Below is my second set of notes on Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully. The book is a hefty 580-page slab, and I’m currently half way through and have reached October 1933. But in the notes below I open in April 1927 and run through to early July 1929.
Page 68. Lovecraft suggests, with a certain amount of levity, that he and some others should form a… “ways and means committee for inaugurating the counter-revolution & establishing the reign of American Fascism”. Said in the context of the context of a newly Soviet-ised, bloody-handed and internationalist communism.
Page 68. Lovecraft is familiar with the “little Benefit St. grocery”, which is likely to be gone soon.
Page 69. He gives more descriptive and demographic details on the slum area he has newly discovered on walks in Providence (see my first set of notes). Much later in the book, in 1934, he briefly notes it has been swept away by the city developers.
Page 70. “the unknown outside clawing at the rim of the known … There are things more terrible to the imagination than any phenomena connected with the nature, passions & aspirations of mankind”.
Page 71. Eddy Jr. is back, at least temporarily, invited over (probably not by Lovecraft himself) to a ‘gang’ meeting in Providence. Only in July 1932 (page 212) do we hear of Eddy again, when things seem to have been patched up between them and Lovecraft is visiting with the Eddys at their house. As I’ve established (Lovecraft Annual 2022), the Eddys were almost certainly then at 317 Plain Street, Providence (address given in a letter to Ghost Stories magazine for April 1929). This house can still be seen on Google StreetView. A delightful structure to British eyes at least, though perhaps rather mundane and samey in American eyes…
The similar next-door corner-house at No. 319 (seen here as the white one) sold in May 2023 for $225,000 (£171k). Pretty good by UK prices, it would likely be twice that in a comparable English city south of Crewe. New England seems a bit of a paradise by the standard of old England. Crazy-high professional salaries, but crazy-low house prices.
Page 76. Lovecraft had been reading about the modern-folkloric creature known as ‘The Jersey Devil’, and had “concluded that IT was an overgrown mosquito”. There is more on page 178-79.
Page 84. His distorted understanding of how own work begins to show up, since here he thinks “The Rats in the Walls” is “barren and obtrusively mechanical”. Similarly he thinks “The Horror at Red Hook” to be the “dullest” of his works (page 88) despite it being immediately picked up for hardback re-publication.
Page 84. A little more detail about the stock of ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop (see my essay in Lovecraft Annual 2022). Cook was about to invest in 70 old volumes of Harper’s magazine. Cook returns to Providence and Eddy’s on page 90.
Page 86. Lovecraft especially likes ‘survivals’ rather than ‘restorations’ in antiquities, and he makes the distinction between the two. A survival is “a lingering bit of the past [such as] the lane back of the Athenaeum” in Providence. Ah, so the mysterious little path at the side of the Athenaeum which I spotted in a photo recently may have led up to that olde lane?
Page 90. HPL was revising a tale called “In The Confessional” for de Castro. The original 1893 version of this survives, but Lovecraft’s revision of it is lost.
Page 91. January 1928. He “stopped reading” Amazing Stories “several months ago”. But will now have to glance at it again, since readers are still talking about a little something he wrote called “The Colour Out of Space” (September 1927, Amazing Stories).
Page 95. Brooklyn libraries. The Montague branch library was the nearest to him in New York City, and he had a card for it… “though I actually spent more time at the NY one in 42nd St. and 5th Ave.” Still there today, the one with the lions outside…
Page 97. He read Witch Wood by John Buchan. One of Buchan’s novels best-liked by his fans, once they step beyond the usual Thirty-Nine Steps etc spy novels. A 1927 novel of devil-worship and evil forests in seventeenth-century Scotland. Apparently rather more subtle and interestingly macabre than the usual occultist devil-worship mumbo-jumbo, and influenced by Blackwood and Machen. Be warned, however, that according to S.T. Joshi… “The dialogue portions of John Buchan’s enormously long novel Witch Wood are almost entirely in Scots dialect”. Which is not easy reading, even for a Scot.
Page 98. “Sydney R. Burliegh, the goof responsible for that monstrosity [the Fleur-de-Lys building in Providence] […] he draws historical and traditional maps in the Ortelian manner […] I have his Providence one and am about to get his South Country one. He lives in a real colonial house on College Hill.” I can’t immediately find these maps online.
Page 101. June 1928. He hasn’t been out of the house for nearly six months. “I haven’t been out since Jany. 2nd [2nd of January], and don’t know when I can ever get out again”.
Page 102. The all-night lunch wagon was invented in Providence “about 50 or 60 years ago” [early 1870s?] and is “now a standard institution” in the city. This seems relevant to Lovecraft’s night-walks in his city, in terms of his coffee / donuts-supply logistics when cafes were shut. The street carts began as a service to the semi-nocturnal newspapermen of the city. Back then, daily newspapermen worked through the night to get ‘the early morning edition’ out.
Page 107. He sees the Boston Museum with Loveman, and especially their new historical room reconstructions including a “genuine Tudor room of 1490” and medieval English stained-glass.
Page 112. Old Everett McNeil was in “Sinjin’s Hospital”, but had then been transferred (once they found he was a war veteran) to the Naval Hospital. Lovecraft sends him letters with his “legal name” of Henry. Thus genealogists should search for a Henry in birth records.
Page 113. Lovecraft describes further correspondence with a ‘Harold’ at June 1929, who is described as an “exotic cultist” who reveals alleged prehistoric Mayan lore and secrets in his articles and pamphlets. Lovecraft found him to “shine to saner advantage” in his letters, and “he seems a remarkably pleasant chap — perhaps destined to become an interesting correspondent.” Page 116 mentions “Harold’s dashing psychic method of exploring the primal past”.
Page 117. Lovecraft sees Wickford again, and remarks that he had not seen it in 21 years. Which puts the first visit at circa 1908 at age 18. This must be the village of Wickford on Wickford Cove at North Kingstown, Rhode Island. About 14 miles south of Providence down the western shore and formerly “Updike’s Landing”. One assumes that this 1908 visit would have been seen on one of his epic solo trolley (tram) excursions at that time. Possibly he was in search of what another of his letters calls “the Pequod Path, ‘the great road of the country’, and just north of Wickford Harbor”. A snippet of biography which may interest Mythos writers. Another letter reveals its later charms… “we explored ancient Wickford with its crumbling wharves, great elms, & centuried white houses”.
Crumbling wharves at Wickford, Rhode Island.
