Acknowledgments
I’m profoundly grateful to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and to its staff: Jean Strouse, Marie d’Origny, Paul Delaverdac, Julia Pagnamenta, and Caitlin Kean. This book could never have been written without the Center’s generous support. Thanks also to Virginia Bartow and Whitney Berman in the NYPL’s Special Formats Processing unit, who shepherded me through their collection of amateur periodicals, which includes issues of Robert Barlow’s little magazine, The Dragon-Fly; to touch the pages that Barlow had touched was a kind of archival magic. Not to mention all the strange little dolls that were lurking in the Special Formats office . . . Truly, if you are looking for wonder in this world, just ask a librarian. Lorna Toolis and Mary Canning at the Judith Merril Collection, in the Toronto Public Library, also provided invaluable help; as did Dr. Thomas Rahe at the Documentation Centre at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, and Christopher Geissler and the staff of the John Hay Library at Brown University.
The Night Ocean is a book (mostly) concerning the dead, but many of their children and grandchildren are still living. Heartfelt thanks to Margot Owens Pagan for enlightening me about her mother, Doris Baumgardt; and to Betsy Wollheim for telling me stories about her father, Donald—and for allowing me to copy a sheaf of unpublished letters from H. P. Lovecraft to the young Wollheim. Thanks to Emily Pohl-Weary for telling stories about her grandparents, Frederik Pohl and Judith Merril. I’m also grateful to Hugh Pierson, the British liaison officer at the Lager Hohne, who emptied his car of houseplants in order to give me a windshield tour of the former DP camp at Belsen; to Jarett Kobek, for his talk on R. H. Barlow at the NecronomiCon 2015; to Mark Rich, for sending me hard-to-find pages of John Michel’s unpublished novel about the Futurians; and to Joseph Quinn, James Wilkie, Richard Wilkie, Lyle Brown, Don Dumond, Oriol Pi-Sunyer, and Michael Schuessler, for sharing stories about Mexico City College in the 1950s. Thanks to S. T. Joshi, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Macfie for being themselves. I hope they won’t be displeased to find their names in these pages. And thanks to Robert Kelly, for telling me about Barlow in the first place. Of course the characters in The Night Ocean are fictions, and I take responsibility for any and all discrepancies between my creations and the facts.
For their shelter and support while I was writing The Night Ocean, I am fervently grateful to the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Ledig House/Omi International Arts Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Eben Klemm gets credit for the Last Call of Cthulhu, but don’t try to make it at home—who knows what might rise from the depths of the glass? Many, many thanks also to the friends who read and corrected drafts of this book: Betsy Bonner, David Lida, Elliott Holt, Noah Millman, Herb Wilson, and Jeff Zacks. I owe boundless gratitude, and as many Last Calls as they would like, to my sanity-preserving agents, Gloria Loomis and Julia Masnik, and to my all-seeing editor, Ed Park.
I might never have finished this book if Kit Reed hadn’t told me that I could do it.
And to my in-house dramaturge, Sarah Stern, who has believed in The Night Ocean all along: dog, heart, sparkly heart, sparkly heart, fat red exclamation point. Or, as Lovecraft would have put it: Umph.
OGTHROD AI’F
GEB’L—EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
‘NGAH’NG AI’Y
ZHRO!
* Thankfully, Lovecraft had abandoned the eighteenth-century style by this point in the Erotonomicon. This footnote, by the way, is mine. Spinks’s was much longer. I’m borrowing his form so as not to interrupt the flow of the text.
* Alfred Galpin (1901–1983), whom Lovecraft met in the summer of 1922. Galpin went on to become a composer and a professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin.
* The Arragon Hotel, in Jacksonville, Florida, where Lovecraft had stayed on a previous trip, in 1931.
* Active anal sex? Lovecraft refers to that act elsewhere as “the Outer Spheres,” but, confusingly, he also uses this second term to mean orgasm.
* This was the name Barlow gave to the closet where he kept his collection of weird fiction and poetry. It strikes me as sad that this material was literally housed in a closet. The name “Yoh-Vombis” comes from the Clark Ashton Smith story “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” which I haven’t read.
* A popular fan magazine, published monthly from September 1933 through February 1935.
* Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932) was the author of The Book of the Damned, a compilation of phenomena, many of which were reported in scientific journals, but which science was utterly unable to explain. Lovecraft didn’t care for Fort’s work, but Charlie did. A copy of The Complete Books of Charles Fort still stands on my bookcase. On its creased cover, a collage of fish raining down on a Victorian street.
* A reference to Barlow’s short story “The Fidelity of Ghu,” which was, at that point, unpublished.
* Charles Blackburn Johnston (1897–?), a painter.
* The name Lieutenant Colonel Barlow gave to his Florida house.
* Lovecraft’s nickname for Henry S. Whitehead (1882–1932), Episcopal clergyman and author of weird fiction. He lived in Dunedin, Florida, on the Gulf Coast.
* A reference to Lord Dunsany’s collection of fantastical short stories The Gods of Pegāna (1905).
* A novel by Abraham Merritt (1884–1943), serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920.
* The reference is to Lovecraft’s stories “The Silver Key” (1926) and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (cowritten with E. Hoffmann Price in 1932–1933). The main character in both stories is Randolph Carter, who seems to have been a kind of alter ego for Lovecraft.
* From Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Gondoliers (1889).
* Spinks notes that in Lovecraft’s novella The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931), the author described the Elder Sign as “somethin’ . . . like what ye call a swastika”; but he drew it elsewhere as a single line with shorter lines branching off, like a bare tree. So, mutual oral sex? Why am I guessing at this? Maybe it’s just that, after what happened to Charlie, I want to pin everything down.
* I.e., the year Lovecraft moved to New York City.
* Performing oral sex, presumably, rather than receiving it.
* In De Leon Springs, about ten miles northeast of DeLand. According to Charlie, it is now a pancake restaurant.
* This was the story Lovecraft revised in Barlow’s hotel room on December 31, 1934.
* Annie Emmeline Phillips Gamwell (1866–1941), Lovecraft’s aunt.
* Barlow had begun a “monumental novel” (Lovecraft’s words) in the fall of 1935. He abandoned it shortly after Lovecraft’s death, and Charlie believes that he destroyed the manuscript. Believed.
* A 1934 novel in verse by the Rhode Island writer Christopher La Farge (1897–1956).
* A textbook by Anne Tillery Renshaw, which Lovecraft was revising.
* Adolphe de Castro (1859–1959), writer and translator. De Castro, Lovecraft, and Barlow had visited St. John’s Churchyard, in Providence, and composed acrostic poems on the name Edgar Allan Poe, who had walked in the same graveyard ninety years earlier. In Lovecraftian circles, Charlie said, this episode is known as the “Poe-session.”
* Wollheim (1914–1990) was a notable science fiction writer and editor. C[atherine] L[ucille] Moore (1911–1987) was also a science fiction writer. Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) wrote a well-known series of fantasy novels; Charlie knew them by heart. Robert Bloch (1917–1994) went on to write Psycho.
* The Moon Pool was published in All-Story Weekly in 1918. My note—all the rest are mine. I wish I could say that I found their veracity reassuring.
* The last sentence of Lovecraft’s 1927 story “Pickman’s Model.”
* Stetson University, in DeLand, was founded in 1883.
* The sat
iric “Battle That Ended the Century,” which Lovecraft and Barlow published anonymously.
* A region of the imaginary world where Lovecraft’s novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927) takes place.
* See the note here.
* Hannes Bok (1914–1964) was a notable science fiction illustrator.
* Lovecraft pronounced it KOOT-u-lew, whereas most fans pronounced it, and still pronounce it, ka-THOO-loo. To say the name Lovecraft’s way, Charlie said, is like rolling the R’s in Mordor: the mark of a fandom so refined that almost no one knows what you’re talking about.
* Verdi Square, on Seventy-Third Street and Broadway. I walk past it all the time, on the way to my office on Central Park West, and now I can’t help imagining Barlow standing there, arm in arm with the white-faced Lovecraft. Was Lovecraft’s face white? Was Barlow holding his arm? I don’t know. As Charlie said, once you get deep enough into a story, you start seeing things.
* Lovecraft made a meager living revising stories and poems for other writers, most of them amateurs.
* E. Hoffmann Price (1898–1988) was a prolific pulp writer, whom Lovecraft had met in New Orleans in 1932. Barlow invited him to Cassia, but he never went. Ray Cummings (1887–1957) was a science fiction writer in Mount Vernon, New York. He visited Florida several times, but Barlow was unable to meet him, either.
* Lovecraft’s 1928 story about a Massachusetts family that interbreeds with extra-cosmic beings.
* Anne Tillery Renshaw’s Well Bred Speech.
* William Seabrook (1884–1945) was a journalist. His book The Magic Island introduced the zombie into popular culture.
* Kenneth Sterling (1920–1995) was a fan who had met Lovecraft in Providence. He later became a physician and worked (brave man) at the VA Medical Center in the Bronx.
* A fictitious university, which figured frequently in Lovecraft’s stories. As a teenager, Charlie made himself a Miskatonic U. student ID, which, he said, got him in to more than one bar.
* I.e., the Golden Gate International Exposition, which was held on Treasure Island in 1939, to compete with the better-known 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
* This was the fantasy and science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–): the K stands for Kroeber.
* This, Barlow believed, was the proper name for the Aztecs. It was what they called themselves, to link their society to the culture that had flourished at Culhuacán. Charlie couldn’t help noticing that Culhua also sounded a little like Cthulhu: as if Barlow was searching for Lovecraft in the Mexican past.
* A reference to Barlow’s story “Till A’ the Seas,” which he had either revised or not revised with Lovecraft in a New York hotel room on New Year’s Eve, 1934.
* The house Rivera shared with Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), who had inherited it from her parents. Now the Frida Kahlo Museum.
* Roys (1879–1965) was a prominent anthropologist and historian of the Mayans.
* The novelist Rafael Bernal (1915–1972), best known for his 1969 novel The Mongolian Conspiracy.
* A sixteenth-century manuscript, which indicated what tributes the provinces of the Culhua Mexica paid to the emperor.
* Senator Clyde Hoey (1877–1954) had begun an investigation of “sex perverts” in the U.S. government in June 1950.
* Earl Singleton (1916–1999) was the first person to commit pseuicide as a way to quit fandom.
* Shub-Niggurath was, unfortunately, the name of one of Lovecraft’s monsters.
* The reference is to Arthur Ransome’s novel Swallows and Amazons (1930).
* An incantation from Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926).
* Margaret Brundage (1900–1976) was notorious for her illustrations of almost-nude women, which appeared on the cover of Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938. It was rumored that her daughter posed for most or even all of these pictures, which only added to their notoriety.
* Howard (1909–1956) was Donald Wandrei’s brother. An artist and writer, he lived in New York.
* Like Wollheim, Frederik Pohl (1918–2013) and Robert “Doc” Lowndes (1916–1998) would go on to be notable science fiction writers and editors; John B. Michel (1917–1969) was a science fiction writer and essayist.
* Samuel Moskowitz (1920–1997), a prominent fan from Newark, New Jersey.
* James Taurasi (1917–1991) and William Sykora (1913–1994), both from Queens, were also notable figures in the microcosm of 1930s fandom.
* At the time, Hornig (1916–1999) was the editor of the science fiction magazine Wonder Stories.
* Kornbluth (1923–1958) was a member of the Futurians, and would go on to be one of the great science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century.
* Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, aka Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), and M[atthew] P[hipps] Shiel (1865–1947) were all writers of weird fiction, whose work Lovecraft admired.
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