Letters to Alfred Galpin

288 Pages·2003·3.247 MB·English

by  H. P. Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz

H. P. Lovecraft

Letters to Alfred Galpin
Alfred Galpin
H. P. Lovecraft
l e t t e r s t o
A G
LFRED ALPIN

Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz

Hippocampus Press
————————
New York
Copyright  2003 by Hippocampus Press
Introduction and editorial matter copyright  2003
by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz

The letters of H. P. Lovecraft and select
unpublished texts by Alfred Galpin have been published
by permission of the Estate of H. P. Lovecraft and
John Hay Library, Brown University.

The photograph on page 232 is used by permission of Scott Connors.

Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
http://www.hippocampuspress.com

All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.

Cover design and Hippocampus Press logo by Anastasia Damianakos.
Cover production by Barbara Briggs Silbert.

First Edition
3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

ISBN 0-9673215-9-X
Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................7
Letters to Alfred Galpin.....................................................................................13
Works of Alfred Galpin....................................................................................233
Mystery...............................................................................................................................233
Two Loves.........................................................................................................................234
Selenaio-Phantasma.........................................................................................................235
Remarks to My Handwriting..........................................................................................236
Marsh-Mad........................................................................................................................236
The Critic...........................................................................................................................238
Stars....................................................................................................................................239
Some Tendencies of Modern Poetry.............................................................................240
The Spoken Tongue.........................................................................................................243
The World Situation.........................................................................................................244
The United’s Policy 1920–1921.....................................................................................245
Form in Modern Poetry..................................................................................................246
Picture of a Modern Mood.............................................................................................249
Nietzsche as a Practical Prophet....................................................................................252
To Sam Loveman.............................................................................................................257
The Vivisector...................................................................................................................258
Four Translations from Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Pierre Baudelaire.................260
Au Lecteur....................................................................................................................260
L’Ennemi......................................................................................................................261
Remords Posthume.....................................................................................................261
L’Ange Gardien............................................................................................................262
Scattered Remarks upon the Green Cheese Theory...................................................262
Department of Public Criticism.................................................................................264
Intuition in the Philosophy of Bergson........................................................................267
Ennui..................................................................................................................................270
A Critic of Poetry.............................................................................................................271
From the French of Pierre de Ronsard (“Amours”—Livre II.)..............................273
Aubade...........................................................................................................................273
Echoes from Beyond Space............................................................................................273
Red......................................................................................................................................275
En Route (An American to Paris, 1931).......................................................................275
I. New York Harbor....................................................................................................275
II. On Deck..................................................................................................................276
November..........................................................................................................................276
A Partial Bibliography of Alfred Galpin..........................................................277
Index...............................................................................................................279

Introduction
It is unfortunate that the long and complex relationship of H. P. Lovecraft
(1890–1937) and Alfred Galpin (1901–1983)—spanning nearly two decades
and covering the entire period of Lovecraft’s mature creative career—is ex-
hibited only fragmentarily in their surviving correspondence; for around 1930
Galpin, apparently ashamed of some of his youthful enthusiasms, destroyed
many of Lovecraft’s letters up to that time.1 In any case, it is evident that
Lovecraft valued this relationship highly, attributing to Galpin the develop-
ment of his philosophical outlook at a critical period in his maturation. Love-
craft remained cordial to Galpin to the end of his life, although it is clear that
by the 1930s Galpin had outgrown the role of “adopted grandson” and had
matured into but one of Lovecraft’s many congenial colleagues with whom he
enjoyed exchanging points of view.
Because of the fragmentary nature of the correspondence, it is not cer-
tain when the two first became acquainted. In his autobiographical notes
Galpin variously dates their first epistolary contact to 1916 or 1917;2 but
elsewhere he states that the earliest extant letter (26 January 1918) was per-
haps the second he received. Lovecraft clarifies the matter somewhat in a let-
ter to Anne Tillery Renshaw dated 24 August 1918, where he states: “Galpin
first dawned above my horizon a year ago . . .”3 Lovecraft had been elected
president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in September,
and he sought a promising high-school student to be fourth vice-president (at
the time the third and fourth vice-presidents were not elected but were ap-
pointed by the president) to lead efforts at recruiting young people to join the
United. Galpin had entered high school in 1915 and had quickly become a
fixture in the Appleton (Wisconsin) High School Press Club, headed by
Lovecraft’s colleague Maurice W. Moe. It was not Moe, however, who
brought Galpin to Lovecraft’s attention, but Joseph Harriman, a recent
graduate of Appleton High School.
The two quickly engaged in copious correspondence—one far more in-
tellectually substantive than many others in Lovecraft’s early career. From the
first, Lovecraft was impressed, even awed, by Galpin’s precocity. As early as
1918 he wrote: “It is hard for me to realise that eleven years separate me from

1. Biographical information on Galpin is chiefly derived from his own writings,
including his memoir of Lovecraft (“Memories of a Friendship,” 1959) and sev-
eral unpublished documents at JHL (titled “HPL” [1971], “Native’s Return”
[1975?], “Old Friends and New Horizons” [1976], and “A. G. (II)” [1979]).
2. The original ms. of “Memories of a Friendship” (at JHL) bears the title “1916–
1937: Memories of a Friendship.”
3. SL 1.71.
8 i Letters to Alfred Galpin
Galpin, for his thoughts fit in so well with my own. I am convinced that he
has a mighty future. He is passing me already in the intellectual race, and in a
few years will have left me behind completely.”4 Three years later he supplied
a definitive account of Galpin’s influence upon him:
It is odd that an old man should be so much influenced by a kid so
vastly his junior, but it remains a fact that no other one human creature has
moulded my thought and opinions as extensively as has that Alfredus child.
The secret is this: that he is intellectually exactly like me save in degree. In de-
gree he is immensely my superior—he is what I should like to be but have
not brains enough to be. Our minds are cast in precisely the same mould,
save that his is finer. He alone can grasp the direction of my thoughts and
amplify them. And so we go down the dark ways of knowledge; the poor
plodding old man, and ahead of him the alert little link-boy holding the light
and pointing out the path. . . .5
Taking into account the wry exaggeration and excessive modesty characteristic
of Lovecraft at this time, this assessment is very likely true, though it is difficult
to document. For example, Galpin probably introduced Lovecraft to the great
iconoclastic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, well before he published
his perspicacious essay, “Nietzsche as a Practical Prophet,” in 1921. Galpin
admitted that his father raised him an atheist, but he never subscribed to what
he mischaracterizes as Lovecraft’s “dogmatic monism”; and in a startling shift,
he converted to Roman Catholicism a year after Lovecraft’s death. But their
early anticlericalism—and no doubt both of them used the pious Maurice W.
Moe as a foil in this regard—helped to establish an intellectual bond. Galpin’s
skepticism regarding the vagaries of modern poetry (see his essays “Some Ten-
dencies of Modern Poetry” and “Form in Modern Poetry,” as well as the par-
ody “Two Loves,” published in Lovecraft’s Conservative) may have assisted
Lovecraft in honing his own arguments against the Imagists and Modernists.
In many ways, Galpin reminded Lovecraft of his own boyhood. His de-
light in Galpin’s various schoolboy crushes—manifested in numerous poems,
such as “Damon and Delia, a Pastoral” (Tryout, August 1918) and “Damon—a
Monody” (United Amateur, May 1919)—became mortifying to Galpin in later
years. The evidence points to one Margaret Abraham (who, oddly enough,
shared Galpin’s birthday, 8 November) as his chief inamorata, and the whole
business led to Lovecraft’s send-up of Elizabethan tragedy, Alfredo (September
1918). Galpin paid homage to Lovecraft in his own literary works, including
the story “Marsh-Mad” (1918)—which led the diffident Lovecraft to postpone
writing his story “The Tree” for three years because he felt that Galpin had
anticipated his use of the “living tree” idea—and the poem “Selenaio-

4. SL 1.72.
5. HPL to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 April 1921 (SL 1.128).
Introduction h 9
Phantasma,” an affectionate tribute to Lovecraft’s “Nemesis” (1917). Galpin
does not seem to have had any overwhelming enthusiasm for weird literature,
but he doubtless appreciated Lovecraft’s early macabre tales—more so than
the later, longer, more complex works that did not meet his favor and that led
to a gradual cooling off of their friendship.
In the early years of their association—roughly the period 1917–24—
amateur affairs were largely on their agenda. After his fourth vice-presidency
in 1917–18, Galpin served as first vice-president in 1918–19; Rheinhart
Kleiner was president during this term, and Lovecraft had resumed his chair-
manship of the Department of Public Criticism, a position he had held in
1915–17. The next term (1919–20) Galpin himself was chairman of the De-
partment, retaining that office until 1922. Anomalously, Galpin simultaneously
held the presidency of the UAPA in 1920–21. Lovecraft, for his part, was Of-
ficial Editor for 1920–22 and 1924–25. It could well be said that Lovecraft and
Galpin were among the stars of the UAPA for the entire period. Galpin’s liter-
ary contributions were not as extensive as Lovecraft’s, and he produced only
one number of his own publication, the Philosopher (December 1920)—a
choice issue for its several contributions by Galpin and the first appearance of
Lovecraft’s story “Polaris” and his poem “The House.”
Galpin states that much of his correspondence with Lovecraft during the
period 1918–22 was embodied in the so-called Gallomo, the round-robin cor-
respondence cycle including Galpin, Moe, and Lovecraft. Only seven Gal-
lomo letters are now extant of perhaps dozens that were written; but they are
among the most illuminating of Lovecraft’s letters of the period. In what
seem less like letters than rambling stream-of-consciousness essays or auto-
biographical vignettes, Lovecraft expounds at length upon his bizarre dreams
(including the one that led directly to the writing of “The Statement of
Randolph Carter”), provides a wondrously illuminating account of the genesis
of his early fiction, pontificates on the world political scene (in particular the
establishment of the League of Nations and the Anglo-Irish conflict of the
early 1920s), and relates at length his gradual emergence from the hermitry of
598 Angell Street (especially following the death of his mother on 24 May
1921), as he ventures to Boston and elsewhere to socialize with amateur writ-
ers. Galpin himself was at this time undergoing changes in his scholastic life:
he had graduated from Appleton High School in 1919 and entered Lawrence
College in Appleton; two years later he transferred to the University of Wis-
consin, from which he graduated in 1923.
In the summer of 1922 occurred the first and, as it proved, the last meeting
of the two associates. Galpin, having struck up a friendship with Samuel Love-
man, decided to spend the summer in Cleveland, and persuaded Lovecraft to
join him. Lovecraft did so, taking the long train ride from Providence on
29 July and arriving in Cleveland the next day. He stayed more than two weeks,
leaving on 15 August. It was a critical trip in many ways: not only did Lovecraft
10 i Letters to Alfred Galpin
meet Galpin and Loveman (the latter of whom he had first met in New York
only a few months earlier), but he also met George Kirk, Hart Crane, and
Crane’s numerous cronies, and also began writing to Clark Ashton Smith after
Galpin and Kirk had lent him some of Smith’s early volumes of poetry. All
these men (except Crane, whom Lovecraft met sporadically up to 1930) be-
came close and lifelong associates of Lovecraft. Naturally, the visit is not re-
corded in their surviving Lovecraft correspondence to Galpin, but echoes of it
can be found in letters to others.
In 1923 Galpin became a fellow in Romance Languages at the University
of Chicago. On 23 June 1924 he married a Frenchwoman, Lillian M. Roche
(whom he called “Lee”), a junior at the University of Chicago. In June 1925
Galpin left for France, ostensibly to study French; but by this time he was be-
coming enraptured by music, and he devoted much of his time to its study. Lee
objected to this change in Galpin’s intellectual horizons and decided to return
to Appleton; it was on her way home that she stopped off in New York, briefly
meeting Lovecraft and his wife and later complaining that the room in which
she was lodged for a night—an apartment in the boarding house at 169 Clinton
Street where Lovecraft and his wife Sonia dwelt—was infested with bedbugs.
By this time the two men’s friendship had cooled somewhat. Lovecraft, in
1927, expressed a certain bewilderment at the change in Galpin’s interests
when he noted, “The boy for whom I predicted the quickest success—a veri-
table infant marvel whose cerebral gymnastics left me beaten and amazed—
has dropped literature altogether and is desperately studying music in an effort
to become a composer . . .”6 When Galpin returned from France in 1926, he
became an instructor in French and Italian at Northwestern University; but he
remained devoted to music, notably piano and composition. In 1930 he ob-
tained his M.A. in music at Northwestern, then spent a year (1931–32) in
Paris; but this time when he returned, in the midst of the Depression, he
found no position available to him at Northwestern, so he went on to Apple-
ton and took a job at Lawrence College.
Galpin reports that the letters from 1932 onward probably survive in their
entirety. It was at this time that Galpin, although having destroyed many Love-
craft letters a few years earlier, decided to reestablish contact. He found Love-
craft a changed man, and one gains the impression that Lovecraft found Galpin
changed also—and perhaps not entirely for the better. The philosophical dis-
cussions of 1933–34 seem to reveal an impatience on Lovecraft’s part at Gal-
pin’s growing mysticism and emotionalism, a far cry from the steely intellectual
sharpness that Galpin had exhibited a decade earlier. As with many other corre-
spondents, Lovecraft expatiated upon the economic and political situation in
the nation and the world, but there is little here that we do not find in other
letters of the period. Galpin continued to display intellectual vagaries, produc-

6. HPL to Zealia Brown Reed (Bishop), 28 August 1927 (SL 2.161).