New on LibriVox, an audiobook of Weather Influences (1904) by Edwin Grant Dexter of the University of Illinois. Being “An empirical study of the mental and physiological effects of definite meteorological conditions” published for the general reader by the reputable MacMillan publishing company. Thus this is relevant to Lovecraft, in terms of the effects that weather had on his very special physiology and biochemistry.

The book opens with a look at time-worn weather proverbs, animal weather lore, and “Weather Influences in Literature”. It may also interest those interested in the effects of the weather on mental states. The book is also of possible interest to those whose professional interests involve deciding the most receptive time to release new information.

Also online as a ebook in a good Wellcome Library scan. There was a review in the journal Nature in June 1905.

A more contemporary judgement is given in a 2015 article on Dexter, “Edwin Grant Dexter: an early researcher in human behavioral biometeorology”, which states that…

Dexter’s Weather influences, while demonstrating an exemplary approach to weather, health, and behavior relationships, came at the end of a long era of such studies, as health, social, and meteorological sciences were turning to different paradigms to advance their fields. For these reasons, Dexter’s approach and contributions may not have been fully recognized at the time and are, consequently, worthy of consideration by contemporary biometeorologists.

Talman’s Texaco Star trade magazine is online in a full 1913-1963 run, in archival scans at the University of Houston, Texas. This was the official free internal monthly magazine of the Texaco oil company, which he edited from 1930. The run appears to have been placed online in March 2021.

Sadly it can’t be searched across in full-text from a single search-box, and there are no TOCs alongside each issue. But scholars know that it was, under Talman’s editorship, home to some items linked with Weird Tales contributors. There’s a story about Everett McNeil which features him as a character, for instance. Lovecraft talked himself onto the mailing-list by the end of 1930 (for the historical and travel articles), and also considered how he might contribute travelogues. And here’s the Robert E. Howard article from April 1931. He doesn’t get the cover, but I’ve also included the front and back cover for context.

There’s also talk in the Talman letters about a forthcoming Providence article and map in the Star, though I haven’t got that far in the book yet.

I’m pleased to have bagged a bargain copy of the Talman letters, the full title of which is Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully. It’s a hefty 580-page slab, and I’ve made a start on it. Below you’ll find my first set of notes.

Lovecraft begins writing to Talman in early September 1925.

Page 17. Lovecraft calls the Kalem member Arthur Leeds… “a very throughout technician, and experienced in the art of practical suggestion”.

Page 18. He must have rated Myrta Alice Little’s intellect very highly, since in 1925 he ranks her in the nine top “active brains” he knows in amateurdom. His own is presumably the tenth. You’ll recall that in the summer of 1921 this tall beauty was Lovecraft’s faint but quite possible marriage prospect. She was religious, though, and soon married a handsome Methodist preacher.

Page 19. One of these “active brains” is British. An “Ernest Lionel McKeag”. Which one assumes he had at least some correspondence with. McKeag lived on until 1974 (other fannish sources say 1976) and wrote stories for British boys’ comics, true-life naval war-stories, and boys’ science-fiction and even two 1950s ‘lost race’ science-fiction books (published from Stoke-on-Trent of all places). Only his Lost City of the Sierras (1927) sounds like a candidate for a Lovecraft revision, but he seems more than capable of churning out his own tales for juveniles.

Page 19. In September 1925, ahead of Kadath, he describes the basic idea for it as… “extremely fantastic — the picaresque progress of a wandering spirit through the marvellous and undiscovered voids and worlds of the remotest universe”. Which makes it sound as if one of its roots was perhaps in “Iranon”.

Page 20. A large section here on the Moon, which would make an excellent appendix to the forthcoming book on Lovecraft and Astronomy. If it isn’t in already.

Page 22. Lovecraft explains the linkage of the signs of the Zodiac to the Babylonian cycle of the seasons and the human year. It didn’t quite hang true in some details, but I could see how it could do so with just a few tweaks. It’s remarkable that this way of understanding the zodiac constellations has escaped me until now. Again, another candidate for an appendix to the forthcoming book on Lovecraft and Astronomy. Could also be the basis for an interesting children’s picture book, if an illustrator is looking for a project.

Page 26. Lovecraft talks of his taking a Providence night-walk on or about 21st April 1926…

… night before last, during the course of which I discovered one of the most hellish slums ever imagined by mankind. It was in a place whose existence I had not before realised – the end of Chalkstone Ave. near Randall Sq. & the railway – and its dark hilly courts approach the very ultimates of blasphemous horror.

A little later in the book there is additional description, and Lovecraft states he plans to use the place in fiction some day.

Page 29. “The bottle idea […] I got it from that old hermit of 30 years ago in Phillipsdale”. Presumably he means the idea of ‘souls in bottles, with which one could converse’ used in “The Terrible Old Man” (1920) and later tweaked and adapted for Dexter Ward (1927), and that he had first heard the idea from a “hermit” circa age six. Phillipsdale being “a historic mill village along the Seekonk River in East Providence, Rhode Island”, and just across the river from College Hill. The idea of extracting and trapping a human essence is one that also crops up in folk-tales, and is by no means unique to East Providence. But an interesting early source, nonetheless. A quick and cursory search reveals no easily-found record of a “hermit” in Phillipsdale in the 1890s.

Page 31. “I ‘did’ […] Federal Hill — & was astonished by the great Italian churches”. This was presumably a trek made without Eddy, from whom he was at that time estranged (though later, in July 1927, there was a partial gathering of ‘the gang’ in Providence and Eddy was there). Surprisingly, he implies he had not seen these churches before, even distantly from the stagecoach when passing through. Perhaps they were relatively new erections?

Page 37. “Conan Doyle has some fair [weird fiction] stuff, too. “Mystery of Sasassa Valley”, “Captain of the Pole Star”, Round the Fire Stories.” The first was Doyle’s first published story, back in 1879. The next mentioned was 1883, in book form by 1890. Round the Fire Stories (1908) is a book of 17 tales. As the author says in his introduction, despite the cosy title these are actually his stories “concerned with the grotesque and with the terrible”. Thus none of the titles suggests that Lovecraft continued reading Doyle after circa 1909. This chimes with my finding that summer 1908 seems to have been when Lovecraft stopped reading Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales.

Page 44. The Old Corner Bookshop (‘Dana’s Old Corner Book Store’) had formerly been in Empire Street, Providence, and a comment from Lovecraft on the stock shows that he patronised it there “years ago”.

Page 50. Lovecraft gives his ideas for an extensive revision of Talman’s first version of “Two Black Bottles” (the final version of which is not included in this volume). The Lovecraft Encyclopedia has… “it seems clear that HPL has not only written some of the tale — especially the parts in dialect — but also made significant suggestions regarding its structure.” Horrorbabble has a free reading on YouTube, of the final version as published in Weird Tales in 1927.

Page 57. Lovecraft talks of “my version” of “Two Black Bottles”. Most likely he refers to the extensive outline/reworking given from page 50 onwards, rather than a story he had actually written from this.

Page 65. Room 328 at the New York Public Library was his favoured evening reading room for material on “Old Providence”. This was on the third floor…

Page 66. A gem of a find. Lovecraft did after all read his friend Everett McNeil’s fantasy / weird work. Many assume that Lovecraft had probably only read his later boys’ adventure novel Tonty. Well, it ain’t so…

Honest old Mac has written weird stuff — and by no means bad, either — but none of it has graced our Chicago contemporary [i.e. Weird Tales] as yet”.

Wish I’d had this quote when I wrote McNeil’s biography.

Page 65. A fabulous quote about Broadway in the morning light. Surprisingly this does not seem to have made it into the Selected Letters…

[In New York I] explore[d] obscure corners in the small hours […] I’ll never forget the sight of the newly-risen sun streaming in a glorious flood of molten gold up the length of Wall St. into still darkened Broadway one morning. It was as if all the past — the brilliant past of Dutch settlers and glamorous shipping and gay coffee-houses — were shining from a land outside time, & welling up from the sea into the dismal & shadowy present.

Page 66. Mention of James Howard Flower and especially his “gem” of a poem “With Shelley in My Soul”). A footnote reveals Flower was a Vermont revision client whose “Shelley” poem has “not been found”. Well, there’s the J. Howard Flower papers, 1899-1959 archive (no Lovecraft letters, it seems), and the James Howard Flower-Solitary Press Collection 1920-1945. This latter “Collection is unprocessed”, and also mis-titled as it should be “Solitarian Press”. “Collection consists of poetry, essays, pamphlets, and issues written by J. Howard Flower and others and printed by the Solitary [Solitarian] Press of Hartford, VT, founded by Flower.”).

Who was who among North American authors, 1921-1939 suggests that these items by Flower himself might be worth inspecting for signs of Lovecraft’s revision…

Florentine Sonnets (1918);
Flower of the Road (1919) (42 page chapbook of verse);
Songs of Love and Liberty (1920);
Under Blue Ascutney (1921);
Florentine Sonnets and Florentine Lyrics (1923)
Bobolinks at Dawn and Whippoorwills at Dusk (1923)

However, one can find that Lovecraft’s friend Walter J. Coates (Driftwind) was also a revisionist for the Solitarian Press. For instance in 1920 Coates revised the Press’s new book Oriental Songs and other Lyrics by one Henry Clay Webster. Thus it’s possible that Lovecraft was revising for those whom the Solitarian Press published, rather than for Flowers himself. Flowers was an ardent socialist from an early age, even a Stalinist by the 1950s, and does not seem the sort of person Lovecraft would have cared to deal with directly. My guess would be that Lovecraft could have been taking ‘overflow’ revision work for the Press from Coates, this being work which Walter J. Coates was unable to manage due to time or complexity.

Still… if anyone’s in Vermont and near the University, it might be worth an afternoon sifting through the 1919-1925 boxes of the Howard Flower-Solitary Press Collection. “Collection is unprocessed”.

New on Archive.org, a useful layman’s survey of the intellectual landscape in which Lovecraft has steeped himself and was living through until the mid 1920s, with particular focus on American reception (or not) of such ideas and trends. Intellectual Vagabondage: an apology for the intelligentsia (1925) has an off-putting title, sounding now like some dour treatise against Marxism. But instead we find a crisp and accessible survey, written by one with ‘boots on the ground’ at the time, as can be seen here by the contents list…

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

Part Three: the October 1915 issue.

Lovecraft has now issued his third issue of his own amateur paper The Conservative. Is it a Halloween ‘horror’ issue? Let’s find out.

He opens with his poem on “The State of Poetry”, headed by a line from Ovid which translates for sense as “Ill-mated things have discordant offspring”. This might seem to some to hint at key themes in his future fiction. The poem ushers forward a series of would-be bards to perform for a king, each bard offering his own form of poetic ineptitude or gross error of topic. One suspects the readers of The Conservative would have been well be able to identify each amateur journalist thus given their turn on the stage. These are sometimes well masked, with names such as “Mundanus”, or even left un-named as mere Whitman-esque “degen’rate swine”.

Note the line of poetry “Ablest is he who in rhyming can reach / The Lofty coarseness of a Cockney speech”, something that Lovecraft had experienced in his own city of Providence at the astronomical Ladd Observatory, in the company of the “affable little cockney from England” John Edwards. Lovecraft ends his verse by suggesting the true poet will do best in chaste seclusion (such as his own, hem hem), restoring ancient times with his imaginative ‘fancy’ and learning much from the lost Golden Ages of creativity such as the England of Shakespeare or Johnson.

His essay “The Allowable Line” naturally follows from the poem. It is headed by another untranslated line from the Roman poet Horace. A line which translates for sense as “On discovering dazzling brilliance, disregard the flaws”. In the essay he continues his debate with Kleiner, begun in the previous issues and continued in correspondence, on the “allowable rhyme”. He tracks this through history, giving a basic outline of its once-common use in English poetry, and then the later emergence of stricter rhyming. In this we also have the sense that Lovecraft has read the work of all those he names, and with due attention. Not that he liked all of them, and for instance he calls Erasmus Darwin’s poetry “pompous”. Though if all he recalled, and hazily so (“Darwin’s ‘Botanick Garden’ … my early reading”) was The Economy of Vegetation, then he may not have realised that the slump in the middle of this book is likely the result of Darwin’s collaborator slotting in her own unheralded verses.

His “Editorial” bites back against the “insulting insects” that have begun to infest his mail-box, and he threatens to publish their letters with “original style, spelling, grammar” in future. The short article “The Conservative and His Critics” naturally follows, headed by more lines from Horace, which can be translated as “It is better, I warn you, not to make me touchy”. Then some short poetic ripostes to politically pro-German lines of wartime verse which had attracted Lovecraft’s special ire.

We then come to the meat of the issue, with the long essay “The Renaissance of Manhood”. Here Lovecraft forensically identifies the types of pacifists who oppose a just and necessary war, and suggests their motivations. One feels he will have more to say on the topic in future. Though as S.T. Joshi has observed, his own attempts at patriotic poetry will fail to rise above mediocrity.

The essay “Liquor and its Friends” reveals that he broadly subscribes at this time to the ‘trickle-down theory’. Those at the top of society must first set an example, “which will then work downwards, as if through gravity”.

His thoughts on “The Youth of Today” follow. He welcomes the postal approach of “schoolboys of today [who] fear not to speak as they think”, and here we learn of how he first encountered his new young protege David H. Whittier.

“Symphony and Stress” appears at first sight to examine another side of amateurdom, in which amateur papers were “the product of a small circle of cultivated ladies”. Yet mid-way he compares this to Lockhart’s anti-rum paper Chain Lightning which vividly recounts “unspeakable evil” among the alcoholics and “horrors utterly beyond the realization” of the sheltered ladies. All drawn from Lockhart’s experiences in his own town. Lovecraft ends by asking the ladies to forbear in their mild criticism of negative-minded “buzzards” in amateurdom. Each has their place, and may do good in their own way.

He briefly lauds some improving amateur papers from youths, and especially notes Basinet’s paper The Rebel. Lovecraft states he knows Basinet personally, but what goes unsaid is that the lad was one of the largely Irish group of Providence amateurs — later to be so ably documented by Ken Faig Jr. Here Lovecraft notes that Basinet has recently switched his leftist beliefs from socialism to anarchism. Dunn, of the same local group, is also noted in the context of discussions of the ever-vexed Irish question. Lovecraft seems to be of the opinion that “Ireland is now an equal and integral part of the British Empire” and thus (presumably) nothing more need be said.

A back-page poem by John Russell titled “Socialism” marks the end of the issue. Russell was a long-distance Lovecraft correspondent (West Tampa, Florida) from 1913 through 1925, encountered via a vehement debate in the pages of The Argosy. This 1915 poem foresees the “stagnant pool” that society would become if a wise man and a fool were to receive the same treatment and income in a vain attempt to enforce a socialist economy. Also the way that socialist leaders, inevitably authoritarian, would start to find underhand ways to “grab the most they could” from the masses.

The Halloween horrors that some Lovecraftians might have been expecting of an October issue are thus… not here. Yet in a way, it is a horror issue of a sort. There are “insulting insects” in Lovecraft’s mail-box; he details some of the very real “unspeakable evil” which emerges from alcoholism; and finally anticipates the looming horrors of socialism — horrors which were to become manifest soon after Trotsky’s Moscow coup in 1917.

Overall one has a strange sense of familiarity with the present day. An ugly mix of high-flying philosophical debate and pro-enemy sympathies during wartime; a hazy vision of socialism which seduces a vocal minority among the young; a mass of hide-bound reactionaries unwilling to adapt to the new modernity; while lone grassroots voices battle for the truth about ruined lives and families in their own town. Also a tendency among creatives toward a complacent withdrawal from it all, into a rose-tinted myopia in which beautiful and well-formed poetry is everything.

“Providence lost, regained IV”, being the final part of a recent set of blog posts which give…

the epilogue of my book, Lost Providence, entitled Providence Lost, Providence Regained. Published in 2017, the book is a history of the design of the modern-day capital of Rhode Island, specifically of its downtown.