This week, a set of hand-drawn postcards sent to Lovecraft. My thanks to the Brown University repository.
From 16th November 1926 Frank Belknap Long began to send a ‘comic-strip by postcards’ to his good friend H.P. Lovecraft. Having recently escaped the ‘pest zone’ of New York City, and recovered his wits, the master thus found one ‘episode’ per day being slipped through his letter-box in Providence from New York. While Long’s art is crude, the biographical and professional insights are of some interest. The final card is not addressed or stamped, so may have been delivered in person or enclosed inside a letter.
1. Randolph Carter and the Priests of Baal-Naplong. While attempting to escape Baal-Naplong (New York?), HPL is caught up on the city’s wall and hangs there ‘invert’ and upside down. He utters vital sentences which are cut in the sword battle between Frank Belknap Long (wielding the Scimitar of Sophistication) in battle against Weird Tales / Farnsworth Wright (wielding, curiously, the Sword of Modernism. Perhaps the irony was intended?).
2. Randolph Carter defies the daemons of Baal-Naplong. Having escaped the city of Baal-Naplong, HPL is perused by daemons from that city. He wields the sword of Puritan Ethics against various monsters, which represent literary, critical and artistic tendencies. He appears to wear a Puritan-style hat.
3. Randolph Carter pursued by an Octopus — that is more shoggoth than octopus. HPL had become rather plump during his early stay in New York, but later took to a ‘reducing’ diet and often this veered near to starvation.
4. Randolph Carter goes in for Genealogy. This may suggest family history as an activity that HPL found solace in when he first returned home from New York City, as he had in the mystery years after 1908. It may also hint that Long was aware that HPL’s family tree was not as blue-blooded as he might have wished for.
5. Randolph Carter indulges in a slight altercation. In Providence Cemetery he battles a “Dr. Calef” for possession of a manifesting spirit. The reference is to Robert Calef, author of More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700).
6. Top: The spirit of Ivan Lampisz, deemed a long-dead medieval poet by the gravestone inscription seen in the previous card, seems to engage in some sort of personality transference with Randolph Carter, which thus enables Lampisz to be released from the spirit world. Lampisz ascends and is welcomed by the higher poetic spirits of Baudelaire, Shelley and Swinburne.
Bottom: Randolph Carter defends the 18th Century. Revivified and rid of the spirit, Carter arises and defends himself and his ugly Georgian Cyclops (i.e. Georgian poetry) against another risen spirit of the graveyard, the Spirit of Eternal Loveliness.
7. Finally, Randolph Carter is seized by three ghouls (Flaming Youth / Victorianism / the 20th Century) and taken by them to the top of a church tower to be dismembered. Lesser horrors (ghost, winged hound or ‘The Hound’ or perhaps a gargoyle, large snake) appear to be circling the church.
A quote from Poe, “The Bells” concludes: “They that dwell up in the steeple, all alone … They are neither man nor woman”. This seems a rather curious choice of emphasis, from the original…
And the people -ah, the people –
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone –
They are neither man nor woman –
They are neither brute nor human –
They are Ghouls
In Long’s choice is there a subtle inference that HPL risks becoming such a ‘third sex’ or ‘intersex’ type, “neither man nor woman”? Which was how homosexuality was vaguely understood and framed, in 1926, following the reception of the new Hirschfeldian sexology from Berlin. A few months earlier Lovecraft had referred to his close friend Samuel Loveman, a gay man, “if Samuelus isn’t a flaming youth still, for all his barren pole and uncertain equator”. The “pole” and “equator” here are presumably allusions to Loveman’s balding head and slightly expanding paunch. This was said in a June 1926 letter to Long. Had Long looked up the discreet allusion apparently being proffered (in a discussion on poetry) then he could only have found it in Shakespeare…
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax
And melt in her own fire. Proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge
Perhaps then the apparent not-so-subtle warning offered by Long’s last card was the whole point of the comic strip? Did Long somehow fear that if Lovecraft remained “all alone” and yet also under the sway of the “flaming youth” (Loveman) by correspondence and poetry, then there was a risk that certain latent platonic tendencies might somehow be encouraged to flower in the master? And with “no shame”, too? That the final card had to be delivered in person or inside a letter, rather than risk one of the aunts seeing it in the morning mail, does seem to enhance the likelihood of “neither man nor woman” being intended to have a personal as well as poetic meaning.
Note that Lovecraft did refer to Long as a “flaming youth” a couple of times. But that was four years later, in 1930, and the context shifted the meaning much more toward ‘flaming young fool’. Lovecraft was at that point chiding Long for not having written a ‘dinosaur egg hatches’ story, back when Lovecraft had suggested it to him and no-one else had yet written one.
