At the beginning of December, Charlie went to Providence, to look some things up in the library at Brown. He was gone for three days and came back looking like an excited cadaver. He told me that he had read hundreds of Lovecraft’s unpublished letters, in search of the Erotonomicon; but Lovecraft never mentioned it, and Charlie was beginning to think that the original reference had been one of the inside jokes that Lovecraft fans were always making when, pasted into an issue of Canadian Fandom from June 1952, he found this advertisement:
“Imagine my excitement,” Charlie said. “If the Erotonomicon is genuine, then it contains exactly the information I’ve been looking for. The only problem is that it’s impossible to find. Brown doesn’t have a copy or even acknowledge that such a thing exists. I’ve been emailing with rare-book dealers all over the country, but they just laugh at me, as if I were some lonely teenager trying to buy a dirty book, or a book of spells, whichever they think is more embarrassing. Of course, the advertisement could be a joke, but I don’t think so. Black Hour Books used to exist, and so did L. C. Spinks. He was a science fiction fan who lived in a little town in Ontario. I guess the question is, did he somehow find Lovecraft’s diary? And if so, does it say anything about Barlow?”
I asked Charlie how he was feeling. “Why do you ask?” he said. “Because you look awful,” I said. “I’m OK,” Charlie said. “The only thing is . . .” He looked at me slyly. “I was wondering if you could maybe write me a prescription for Adderall? I’m becoming aware that this project is going to be an insane amount of work. On the plus side, it’s the kind of story that sells. Which would be good, right? Since we’re thinking of having a kid?” He fixed his eyes on me in a way that I found unsettling: it was as if he had read somewhere that this was how you convinced people you were sincere. Actually, the image that came to mind was of a stage magician, who keeps your attention focused on some irrelevant phenomenon while the trick happens elsewhere. But Charlie really did look worn out, and I worried that if I refused to write him the prescription, he’d get pills from one of Eric’s programmer friends. Hoping the DEA wouldn’t audit me anytime soon, I wrote a script for 20-milligram extended-release tablets. Charlie folded the slip and put it into his shirt pocket. “Thanks, Mar,” he said. I told myself my intentions were good, but, in retrospect, I think it would be more honest to say that I was afraid.
Charlie didn’t mention the Erotonomicon for weeks after that. I remember him talking about wanting to leave New York, to live in a big house somewhere in the country, a fantasy that struck me as being totally unrealistic. Charlie’s idea of self-sufficiency was ordering food to be delivered. “So I know my kung pao,” he said. “I still like the idea of more space. If we lived in a house, you could have a piano.” I hadn’t played since college, hadn’t talked about playing; I was amazed that Charlie even knew this about me. “You’re sweet,” I said, “but I’m happy here. Aren’t you?” “Definitely,” Charlie said. But one night in December, I came home late, and he wasn’t there. He hadn’t left a message or texted to tell me where he was. This triggered some issues for me, and I became very anxious. I poured myself a glass of wine and watched TV, which helped, but not much. I drank another glass of wine. By the time Charlie came home, I was feeling hazy and sad. “Where were you?” I asked. Charlie said he and Eric had gone out for a beer in Chelsea, to celebrate a major victory. “And what was that?” I asked. Charlie looked at me warily. “Mar,” he said, “have you been drinking?” “No,” I said, but the mostly empty bottle was on the table in front of me. Charlie started laughing. He put his arms around me, and I clutched his skinny back and inhaled his wool-and-sweat scent. “Did you at least save me some?” he asked. “No,” I said again. “Well, can we order pizza?” “No,” I said; then I said, “Yes, but promise me that you’ll never vanish like that again.”
Charlie told me that he had finally gotten his hands on a copy of the Erotonomicon. He took a padded envelope from his messenger bag, and from the envelope he withdrew a slim blue clothbound book. I reached for it, but Charlie jerked the book back; then, realizing how weird that was, he handed it to me. I leafed through the first few pages, and a phrase in the introduction caught my eye: “I think, in the end, history will conclude that by publishing this book I have done H.P.L. a favor.” How grandiose, I thought, and gave the book back. “Congratulations,” I said. “Don’t be grumpy, Marina,” Charlie said. “This is a big deal.” He replaced the book in its padded envelope, and put his hand on my thigh. “The pizza can wait,” he said.
2.
It would be impossible to make sense of what happened to Charlie without talking about the Erotonomicon, so I am going to quote from it rather extensively here. Its story begins in 1925, when H. P. Lovecraft was living in New York:
Feby 2, 1925
Perform’d 3 times tonight ye YOGGE-SOTHOTHE ritual, ceasing onlie when my Forces were entirely us’d. Thought the while of Belknapius, with Longing.
In a footnote, L. C. Spinks helpfully observes that Lovecraft is writing in eighteenth-century English. He learned it from old volumes of Pope and Dryden and so on, which he found in his grandfather’s attic as a child. At the same time, Spinks points out, this is the language of Joseph Curwen, the evil magus from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Was the diary written in the voice of Lovecraft’s evil—but experienced—self? Or was the language a reminder of his happy childhood? Anyway, Spinks noted, all the sex acts were described in code. Yogge-Sothothe is a being from Lovecraft’s fiction: a collection of glowing spheres which is “the key and guardian of the gate” to the realms beyond the cosmos. It was also Lovecraft’s word for masturbation, as I could probably have guessed.
As for Belknapius, a second footnote explains that Lovecraft was referring to Frank Belknap Long (1901–1994), a young writer who lived in New York. When Lovecraft moved to the city, he and Long became inseparable; they ate together, argued politics, shopped for books, took long walks at night—and all the while, the Erotonomicon revealed, Lovecraft longed for Long. This, Spinks wrote, was why he married Sonia and moved to New York, to be near his beloved Belknapius. But Long did not return Lovecraft’s affections, so he looked elsewhere:
Feby 24
Down at ye Dockes againe this night, seeking Subjects for ye Worke. No Shippe was in, so I tried ye Columbia-Streete, where at length I found a Youth of Sullen & Poxy Mien. In a Vile Shack in ye Warren-Streete (aptly named!) we tried a Lesser Summoning, but nothing Came. I was Apologetick, & said great Fatigue must have caused my Magicks to Faile, but the Boy was Unmov’d, saying that not all Calls are Met with an Answer. John Dee himself must from time to time have dropt a Syllable, and so drawn a Blank. He beseech’d me to returne when my Force was greater, and I said I surely would, tho’ on Reflection I think it best Not. The boy reek’d of Tobacco, a smell that pleases me not, and which has oft and againe hinder’d my Contact with ye Outer Spheres.
Ye coste: $2.25.
Again a footnote. Sonia left New York at the end of 1924, to take a job at a department store in Cleveland; and Lovecraft moved into a boardinghouse on Clinton Street, in Brooklyn Heights. He lived on canned spaghetti and wrote nothing except increasingly outraged letters to his aunt Lillian in Providence. In one of them, Spinks says, he complained that a Syrian man lived next door, and “played childish and whining monotones on a strange bagpipe which made me dream ghoulish and indescribable things.” Well, that’s Brooklyn.
Unfortunately for Lovecraft, things only got worse:
Ye 25 of May, 1925
A calamitous Day. Sought in ye Red Hooke a Body for ye Worke, and, chancing on a young Negro idling by the Harbor, I brought him to my Chambers in Clinton- Streete. With a bottle of Canadian Gin which I hadde from Crane, I induced him to perform the Ablo Ritual, after the whiche he fell asleep, or seemed to, on my Cot. Thinking to do the III. Ritual of the Liber-Damnatus with him when he awoke, I settl’d to write severall Letters I had for a long time ow’d.
Then, damme, I must have drows’d, for the next I knew, the Boy had vanish’d, and with him, all my Suits except the thin blue, the Flatbush Overcoat I had from Sonia, and Samuelus’s Radio, which he had entrusted to my Safe-Keeping. How shall any of it be replac’d? If I could find the Boy, I’d wring his Necke, and do Ablo again on his lifeless Forme.
Ye Coste: $4.00, 1 btl of Gin, and nearly all I own’d.
The footnote identifies Crane as Hart Crane (1899–1932), the American poet, whom Lovecraft met through their mutual friend Samuel Loveman, aka Samuelus. Crane was an alcoholic, and it’s not surprising that he had bottles of gin to spare, even in the middle of Prohibition. The Ablo Ritual, according to Spinks, was another of Lovecraft’s code words for sexual acts—in this case, probably oral sex. Spinks further remarks that the theft of Lovecraft’s clothes was a turning point in his decline. By the end of 1925, he was writing things like:
It is not good for a proud, light-skinned Nordic to be cast away alone amongst squat, squint-eyed jabberers with coarse ways & alien emotions whom his deepest cell-tissue hates & loathes as the mammal hates & loathes the reptile . . . Experience has taught the remnants of the American people what they never thought of when the first idealists opened the gates to scum.
I diagnosed psychosis; Charlie heard the true voice of the white American soul. Spinks was more charitable. It all came back, he said, to the Ablo Ritual with the Negro boy. “An encounter that could have put Lovecraft thirty years ahead of his time, morally speaking, became, in the weird logic of his imagination, a source of horror. But at the root of it was an act of love.” Given that the Erotonomicon was published in 1952, I think Spinks overestimated the tolerance of his own era, but I’m not going to press the point.
Lovecraft went back to Providence in March 1926. His diary recorded no sexual encounters until the fall, when the Yogge-Sothothe ritual returned, followed almost immediately by an unconsummated meeting with a “young Portugee boy, no more than X or XI” in an alley off South Main Street. Spinks speculated that this might have been connected to the publication of Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” in Weird Tales. “Success,” he wrote, “posed as much of a threat to Lovecraft’s image of himself as a reclusive New England gentleman as did sex itself.” He could live without sex for months at a time, but when a crisis occurred—a story accepted, a story rejected, a visit from an out-of-town friend—he’d wind from South Main Street to South Water, “searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers still touched,” looking, in this “maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, bubbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless odours,” for a companion with whom to do Ablo, or Borellus’s Ritual, or Zaristnatmik’s Ebony Boxe. Always with a boy or a young man, frequently of another ethnicity or race. Then he met Robert H. Barlow.
3.
Barlow was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up on military bases in Kansas and Georgia. In 1932, his father, Lieutenant Colonel Everett D. Barlow, was discharged from the army for medical reasons, which probably had to do with his “delusions of having to defend his home against a mysterious Them,” as one of Lovecraft’s biographers put it. He moved his family to a house outside DeLand, Florida, about three miles from the nearest neighbors. Here Barlow played piano, raised rabbits, shot snakes, painted, drew, and collected weird fiction. In one of his reminiscences, he noted that, “I had no friends nor studies except in a sphere bound together by the U.S. mails and the magazines of fantastic stories for which Lovecraft wrote”; but through their correspondence, he and Lovecraft became friends. He asked for Lovecraft’s autograph and sent news about High and Jack, his cats. He offered to type Lovecraft’s manuscripts. He wrote stories and mailed them to Lovecraft, who returned them with enthusiastic comments. In the spring of 1934, Barlow invited Lovecraft to visit him in Florida, and Lovecraft went. He stayed with Robert and his mother (his father was visiting relatives in the North, and his brother Wayne was away at West Point) from May 2 to June 21. This is what the Erotonomicon had to say about his trip:
De Land
May 4, 1934
Ye gods, but the boy is young!* He is younger than Galpinus* was when I met him in Cleveland. He is slimmer, too, and seems to be watching me, as though he were waiting for me to do something—drop my bag, crow like a rooster, turn into a bat. I shall have to be careful. Fortunately there was a youth at the Arragon* who knew what I wanted, the little adept, as soon as I arrived. No sooner had I got my hat off and my stationery unpacked then he was scratching at the door, insinuating that he knew certain rituals which would turn even the oldest flesh to stone. For $1.25—how they are cheap down here! no morals, I suppose, to pay the price of—I had an Ablo and two Nether Gulfs.* That showed him what old flesh can do! At least when it is warmed by the Florida sun . . . The imp limped out round-eyed, and offered to return in the morning with another of his brotherhood. I was sorry to inform him that I would be on the De Land bus before the sun came up. Still, with his memory I may attempt to summon up somewhat—only where? There is no privacy in this house; though Bobby’s bedroom and mine are separated by a hall at one end and the upstairs landing at the other, he is liable to burst in at any time. Meanwhile his mother snores in the big bedroom downstairs. Possibly the shed by the lake will suit my purposes—if I can convince Bobby to leave me there by myself.
May 8
Bobby and I were in Yoh-Vombis* this afternoon, looking through his run of The Fantasy Fan,* when I could help myself no longer, and asked whether there might be a secret panel in the back of this closet which led to another closet, where he kept the truly accursed volumes of his collection. He professed not to understand what I meant: was I looking for something by Charles Fort?* Yet I thought that in the back of his eyes—which are pale brown, by the way, and much magnified by his glasses—I saw some tremor of interest. “Nay,” said I, “I was thinking of The Picture of Dorian Gray, or something of that ilk.” Bobby was perplexed: “By Wilde? I don’t believe . . . that is, I don’t know who has forbidden it.” “Twas only a joke,” I said. “Your old Grandpa has odd humors, sometimes.” I am afraid that I went too far.
May 11
Fie on the fidelity of Ghu!* Today Bobby told me he was going blueberry-picking with Johnston,* the housekeeper’s son, an athletic young man who stalks around the Barlovian estate with a needless machete—needless for the grounds, but handy when it comes to protecting his “turf” from elderly visitors. I insisted on going with them, despite Bobby’s warning that the trip would be muddy, difficult & possibly unpleasant on account of the mosquitoes, snakes, &c. All those things proved true, & the mosquitoes in particular were even worse than Bobby made ’em out to be, but the Old Gentleman persisted, driven half-mad by the thought of what Johnston might get up to with Bobby if they were left alone in a blueberry-patch. We spent a wretched afternoon trekking through the swamp & jungle, Bobby darting ahead, just a leg visible, a bit of shirt, nothing at all, and Johnston, the brute, asking over & over if he could give me a hand. Both of them were visibly displeased by my company. And the worst was still to come: when we were almost back to Dunrovin,* I fell into a stream, and lost nearly all the berries I had painfully gathered! I apologized ’midst scowls and grumblings and was glad to be back in the semi-privacy of my room. Now it is night, and Florida moths are burning themselves up in my lamp—white moths which can lose a wing and spiral somehow back into the croaking darkness.
May 12
Remorseful, possibly, anent the outcome of our berry-picking expedition, Bobby drove me to St. Augustine, two hours distant. We forewent the old town, which I had seen when I visited Canevinus,* and made straight for the chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Leche—where, according to improbable legend, the Catholics said their first Mass in the New World. Indisputably true however were the tombstones in the small graveyard next to the chapel, which belonged to young people dead of the plague a hundred years earlier. We sat on a stone bench just beyond the c
emetery railing and imagined what kind of story might be told about these wretches—young men & women dropping dead, covered in foul sores, pustules, &c. Would a ghoul relish such meat? What is meant, precisely, by a ghoulish appetite—do ghouls prefer the fair? Bobby threw at me an oft-quoted line of Poe’s, viz., that there is nothing more poetic than a beautiful dead woman, and asked if I agreed. “A dead one more than a live one,” I said, in jest. “But Beauty,” said Barlow, “do ghouls care for Beauty?”
The Old Gentleman hesitated, as if he’d heard a knocking on some long-rusted door . . . a door that did not lead to the outside, but to the crypt. “I believe they do,” he said. No one was present to see us. Bobby’s eyes grew to fantastic dimensions as his face approached the surprised, suntanned face of an Old Gentleman who had for many years believed his kissing days to be over. Iä! Deesmess! Jeshet! BONEDOSEFEDUVEMA! ENTTEMOSS! We rose from the bench and followed a white shell-shard path into the woods.
May 13, Hour of the Goat
Rose late. Bobby had already gone out—to De Land to buy provisions, at his mother’s request. He returned just before sunset and suggested we take the rowboat out, and I gladly acquiesced. We rowed to the far shore of the lake, where we moored the boat by a stand of Northern oak. There we found a dead heron, trapped under a branch in the lakeside mud. “Ugh,” Bobby said, “what a stink.” He asked me to help him carry it into the woods, but I could not bring myself to touch it. With a further grunt Bobby heaved it out of the muck himself, and, holding the dead thing close to his chest, carried it out of sight. When he returned to the boat I apologized for my cowardice. “It’s unbecoming, I know,” I said. “A gentleman should be the equal of every situation.” “Even this one?” Bobby asked, and brought his face close to mine. “Halt,” said the Old Gent, “desist!” “Why?” Bobby asked. The Old Gent took a moment to collect his thoughts. Why, indeed? Because the act is naturally repugnant to the overwhelming bulk of mankind—because it is merely cheap unrestraint, and therefore aesthetically ignominious—because sex is a prosaic mechanism, an aspect of purely animal nature, & separated from such things as intellect & beauty . . . Bobby interrupted me, & with fevered seriousness he placed his hand on the bony knee of the Gentleman, which had not been touched in that way since the year MDCCCCXXV, and not pleasurably, then. An indescribable chill penetrated my frame as he spoke in a low but sonorous voice: “Howard,” he said, “you and I are going to die. We will be as dead as that heron. Why shouldn’t we do what we want, if we enjoy it, and don’t hurt anybody?” “Pleasure has many forms,” replied the Gent, “and this is certainly not the highest of them . . .” “Reason all you like, Agrippa,” he said, “but I don’t see why the one form should exclude the other.” Bobby touched my lips with his. “Why, but, but,” sputtered the Gent, while Bobby giggled at his apoplectic tediousness and general mustiness of moral character. Then, with an interior thunderclap, Reason saw—there was no reason. Why in Pegāna’s* name should we not enjoy our bodies—any less than we curry our horses, or nourish our slaves? Why not enjoy—all? With sudden vigor I rowed us into the center of the lake, where I made the boat go around in circles. Bobby giggled; he cackled; we both laughed like the madmen we had become. Mad with Reason! Drunk on Scientifickal Explanation! The sun set; grackles squawked and night-herons barked in the reeds. After what seemed like hours, Bobby wondered aloud if his mother would be looking for us. “I don’t care,” said the Gent with new-found brashness. “I am rowing until someone reproves me!” True to my word, I went on rowing until Mrs. Barlow came to the edge of the lake and hollered that we young ’uns had had enough fun for the day, and it was time to come in and eat.
The Night Ocean Page 3