The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  The next day, Barlow was contrite. He had overreacted, he said. He never wanted, or imagined that he had, Lovecraft’s love exclusively to himself. What he wanted was honesty. Now that he had read the Erotonomicon, he felt that he and Howard could be better friends—that they could be real friends. But the spell which had kept Lovecraft in Florida was broken. On August 18, the Barlows drove Lovecraft to Daytona Beach, where they intended to spend a couple of weeks, probably at the advice of the psychiatrist who had seen Robert. They left Lovecraft at the bus station. As he had the year before, Lovecraft stopped in St. Augustine on his way North, and on August 20, Lovecraft’s forty-fifth birthday, Barlow joined him there. Lovecraft’s letters (quoted by Spinks, and verified by me) indicate that they visited an Indian burial ground “where the skeletons were preserved as they were buried,” whatever that means, but there is no entry for the date in the Erotonomicon. Lovecraft left St. Augustine on the twenty-first and traveled directly to Savannah, where he admired the old buildings, charmingly arranged around a grid of little parks.

  5.

  Lovecraft and Barlow saw each other for the last time when Barlow visited Providence in the summer of 1936. He stayed in a boardinghouse behind the apartment Lovecraft shared with his aunt, at 66 College Street, a situation which Lovecraft found trying:

  July 31

  Bobby scratched at the door shortly after A E P G* had gone to bed. Wanted to talk about his novel,* which I find unpromising. “Why,” I asked him, “would a sane & mature artist wish to talk with a cheap & undistinguished prizefighter?” “I don’t know,” Bobby said archly. “Why do you think?” I let him know in no uncertain terms that the Grandpa who succumbed to his advances last summer is no more. A man of taste & dignity cuts that side of himself off as he ages, I said, & for an artist the responsibility is even greater, because his work will be read by many who do not know him. I advised Bobby to read Hoxsie Sells His Acres,* which is proof that the decent Anglo-Saxon spark still burns, even in the literary milieu. Bobby scoffed, & called me a hypocrite. I told him that he must not make a scene, & certainly not with Mrs. Gamwell sleeping just down the hall!! Threatened to throw him out bodily if he could not be calm. He retreated—wanted to be kissed—said he wouldn’t have come to Providence if he’d known what a beast I had become. I had him out by 3 A.M.—at which point I returned to the ordeal of Well Bred Speech.*

  However, the two soon reconciled:

  Aug 1

  A contrite Barlovius visited me after midnight. He had something to show me, he said: a photograph of Jules Verne on his deathbed, which he’d had duplicated from the negative at the 42nd St. Library in New York. We agreed that the old man looked quite majestic. “You see?” Bobby said. “Not everyone looks bad with a beard.” “I never said anything of the sort,” I replied. “It’s a matter of the composition of the face—and the era in which the face finds itself. On you, for example, those whiskers are quite unbecoming.” Bobby rubbed his mustache doubtfully. “Do you think so? I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on ’em.” I chided him for the abominable gotten and inwardly wondered whose compliments he meant. “When I die—shave me,” I said. “You won’t die,” Bobby said. “Hypochondriacs like you never do. You’ll outlast everyone you know.” He touched my knee—I flinched. “Howard,” he said, “can’t we go back to how things were?” “Impossible,” said the Old Gent. Bobby’s nose twitched. He rose, & said, “In that case, I’ll be off.” I saw him to the door, but at the thought that Bobby now belonged to my past I lost the power to resist him, & in a moment we had done Ablo. I felt the warmth of it spread through my whole body, as though he’d carried a phial of Cassia with him, & opened it in my Providence room. Then I shooed him out, & told him that in the future we’ll have to meet in public, & behave as friends. Yog-Sothoth’d, in memory of encounters recent and ancient—all now equal in non-actuality.

  Aug 8

  . . . on returning from the graveyard, Bobby said he felt de Castro* had been spiteful toward him. “Is he jealous?” Bobby asked. “Of your youth, possibly,” I said. “He’s broken-down and penniless, and his wife has just died. If you feel anything for him, feel pity.” “I don’t want to get old,” Bobby said. I told him he would feel differently when he was Grandpa’s age. “If I reach your advanced age,” Bobby said. “Stop being morbid,” I said. He laughed. “Howard Phillips Lovecraft has told me not to be morbid!” “Ssh,” I said, “you’re making too much noise. And if you think I am morbid, you haven’t understood me at all. I merely think that I, we, all of us, are insignificant, from the cosmic point of view.” “In which case . . .” Bobby said, and put on his sly-kitten face, which his whiskers only accentuated. The imp was impossible to resist. We tiptoed up the stairs to my bed-study-library, & did the Cryptic Seal of Ulthar. Afterward Bobby asked, “Howard, do you love me?” “Yes,” I said. The Old Gent would have been lying if he said any different. Then in jest I took hold of Bobby’s pinky finger and said, “Umph.”

  On August 15, Lovecraft and Barlow visited Newport. On the twentieth, Lovecraft’s forty-sixth and final birthday, they went to Salem and Marblehead. Lovecraft had written about both towns in his stories (Salem was “Arkham,” and Marblehead “Kingsport”); Marblehead in particular had made a lasting impression on him when he first went there, in 1922. Years later, he was still talking about the trip as “the high tide of my life,” the one moment when he felt united with his environment, rather than alien to it. The return visit with Barlow was stimulating:

  Marblehead!! The gabled roofs, the fort overlooking the harbor, everything just as it was the first time I came here—the place does not change. It is the sole survival into the present of the untainted Anglo-Saxon world to which my soul and imagination belong. We walked down to Fort Sewall, where we stood a while, gazing at the Salem Sound, & imagining that we were merchant princes, watching for our ships laden with cotton & molasses. I’d just begun to think of a story—history of a New-England family which passes on some unspeakable taint from generation to generation—when Bobby, whose mind was apparently running on a parallel track, asked, “What if my artist wanted to talk to the sea?” “I imagine he’d collect seashells,” I said, irritated at having my thought broken off. “Or what,” Bobby said, with characteristic agility, “if the sea wanted to talk to him?” “That’s interesting,” I said, “but the sea is too vague. It would have to be something in the sea, for the tale to have interest.” “Figures swimming in the sea.” “Figures gesturing from the waves,” I suggested, “beckoning, perhaps.” “And the artist must try to understand their meaning,” Bobby said. “It’s certainly better than your prizefighter,” I said. Just then, as if to invite our thoughts further down this path, a harbor seal broke the surface of the shining water. We entertained ourselves with speculation as to what it might be trying to say, & decided it was telling us we’d stared at the ocean long enough, & should wander on in search of nourishment.

  Aug 20, later

  Ablo, Aklo, Outer Spheres. Bobby is asleep. I must write quietly—don’t want him to find this notebook again!!

  From this episode, Spinks wrote, came Lovecraft and Barlow’s final collaboration, a short story called “The Night Ocean.” It is about an artist who visits a resort town called Ellston Beach at summer’s end to “rest a weary mind.” He has been working on his entry for a mural competition; now it’s done and he wants a change of scene. At first he finds Ellston Beach pleasant: the house he rents is less than a mile from town, but because it’s around a bend in the coast, it feels secluded. He swims in the ocean, walks on the beach, and goes out for dinner. He finds the curio shops and “falsely regal theater-fronts” of Ellston Beach vaguely annoying, and returns to his cottage. The summer ends. The first mists of fall cover the sky, and the town empties out. The artist eats dinner in a hurry; for some reason he’s afraid to be outside after dark. He mentions that there have been drownings at the beach—even swimmers “of a skill beyond the average” have bee
n lost, and their strangely mangled bodies washed up onshore days later. No one thinks too much about this. Then one day the artist is out walking, and he’s caught in a rainstorm. Something about the sky and the cliffs and the beach reminds him of a story he read as a child, about a princess who falls in love with, or is loved by, a sea king, but the memory slips away. He goes back to his cabin and puts on dry clothes, and then, while he stands at the window, watching the rain, he sees figures on the beach which were not there before. He goes out and gestures at them (so the idea of gesturing was reversed, Spinks noted), and they look at him, “as if they awaited some other action.” But the artist doesn’t know what to do, and eventually the figures vanish back into the sea.

  The next morning, on his way to the village, the artist finds a hand tangled in some seaweed—at least it looks like a hand. It has fingers. He doesn’t touch it. Days pass, in which the artist is troubled by “a perception of the brief hideousness and underlying filth of life,” and meanwhile the ocean gets colder and colder, and the sky gets darker and darker. Finally, the artist decides he’s had enough of Ellston Beach; and just then he gets a telegram, informing him that he’s won the mural competition. It doesn’t make him happy. He stays up late on a moonlit night, smoking a cigarette and watching the ocean, and sees a figure swimming “with horrible ease,” and carrying something—a man, probably—on its shoulder. Then the figure disappears back into the ocean, and the artist leaves Ellston Beach, and we never find out what the figures in the ocean were, or what they wanted. The story leaves us with a sense of the futility of even trying to understand. We will vanish from the Earth, the artist says, but the ocean will be around forever.

  6.

  Barlow left Providence at the beginning of September. His parents had divorced, and he went to live with his mother in Kansas City, where he enrolled in art school. In October, Lovecraft climbed Neutaconkanut Hill, from which he had a marvelous vision of Providence, “a dream of enchanted pinnacles & domes half-floating in air, & with an obscure air of mystery around them,” he wrote to Barlow. A few weeks later, Lovecraft was walking in the Squantum Woods when two kittens, one gray and one tortoiseshell, came out of nowhere and followed him, like guardians. The world seemed to be full of mysterious signs.

  That winter, Lovecraft complained of a “grippe” which wouldn’t go away. In March 1937, his aunt took him to the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence, where he was diagnosed with nephritis and intestinal cancer. He died on March 15, having first named Barlow as his literary executor. Barlow went to Providence to collect Lovecraft’s papers, and took them back to Kansas City, where he let grief overwhelm him. He dropped out of art school and moved to San Francisco. His plans to publish Lovecraft’s work bore scant fruit: a single letterpress chapbook of Lovecraft’s commonplace book, printed in seventy-five copies. Before long, Lovecraft’s friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei took matters into their own hands. They started a publishing company called Arkham House and put out a fat, dense volume of Lovecraft’s stories. At the same time, Wandrei and Samuel Loveman (who had his own reasons for hating Barlow) spread a rumor that Barlow had stolen Lovecraft’s manuscripts, and he was excommunicated from the society of Lovecraft’s friends.

  For the second time, Barlow considered suicide, but instead became a poet, and entered the anthropology program at UC Berkeley. He moved to Mexico City, where he taught at Mexico City College and published so many books, papers, and pamphlets on the civilization of the Aztecs that historians of Pre-Conquest Mexico still remember the 1940s as the “Barlow decade.” For a time, he seemed to have found happiness; then, in the fall of 1950, one of Barlow’s students threatened to expose him as a homosexual. On January 1, 1951, Barlow shut himself in his room and took twenty-six tablets of Seconal. His body was not found until the next day, or possibly the day after, because he had left a note on his door, which read, in Mayan, Do not disturb me, I wish to sleep for a long time. There was no funeral. The Mexico City Collegian ran an obituary, and the Mexico Quarterly Review published a memorial essay; neither mentioned that Barlow had killed himself, much less why. The only frank report of his death came from William S. Burroughs, who, by one of those coincidences which sometimes make fact as rich and as strange as fiction, was Barlow’s student. “A queer Professor from K.C., Mo., head of the Anthropology dept. here at M.C.C. where I collect my $75 per month, knocked himself off a few days ago with overdose of goof balls. Vomit all over the bed. I can’t see this suicide kick,” Burroughs wrote in a letter to Allen Ginsberg.

  Meanwhile, Lovecraft had become famous. His books sold and sold; his reputation grew, and came, as the years passed, to resemble a cult. This was thanks, in part, to Derleth and Wandrei, who fabricated the myth that Lovecraft had been an aristocratic recluse, who roamed the streets of Providence at night but otherwise had nothing to do with the world. They did not speak, or let others speak, about the less savory aspects of Lovecraft’s character: his racism, his anti-Semitism. They certainly did not speak about Robert H. Barlow. Spinks mentioned all these sad facts in his footnote to the Erotonomicon’s brief final entry:

  Nov 12

  Down in ye Packet-Streete, a Lesser Summoning with a Boy who spoke no English. I had to explain what I wanted from him with Signs. Gave him $1.15. I have no Idea how much he Ask’d.

  7.

  But it was all a hoax: the Erotonomicon had been written by L. C. Spinks. “I can’t believe it, Mar,” Charlie said. “Even though I know, I still can’t believe it. Where did this freak get his information?” The Erotonomicon was published in 1952, and the first biography of Lovecraft didn’t appear until 1975. When Spinks wrote his book, Lovecraft’s letters to Barlow were still uncataloged and off-limits, in the vaults of the John Hay Library, at Brown. Even if Spinks had read the letters, they didn’t have any sex in them. “It’s so messed up,” Charlie said.

  In the spring of 2009, Charlie tried to figure out how Spinks had done it, but there wasn’t much to know. L. C. Spinks had been an appliance repairman by trade; in his spare time, he wrote and published a fan magazine called Pickman’s Vault, which consisted of lists of books and magazines that Spinks wanted to buy or sell, humorous observations about life in Canada, and some clumsy attempts at macabre fiction. One issue featured fake letters from various science fiction luminaries; it earned Spinks a reputation as a prankster in the otherwise placid world of Canadian fandom, but nothing about Pickman’s Vault made you think that its author could also have written the Erotonomicon. How had Spinks done his uncanny imitation of Lovecraft’s prose—and of Lovecraft’s life? Charlie didn’t know. He did, however, find a great deal of information about what happened after the Erotonomicon was published. When you knew what to look for, he said ruefully, it was everywhere.

  To put it mildly, history did not conclude that L. C. Spinks had done Lovecraft a favor by publishing the Erotonomicon. The first outcry came from Lovecraft’s fans, who reacted with horror and disgust to the idea that their idol had had sex with young men, some of them Negroes. Bob Tucker, the editor of the long-running fanzine Le Zombie, wrote, “Why did it have to be BOYS? If it was girls, I could have cut him some slack, but as it is—I want to barf. I’m going to throw my Weird Tales in the incinerator this afternoon, and try to forget I ever thought this creep belonged anywhere except in jail, or the nuthouse.” Tucker’s reaction was typical. All over the United States, fans came up with ingenious ways to dispose of Lovecraft’s books: on pyres, in chasms, over the sides of ships in international waters. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service declared the Erotonomicon obscene. The New York police raided the offices of Black Hour Books and confiscated all unsold copies of the book—or at least all the copies they could find—but the harm to Lovecraft’s reputation had already been done.

  No one seems to have considered the possibility that the Erotonomicon was a hoax. On the contrary: fans and critics alike found evidence, which had mysteriously been overlooked until then
, that H. P. Lovecraft was a homosexual. There were no female characters in his stories—or almost none! His creatures had long, slimy tentacles! Also, Lovecraft frequently used the words nameless and unspeakable: What was that, if not a sly reference to the love that dared not speak its name? “Everything about HPL’s stories is queer,” wrote Forrest Ackerman, another well-known fan, “but this diary is the only tale he ever penned that’s really frightening. Who knew? It turns out the horror was him.” In Havana, a fan named Raul Bru formed an anti-Lovecraft society, which published two issues of a magazine called, predictably, Hatecraft, before it disbanded. In fannish circles, Lovecrafty (or just crafty) became a synonym for queer. And worse things were still to come.

  In the fall of 1952, the Erotonomicon came to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was, in those days, roaming the nation, looking in ever less likely places for signs of Communist conspiracy. Homosexuality was, as everyone knew, a gateway to Communism. When HUAC convened in Chicago, in September 1952, to investigate the influence of Communists in the labor movement, they also summoned August Derleth to testify. He was examined by Harold Velde, an Illinois congressman: