Added to the Open Lovecraft page, a mostly well-researched new (June 2013) local history article on the Arthur Goodenough farmhouse, “The Levi Goodenough Farm 1783” with lots of new pictures of the site. Although the short section discussing “The Whisperer in Darkness” is bizarre. The farmhouse was the home of Arthur H. Goodenough, the elderly amateur press man and friend of Lovecraft living near Brattleboro. His home was in part the inspiration for the setting of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Interesting to learn that it’s set directly back into the hillside, like the house in “The Dunwich Horror”…
“his house — a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside” (“The Dunwich Horror”).
Mr. Arthur Goodenough, as a younger man.
Investors are currently being sought to help keep the historic site open for visitors.
Interesting historical piece… although I have to VASTLY disagree with the author’s “interpretation” of “Whisperer in Darkness” as some kind of cosmic anti-Bolshevik allegory.
It’s a vaguely interesting idea, although I’m not sure how he would have heard about the atrocities. Sonia H. seems an unlikely informant. And there were then many apologists for Communism active in America, willing to cover things up or howl down such claims as being ‘right-wing propaganda’. On the other hand, Morton was a savvy old anarchist, and may have been aware of the mass killings of anarchists in Russia and their “eradication” by 1929. One suspects that Alfred Galpin was a fascist fellow-traveller, living in fascist Italy in the 1920s – and if so then he may have heard of what was really going on in Russia – but he didn’t correspond with Lovecraft much at that time. So I don’t think the notion can be made to stand up – if Lovecraft wanted to make a topical political point he was far more likely to make it in a straightforward manner in an essay, article, or letter.