Traces of the old Charlie were still easy to spot. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way. Nothing has led me to believe that people can change their deep selves; the best we can do is to fit our dispositions into the real world, and Charlie did that. His profiles didn’t make him famous, and they certainly didn’t make him rich, but they were a joy to read, even if you had no interest in the things his almost-celebrities were almost famous for. He took their obscurity and lit it up with his caring. The only sad thing about his work, I thought, was that it was connected to his father: as if he were still trying to salvage his lost, flawed dad, who had spent his professional life looking for traces of colonialism in the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger. I didn’t tell him that, but I wonder if anything would have been different, if I had. Probably Charlie would have grimaced and said, Mar, you’re a great therapist, but you’re not my therapist, so please, shut up. But maybe it would have sunk in, anyway, and he would have been more cautious when he met L. C. Spinks. Actually, I think he must have known, by the end, that he had to let his father go. I think his disappearance was a way of letting go: not a great way, but the only one he could imagine, at that point. More wish fulfillment, you’ll say. Maybe so. The most terrible of my midnight thoughts is that Charlie took L. C. Spinks with him to the bottom of Agawam Lake, not in reality but in his heart, and that my husband is there now, deep in cold water, curled around the memory of the worst father he’d ever known.
3.
L. C. Spinks came into our lives thanks to Charlie’s friend Magnus, whom I still see sometimes, sitting in a café on Avenue B, or walking his dog in Tompkins Square Park. I avoid him. Magnus is, or used to be, a poet; he published a book in the 1970s, and one of his poems was turned into a song by the Holy Modal Rounders, whose music Charlie tried to explain to me, in vain. At one point, Magnus taught classes at City College; now, as far as I know, he lives on disability and the remains of an inheritance. He is walrus-shaped, with a shock of white hair and a gnawed walrus mustache. Charlie used to say that Magnus looks the way Theodore Roosevelt would have looked if Roosevelt had come of age in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, but that tells you more about Charlie’s powers of idealization than it does about Magnus himself. I don’t know how the two of them met. What I do know is that Charlie was planning to write a profile of Magnus, but then, one day in the summer of 2006, the two of them started talking about H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories, it turned out, they both admired.
“Who’s that?” I asked. “You don’t know?” Charlie said. “Only the greatest American horror writer since Poe.” Lovecraft was the author of “The Call of Cthulhu,” At the Mountains of Madness, and other works I hadn’t heard of. His stories, Charlie said, were about a universe inhabited by powerful alien beings, who feel about humanity the way a person coming home from a long trip might feel about an infestation of spiders. “Sounds cheerful,” I said. “I got a kick out of them in junior high school,” Charlie said. “In fact,” he went on, blushing, “Eric and I started a Cult of Cthulhu. We sewed ourselves black robes, and walked up and down Broadway in the middle of the night, holding signs that read THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH—GIVE TO THE CULT OF CTHULHU. In retrospect, it was suicidal, but nothing bad ever happened to us. I think we must have been so weird that people left us alone. A half-black kid and a Puerto Rican kid, stumping for Cthulhu! We could have been poster children for the city of New York.” “You didn’t really believe in Cthulhu, did you?” I asked. “No,” Charlie said, “but it was so much fun to pretend we did believe, it was a lot like believing. I’m sure,” he added, when he saw my worried expression, “if Cthulhu had actually appeared, I would have been scared shitless.”
Magnus, who knew everything about everything, or pretended to, told Charlie that he had met one of Lovecraft’s friends, a fellow named Sam Loveman, who owned a used-book shop on Fourth Avenue. Those were their real names, Charlie said: Lovecraft and Loveman, which was ironic, because if there was anything they didn’t know about, it was love. Anyway, this was in the 1970s, when Sam Loveman was very old, and Magnus was looking for books by the English writer Hubert Crackanthorpe, a realist who had drowned himself in the Seine at the age of twenty-six. Loveman turned out to be a Crackanthorpe fanatic, possibly the only such person in the world. He immediately became fond of Magnus. They’d spend hours in Loveman’s second-floor shop, sitting on draftsman’s stools, talking about their beloved, forgotten writers, and it came to light that Loveman had known H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s and ’30s. “What was he like?” Magnus asked, dazzled. “Howard was a real New England gentleman,” Loveman said, but as their conversation went on, he revealed some things about Lovecraft that weren’t exactly pleasant. Lovecraft had hated the Jews, black people, Asians, Arabs. He had despised women. “In the end,” Loveman said, “I think the only person he ever cared about was Bobby Barlow, and even about him, I’m not sure.” “Barlow?” Magnus asked. “Robert Barlow,” Loveman said, with a kind of bitter sadness mixed with puzzlement. “He was Howard’s literary executor. You don’t know the story?” Magnus shook his head. “Well,” Loveman said, “Barlow was a very assiduous fan who lived in Florida. He wrote letters to Howard, and they became friends. Finally, in the summer of 1934, Barlow invited Howard to visit him, and Howard went. He stayed with Barlow for two months. But what you have to bear in mind is that Howard didn’t stay with anyone for two months. He was too attached to his precious old furniture, his books, his dear Providence. The other thing that makes the episode unfathomable is that Howard was forty-three when it happened, and Bobby was all of sixteen, and not good-looking.” “You mean they were lovers?” Magnus asked. “No one knows,” Loveman said. “No one dared to ask Howard, and Barlow vanished. I heard he went to Mexico and died there under unhappy circumstances.” “Oh,” Magnus said. “If they were lovers, and I’m not saying that they were,” Loveman continued, “then that was the stupidest thing Howard ever did. Although in truth, it was probably the most endearing thing, too.” “How do you mean?” Magnus asked. Loveman patted the stack of books on the desk beside him, as though to reassure them of something. “Don’t you see?” he asked. “If he really did love Bobby, at least that would mean he was human.” Sam Loveman died soon after that, but the story of Lovecraft and Barlow remained in Magnus’s mind, hard and small, like a seed. He thought of doing something with it, writing a sequence of poems, maybe, but he lost interest. “Which is the tragic pattern of my life,” Magnus said, rubbing his finger across his mustache. “If only I’d known how to hold on to things, I’d be immortal.” “And that’s the story,” Charlie said. “I’m going to look into it.” “I bet you will,” I said.
• • •
So Charlie set out on the path that would lead to the shore of Agawam Lake, but I don’t believe his journey ended there, and I have reasons for not believing it. There’s the note he left on his bed in the hospital, which read: Do not disturb me, I wish to sleep for a long time—an absurd message from a literal point of view, since Charlie wasn’t in the bed, but a meaningful one to anyone who has read his book about Lovecraft and Barlow. There’s the fact that Jessica Ng keeps changing her story. Did she leave him on a side road, by an abandoned farm? Did she leave him within view of the lake? Did she leave him at all? And, finally, there’s the image I am looking at as I write this, a photograph of a stretch of nearly black sand, and, beyond it, an indigo ocean. It showed up on my phone a month ago. I cried when I saw it, then I laughed. It’s just the kind of thing Charlie would do.
II.
AN ANTECEDENT AND A HORROR
1.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Charlie soon discovered, was even stranger and more forbidding than Magnus had made him out to be. Lovecraft was born in 1890, the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a silver salesman, and Sarah Susan Phillips, the daughter of a rich Providence merchant. When Howard was three, his father was committed to the Butler Hospital for the Insane, following an episode of paranoid delus
ion, and Lovecraft went to live with his grandfather. He had a bookish, solitary childhood, which was marked by a fondness for eighteenth-century English literature and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He disliked games and had few friends, but he did enjoy building cities out of blocks and enacting their decline and fall.
Lovecraft’s grandfather died in 1904, and Lovecraft and his mother moved to a smaller house. Lovecraft found the change so deeply upsetting that he contemplated suicide: he really was attached to familiar places and familiar things. Also, his mother sounds like a terror. She was pretty, vain, and nervous; she dressed the infant Lovecraft as a girl—a fact of which critics have made much over the years—and told people that her son was so ugly, he shouldn’t be allowed outside in the daytime. In the end, though, Lovecraft decided that life with Susie, as she was known, was better than no life at all. There were so many things he wanted to know: What would Shackleton and Scott find in the Antarctic? What about Africa, and the vast gulfs of space? He studied history and science, especially astronomy, about which he wrote a column for the Providence Evening News. He dreamed of becoming a scientist, but when he was seventeen, he suffered from mysterious seizures and withdrew from high school. For several years, Lovecraft did nothing at all; then, in his twenties, he published a magazine called The Conservative, in which he advocated “total abstinence and prohibition, moderate, healthy militarism as contrasted with dangerous and unpatriotic peace-preaching, and the domination by the English and kindred races over the lesser divisions of mankind.” “Uh-oh,” I said, when Charlie told me about this. “It gets worse,” Charlie said.
Lovecraft lived with Susie until 1919, when she, too, was committed to the Butler Hospital for the Insane. She died there in May 1921. Six weeks later, as if his heart had been released from servitude to her, Lovecraft met Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, at a convention of amateur journalists in Boston. Sonia was seven years his senior and had a teenage daughter by a previous marriage. She was not attracted to Lovecraft, but she admired his writing. What Lovecraft felt for her is not known, because she burned his letters, a whole trunkful of them, before she left for California in 1935. However, it doesn’t seem to have been a passionate attachment. Lovecraft never kissed Sonia, never said he loved her. When he wanted to express affection, he wrapped his pinky finger around hers and said, “Umph.” They were married in 1924, and he moved into her apartment in Brooklyn. The two years that followed were difficult, to say the least. Lovecraft placed wordy ads in the newspaper, announcing that he was available to revise and edit works of prose and poetry on any subject, but no one hired him. He tried selling magazines door-to-door, but he had no talent for selling. He didn’t believe in selling. It wasn’t gentlemanly.
Meanwhile, Sonia sold women’s hats, fed Lovecraft spaghetti, and brought him to meetings of her literary club. He became almost psychotic. By the end of 1925, he was writing to his aunt Lillian about the “loathsome Asiatic hordes” and “scarcely less undesirable Latins” of New York, “the clamorous plague of French-Canadians,” and “the hideous peasant Poles of New Jersey,” not to mention the Jews, who, he wrote, “are hopeless as far as America is concerned. They are the product of alien blood, & inherit alien ideals, impulses, & emotions which forever preclude the possibility of wholesale assimilation.” “Whoa!” I said. “Maybe you should let this one go.” “What,” Charlie said, “and miss the chance to tell the world that Lovecraft had sex with a sixteen-year-old?” “Are you writing an exposé?” I asked. “Kind of, kind of,” Charlie said. “You know, childhood hero with feet of clay. I appreciate his honesty, though. You don’t have to read between the lines.” “Wasn’t his wife Jewish?” I asked. “Yep,” Charlie said. “Old Howard was a complicated fellow.”
In the spring of 1926, Lovecraft went back to Providence. His marriage to Sonia dissolved. He worked frantically, as if he were running away from something: in the two years following his return from New York, he wrote the stories “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The Silver Key,” and “The Colour Out of Space,” and the novels The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Because this last book ended up being the pattern, in a strange way, for Charlie’s relationship with L. C. Spinks, I should say something about it. It concerns a young man named Charles Dexter Ward, a Providence native who is fascinated by the colonial past. While looking through old papers, he finds a reference to his great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Curwen, about whom no one has ever told him anything. He discovers that Curwen was a merchant who came to Providence from Salem around 1693 and lived there for a century without growing visibly older. Curwen performed sinister experiments in the cellar of his Pawtuxet farm, which finally upset the people of Providence so much that they raided the farm and killed him. Ward is eager to learn more. Why didn’t Curwen age? And what were his experiments? He digs around in libraries and locates Curwen’s house, where he finds secret papers that explain how to bring Curwen back from the dead. Ward performs a sinister ritual; there’s a thunderstorm, and, poof, Curwen is back—but, unfortunately for Ward, his plans do not involve informing his great-great-great-grandson about eighteenth-century Providence.
If you don’t know how the book ends, I won’t spoil it for you. Let’s just say that The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has been read as a parable on the perils of research. In the fall of 2006, I saw those perils more clearly than Charlie did. He said he hadn’t forgotten what a problematic person H. P. Lovecraft was, but the more deeply immersed he became in Lovecraft’s story, the more he forgot to ask questions about it, except the researcher’s constant demand: Tell me more. Many of the things he learned seemed trivial to me—for instance, that Lovecraft had traveled with a black imitation-leather bag, or that he hated fish, and loved cheese—but Charlie recounted them with secretive excitement, as though, from these motes of fact, he were going to bring the man himself back to life. I said he was becoming too much like poor Charles Dexter Ward, and he laughed. “Just because my name is Charles?” he said. “Or actually Charles W.?” “You’re freaking me out,” I said. “Don’t worry,” Charlie said, “I’m in full possession of my faculties. Mwahahaha.” “Don’t do that!” I said.
Charlie unearthed a certain amount of information about Robert Barlow, too. Just as Magnus said, Barlow and Lovecraft had corresponded, and Lovecraft visited Barlow in Florida twice, in the summer of 1934 and again in the summer of 1935. In between, Barlow and Lovecraft met in New York City, and in the summer of 1936, Barlow visited Lovecraft in Providence. They exchanged hundreds of long letters, about art and politics and their health and the health of their relatives and their cats. (To Charlie’s chagrin, only Lovecraft’s letters survived. Lovecraft was not the kind of person who held on to other people’s letters, apparently.) After Lovecraft died, in 1937, of cancer, Barlow wrote several reminiscences of Lovecraft; in one of them, he called his old friend a “closet Quetzalcoatl,” which would have been more damning if closeted had been slang for gay back then. In another, Barlow wrote of his youth in Florida that “life, save for certain secret desires which centered on the person of a young man . . . was all literary then”; then he crossed most of the line out of the manuscript. In the published version, it read: “Life was all literary then.” “Kinda sums it up, doesn’t it?” Charlie said. “The official version plasters over the gaps, the secret doors leading down to sexual sub-basements . . .” “Sexual sub-basements?” I repeated. “Or something,” Charlie said.
That was in October. Already, Charlie was working on his Barlow project to the exclusion of nearly everything else. But although the letters and memoirs offered up a great deal of circumstantial detail about what Lovecraft and Barlow did when they were together, there was a blank spot at the center of the story. No one could say—or, at least, no one had said—what they felt for each other. Even Loveman had never known if they were lovers. “So what’s the story?” Charlie asked. “Wh
at am I even going to write about?” When he was feeling especially frustrated, he speculated that the truth about Lovecraft and Barlow had been covered up by somebody who wanted to protect Lovecraft’s reputation. He talked about abandoning the Barlow project, about giving up writing completely. He’d always wanted to work on a fishing boat, he said. I had to laugh. My father has a thirty-four-foot sloop, and he offered once to take Charlie out on the Sound, but Charlie refused, on the grounds that he’d probably be the first black person to sail in Connecticut since the Amistad, and he wasn’t ready to bear that historical burden. Ha, ha, ha. The truth is, he was terrified of anything he couldn’t control.
Other things happened. My grandfather passed away. Charlie and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and talked about having a child. Then, one evening in November, Charlie came home with a flushed, triumphant expression. “What’s up?” I asked. “There’s a book,” he said. He had found a reference to it in an article on the forbidden books of H. P. Lovecraft: imaginary books, which Lovecraft referred to in his stories. The best known of them was the Necronomicon, but there was also the Culte des Ghoules, the Liber Ivonis, the De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt. All of them full of powerful, secret knowledge—and all fictitious, which hasn’t prevented generation after generation of Lovecraft fans from believing they are real. But, anyway, in this article, Charlie said there was a parenthetical reference, which was just the words except, of course, the Erotonomicon. The author didn’t say what the Erotonomicon was, and, in fact, Charlie had the feeling that he, the author, had mentioned it as a joke, or that he had meant to delete the reference but forgot. “But,” Charlie said, “the etymology is interesting. When I was a kid, I thought Necronomicon meant the book of dead names, but according to the article, it means the image of the law of the dead, or just a book concerning the dead. So the Erotonomicon would be the image of the law of love, which, you have to admit, is kind of intriguing.”
The Night Ocean Page 2