The Erotonomicon chronicled furtive kissing and cuddling in Barlow’s bed and the closet Yoh-Vombis, where they “did Ablo” for the first time, and Lovecraft “probed ye Outer Spheres” with “magickall Ease”—the eighteenth-century dialect kept creeping in. Possibly it was a sign of Lovecraft’s discomfort with what was taking place, although at no point after this did he suggest that he and Barlow should stop having sex. His chief concern, and Barlow’s, was the return of the Colonel, whose mental health had become even more precarious during his trip north. Many was the night, Barlow reported, when his father had sat with a shotgun on the porch, waiting for the squat, shadowy figures he had first spied in the Philippines to emerge from the forest and try to slit his throat. What would he do if he learned that his son was Lovecraft’s lover?
Curiously, neither Barlow nor Lovecraft seemed worried that Barlow’s mother would catch them—she may have had other things on her mind. Charles Blackburn Johnston, the painter, was more observant:
June 4
Came down from an Ablo—my third in twenty-four hours!—& found Johnston scowling in the sitting room. “Where’s Bobby?” he wants to know. “Sleeping,” says I. “At least I assume he is. We were up late, and there’s a note on his door, requesting that he not be disturbed.” “We were going to drive over to Daytona Beach,” Johnston said. “Don’t suppose that would interest you. You don’t like to swim.” Unruffled, I admitted that I do not enjoy the sea. “Although I’ve had some very amusing moments by the shore,” I said. “What were you doing last night?” Johnston asked, the villain. “Bookbinding,” I said. “Bobby shot a snake, and we’ve been using its skin to make books.” This was the literal—though hardly complete—truth, and Johnston could find no way to refute it. “Tell him I’m leaving at noon,” he said, “and I’ll have a dozen bottles of cold beer in the trunk.” I assured him that the message would be relayed. Johnston went away, and I tiptoed upstairs and scratched at Bobby’s door. “Entrez,” he said. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, entirely naked, with a glass of water in one hand and a copy of Merritt’s The Metal Monster* in the other. “My dear Mr. Carter,” he said, “Have you got your Silver Key?”*
Johnston appears only once more in the Erotonomicon. Lovecraft’s attention was entirely focused on Barlow: they went to Silver Springs, where Barlow
proposed we try a joint Yogge-Sothothe—in a glass-bottomed boat! We were on the far side of a green-tufted island, out of sight of our fellow pleasure-seekers, but, “Ye Gods,” I exclaim’d, “what if we are observ’d from Below?” “‘From Below’ would make a good title for a story,” quipped Bobby. I told him not to be foolish.
Despite Lovecraft’s squeamishness, the two of them did write a satirical story, “The Battle That Ended the Century,” a spoof of their friends in fandom. According to the Erotonomicon, it was composed the way Valmont wrote his famous letter in Les Liaisons dangereuses: with Barlow’s typewriter balanced on Lovecraft’s naked back. Then they parted. The Colonel would be returning soon, and Barlow’s mother advised Lovecraft to be gone before he came home. Barlow, too, seemed to have lost his enthusiasm for the Silver Key and Nether Gulf; he went off alone to shoot snakes in the forest, or rowed alone to the middle of the lake and wrote in his diary.
On June 21, 1934, Lovecraft took the bus from DeLand to St. Augustine, where he stayed at the Hotel Rio Vista, two blocks from the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. The Erotonomicon records his reaction to the sudden separation:
. . . did Yogge-Sothothe in my room, then I felt a wave of terror, as though I had stepp’d into a great gray-green Ocean, and the combers were rolling me in their troughs. Your Old Gentleman has been a solitary character for much of his life, but, Pegāna! I have never until now known what it is like to be alone!!!
Lovecraft consoled himself with familiar things:
June 28
Return’d to the Arragon. I fear’d the Kid who came to me at my last Visit would be Absent, & trembl’d somewhat at the Knees when I saw him pushing a Mop thro’ the Lobby. This time he came unask’d. He sooth’d the Old Gentleman, who had fallen into a Melancholy Way. Just before daybreak we visited ye Outer Spheres. He left my room soone after, but there lingers in the bed an Odour, as of Cinammon. Ye Coste: nil!!
4.
Lovecraft saw Barlow again at the end of December, when they met in New York. Lovecraft was visiting friends, and it wasn’t until the early hours of the thirty-first that he and Barlow were alone:
. . . but when finally Bobby shuts the flimsy door of his hotel room, he goes to his satchel and pulls from it a mess of paper! “Howard,” he says, “I’ve written another story. Will you read it?” I sat down at the desk, sighing, with pencil in hand. Well! Three hours passed before Grandpa had finished improving Bobby’s mediocre tale of the last man on an arid world—and by then the lad had fallen asleep. I added to the end of the story a few heartfelt sentences about the futility of human endeavor, by way of reproach.
The incident had no ill effect on their friendship. In June 1935, Lovecraft visited Barlow again in Cassia, the village where Dunrovin was situated, after what had become a customary stop in Jacksonville. This time Barlow’s father was home, and Lovecraft notes with amused relief that they had no reason to fear him:
Dunrovin
June 10, Year of the Lizard
The Colonel came out of his room at dinnertime, & professed to be very pleased to meet the Rhode-Island Gentleman about whom his son had been raving all year. Physically he and Bobby are almost of different species—the Colonel is stout, big-shouldered, worn, obviously, with time and care, & sports a mustache of 1912 vintage. He resembles his son chiefly about the eyes, which are narrow and suspicious. For some time we kept the conversation to the weather, the proliferation of rats in the trees—“strange, short-tailed rats,” the Colonel said, suggesting an inclination to the weird!—and the excellence of Mrs. Barlow’s cooking. However as the meal drew to a close I ventured to ask about the Colonel’s health. “Sir,” he said, “if I may speak freely, it is poor. I can read the signs as well as any man—they tell me I will die on October seventh.” Poor fellow! I think he really believes it. However, Mrs. Barlow saved the evening from gloom with a bottle of brandy, of which, needless to say, the Colonel was the only partaker. In a quarter of an hour he and I were animatedly discussing Chancellor Hitler’s chances of saving Germany from economic collapse; twenty minutes after that we were singing “In Enterprise of Martial Kind.”* Sad, curious man! Bobby looked sour. Said he would not do Ablo nor anything else in the house—we must find a place outdoors.
Lovecraft and Barlow spent the summer of 1935 building a cabin on the far shore of the lake, by the stand of oak trees they had visited the summer before: the Druid-Grove, Lovecraft called it. They made love in the grass, in the cabin, on the lake, at night, after Barlow’s parents had gone to bed. It was an idyll, an almost unbelievable suspension both of Lovecraft’s self-loathing and of the world’s judgment of his behavior. “I am for the time being really alive & in good health & spirits,” he wrote to his aunt Lillian. “The companionship of youth & artistic taste is what keeps one going!” On June 17, Lovecraft and Barlow visited Black Water Creek, three miles from Dunrovin:
It is hard to convey the effect of a scene like this . . . The black, silent glassy river with its cryptic bends—the monstrously tall cypresses with their festoons of moss—the twisted roots clawing at the water—the ghastly, leaning palms—the black, dank earth . . . everything to suggest some exotic world of fantasy . . . We did the Ebony Boxe on the riverbank, then lay on our backs & watched menacing clouds skulk from treetop to treetop. Bobby proposed that we collaborate on a story set in this place, & I readily agreed. We decided that it will be about a degenerate family of swamp-dwellers, who, whilst hunting possum or some such, stumble upon a ruined temple where far more ancient and far more degenerate beings dwell . . .
Even better, on July 9, the Bar
lows invited Lovecraft to stay past the summer’s end:
The whole family is in favor of the Gent’s staying on. Mrs. Barlow made a vague, timid suggestion that I could help Bobby prepare for college, which he will attend next year. A flattering overstatement of the Gent’s academical abilities, I am afraid! But they were all so kind & insistent that I said I would give the proposition careful thought—it would mean separation from my books & files & familiar home things. In the meantime, Bobby asked if I would help carry his printing press out to the cabin. It was a warm day even by the Gent’s standards, & we were both dripping by the time we had the press in place beside Bobby’s desk. “Now there’s hardly room for a man to stretch out in here,” I said, “you’ve got it as snug as the cabin of a ship.” “I’ll bet there is, though,” Bobby said. He indicated a spot on the new-cut plank floor. We made an Elder Sign* & promptly fell asleep.
The invitation was all the more tempting because Lovecraft hated the cold. What was more: in Florida, he would have Barlow’s company and the Colonel’s, too. They knew a lot of the same songs. On the other side of the scale was Lovecraft’s attachment to Providence, the city where he had been born and where his deepest attachments lay. “I am Providence,” he had written to his aunt—but he wrote that when he lived in New York. Now he was in a place that made him happy. Could there be a Florida Lovecraft? What would that person be like?
July 11
I have accepted Bobby’s invitation. Can it be? Is the Old Gentleman to be forever divorced from his native land? “It isn’t forever,” Bobby points out, “and besides, you’re not so old.” Yet the decision cost me sleepless nights. I do not want to repeat the ghastly rashness & idiocy of 1924!* I must be sure I can belong here, which means, I think, not being useless or idle. I am like a man who, having once fallen into quicksand, watches every small variation of the ground for signs that he is about to sink again. “But Howard,” Bobby says, “if you knew everything that would happen, how could it be an adventure?” Ablo, Aklo,* rest. Nether Gulfs. Rest.
With this decision, a remarkable transformation occurs. Its most visible sign is that Lovecraft starts eating fish. In the third week of July alone, he tries mackerel, flounder, swordfish, and marlin, and asks Barlow’s bemused mother if he can have them each again, so he can decide which is most delicious. He puts on weight. Barlow drives him to DeLand to buy new collars—but instead he buys new shirts, of the “short-sleeved button-down variety.” He reads the Colonel’s copy of the West Volusia Beacon, which never used to interest him. Even more surprisingly, he visits the West Volusia Historical Society, where he applies for a job as a “front-desk man.” In New York, in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, Lovecraft could not find work; here, in DeLand, where he is a Yankee outsider with no résumé and no references other than the seventeen-year-old Barlow and his deranged father, he gets the job right away.
July 24, 1935
This morning—ahem—saw Grandpa at his post in De Land, fitted out in his freshly ironed shirt and worn but newly polished wing-tips! Bobby, who had been loitering in the coffee shop on Main St., came in around eleven. “I wonder if you can help me,” he said. “I’m looking for something that used to be here a long time ago.” “That’s our business,” I said helpfully. “What was this thing called?” “I believe its name was Howard,” he said, giggling. “Of course,” I said. “The Old Howard, it’s called around here. Built by the Spaniards in 1638, it stood until just last year, when a hurricane brought it down. You’ll find the ruins about twenty miles down the De Land-Eustis Highway.” “What was it?” Bobby asked. “Some kind of fortress?” “No one knows,” I said. “Its construction was highly peculiar. For one thing, it had no doors.” “No doors? Then how did people get in?” “Either they were born there,” I said, “or they didn’t get in at all.” With that I shooed him out, but he returned at five o’clock to drive me home. He proposed a celebratory Borellus, but I declined—wanted to stretch my legs before it was time for supper.
Lovecraft gave half of his first paycheck to the Barlows, and with the other half, he bought a radio. He listened to the news and discovered in himself a strange fascination for the game of “Base-Ball.” He planned to buy a car and asked Barlow to give him a driving lesson. Then:
July 30, 1935
The Jacksonville Kid has return’d. He came to the Historical Society this afternoon, & profess’d himself much Surpris’d to find me there. He was looking, he said, for Documents pertaining to a certain Ancestor who had been cruelly enslav’d by the Spanish, & work’d to Death at the De Leon Sugar Mill.* I said, I was not sure any Documents surviv’d from that Era, but any such as we hadde would be in the Records Room. Normally it was closed to the Publick, but as we had no other Custom I thought he might enter, provided he were Accompanied. Outer Spheres—quietly. Then I hurried him out, before he could be Seene.
August 3
Iä Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young! Iä Nyarlathotep, the Messenger, and Yog-Sothoth, the Opener of the Way!! The Old Gent is driving!!! At a secluded spot by the side of the De Land-Eustis Highway: Ablo 1x. “This,” Bobby said, “is why we have cars.” Against my will, I thought of Jacksonville—only 2 hours distant, with an automobile.
August 4
In the afternoon Bobby and I made a return excursion to Black Water Creek. Bobby wanted to do the Box again, but the Old Gent could not summon up the strength for it, so we settled for the Aklo Password, which I was glad enough to give him. Then, as on our first visit, we lay back on the moss, & listened to mournful birds, which sounded like loons, tho’ I wouldn’t have looked for ’em in Florida so early in the year. “Howard,” Bobby said, “are we ever going to write that story?” I said that he should write it, & I will revise it when he’s done, though he hardly needs my corrections—the lad has come a long way since “Till A’ the Seas.”* “But don’t you want to write it yourself?” he asked. “It’s so much your kind of story.” I informed him that the Old Gent may take a break from weird stories for a spell—they were never aught to me but an amateur pursuit, and I am done with amateurism for the time being. I kidded him about wasting time on stories when he could be studying for M.I.T., or Brown, until he rolled onto his side and started throwing pebbles into the water. “Careful, or you’ll wake something,” I said. “I wish,” Bobby said, petulantly.
August 6
The Jacksonville Kid came in again. I told him to come back at the end of the day, when he could impersonate a janitor, & I could tell the Barlows I was working late. “I’m still looking for them documents,” he said. I laughed and told him we’d turn the place upside-down until we found ’em. Ablo—no documents. Promised that I will come up to Jacksonville as soon as I am confident driving on the highway. But I cannot be seen with him too much, & not only on account of the color of his skin.
August 15
Return’d from Jacksonville to find Dunrovin cast into Gloom. Twas Mrs. Barlow who told me what had occurr’d: just an hour after I drove off, she heard a Frightful Cry from Bobby’s room, & ran up to see what the Matter was. “Nothing,” said he, in a trembling voice. “I was merely rehearsing for a play.” Hearing no further Shrieks, she return’d downstairs, & did not think to look in on her Sonne until Evening, when she went up againe to inquire if he would eat. Getting no Reply, she try’d the Door, & found it lock’d. Johnston was summoned from his Mother’s House, where he chanced to be stopping, & he broke it downe—& found Bobby on his Bedde, his Wrists considerably bloodied. There was a moment of great Feare, & the Doctor was summon’d from De Land, but as it transpir’d his Woundes were mere superficiall Cuts, that had produc’d much Blood, but no real Harm. Bobby claim’d it was all for his Play, a Mode, however extream, of assuming a Character. The Doctor Medicus advis’d Mrs. Barlow that he should be seen by an Alienist, & quit the scene. Bobby, much embarrassed by all the Commotion, excus’d himself, & went to his Cabin, having first Promis’d to doe himself no
further Injurie. & there I found him, supine on the floor by his Press, & holding by his side a certain Notebook, property of Mr. Lovecraft, of the Rhode-Island & Providence Plantations. Hearing me come in, he op’d his Eyes, and murmur’d, “You thought my story was mediocre?”
The Night Ocean Page 4