Review of the Lovecraft Annual 2022.

Last year’s ‘curry coloured’ Lovecraft Annual 2022 is about to be edged aside by the new ‘brilliant blue’ 2023 issue of the S.T. Joshi edited journal. Thus I thought I should hurry up and post my review. Here it is.

The issue opens with “A Tale of Two Providences: Topographical Realism in “The Haunter of the Dark”, a close study of Lovecraft’s depictions of his own College Hill and the more distant Federal Hill in the city of Providence. The author asks why candles were not lit inside the College Hill study, to try to keep the Haunter at bay by giving at least some light? A valid query, but one perhaps open to objections. There had recently been strong storms and power-cuts, making it likely all the local stores had sold out of candles. But the main objection would be that the protagonist Blake clearly states that he needs to see out into the dark, meaning that his curtains must be open and the interior of the room totally dark. How else can he know if the power has been cut on Federal Hill? Though it’s later made very evident that the Haunter is ‘taking him over’ in some strange way, and perhaps restraining certain of his actions — such as lighting candles. The essay goes on to note that Blake tries to define himself at the end by giving his address, as if standing before a desk in a police station. This leads the author to many interesting points relating to Lovecraft’s own close identification with the fabric and layout of the city of Providence, including that if ‘he was Providence’ as it was circa 1900, then thereafter “every change that affected Providence also affected Lovecraft”.

My own research on “‘Uncle Eddy’: H.P. Lovecraft’s Used Bookseller” follows. I present several newly-found 1940s memoirs of Lovecraft, and test their veracity. Along the way I add to our understanding of the role of the Eddy family in Lovecraft’s life in Providence. This essay is the first investigation of ‘Uncle Eddy’, despite his being mentioned several times in passing in the letters. It shows, I think, what can be done when one ranges across the wealth of new 1920s and 30s resources now becoming freely available via Archive.org, Hathi Trust, Google Books, eBay and in the newly online large collections of the American museums and map collectors. Not to mention the Brown repository, which provided several useful items for my essay.

I wasn’t expecting much from “The Ripple Effect: Star Trek and the Lovecraft Mythos” but I found the essay engrossing, at least in its first sections which offer fascinating information about the impact of Lovecraft on some episodes of the original TV show (1966-69), via Robert Bloch and Samuel Peeples. It may help if the reader is aware of the classic Shatner/Nimoy first Star Trek, rather than all the later versions. But if not, it’s easy enough to view the episodes under discussion. The final section of the essay becomes a re-telling of the plot of Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness”, whereas I would have preferred deeper considerations of the philosophies involved in the context of the cultural dialogue between the 1930s and the mid 1960s.

“Solitary Conversation: A Bakhtinian Exploration of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon”” is next. The author reads the story “Dagon” through the lens of the worthy theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Who is best known in academia for ideas about ‘the carnivalesque’. But here his useful ideas are those about ‘polyphony’ (multiple voices) and the multiple layers of meanings that arise from this — even when we appear to have a single narrator.

““The Essence of Cosmic Mystery”: The Appeal of John Martin’s Paradise Lost Pictures to H.P. Lovecraft” is both well-written and fun, a rare combination for anything concerning Milton. In the first half we learn more about Martin than about Lovecraft, but I still found it an interesting read. Martin comes across as a Lovecraft precursor in the visual arts, dedicated to scenes of a proto-cosmic sweep and in which man is a puny and insignificant figure. Lovecraft felt that this partly arose because Martin, like himself, was technically weak on depicting the human figure but excellent in sweeping vistas and monstrous architecture. An interesting point, technical inability pushing an artist toward certain avenues of expression rather than others. There are no pictures here, all of which should by now be public domain, but one wonders if an illustrated free ebook edition might be possible at some point.

“Lovecraft and the Folklore of Glocester’s Dark Swamp” examines the accounts of the Lovecraft-Eddy trip in search of the swamp. Then, across twenty pages, exhaustively examines a range of previously undetected local lore and history relating to it or to thereabouts. The conclusion is that it’s ultimately impossible to know if Lovecraft or Eddy ever knew of such local lore. But again we see the wealth of unknown material that opens up once independent scholars have free access to online archives.

“A Note on Nodens in Lovecraft’s Mythos” looks at the sparse and transient use of Nodens in Lovecraft’s own work. Sources are pointed out in Machen and elsewhere, though the author doesn’t suggest the Neptune garden on a headland near Magnolia, on a shoreline that Lovecraft and Sonia knew well. One wonders if it was open to the public at certain times in the summer in the 1920s.

The estate (1904-1958) was at the end of Magnolia Beach… “Most summers, we lived in cottages on Magnolia Beach […] The famed Coolidge Estate was built high atop the rocky end of the horseshoe-shaped beach.” (Meredith d’Ambrosio). Demolished due to property taxes in 1958, and the land given to be maintained as a natural park in perpetuity. The red dot indicates the location…

The British archaeological and philological findings on the pagan deity Nodens are recounted (the River Severn, the Vyne ring, Nuada of the Silver Hand, etc) all of which will be familiar ground to many Tolkien scholars. The author also usefully looks at the Noden related idea of the “Great Abyss” of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands and how this and other voids might have related to the crucial early scientific idea of ‘the vacuum’ and the discovery of void spaces in which there seemed (at that time) to be nothingness. The subtle relations of Lovecraft’s work to the hard sciences is under-discussed, and I found this to be a welcome and unexpected turn in the essay.

The essay “Lovecraft’s Garden: Heart’s Blood at the Root” follows, with a long preamble that establishes for the reader the key themes in the uses of gardens and gardening by the Romantics (i.e. the Wordsworth era in English literature). There follows a two or three page survey of gardens in Lovecraft, with a few extracts from letters. Though the author was not able to unearth some very pertinent letters such as…

In childhood I used to haunt such places [florists’ shops] about February, when the strain of hated winter became unbearable. I liked to walk through the long greenhouses & imbibe the atmosphere of warm earth & plant-life, & see the vivid masses of green & floral colour. One of my early doggerel attempts was a description of an hypothetical glass-covered, furnace-heated world of groves & gardens …” (Selected Letters Vol. III, page 138).

A deeper and comprehensive survey of Lovecraft and gardens is needed from someone, I’d suggest. This essay is not it. But it makes a good start. The essay then concludes with a very long examination of Lovecraft’s long poem “The Garden” (1917), written when he was about 26/27. This poem is found to deploy themes and categories that would have been recognisable to the Romantics. The author contends that this early poetic Lovecraft can be understood to be what he terms a “Romantic ‘on the darkside’”. I would be interested in a sequel which might look at the Wildean and continental Decadents and gardens, in relation to Lovecraft.

We then have “The Authorship of The Cancer of Superstition and Lovecraft’s Late Readings on Folklore”, which shows that the Arkham House published text of CoS was hardly written by Eddy. Nor by Lovecraft, at least in the usual way. Rather it was Lovecraft’s short telegraphic synopsis, woven and patched together with a number of extracts that Eddy lifted from books which had been supplied to him for his research. The contribution of Eddy to CoS is thus judged to be about 15% of the total, as printed by Arkham House. On this matter, here are the key Collected Essays notes of Lovecraft’s outline synopsis…

HPL’s synopsis for a book combating superstition, commissioned by Harry Houdini; the work was halted by Houdini’s sudden death on 31st October 1926. His colleague in the Houdini work, C. M. Eddy, Jr., then attempted to write out the synopsis.

Joshi’s I Am Providence has it that this attempt at expansion was…

clearly by Eddy; I see little of Lovecraft’s actual prose in it, although no doubt many of the facts cited in it were supplied by him.

The author has established the book sources used to construct Eddy’s patchwork of post-Houdini expansion. The examination of these titles and authors leads to the suggestion that preparatory ‘Houdini reading’ for this joint project might have influenced the story “The Call of Cthulhu”. In terms of ideas about cultic idolatory, sunken temples, earthquakes as ’caused by the gods’, and astrology (“the stars were right”). Possibly, but Lovecraft was playing with such ideas long before that. So were many in Weird Tales, not to mention the Theosophists. Recall also the countless real ancient idols and primal carvings Lovecraft would have seen when visiting the New York museums, immediately prior to “Cthulhu”. Reading was not his only source of inspiration.

I wondered how many of the ‘book paragraphs’, the ones Eddy evidently had access to and largely plagiarised, might have actually come to him via Houdini’s notes (made from Houdini’s extensive book collection)? But I don’t recall this point being addressed.

Next is “Painting in Word Shadows: The Role of the Hidden and Unknown to the Reader in Lovecraft”. This surveys the main stories for examples of ‘unseen but seen’. For instance, when we see Cthulhu…

We are seeing the narrator’s highly condensed version of Johansen’s diary, which in turn is his censored version of something he did not truly understand written long after the events occurred, in a language other than the writer’s.

The artful obsurement of his monsters, while simultaneously depicting them in a manner in which the readers can paradoxically see them clearly for themselves, remains a cornerstone in the power of his work.

We then head into the book reviews. Steven J. Mariconda offers the reader a long and initially discursive chapter-sized look at Joshi’s The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft (2021, though here “2012”) along with Joshi’s Journals 1974-1987 (2021-22, three volumes). Mariconda eventually comes to the judgement that Lovecraft’s enduring appeal is partly because…

he found the instruments for probing and documenting his own consciousness using the language of symbolism. […] he developed an art divorced from didacticism and ethical significance. He was devoted entirely to his vision, striving to embody it with perfection of form and complexity of technique. Over time he succeeded: his tales became progressively more intricate and layered. […] His concerns are not transitory [and mundane, but] speak to two fundamental issues — the unknown of the external world, and the isolation of existing inside a human mind.

And he did this when there was a growing need for a “new basis in art”, an art enhanced by the new sciences and their many interlocking revelations about humanity and the cosmos.

At a more workaday level Mariconda picks out a few entertaining ‘digs’ from Joshi’s new books. But overall observes that…

a few may be surprised at the mild tone Joshi adopts for the bulk of the Recognition. […] He even refrains from blasting certain academic Lovecraft criticism — vague, jargon-filled and detached from pertinent sources — which is manifestly inferior to many prior contributions.

There is also a useful outline of what is to be found in Joshi’s three-volume personal Journals, and a deep appreciation of Joshi’s decades of initially thankless and unrewarded labour on Lovecraft’s behalf. The Journals can be easily found as affordable Kindle ebooks.

The shorter reviews follow. The new publication of Arthur S. Koki’s 1962 Lovecraft biography is ably evaluated by Ken Faig Jr. Faig nods in approval at this early attempt, noting the extensive access that Koki had to many of Lovecraft’s still living friends and neighbours. He also notes and approves Koki’s still-unrealised hopes for a superb and highly illustrated edition of the Dream-Quest. I was interested to learn that Koki had owned a ‘How to Read and Write Spanish’ book seemingly purchased by Lovecraft in 1911 (age 21), who had written his name in it. Faig points out that this book is not in Lovecraft’s Library. But I would be cautious here, since we know that Koki was interviewing Loveman at that time. And Loveman was well known in the rare book trade for that kind of fake…

Nearly every catalogue that [the older] Loveman issued was tilled with fabulous ‘bargains’ — books signed by Melville, Mark Twain or Hawthorne — a whole galaxy of great authors. All priced at ten to twenty-five dollars each” (Joe Nickell, Real or Fake: Studies in Authentication, University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

As senility set in, Loveman got more and more careless about signing books, using ball-point pens for signatures of authors who had died before the ball-point pen was invented. His catalogs were an endless source of amusement to those familiar with his wares”. (Robert A. Wilson, Modern Book Collecting: A Basic Guide to All Aspects of Book Collecting, 1980).

So far as I’m aware Loveman never sold Lovecraft fakes. But I’m guessing that he might have made one as a quick present for Koki. Lovecraft had no sustained facility with Spanish that I know of. Nor would he have needed it. Since at that time the bulk of the immigrants to Providence were Swedish, Irish and Italian.

Bobby Derie then has a short review of Faig Jr.’s Lovecraftian People and Places, and finally Martin Andersson rounds out the issue with a short joint review of the new Miscellaneous Letters and Letters to Woodburn Harris and others. It’s stated that the Lovecraft letters are nearing the end, with only a few more volumes to go. But my hope is that funds can then be raised to go beyond these print volumes, by establishing a search tool for searching inside and across the full texts all of Lovecraft’s works, essays, poems and letters. Only snippets would be provided in results, in much the same way that Google Books works. This is not the sort of technical job that S.T. Joshi will want to take on, but with his support a major crowd-funder campaign could surely raise the funds needed to pay the professional coders and server-wranglers.

The Lovecraft Annual 2022 can be had from Hippocampus Press, and some might want to order it with the 2023 edition — which is set to appear very soon.