The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  Mr. Velde: Mr. Derleth, did you have any idea that Mr. Lovecraft was a homosexual?

  Mr. Derleth: I did not, because he wasn’t.

  Mr. Velde: Were you personally acquainted with Mr. Lovecraft?

  Mr. Derleth: If you mean, did I ever meet him, then no, I didn’t. We wrote each other letters.

  Mr. Velde: But you believe that he wasn’t homosexual.

  Mr. Derleth: I don’t believe he was sexual at all.

  Mr. Velde: Mr. Derleth, I would like to read you a passage from Lovecraft’s story The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath—am I pronouncing it right?

  Mr. Derleth: Yes.

  Mr. Velde: I am going to read a passage from this story, and I would like you to tell me what it makes you think of.

  Mr. Derleth: Go right ahead.

  Mr. Velde: “They bore him into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths beyond. When he struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled him with deliberation. They were frightfully cold and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously downward through inconceivable abysses . . .” This fellow does use a lot of adjectives, doesn’t he?

  Mr. Derleth: . . .

  Mr. Velde: “. . . abysses, in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dark, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. He screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety.” What do you think of that, Mr. Derleth?

  Mr. Derleth: It’s from his Dunsanian period.

  Mr. Velde: Pardon me?

  Mr. Derleth: Never mind. It’s a scene of horror. Carter has been captured by the night-gaunts, and they’re taking him to the Peaks of Throk.

  Mr. Velde: The peaks of . . . I see. Well, what do you make of all the tickling?

  Mr. Derleth: This is ridiculous.

  Mr. Velde: If I were trying to frighten someone with a story about a terrible monster, I think it’s very unlikely that I would mention tickling.

  Mr. Derleth: Well, you may not find it frightening, but I’ll bet Howard did.

  Mr. Velde: He thought it was frightening to be tickled?

  Mr. Derleth: I guess he probably did.

  Mr. Velde: And yet you’re sure that Mr. Lovecraft wasn’t queer?

  Derleth, who was himself bisexual, engaged to a high-school student, and utterly terrified by the way events had turned, made the mistake of mentioning that many of Lovecraft’s young correspondents in New York City and elsewhere had been Communists at one time or another—at which point HUAC thought it might have stumbled onto a rich new lode of subversion. Weird fiction wasn’t as glamorous as Hollywood, but people did read it, and the committee couldn’t stand by while night-gaunts and such like tickled America’s youth pink. So Lovecraft’s friends and disciples were investigated. The ones who had jobs lost them, and they all suddenly found it impossible to sell their work.

  It was as if the Erotonomicon were one of the forbidden books from Lovecraft’s fiction, destroying or driving mad everyone who came into contact with it. The only person immune to the book’s malign power was L. C. Spinks: him it made famous. After Derleth testified to HUAC, Spinks played the part of the apostate who had seen the error of his ways. He told Walter Winchell that he had published the Erotonomicon because he wanted people to know who Lovecraft really was. It was as if he had deliberately struck a blow against Lovecraft in the name of decency. And, in fact, as the Erotonomicon did more and more harm to more and more people, Spinks underwent a curious transformation. He spoke less about revealing the truth, and more about the dangers of “perverted horror”—i.e., the kind of horror fiction written by homosexuals, Communists, and other subversives. Four years before The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Spinks wondered if horror itself was a plot to co-opt the minds of vulnerable young Americans. He appeared at dinner parties with Winchell, William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, and so on. In photographs from that period, Spinks looks genial and bloated, the way you’d expect someone to look if he spent all his time being wined and dined by the right-wing intelligentsia of the United States.

  The zenith of Spinks’s fame came in February 1954, when he wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post, in which he attacked Lovecraft, Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wollheim, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch,* and just about every other writer whom Lovecraft had ever praised, as degenerates whose art, if you could even call it art, made its readers into morbid cynics. In place of their tawdry, dangerous work, Spinks proposed, there ought to be a genre of “wholesome horror,” which would thrill its readers with stories of men and women triumphing over monsters; or, in certain cases—stories for small children, or the feebleminded—over natural enemies such as bears and cold.

  8.

  Then, in the spring of 1954, Galaxy magazine published a letter from a distinguished Mexican anthropologist named Pablo Martínez del Río. Outraged by what the Erotonomicon had to say about R. H. Barlow, Martínez del Río had hired a private detective named Edward Armstrong to find out whether the book was genuine. Armstrong began his investigation at the office of Black Hour Books on Lafayette Street, where he found a scene of total chaos: boxes were heaped everywhere, along with rolls of brown paper and scissors and bottles of rubber cement, bundles of advertisements for books such as Lady Chatterley’s Friends, I Was Hitler’s Doctor, and Venus in Chains, and plaster busts of Moses and Goethe (one each), as if the world’s least tidy academic had agreed to share an office with the world’s least tidy pornographer; although, in fact, it was probably just the aftermath of the police raid. From amid this jumble there eventually appeared a prim bald man in a red bow tie, who introduced himself as Samuel Roth. “At that point,” Martínez del Río wrote, “a chasm of fakery opened beneath my feet.”

  Roth was a notorious booklegger, a publisher of illegal books, whose pirated edition of Ulysses had caused an international scandal in 1927. By 1954, he had been convicted seven times for publishing obscene material and served four prison terms. He ran a thriving mail-order business, which invented imprints one after another to stay ahead of the U.S. Postal Inspectors. The year before the Erotonomicon appeared, Roth had published My Sister and I, an incest memoir attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, which was almost certainly a hoax. And Martínez del Río’s letter went on: Roth told Armstrong that he had never seen Lovecraft’s notebook, only a typescript. Nor had he met Spinks, who, he said bitterly, was avoiding him. I hear he’s writing a memoir, Roth said, with Doubleday—Doubleday! But what can I expect, no one is grateful to a prophet in his lifetime. OK, Armstrong said, well, do you have an address for Spinks? Sure, Roth said, but don’t expect him to reply. He combines the worst qualities of a hermit and a prima donna. He went into the back office and returned with a ledger, which he stuck under Armstrong’s nose. Look at these royalties! he said. I thought the book was banned, Armstrong said. Ha, Roth said, all my best-sellers are banned. How do you think they become best-sellers? Look at that. Forty thousand dollars in sales—and not a word of thanks! Armstrong noted Spinks’s address—a post office box in Parry Sound—and saw, beside it, the address of someone named V. Schmidt, in Bismarck, North Dakota. Who’s this Schmidt? Armstrong asked. I have no idea, Roth said. Spinks just wrote to me and said ten percent of the royalties should go to her. Her? Armstrong repeated. Truly, I don’t know, Roth said, and I don’t care. This business makes me sick. I’d quit tomorrow, if anyone else had the courage to do my job. He slammed the ledger shut. I was meant to be a poet, he said. Have you read my poems? I don’t read much poetry, Armstrong said, but Roth was already rummaging in a box under what in a normal office would have been the receptionist’s desk. Here, he said, my first collection. You’ll see, it’s twenty years ahead of its time! Armstrong took it and stumbled downstairs, blinking as if he had stepped from the pages of a c
losed book into the light of the three-dimensional world.

  What happened next, Martínez del Río wrote, was that Armstrong went looking for V. Schmidt. He took the train to Minneapolis, rented a car, and reached the Schmidt farm just as night was falling. At first the woman who answered the door denied that any such person as V. Schmidt lived there. But Armstrong, who was used to being put off, insisted, and finally the woman told him to wait. Violet! she shouted up the stairs. There’s a very rude gentleman to see you! She showed him to a small bedroom with a sloping ceiling and a pink rag rug on the floor, and there, sitting at a battered Shaker desk, Armstrong found Violet Schmidt, an obese girl about twenty years old, whose gray eyes were magnified by glasses so thick they seemed like the closest thing to blindness. Armstrong asked her if she knew L. C. Spinks, and she burst into tears. Violet was a science fiction fan; when she was younger, she had written letters to Pickman’s Vault. She bragged about her ability to mimic anyone’s handwriting, and said that Spinks had asked her to forge the signatures of nearly every famous science fiction fan in America for a prank involving some fake letters. The letters were ridiculous, she said, but the signatures fooled everybody! So Violet was not entirely surprised when, in the fall of 1951, she got a call from Spinks, asking if she could do H. P. Lovecraft. A few days later, she received a package containing a typed manuscript, a twenty-year-old blank notebook, a sample of Lovecraft’s handwriting, and several bottles of black Skrip ink. There was also a note from Spinks, with instructions on what to do: Everything must be returned to me, it concluded. Spinks loved pranks, and that was what she assumed this was. Violet was astonished to learn, months later, that the “rather disgusting” book she had penned had been published and that it was causing a sensation. She wrote to Spinks and mentioned that her mother wanted a new washing machine. They came to an agreement. Do you have anything to back this up? Armstrong asked. Any proof? I’m not dumb, Violet said. She lifted the folding top of her desk and took out a note from Spinks: Everything must be returned to me, it concluded. She showed Armstrong a bottle of ink.

  That summer, every fanzine in North America demanded that L. C. Spinks explain himself, but Spinks stayed silent. Possibly, he believed he was so important that he didn’t have to care what fandom said about him. He’d dined with Walter Winchell and written for the Saturday Evening Post! He had the attention of a continent. Why should he worry about some teenagers with overactive typewriters? What he didn’t know was that one of the teenagers’ fathers worked for the Postal Service. Mail fraud was a crime in Canada, too. Spinks was in the shower, singing an air by Carl Orff, when the Mounties arrived.

  The hoax unraveled quickly. The notebook and typescript were found in Spinks’s study; Edward Armstrong handed over the bottle of ink Violet had given him, and it matched the ink in the notebook. On May 12, 1954, Spinks’s lawyer delivered a statement to the Toronto Star, in which Spinks said that the Erotonomicon was “a practical joke that went wrong,” and apologized “if anyone’s feelings were hurt”—quite an understatement. The New York Times ran a story about Samuel Roth’s many crimes; and the drama of the Erotonomicon came to an end a week later, when Spinks appeared on Edward R. Murrow’s TV program See It Now. Murrow had no idea who Lovecraft was, and he didn’t care. To him, the hoax was simply the story of another group of Americans who had been duped into walking in fear, and another example of courage and good sense winning out in the end. What Spinks hoped to get from the interview is less clear. I watched the clip with Charlie: the Spinks who appears on Murrow’s show is exhausted and bewildered, like a man who has walked into a fogged-in valley and has for many days been trying to find his way out. He’s wearing a checked sports coat and a tie. It’s hard to tell on the pixelated YouTube video, but it looks like his fly is open.

  Murrow: Mr. Spinks, earlier this week you gave a statement to the Toronto Star, in which you confessed that you had made up a book called the Eroto . . . eroto something, am I right?

  Spinks: [Nods.] It’s called the Erotonomicon. And it’s . . .

  Murrow: Never mind what it’s called. The important thing is that you destroyed the reputation, the posthumous reputation, of a writer named H. P. Lovecraft. Now the question I think most Americans want answered is, why did you do it?

  Spinks: Why?

  Murrow: Yes, why?

  Spinks: I . . . I guess I . . .

  Murrow: Surely you must have had a reason.

  Spinks: Well, Mr. Murrow, I’m from a small town in Canada. And all my life, I’ve dreamed of having an adventure. You know, like going on a safari, or climbing a mountain, or fighting in a war. And I guess this book was my adventure.

  Murrow: Do you mean to tell me that you ruined a man’s reputation because you wanted an adventure? For shame, Mr. Spinks.

  Spinks: Well, I don’t know. I’m just telling you how it seemed to me at the time when I, uh, when I did it. I guess I just wanted to do something daring.

  Murrow: So you defamed an innocent person. A man who had never done anything to you.

  Spinks: I didn’t think of that.

  Murrow: I don’t see how you could not have thought of it.

  Spinks: Well, I didn’t! I got caught up in the excitement of it, eh? You know, when you do something like that, you really feel, you feel like you’re living. And when you’re living you don’t think about everything that comes to your mind. You just think about living.

  Murrow: Mr. Spinks, I think you’ll excuse me for saying that your answer is incoherent and unacceptable.

  Spinks: You know, horror fiction has a corrosive effect on the minds of young children.

  Murrow: And?

  Spinks: Well, I just think it needs cleaning up.

  Murrow: So you defamed Lovecraft in order to clean up horror fiction, am I understanding you correctly?

  Spinks: I don’t think I defamed anybody. I’m not sure. Yes.

  Murrow: You deliberately wrote an obscene book to clean up literature. Mr. Spinks, even you have to admit that that’s absurd.

  Spinks: Is it? I mean . . . What does it mean, to know why you did something? Who knows why they do what they do? Do you even know why you’re interviewing me?

  Murrow: Yes, Mr. Spinks, I do. And I think this interview is just about finished.

  The video is unsettling. It’s like watching a soul dissolve into dust before your eyes—like watching a mask drop and finding no face behind it. The only way to understand it is to think that Spinks didn’t care anymore about how he was seen; he only wanted to be seen. But, in fact, the last known photograph of Spinks was taken in front of the CBS studio on Park Avenue, before the interview. He is wearing dark glasses and looking anxiously at something that’s happening up the street. A stranger’s arm obscures most of his torso. It adds to the impression he gave in the interview, that he was someone who had never really been.

  9.

  Charlie tried to find out what had happened to Spinks afterward, but this proved strangely difficult. He published nothing after May 1954, and no one published anything about him. His name didn’t appear in L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Life, or in S. T. Joshi’s thousand-page I Am Providence, or in the Journal of Lovecraft Studies, or Studies in Weird Fiction, or the papers delivered at the various Lovecraft conferences that had been held over the years. In the 1970s, it became fashionable for science fiction writers to talk about sex—but no one spoke about the sex scandal that had nearly engulfed Lovecraft’s reputation. It was as if fandom had found the hoax too queer and decided to erase L. C. Spinks from its memory, Charlie said. And that wasn’t all: Spinks himself had vanished. He wasn’t listed in any public record anyone had seen fit to put online; there wasn’t even a newspaper obituary to revive the memory of his hoax for a column inch or two. Charlie was certain that someone knew what had happened to Spinks, but every path he tried led to a dead end. “It’s the riddle of the Spinks,” he said. He wrote to S. T.
Joshi, the Lovecraft biographer, to ask if he had any information about Spinks, and Joshi replied that he not only knew nothing about Spinks, but didn’t want to know. In his opinion, far too much had been made of the question of Lovecraft’s sexuality. Of course, it was interesting, the way anyone’s sexuality is interesting, it excited a kind of prurient interest, but really, Joshi wrote, it was only one aspect of Lovecraft’s being; and when you thought about the other aspects—his anti-modernism, for example, or his often overlooked talent as a regional writer, a kind of Faulkner of New England—his sexuality began to seem like one of the least distinctive things about him.

  At the end of May, Charlie told me he was done looking for Spinks. “The more I look, the more his story unravels,” he said, “and the more it unravels, the more I doubt my sanity. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can end my Barlow project with Spinks’s hoax. It’s like, the lengths some people will go to, to fill in a blank spot. Then I say, whew, glad I know where reality stops and fantasy begins, and I’m out.” Charlie grinned. His voice was warm and full. I thought with relief that I had heard the last of L. C. Spinks, but as a psychotherapist, I should have known better. Nothing in a person’s life vanishes for good; it only drops out of sight, to return, as Lovecraft would have put it, when the stars are right.

  III.

  A SEARCH AND AN EVOCATION

  1.

  In order to go deeper into the world of his story, Charlie retraced Lovecraft’s 1934 trip to Florida. In June 2007, he took the bus from New York to Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and, finally, Daytona Beach. (There was no longer a bus station in DeLand.) He rented a car at the Daytona Beach airport and drove inland, past billboards which were like no other billboards he had ever seen before: advertisements for a law firm that specialized in divorce for men only and a gun shop that sold tactical arms; a warning that faking auto accidents is not child’s play. The landscape between the signs was flat and drab green, streaked with white where a road led off into the forest. Malls encroached on the forest, with palatial strip clubs and bunker-like movie theaters, but to Charlie’s delight, DeLand looked as if it hadn’t changed much since the 1930s. Art Deco buildings in pastel blues and pinks and yellows boiled in the humid air. The storefronts belonged to grimly local businesses: a diner, a health food store, and a doll-repair shop, its windows populated by row upon row of armless, legless, or headless dolls. Lovecraft would have loved it here, Charlie thought. He ate lunch in the diner and drove on to Barlow’s house, which he had located on the Internet. He was relieved to find Dunrovin abandoned: he had dreaded speaking to the people who lived there and explaining why he had come. On the other hand, the property was very clearly marked with NO TRESPASSING signs. Charlie parked in the driveway and got out of his car. His heart was pounding. The house where Barlow had entertained Lovecraft was two stories tall, and made of, or at least sided with, massive cypress logs. It looked very sturdy for a structure built by a paranoid lunatic, Charlie thought; or maybe Colonel Barlow’s paranoia had contributed to the sturdiness of its construction. He walked quickly around the property, taking photographs which, when he looked at them later on, would turn out to be almost useless: a swath of lawn with Dunrovin in the distant background; a bush that mostly obscured the tumbledown red barn; a close-up of the shed which—in the Erotonomicon, anyway—Lovecraft had thought about using as a writing studio. The lake where Lovecraft and Barlow once rowed had dried up; its bed was choked with reeds. The lawn was speckled with seedpods and white sand. But the parts of the house that Charlie could see through the downstairs windows were intact, if mostly empty. The rooms were spacious and comfortable-looking. Indeed, a heap of sofa cushions on the living room floor and a new propane tank by the kitchen window suggested that someone might be moving back in. Charlie took a photo of himself standing by the front door, as a kind of trophy, and hurried back to his car.