Here is the final instalment of my notes on the Letters to Family volumes.
Lovecraft states that his edition of Poe was a cheap one, until he was given a more handsome illustrated edition in the late 1920s.
For Lovecraft, in the 1920s, “my favorite Downyflake doughnuts” was the fare for breakfast and eaten with cheese. “Untouched by human hands” proclaims the marketing of the 1930s.
Gervaise Butler was “that young friend of Loveman’s” (p. 737), further confirming my idea (see my earlier post) that he was not the older dance critic of the same name. Earlier in the Letters to Family we also learn that Loveman had a string of young male proteges.
Lovecraft had acquired a book on the practice of drawing in January 1929, and wistfully still hoped he might one day improve at the art.
He was greatly impressed by “my new acquaintance Troop” (p. 744-746), but it appears this brilliant fellow (Oxford and Harvard) has not yet been identified.
In April 1929 he saw a marvellously arranged exhibition of “the strange and sinister deep-sea fishes discovered by William Beebe on his Arcturus expedition” [1925]. This might seem to contradict the recent claim that interest in deep-sea biology was effectively in abeyance from 1900-1945. In January 1934 he saw the newly opened Hall of Oceanic Life (later the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life) at the American Museum of Natural History. Science may well have been largely uninterested in deep-water biology, but celebrity explorers and the public were evidently still occasionally fascinated.
Book on William Beebe.
The Hall being refurbished, probably in the early 1950s.
Lovecraft plotted a tale for his friend Orton (pages 747, 748, 749 x 2, 752) as a way of repaying him for copious hospitality. Seemingly this was all plot, as “Orton can write the prose but has no plot ideas”, and also involved adding motivation while untangling contradictions. “Wednesday evening I spent devising a complicated plot for his coming story.” This was April 1929, and two more sessions saw the synopsis to a “tentative conclusion”. He gives no indication of the nature of the tale, and the footnotes can shine no light on its survival or folding into a later Lovecraft tale. A few weeks later, perhaps made gun-shy by intensive plotting sessions with Lovecraft, Orton teamed up with a young crank-’em-out plot-maker (who Lovecraft found rather uncouth) with the aim of targeting the “cheap magazines”.
He recalls that he saw Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the Opera House, aged 7.
In 1929 Frank Belknap Long acquired a large “night-black were-hound” as a pet, and Lovecraft helped to walk it through the streets of New York City.
Lovecraft gives the address of his regular “Jake’s restaurant in Canal Street”, which he later describes in May 1930 as growing “rabbly” in terms of clientele, mentioning rough stevedores and trucking men who worked the dock-side. Trucking presumably means the operators of ship-unloading hand-trucks, not drivers of 18-wheelers.
Munn drove a high-explosives nitro-glycerine truck for high wages. (p. 858).
Lovecraft did actually make good on his comedy-threat to mail home a sea-horse from the aquarium (p. 800), a visit which I have a post on. Presumably it was not live, but I think it was possible to ship such things live by mail in those days.
In the Philadelphia museums he saw “a gigantic sphinx”.
In spring 1929 he was reading Time, Scribner’s, and Harper’s magazines. At the end of his life he was reading Scribner’s when he had a chance to get to the reading room of the Providence Public Library.
“West Deerfield — what visions and memories that name evokes!” (p. 807)
He read Kruch’s “work on Poe” in early summer 1929.
He recalled that 1926 was a superb year for the aurora (‘northern lights’).
He was still wearing “arrow softs” collars into early summer 1930, but found them increasingly difficult to obtain in the shops. These appear to have been a brand, with many types. Presumably he favoured their older and more conventional forms.
By summer 1930 the family’s repair-tailor appears to be a Mr. Seagrave, in Somerset St. (p. 852). Lovecraft was anticipating seeing his old Providence pal Eddy again at this point (p. 855), and also Kleiner.
He found the cinema of 1929-1930 mostly very tedious, despite the advent of the new “talking device”. Though he was impressed by the African adventure movie Trader Horn (1930) and felt “the atmosphere of cryptic Africa in every inch of it”. Still available in a fine print today. The 1975 remake was a dire quickie made with old Tarzan footage, incidentally.
He makes a lone remark, the only one that I know of, which indicates he saw the news-reels that then accompanied most cinema shows at that time. Which means he must also have seen the cartoon shorts.
He read the Montague Summers book on vampires in early June 1930. Whitehead gave him a present of Paul Morand’s book Black Magic, which was Morand’s account of his travels in Sub-Saharan Africa. Both feed into my notion that Lovecraft would have explored ideas about Africa’s Ancient Roman frontier and vampires, had he lived.
At Whitehead’s informal local boys’ club in Florida, Lovecraft read not only a now-lost ‘re-written from memory’ version of “The Cats of Ulthar” but also his “The Outsider”. The latter had appeared in the latest Weird Tales, which Whitehead presumably had mailed to him and was thus available in the house. (p. 906). Such clubs are usually split in two by age, and I would imagine the younger boys heard “The Cats of Ulthar”, while the older ones heard “The Outsider” at a later session.
Lovecraft talked of his “gold bows”, meaning his spectacles. Solid gold would presumably not cause an allergic skin reaction.
He did “quite a bit on a new story” in June 1930, but quit it when he heard of a rejection from Weird Tales editor Wright. The tale and theme are unknown.
He revisited the Cloisters in New York City, albeit in a blazing July rather than in more suitably medieval mist and fog. (p. 943). I have a long post on the Cloisters.
In July 1931 Arthur Leeds was running a Coney Island bookshop (p. 935), revealed a page later to be The Half Moon on Surf Ave., the main drag. Lovecraft purchased there a 10c copy of Beowulf in “a good school translation” and presumably later read it. Possibly the bookshop was in the lobby of The Half Moon Hotel (opened 1927) on Coney Island, later a haunt of 1930s gangsters.
He visited the Museum of Modern Art and only made the terse observation that… “The collection did not greatly impress me”. He went from there to see real gorillas and found them vastly more interesting than the MoMA, even witnessing the creatures standing and chest-drumming. Seeing them for the first time, outside of cinema newsreels, he found the species to be “a very sinister-looking customer”.
In September 1931 he managed to replace the Atlas supplement for Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens, having lost his inherited original in March 1926.
Leeds was a strong anti-communist at Christmas 1932, as he and Lovecraft did their best to persuade Long out of his communist affectations.
He read Pitkin’s History of Human Stupidity over Christmas 1932.
John H. Briss was one of Lovecraft’s correspondents (p. 960).
In January 1934 Lovecraft writes briefly of Morton’s luminous rock collection (p. 967), being rocks “which shine with strange colours”. It was located in the attic of the Patterson Museum, which Morton ran. Earlier we learn that his friend Morton also wrote weird poetry (p. 757).
He skimmed a borrowed book on Mu, probably The Lost Continent of Mu (1926).
He read a sheaf of recent unpublished stories by Arthur Leeds and gave his opinion to Leeds… “Some are really rather good” he observed in a letter. In January 1935 Leeds was working for the winter in a 4th Ave. bookstore in New York City, and there he pointed the visiting Lovecraft to a cheap copy of the old gothic horror The Monk.
By March 1936 Lovecraft was buying catnip by the box-full (p. 984), commenting on his “new box”. He habitually kept some on his person, in case he encountered a kitty that needed enticing.
Toward the end of his life he evidently took up, once again, his exploratory walks around urban Providence. For instance he encountered an abandoned dome and explored the “monstrous ruin” (p. 990). Seemingly trespassing, “I stepped inside the spectral abyss — a mere dot in the midst of utterly empty shadowy immensity.” HPL, urban explorer… before urban exploring was a thing.
He saw Peck’s Providence show at the Art Club in 1936, and recalled he had seen the earlier show in 1928 (p. 1036). I have a post on Peck.
He fondly recalled “the old Sea View line” as once marking one of the boundaries of his youthful world. (p. 1037). This was a trolley-car line operated by The Rhode Island Company. The line appears to have ended at Narragansett Pier, suggesting this was once a terminus of Lovecraft’s young world. Shipwrecks on the shingle and a fanciful water-tower could have been memorable items for a young lad.
One wonders if there were other large and whimsical creatures on the Narragansett Pier sea-front, and how Cthulhu-like they became.