Category Archives: Astronomy

HPL at 65

10 Monday Apr 2023

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What might have been… a well-fed and hairpiece-augmented Lovecraft imagined at age 65, at the end of a career as the venerable and respected astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto.

In this alt. history picture one might imagine that it’s 1956 and his retirement portrait is to adorn the newly-built hallways of NASA. As a writer, in his youth he published a few classic Dunsanian fantasy tales, but then fell silent in fiction. Yet he has just published a slim volume expounding a curious new ‘cosmic’ philosophy, a work said to be exciting some keen interest among European intellectuals.

The picture is more ‘Nick Cage plays Lovecraft’ than Lovecraft, perhaps, but that’s one of the tendencies that Wombo veers towards. The other is Buster Keaton. An AI isn’t making visual distinctions, it just knows a certain set of facial images are associated with the keywords 1920s (Keaton) and with Lovecraft (Cage). There are three ways I know of to control that. One is luck and a good text prompt. The other is a knockout word presented as $Buster$ and the other is to upload a ‘seed’ image of the real Lovecraft.

Thanks to the Dream by Wombo AI and Photoshop. I know I said I’d keep AI generated images off Tentaclii, but it’s getting so good now…

Notes on The Conservative – April 1915

07 Tuesday Mar 2023

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Notes on The Conservative, the amateur journalism paper issued by H.P. Lovecraft from 1915-1923.

Part One: the April 1915 issue.

This first issue opens with a poem. The casual peruser might at first dismiss this poem as a comedic effort for the amusement of amateur journalists, since it has do with spelling, printers and the sort of prickly reviewer who delights in the public revelation of small errors in typesetting and spelling. In a way, that is what it is. Yet just 15 lines into the poem, Lovecraft’s key future-themes of madness, knowledge and language emerge strongly. While out walking he encounters a scholarly “sage” made raving mad by his own scholarship. Out of a desire for some relief from complex language and thought, this madman has devised a ‘simple spelling’ system in which errors are not to be considered errors. Lovecraft buys into this one-man cult and thus becomes abandoned in his writing, until his “amorphous letters pass as language pure”.

The wartime essay “The Crime of the Century” follows, an essay relatively well-known to Lovecraftians and evidence for his close alignment with the common race-thinking and terminology of the time. Collected Essays 5 has one footnote for it, on the “Thomas Henry Huxley” who was one of the first to grasp and endorse Darwin’s principles of evolution. In passing Lovecraft also appears to endorse the theory that the Viking-discovered Vinland (“Vineland”) was indeed located in New England or thereabouts. Such ideas and their ideological hinterland are still contentious today, as evidenced by the recent removal of this picture from the walls of the National Gallery in Oslo1 due to its ‘colonialist’ political incorrectness…

Christian Krohg’s “Leif Erikson discovers America” (1872).

The Krogh painting was itself a replacement for a painting (originally on the museum’s grand staircase) banished because deemed even more politically incorrect.2. This was “The Ride of Asgard” (Asgardsreien) (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo. All this reminds one that the defunct political and ethnographic commonplaces of Lovecraft’s youth still have a curious power to induce fear, even today. It is not to be found only in his horror stories and darker poetry.

In a note immediately following the essay Lovecraft, expecting attacks, wittily warns his would-be critics that he has closely studied both Pope’s Dunciad and…

Paul J. Campbell’s ‘Wet Hen’

The latter was a quarterly humour magazine which bore a customarily risque cover, being produced by the journalism fraternity of the University of South Dakota. I assume Lovecraft had it by mail via amateur contacts, possibly editor Campbell himself, of whom no trace can be found. It was presumably mailed in a plain brown wrapper, the rules on the U.S. mail then being rather strict. If Lovecraft was indeed a subscriber in 1915 then it had a long run, because mention of this quarterly can be found right through into the 1950s. It is not online except in very occasional eBay listings, though the University’s Archives & Special Collections has it in archival boxes — if anyone wants to spend a merry hour hunting for unknown Lovecraft letters or perhaps even a jaunty poem or two. Wet Hen looks to be similar to Home Brew, to which Lovecraft would later contribute.

Lovecraft then introduces his readers to the newest UAPA recruit and his boyhood friend Chester P. Munroe. While Lovecraft is still “secluding himself amidst the musty volumes of his library”, Chester has grown into a man of the world and is living in South Carolina. The reader learns that Chester would write stories at the Slater Avenue school they both attended, and he later wrote “an unpublished novel”. His “charming younger brother” Harold is now Deputy Sheriff of Providence County, which gives Lovecraft an interesting early connection with the local police (even though he never read the police report pages in his local newspaper).

Lovecraft next admires Leo Fritter’s astronomical-philosophical essay on “The Spiritual Significance of the Stars” in the amateur journal Woodbee. Again, this is not online. One assumes no taint of astrology was to be found in this essay. Since elsewhere in The Conservative Lovecraft endorses Fritter for the role of UAPA President.

Lovecraft reports he has read Dench’s new booklet “Playwriting for the Cinema”, finding it “terse and readable”. The full title is Playwriting for the Cinema: dealing with the writing and marketing of scenarios (1914). No scan is online, but one can discover it to be a substantial 76-page booklet. Both Arthur Leeds and Everett McNeil were professional scenario writers in the movie business, then centred in New York City. Over a decade later Dench will become one of the lynch-pins who brings together the Lovecraft Circle in New York City, including Leeds and McNeil.

Lovecraft greatly admires J.H. Fowler’s poem “The Haunted Forest”, encountered in the British amateur journal Outward Bound. It…

shows a marvellous and almost Poe-like comprehension of the dark and sinister

This poet was the schoolman, anthology editor and de Quincey expert John Henry Fowler (1861-1932). I can find no volume of his own poetry. Conan Doyle may have poked fun at him in the classic mystery story “The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange” (1883), and if so then this hints that (at age 22) he was becoming known among writers and publishers for his interest in such things…

J.H. Fowler & Son, Dunkel Street, suppliers of mediums to the nobility and gentry; charms sold — love-philtres — mummies — horoscopes cast.

In The United Amateur, Lovecraft expands on the poem…

The Haunted Forest”, a poem by J.H. Fowler, is almost Poe-like in its grimly fantastic quality. We can excuse rather indefinite metre when we consider the admirably created atmosphere, the weird harmony of the lines, the judicious use of alliteration, and the apt selection of words. “Bird-shunned”, as applied to the thickets of the forest, is a particularly graphic epithet. Mr. Fowler is to be congratulated upon his glowing imagination and poetical powers.

I see that Lovecraft much later slips this same wording into his story “The Haunter of the Dark”…

… what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows?

  1.   “Storm blows around art banished to the new National Museum’s cellar”, Norway’s News in English, 20th February 2023. ↵
  2.   Peter Nicolai Arbo and Artistic Hybridity in the Nineteenth-century (2018), page 58 ↵

HPL at the Ladd – in full Vint-o-Vision

17 Friday Feb 2023

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, something a little different. In the merry spirit of our new ‘deep fake’ era… HPL seen steering the controls of the Ladd Observatory telescope, Providence. In hi-res colour Vint-o-Vision.

[I had] the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle. […] So constant were my observations, that my neck became affected by the strain of peering at a difficult angle. It gave me much pain, & resulted in a permanent curvature perceptible today to a close observer. — Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, November 1916.

Stellarium 1.0

22 Saturday Oct 2022

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After 30 years as a ‘perpetual beta’, the fine and free Stellarium desktop software is now in version 1.0 stable. It’s a little technical and the UI is initially unfamiliar. But it’s perhaps the most accessible balance of power/usability, for casual night-sky watchers who are not part of the telescope crowd. And its time-travel function is especially valuable for historical researchers and historical-fiction authors.

Numbering is a bit confusing. The stable 1.0 is officially 0.22.3 for Windows 7 warriors, and 1.22.3 for other Windows OS versions.

Frank Drake (1930-2022)

10 Monday Oct 2022

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It’s sad to hear of the death of Frank Drake, originator of the famous Drake Equation.

Of course Lovecraft never lived to hear his November 1961 equation, or even an intimation of it in early science-fiction. He never put its weightings so precisely, but I do recall that in his letters he sometimes put his mind to thinking along the same logical step-by-step lines, about the chances of other intelligent and enterprising beings elsewhere in the galaxy. I seem to recall a passage in which he estimated the likely time between the emergence of each new sentient species, and from that logically extrapolated according to the astronomy of his day (which was still discovering basic matters about the universe), concluding there was a good chance of other intelligences.

Though re-finding the relevant quotes would take a long time. Roll on the unified mega-index of Lovecraft’s letters, which will hopefully have entries for concepts such as “Extraterrestrials, likelihood of actual existence”. Possibly the forthcoming ‘Lovecraft and astronomy’ book will also have some identification of the relevant letters.

Notes on the Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V

11 Monday Jul 2022

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Notes on the Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V.

The time is 1934-37.

* Lovecraft was using his old cleaned telescope for local observations again, in early 1935… “Last Sunday evening I was all ready to watch the occultation of the Pleiades, but clouds malignly intervened.” (Page 107). He does not give the location, but presumably somewhere open and near his home.

* He saw a large exhibition of Hokusai prints from Japan… “a splendid lecture & special exhibition pertaining to my favourite Hokusai, & the entire [Art Museum, Providence] quarterly bulletin was devoted to the subject of Japanese prints. (Page 127). The Museum had acquired a large set. “Hokusai’s Cranes on Snow-Laden Pine was one of the things I especially liked in the exhibition” (Page 127). This seems to be ‘Cranes on Branch of Snow-covered Pine’…

* He was back at Jake’s in Providence in early 1935…”we descended [College Hill] to “Jake’s” – the famous stevedore [dock-worker] restaurant at the foot of the hill which Wilfred B. Talman (then a Brown student) discover’d in 1926 and introduced to the gang. Here have gorg’d such dignitaries as W. Paul Cook, James Ferdinand Morton, Donald Wandrei … and now Robert Ellis Moe. This is the joint where good food is serv’d in such fabulous quantities. We chose sausage-meat and johnny-cakes, with stupendous bowls of short-cake (R.E.M. banana; H.P.L. peach) and whipped cream for dessert.” (Page 126).

* He was amused by a S.F. League spoof publication, Flabbergasting Stories. The… “S.F. League & its members have [a] mimeographed parody on the science fiction magazines – Flabbergasting Stories. It is really extremely clever & witty — Sterling showed me a copy.” (Page 151).

* By April 1935 he accepted the presented evidence for some form of vegetative life living on Mars… “We can no longer dispute the independent existence of protoplasm on different worlds, since vegetation on Mars has been well authenticated by direct visual & photographic evidence.” (Pages 153-54).

* Lovecraft records that… “in idly reflecting on my correspondence list the other day, I discovered that the praenomenon [Christian name] most numerously represented is none other than Robert – Barlow, Bloch, Howard, Moe, Nelson.” Who was Robert Nelson? He’s in the volume Lovecraft’s Letters to Robert Bloch, as Robert Nelson (1912-1935), since new letters were discovered in 2012. His weird poetry and other work is now collected in Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters by Robert Nelson.

* He also recalls that… “Clarke Howard Johnson [1851-1931, 49 Westminster St.] Chief Justice of the R. I. Supreme Court was my grandfather’s best friend and executor of his will.” (Page 166). No photo can be found.

* Beyond the lake-pines around Barlow’s Florida homestead were real English oaks… “Bob’s [Barlow’s printing] cabin across the lake is virtually finished, & last week I cut a roadway from the landing to the cabinward path. This edifice is ideally located in a picturesque oak grove – not the live-oak of the [U.S.] south, but the old-fashioned, traditional oak of the north & of Old England.” (Page 182).

* Extensive reading preceded each trip to a new place… “Every time I take a trip I read up as extensively as possible on the places I’m going to see — so that when I get there, each site and object will have some meaning for me.” (Page 188).

* “I’ve felt only one earthquake in the course of my existence – the shock of Feb. 28, 1925, when I was in New York.” (Page 207). Apparently… “one of the most powerful earthquakes of the 20th century”, the Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake. It originated under the St. Lawrence River Valley in Canada, which may interest Mythos writers if that location has not already been used.

* The autumn/fall of 1935 was very mild and prolonged, and Lovecraft was fortunate to spend two weeks in New York City during this fine spell. He stayed with Donald Wandrei at 155 West 10th Street… “The brothers have taken a very attractive four-room flat in Greenwich Village — at 155 West 10th St., above a rather well-known ‘bohemian’ restaurant called Julius’s.” (Page 210). Donald’s brother was away during the stay, and so Lovecraft had his room. Thus Lovecraft was for two weeks in a flat above one of the most famous gay bars in history. A bar still going today and now numbered as 159.

The bar on 1940s.nyc, here cleaned and colorised.

* In 1935 the John Hay Library has “frequent exhibitions there (books & reliques of literary or historic interest) which I usually see.” (Page 216). Such as one on the poet Horace along with a lecture (Page 218).

* His Christmas tree was delivered, rather than netted and then personally slung over a shoulder before being manfully hefted up the hill from the Market Place… “Our Christmas tree arrived yesterday, but will be kept in a cool closet to prevent deterioration”. (Page 218).

* Lovecraft had once been a regular reader of the magazine The Black Cat, which folded just before Weird Tales appeared on the stands. Morton was seeking to collect a complete run in 1936, and Lovecraft remarked… “Hope ya kin get your Black Cat file. I used to buy that reg’lar-like, and recall the swell weird stuff it had.” (Page 227). Which means he would have seen Arthur Leeds stories in it, before he encountered any members of the Circle including Leeds. That assumes though that he read the magazine past early summer 1914. Leeds was hailed as “new to our readers” in the May 1914 issue. We know Lovecraft began to “notice” the magazine in 1904, but seemingly not the cessation date for his interest in it.

* In his final years he was writing to a “Frederic Jay Pabody” about Atlantis. Ten such letters came up for sale in 2016 and are now found complete in Letters to C.L. Moore and Others.

* His Uncle had translated Virgil… “Some day I wish I could get his Virgil published — a blank verse translation of everything but the Eclogues which (together with other mss. of his) I have always carefully treasured.”. (Page 329). Sadly it appears that these works have been lost?

* In his younger days he saw the stage actor Robert Mantell play… “Horatio, Iago, Mercutio, Bassanio, Edmund, and Faulconbridge” in Providence. (Pages 340 and 350). This means he saw performed Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and King John. He elsewhere implies that he saw Richard III with the players using the 18th century Cibber version.

* His Remington typewriter gave “non-visible writing”, i.e. as the typist he could not see what was being typed onto the page. (Page 267).

* “The first comet I ever observed was Borelli’s — in Aug. 1903. I saw Halley’s in 1910 — but missed the bright one earlier in that year by being flat in bed with a hellish case of measles!” (Page 282).

* “The especial glamour of spangles [i.e. small sparkles of light] probably comes from a synthesis of different pleasant associations — the stars, the rising sparks of a comfortable fire, precious stones, &c.” (Page 328). Sunlight on clear purling water, too.

* October/November 1936. “I haven’t had a new suit of clothes since 1928.” (Page 337). “I have reduced nourishment to $2 and $3 per week” to economise. (Page 364).

* Talking of the future… “I would advocate the improvement of backward groups through education, hygiene, & eugenics.” (Page 323). What does he mean here? Not what modern leftists mean, who have since sought to conflate 1930s eugenic practices and ideas with mass murder in Nazi death-camps. But Lovecraft explicitly told his correspondent that he did not mean death. He was speculating about a possible future “within the next half-century”, and stating that he would not wish some future state to “starve & kill off the weak”. Though he was highly doubtfully about the chances of any human “improvement” happening via scientific breeding, what he envisioned was evidently more a ‘eugenics for health’ programme of sterilisation and contraception. Such ideas were relatively common at the time, not least on the left, and in Lovecraft’s words were widely “agreed” on… “It is, for example, agreed that hereditary physical disease & mental inferiority ought not to be transmitted — hence within the next half-century the sterilisation of certain biologically defective types will probably become universal throughout the western world, thus cutting down the prevalence of idiocy, epilepsy, haemophilia, & kindred inherited plagues.” Similarly his use of the word “hygiene” has a different meaning than today, being a 1920s and 30s euphemism for various forms of birth-control and venereal disease prevention (e.g. condoms) under the control of the users. At that point in time, mass routine abortion of babies appears to have been unthinkable as a eugenic method.

* He indicates what a possible 1940s ‘Romans in Africa’ tale or novel might have looked like, with Ancient Romans… “penetrating south into Africa beyond the mark set by Maternus, skirting the [River] Niger, threading through steaming jungles … and finally coming upon that Kingdom of Elder Horror whereof there survives today only the ruined masonry of the Great Zimbabwe.” (Page 375).

* He gives a useful starter reading list for Dunsany… “When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of The Gods of the Mountain [a play], Bethmoora, Poltanees Beholder of Ocean, The City of Never, The Fall of Babblekund, In the Land of Time, and Idle Days on the Yann.” (Page 354).

* “My dream of the black cat city was very fragmentary. The place was built of stone and clung to the side of a cliff like some of the towns drawn by Sime for Dunsany’s stories. There are towns more or less like it in Spain. The place seemed to have been built by and for human beings aeons ago, but its present feline inhabitants had evidently lived there for ages. Nothing actually happened in this dream — it was just an isolated picture of the place, with the cats moving about in a rational and orderly manner, evidently in the performance of definite duties.”

* In his Mythos, cats are (probably) tentacle-tailed aliens from outer space… “the mysteries of those black outer gulfs whence surely the first terrestrial felines lithely sprang long ago when Mu and Hyperborea were young.” (Page 377).

* Shortly before he became ill and died, he at last saw a movie of which he could approve. (Pages 435-36). “A Midsummer Night’s Dream [released 1935] — and it was certainly no disappointment. The delivery of the lines was in nearly every case excellent; and though there were some cuts in the [Shakespeare] text which I lamented, these did not amount to more than the excisions common to all acting versions from the Restoration down. The music blended effectively with setting and dialogue, and the pageantry was excellently managed. Some of the elusively weird photographic effects connected with the haunted wood were incomparably fine. As the animating spirit of the grove, that little elf who played Puck certainly scored a triumph. In aspect and voice and demeanour he represented with utter perfection the bland, mischievous indifferentism of the traditional sylvan deity, while that shrill, eery, alienly-motivated mirth of his was the most convincing thing of its kind that I’ve ever seen.”

The movie seems to have had many sniffy reviews at the time, from critics who thought it too low-brow. But it won two Oscars due to a “grass-roots write-in campaign” from fans. For initial general release in October 1935 the movie was cut from 132 minutes to 117, but I don’t know what running-time Lovecraft saw more than a year later in Providence in early 1937. Could it have had a more fulsome public release, post-Oscars? Perhaps movie historians can answer that one. The movie finally had a good home release as a DVD in 2007, but it does not appear to have been otherwise restored. It appears to have been ignored by writings about Lovecraft and cinema, presumably because it was seen so late in his life. Nevertheless, it should be included in any future survey of his appreciation of the cinematic arts. I have to say that it certainly feels overlong when seen at its full length. The visual are indeed very fine, but the music and delivery are both far too strident. The music is written for the concert hall, not a movie, and the vocal delivery has that very fast and shrill (shrieked, at times) ‘screwball’ pace that is all to common in 1930s movies.

Well, that’s it for the Selected Letters. All five volumes are now done. I’ll now be catching up on my saved bundles of blog posts, tutorials, reviews and newspaper and magazine articles. After that I’ll be reading the Lovecraft Annual 2021, for an in-depth review before the 2022 Annual is released.

Notes on H.P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, Volume 4

29 Wednesday Jun 2022

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Notes on H.P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, Volume 4.

The time is the early 1930s.

* As a child, circa 1896-7… “I made my mother take me to all the Oriental curio shops” in Providence. (Page 8).

* “I read French’s [supernatural anthology] Ghosts, Grim & Gentle, & have twice seen the anthologist. He is an old man – must be high in the 70’s – but very vigorous mentally.” The initial meeting was at ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s book shop, and presumably there was also one other meeting there by early 1932. Which suggests that Joseph Lewis French was a Providence resident rather than a visitor. (Page 15).

* “Cram’s ‘Dead Valley’ is great stuff, & makes me wish desperately I could get hold of his other weird stuff. Whitehead knows Cram personally”. This is Ralph Adams Cram, and the story is in his collection Black Spirits & White (1895). Evidently unavailable in the early 1930s even as a loan from Cook or some other weird collector. (Page 15).

* “I’m now helping Whitehead prepare a new ending and background for a story Bates has rejected. … I am having the bruise excite cells of hereditary memory causing the man to hear the destruction and sinking of fabulous Mu 20,000 years ago!” Whitehead’s “Bothon” (1947) carries the storyline in question, but has no trace of incorporation of Lovecraft’s actual language rather than his re-plotting. (Page 37).

* H.P. Lovecraft as a party gatecrasher while visiting New Orleans… at “the celebrated ‘Patio of the Palm’ at 612 Rue Royale, where a titanic Brazilian date-palm springs from the soil of a small court and spreads a strange glamourous green twilight over the whole expanse of flagstones, fountain, and prodigious water-jars. I hung around this place like a thief planning a large-scale cleanup [i.e. burglary], but was finally rewarded when a large party – evidently friends of the inhabitants – called and strolled about the patio and arcade with the gate open!” The implication, discreetly left unstated, is that Lovecraft swiftly tailed them through the gates. This was the Rue Royale, in the French quarter of New Orleans. It’s since been renamed as the less exotic “Royal Street”. No. 612 suffered severe hurricane damage in 1965, which sounds like it would have taken out any large palms. There appears to be no photos of the former garden, only the exterior. No. 612 is now the art gallery ‘Le Jardin’. (Page 46).

* “Stories often result from the oddest & most seemingly irrelevant ideas & glimpses. I am most often moved to composition by vague landscape, atmospheric, & architectural effects – either first-hand or in pictures – though stories, newspaper cuttings, dreams, & all sorts of other things have lain behind many of my efforts”. (Page 84). Harried academics often want a quick fix and hare off to suggest some ‘big name from the canon’ as an influence on the author. But, as Lovecraft says, that’s often not how it works.

* Lovecraft mentions a large public book sale, which might be thought to be the remainder of the stock of Uncle Eddy’s book shop. In October 1932… “Other recent purchases of mine (at an alluring remainder sale) are…”. (Page 90). However, Eddy did not die until April 1933, so that sale can’t be of his stock.

* R.E. “Howard is so used to violence [in Cross Plains] that he can hardly believe it when I tell him that there are no fights on the public streets of the East except in slums & gang-ridden areas.” (Page 125).

* “Some years ago Long and I attempted to explore the Fulton Fish Market section of New York [Brooklyn’s Fulton Street continues across the river] which is full of quaint scenes and buildings. Ordinarily I have about 50 times the vigour and endurance of young Belknap – but for once he had grandpa at a disadvantage! I don’t know where I left the lunch I had eaten an hour previously – for I was too dizzy to read the street signs! In the end I managed to stagger out of the stench without actually losing consciousness.” (Page 139).

* 1933. “Heard a fine lecture on Spinoza – whose contributions to philosophy I appreciate more & more as I get older – at Brown just before the cold spell. It was delivered under the auspices of the newly founded R.I. Philosophical Society – a thing I may join if I find membership worth the annual dollar. … I shall attend later lectures in the course – all dealing with aspects of philosophy”. (Page 140). Wikipedia has the Society as being founded in 1950. Obviously it was actually founded circa 1933, and then perhaps re-founded in 1950 after the war.

* “I liked [the story] ‘The Green Wildebeest’, & have it noted down for mention in any future edition of my [“Supernatural Literature”] article”. (Page 144) This was the opening tale of John Buchan’s collection of club stories The Runagates Club (1928). Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay recounts a mystical tale from his years on the South African frontier.

* Lovecraft finds the movie version of Strange Interlude (1932, seen New Year 1933 with the Longs) to be “excellent”. It’s a cut-down of a four-hour play by Eugene O’Neill, apparently a high-pitched drama about family paternity secrets and a neurotic woman. I can’t see any likely influence on “The Thing on the Doorstep”, written August 1933. One of the characters is somewhat of a Lovecraft-alike, at least visually…

* From September 1932 Lovecraft, seeking to economise even further as the Great Depression gripped, started to use the cheap Carter’s Kongo Black ink. It only cost a “dime-per-2 oz.-bottle”. (Page 147).

* [as a youth] “I loved firearms & could scarcely count the endless succession of guns & pistols I’ve owned. I wish even now that I hadn’t given away my last Remington [rifle].” (Page 158).

* “Half the stories I wrote during that research period (when I was 14, 15, and 16) had to do with strange survivals of Roman civilisation in Africa, Asia, the Antarctic, the Amazon Valley, and even pre-Columbian North America.” (Page 336).

* He gives a hint about what his early destroyed stories might have been like, re: “a youthful mystery of my own … involving the name of Afrasiab. You doubtless recall the closing passage of Poe’s [story] “Premature Burial” … ‘but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us – they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.’ … I wove all sorts of hideously fanciful images about that voyage, and made obscure references to it in many of my juvenile tales. … Only after years did I find out somehow that Afrasiab came from [Hakim] Firdousi’s great Persian epic [the Shah-Namah, which he cannot obtain and so] … I am still ignorant of Afrasiab’s frightful adventure with the daemons.”

Poe scholars cannot find this reference in the Shah-Namah, at least in English, and nor can I. Afrasiab is also to be found in Lovecraft’s story “The Nameless City”… “In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demoniac lore … I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the demons that floated with him down the Oxus”. Also perhaps relevant is the reference to “Turanian-Asiatic magic” magic in “The Horror at Red Hook”, because Afrasiab was a semi-mythical Turianian king and also a deathless and magic-powered ‘super-villain’ of regional folklore. The sands anciently swamped the cities on the west of the river Oxus and — as Afrasiab was also considered a regional ‘drought-bringing demon’ — I guess the idea of his voyaging the Oxus might perhaps be connected with the natural historic drying of this liminal border landscape?

* “my absence of training in economics and sociology is really a deplorable handicap to me in my efforts to understand the trend of these tense times, when so much of the motivation of nations, as well as their internal problems, depends almost wholly on complex economic consideration.” (Page 169). “I myself, for example, am so ignorant of economics, engineering, finance, and other basic governmental essentials, that no really enlightened nation ought to allow me to vote or hold office.” (Page 224).

* “my old principal is in an insane asylum. The one where my young friend Brobst is now a nurse.” (Page 173) “My only exploration of a madhouse was last year”, that year being 1932, with Brobst at his institution. (Page 191). Lovecraft doesn’t say if he encountered his former headmaster on this visit.

* Lovecraft uses his old telescope (last seen being carefully cleaned in Vol. 3) in the summer of 1933… “Had my telescope out last night – pretty fair sky-vista here. Mars and Jupiter were so close together that I could get them into the same telescopic field with a 150-diameter eyepiece.” (Page 203).

* In the secluded St. John’s churchyard in Providence, Lovecraft would have shown visitors… “the impressive altar tomb [of the astronomer] John Merritt, the London merchant who came to Providence in 1750 & had the first coach, first astronomical telescope, & first globes in town.” (Page 276).

* His beloved Prospect Terrace was… “on my direct route downtown from 10 Barnes St.” (Page 273).

* Lovecraft concedes that religion does at least, behind the veneer of “fictitious heavenly authority”… “embody a vast amount of really useful precept – the massed experience of mankind worked out by trial & error” (Page 278). Yet “It would have been far better if we had kept our classical conception of ethics as a matter of beauty, good sense, & taste … for its survival would not then have been so imperilled by the decline of [the Christian] religion.” (Page 279).

* In the opening weeks of 1934 he reads Weigall’s Wanderings in Roman Britain (1926) and this overturns his previous conceptions of the likely ‘root historicity’ of the mythical King Arthur. Arthur is now deemed by Lovecraft no longer a Welsh “Cymric-speaking tribal chieftain”, but rather ‘the last of the Romans’ alive in the British Isles after the withdrawal of the Legions. (Page 292 onward). This is interesting in terms of its suggesting that Lovecraft had not seen book reviews of Weigall’s reputable book, which went through four editions. Nor it appears had he even heard of the idea being put forward, which might indicate that in the years 1926-1934 he was not really following British archaeology or Dark Ages history. This seem curious for one who had by then been corresponding with R.E. Howard on such topics for three years. Incidentally, note that a recent book on the main root possibility for a ‘Roman King Arthur’, i.e. deriving from a “Celtic-Roman Artorius”, fairly conclusively undermines the evidence for the idea.

* In 1933 he is still using his… “#2 Brownie which I bought 26 years ago – in far-off 1907. A sturdy two dollars’ worth!”. His early Box Brownie was one of the first mass-market ‘snapshot’ cameras.

* “I have for years been thinking of basing a tale on the celebrated Oracle of Trophonius – that yawning cave whose nighted revelations were such that none who had received them ever smiled again.” (Page 325).

* A dream indicates the possible date when Lovecraft discovered that he could see from his room the lads in the neighbouring frat house. This is evidenced in “The Haunter of the Dark” (“Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake’s study…”). Lovecraft had moved into No. 66 College St. in May, and thus only in November would the leaves be off the trees to reveal previously concealed neighbouring windows — and views into them in the early evening before curtains were pulled. A November 1933 letter appears to offer confirmation of this view, and the strong impact of its revealing on Lovecraft… “Last week I had a very vivid dream of forming the acquaintance of a group of quiet, well-bred, and apparently wholesome young men, all of whom lived in quasi-bohemian apartments in ancient houses along a hill street in Providence which I had never before discovered”. (Page 235). Later used for the late and rather ponderous Derleth story “The Dark Brotherhood”.

* January 1934… “H.C. Koenig has for some time been lending me books on witchcraft from his remarkably extensive library.” (Page 347) Early in Vol 5. he remarks that he is continuing to get regular batches of such books from Koenig.

* Lovecraft appears to have first met his New York friend la Touche in 1924 and through Henneberger… “I met him in Henneberger’s suite at the Hotel Empire in N.Y. … the old-time wit & columnist La Touche Hancock” (Page 369).

And a little bit from Vol. 5, to go to the end of 1934:

* “No real civilisation wishes to change anyone’s opinion, except through rational arguments designed to make the holders of error see the error of what they have been holding.” (Vol. 5, page 13).

* For his long stay in Nantucket he roomed at the “Overlook”. (Vol. 5, page 25). This is now the ‘Veranda House’ at 3 Step Lane, Nantucket. It was known as the ‘Overlook’ from 1930-45. Named for its… “three spacious verandas on each of the three sides of the house, where patrons may enjoy the benefit of the sea breezes”.

The view.

The hotel. This was the cheapest he could find.

* He finishes 1934 with his aunt’s powerful radio set, as they listen by the Christmas tree to the hour-long British Empire Christmas broadcast of… “Etheric [short-wave radio] conversations between London & the uttermost reaches of our Dominions – Australia, Tasmania, Canada, India, South Africa, & so on – with other area sages from Scotland, Ireland, Liverpool, & a country place in the Cotswolds… & finally an address by the King. I don’t know when I’ve ever had a greater imaginative stimulus.” (Vol. 5, page 84). Live, the hour was an intricately coordinated triumph of radio engineering and clear evidence of the new medium’s global reach. The British Empire then still ruled a quarter of the world’s people, so Lovecraft’s fond cry of “God Save the King!” was no archaism.

Still from the excellent movie “The King’s Speech”.

Notes on Lovecraft’s Selected Letters III

22 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context

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Notes on Lovecraft’s Selected Letters Vol. III.

* “I am very fond of gardens – in fact they are among the most potent of all imaginative stimuli with me.” (page 29). Later he implies they formed his “earliest dreams”… I have actually found the garden of my earliest dreams – and in no other city than Richmond, home of my beloved Poe! Maymont!” (page 151). He also refers to an early, lost tale or long poem… “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 …” (page 138). He had early read Erasmus “Darwin’s ‘Botanick Garden’ … my early reading” (page 419), a likely influence on such early writing.

* He was taking night-walks in Providence in the Autumn / Fall of 1929… “the Hunter’s Moon last week was exceptionally fine. I took several walks to get the benefit of the mystic moonbeams on particular bits of landscape & architecture-river reflections” (page 38). Later he explores the far south of the city on foot, and later still (Vol. IV) parts of the north of the city.

* On everyday Christianity vs. its often pagan material trappings: “We have mouthed lying tributes to meekness and brotherhood under Gothic roofs whose very pinnacled audacity bespeaks our detestation of lowliness and our love for power and strength and beauty.” (page 45).

* On his Zimbabwe poem “The Outpost”, set in Rhodesia, he gives a linkage with Ophir which is not in the poem… “smart Arab and Phoenician Kings reign’d within the walls of the great Zimbabwe … and work’d the illimitable mines of Ophir”. The poem’s protagonist “K’nath-Hothar the Great King … [born of] great King Zothar-Nin [who] was born in Sidon of pure Phoenician stock” (page 55).

* He reads “The Netopian, house organ of Providence’s most influential bank”, which has some antiquarian articles. (Page 56). This is not online, but Brown holds the 1920-31 run at its Rockefeller Library.

* Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” features Commorium, which Lovecraft deems buried under the ice of Lothar. “It is this crux of elder horror, I am certain, that the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred was thinking when he – even he – left something unrnention’d & signdfy’d by a row of stars in the surviving codex of his accursed & forbidden Necronomicon!” (page 87). Lovecraft later refers to… “the mildew’d palimpsets of Commoriom” (page 242).

* Lovecraft hints at a “Cthulhu” sequel, having elsewhere suggested the possibility of a sequel story set on Cthulhu’s “home planet”. The following seems the match with that idea… “I shall sooner or later get around to the interplanetary field myself … I doubt if I shall have any living race upon the orb whereto I shall – either spiritually or corporeally – precipitate my hero. But there will be Cyclopean ruins – god! what ruins! – & certain presences that haunt the nether vaults.” (page 88) “It would begin as a dream-phenomenon creeping on the victim in the form of recurrent nightmares, as a result of his concentration of mind on some dim transgalactic world. Eventually it would enmesh him totally — leaving his body to vegetate in a coma in some madhouse whilst his mind roamed desolate & unbodied for ever above the half-litten stones of an aeon-dead civilisation of alien Things on a world that was in decay before the solar system evolved from its primal nebula. I doubt if I’d handle it as, phantasy so much as a stark, macabre bit of quasi-realism.” (pages 95-96).

* “The cuttings you enclosed are of extreme interest – that about the “star jelly” being absorbingly & superlatively so. … It is really improbable that any matter in the condition we recognise as “organic” could manage to get from one orb to another under the strenuous conditions of meteoric flight, though these occasional reports certainly do have their puzzling aspects. I have used the idea once – in “The Colour Out of Space” – & may yet use it again in a different way.” (page 136).

* In 1930 “the covers as well as the contents of rags like Snappy Stories represent true pornography” (page 108).

* “I’d damn well like to come out with a book [of philosophy] some day, even though I might never win a place beside Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Bertrand Russell.” (page 110). On learning philosophy he suggests to Toldridge… “You ought most emphatically to read The Story of Philosophy by Dr. Will Durant” (page 146).

* The “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet “series” was actually a modest and immediate financial success at a difficult time, netting him “$52.50 to date” (page 129).

* The writing of “The Whisperer in Darkness” was interrupted… “I am still stall’d on p.26 of my new Vermont horror, since revision (which I can’t refuse if I expect to make my trip!) has overwhelm’d me.” (page 130).

* In June 1930 he gives the place of a recent meeting with Dwyer… “the genial and fantastic Bernard Dwyer, whom I visited in antient Dutch Wiltwyck, up the placid Hudson” (page 159).

* In October 1930 he really does believe in witches… “the traditional features of witch-practice and Sabbat-orgies were by no means mythical. … Something actual was going on under the surface … scholars now recognise that all through history a secret cult of degenerate orgiastic nature-worshippers, furtively recruited from the peasantry and sometimes from decadent characters of more select origin, has existed throughout northwestern Europe; practicing fixed rites of immemorial antiquity for malign objects, having a governing system and hierarchy as well·defined and elaborate as that of any established religion, and meeting secretly by night in deserted rustic places. … the first mediaeval opposers of witchcraft were not mere fanatics fighting a shadow. They were deluded in that they thought themselves to be fighting something supernatural, but they were most certainly right in believing that they were fighting a genuine menace. … The witch-cult itself is probably now extinct, but no one can say just when it perished.” (pages 179-181) He later borrows many books on the topic from Keonig… “H. C. Koenig who has for some time been lending me books on witchcraft from his remarkably extensive library.” (Vol IV).

* There is a joking incantation on page 185, not in The Ancient Track…

N’ggah-kthn-y’hhu! Cthua t’lh gup r’lhob-g’th’gg Igh thok! G’llh-ya, Tsathoggua! Y’kn’nh, Tsathoggua!

It hath come!
Homage, Lord Tsathoggua, Father of Night!
Glory, Elder One, First-Born of Outer Entity!
Hail, Thou Who wast Ancient beyond Memory
Ere the Stars Spawned Great Cthulhu !
Power, Hoary Crawler over Mu’s fungoid places!
Ia! Ia! G’noth-ykagga-ha!
Ia! Ia! Tsathoggua!!!

* He is chided by Morton on his disregard of mineralogy in science… “No, Sir, I am not insensible of the importance of mineralogy in science… The fact is, I am perhaps less anti-mineralogical than the rest of the herd; insomuch as I realise that the trouble is with myself rather than with mineralogy.” (pages 200-201). One wonders if this chiding contributed to the mineralogy aspects of “At The Mountains of Madness”?

* In 1930 he recalls a past era when normal magazines would take weird fiction… “it often amuses me to note how the sedate & established magazines used to take horror-tales & phantasies without hesitation. Those were free & unstandardised days; & the prevailing view of the cosmos was one of awe & wonder, amidst which a bit of weird fiction was not at all incongruous. But all is changed now.” (page 203).

* He itemises the personal libraries of the circle… “The really big libraries owned by our crowd – beside which mine sinks into insignificance – are those of James F. Morton (general belles-lettres, specialising in Elizabethan literature), Loveman, (poetry, rare bibliophilic items), Orton (modern first editions – for which I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel), Cook (weird material), Munn (popular weird material), & young Derleth (everything under the sun — weird & modern fiction predominating).” (page 211). Curious, since I thought that Loveman was the Elizabethan specialist? Nor does he mention political works as an aspect of Morton’s library.

* On the prospects of his once again writing like Dunsany, in 1930… “In my hands, the result tends to resemble “The Land of Lur” more than it resembles the products” of Dunsany. What was “The Land of Lur”? He refers to a story in the May 1930 Weird Tales.

* “I am as geographic-minded as a cat” (page 214).

* He is still thinking in terms of ether-waves in 1930, albeit poetically… “after the destruction, the ether waves resulting therefrom might roll still farther out into some other realm of entity, where they – or part of them-might curiously reintegrate.” (page 217). In science he is also thinking of a ‘circular time’ in a similar way… “a curved time corresponding to Einsteinian curved space, you might have the voyager make a complete circuit of the chronological dimension-reaching the ultimate future by going beyond the ultimate past, or vice versa” (page 218) In relativistic terms, in space… “Straight lines do not exist, nor does theoretical infinity. What seems infinite extension is simply part of an inevitable returning curve, so that the effect of proceeding directly away from any given point in space is to return at length to that same point from the opposite direction. What lies ultimately beyond the deepest gulf of infinity is the very spot on which we stand.” (page 388). See also “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1934), though note that the maths in that were from his collaborator Price.

* In late 1931 he hears a lecture on the “expanding universe” theory, re:… “all spiral nebulae – external galaxies – are retreating rapidly into outer space” (page 438). But then he has second thoughts in early 1932… “Probably the expansive effect now perceived is in part illusory & in part due to one phase of a general pulsation of alternate expansions & contractions.” (Vol. IV, page 6).

* “As for Irem, the City of Pillars … The mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is said to have dwelt therein for a time in the 8th century A.D., prior to the writing of the abhorred & unmentionable Necronomicon. … some timid reader has torn out the pages where the Episode of the Vault under the Mosque [i.e. a CAS story] comes to a climax – the deletion being curiously uniform in the copies at Harvard & at Miskatonic University. When I wrote to the University of Paris for information about the missing text, a polite sub-librarian, M. Lean de Vercheres, wrote me that be would make me a photostatic copy as soon as he could comply With the formalities attendant upon access to the dreaded volume. Unfortunately it was not long afterward that I learned of M. de Vercheres’ sudden insanity incarceration, & of his attempt to burn the hideous book which he had just secured & consulted. Thereafter my requests met with scant notice.”

* On what would today be called jet-set ‘globalists’… “We cannot judge cultures, and their deep instinctive attitudes toward one another, by the unctuous amenities of the few internationally-minded aristocrats, intellectuals, and aesthetes who form a cosmopolitan and friendly group because of the common pull of surface manners or special interests. Of course these exotic specimens get on well enough together…” (page 272)

* His… “dream-self has come to represent me so perfectly that in waking hours I sometimes feel odd for lack of my three-cornered hat, powdered periwig, satin small-clothes, silver sword, and buckled shoes.” (page 283). Although elsewhere he remarks that the bulk of his dreams involve his childhood.

* “I first read up on the Hellenistic [ancient Greek] period back in ’04 and ’05.” (page 288). He reckons just 2,400 years since the height of Periclean Athens. Which makes 2022 around 2,500 years.

* The young Lovecraft, at around age 12, always carried a real revolver with him (page 290). He also had a set of disguises and false beards. This was presumably to do with his boyhood detective work. He later had “an endless succession of guns and pistols” (Vol IV, page 158) and became a crack shot until his eyesight gave out.

* He alludes to the British scientist Sir Oliver Lodge without naming him, re: spiritualism… “the nostalgic & unmotivated ‘overbeliefs’ of elderly & childhood-crippled physicists” (page 295) and “the side-line tripe cooked up by bullhead-brained physicists on their mental vacations!” (page 302). Alongside Conan Doyle, Lodge was a leading public champion of spiritualist nonsense.

* He recalls that… “from the age of three my mother always took me walking in the fields & ravines, & along the high wooded riverbank, (the latter still unchanged, thanks to the Met. Park System.).” … “the old countryside is almost gone; though one farm still remains as a farm with a few acres of antient field & orchard & garden around the antient (1735) house, & forms the goal of many a walk of mine.” The “Met. Park System” means the park formed along the banks of the Seekonk. (Pages 317 and 318).

* Early 1931. “All winter, as I told you, I have been studying Quebec; & all this spring I have been studying the Dutch Hudson Valley” (page 327).

* Lovecraft and Middle-earth, 1931… “a cold winter twilight calls up all sorts of images of shadowy shapes marching imperiously in some Northerly middle region just beyond the Earth” (page 394)

* The out-of-Africa theory was not then know. “That the human race started on some plateau in central Asia is almost certain” he writes (page 412). This out-of-Asia theory would have been a supported scientific position as late as the 1950s. Only in the 1970s and 80s did the ‘out-of-Africa’ theory become the new consensus.

* On sister-marriage and consanguinity, pre-genetics, he writes… “science long ago exploded the myth that there is necessarily anything unhealthy about the offspring of close kin.” (page 424). I’m not sure where he was getting that from, but it might argue that he had radically departed from the accepted eugenic science of the time re: the dangers of in-breeding.

* Writing to young Shea, he foresees a future time of at least partial erotic liberation… “At present, the [active] following of an alternative course [to normal sexuality] involves so much commonness & ignominious furtiveness that it can hardly be recommended for a person of delicate sensibilities except in extreme cases. It remains to be seen what sort of middle course the future will work out.” (page 425).

* Loveman was riding out the worst of the Great Depression quite well, at least in summer 1931… “Loveman gets $60.00 per week as an expert cataloguer for the well-known N.Y. firm of Dauber & Pine”. (page 416)

* Lovecraft’s younger aunt spoke with a Boston accent. (page 420).

* A revision job… “this week I have received impressions from the book-revision job which slightly alter my picture of 18th century life in the Connecticut Valley”. I can’t immediately find which book this might have been. (Page 426). The letter was October 1931, so if the work was published as a book then it might have been anywhere from Christmas 1931 to around 1935.

* “Deeps of Gba-Ktan, beyond Devil’s Reef off the coast of Innsmouth.” (page 435). Appears not to have found its way into Mythos encyclopedias.

* And finally, an item that might have made an entry in his Commonplace Book, but didn’t. “Wind in hollow walls mistaken for spectral music. Actual case in Halsey Mansion around the corner from 10 Barnes St. … actually feared by the ignorant” (pages 444-445).

Notes on Selected Letters II – part one

23 Monday May 2022

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, Lovecraft as character, New discoveries

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Over the summer I’m re-reading H.P. Lovecraft’s five volumes of Selected Letters and this time I’m making notes. Here is part one of my notes on Selected Letters Vol. II.

* Lovecraft mentions Chase’s Drug Store located at the central “bridge” area of Pawtuxet, stating that this store offered all the best available postcards of local scenes (page 58). The Providence Public Library has a picture of Chase’s frontage, with a chap appearing to carry away a packet of drugs that could equally be a set of postcards. I’ve here rectified and faintly colourised it (this kind of picture doesn’t take colour very well). The picture was made by Mr. Chase, so it is his store.

* Lovecraft states that he had his cuttings on Rhode Island and antiquarian matters well-sorted and assembled into scrapbooks by October 1926. These having been in mounded up in piles on his desk, when living in one room at Red Hook (page 77). His scrapbooks, antiquarian or otherwise, do not appear to have survived.

* In April 1926 he was back in Providence and exploring his own city. Though obviously inspired by Eddy’s recent introduction to the reality of an ‘unexplored Providence’, he appears to be alone in the following exploration. He was also presumably using the secrets he had learned about the layout of colonial Providence during the fateful visit to the Shepley Library. He thus begins to visit on foot parts of Providence he had not previously visited…

I discovered one of the most hellish slums ever imagined by mankind. it was a place whose existence I had not before realised — the end of Chalkstone Ave. near Randall Sq. and the railway — and its dark hilly courts approach the very ultimates of blasphemous horror.” (page 43)

It appears to be a dangerous area even today, just to warn any local Lovecraftians who might be thinking of photographing there. The 2022 news reports two shootings in Chalkstone Ave.

* In May 1926, Lovecraft was still exploring previously unexplored “seedy” by-ways, but this time perhaps less squalid ones. As he was in the company of his aunt…

Mrs. Gamwell and I took a walk thro’ a section of the town in which I had never set foot before — an antient and now seedy district east of the river and just south of the good residential area. Colonial houses abounded, and I was astonisht at some of the gorgeously antique effects obtainable here and there. […] It is call’d Dove Street, and has neither pavement nor sidewalk, but consists of irregular rows of simple Colonial cottages with rough stone doorsteps, and here and there a flagstone or two.” (page 54)

Dove Street is one of the parallel side streets that run alongside the main Hope Street at Fox Point, and head down toward the waterfront rail-yards at India Point. Dove Street still exists, though the map hints it may have been truncated in modern times. Today the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Mary Elizabeth Robinson Research Center is located about 160 yards to the north, which means that researchers might also fit a visit to nearby Dove Street in when visiting. The top part of Dove Street appears, from Street View, to be on its way to being gentrified.

* In February 1927 he writes of the Providence waterfront and names four “dark alleys” there…

the vivid, glamorous waterfront with its rotting wharves & colonial warehouses & archaic lines of gambrel roofs & dark alleys with romantic names (Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Bullion, etc) & wondrous ship-chandleries & mysterious marine boarding houses in ancient, lamplit, cobblestoned courts”.

Today “Doubloon Street” etc. One of which might have partly inspired “The Call of Cthulhu” setting…

one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside [of Providence] which formed a short cut from the [dock used by the Newport boat on the] waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street.

* In October 1926 he travelled, seemingly by motor-coach, from Providence and…

the Eddy Street coach terminal over the antient Plainfield Pike […] and later on the region devastated to create the new Scituate reservoir” (page 81)

In March 1927, five months later, he wrote “The Colour Out of Space” with its soon-to-be reservoir setting.

* He cleaned his old telescope in October 1926…

I cleaned the brass of my telescope yesterday for the first time in twenty years. Gehenna, what a green mess! And I couldn’t get it very brilliant even in the end. That’s what neglect does!

So this tells us two things. That he still had his old telescope, but that he had not used it for a long time.

“Gehenna” is a word used in the King James Bible in the final parts of Isiah, and refers to a beautiful garden place, a garden-grove for refined dancing and singing that was near to Jerusalem. An insidious and intractable Moloch worship [i.e. ritual sacrifice of young children by burning alive] came to replace the dancing and song. Lovecraft thus alludes to the later form of the valley when, after being utterly despoiled by the Moloch worship and sacrifice, the later and more respectable kings of the city sought to blot out the memory of the despoliation with further despoliation of their own — they buried Gehenna under a giant tip used for the fire-ashes and waste and unwanted dead bodies of Jerusalem. Thus “Gehenna” became a byword for ashes and filth.

In April 1927 (page 126) Lovecraft gives the vaguest hint that he may have made some winter or early spring 1927 observations through the newly-cleaned telescope…

As in your case, the skies exert the utmost fascination upon me; nor is the weaving of wild dreams about their unplumbed deeps & suns & worlds in the least hampered by the precise astronomical data which my scientific side demands.

* By June 1927 (page 140) Lovecraft had noticed how at least one critic had made the connection of the more fanatical aspects of the Puritan era with “the horror-element in American literature”…

It is easy to see how the critic Paul Elmer More traces the horror-element in American literature to the remote New England countryside with its solitude-warped religious fanaticism.

* Eddy Jr. pops up again in July 1927 (page 156) when he is “hunted up” to join a gathering of visitors at Barnes Street of Morton, the Longs and others. The implication of the wording is that Lovecraft has not seen Eddy Jr. for a while, had not invited him to the gathering, and was not quite sure how to get in touch with him when someone (likely Morton) suggested Eddy Jr. should join them at Barnes Street.

* His birthplace and childhood home at 454 had an “ebony and gold” decorative scheme for the “front hall”, and then a rich “old gold and rose” for the “front parlour”, in which he used to read The Arabian Nights.

* A letter offers us some implied details of Long’s proposed “novelette”, which would have made characters out of Lovecraft and others in the New York City ‘gang’. He chides Long (page 172)…

As for your new novelette — look here, young man, you’d better be mighty careful how you treat your aged and dignified Grandpa as here! You mustn’t make me do anything cheerful or wholesome, and remember that only the direst of damnations can befit so inveterate a daemon of the cosmick abysses. And, young man, don’t forget that I am prodigiously lean. I am lean — LEAN, I tell you! Lean! And if you’re afraid that my leanness will make the horror get you instead, why just reduce [diet] like your Grandpa and escape as well! And be sure to depict me in my new Puritan frock coat. I think I shall adopt an umbrella also.

Evidently the proposed novel had by September 1927 become a “novelette” and was in the planning stage. Lovecraft by then expected it to be in the weird monster-horror vein and likely to feature mysterious demise or else “damnation” for the gang. Presumably it was to be set in the mid 1920s in New York City. That’s about all that can be gleaned here. His use of “LEAN” refers to Long’s humorously ribbing of Lovecraft about the early part of his New York sojourn, during which the master had grown distinctly plump under the influence of Sonia’s cooking and also her largesse in paying cake-shop and restaurant-bills.

* In late September 1927 Lovecraft lists his recent notable reading likely to be of interest to Ashton Smith (page 174)…

– Goat Song by Werfel. (a printed play)

– Atlantideer by Beniot.

– New Lands by Charles Fort (only “skimmed”)

– The World’s Desire by Rider Haggard and Long (a mis-transcription for Lang) (planning to read)

The latter was not a new book, and had first appeared in 1889. Lang was the famous late Victorian scholar and folklorist, compiler of numerous useful popular anthologies of fairy and Northern epic stories, and translator of ancient classical texts. Haggard was the florid and fantastical adventure writer, famous for She. Their novel apparently… “continues the story of Odysseus, who returns to Ithaca to find his home destroyed”. He then leaves for a new quest, seeking his former love Helen of Troy. Lovecraft likely did read the still-rather-readable novel, since it spurred entry #141 in his Commonplace Book. Incidentally, the novel’s Wikipedia page has obviously had a severe and politically rebarbative mauling by leftists.

New Lands was a 1923 book by the modern confabulator Charles Fort, in which he focused on apparent “astronomical anomalies” that fall or float down from the sky. Fort used the book to loosely… “pull together examples of falls of stones, gelatinous substances, anomalous earthquakes, fireballs … bright stars, luminescent gas, mirages, ball lightning”, in pursuit of his barmy notion of ‘sky islands’ — actual land floating all unseen in our upper atmosphere. This theme of sky-falls has obvious relevance to Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”, written March 1927. Since I assume that Fort’s book was “skimmed” before and not after the writing of the famous story. I’ve not seen any other suggestions that New Lands inspired “Colour”, or rebuttals of the notion. Thus this may be my new discovery — if the dates align.

“Atlantideer” is a mis-transcription for Atlantida. This 1919 novel appeared in English in 1920 and was serialised in Adventure. It appears to be a romantic Sahara desert ‘lost race’ adventure with strong similarity to Haggard’s famous She. Indeed so strong that there was a legal case over it.

Goat Song appears to be a romantic coming-of-age tragedy-adventure involving a Spartan boy-warrior and his beloved.

It’s interesting that The World’s Desire, Atlantida and Goat Song could all be construed as having strong female themes which would have allowed Lovecraft to ‘think through’ his relations with the departed Sonia.

* With the visiting Talman’s help he discovered apparent Welsh elements in his family ancestry. Although striking an amused pose, he appears rather peeved and not a little un-nerved by this (page 180). Several slightly later letters see him diving headlong into Ancient Roman history and imagining (and indeed dreaming) himself as a Roman. I intuited that this may have been in reaction to the Celtic discoveries, or as he phrased it “this shocking revelation of hybridism”. This discovery has obvious implications for the development of the later “Innsmouth” and its idea of tainted heredity. The Welsh discovery was not the only shock from his family tree. Later, as Ken Faig Jr. has recently discovered, Lovecraft found an American side of the family line who had been rather lowly fish dealers. Thus offering us another possible inspiration for “Innsmouth”.

Actually the Welsh link in his core line of descent, as I’ve pointed out, may not have been really Welsh by lineage and blood. It may have simply been by residence. Although admittedly his letters do report him discovering one seemingly true-blooded Welsh lady had married into the family. Sadly his Northumbrian / Welsh(?) family line never seem to have been followed by a modern genealogist, and indeed I’m not sure if the relevant data now exists.

* He notes with some pleasure the first appearance of his fiction in hardback, when “The Horror at Red Hook” was re-printed as the concluding story in “Not at Night”. This was actually titled You’ll Need a Night Light, the third of what had only just become the ‘Not at Night’ series. These books contained Weird Tales reprints, selected for the British market by the magazine’s London agent Charles Lovell and then passed to Selwyn & Blount’s anthologist Christine Campbell Thomson for final choice and arrangement.

Despite this being a “third edition” cover the publisher apparently went bust shortly after publication, and the book’s UK rights were promptly purchased by Hutchinson. Which led to a legal tangle with Weird Tales, as a later Lovecraft letter recounts.

* And finally, a line written while joshing with Long (page 202) sounds like an entry in the Commonplace Book, but wasn’t…

… certain queerly-dimensioned cities of windowless onxy towers on a planet circling around Antares

Notes on Selected Letters – part one

24 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context

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Notes on the Selected Letters – part one:

I’ve decided to re-read Lovecraft’s Selected Letters over the summer. Here are my ‘Note on Selected Letters‘ for Volume 1, which I was lucky enough to get in a cheap ex-library copy some years ago. Thanks to my Patreon patrons who made that purchase possible. One of the nice things about such a hardback, compared to the paperback volumes of letters, is that the binding is such that they can lay flat when you open them and lay them on a table or book-stand.

Note that I skimmed and sometimes skipped a few letters from people I already have in their dedicated volumes, such as Moe and Kleiner.

* The planet Venus is noted, along with Develan’s Comet. Page 5.

* Lovecraft is hailed by key members of the audience as a “born public speaker”, after laying aside his script and giving his talk impromptu at the Hub Club. Page 124.

* He saw the movie David Garrick. He mentions the name of the leading man, so we know this was the 1916 version, seen below. Page 127.

* His amateur colleague Jackson kept scrap books of the best of amateur publications, in which Lovecraft found he featured heavily when he was shown them in Boston. I’m not sure if these scrap-books have survived. Page 126.

* In 1921 Lovecraft anticipates “the next war”. Page 160.

* “Don’t complain of the youth’s high-powered motor-car unless you can give him an horse and armour and send him to conquer the domains of the neighbouring kings!” Page 209.

* With his youthful telescope he… “gazed upon the moon’s frightful abysses where no diffusing air softens the nighted blackness of distorted shadows.” and “It has always been my intention to write a set of tales involving other planets”. The latter said in 1923. Page 214.

* He reveals why he ceased publishing his astronomy articles in the local newspaper… “The paper was sold to the Democrats”. Page 214.

* There is a magnificent extended description of a Portsmouth garden, which is almost a prose-poem in itself…

When it is twilight in the worlds, there are heard in that garden the invisible steps of MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀI, who is weary of Sardathrion’s gleaming walls and onyx lions, and would gaze softly and gently on that loveliness he hath created in his dreams.

MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀI is Dunsany’s ‘Dreamer of All Things’ god. Page 245-46. Lovecraft is writing fan-fiction, in 1923.

* In a 1923 exploration of the front part of Nentaconhant Hill [Neutaconkanut] he notes that at the summit an… “observatory in the Gothick manner, somewhat in disrepair, crowns this majestick acclivity”. Although the lack of any further description of his climbing this tower suggests there may have been no public access. The Rhode Island Historical Preservation 1976 survey listing for Johnson makes no mention of this tower, but this 1926 map shows the “King Observatory” and its location on the hill…

This was Abby A. King’s ‘The King Observatory’, a 60-foot tower “topped by an observation cupola”, though if for night-time astronomy rather than daytime sight-seeing is now uncertain. Perhaps the intent was to allow both. But Rhode Island Historical Notes for 1977 has a footnote, to an article on an early Boy Scouts trip to the hill, that reveals the above map was out of date. Since the tower, it states… “was burned to rubble by vandals in 1925”. This probably suggests that local youths had a clandestine way into the tower, and also suggests a heavy timber frame inside stone facing. Given this the setting thus presumably inspired ‘the tower scene’ in the excellent recent biographical graphic-novel Une nuit avec Lovecraft, although the tower is there imagined as having survived into the 1930s.

Only much later in his life did he discover the little-visited faun-haunted meads and twilit glades at the back of the same hill, then just outside the city boundaries…

* In early 1924 Lovecraft recalls of his earlier self..

In those middle years [after leaving High School I was] practically out of the world until three years ago [i.e. 1921]” … “the poor devil was such a nervous wreck that he hated to speak to any human being, or even to see or be seen by one; and every trip to town was an ordeal.

By “trip to town” he must mean for daytime or evening shopping and suchlike in the central market and business district, or for the Public Library / bookstores, rather than any hypothetical night-walks (he appears to have been largely nocturnal during this period).

* In early 1924 his planned “big novel” Azathoth will be “exotic and highbrow” and “wholly unsuited” to Weird Tales. While his lesser novel for the Weird Tales masses will be a “hideous thing … The House of the Worm“. Neither were written, of course. Page 295.

* There is a useful plain explanation, to a puzzled Frank Belknap Long, of what the submarine city in his “The Temple” is meant to be…

My submarine city is a work of man – a templed and glittering metropolis that once reared its copper domes and colonnades of chrysolite to glowing Atlantean suns. Fair Nordick bearded men dwelt in my city, and spoke a polish’d tongue akin to Greek; and the flame that the Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein beheld was a witch-fire lit by spirits many millennia old.

There are only oblique hints of this in the tale…

1). The reader in the year 1921 is presumably expected to parse several mid-Atlantic locations. The submarine is preying on the “Liverpool-New York” civilian shipping lanes at “N. Latitude 45° 16′, W. Longitude 28° 34′”, something most schoolboys would then be familiar with via their school Atlas, which showed the shipping lanes. Later the submarine drifts well “south” of these shipping lanes, so… she is somewhere north of the Azores and thus outside the well-trafficked routes.

2). As for the underwater city, it is clearly prior to even the earliest Greek art… “impression of terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather than the immediate ancestor of Greek art”. The reader, informed elsewhere by the historical-ethnographic categories known to the early 1920s, must thus deduce that due to its stated age the city was built by a primal unknown ‘Nordic’ culture which only later informed the known historical ‘Mediterranean’ type culture. There was in the 1910s a simplistic ‘Nordic vs. Mediterranean’ argument relating to the wider questions of Indo-European cultural origins and diffusion. Lovecraft is probably assuming that everyone is familiar with these divisions.

3). As for the “witch-light”, the story does offer a… “rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet beautiful chant or choral hymn … vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-flame far within”. Which seems clear enough. But by “witch-light” Lovecraft presumably means ‘a large but somewhat faint flickering radiance’, rather than ‘a light lit by witches’.

4). But that the flickering light (implied flame) has been lit by “spirits” is only meant to be deduced from the general ghostly underwater setting + the immense age of the place. Perhaps also by the carvings on the temple doors “exquisite carvings like the figures of Bacchanals in relief”, which indicates the spirited scene that awaits beyond. I can find no details on ancient temple Bacchanals which indicate that some sort of special large flickering flame was present at the interior aspect of these (the processions are better attested) but perhaps Lovecraft knew differently and expected others to know it too.

Notes on the Galpin letters – part three

17 Sunday Apr 2022

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, Odd scratchings

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Part three of four, of a few notes on the new expanded edition of the Galpin letters:

* Lovecraft’s childhood barn was “razed” in 1931 (p. 272) having become rotten and fungus ridden. He puts an age-date on the period in which it formed his playhouse, age 10. Which puts the disposal of the carriage-horses at or before 1900. (p. 272).

* The 1932 eclipse of the sun is described in detail on page 274, with some comparative reference to the eclipse of 1925.

* He cogently summarises his attitude to emotions and his ‘what the heck’ approach, in paragraphs at the foot of pages 278 and 279.

* He notes the “mild winters” in 1932/32 (p. 283), 1932/33 (p. 288), at a time when he had not yet moved into 66 College Street. The move to the new house may well have saved his life, since 1933/34 was a very cold winter and was sometimes at “seventeen below” zero (p. 305). But by then he thankfully had the 24-hour steam-heat from the neighbouring Library boiler. At No. 66 he also enjoyed the “symphony of chimes” from the various nearby clock and church towers (p. 291).

* Lovecraft found a “surprisingly vast audience” attendant on a public visit to Brown by the T.S. Eliot to Providence. He notes that Eliot was newly British Royalist / Anglo-Catholic.

* At the end of March 1933 he was about to launch into the revision of an 88,000 word novel, which it appears he completed and for which he was paid $100. “This novel has not been identified” says a footnote.

* He notes various Cleveland locations in August 1922. More on those, with new pictures, in a near-future ‘Picture Postals’ post at Tentaclii.

* He tells Galpin in 1933 that he had twice been mistaken by Canadian strangers as a British man (p. 296). The non-French Canadians presumably being, at that time, more familiar with the British upper-class accent than today.

* He talks of a booklet issued by the city “school department” circa 1933, which presumably formed a guide to College Hill. Since he was pleased that the bird’s eye view on the cover showed #66 and its garden court. (p. 300) Elsewhere he talks of the magnifying glass he used to closely scrutinise such things, and also picture postcards and photographs.

* He gives a long synopsis of a never-written story of his, in a lengthy paragraph (p. 303, also footnote on p. 305 which references Commonplace Book #157). This would have been about the animated ‘Kirby krackle’ that happens behind the eyes when they are tightly scrunched shut.

“It would amuse me if some writer were to build upon my work & achieve a fabric infinitely surpassing the original!” (p. 301). Indeed.

* He did extensive research on the topography and sights of Paris in early 1933, as he had earlier done for olde London (p. 304).

* Belknap Long was a strongly doctrinaire communist by June 1934, but by October had learned to tone it down a bit when writing to Lovecraft (p. 312, p. 322).

* “Had an interesting view of Peltier’s Comet…” late in his life at Ladd. He then still had his own “small glass” [i.e. his telescope], but evidently he has not set it up on the monitor roof at No. 66. He had a fine westward view, and even a door onto the roof. But the general view of the northern sky had an “obstructed nature” as he put it (p. 336).

* Galpin’s lost novel is named, being Murder in Monparnasse (p. 336).

* The de Castro letters are at the end of the book of Galpin letters. Spurred by de Castro’s wayward pursuit of various New Testament figures via ancient Gaul, Lovecraft engages in discussion about the historicity of Christ and the value of Christianity in the modern world (pp. 366-367).

* He recalls he read a biography of Baudelaire circa 1922. The book’s notes suggest there were then two good choices for such (p. 375).

* His phone number at No. 66 was Providence 2044. Which is the title of a future Lovecraftian sci-fi graphic novel, if ever I heard one (p. 375).

* Despite Lovecraft’s reputation for being supposedly unreadable, a Galpin review hails his style in “Arthur Jermyn” story and the Dreamlands tales… “He certainly excels Lord Dunsany in the directness of narration” and has a “beauty of style” (p. 426).