16.
From 1953 to 1954, Spinks moved in strange circles. He dined with Winchell at the Stork Club and said hello to Roy Cohn when he stopped by their table. He saw Cohn again at the 21 Club, where he was eating dinner with George Sokolsky, a columnist for the Hearst papers:
Cohn invites me to join them for a drink. To my amazement, he says he read my article in Confidential. Terrific stuff, he says. We can’t let our kids read this pro-queer crap. Right, Sok? Go get ’em, Roy, Sokolsky says. Cohn points at me with the butt of his spoon. What you gotta do, he says, is broaden your approach. You nailed Lovecraft, OK, great. Don’t stop there. Who were his friends? Did he know Hammett? Or what’s her name, Kay Boyle? Me: I don’t think so. Cohn: So, who? Me: Well, there’s Clark Ashton Smith. Cohn: Never heard of him, but OK. Me: And . . . Lovecraft exchanged letters with Robert E. Howard. Cohn: The Conan guy? It figures. You gotta go after them all, get ’em off the fucking shelves. Me: How? Cohn: Sok? Sokolsky: I could help you out, sure.
The next thing Spinks knew, he was writing for Hearst about “perverted horror” and the need to get the works of Dunsany and Machen and even Poe out of North American libraries. He was amazed by the response he got. It wasn’t just from anti-Communists like Buckley and Cohn; ordinary people all over America sent him letters, thanking him for telling the truth about those terrible books, which were giving their children bad dreams. He became a regular in the Stork Club’s exclusive Cub Room. He and Cohn and Cohn’s friend David Schine took a weekend trip to Montauk, where they ate fried clams and drank beer, and Schine picked up a waitress. They drove back to Manhattan drunk, and when the cops pulled them over, Cohn talked to them gently, and the cops vanished.
Was this what Barlow’s spirit wanted Spinks to do? He thought maybe it was. Live, he told himself, live as much as possible! The problem was that the more he lived—the more he drank, the more notable people he met, the more places he visited—the more Spinks felt unreal. It was as if there were some inverse proportion between reality and experience. Who was he at the Stork Club? In Washington, DC? In Spokane, where he gave a speech on Wholesome Horror to the American Book Publishers Council? Was he Barlow, or Spinks, or some completely other person, who was often hung over and always tired, who had trouble moving his bowels and woke up at four in the morning, night after night, terrified of an unspecified event which somehow never happened?
To anchor himself in the world, Spinks returned to the faith not of his fathers, but of his father. He went regularly to Quaker meetings at the Society of Friends on Fifteenth Street, and although the spirit did not move him to speak, he felt buoyed by the familiarity of the meetinghouse. He could almost imagine that he was a child again, sitting with Walter Spinks while gentle, frowsy people stood up to bear witness in a language he did not yet entirely speak. As soon as he left, though, he felt dizzy, as if he’d gone too long without eating—which, sadly for his waistline, was never really the case. He told Cohn about his problem, and Cohn sent him to his doctor, who gave him a shot of vitamin B12. That, too, made Spinks feel better for a while. But:
January 19, 1954. In Providence for a conference of Writers for Freedom. The usual talk on the Lovecraft Cult, &c. Afterward, restless in my room at the Biltmore. Out for a walk, and, naturally, up College Hill. Without meaning to I find my way to HPL’s old house at 66 College Street. Someone has scratched COMMIE QUEER in the door’s green paint. Signs too of something white—toilet paper?—having mostly been scrubbed off the sidelight windows. Well. Justice. But I can’t help thinking that Barlow would not have been pleased. I walk until dawn, & stand on Prospect Terrace, overlooking the statehouse dome & the red and black city. No sensation of beauty, only of loss.
That Sunday, Spinks went to the Society of Friends as usual.
January 24. Stand up in meeting & try to talk about what happened in Providence. I have a friend who believes some terrible things, I say. He told me about them in confidence, but I couldn’t keep his secret, and now my friend’s friends have turned on him. I ask the meeting, did I do right, or wrong? Then I get into this bit about the name Providence and how perhaps everything that happens is right because it accords with the divine plan. It sounds very abstract, even to me. The silence after I sit down is ordinary but devastating.
Spinks went on with his campaign to save the world from the horrors of Lovecraft. In February, he wrote an essay for the Saturday Evening Post, in which he let all the horror writers have it, all the disciples, all the villains. As usual, grateful letters from parents and clergymen flooded in. Librarians were taken to task—and what about comic books? Spinks’s readers wanted to know. Tales from the Crypt was full of gore and queer innuendo. Shouldn’t somebody do something? The public’s enthusiasm for wholesome horror was gratifying, but Spinks was finding that kind of gratification less and less sufficient. Had he done right? Had he done wrong? He went to see Loveman, who had been totally unaffected by the Erotonomicon scandal; indeed, he was still selling copies of the Erotonomicon under the counter of his shop. Spinks wanted Loveman to absolve him—he wanted Loveman to say he’d done what a poet would do. But, in fact:
L. will hardly talk to me. Says he’s in a hurry, he has to meet a friend for lunch. Who? I ask. Just a friend, L. says. First time he has ever failed to mention the name of one of his friends. I hang around the shop for ten minutes, buy a first edition of Besant’s Thought Forms. L. wraps it up, and asks me not to come back. He doesn’t want any trouble, he says. I walk up to Union Square. A loudspeaker truck blares Give, give to Israel. I stop at a newsstand to pick up the Journal-American and browse the paperbacks. Ray Bradbury has a new book, Fahrenheit 451. And in a tawdry Ace double, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. So much for wholesome horror, I think. Leaf through it. To my amazement, it’s by Bill.* Give, give to Israel! I sit on a bench. I have accomplished nothing.
Ten days later, Spinks wrote to Don Pablo Martínez del Río, inviting him to expose the hoax. That summer, he left New York for the last time and returned to Parry Sound.
May 24, 1954. I climb the steps to this house which I shall never really leave again. Charlotte is just getting out of the bath. Leo, you’re so fat! she says. It’s good that you came home, you were letting yourself go in New York. She strokes my cheek. Her love is more forgiving than forgiveness itself, and more terrible, too.
The hardware store was long gone, so Spinks went into the appliance-repair business. At least there he knew what he was about. Charlotte put him on a diet, and he went on and off it. He swam in the summer and skated in the winter. He slept nine or ten hours a night. Even so, he didn’t feel any more real in Parry Sound than he had in New York. What he felt, more and more, was angry. He’d tried to bear witness, and what happened? The United States had made him into a monster. Yes, that was what he had become: it was like at the end of Lovecraft’s story “The Outsider,” where the hero looks in the mirror and realizes that the horror is him. But what else could Spinks have become? On the day he read his story to the Arisians, he’d lost the chance to be anything else. It was maddening. He had tried to speak, but the idiocy of those kids was too strong for him. The American id could not be educated, Spinks thought. It needed horror in order to stay awake and to justify its most pleasureful pursuit, the destruction of helpless people who had never done anything wrong.
America is truly Lovecraft’s country: fearful because it cannot love.
Spinks wanted to set the record straight about Lovecraft and Barlow, but if he spoke out, who would believe him? For many years, he fixed radios and washing machines and television sets. But something was coalescing slowly in the innocent air of Parry Sound; a thought was taking shape. If L. C. Spinks was unreal, then who could say he was really Spinks? Who was really anyone? Souls were words.
No reality but in books.
So Spinks hit on the idea of telling the true story of Lovecraft and Barlow, but not as himself. He would have to become the one person whose k
nowledge of the story no one could doubt. He tried on the name Barlow the way a transvestite might try on a stocking. Then the other leg, then the dress, the makeup, the wig. It took him years to master the facts of Barlow’s complicated life, but it gave him an enormous, private satisfaction. He was proving the power of love to the only audience that could still hear him, i.e., to himself. In the privacy of his study on Waubeek Street, he demonstrated that with great love and hard work and enormous attention to detail it was possible to bring a human being back to life. It was a kind of reincarnation: an invitation to Barlow’s soul to possess Spinks’s living flesh once and for all. He didn’t dare to hope that someone would discover his new identity, but he did dream of it: of the day when he would be able to tell the truth. He owed that much to Barlow’s memory, and to Wollheim and Lowndes and Pohl and even to sneaky Michel. Most of all he owed it to Doris Baumgardt, who had died of lung cancer in 1970, at the age of forty-nine.
17.
I was up all night, reading. In the morning, I took a cab to the West Parry Sound Health Centre. Spinks was in a semi-private room, the other half of which was unoccupied. He lay propped up on a hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask. His eyes were closed. In his blue hospital gown, he looked smaller than he had the day before, and I had the strange thought that telling his story had literally shrunken him, as if he had parted not only with words but with his own substance. His arms were thin and mottled. Strands of dyed hair clung to his forehead. I sat down by his bed, prepared to wait until he woke up, but he must not have been sleeping, because he opened his eyes right away. “Hi,” I said. “You scared me yesterday. Are you all right?” Spinks slipped the mask down over his chin. “Don’t do that!” I said. “It’s all right,” Spinks said. “I can breathe on my own for a few minutes.” “I brought you flowers,” I said. I’d bought them in the hospital gift shop, an afterthought. “How kind,” Spinks said. “Put them over there.” He pointed at the radiator. I thought of how my grandfather’s hospital room had looked by the end, how there wasn’t room for another carnation, another card. Here, there was nothing. How happy Spinks must have been, I thought, when Charlie called him up out of the blue. I, too, might have impersonated someone, just to have the company. “How are you?” I asked. “I have a pulmonary fibrosis,” Spinks said. “It’s not new, but it does seem to have gotten worse.” “Are you taking steroids?” I asked. “They should have you on steroids.” “Thank you, Dr. Willett,” Spinks said. “I’m sure if my doctor thinks steroids would be a good idea, he’ll prescribe them.” I blushed. “Did he say how long you’ll be here?” “Two or three days,” Spinks said. “Can you stay? I want to tell you the rest of my story.” I thought about informing Spinks that I had already read the rest of his story, but decided not to. “I’ll try,” I said. “If you can’t stay, then you’ll have to come back,” Spinks said. “Provided I’m still here!” “OK,” I said, “let’s see what your doctor says.” “Good idea,” Spinks said. He put his mask on again and closed his eyes.
I sat there, watching him breathe. Now that I knew his story, it was hard for me to hate Spinks, or to fear him. It was true that he’d done terrible things, in the distant past and in the recent past, too, but mostly I felt sorry for him. He’d so rarely been happy or loved. Except by Charlotte—and by her, too much. In his way, Spinks had even tried to be good. He wanted to help the Futurians, and Luiza, and Doris; it wasn’t his fault that the world’s currents had wrecked him on the rocks when he was just a child. The person he ought to have been was Levente Rozen, and I couldn’t entirely blame him for impersonating Barlow. After the age of four, his whole life had been an impersonation. Poor Levente! He never had a chance. Strange to say, I was angry for him.
After maybe five minutes, Spinks opened his eyes. “You’re still here,” he said. “Yup,” I said. “Why?” he asked. “Why what?” I said. “Why are you here?” I thought about it. There were many things I still wanted to know, but none of them explained why I was sitting by L. C. Spinks’s hospital bed, watching him sleep. Nor did I really expect to learn them from Spinks anymore. The story was over, I thought, but the person was still there. He deserved something. “I didn’t want to leave you alone,” I said. Spinks reached out with surprising speed and took hold of my hand. His grip was as strong as ever. “Thank you,” he said. Then he lay back and closed his eyes again. He was still holding my hand. I let him hold it until the nurse, Denise, came in. “Why, hello,” she said, “you must be family!” “Just a friend,” I said. “Dr. Willett is one of my admirers,” Spinks said. “Look, she brought me flowers!” “Aren’t those pretty,” Denise said. “I’ll get a vase so they don’t wilt.”
My flight didn’t leave until the next morning. I took a cab back to my B&B and looked at the flyers downstairs for local attractions. Each looked more dismal than the last. I had used Parry Sound up; now I wished I could fall asleep and not awaken until it was time to leave for the Toronto airport, but I wasn’t tired. With a feeling of total arbitrariness, as if I were a molecule bouncing through the humid August air, I walked up Gibson Street, toward the center of town. There were two bookstores on Seguin Street, one new and one used. The used one looked more inviting, so I went in. On a whim, I asked the gray-ponytailed manager whether she had The Book of the Law of Love. She made a face. “I think we got rid of it,” she said, “but if not, it will be in local history.” She pointed me to a slim section between Spirituality and Gardening. Charlie’s book was, indeed, not there, which was just as well. I leafed through Up the Great North Road: The Story of an Ontario Colonization Road, by John Macfie, who had compiled a great deal of information on the subject. “It was Man against Nature in its most primary form,” the introduction told me, “bareknuckled roadbuilders and homesteaders attempting to transform a rugged landscape containing the most ancient rock on the continent.” I wondered if that was really the most primary form the contest could take. What about the contest between a person and his own nature? What about the ancient rock of the id? Stop analyzing, I told myself. I put Up the Great North Road back and pulled out another book, also by John Macfie. Half the books in the local history section were by him, I realized, with wonder. After three days, I thought the town had nothing more to tell me, but here was someone who had found in it an inexhaustible supply of stories, about loggers and homesteaders and trappers and ships and fires and weather and Indians and trains. And wars: I opened Sons of the Pioneers: Memories of Veterans of the Algonquin Regiment, and glanced at the table of contents. Spinks’s story was not listed, which wasn’t surprising; he’d only served in the Algonquins for a short time. But Horace Tudhope was there, good old Horace Tudhope, the weaselly kid who’d picked fights and burned up Germans in a flame-throwing tank. I read his story. Spinks wasn’t in it anywhere. With a little flutter of anxiety I flipped to the index. No Spinks, L. C.
I took the book to the register. “Is John Macfie alive?” I asked. I pronounced it Mac-FIE and the manager corrected me: Mac-FEE. “He is,” she said. “He came in just the other day.” “He lives in Parry Sound?” I asked. “Yes,” the manager said. Of course he did. I went outside and found his phone number on the Internet. A woman answered. “Hi,” I said, “I’m trying to reach John Mac-FEE.” “Oh,” she said, “John!” He came on. I told him that I was the widow of the man who had written The Book of the Law of Love, and that I’d just spoken with L. C. Spinks. He took a moment to understand what I was talking about, then he asked, “What can I do for you?” Everyone here is so helpful, I thought. “Mr. Spinks was telling me about his life,” I said. “He said he was discharged from the Algonquin Regiment for shooting at a German U-boat, in Newfoundland. I was wondering if you know anything about that?” “No,” Macfie said. “I’ve never heard that story before.” I’d been walking as we talked, and now I found myself on James Street, which was closed to traffic for a festival. There was almost no one in the street, though, just a few lonely booths offering to check your blood pressure or sell you ce
ll phone service. “Well,” I said, “do you think it could have happened, anyway?” “It’s not why he was discharged,” Macfie said. “There was another reason for that.” “Which is?” I asked. Macfie hesitated. “I wonder if it would be easier to talk about this in person,” he said. An impossible red vehicle rolled past, a cart pedaled by a dozen people all wearing the same aqua T-shirt. The back of each shirt read TOGETHER WE CAN. I have no idea what was on the front.
Macfie lived at the other end of town, in a white ranch house with a steepish front yard. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt, cargo shorts, and slippers with socks. He was as old as Spinks, but tall, rangy, rumpled, and in better shape. He showed me to his office, which was in the basement, a chilly low room cluttered with photographs, farm implements, glass telephone resistors (I asked), and other tangible evidence of Parry Sound’s past. He showed me a photograph of the Algonquins at Camp Borden and pointed out Spinks in the second row. “There’s your man,” he said. “He was discharged because he was a homosexual. I think they caught him fooling around with a First Nations boy up in Thunder Bay.” “No,” I said, “that can’t be right. He was married to a woman named Luiza. He met her in Europe, at the end of the war, and brought her back to Parry Sound.” “I’d be very surprised if Leo Spinks was ever married,” Macfie said. “She was a redhead,” I said. “A teacher, from Budapest. She gave French lessons!” “I’ve never heard of any such person,” Macfie said. “But here, I dug this up.” He handed me a manila folder labeled PARRY SOUND UFO HOAX. It held two tawny newspaper clippings about exactly that: in the winter of 1938, a local youth had frightened the town’s residents by driving around with a loudspeaker, announcing that invaders from Mars had landed by the Nobel munitions plant and were heading south. The youth was, of course, L. C. Spinks. The article noted that he’d made the loudspeaker himself, by taking apart his parents’ radio. “He’s always been like that,” Macfie said. “Kind of a pain in the ass, pardon my French. I worked for the Forest Service, after the war. Leo would haul old tires out to a clearing in the middle of God knows where and set them on fire, and we’d have to send our trucks out for nothing. Things like that. We had a big carnival for the town centennial, in 1967, and he sneaked in a day early and set off all the fireworks. Leo’s one of those fellows that can’t take anything seriously.” Macfie reflected. “Maybe because he never fit in here,” he said. “Being, you know. Liking men.” “Plus, he was adopted,” I said. “That can’t have helped.” Macfie just looked at me. “Where’d you get that idea?” “Oh, no,” I said.
The Night Ocean Page 32