I’ve started in on the new and enlarged book of Lovecraft-Galpin letters (thanks to my Patreon patrons for the purchase). These are fronted with the Cole letters, which at first glance promise to be very dull amateur journalism business. But they very soon liven up. Lovecraft starts writing ‘as-if an 18th century gent’ to the new son of the Cole family, and later letters are from New York or illuminate the poverty of the early 1930s. I’m up to about 1934 so far.

We get the name of the 50-cent boat that Lovecraft took to Newport in the depths of the depression, the summer passenger boats having engaged in a price-war. It was not, as it turns out, the salubrious and gleaming liner of postcard dreams. His old tub doubled as the Providence-Newport cow-boat, meaning that Lovecraft shared the journey with moo-ing and slightly bemused cattle. The boat came back later to Providence than the more expensive competitor, and presumably without the cows to provide body-heat, and so Lovecraft found it could be cold even in August.

Also, the book gives the solution to the small problem of the ‘andwheres’. It turns out this curious word was Lovecraft’s own coinage. His friends, being given the whistle-stop tour of Providence in the early 1930s, heard his constant repetition of “And where, but in Providence, would you see such a fine…” used of grassy lanes in the heart of the city, quaint back-street courtyards, relic backyard barns, sublime semi-rural vistas, etc. His friends found this phrase wearing, and so he abbreviated the outburst to a simple one-word “Andwhere…”. This found its way into his letters, when he calls a choice forgotten nook or grassy relic lane an ‘andwhere’ type of place. Thus it was similar, in inventive quality and topophiliac pleasure, to Vita Sackville-West’s later coinage of “through-leaves”. This indicated a small-but-special enjoyment encountered on a walk… such as kicking through dry leaves or running a picked-up stick along iron railings.