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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Historical context

Bradbury’s “The Exiles” (1950) – the Lovecraft version

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraft as character

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My thanks to ‘Susmuffin’ for locating Ray Bradbury’s Martian story “The Exiles” (1950 version), featuring Lovecraft as a character. It appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Winter/Spring 1950. Though a Mars story it is not formally part of The Martian Chronicles, being set long after the end of that cycle. By that time Mars has been abandoned by humans, but the first new colonists are now arriving and they encounter what might be Martian ‘ghosts’ in human form. Ironically, given the censorship theme of the story, the Lovecraft section was excised for later printings of the story.

I’ve extracted it in a printable plain-text form as a PDF, in the hope that a reader with a talent for voices might make it an audio recording for YouTube: Bradbury_The_Exiles_1950.pdf

New on Tentaclii in June 2022

02 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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Time for another monthly round-up for Tentaclii. As always, please try to support me via Patreon or an occasional PayPal donation or even an Amazon Gift Voucher. Also, please note that I may well be looking for additional regular-monthly paid work from September 2022. If anyone can use my talents for $500 a month, please enquire. Digital magazine production and historical research work are a speciality. At present I’m producing Digital Art Live magazine each month, and have been for years now. To contact me, just post a comment on Tentaclii and I’ll see it.

This month on Tentaclii, in ‘Picture Postals’ I took more deep dives into Lovecraft’s New York City: strolling along Willoughby / Fulton Street, Clinton Street, and also popping into Automats pre and post-Deco. In the most recent posts in this series I put the final touches to the discovery of Lovecraft’s favourite cafe and grocery in Brooklyn, with a useful map, the names of businesses and business-men surround the cafe, and new vintage photos of 169 Clinton Street. I think this burst of New York research is pretty much done now. It adds to the story of Lovecraft’s cafes, most of which turn out to have unusual characteristics or unusual characters who ran them.

I also posted research essays on Lovecraft and Haldeman-Julius’s censorship-busting “Little Blue Books” of the 1920s and 30s, and on Lovecraft’s passing adoration of the now-obscure French writer Remy de Gourmont at the end of his ‘decadent phase’. A question from a Patreon patron also resulted in the short essay “Lovecraft and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith”. E.E. Smith being a contemporary cosmic tale-weaver but of a very different sort.

I linked to a scan of the Lovecraft poem “New England Fallen”, new at the Brown Repository and not in the collected poetry. A new collection of mid 1960s sci-fi convention programmes being posted on Archive.org enabled me to put a face to Lovecraft’s biographer L. Sprague de Camp. I also found a small new 1923 item by Everett McNeil, “oldster” of the Lovecraft Circle, the non-fiction “The Feast of the Dead”.

I posted my lengthy “Notes on Selected Letters II: Part Two”; “Selected Letters III”, and “Selected Letters IV”. I’m now starting on the final Volume V, again making notes as I go. Relating to a recent ‘Picture Postals’ post, I was pleased to find evidence that Lovecraft did see the hothouses at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The Letters also offered more evidence for his early love of florist’s shops and fine ornamental gardens.

New scholarly books noted this month included Ken Faig Jr, Pike’s Peak or Bust: The Life and Works of David V. Bush (Lovecraft’s major revision client in the 1920s); S.T. Joshi published The Parameters of the Weird Tale, with some Lovecraft-related essays not in his recent volume collected essays on Lovecraft; and also Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft (forthcoming). New in Spanish was H.P. Lovecraft: poesia fantastica completa (‘the complete fantastic poetry’). I suggested the need for a volume of Lovecraft’s maps, alongside the forthcoming mega-index to the volumes of Lovecraft’s Letters, and outlined a contents-list.

In the arts, the opera A Dream at the End of Time, a Lovecraft musical was staged in Los Angeles for a week’s run. Various forthcoming TV and movie adaptations of Lovecraft were noted. A number of new public-domain audio readings were linked, including The Strange World of Harry Houdini from 1920s issues of Weird Tales. The useful typewriter font ‘X Typewriter’ was found and linked.

In terms of free research materials, this month I found a run of the journal Old-Time New England, 1910-1981 on Archive.org. And as for research tools I made a home-brew mouse-gesture to fix the Opera browser’s problem with Google Search + spellcheck (only relevant if your browser can’t do spellcheck on search-terms you type into the Google Search box).

I was ill for two weeks this month, and so my Doctor Who Tom Baker watch or skip list was updated. Some months back I had stalled in my re-watch at the end of Season 14. But now I’ve also seen series 15, 16, 17 and 18 and have updated the watch/skip list accordingly. I’ve now also ferreted out the ‘watch’ list for the subsequent Doctor Who, Peter Davison (1981-84) which totals 11 stories.

That’s it for June, onward to July!

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: back to the old house…

01 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, back to the city of Providence from New York. A restored and colourised 1971 picture of the sad fate of the site of Lovecraft’s final home, the house at 66 College Street. The roadway is just off-camera to the right.

Though it should be said that his house was at least moved and not destroyed, being slowly rolled through the streets of his city like a ominous rumbling monster. And at least the brutalist late-modernist block (the ‘List Building’ aka ‘List Art Building’, ’64 College Street’) seen here was to be used as an Art History building with an incorporated Gallery and studios. The worthy British art historian Kenneth Clark (Civilization) gave the opening address for the building, another factor Lovecraft might have approved of. Further, the building’s elevation and windows serve to preserve something of Lovecraft’s views across Providence to the west when the leaves are off the trees.

On the right one can see the back of the John Hay Library at Brown, with its back-terrace invisible from this angle. Today this holds Lovecraft’s letters and the Lovecraft Collection.

Lovecraft’s house stood about where the central elevated small block is, as seen here. With a back wing (not seen here) going further back…

As can be seen, by 1971 the quiet 1930s courtyard garden is now a two-part car-park divided by a central wall, but some of the trees and large shrubs on the left may have been retained. They may have once formed a border along which the K.A.T. roamed.

The building’s hilltop position, limited $3m budget and narrow plot required compromises. A page on the Brown website now observes that much of the building often has a dark and haunted feel, which seems most suitable for the site of H.P. Lovecraft’s house. It was largely designed for its incongruous external ‘look’, and as a consequence…

“Room divisions are awkward and classrooms often artificially-lit … Long empty corridors feel abandoned and ghostly…”

Though a dark and spectral feel is perhaps a good thing. University managements have a tendency to turf out friendless and un-trendy humanities subjects like Art History from fine buildings — especially ones surrounded by leafy and westward hilltop views — for re-use as their own office space. I’ve seen it happen myself, at Birmingham. Ugliness, gloom and strange angles have their uses, as H.P. Lovecraft could have told the current Art History Dept.

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

29 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Historical context

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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”.

Arthur Leeds in The Black Cat

28 Tuesday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Kittee Tuesday

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An Arthur Leeds crime one-pager from The Black Cat, March 1920. Newly on Archive.org.

And a longer railway tale in the May issue, “Over the Great Divide”.

The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe

27 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Online for free, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe in the revised two volume Gordian Press edition: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (both 1966).

Also, from the same worthy press and site, Poe’s collected Imaginary Voyages (1994). This is also on Archive.org “to borrow”, but here it’s free in full-text.

The Feast of the Dead

25 Saturday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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A newly discovered item from Everett McNeil, “oldster” of the Lovecraft Circle. Published in Comfort magazine, September 1923, a short syndicated item titled “The Feast of the Dead”.

In 1913 the same paper ran his long biography of Kit Carson. He had previously published the historical novel With Kit Carson in the Rockies; a tale of the beaver country (1909).

de Camp in 1966

23 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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A large collection of science-fiction convention programmes have recently arrived on Archive.org. Among these is the Tricon 1966 (a Worldcon, Ohio) convention booklet. This features a cover by Kelly Freas depicting Lovecraft’s first full-length biographer L. Sprague de Camp.

And another inside, an ink drawing by Joseph Wehrle.

And Progress Report 1 has a good photo, which I’ve enhanced a bit.

Incidentally, there’s a new blog dedicated to de Camp and his fiction, at Sprague de Camp Fan.

Notes on Lovecraft’s Selected Letters III

22 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf 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).

Map of the NYC subways and elevated system, 1924

20 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Maps

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Map of the NYC subways and elevated system, 1924. Useful for research orientation.

A little more data on Willoughby St.

19 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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A little more data on Willoughby St., Brooklyn, which was looked at in depth in recent posts.

1) A 1914 ad for “Bristol’s”, which was next to “John’s” in Brooklyn.

Their office address was No. 3, but the Dining Rooms were classed as 3-5. Thus Lovecraft was aware of this double-frontage numbering when he said in a letter that John’s was “next door” to Bristol’s… at No. 7.

In 1914 Bristol’s was advertising itself as “always open”. J.E. Bristol is the owner.

2) By mid 1922 Harry E. Spilbor, Sign Writer, was listed as at No. 7 Willoughby, presumably in the sub-shop that was photographed when empty in 1916. By the mid 1930s the New York State Manufacturers directory puts him next door at No. 9. My guess is he started in the sub-shop at No. 7 at the start of the 1920s, and then later moved next-door when No. 7’s frontage was “boxed” (as seen on 1930s photos). He also writes sign cards for show-windows in stores.

The empty sub-shop in 1916.

3) Next door to “John’s” in 1923 at No. 9 was Mike’s Radio Shop (the Kranz Brothers), in either the upstairs or the sub-shop. Still in business in 1925 because they were recorded making a payment to the city, though no address is stated alongside. Barbers don’t tend to go out of business, so my guess would be the 1916 barber’s was still there in 1925 and the radio shop was in the sub-shop below it. This would be a good location for such a store because the big new Edison Electric office block was next door at the former 11-17 (subsumed circa 1923 as No. 15, still standing today).


So, that all fills in a little more mid-1920s detail on the immediate surroundings for Lovecraft’s favourite Italian eatery at John’s. The long-standing Bristol’s Dining Rooms at 3-5 with Lovecraft’s friend and fellow revisionist la Touche Hancock in an office above. Then John’s at No. 7, with Mr. Spilbor the sign-writer below in the sub-shop. Next door at No. 9 was probably a barber shop, with Mike’s Radios below.

Lovecraft and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith

18 Saturday Jun 2022

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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My Patreon patron John Millar asks: “Did HPL read the work of the American science-fiction writer E.E. “Doc” Smith? Did he offer an opinion about it?”


Born in 1890, the early science-fiction pulp writer E.E. “Doc” Smith was the same age as Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft he was also a doughnut enthusiast. But in Smith’s case, he didn’t just dunk the ‘nuts in his three-sugar coffee. He made a career out of the food science of making doughnuts. On the side he also wrote implausible super-science ‘space operas’, complete with immense and ever-expanding spaceships. Tales which — some might now wryly observe — bear a certain resemblance to his light air-pumped doughnuts. But nevertheless, like Lovecraft’s work, his interstellar tales pioneered what later became a vast sub-genre.

A liking for doughnuts was not the only similarity in the youth of the two writers. Like the young Lovecraft, as a youth Smith took avidly to rifles and amateur chemistry sets. Hobbies that might have a kooky kid locked up and sedated in today’s America were then quite normal. Possibly there are other such comparisons to be drawn.

Like Lovecraft, Smith’s breakthrough in writing fiction came in the early 1920s. However, publishing was a different matter. Smith had far more trouble seeing his work published than Lovecraft who had the Weird Tales market. Only in April 1927 did the breakthrough The Skylark of Space begin to appear in the magazines. It had been completed years before. Other Skylark novels were published and then Spacehounds of IPC in 1931, Triplanetary in 1934. Thus Lovecraft might at least have noticed these and the Skylark series, though he was largely averse to actually reading the ‘scientification’ pulps. Smith only seems to have enjoyed book publication after the war. Also, Smith’s famous Lensman series only began to arrive after Lovecraft’s death.

In 1929 Lovecraft considered getting into the game himself, but he did not think much of the competition…

A good interplanetary or interstellar tale has yet to adorn the pages of [Weird Tales] … I shall sooner or later get around to the interplanetary field myself — & you may depend upon it that I shall not choose Edmond Hamilton, Ray Cummings, or Edgar Rice Burroughs as my model!”

So we know he was reading or had read some examples of the type, and was aware of the emerging sub-genre. Thus it’s not impossible that he at least noticed the emergence of Smith. However, in 1934’s essay “Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” Lovecraft does not mention Smith. The nearest equivalent cited, in terms of galactic scope, is Olaf Stapledon’s seminal classic Last and First Men (1930).

Confirmation of Smith’s non-reading by Lovecraft comes in his letter to Conover in 1936…

About The Skylark of Space — I’ve never read it, since a vast majority of the mature critics who have tell me it has no serious literary merit. From what I hear, it has some clever theories as background, but is essentially a juvenile action-adventure story [of the stock type, and] one can’t spare the time to read everything” (Letters to Robert Bloch and others, page 390).

Again, he recommends that the lad take Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men over Smith.

The approaches of the two writers to cosmicism have been compared in one essay, Rolf Maurer’s “Through a Lens Dark and Lightly: The Cosmicism of E.E. Smith and H.P. Lovecraft”, presented at the Armitage Symposium in 2017. But seemingly not then published in Lovecraftian Proceedings #3. Smith’s “irrepressibly optimistic, learn-as-you-go heroes” are contrasted by Maurer with “Lovecraft’s characters as learned-but-fragile pawns of higher powers”.

In his essay “The Epic of Space” (1947) Smith name-checked Lovecraft as a writer he enjoyed, and later in the same essay he implies influence when he states that “Lovecraft was the master craftsman” in atmosphere. Lovecraft’s sense of the vastness of time and space, and the sense of burning curiosity for knowledge may also have been influential, though that’s not stated in the essay. What Smith did not take from Lovecraft, if take he did, was the sense of the un-breakable rules of the cosmos. Galactic space-opera, by definition, must bend the rules.

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