Monthly Archives: March 2021

Loveman’s “young” friend Gervaise Butler

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Historical context

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Here I take a brief look at Samuel Loveman’s “young” friend Gervaise Butler. H.P. Lovecraft him met several times in short succession in Boston in early 1929, in the company of Loveman. Later that springtime Lovecraft remarked in April 1929 that he had been “seeing” young Gervaise, seemingly without Loveman, and a year later he recalled that this had been in New York City. Lovecraft also refers to him as being a “find” made by Loveman. “Find” being an amateur journalism term, used in terms of recruitment. Lovecraft calls Butler “young” several times, but the footnotes to the Letters to Family have him as born in 1888, making him two years older than Lovecraft. That didn’t seem quite right to me. Why would he repeatedly refer to someone older than himself as “young”, and do so across multiple letters? He did occasional use the term “good old”, mostly for old men, but that is not the sense he is using “young” here. Could there have been another Gervaise Butler? Indeed there was. Here are the two candidates, then…

1. There was a Gervaise Butler who left Bloomington High School, Illinois, in 1922. He was an boy actor with the local troupe, able to play “the comic bell boy” in 1923, and by 1927 he was film critic of the Bloomington Pantagraph. Bloomington is about 60 miles SW of Chicago. The dates would make him “young”, if he had left High School at 18 that would place his birth date at around 1904. Nearly 15 years younger than Lovecraft, and aged 25 if they had met in Boston in 1929. A short partially accessible biography in Trend reveals more and confirms the 1904 date and suggests a writer…

GERVAISE BUTLER. Born in 1904 at Bloomington, Illinois. Mr. Butler has, since that time, pretty well covered the United States and Europe. He studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; he reviewed books for the San …

My feeling is that the “studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley” covers his 1924-26 period.

2. There was another Gervaise Butler, from Muscatine, Iowa. He was the manager of the Doubleday bookshop (Greybar Building, Manhattan, NYC) in 1932 (Publishers Weekly). One F. Minot Weld (poss. b. 1910) and Gervaise Notley Butler opened their own bookshop in 1933. The shop closed in 1955 when F. Minot Weld retired. (Publishers Weekly). A Publishers Weekly profile of Weld and Butler (only very partially available online) states he had been writing from childhood in Iowa, had seen publication in The Century magazine and others. In the 1930s he “became owner and editor of Decorative Furniture” magazine. Given the “N.” this seems likely to be the same Gervaise N. Butler who later wrote extensively as a dance critic for the Dance Observer (1934-) and who served on the board of the title. He it must be who has the 1888 birth date given in Letters to Family.

Either would be fitted to be Loveman’s friend. But Lovecraft’s repeated “young” does rather suggest that Loveman’s friend could be the other Gervaise Butler, born 1904 and picked up by Loveman as a 24 year-old amateur journalism protégé and “find” — most likely on his coming to New York City circa 1928.

February on Tentaclii

01 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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The mighty sun-ward wall of Tentaclii Towers slowly thaws, in the earliest spring sunshine. In the groves beyond the moat, the pussy-willow buds fluff a little. Catkins dangle and twist in the chill wind. A low sunlight browses over a stack of bargain-priced books containing Lovecraft’s letters, each begging to be read with note-taking. But for now three Tolkien tomes must take precedence.

February brought many new discoveries about Lovecraft’s places and people. I took a look at the Providence Courthouse and especially the louver-boarded tower that Lovecraft could see from his windows at 66 College St., and found there an unexpected connection with “The Haunter of the Dark”. I also sauntered down Riverside Drive, NYC, in the 1920s, a place where we almost lost Lovecraft — had he taken up a dare he could easily have become a gory squish on the railroad tracks that lay far below a Riverside Drive bridge. This led to me considering the place in relation to Morton’s apartment in Harlem and the Roerich Gallery — I saw that one could walk between these points by going down the pleasant shorewalk. Lovecraft and Morton might even have walked on south along the shore and into Hell’s Kitchen to see McNeil, but that possibility is not yet confirmed. I also took a look at Morton’s actual north Harlem building at No. 211 and discovered more about the curious fellow who owned it. I was also pleased to discover more about the whereabouts and doings of Lovecraft’s friend Arthur Leeds, including the possible location of an unpublished memoir of his life among 1930s crime writers and new data on his fronting of a Chicago human freak show in 1927. As a lead-in to this Leeds post, a ‘Picture postals’ post was on Jean Libbera, a freak-show attraction and (accordingly to Leeds) a Lovecraft fan.

This month a Patreon patron asked for more about the attempts of “HPL & Robert E. Howard” to meet. Not having much Howard material to hand yet, my answer may have appeared a bit basic to Howard scholars. But I think I successfully outlined the three points in time at which they could have met. I also looked this month at some of the historical context for Lovecraft’s ‘cats fly to the moon’ idea in his Dream Quest, and along the way noticed a new source for his early local newspaper column on the possibility of man one day reaching the Moon.

Not many new non-fiction books in this short month. Lovecraft: The Great Tales is a weighty new non-fiction survey of the tales. Old World Footprints also reappeared as a reprint book, newly annotated and richly illustrated. In Lovecraft-related books, I noted a crop of new introductory books of interest to those curious about ‘the Stoic Lovecraft’, and pointed out the need for a more accessible ‘For Beginners’ type book on Lovecraft’s philosophy.

In journals, the first issue of S.T. Joshi’s annual scholarly mega-journal Penumbra became available in ebook, and the new Spectral Realms #14 is said to be a themed ‘poems about Lovecraft’ issue. The Fossil #386 appeared and in it David Goudsward presented a rich seam of new data about the early life of Lovecraft’s friend Mrs Miniter. One can see why she appreciated the sober Lovecraft and the amateur journalism life, after an early life with a drunken husband. Several reviews of Lovecraft items popped up in newspapers and zines, and were linked to and partly translated if needed.

In music, Joshi’s Songs from Lovecraft and Others is forthcoming. Another Tentaclii post brought news of a forthcoming new psychobilly album by the band The Arkhams (U.S. backwoods rockabilly with Lovecraftian lyrics), and a successful Kickstarter for Dunsany Dreaming: An Eldritch Folk Album. In audio I noted that the novel The Wanderings of Alhazred is now available as a nine-hour audiobook, a fictional account of the life of Lovecraft’s Alhazred.

In the visual arts, I gathered the Druillet covers used for a popular edition of Lovecraft in French. A Call of Cthulhu Graphic Novel is forthcoming, seemingly pitched at the slow readers in the youth/schools market. Apparently Netflix is also planning a one-off TV-movie vaguely involving Cthulhu. But don’t get too excited, as the title makes it sound like a quickie Indiana Jones spoof/parody. The Myst-like Lovecraftian videogame The Shore was released and seems to have been a modest critical success but with the usual first-day technical niggles taking the shine off reviews. The lone developer of The Shore is said to be working on a VR expansion for it, so it’s probably one for occasional gamers to keep on hold for a year until there’s a bug-fix patch and expansion.

Finally, a big crowdfunder was launched to purchase the Lovecraft-Long letters (not to be confused with the Long-Lovecraft letters, mentioned by S.T. Joshi in a recent blog post). The letters will go to the Brown repository if the campaign is a success. Many are said to be unpublished.

That’s it for February 2021. Please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon to help Tentaclii continue through 2021. Even $1 a month is encouraging.

Lovecraft’s tailor

01 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries

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The new Letters to Family reveals the 1920s Providence tailor… “Bernstein, late of the Golden Ball Inn”. It appears he was the go-to for substantial clothing repairs and alterations required by H.P. Lovecraft and his aunts. “Late” likely indicates the business had moved from Benefit Street.

A 1975 obituary for his son (above) reveals that Mr. Bernstein the tailor was also a Providence correspondent for the Jewish Daily Forward. This was a large-circulation Yiddish newspaper of record and culture, published nationally from New York City. The archives of the newspaper are online, but no article by a “Morris Bernstein” is to be found. Most likely the name does occur there, but in Yiddish. Or else his name was not given on his Providence reports. Unfortunately this prevents me determining the dates when he was the newspaper’s Providence correspondent.

The Jewish Daily Telegraph had a short report in English at Christmas 1926, from a “Chicago Correspondent, Morris Bernstein”. This is the only time his by-line appears there, and they have the whole run online and with an exemplary search-tool and results presentation. Could this actually be the Providence Bernstien, picking up news of an important ‘cosmic’ experiment near Chicago, from a chance conversation with Lovecraft, and stringing it along to the news service?

Prof. Michelson’s invention … measures the speed of a beam of light flashed from one mountain peak to another. He will use the interferometer when he once more conducts the world famous experiment which involves the measuring of the speed of the earth, and with it, the whole solar system through space.

His son (1910-1976) went on to become a leading man in Providence, a patron of the arts and a pioneer of persuasive advertising methods. Lovecraft was unlikely to have encountered the son, who started his ad agency in 1941 several years after Lovecraft’s death.

Still, this adds to the picture. Lovecraft’s jobbing tailor was likely also a working journalist, and his son had a very remarkable flair for words and a strong interest in the arts. These facts may hint at why Lovecraft favoured Mr. Bernstein above other Providence tailors who he might have patronised, beyond simply his presence in the historic Golden Ball Inn.

My thanks to Ken Faig for his new Moshassuck Monograph No. 33 on the “Golden Ball Inn”, which prompted me to see what I could find online about Lovecraft’s tailor.

The Golden Ball in the early 1910s. Possible side-entrance to tailoring workshops in the upper-back? (Picture not from the Moshassuck Monograph)