More notes on insights gleaned from Letters to Family…

* In 1925 Lovecraft adored a screen recreation of the Italian Renaissance, as seen in the Lillian Gish silent movie Romola (1924). He saw this in New York in August 1925, during his short New York story-writing period. He liked it mainly for the costumes, lavish on-location backdrops, Italian physiognomy, and the painstaking attention to historical detail, but felt the acting was merely “adequate”. Picture-play magazine also had a similar opinion, that “Romola is beautiful but dull”. The movie is now newly on Archive.org with English inter-titles and no music. It was previously only available there with Portuguese hard-coded inter-titles and generic silent-movie music. The English version has slightly better compression, but is obviously from the same print. On Amazon there is a streaming version and reviews deem it “unwatchable”, “one big blur” and the captions “unreadable” and “chopped off”. However, as usual, Amazon is misleading its customers and a little more digging finds that these reviews are for the old VHS tape Grapevine release. An Amazon bot has been allowed to idly copy the reviews over to the new page. The English Archive.org copy seems likely to be the best that can be had. With adjustments in VLC Media Player, and shrunk to about 5″ at tablet size, it is watchable and the titles can be read.

* Lovecraft also planned to see “a fantastic cinema” on the evening of 11th August 1925, the same day he wrote the story “He”. Both Loveman and Leeds were eager to see the movie with him, suggesting it had more than the usual appeal. But a broken morning ferry at Elizabethtown threw the movie plan into disarray. The movie is not named. Coming so soon before “The Call of Cthulhu”, if might have pushed him in another direction, and we would never had had “Cthulhu”. What could the movie have been? The British adaptation of She was not released in the USA until 1926. The Phantom of the Opera had not yet been released. Nor had the werewolf movie Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest. It can’t have been The Unholy Three as that was not released until 16th August and was seen later without reference to a missed screening. Of 1924 movies, The Hands of Orlac was not released in the USA until 1928. The comedy-horror-melodrama The Monster is a possibility. The French Le fantome du Moulin-Rouge is another possibility, although it was also a comedy-horror. The German anthology movie Waxworks seems the most likely, which had seen a November 1924 release and could still have been running in New York.

* Lovecraft wrote “He” on 11th August 1925 (wrongly stated as 18th Aug in the Lovecraft Encyclopaedia timeline, though the entry itself is correct). But on the morning of Saturday 15th he returned to the same Elizabethtown park in which he had written “He”. There he outlined and began writing another tale…

I settled myself as on Tuesday in Scott Park — beginning a horror tale I had in mind. This I sketched out and began filling in when my labour was interrupted by the advent of one of those curious stranger-addressing characters whom one meets now and again […] He was interested in the weird material he found me writing”. (pages 350-51)

The old fellow turned out to be the nation’s leading expert on bison and their care, and they had a long and amiable chat about the shaggy beasts. Thus, Lovecraft had his very own ‘Porlock’. What was this interrupted and seemingly uncompleted tale? He had already written “Red Hook” and “He” and got down the gist of and plotted “Cthulhu”. “In the Vault” was not written until mid September 1925, and was anyway not a story he “had in mind” but was an idea suggested by Tryout editor Charles W. Smith.

The possibilities would be:

i) a first try at “Cool Air” (later written February 1926);
ii) a first try at “In the Vault” (if Smith had suggested the idea by then, it having been “sketched out” sometime in August);
iii) a first stab at part of “The Call of Cthulhu”;
iv) at this time Lovecraft talks in letters of his “Salem novel” or a novelette of “Salem Horrors”, though this was not yet written. Possibly related to the Commonplace Book‘s 1925 “Witches’ Hollow novel”, though this was obviously a school-story and thus a planned collaboration with Whitehead.

Can his telegraphic 1925 Diary throw light in the incident? He records an evening spent with Loveman at the insalubrious Tiffany cafe on the edge of Red Hook, haunt of gangsters and petty hoodlums, after which… “HPL stay[s] up to explore with pad & pencil”, which sounds like experimenting all night with story ideas. His Diary then makes no mention of the Porlockian stranger he met the following morning, and the entry for this time is simply…

… ferry to Stat. Isl. in dawn — across to Eliz Ferry — sunrise — Eliz[abethtown]

Despite it being a Saturday, on his return he was immediately plunged into an unexpected maelstrom of urgent work and complex logistics relating to his circle. Presumably the dawn tale was forgotten. So all in all it sounds to me like this was an experimental New York story arising from his “explor[ing] with pad & pencil”, a tale perhaps later mislaid or destroyed or folded into some other tale?

We perhaps get a glimpse of the tale in the Commonplace Book in the second half of 1925, with the items here slightly re-structured to make more of a modern-gnostic story outline…

A secret language spoken by a very few old men … Hideous world superimposed on visible world — gate through — power guides narrator to ancient and forbidden book with directions for access. … Someone or something cries in fright at sight of the rising moon, as if it were something strange. … Explorer enters strange land where some atmospheric quality darkens the sky to virtual blackness — marvels therein.

As such the November 1927 dream-fragment “The Book” may seem to connect with these 1925 ideas. However, note that Joshi is not convinced that there was no later Derlethian padding… “the latter portion of the text may not be Lovecraft’s at all: several sentences here are distinctly un-Lovecraftian in style.”