In this week’s ‘Picture Postal’ post, Marblehead. In Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story-ideas, we read…

No. 81   Marblehead — dream — burying hill — evening — unreality

It was a story never to be written, though perhaps parts of “The Festival” and the “The Strange High House in the Mist” hint at what it might have been like. Are there then pictures of Marblehead’s ‘burying hill’, which inspired the story-idea? Indeed there are.

Here we can just about see an indication of the wealth of macabre carvings to be found on the stones. We also see the ground in relation to distant buildings further around the coastline.

However, in the above picture we see summer. Lovecraft would have first seen the burying ground in the Christmas-time snow, and toward dusk…

I came to Marblehead in the twilight, & gazed long upon its hoary magick. I threaded the tortuous, precipitous streets, some of which an horse can scarce climb, & in which two waggons cannot pass. I talked with old men & revell’d in old scenes, & climb’d pantingly over the crusted cliffs of snow to the windswept height where cold winds blew over desolate roofs & evil birds hovered…” — H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Kleiner, 11th January 1923.

Yes, Lovecraft was tromping through snow. Evidently at that time, if wrapped up warm and keeping moving, he was not so averse to cold weather. It turns out there are several pictures of the summit in the snow, recorded by Samuel Chamberlain. This photographer seems to have been here c. 1928 onwards, so perhaps the pictures date from a time when Lovecraft was alive and visiting. Here I’ve toned and burned the plain archival scans of the negatives, as the photographer would have done at the time on prints for public presentation…

Compare this with the postcard above, and it is the same view. The same pair of distinctive headstones and fenced plot are seen.

… atop all was the peak; Old Burying Hill, where the dark headstones clawed up thro’ the virgin snow like the decay’d fingernails of some gigantick corpse.” (Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner)

From the round dome of rock above the burying ground, Lovecraft also looked across to the old town. To see his fabled view of Marblehead with its many-lighted windows.

The view across to Marblehead.

Immemorial pinnacle of fabulous antiquity! As evening came I look’d down at the quiet village where the lights came out one by one; at the calm contemplative chimney-pots & antique gables silhouetted against the west; at the glimmering small-paned windows … Shades of the past! How compleatly, O Mater Novanglia, am I moulded of thy venerable flesh & as one with thy century’d soul!

He dates and times the experience very precisely…

… huddled and archaick roofs under the snow in the delirious sunset glory of four p.m., Dec. 17, 1922!!! I did not know until an hour before that I should ever behold such a place as Marblehead, and I did not know until that moment itself the full extent of the wonder I was to behold. I account that instant — about 4:05 to 4:10 p.m., Dec. 17, 1922 — the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence.

He visited many times thereafter, and in better weather. Here is another from Samuel Chamberlain, looking up at the low rock-dome of the hilltop in the early springtime. With the burial ground running narrowly just below, along a short and turfy terrace.

From the summit, evidently one could also have a view over the ocean below.

On the rocky dome just above the Burying Ground, looking out to sea.

Although a 1909 picture-map shows the Ground is located relatively inland, rather than dropping down to shoreline rocks…

Despite the deathly location from which he took his view, in the waterfronts and lanes of the old town of Marblehead itself Lovecraft felt that he…

“had sojourned for a time in the past itself — not the past of books, but the living, breathing streets. Since then I have dreamt of nothing but Marblehead … old streets and gables and chimney-pots, and the endless maze of fanlighted Colonial doorways. … ancient houses set at all possible angles on moss-grown rock foundations and weird terraces …” (Selected Letters I).

Pictures from the Samuel Chamberlain Photograph Negatives Collection, 1928-1971, held at the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.

I’ve been looking again through the Smithsonian’s collection of online pictures, now they number some 4.5 million. That compares with 2.5 million at launch.

A few finds…

1) There was a Ward Manor in Red Hook, NYC, of all places. Which may be of interest to Mythos writers. It evidently had antiquarian pretensions and ‘had a lake in the ravine’ in its near 1,000-acre grounds. At the time Lovecraft was in New York it was essentially disused by the owner who preferred to live on Long Island. One recalls the mysterious preserved estate in Lovecraft’s “He”. It was purchased from him in 1926 and fitted out as a children’s home, seemingly after Lovecraft had left the city and returned to Providence. All of which could be setting it up for a role in a Mythos story or RPG.

2) The month of May in the back-alleys of Columbia Heights. The locale was where Hart Crane and Loveman lived.

3) Provincetown waterfront, seen from the sea.

I stopped off at Boston for an all-day boat trip to Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. This village I found to be somewhat overrated, but the sail – my first experience on the open sea out of sight of land – was well worth the price of the excursion. To be on limitless water is to have the fantastic imagination stimulated in the most powerful way. …” (24th September, 1930

Just over a year later he wrote “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

4) Brown University Dept. of Mathematics, the “Great Dodecahedron”. Not the Trapezohedron of “Haunter”, but might Lovecraft have seen a range of such models on a visit with Morton? Including a Trapezohedron? Though doubtless Brown was not alone in modelling such things for display, and they would also have been seen in various museums of science and in magazines such as Popular Mechanics etc.

5) My various searches failed to discover an early ‘faery’ skyline of New York from near the Brooklyn Bridge, seen somewhat as Lovecraft had encountered it. The closest I could find at the Smithsonian was this nocturne by Johann Berthelsen, c. 1913.

6) A nice find. A vivid sketch-recording of “Snowstorm in the Village” (1925). Being Greenwich Village, New York City. Evocative of the harsh winters in New York City in those days. Lovecraft moved to his Red Hook room just a day or so before the biggest snowstorm in living memory hit the city (1st-3rd January 1925), so this is the same snowstorm. The central railway seen here is ‘the Elevated’, which Lovecraft often mentions in his New York letters.

This led me to this fine lithograph by Ellison Hoover, held elsewhere, depicting a circa late-1930s snowstorm. In the middle-ground is one of the key New York City libraries which Lovecraft frequented. I seem to recall this library was where he researched a lot of Supernatural Literature during the winter months of 1925/26. I find that New York also saw several very heavy record-breaking snowstorms in February 1926, though Lovecraft’s letters to his aunt at this time don’t mention any problems arising from these.