highly prized by sportsmen in other regions, particularly Lake George, where they grow to impressive size.

  In two or three of those summers I became an up-and-coming young entrepreneur to an extent that I have never been since, collecting minnows to serve as bait and selling them to other guests at the inn.

  CHAPTER 2

  In earlier years, at any given period, the image I usually had of myself was slightly futuristic in nature. I achieved this through a process of thought projection. I imagined myself to be three or four years older than I actually was at the time, with a state of mind and some achievements to my credit that had not as yet materialized. It was unquestionably a foolishness. But it harmed no one but myself, and I never felt the slightest twinge of guilt about it.

  Hence it was that when HPL returned to New York after his brief, earlier visit and settled down as a married man at Parkside Avenue in picturesque Flatbush, I considered myself not just a young student at New York University, but a very serious young writer with certain literary standards I had no intention of relinquishing, and a background which enabled me to mingle with other writers in the Village and elsewhere without an awkward lack of self-confidence.

  It didn’t matter that I had not as yet sold a single story—my first sale to Weird Tales was still a few months in the future—or that I had not acquired anything like the intellectual maturity of HPL’s other voluminous young correspondent, Alfred Galpin. It was the kind of person I felt myself to be, and I refused to let anyone talk me out of it.

  In the weeks that followed the first Parkside Avenue apartment-warming reception—I seem to recall that it was on a Sunday—I met and talked at length with perhaps a dozen of HPL’s early New York correspondents and of Sonia’s Brooklyn friends.

  It was an enlivening period indeed. HPL’s initial enchantment with New York had not even begun to wear off, and none of those early visitors had reason to believe that it might. I was present at three or four of the gatherings, but must have missed many more.

  In The Conservative and not a few other amateur journalism publications HPL had been at sword’s point with perhaps half of the members of the Brooklyn-based Blue Pencil Club, castigating them in no uncertain terms for what he regarded, at the time, as political and social views of a sadly misguided nature. But despite the fact that his own ultra-conservative views had far from vanished in the early nineteen twenties, he greeted those enemies on paper with a total lack of rancor, and a friendliness so unmistakable that its sincerity could not be doubted.

  Charles D. Isaacson and James F. Morton were the two most prominent members of the Blue Pencil Club and with both he was in strenuous disagreement in several areas. By that time, however, Morton had become one of his four or five closest and most highly valued friends—and of mine as well—as I’ve set forth at considerable length in Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside.

  Isaacson, prominent both as a musical critic and a political analyst, with a column in a New York newspaper, was the kind of persuasive talker who could demolish many opponents with a few carefully chosen words. But with HPL he did not score a point in a two-hour discussion of views which were certainly sounder than a round dozen advanced by HPL. I was present at that discussion, and it lingers in my mind ineffaceably across five intervening decades.

  The Kalem Club, as has often been mentioned in discussions of the Lovecraft Circle, in its early stage consisted of members whose last names began with K, L, or M. It was Samuel Loveman who hit on this nomenclature, and it was Loveman who became a slightly more frequent host to the group than I did on our monthly gatherings during HPL’s stay in New York.

  He resided in Brooklyn Heights just one flight above Hart Crane, with a splendid view of New York harbor, and, of course, the Bridge.

  I will not attempt to include in this or later chapters the material concerning Loveman that will be found in The Dreamer for the simple reason that if I added all of that to what I am about to relate here my attempt to keep the entire volume in balance would go by the board. A brief recapitulation, however, is in order and, I fear, necessary.

  Sam, at the time, was thirty-five. He had visited New York briefly two years before HPL’s marriage and, with Howard, had been a guest at Sonia’s Parkside Avenue home. He then returned to New York and became a permanent resident, and held various positions in the rare book field for a great many years.

  He was born in Cleveland and had been a boyhood friend of the Cranes, and when Crane’s mother died he officiated, as her will stipulated, in the disposal of her ashes over the waters of the harbor from Brooklyn Bridge.

  He was a very fine poet. But during his lifetime recognition was confined to only one slim volume, published by the Caxton Press, and his early correspondence with Bierce (Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce) whom he met in pers
on just before Bierce vanished in Mexico. Bierce greatly admired his early poems and so did George Sterling, Clark Ashton Smith, Edwin Markham and, of course, HPL. His position as a minor poet with certain rare and unusual qualities which made him in some respects an unique voice will, I think, undergo no diminishment in the years ahead, in the eyes of historically-minded poetry lovers. Like Smith, he became entrapped, to some extent at least, by a poetic tradition that has become almost totally replaced today by a different kind of poetry except, perhaps, here and there, on the popular magazine verse level, and Sam’s poetry had even less in common with that kind of sentimental rubbish. His poems dwell on the splendors of the ancient world and there is a certain despairing bitterness, combined with a great sympathy for the outcast and the afflicted that is all too often absent from poems in that particular vein. For anyone fortunate enough to have the Caxton volume my suggestion is: Take it down from the top shelf and re-read it at least three times a year. His translations from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine are among the finest I have ever seen. (They are not in this volume, unhappily.)

  Here is another in a somewhat different vein:

  Li Ho Chin, in the sunset’s gleam,

  Murmurs “Life is an opium dream,

  Drugged or drunk were the gods that blew

  This world on their opiate pipes of dew,

  That wrought in the poppy’s emerald deep

  Laughter and love and an endless sleep.”

  Li Ho Chin descries from afar

  The yellow moon and the evening star.

  Both in my Doubleday volume, The Early Long, and in my contribution to Marginalia (an Arkham House volume many years out-of-print) I have described HPL’s early meeting in the Village with Hart Crane and how it coincided with a copy of The Bridge in manuscript which Sam had shown me earlier on the same day. I did not know until quite recently, when I had occasion to consult some biographical material dating back to that period, that HPL had met and talked with Crane again, two or three times during his New York period. The error was understandable, for those meetings were apparently quite brief, and in all his conversations with me HPL never discussed Crane to any extent. Both HPL and Alfred Galpin had been guests at Crane’s home during an early, quite brief Cleveland visit but his only reference to Crane had been in relation to what Loveman had told him—that he had an ungovernable temper when intoxicated and had, at one time, hurled a typewriter through a window.

  But two incidents concerning Crane come to mind which I have not previously related, the second a quite spectacular one, told to me by Loveman, which, as far as I know, has received no biographical mention.

  At a Kalem Club gathering in Brooklyn Heights, a short while before HPL’s return to Providence, we passed the door of Crane’s apartment on descending to the street from Loveman’s apartment on the floor above. (I can’t recall with absolute certainty whether or not HPL was present at that gathering.) The door of Crane’s apartment was about one-third open and from it there came a continuous hum of voices.

  When we reached the street Sam told me, “Frank, everyone is there. Tate, Waldo Frank, e e cummings…a dozen others just as important. He urged me to join them, and I promised to drop in later. It’s The Bridge, of course. He keeps telling me the poem’s ‘just rhetoric’ but they don’t think so. And I don’t think he does either. If you like, we can go back and I’ll introduce you.”

  It was a tempting offer, but I decided to depart with the other Kalem members—about seven in all. I felt I’d be just a little ill at ease in such a prestigious gathering. If HPL had been present that evening—and, as I’ve said, I’m far from sure he was—he probably slipped quietly away as he sometimes did at the end of a talkative evening. I don’t remember accompanying him to the subway, and discussing that other gathering.

  The second incident, the spectacular one—though it would not have seemed so to Sam if Crane had ended up dead—began with the feeling that Sam had when they were both standing on the roof staring out over the harbor. He had never, Sam told me, seen Hart in so black a mood. He had been drinking heavily for two or three days and somehow to Sam the roof seemed the wrong place for him to be at that particular time. That feeling was confirmed when he made a despairing gesture, rushed to the parapet and started to ascend it. There was never any doubt in Sam’s mind that if he had not rushed forward, grabbed him by the legs and pulled him back to safety, he would have hurled himself over.

  During that early New York period there were three writers whom I met and talked with frequently who remain, across the years, as firmly entrenched in my memory store of important friendships as they did, I’m sure, in the treasure house of HPL’s memories until the time of his death.

  My close friendship with Donald Wandrei and, later, with his brother Howard dates from after HPL’s return to Providence and will be discussed in another chapter. So did my first meeting with Wilfred Talman and Vrest Orton.

  The three writers were Samuel Loveman, H. Warner Munn, and James F. Morton. Morton was, of course, far less of a writer in a strict sense than the other two, for his main activities at the time were of a social, educational and political nature. He lectured frequently for the New York Board of Education, attended political rallies, and was one of the earliest of Black Rights crusaders. He was, for a number of years, and before he became curator of the Paterson (New Jersey) Museum, a quite prominent New Yorker whose name appeared often in the newspapers.

  He was so well-known, in fact, and so assured when he spoke in public that one of my father’s patients recognized his voice in the living room when he accompanied HPL on his first visit to our home on West End Avenue. “Goodness, Dr. Long,” she said in the dental chair, “that must be James Morton. We’ve moved in much the same circles and there are some voices you can’t be mistaken about.”

  Despite his strenuous round of activities Morton managed to write a number of urbane and scholarly essays, ranging in theme from nineteenth-century English literature in general (Browning, whose optimism he shared, was the poet he most often quoted) to social and political matters a little remote from the ones of more immediate concern to him.

  He always thought of himself as something of a radical and, as I mentioned in The Dreamer, knew Jack London in his youth, and continued to embrace, at least in theory, the semi-socialism of the long outdated single tax. He continued to believe in “free love“, as it was then called—an odd-sounding term indeed today! It’s hard to imagine what he would have thought of X-rated films.

  Today his views in general would still make him seem just a trifle to the left of center, perhaps, but even of that it is impossible to be sure. In many respects he was the exact opposite of HPL—of sturdy physique, florid complexion, reddish hair (a little faded at the age of fifty), he was a perfect example of a Lovecraftian contending image. But the two still got along famously.

  As I also mentioned in The Dreamer, he took great pride in his Harvard M.A. (which carried more prestige in the ’twenties than a Ph.D does today) and had managed to get himself in Who’s Who in America at the age of forty, no mean feat at any period, however you slice it.

  H. Warner Munn was thirty years younger than Morton—exactly my age, in fact, give or take a few months—and he arrived in New York on his first visit at the time of HPL’s marriage. That visit stands out very pronouncedly in my memory because we traveled about the city so extensively in the course of not more than two or three weeks.

  We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art twice (he was particularly interested, as was HPL, in the Egyptian exhibits), the Central Park Zoo, and the marine, three-masted schooner survivals just north of Battery Park. At that time old three-and four-masteds still plied the seas to an extent undreamed of today. Oh, yes—the old Battery Park aquarium—superior in many respects, I’ve always felt, to the one at Coney Island today, despite its Melville-marvelous “white” whales
and dolphins.

  We took Harold in the family car to Woodlawn Cemetery, where there is a Long burial plot topped by a pyramid-type monument and until a few years ago—it was lost through a storage mishap—I possessed a snapshot of the Werewolf of Ponkert and Chaugnar Faugn in their terrestrial incarnations standing at the foot of the grave I shall probably eventually occupy.

  On Harold’s second, somewhat later visit to New York—and I may as well dwell on that here—an event took place of tremendous importance to a man who may conceivably be still alive today because of an exceptional act of heroism.

  Harold arrived at the beginning of summer, in search of some measure of economic security that would enable him to remain in the city until September. At that time he seemed new-adventure disposed, in robust health and in search of some job that would not involve any kind of business office confinement. The mother made a suggestion that I would not have thought of. Why not try to secure a job as a crewman on one of the once-famous Iron Steamships that made two or three trips daily between Battery Park and Coney Island? She had read somewhere that the company that operated the boats had difficulty in securing deck hands.

  Harold immediately acted on the tip and secured the job without difficulty. I can’t recall exactly how long it lasted—perhaps three weeks, perhaps for the major part of the summer. But it lasted long enough to enable him, at the risk of his life, to leap from the rail during an unusually rough-weather passage and rescue a passenger who had fallen overboard. It was on the front page of the New York Times the following morning. Not in headlines exactly, but in at least a lengthy column.