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Review: Lovecraft Annual 2019

20 Wednesday May 2020

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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One can quite imagine S.T. Joshi as a 1920s stage magician. He must surely have at least some magical powers, in order to sustain his vast workload and output. Look, there he is now… appearing from behind a curiously carved panel on the darkened stage. An interlude of dancing cats exits stage-right. Joshi steps forward into the spotlight and deftly tips his bright red fez hat in greeting. Then he whisks back his thick satin cape, and with the merest raise of his eyebrows he invites a member of the audience to step up and inside yet another of his mysterious magical cabinets.

Up the cabinet rises through a stage trap-door. In this case the particular ‘mysterious cabinet’ is the 2019 edition of the annual scholarly journal titled The Lovecraft Annual. This usually appears like magic at the end of each summer. Joshi is here, as usual, the benign editor with the magic wand. Once inside his cabinet it’s a bit of a tight fit, since the page gutters could do with another eighth of an inch. But the audience member doesn’t mind, as he is whirled through 12 essays and several reviews.

The first essay is Fred S. Lubnow’s “The Lovecraftian Solar System”, which briskly alights on each planet in turn and surveys Lovecraft’s footprints on it. The solar tour includes a tantalising single mention of the “white fungi” on Neptune, among which Lovecraft’s indescribable Neptunians must move. Lubnow tracks down most solar items, but in one instance he states that “Lovecraft made no specific reference to Uranus in any of his tales”. I would point out that there is an inference, at least, in one story. “Pickman’s Model” has mention of… “the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood”. Trans-Saturnian refers to, I believe, Uranus and Neptune. Admittedly, this is a reference not to the planets themselves but to their depiction in art. The planet Pluto (yes, it is a planet in my view) is understandably left until last by Lubnow, and as Yuggoth it sees the most discussion. It also understandable that Lubnow did not want to burden the survey with items from the letters or the poetry. But I hope that in due course we will see a Part Two, in which he does draw on and survey these. Perhaps even a Part Three on things like comets that enter the system, the aurora or ‘northern lights’, meteors, the “star winds”, and similar.

Duncan Norris’s essay “Hungry fer Victuals I Couldn’t Raise nor Buy”: Anthropophagy in Lovecraft” is an excellent survey of cannibalism in Lovecraft’s work, with abundant historical, anthropological and literary contexts. Once one starts looking, it seems, cannibalism is everywhere and Lovecraft was consumed by it. Usefully, Norris also looks for hidden or hinted-at cannibalism. He does not mention Bloch’s “A Visit with H. P. Lovecraft” and its toothsome ending, which would have been an amusing final nibble for the end of the essay.

Andrew Paul Wood’s “The Rings of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, Durer, Saturn, and Melancholy” is a fascinating speculative essay that draws first on Durer’s famous picture “Melancholy”. Then on the mythical Saturn. Saturn’s ‘ravening for delight’ aspect, and one aspect of his visual appearance in his defeat, is linked with the possible genesis of Cthulhu. Lovecraft’s fascination with Saturnalia (the Roman revels of 17th December) is noted along with his early knowledge of Virgil’s ‘golden age of Saturn’, and likely awareness of a lines from Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion”…

And saw, what first I thought an image huge,
Like to the image pedestal’d so high
In Saturn’s temple. Then Moneta’s voice
Came brief upon mine ear ‘So Saturn sat
When he had lost his realms’ …

One can quite see the potential inspiration, as Wood suggests, for the famous sitting idol showing Cthulhu on his pedestal. Wood offers the reader a brilliant and fascinating essay. There is occasional over-reaching, but the informed reader can make up his own mind on such things. He misses a few elements that might have augmented his argument. He notes Lovecraft’s “Simplicity: A Poem” (1922), further evidence of Lovecraft’s awareness of Virgil’s ‘golden age of Saturn’…

Etherial spirits of celestial grace;
And he, unspoil’d, may childlike bask again
Beneath the beams of Saturn’s golden reign.

But he overlooks another poem which offers… “Hath held too long his Saturnalian feast”. These items again remind me how useful it would be for Lovecraft researchers to have a keyword-searchable ebook edition of The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft.

Also unmentioned by Wood is that Lovecraft’s friend Loveman had a literary interest in Saturn, evidenced by his naming his journal The Saturnian. But it’s only an incidental connection, and it’s quite possible that Loveman was using the word Saturnian as it arose from the French decadent milieu, from which it spilled over into use among poets as a code word for ‘homosexual’. A little earlier in time Uranian had a similar vogue among Edwardian poets as a code-word. Still, if Wood is right about a partial Saturn influence on the posture of the Cthulhu idol, then the all-male cultists cavorting around the idol in “The Call of Cthulhu” are also Saturnian orgiasts in the Loveman sense of the word. Because, as Lovecraft himself bemoaned…

You’ll recall that Rankin [the Weird Tales artist] made ample-bosomed wenches of my male orgiasts in the Louisiana swamp scene of “Cthulhu!”

Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer’s short “The Cats”: An Environmental Ditty” is thankfully not saddled with questionable eco-critical theory, and is a straightforward discussion of Lovecraft’s 1925 poem with some historical context. Her essay is a useful study of this powerful New York poem, delving into the sound-patterning and also discussing the relationship to the similar future-visions in the story “He”. Some phrases in the poem are seen to relate to what she claims to have been the state of the sanitation and water supply of New York City in 1925. Fair enough. But there is a rather unfortunate historical tangle on page 71, in which the reader expecting good evidence for the suggestion is expected to jump from 1925 to 1935, and then we get the quote “no system for disposing of sewage and garbage …” which — on my finding its source — actually relates to circa the 1690s. This date is not given by Hopkins-Drewer, and yet she immediately follows the quote with… “Certainly, if the pollution had been left unchecked…” in 1925, Lovecraft’s prediction of a future New York City in “The Cats” would have come true.

Such a damaging tangle on the historical evidence could have been avoided with just a little online research, and the argument strengthened. For instance I can quite easily find that in the 1920s the Brooklyn water-supply actually came from pumped ground-water in Queens, on Long Island, drawn from a catchment area of over 100 square miles. It was chlorinated by the time it reached the taps of Red Hook and does not appear to have done Lovecraft, or probably any of the street-kitties he encountered at their water-bowls, any harm. On sewage Hopkins-Drewer is correct, although the evidence presented for her point is confused and somewhat misleading. It should have quite easy to nail the claim quite precisely to the mid 1920s and Brooklyn, with just a little research — it’s easy enough to find that by the summer of 1926 raw sewage pollution of the harbour became so intolerably bad that all the New York City public beaches were closed, except those that directly faced the open ocean. When we think of Lovecraft living in Red Hook, we forget the likely summer smells — all the raw effluent of New York City, massing up day after day and week after week around the harbour, and the reek of it wafting in over the tenements. Knowing this, one then reads “Red Hook” somewhat differently — regarding the opening words such as “oily waves” and “filth”. In the searing killer heatwave of June 1925 the shores were presumably oily with more than just ship-bilge, and on a windy day the filthy smell of excrement must indeed have been noticeable even some miles from the shore. One wonders if some prevailing summer wind from such a shore partly explains why, until the public works of the mid to late 1930s, there were still shantytowns, open scrubby land and undrained marshland along the waterfront there and why the eastern parts of Red Hook were heavily dotted with “weedy undeveloped terrain” on 1924 aerial photography.

However “The Cats” was actually written in the winter. On 15th February 1925 to be precise, an important point that Hopkins-Drewer does not note. Lovecraft was then about a month into living in his “dismal hovel” at 169 Clinton Street, having luckily moved in just days before the worst snowstorm in living memory (1st-3rd January 1925). The date of the poem might suggest that an early thaw made him suddenly aware of the stench that might well waft up from the shoreline in the high summer. The New York Times for February 1925 does indeed suggest a thaw, with one of its articles titled “Thaw Releases Frozen Cars”. Also, the few letters Lovecraft sent from New York at this time suggest he was out and about and these make no mention of snow or ice. But if a February thaw and sun was quite enough of a thaw to send a new shoreline scent to Lovecraft’s sensitive nose is rather debatable.

Such points do not lessen a claim that “The Cats” is in part an “environmental ditty”, and it is anyway a poetical work that is only partly biographical (i.e. the Red Hook location, the implied black cats which relate to his own lost cat, the allusion to Poe’s Pluto, Lovecraft’s repeated nightmare of how the “thick tide retreats” leaving a shining river a mass of oozing mud). It can certainly be read as an environmental poem — “Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun. … Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.” — but such claims need more precise historical evidence on matters of water-supply, sewerage and weather, and close attention to dates.

Hopkins-Drewer does excavate one fascinating historical nugget that was wholly new to me. The Chicago gangster Johnny Torrio was “holed up” in Red Hook after a January 1925 mob shooting in Chicago, and he took over the rackets there. I can add that he appears to have arrived in Red Hook from Chicago in February or March, probably shortly after Lovecraft wrote “The Cats”. He went to Red Hook because he had grown up there and it was his old racketeering ground. It’s not impossible, as Hopkins-Drewer hints, that Red Hook was abuzz with the return of Torrio in summer 1925, when Lovecraft was about to write of the similarly ‘resurrection’-like return to social life of the gangster-consorting Robert Suydam in “The Horror at Red Hook”. We know that Lovecraft frequented cheap cafes where one could overhear hoodlums talking over the current state of things in Red Hook, and there may also have been local cafe-owner gossip and press coverage of the matter. It’s quite a plausible suggestion, and again a little more research would have let Hopkins-Drewer strengthen the suggestion.

What of a curious line in the poem “The Cats”, of their “Yelling the burden of Pluto’s red rune” at the city, almost as a form of curse? This is not addressed in the essay, but it offers another route to a concern with animals and thus the environment. “Pluto” is not a science-fiction reference to the cats arriving from that distant planet in a gigantic cosmic leap — akin to that of the Cats of Ulthar or perhaps the Cats of Saturn in Dream Quest. Since the planet Pluto was not discovered or named until 1930. Rather, it is a reference to the eye-less cat Pluto in Poe’s famous tale “The Black Cat” and thus to Pluto the god of the underworld. Lovecraft thus makes a poetic linkage of this cruel mistreatment of cats with the astrological rune for the planet Pluto, which resembles an eye socket with blood dripping from it. Presumably Poe had also seen this macabre likeness, and drew his tale from the observation. Though I can find no scholar of either Poe or Lovecraft noting a possible connection.

Is there any additional symbolism to the Pluto rune? Unfortunately it is impossible for a search-engine to cut through all the blather produced by neo-pagan parrots and occult mumbo-jumbo munchers. But it’s possible to find some 19th century scholarly sources that suggest a couple of options. To summarise, to one it was spirited living intellect circling above the inevitable river of the underworld (death). To another it simply arose as a confusion with a Nile goddess symbol, when Ptolemy took over Egypt and moved in his new statues. From there it became a sign for Pluto as a god of the underworld. There seems to be no clear route back in time, and the origin is probably lost. All we can really say is that it is a circle in an arc above a short cross. But we can say that Lovecraft’s cryptic literary-historical symbolism in “The Cats” is also a form of concealed environmental commentary for the learned and literary reader, since it evokes the cruelty of certain types of people to animals. One can also note that he cleverly accents the shape of this “rune” with the “oo”s seen in the following line’s “swoop low” — which offers a partial rhyme with “Pluto”. Two “oo”s (eyes) become one “o” (a missing eye), just as in Poe’s gory tale. The imagery of “swoop low” also evokes the gouging motion involved.

Lovecraft’s use of “rune” in the poem may seem incongruous since it offers a Nordic touch to the poem, evoking the one-eyed Odin of the North and Northern runes. If so, then this was not entirely his spurious confabulation. Lovecraft may have noted in the histories that Nordic and Teutonic warrior-cultures had long sent armies across the Danube, and had even occupied Sparta and Alexander the Great’s boyhood/maternal homeland. This would offer Lovecraft a possible cultural origin in the North for the later use of the Pluto symbol in the Egypt of Ptolemy — Ptolemy having raced to claim and hold Egypt as his own, after the death of Alexander. Ptolemy’s Hellenistic Egypt is of course a key place for early astrology and also where one finds the first direct evidence for the origin of alchemy, and it seems from some brief research that such origins were under active discussion in the psychological (Jung) and archaeological literature of the early 1920s.

Matthew Beach’s “Lovecraft’s Consolation” is a follow-up to his earlier “Lovecraft’s Optimism” in Lovecraftian Proceedings #2. He examines the possible consolations of ‘the cosmic’, something Lovecraft offered to some of his friends in letters. These consolations are basically that we need not despair at the ultimate ‘futility of it all’, because: ‘cosmic time’ is full of potential, even if rather impersonal from a human perspective; and the endlessness of ‘cosmic space’ offers infinite possibilities.

Such a sense of time and scale may then give us a certain sense of freedom from the earthly judgements of others. Hence the personal ‘indifferentist’ stance that Lovecraft tried to maintain toward others. This stance was bolstered somewhat by his more down-to-earth understanding of the glandular human body, and the (in his eyes) uncontrollable urges this produced. It follows that if some had “abnormal” urges, they couldn’t help it. Equally, a sense of the vastness of time and space may lead us to consider that beauty and significance may reside, or at least be thought to be found, outside what our age considers “normal”. Perhaps even in the non-human, somewhere else in the vastness of cosmic time and space. Such cosmic possibilities might even arouse in us the “sense of curiosity” (Selected Letters III), and the prospect of the pursuit and gratification of such curiosity would also be a cause for optimism. If not for oneself, then for future generations — to which one contributes useful knowledge today, knowledge on which future generations will build.

In some sense then, I would also suggest we can see Lovecraft as having anticipated the discovery and ‘cosmic unity’ later presented by the more advanced novels of galactic civilisation and alien encounter. In which the presence of a striving and expanding mankind in the galaxy at least supplements the formerly cold cosmic wastes with meaning, even if it doesn’t deeply infuse it with meaning. Of course, if Lovecraft’s work and letters actually influenced the genesis of this sub-genre is more debatable and it would take some hard sleuthing by Lovecraftian scholars to prove such a claim. But when Beach notes Lovecraft tell Sully in a consoling letter that one can “harbour great hopes” for the human future, albeit in a “light, indefinite way”, and extract from them a “bracing power” that should be harnessed to the human imagination — then he might seem to be laying the foundations for a future galactic empire or two.

That said, it’s obvious that if Lovecraft has an “optimism” to share then it’s not the blithe emotionalist’s happy-clappy variety of optimism. He says as much himself, and Beech deftly extracts the relevant quotes. Rather it is an optimism that “integrates rather than ignores the harsh realities within cosmic time and space” (Beech). A sort of Super-rational Optimism. But these “harsh realities” offer another clear form of consolation to the cosmicist — that harsh though the universe is, it has clear and un-breakable rules. There is no capricious hostile god or malign devil toying with human lives or expecting weekly sacrifices of burning babes. Similarly, priests have no power to call down retributions or to channel divine beneficence.

His other consoling advice is more homely and it must draw on the various writers of the classical world that he admired. Practice pragmatism in everyday life. Minimise pain and maximise pleasure, in moderation. Plan for a sensible future, one that will include “inevitable loss” — but with the understanding that ‘time heals all wounds’, and that both personal human memory and long-term recording allow us to cherish and recall the best of what has been. Lovecraft’s antiquarianism was part of this stance, I would suggest, and somewhat fits with his cosmic view. If there is no god, then ancestors can at least serve one as secular substitutes for the saints and angels. The risk comes in knowing too much about them. Spend too much time “correlating the contents” and one’s historical heroes may develop feet of clay, or one’s family tree may develop an unwanted fishy side. A new monograph by Ken Faig Jr. suggests that Lovecraft’s family tree did just that, and I suspect the discovery probably informed “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

Dylan Henderson’s “The Inability of the Human Mind”: Lovecraft, Zunshine, and Theory of Mind” seeks to sift Lovecraft’s rich life for signs of autism — whatever that is these days, as the definitions are stretched and warped by non-autistics seeking a ‘get out of jail free’ pass for bad behaviour — then he tries to do the same at a few points in Dexter Ward. There may be a case to be made, but I was not convinced by this brief tour of some possibilities.

A brief Notes paragraph notes that no less than three new Lovecraft documentaries are underway.

“H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Sunset’” is S.T. Joshi’s own musical choral setting for Lovecraft wistful autumn/fall poem of 1917, with pages of musical notation. I don’t read music, so can’t judge this item. Joshi’s blog reports that his choir has performed it several times, but it appears not to be online.

Ann McCarthy’s “The Pathos in the Mythos” is a short essay that points up some elements of emotional ‘colour’ in Lovecraft’s work: the joy he finds in certain places and evocative views; the delight in dogged research and scholarly detection; his sympathy for old and isolated men, both living and those literary ancestors isolated from him in time. One might have added his tenderness and concern for cats, although admittedly this is more in the poems and letters than the stories.

Jan B. W. Pedersen’s ““Now Will You Be Good?”: Lovecraft, Teetotalism, and Philosophy” is a survey of alcohol in the stories, and partly in the letters and in The Conservative. This is introduced with eight pages of general history on temperance and teetotalism, pages which might instead be given over to digging into the context of two fascinating Lovecraft quotes which Pedersen leaves un-examined. The first is the 1915 quote… “to transform himself to a beast, and in the end to degrade himself and his descendants permanently in the scale of evolution”. The second is from 1932, talking with R.E. Howard about “the hard-pressed classes” and their drinking… “The more drink-sodden they get, the worse their biological stock becomes”. Evidently in 1932 Lovecraft was still holding to the “three generations is enough” argument of the 1910s, a slogan which implied the outright danger of allowing the breeding of a “fourth generation”. Circa 1910 the commonly understood sequence of degeneration ran: nervous temperament and moral laxness in the first generation; then their children, who have severe neurotic behaviour leading to addictions and drink; leading in the third generation to insanity and suicide; then at the last a sterile fourth generation with outright cretinism and often malformed bodies and heads. There was also an increasing understanding that recessive genes could be carried by seemingly healthy people, and passed to offspring who would then exhibit the defect. Peterson misses a prime opportunity to explore or at least summarise the anti-liquor movement’s theory of generational degeneration and recessive traits. To ask if Lovecraft understood this correctly, if it was modified by research or was supported by other currents in society and/or developed and added to by Lovecraft himself. Then to tease out what uses might have been made of it in the stories.

I had anticipated that Michael D. Miller “Lovecraft’s Open Boat” might be about the young Lovecraft’s row-boat on the Seekonk river, finding connections to “Dagon” via Lovecraft’s recurring dream of the Seekonk drained to oozing mud, and his landing by row-boat on the muddy washed-over Twin Islands in the Seekonk. But it is not. Miller finds some parallels between Lovecraft’s indifferentist and cosmic stances and Stephen Crane’s “The Boat” (1897), a story inspired by his shipwreck while travelling to pre-communist Cuba.

Horace A. Smith’s “Lovecraft Seeks the Garden of Eratosthenes” details the young Lovecraft’s astronomical observations of the Moon in 1903-06, in particular certain areas of the Moon, and offers some fascinating historical context about the lunar life theories and the observations of William Henry Pickering. Pickering imagined the life he ‘saw’ on the Moon as being a low vegetation. Could the young Lovecraft’s vivid imagination have mused on these Selenites as vegetable animals, a possible precursor to some of his later creatures? Possibly, but Smith sagely calls that idea “a stretch”. Yet Smith also notes something from early in Joshi’s I Am Providence: that the young Lovecraft once had a “now lost tale set on the dark side of a Moon”, although at an unknown date. Smith doesn’t speculate on what the story might have had in it. But I’ve looked into the story’s scientific spur and it seems informative. In 1854 the eminent German astronomer Hansen had proposed that our Moon was not a perfect sphere, but was deformed by a huge elevation of about 35 miles in height. This ‘bump’ was directed toward Earth, presumably due to gravity, and its presence would mean that a shallow atmosphere could just about persist on the dark side, most likely with some icy crater-lakes and thus the potential for primitive life. However, by 1903-06 most scientists assumed that any water and ice would long ago have been lost to space. But not all scientists, as the Germans were still proposing an 1890s ‘water ice’ theory for many cosmic bodies, and this was championed and bolstered by the substantial book Glacial-Kosmogonie in 1912. The theory apparently persisted into 1930s Germany. In the 2010s abundant water ice was indeed found by probes on the surface of the Moon, and presumably it exists in even more abundance on the dark sides of the poles. One assumes Lovecraft’s lost juvenile story would have encountered life of some kind (he recalls it as a “thriller” in a letter to Kleiner) and one wonders if Lovecraft’s 1919… “insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter” (“Beyond the Wall of Sleep”) preserves a hint of the subject matter. Likely written at around age 14, the science of 1904 suggests he would have imagined shallow ice lakes and their sub-surface primitive entities. In this he would have been following the recent German elaborations of Hansen’s initial 1854 proposal. One assumes that the astronomical journals were keeping readers abreast of such developments from Germany, even though the growing consensus elsewhere appears to have been that any Moon water had long since drifted away into space. Such a juvenile tale would thus, eventually, have been proved partly right by science. No ice-lakes, no vegetable-insect life musing on their slow alien philosophies, but… around 6% water-ice per NASA probe-scoop, and possibly much more ice banked up in the crater-shadows. Quite how his tale’s presumed protagonists and their acetylene lamps would have reached the dark side of the Moon from Providence is another question. One imagines that Lovecraft’s beloved black cat, leaping and darting all around his telescope in the garden dusk, might have given him the idea of simply leaping to the Moon as if in a dream. Lovecraft would muse more solidly on such matters a few years later, in his “Can The Moon Be Reached By Man?” (1906).

Scott Meyer’s “Diabolists and Decadents: H. P. Lovecraft as Purveyor, Indulger, and Appraiser of Puritan Horror Fiction Psychohistory” attempts to detect alignments between Lovecraft and the Puritan worldview, and this seems most useful in a short section in which he examines the letters.

Steven J. Mariconda’s “How to Read Lovecraft” column muses on Lovecraft’s playfulness, although the essay sticks within the confines of the 1930s/1970s psychological ideas of the puer aeternus (aka ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’) and Jungian archetypes. We also learn that Lovecraft’s mother was “apparently progressing toward schizophrenia”. She was undoubtedly mad before her botched gall-bladder operation and death, but “toward schizophrenia” seemed to me a rather bold armchair diagnosis. Does one really “progress” toward such a thing? I’d never heard that said, and on investigation it appears not to be the case — on which point see the 2013 paper “The Myth of Schizophrenia as a Progressive Brain Disease” in a leading Oxford University Press journal. Another point of error in the column is the claim that… “Lovecraft was thirty-three and Barlow was sixteen when the former went to Florida”. Actually, when Lovecraft stepped off the bus, he was forty-three and Barlow was fifteen.

Finishing up the 240 page issue is a lengthy book review by veteran Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig Jr., reviewing the new Ave atque Vale, here rather amusing titled Ave atque Value — perhaps in an unconscious pun on its mere $30 price in paperback. This is the fine new book of reminiscences of Lovecraft, effectively replacing the previous Lovecraft Remembered. Faig’s review is entertaining and erudite, and doesn’t forget to give the juicy details of the book — that it has notes and an index, biographies of contributors, and 400 footnotes. One data point has already been superseded — my recent discovery of more Eddy memoirs adds to our knowledge of the bookshops, and Faig’s observation that “Lovecraft knew each of the big three of Providence bookselling” must now be expanded to four — including ‘Uncle’ Eddy.

Well, that’s it for 2019. Onward to the 2020 issue — which I imagine will be going to pre-order relatively soon.

“The World The Children Made” (1950)

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings

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This week’s “Kittee Tuesday” post is a PDF newly-upload in the public domain slot on the SFF Audio server. It’s a good scan of “The World The Children Made” by Ray Bradbury, as it first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for 23rd September 1950. Though with ads removed, so we only get to see half of the historical context of its original publication.

The story is of course more famously known as “The Veldt”, under which title it was published the next year in Bradbury’s collection The Illustrated Man.

It’s interesting to know that SFF Audio consider that the tale is now in the public domain, at least in the USA. I can’t find any supporting evidence for that, but perhaps a reader of Tentaclii knows more on that point? I see from two reprint sources that the story’s copyright was renewed in 1977, when some 1950 copyrights were up for renewal in the USA.

In 1955 it had a full-cast radio adaptation which is now online at the X Minus One archive. This used an earlier 1951 radio script, but padded it to 30-minutes by added a new framing story. I once had an edit which cut this broadcast down to six minutes with a focus on the original story, but it appears to have been lost over the years.

Some interesting authors entering the public domain at the start of 2021

17 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings, REH

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Here’s my survey of interesting texts and authors set to enter the public domain in early 2021 in nations which follow “the 70 year rule”, the author having died in 1950. Some of their works may already be in the public domain, but soon all of them will be. Then I follow this section by briefly noting the names in the “50-year rule” nations.

Nations following the 70 year rule:

* Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Tarzan, Barsoom, old Venus and more.

* George Orwell, for the anti-authoritarian political classics, Animal Farm and 1984. His essays might also be selected from to make a new themed book.

* Olaf Stapledon, ground-breaking British science-fiction author. His seminal ‘future history’ Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are his best known books. His post-war Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fantasy (1949) was only issued in a limited edition of 500. Basil Davenport collected his best in To the End of Time: the Best of Olaf Stapledon (1953) and Sam Moskowitz gathered up the rest in Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon (1979).

* Ernest Haycox, an extremely prolific and popular author of what appear to be romping quality westerns and revolutionary war adventures, featuring tough and robust characters who live by their own rules. Had stories in the pulps of the 1920s, and he later graduated to the ‘slicks’ where he was admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway. I would imagine he was being noticed by the likes of Robert E. Howard. One story was filmed as Stagecoach (1939), another as Union Pacific (1939). He had a vast output, and looks likely to be an excellent mine of brisk adventure plots that could be morphed into newly-told science-fiction works.

* Rafael Sabatini, a prolific English-Italian writer of historical adventure and mystery novels. His sea adventures The Sea Hawk (1915) and Captain Blood (1922) became best-sellers and were filmed. Blood became over time, effectively, a four-book set. Along with the works of Everett McNeil, the Blood books were among the very few books that librarians found it impossible to keep on the juvenile library shelves in the 1920s and 30s — as soon as they came back, another boy would take them out. He also published a three-book series The Historical Nights’ Entertainment, containing vivid re-tellings of real-life royal murders and intrigues, impersonations and similar bizarre doings in the upper echelons of society. His mystery stories were collected in The Evidence of the Sword and Other Mysteries (2006). At a guess, he’s now possibly of most interest today to makers of media productions looking for the next Game of Thrones with a pirate-y twist.

* Max Pemberton, a London dandy who had an early career as a boys’ magazine editor. Knowing what boys want, his The Iron Pirate was a best-seller of the 1890s — a tale of a giant new type of gas-powered ironclad ship which dominates the Atlantic. He went on to write many historical adventure novels and mystery-crime stories. His Wheels of Anarchy (1908) is an “adventure tale about anarchists and assassins that is set across Europe”.

* William Hovgaard, a naval historian. His early book The Voyages of the Norsemen in America (1914) has probably been superseded, but perhaps suitably updated with his 1925 article “The Norsemen in Greenland” and later scholarship, it might make the basis of an unusual non-fiction graphic novel?

* Erle Cox, an Australian science-fiction writer with a modest output. His novel Out of the Silence (1919 as a serial, 1925 as a book, 1928 in New York) was very popular in Australia and saw 13 reprints. This became a long-running comic strip and also a radio series in Australia. His Fools Harvest (1939) was a prophetic future-war tale. Short story collections available include Major Mendax: Tales of a Mad Scientist, and The Gift of Venus and Other Stories. He was perfectly timed, and with the right politics, to have been an occasional H.P. Lovecraft correspondent — but he doesn’t appear to have been.

* George Bernard Shaw, the once incredibly famous playwright and thinker. He had a vast output, but almost all of his work addressed ‘topical issues’ of his time and thus is not usually to modern tastes. Some of it has had a lasting popularity, such as his Pygmalion (famously filmed as My Fair Lady) which might be newly adapted into science-fiction, perhaps with themes of AI and robots. His Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) is a series of linked plays leading into the far-future in an Olaf Stapledon-like manner, and it is his only serious attempt at science-fiction. It was ambitiously presented as an unabridged full-cast broadcast for BBC radio in 1952, but no recording or reading-script appears to have survived. By the 1950s Back to Methuselah had become a running joke in the dressing-rooms of British theatre-land, for its difficult staging and long running-time. Like most of the British left at that time, he was avidly in favour of eugenic breeding — which may freak out today’s enfeebled left and cause further problems with any revival.

* R. R. Ryan. (Evelyn Bradley). Tense and ghoulish psychological horror novels of the 1930s, usually involving girls being menaced. From the descriptions, he seems to be an acquired taste for hardened connoisseurs of obscure British horror.

* Ralph Straus, a science-fiction and fantasy author with some novels that still sound interesting and are probably already in the public domain in most places. His The Dust which is God (1907) takes the Edwardian reader on a Dante-esque guided tour of several utopian planets, and it may be of interest to those who enjoy early ideas-led Edwardian cosmic science-fiction and attempts to imagine utopias. Apparently rather a good book, according to several reviewers in the 1970s, though he doesn’t appear in Science Fiction: The Early Years. In his later Pengard Awake (1920) he departed from his usual style, and has “An English book collector travel to Chicago where he meets an antiquarian bookseller in his shop in Chicago and tries to help him cope with a dark mystery.” The review in Punch said that the author “tells his queer story so plausibly and with so light a touch that even though you may affect to scoff at his dashing improbabilities you cannot escape their attraction.” The New York Tribune made it sound a little darker… “an amazing but plausible novel of dual personality. Not since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we had a more powerful delineation of the forces of good and evil at war in a man’s soul.” Possibly there are other interesting stories by Straus to be found and collected.

* Irving Bacheller was a successful American newspaperman who introduced American readers to the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, and who sponsored The Red Badge of Courage. He turned to writing his own enormously popular semi-autobiographical novels of early America, farm-life and war. He also wrote what appear to be vivid historical novels such as Vergilius: A Tale of the Coming of Christ, and his favourite A Man for the Ages: A Story of the Builders of Democracy (being the story of Abraham Lincoln).

* William Rose Benet the American encyclopedia-maker, reviewer, anthologist and poet. His more intriguing titles include The Flying King of Kurio: A Story of Children (1926) and the poetry pamphlet Mad Blake: A Poem (1937). The latter seemingly sunk without trace, but presumably being about the visionary William Blake. His dark poem “The Skater of Ghost Lake” is taught in American schools. His Pulitzer Prize winning poetry book The Dust which is God is not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Ralph Straus (see above).

* Frank Parker Day, whose novel Rockbound (1928) evokes the terrible powers of the Atlantic ocean, as it tells the story of bitterly feuding families on an isolated island off Nova Scotia. Not a novel to take away on your cheerful island holiday, by the sound of it, though it appears to have a cult following among modern gloomsters.

* Warwick Deeping, a once very popular British story and novel writer, who saw reprints in the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure. His early works were described as… “misty colour-shot, ultra-fantastic romances of pre-Arthurian days”, and he is is said to have gleefully re-worked Arthurian characters in a Marion Zimmer Bradley manner. But he was stung by vicious utilitarian critics for the crime of being both fantastical and middle-brow, and he appears to have tried to please the critics by turning to modern tales addressing worthy ‘social issues’. He apparently sometimes succeeded quite well at this, despite the continuing disdain of the critics — who made his name a by-word for popular mediocrity. But one wonders what he might have produced, if his lighter historical fantasies had been allowed to develop and deepen through the 1920s and 30s. But what we do have of the earlier historical and Arthurian novels are: Uther and Igraine; Love Among the Ruins; The Seven Streams; Bertrand of Brittany; The Red Saint; Joan of the Tower; The House of Spies (Napoleonic period); Martin Valliant, and also the posthumous The Sword and the Cross (1957). His time-travel story The Man Who Went Back popped up as the lead novel in Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine for Christmas 1947, and is essentially a historical work. Probably there are others like it…

* E.C. Bentley, a British poet who published a much-praised modern detective novel, Trent’s Last Case (1913) which was filmed three times. Later Trent short stories were collected in his Trent Intervenes (1938). A science-fiction story, “Flying Visit” (Evening Standard, 1953) has recently been re-discovered.

* Lawrence Donovan, a writer of nine Doc Savage novels, he may have died in 1948 or 1950 (Wikipedia has 1948, Gutenberg Australia has 1950). In the 1920s he landed stories in titles ranging from Argosy to Zeppelin Stories, and then continued publishing in the pulps and mystery magazines into the 1930s.

* Dorothy Kathleen Broster is now best known for a trilogy of historical Scottish novels set at the time of the Jacobites, but she also wrote some British ghost stories. These are said to be almost all collected in the wartime book Couching at the Door: Strange and Macabre Tales (1942).

* Percy K. Fitzhugh was an enormously popular writer of Boy Scout books in 1920s America, often humorous and most of them officially approved by the Boy Scouts of America. They sound vaguely like a sort of Scouting version of the British Just William tales, only with less grubby boys.

* Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, the Nobel Prize winner and a leading Danish author of the 20th century. His The Long Journey trilogy (in English 1923–24) “attempted to create a Darwinian alternative to the Biblical Genesis myth” by following “the development of mankind from the Ice Age to the times of Columbus”. Most of his work is in Danish, and some of it appears to be on ancient myths.

* Alfred Korzybski, a charlatan whose book General Semantics somewhat influenced early science fiction writers, with van Vogt using the ideas to fuel at least one imaginative work. General Semantics allegedly offered a way to “improve mental health through linguistic discipline”, and as such may have inspired Hubbard and perhaps even modern ‘political correctness’.

50-year rule nations:

E. M. Forster.

Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason books)

Rube Goldberg.

Yukio Mishima.

Reanimator Incorporated

17 Sunday May 2020

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Herbert West Reanimator may have been dashed off as a ‘quickie grue’ series for Lovecraft, written to help a friend fill a new magazine of cheap titillation. But within the tale may lie “philosophical and theological themes”. Or such is the claim of the creatives behind the new graphic novel, Reanimator Incorporated. This re-tells West by pointing up these themes, making the tale an “exploration of existence itself”. The creatives have also shifted the setting to the future, with the serum becoming a “AI-driven atomic assembler unit”. Part one of the six-part series is out now.

Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924)

16 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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George Laswell’s artbook Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924) is now in the public domain and online at Archive.org as a good scan. Possibly also at Hathi, although for the last few months Hathi has been so slow and un-responsive as to be totally un-usable.

My thanks to Ken Faig Jr. who in the latest Lovecraft Annual points out that Sonia recalled that Lovecraft knew and admired Laswell’s pen sketches — since they had first appeared weekly in his local newspaper. A paper on which Laswell was the Staff Artist. Oh, for the days when a local newspaper had a Staff Artist who worked in crisp pen and ink…

That must have been circa 1921-1924, and thus we see Providence as it was after the First World War but before Lovecraft left for New York City. The main focus is on the worthy and seemingly timeless historic buildings, many of which Lovecraft mentions in his letters and stories. While posterity might have preferred a selection of the less-noticed elements of Providence — such as the bookstores, the hidden courtyards and their cats, the Seekonk shoreline and its dark ravine-pools — the book’s extensive survey of the city’s key buildings does make it a handy ‘look up tool’ for visualising a building as described in Lovecraft’s work or letters.

But there are two or three glimpses of the less genteel life of the city, of the sort that Lovecraft could have encountered on waterfront night-walks in the early 1920s. Such as the dredging fleet which over-wintered at Fox Point, and this portrait of the wooden waterfront with its cheap cafes that (so the text says) often went up in flames and burned out sections of the waterfront.

Burned out

I can imagine Lovecraft and Eddy breezing into one of these coffee cabins at the crack of dawn, in the early 1920s, after a long night-walk.

Lovecraft moves to 66 College Street

15 Friday May 2020

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On 15th May 1933 H.P. Lovecraft moved to his last home at 66 College Street.

Here we look down College Street, from the gates of the Brown Campus. Lovecraft’s pale yellow wooden house was hidden away in a secluded garden courtyard, reached down an unpaved little lane at the shadowy back of the John Hay Library. The Library is the tall white building seen on the right of the picture, and the lane entrance is on the corner — seen just a little ahead and in the centre of the picture.

At No. 66 he had more living space than formerly. This included access to a hoary old loft attic with age-encrusted nooks. Lovecraft also mentions “one of the attic rooms” to Bloch, shortly after moving in, and implies this was ‘shrine’ sized. There appear to have been loft windows (possibly shuttered, see below) in the ‘monitor’ roof, and there was an all round view. I recall reading that Brobst later found a way to open a mysterious attic door or hatchway, which the old gent had been unable to open himself, thus revealing another fine view. Presumably this was a door that gave workmen, chimney-sweeps and window-cleaners access to the roof. One imagines this was westerly-facing, as that would have also enabled a wider view across the sunset city than was obtainable from the small windows.

Some might imagine that this loft then became crammed with Lovecraft’s older and less-read books. In one letter he did anticipate using in in that way. But many of Lovecraft’s family items, and the childhood library of old long-s books, had to be stored in another and more distant loft which had stronger rafters. In 1934 Lovecraft mentioned to Barlow that the old books he had grown up with and inherited were stored in the loft of a friend’s nearby barn. There they had become inaccessible to him, because the removal men’s crates had been jammed between old family furniture and crates of heavy crockery. For those in search of this barn, the likely weight involved surely indicates that the loft’s boards and rafters were rather more substantial that those of 66 College Street. Thus a large and sturdy candidate is surely required for the barn.

What became of this inaccessible loft-library, that had once been so formative for Lovecraft in his isolated early childhood? We can be sure that his personal library retained his cherished old copies of the Spectator, similar works of his beloved 18th century wits and satirists, and the pick of the old library. But as for the rest, it’s uncertain, and Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library doesn’t seem to offer an easy answer. I’d imagine that the residue of the family library was eventually hauled out of its barn, perhaps in spring 1941 a short while after Mrs Gamwell’s death, and sent down wholesale to be sold via the Dana bookshop in Providence? The interest in crates of mouldering 18th century books was perhaps not high during the Second World War, but some of the choicer items — such as the books once requested in vain by Barlow — may have found their way to appreciative collectors.

My enlargement and colourisation of the above picture…

Fragments from the Dreamlands

12 Tuesday May 2020

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Here is my reasonably faithful large assemblage of the cover art for the 1971 Ballantine U.S. paperback edition of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The spine could only be had as a low-res scan, which is why that bit is fuzzier than the rest.

The book went through three paperback printings from Ballantine before 1975, as the USA’s baby boomers came of age and discovered Lovecraft and fantasy in general. By 1983 the Del Rey edition had galloped like a frisky zebra through 28 reprintings. Given such apparent popularity at that time, it’s a pity so few young writer cut their little kitty teeth on Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Gary Myers’s fine The House of the Worm (1975) collection being the stand-out exception. As C.W. Thomas wrote, back in 2010 at Innsmouth Free Press…

It saddens me a little that the Dreamlands never caught on as a setting for other writers. This seems odd, considering how much of what Lovecraft wrote became the springboard for new authors. … My challenge to writers is simply to write a tale of Ulthar or lost Kadath. Forget the retread tales of Deep Ones, the diaries about guys who look for Cthulhu. Try a little magic, instead. I will gladly join you in the land of Mnar, where men built “Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai.”

The Ballantine cover art for the 1971 Dream-Quest was by Gervasio Gallardo (Gervasio Gallardo Villasenor, of Barcelona, Spain). He had a solo 95-page artbook in 1976, The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo, and a feature in Novum in the early 1970s, “Gervasio Gallardo, Spain: a master of free and applied art”.

An example of his other 1970s work can be seen below. This picture was made at a time before the crude political usurpation of the Marian ‘crown of stars’ by the mundane European Union, and the symbolism here is rather in his blending of the Catholic Mary ‘star of the sea’ with the classical Venus. Though such a comparison was likely to have gimlet-eyed Jesuits leaping out at the artist from dark corners of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, it was and is a perfectly valid elision to make and rests on good historical foundations — it was not a made-up New Age hippy confabulation of the mid 1970s. The devout Christian C.S. Lewis had also felt free to make a similar elision at the end of one of his science-fiction novels, as a way of of introducing the Marian in a form palatable to his readers.

Born in 1934, the artist Gervasio Gallardo came-of-age in the Catholic Francoist post-war Barcelona of the mid 1950s. He left Spain for work at a German studio in 1959, moving later to an agency in Paris and then to USA in 1963. He was prolific in the early and mid 1970s, producing many covers for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and other authors. Thereafter he went back to Barcelona and set up his own studio, and then appears to have worked mostly as a commercial artist, with clients among European perfumiers and the makers of fine Spanish liqueurs and brandies. Not a bad line of regular work to be in, as the boom years of the mid-1980s approached.

The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo at Archive.org.