by S. T. Joshi
Matters are not helped by Bierce’s “A Poet and His Poem,” which merely showers praise upon the poem and sees in it an instance of “pure poetry” (not a phrase used by Bierce, but implied in such comments as “Their author has no ‘purpose, end, or care’ other than the writing of poetry. His work is as devoid of motive as is the song of the skylark—it is merely poetry”[62]). And although Bierce states that “Great lines are not all that go into the making of great poetry,”[63] he goes on to quote a number of the more notable lines and draws particular attention to Sterling’s felicitous use of “epithets”—i.e., the modifiers of key nouns of the poem: “They personify, ennoble, exalt, spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like the spear of Ithuriel.”[64] Well and good; but this get us no closer to the overall thrust or intention of the poem.
Because “A Wine of Wizardry” does not tell an actual story or have a coherent “plot,” as we now know to be the case with a poem that many contemporary readers likened to it—Clark Ashton Smith’s The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil (1920)—and because Sterling himself is so cagey as to the poem’s meaning, we must infer meaning and purpose by means of the text of the poem itself. Its surface “plot” is simple enough: the first-person narrator drinks a glass of wine in a “crystal cup” (3), which allows his “Fancy” (6) to commence a kind of voyage through the realms of the imagination. It becomes evident that Fancy here is simply a stand-in for the imagination. Initially, Fancy ventures into domains marked by religion, as the lines “Sifting Satanic gules athwart his brow” (19) and “O’er blue profounds mysterious whence glow / The coals of Tartarus on the moonless air” (28–29) suggest. In other words, imagination teases out the vivid imagery inherent in Christian and pagan myth. Eastern myth also comes into play, as the references to “a Syrian treasure-house” (48) and “The brows of naked Ashtaroth” (51) indicate.
But, as Bierce pointed out to a critic who failed to understand the line “Or chaunted to the Dragon in his gyre” (66), Fancy quickly proceeds to the boundless cosmos for its inspiration (“Dragon in his gyre” refers to the constellation Draco, the Serpent). More cosmic imagery follows (“Where crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes conspire / To quench Aldebaran’s affronting fire” [69–70]); but it is not long before Fancy returns to earth—and the monsters spawned by countless millennia of human myth-making: “the twilight witch” (84), “silent ghouls” (86), and so on. A passage recounting a kaleidoscope of precious minerals and jewels—“moonstone-crystal” (96), “coral twigs and winy agates” (97), “Translucencies of jasper” (98), “banded onyx” (99), “vermilion breast / Of cinnabar” (99–100)—make it clear that Sterling is writing a poem that features both pure terror and exotic beauty.
Sterling now brings Fancy back to the realm of religion (“the hushed cathedral’s jeweled gloom” [125]), as she
kneels, in solemn quietude, to mark
The suppliant day from gorgeous oriels float
And altar-lamps immure the deathless spark . . . (127–29)
The suggestion here, I believe, is that religion itself can be used as a means of imaginative expansion, for very quickly the imagery returns to pagan myth:
And now she knows, at agate portals bright,
How Circe and her poisons have a home,
Carved in one ruby that a Titan lost . . .
As craftily she gleans her deadly dews,
With gyving spells not Pluto’s queen can use . . . (136–38, 143–44)
But that Sterling’s Fancy is similarly attracted to the darker aspects of Christian myth is evident in a subsequent passage:
And Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed,
Ere Lilith come his indolence to greet,
Who leads from Hell his whitest queens . . . (157–60)
But even this is not enough for Fancy, who “is unsatisfied, and soon / She seeks the silence of a vaster night” (165–66). Her quest for even more potent and bizarre imagery leads her to India, where “By the Ganges’ flood / She sees, in her dim temple, Siva loom” (178–79). Her stay in Asia is short-lived, as she returns to the myths of Europe (Merlin [187] and Hecate [193] are cited); and it is now that those celebrated lines about the blue-eyed vampire are found. The poem ends quietly, as the first-person narrator at last reappears: “And I . . . / Gaze pensively upon the way she went, / Drunk at her font, and smile as one content” (204–7).
If the most we can say about “A Wine of Wizardry” is that it is simply a riot of fantastic imagery taken from the central myths of human society, then perhaps that is enough. Bierce was guilty only of mild exaggeration when he stated that “not in a lifetime has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much poetry and so little else. It is as full of light and color and fire as any of the ‘ardent gems’ that burn and sparkle in its lines. It has all the imagination of ‘Comus’ and all the fancy of ‘The Faerie Queene.’”[65] The absence of a recognisable “plot,” and even the relative dearth of philosophical “meaning” beyond its prodigal wealth of vibrant imagery, are not drawbacks but virtues; for the single-minded “purpose” of “A Wine of Wizardry” is to suggest the inexhaustible scope of the human imagination—an imagination that has so frequently been drawn to the evocation of horror, terror, weirdness, and bizarrerie. In that sense, the poem becomes a self-fulfilling justification for the entire realm of weird literature.
Samuel Loveman: Shelley in Brooklyn
At first glance it might be thought that Samuel E. Loveman (1887–1976) is a mere hanger-on of the great. A correspondent of Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) and George Sterling (1869–1926), a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), and Hart Crane (1899–1932), Loveman could easily be dismissed as a literary dilettante whose own accomplishments seem meagre when juxtaposed to those of his great associates. If this is so, however, it is in large part because Loveman himself made singularly little effort to put himself forth as a literary figure in his own right. Even more diffident than Lovecraft in approaching professional markets for his work, and adhering to standards of poetic style and diction that, with the advent of Modernism in the 1920s, consigned his exquisitely crafted verse to the margins of literature, Loveman seemed content to appear in amateur venues, and on occasion was so careless of preserving his work that his friend Lovecraft would force him to recite his poems viva voce so that Lovecraft could hastily scribble them down and tenuously preserve them for posterity. Loveman’s two slim volumes of poetry, the first of them no more than a privately printed pamphlet, comprise less than half of his known output of verse, and it has taken the laborious efforts of several scholars, poring through crumbling amateur journals of nearly a century ago, to resurrect a number of forgotten poetic jewels; and Loveman made no effort at all to collect his scattered short stories, essays, and prose-poems.
A biography of Loveman must be pieced together from a multiplicity of sources, and the end result remains fragmentary and episodic. He was born on January 14, 1887; the first thirty-seven years of his life were spent largely in Cleveland, and in many ways he retained emotional and literary ties to that metropolis. His literary awakening occurred at an early age: in 1902, according to a brief memoir by his fellow-Clevelander Harry E. Martin,[66] he joined the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA), although no publications prior to 1905 have been found. In that year, however, a number of his poems appeared in amateur journals, and he also issued what appears to have been a pamphlet or one-shot magazine called Dedication, containing two poems, “David, King of Israel” and “The Witch of En-Dor.” Regrettably, no copies of this publication have come to light, and its contents must be adduced only from a lengthy review of it (probably by Nelson G. Morton, then chairman of the NAPA’s Bureau of Critics) in the National Amateur for March 1906. The review describes the poems as “recitals in the verse of Biblical incidents, with slight imaginative additions.” The first poem “p
ortrays the anxiety of David for Absalom and his grief over his son’s death”;[67] the second poem is not described by the reviewer, but is presumably a retelling of the celebrated encounter of Saul with the Witch of En-dor and her raising of the spirit of Samuel, as described in I Samuel 28:3f. Loveman contributed poems prolifically to the amateur press in the period 1905–10, especially to Martin’s Sprite and other local papers. In “A Convention Address” (1923), he speaks warmly of the influence of amateurdom upon his life:
I remember my entry into Amateur Journalism as though nothing else had intervened in all those years. I remember the papers that flooded my mails. I remember the shiver of delight with which I beheld my first contribution, a poem, and I remember my first convention, when, for the sheer ecstasy of anticipation, I could not sleep for two weeks ahead, awaiting the glorious event. I remember [Warren J.] Brodie’s boyishness, [Tim] Thrift’s idealism, . . . [John S.] Ziegler, the then-philosopher, [Alfred V.] Fingulin, impulsive and warm-hearted, [Richard R.] Kevern, and Feather and Kostir—and these things that I remember, I assure myself can never be forgotten, for they have entered into the making of whatever has been worth while in my life, whatever has been vital, sincere, artistic and strengthening, in an otherwise no very successful literary career. For Amateur Journalism gave to me at that crucial period, what it has given to so many others, what we hope it will continue to give to so many an impulse and a defined incentive for keeping a flame in the torch, a light to go by, in an age almost hopelessly money-mad or material.
These words are strikingly in accord with those of another shy, bookish, introspective writer who found in amateurdom exactly the literary and personal encouragement he needed at a critical stage of his life—H. P. Lovecraft, who in “What Amateurdom and I Have Done for Each Other” (1921) writes similarly that “With the advent of the United [Amateur Press Association] I obtained a renewed will to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile.”[68]
In 1908 Loveman took a much bolder step toward establishing a place in the wider literary world: he wrote to Ambrose Bierce. Specifically, he sent his poem “In Pierrot’s Garden” (first published in the amateur journal Cartoons for November 1907 and winner of the NAPA’s laureate award for poetry the next year) to Bierce in care of Cosmopolitan, under the impression that Bierce worked in an editorial capacity for that Hearst magazine and would be in a position to consider its publication there. In fact, as he told Loveman in his reply (October 17, 1908),[69] Bierce was only a regular contributor to and not an editor of Cosmopolitan, so he did not think he could do anything with the poem, although he spoke of its “excellence.” Some months later Bierce wrote that he was planning to include “Pierrot” in his own monthly column, but in May 1905, before the poem could be published, Bierce had severed relations with Cosmopolitan. At that point Bierce began an unsystematic attempt to secure “Pierrot”’s publication in one of the major magazines of the period. Loveman had already noted that some of his poems had been rejected by Harper’s because they “lacked the modern note,”[70] and Bierce forthwith garnered rejections of “Pierrot” from Everybody’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and apparently some other magazines. In this whole procedure Bierce was consciously reprising his years-long attempt to find a home for his pupil George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry,” which after being rejected by as many as a dozen periodicals was finally published in Cosmopolitan (September 1907). Bierce seemed to regale himself with the notion that the leading magazine editors of the nation could not recognise true poetry when they saw it, and he frankly used Sterling’s and Loveman’s work as test cases to confirm his theories on editorial obtuseness.
In spite of the fact that Loveman actually met Bierce briefly in New York in September 1913, a few months before Bierce disappeared in Mexico,[71] it is highly unlikely that Bierce’s interest in Loveman’s work could have justified the latter in stating, many years later, that he was a “protégé” of Bierce.[72] Bierce did, however, accomplish one simple function that would prove to be of vital importance: he put Loveman in touch with George Sterling. Sterling really was a protégé of Bierce, and the latter quickly recognised that the two younger poets were both devoted to older standards in poetry, stretching back to the early Romantics (Keats, Shelley, Coleridge) up to Swinburne. In 1909 Bierce sent “Pierrot” to Sterling, who announced that it was “poetry clear through”[73]—high praise indeed, given Sterling’s devotion to what he called “pure poetry,” or poetry whose sole function was the expression of beauty and not the propagation of social, political, or moral lessons. Sterling remained a somewhat sporadic correspondent with Loveman, but he always spoke warmly of Loveman’s poetic work; as early as 1913 he wrote to him: “Yes, Sam, you are a poet, a true poet, and a poet showing promise of being at least the equal of any person writing verse in this generation. And in such faith I am most firmly established.”[74] It was exactly at this time that Sterling put Loveman in touch with his own protégé, Clark Ashton Smith, resulting in a rich relationship that would last the better part of both poets’ lives.[75]
Loveman’s own literary career, however, was not advancing in any significant way. Harry E. Martin states that Loveman left the NAPA in 1910. The next year he issued the first of his two volumes of poetry, a 24-page pamphlet entitled simply Poems, published in Cleveland at his own expense. He sent the book to Bierce, who urged him to send it to H. L. Mencken for review in the Smart Set, but it is not clear whether he ever did so. No publications by Loveman for the next six years have been located. Martin speaks of Loveman being employed as a “cost accountant,” and Loveman himself noted to Smith in the summer of 1915 that the added burden of tending to his ailing father resulted in “twelve to fifteen hours of hard labour [a day], mental & physical.”[76] Loveman’s father died in December 1915, thereby easing one aspect of the physical burden but probably not assuaging the mental burden appreciably. Around this time Loveman began work on a novel called Philip Heather, a chapter of which he sent to Sterling, but it came to nothing and apparently does not survive.
In 1917 Loveman rejoined amateurdom, enrolling in both the NAPA and the UAPA. H. P. Lovecraft prided himself on the fact that it was he who had persuaded Loveman to re-enter the amateur movement.[77] Lovecraft had stumbled upon Loveman’s early amateur verse and had written a poem about him as early as 1915, “To Samuel Loveman, Esquire, on His Poetry and Drama, Writ in the Elizabethan Style” (Dowdeall’s Bearcat, December 1915); at that time he was not merely unaware of Loveman’s whereabouts but was unsure whether Loveman was even living. Two years later, he somehow (perhaps through a Clevelander like Harry E. Martin or William J. Dowdell) established epistolary contact with Loveman; the latter, in his 1948 memoir, wryly describes the gist of Lovecraft’s first letter: “Was I alive or dead? Would I write to him if I were still in the land of the living?” The correspondence between Lovecraft and Loveman must have been both voluminous and fascinating, but almost none of it is extant: only five letters and two postcards on Lovecraft’s side,[78] and only a few scraps on Loveman’s, which survive only because Lovecraft used the versos of them for rough drafts of his stories or essays.[79]
Although, as we shall see, Loveman would later come to have very mixed feelings about Lovecraft, there is no question that the Providence writer was taken with the Clevelander, both for his erudition in the obscure byways of literature (in 1919 he notes admiringly that Loveman “has a vast library of rare first editions and other treasures precious to the bibliophile’s heart”[80]) and for his refined aestheticism. To such a degree had Loveman entered Lovecraft’s imagination that he served as the protagonist, or at least the trigger, of two of Lovecraft’s weird tales of the period: “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (December 1919), an almost literal transcript of a dream in which Lovecraft (cited in the story as Randolph Carter) watches Loveman (cited as Harley Warren) enter a centuried crypt but not emer
ge; and “Nyarlathotep” (December 1920), which was inspired by a dream in which Loveman tells Lovecraft, “Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.”[81] One suspects that Loveman was exactly the sort of person Lovecraft, at this stage of his life, wanted to be—learned, bookish, poetically gifted, and almost excessively sensitive to both the beauties and the tragedies of life and literature.
In “A Letter on Hart Crane” (1933) Loveman states that he first met Hart Crane in 1919, but this appears to be an error, and Crane’s biographers agree that the two did not meet until 1921, when they ran into each other at Laukhuff’s bookstore in Cleveland. Loveman had been drafted in the summer of 1918 and spent the next year and a half at Camp Gordon, Georgia. His life there was not happy, as he suffered both from “bronchial trouble that put me in the hospital in the army”[82] as well as heart trouble; his bad eyes had prevented him from being sent overseas. Upon his return to Cleveland he was apparently unable to return to his job as an accountant, and seems to have been unemployed for some years. The young Crane was immediately taken with Loveman, although temperamentally they differed significantly, Crane being emotionally open, flamboyant, and an enthusiast of literary Modernism while Loveman was shy, reserved, hypersensitive, and devoted to the literature of a century or more ago. Crane speaks affectionally of “my classic, puritan, inhibited friend Sam Loveman.”[83] Loveman introduced Crane to the artist William Sommer, and they began developing a cadre of like-minded artists and writers in Cleveland, including William Lescaze (later an internationally known architect), Edward Lazare (who would briefly mingle with the Lovecraft circle in New York in 1924–25 and would later become a longtime editor of American Book-Prices Current), and others. Crane biographer John Unterecker speaks of Loveman as “perhaps Hart’s most faithful friend,”[84] and he would not only take care of Crane’s ailing mother, Grace, after Crane’s early death, but then become Crane’s literary executor after Grace’s death in 1947.