Category Archives: Historical context

Review: Lovecraft Annual 2019

20 Wednesday May 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924)

16 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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

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

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

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

Burned out

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

Jason Eckhardt’s Map of Lovecraft’s Providence

06 Wednesday May 2020

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New to me, Jason Eckhardt’s Map of Lovecraft’s Providence. Sadly, ‘sold out’, but still with an online preview.

Also, Brown has Henry Beckwith’s Map of Lovecraft sites in Providence. As with seemingly every item in their online Lovecraft collection, Brown’s cataloguers are rather ambitiously claiming “No Copyright” on this. So far as I can see there’s quite a bit in there which is still under copyright, despite the blanket “No Copyright” claim.

See also my own map, Some Places Known to Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Also, in the same topographical line, a local newspaper column The View From Swamptown this month surveys the history of the fine old house of the pioneer Lovecraft researcher Henry Beckwith (Lovecraft’s Providence and Adjacent Parts). Unlike the craven Providence newspapers they have not totally blocked visitors from the UK and Europe, due to the idiotic new regulations of the European Union.

Conan Doyle and spiritualism

01 Friday May 2020

Posted by in Doyle, Historical context

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The Catholic Register explores the transition of Conan Doyle from Catholicism to the charlatanry of spiritualism…

“from 1918 onwards, books and bookshops, lectures and lecture tours were to follow, as Conan Doyle became the “Saint Paul of Spiritualism.” From then on, he was to expend more energy on this newfound belief in Spiritualism than on anything else. As a result, by the time of his death in 1930, his reputation lay in tatters.”

Such a pity he didn’t transfer such stuff into some wild and weird fiction, although to some he might seem to have touched on such things by 1910. For instance, when Sherlock Holmes steps down to Cornwall in 1910 (“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”), the reader also gets a lecture on possible Cornish Phoenician links that may extend (it is later barely hinted) not only to the Mediterranean but even into lost empires in Africa. This might sound to us like crackpot territory, yet for the Edwardians this was still a plausible though as-yet unproven hypothesis.

But spiritualism is definitely crackpot territory, then as now, and one can’t help but regret not being able to read the adventures and science-fantasies Doyle could have written after the war if he had not gone chasing after the fairies. I’m no Doyle expert beyond multiple readings of Holmes and knowing a bit about the West Midlands biographical connections and some related provincial stories, but after 1918 I see only the spiritualist apologia novel The Land of Mist (1926). As Lovecraft remarked several times in letters of the 1920s (I paraphrase from memory): ‘why don’t these deluded fellows pour their delusions into fiction, as they’d be far more fulfilled and their readers far more entertained.’

Of course, at that point in time even spiritualism and its ilk wasn’t quite so clear cut. The state of science was such that it wasn’t altogether implausible to suppose that ‘the fairies might be proved by science’ at any moment, even if they turned out to be early-morning dew-shapes forming in the air on electrical ‘kirlian’ coronal discharges from flowers, rather than diminutive nymphs with floaty dresses and dreamy smiles. One can equally see how it could have been just-about supposed that mediumship, ‘spiritual healing’, ESP, precognition, time-travel, aether-inhabiting ghosts, stone-circle construction via telekinetic levitation of rocks on ley-lines, and many other previously nebulous or uncertain ‘psychic’ phenomena were about to be somehow ‘proved’ or even ‘enabled’ by the new sciences. That was part of the attraction of such things I suppose, at that liminal moment of circa 1918-1928.

Much the same was true of mainstream archaeology and sound philology, then revealing vast new sweeps of time and major lost civilisations such as the Babylonians. One can see how easy it would have been in 1921 to imagine the steam-shovels digging down just another few feet to discover traces of a Conan-like Hyperborea, or an irrefutable fragment of some lost Atlantean super-civilisation, or just a Phoenician city-port under Roman London.

For further reading on the science angle here, an excellent survey book on the close intertwining of science and the occult is TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. I can’t immediately think of a similarly sweeping and high-quality history of the ‘lost archaeology and languages’ angle, on the interplay of real discovery and imaginative speculation, but I’d welcome hearing about it if one exists.

Picture postals: Brown, the “Annmary Brown Memorial”

30 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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The Barlow letters reveal that H.P. Lovecraft knew the Annmary Brown Memorial, located on a quiet part of the Brown campus.

Picture: ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’ on the entrance doors.

The 1907 Memorial is at once a tomb, a 530-volume library of the rarest books from the presses of the first printers (circa 1450-1500, aka ‘incunabula’), and a substantial fine art gallery. Many early woodcuts were apparently also on display, showing their early use in book illustration. A catalogue for the Gallery was issued in 1913, and a descriptive essay book on the Memorial appeared in 1925. The latter evokes the scene as Lovecraft would have enjoyed it, after entering through the doors depicting personifications of ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’…

On a midwinter when a blanket of snow darkens the skylights overhead, the fire burns the brighter on the hearth. A sidelight from the glass doors of the vestibule catches on the burnished goldleaf of the initial letters and illuminated borders in the gallery of early printed books. Some ray will touch the lattice-work and tracery of the gold-bronze door which at the far end of the building leads into the mausoleum where General and Mrs. Hawkins lie entombed. … Like its exterior, the building itself is without embellishment save for the books and pictures with which its walls are lined. The entrance hail, its walls a neutral green, is hung with water-colours and etchings … At the left is the curator’s study with its reference books and cheery fire … an open doorway leads into the galleries, the first of which contains the early printed books. … In the tall glassed-in cases which line the walls of the first gallery, the shelves are made to slant like book rests. On them are laid these “first books”, opened such that their individual characteristics may be studied with ease; and an impressive display they make, their texts as clear and the linen paper almost as immaculate as the day they came from the press. … Venerable as they are, they show few marks of age as they rest content in the light and pure air of their final home. … A surprising number of these early printed books are still in their original bindings, oak boards covered with tooled pigskin or with vellum now taut with age, and in some instances with bosses and clasps still intact.

Picture: The book galleries as Lovecraft would have known them, and almost the same as in a 1908 picture of the same view. Note the Lovecraft-alike man in the next room, viewing the pictures.

Given the 1907 opening date and the original bindings of the books, there is the interesting possibility that such ancient books helped to form the young Lovecraft’s eventual idea of the Necronomicon, at least in terms of what the hoary tome might have looked like.

Offsetting the books was a huge vivid painting by veteran traveller and artist Edwin Lord Weeks. “The Golden Temple” formed a centrepiece of the Gallery section, and depicted the holy temple of the Sikhs. Lovecraft would have seen this work in its prime, as in later decades it was long used as a ‘test canvas’ for teaching student conservators how to clean a painting. The sunlit scene thus became very ‘patchy’, but has recently been painstakingly restored as much as possible.

This picture was accompanied by another large work from Weeks, “Caravan Crossing the Desert”. “Caravan” is not online, but was described in 1916 as being “beautifully executed in high academic style” … “buff sand and the dark blue of the African sky, with vigorous figures of Arabs and camels in the foreground.” One imagines that Lovecraft would have recalled his story “The Nameless City” on seeing such a work, or perhaps Abdul Alhazred.

His ancestral interests in England meant he would also have paused long before Lamorna Birch’s “Cornwall”, in which great windswept clouds are said to race over the Cornish downs. A picture by Adriaen van Ostade of an aged wandering fiddler might have recalled to mind his “Erich Zann”.

That Lovecraft knew the interior of the Memorial is evidenced by his planning to take young Barlow there on a visit to Providence. Barlow was, of course, a fine printer and developing a connoisseur’s taste for papers, bindings and inks. One imagines that the Memorial had also been on the itinerary for some of Lovecraft’s other visitors, at least those who would not feel bored and would benefit from closely observing the bite of type into laid paper, the sheen of oak-gall ink, and the hand-tooling of animal skins. In his time the Memorial was quietly open to the discerning for four days a week, and it was free to enter — an important point for the impoverished Lovecraft.

The Lovecraft Geek Podcast #4 (new series)

29 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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I’m pleased to find The Lovecraft Geek Podcast – New Series #4 (February 2020). I missed this, earlier in the spring, but here’s the link. It’s an excellent set of questions for Robert M. Price, this time around, and he rises to the challenge.

At the end of the The Lovecraft Geek podcast Price reveals he has a new book of short stories available, Horrors and Heresies, in which horror meets various aspects of religion. Price is, of course, an expert on the Bible as well as on Lovecraft and sword-and-sorcery, so a joining of the three should be especially succulent. If you want to know more of the anthology, the podcast The Free Thought Prophet #195 recently brought him onto the show to discuss the new collection.

I can also add a couple of small pointers to the questions and answers in this latest Lovecraft Geek.

i) On the ‘Poe’ question, there’s what appears to be a strong new book The Lovecraftian Poe which would be useful for the enquirer.

ii) On the ‘Nodens’ question, I can add that Nodens was once a god in ancient Britain, and this fact had been known among antiquarians after excavations at Lydney in the 1770s and became briefly known again when an additional find was written up for publication in the 1880s. This material and the name must surely have been known to Machen. Machen’s fictional use greatly impressed Lovecraft, who wrote in a letter…

I’ll never forget that pillar raised by Flavius Senilis to Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss

Machen having the inscription read: “To the great god Nodens (the god of the Great Deep or Abyss) Flavius Senilis has erected this pillar on account of the marriage which he saw beneath the shade.”

Lovecraft had first discovered and read Machen’s work in the summer of 1923, and Nodens then appeared in Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1926) and Dream-Quest (1926-27). It seems quite plausible to assume, as Joshi and others have, that Lovecraft had been unfamiliar with Nodens prior to 1923. My quick search of Google Books for the 19th century and for 1900-1924 confirms this strong likelihood. You couldn’t look him up in an encyclopedia, it seems.

Nodens appears to have been only a brief dalliance by Lovecraft, as there seems to be nothing lurking in the poetry. But his lack of any pursuit of the god into Dunsanian realms was perhaps timely. Since there was a flurry of publicity by 1929 around the Nodens name, which would have constrained any continued use of the name in fantastic fiction. The name and site at Lydney became closely associated with the discovery of a lost golden ring, known as ‘The Vyne Ring’, and a curse. The discovers put a call through to one Professor Tolkien, who kindly wrote a learned philological essay on the name Nodens in the light of the new finds. His essay is to be found in good form in the back of the Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932) and reprinted in Tolkien Studies #4 (2007).

Fourth-century inscription dedicated to Nodens, at Lydney, with sea-dragons. Note the Sauron-like staring ‘eye’.

Tolkien’s linguistic pursuit of the name led him to find a cognate across the Irish Sea in Nuada Argat-lam, he of the lost hand. There is thus a possible origin here for Tolkien’s idea of Sauron and the ring of power. Since Sauron lost a severed finger and with it his ring, and thus most of his power was lost. This key idea is not so far, at least in its basics, from a quick imaginative combination of the lost and cursed golden ‘Vyne Ring’ + the lost hand of Nuada.

“Deluge” movie fully restored – now streaming

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Films & trailers, Historical context

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Further to my recently look at S. Fowler Wright and his biography and influence on Lovecraft, I’m pleased to see a post today lauding the restored 1933 movie of Fowler Wright’s science-fiction disaster classic Deluge (1927). It’s now available to stream…

Once a lost film and for decades only available in an Italian language print with English subtitles, it was recently restored from a newly-discovered 35mm nitrate negative with the English language soundtrack by Serge Bromberg’s Paris-based Lobster Films. Kino Repertory picked up the film for a limited theatrical re-release in the U.S. and now Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents the stateside disc debut of the Lobster restoration. It looks very good for its age, especially considering the original elements suffered partial decomposition. Digital tools have restored much of the image and the sharpness and the soundtrack is even more impressive, with a clarity not often heard in orphaned films of this vintage and a dynamic range to the musical score. The Blu-ray and DVD Kino Lorber release also features new audio commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith and a bonus feature: the 1934 B-movie Back Page, a newspaper drama starring Peggy Shannon.

Apparently the movie’s distributor went bankrupt shortly after it was released in 1933, and then the movie was abruptly pulled from cinemas and cannibalised — the spectacular and costly special-effects scenes were extracted and crafted into new “Destruction of New York!” shorts that could generate long-term profits for creditors. This catastrophe scuppered any hope of a Hollywood script-writing career for S. Fowler Wright, and he returned to England.

Did Lovecraft see it? Well, after a long hiatus Lovecraft had returned to movie-going circa the winter of 1932-33, as the quality of movies rapidly improved. He was later wowed by the historical time-travel drama Berkeley Square in 1933 for instance. It’s thus quite possible that the prospect of seeing the ‘pest zone’ of New York entirely destroyed and swept away would have enticed him to a 1933 viewing of Deluge (the movie’s makers had swopped out the English Cotswolds for New York).

Though the Barlow letters suggest that Lovecraft was often tardy in such things, waiting until the very end of a film’s local run before visiting the cinema. Presumably there was less of a noisy distracting crowd in the cinema during the last few days of screening, and that was the way he liked it. Perhaps the tickets were also cheaper at such times. Such tardiness may well have meant he missed Deluge, it being abruptly pulled from release before he could see it. I know of no evidence that he managed to catch the movie before it was pulled.

He somewhat sporadically continued to attend cinema shows, for instance adoring the 18th century British Empire romance-adventure Clive of India (1935) showing the founding of the British Empire in India. This he held up to Barlow, alongside Berkeley Square, as a movie that had given him a ‘real kick’. In such continued cinema-going it’s not impossible he may have, at some point in 1934-36, seen and enjoyed one of the “Destruction of New York!” shorts that Deluge became.

Fowler Wright as an inspiration for “Shadow Out of Time”

13 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries

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WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Well, I’ve finished the classic S. Fowler Wright book The Amphibians / The World Below in its Galaxy Novel form.

I first wondered if Tolkien had read it, as there are a couple of similarities with The Lord of the Rings…

1) The vivid opening action recalls what happens the instant Galdalf steps onto the threshold of Moria. It has some resemblance to The Amphibians, when a slight step off the path triggers a ferocious tentacle attack…

her left foot pressed for a second on the purple soil beyond. As it did so, with the speed of light itself, the nearest of the bright-green globes shot open in a score of writhing tentacles, of which one caught the slipping foot

The similar scene from The Lord of the Rings…

He strode forward and set his foot on the lowest step. But at that moment several things happened. Frodo felt something seize him by the ankle, and he fell with a cry. … the waters of the lake seething, as if a host of snakes were swimming up from the southern end. Out from the water a long sinuous tentacle had crawled; it was pale-green and luminous and wet. Its fingered end had hold of Frodo’s foot and was dragging him into the water. Sam on his knees was now slashing at it with a knife. The arm let go of Frodo, and Sam pulled him away, crying out for help. Twenty others arms came rippling out. The dark water boiled, and there was a hideous stench.

2) There are some passages that remind me of the entrance and walk into Lorien in The Lord of the Rings. A peaceful wood of yellow but-vitally living leaves, the troop of elf-warriors heading out to deal with the orcs, the freeing of the Fellowship from worry or grief…

I could not say if the others slept, for I knew nothing more till I woke bewildered in a dim golden light, with my comrade of the night touching my hand to rouse me. The rest of the troop had begun to move forward already.

I was sunk deeply in the soft moss, which was of a very close texture, and of so dark a green as to look black in the shadow. The branches overhead spread low and wide, as do those of a beech. The leaves also were beech-like, but of a golden yellow. Not the yellow of Autumn, but one of an abundant vitality. I noticed the fragrance which had soothed my exhaustion when we entered. It gave me now a sense of contentment and physical well-being such as I had never experienced.

Indeed, there seemed to me a general kinship between Wright’s Amphibians and Tolkien’s elves, in terms of i) their tall superhuman movement, sight and agility; ii) their method of ‘waking sleeping’; iii) various aspects of their ‘strangeness’; and iv) the ability of some of their kind to perceive the minds of others. The Amphibians are also sea-dwellers and thus, in their venture onto land, have a “sea-longing” akin to Tolkien’s elves. If in circa 1930 Tolkien had been looking for a way to get his elves out of diminutive Edwardian fairyland, he would have found here several possibilities.

I also spotted a rather firmer and more likely inspiration, but this time for H.P. Lovecraft, re: his “The Shadow Out of Time” (written Nov 1934 – Feb 1935). In the first book Wright offers…

In the interior where they live, the Dwellers have captive specimens of the inhabitants of many bygone ages. These they keep under such conditions as approximate to those from which they come, so that they may study their habits and acquire their knowledge, if they should have any which may be worth recording.

The similarity with the modus operandi of The Great Race in “The Shadow Out of Time” is quite obvious.

The dating also fits. A letter shows that Lovecraft had The World Below as a Christmastime gift in December 1932 or January 1933 (I allow for the vagaries of the mail at such a busy time), and presumably he then found time to read it sometime in 1933 or even into 1934. Which would mean he read the book before he wrote “The Shadow Out of Time”.

Wright’s initial idea about ‘captive minds from many bygone ages’ is only very loosely developed in the second book, The World Below. Firstly there is some cursory introduction of ‘display windows’ showing cinema-like fragments of time (a dinosaur-era pool, a calm ice-age scene, a giant-bird hunting scene possibly from an intermediate future). These are seen as the hero passes through The World Below, being displayed on tunnel walls by some undetermined method of the Dwellers. But they reveal little and are concluded to be akin to decorative wall-hangings for solemn contemplation by the morose Dwellers. The first book’s idea of there being many captive minds from many ages is only alluded to at the end of the second book, when the hero learns of a method of sanctuary from the Dwellers, in one of the library-temples…

if you can then make your way to the Place of the Seekers of Wisdom, you will be in a sanctuary from which none will seek to remove you. They will question you of the life you left, and so long as you can tell them of new things they will be very sure to keep you in safety.

The hero goes there, but the ending of the second and final book is very cursory and must have been frustrating for Lovecraft…

I was with the Seekers of Wisdom many months, till the year was completed. During that time I was examined incessantly on every detail of the civilisation from which I came. … But to write of these in detail would be to begin a book when it is time for the ending.

We learn nothing of the Seekers, their temple-like Place, and there is no mention of the other minds from other times that (if the retentive reader remembers a brief aside given in the first book) must also be held there.

There are a few other similarities, beyond the obvious time travel (here going forward, rather than back). Such as the weirdly verdant setting, the vast library, and the wider scenario re: a millennia-past global conflict and its apparently fragile and fearful resolution — which is breached while the time-travelling hero is there, when the feared monsters attack again…

they [the Dwellers, the dominant race] passed through a period of warfare with the inhuman population of other portions of the earth’s surface, in the course of which many of them were destroyed, and which remained as a continuing menace when the actual conflict ceased.

Their enemy takes the form of huge…

… monstrous insects flying low over the water. As it neared the conflict, its head drew back into a neck-like collar, which shone with a metallic lustre, similar to that of the wing-sheathes. The front pair of sheathes lifted and adjusted their positions, till they formed a vertical shield to the advancing monster.

These are battled with what are in effect giant blue laser-beams, which once fired, form into living “wil o’ the wisps” that act like a wolf-pack. Again, one thinks of “The Shadow Out of Time”, in which the Great Race greatly fears the resumption of a war by…

a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. … the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records.” Their weapons being… “camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects”

And then there are Lovecraft’s own beetles…

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.

S. Fowler Wright

10 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings

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Another Arkham Sampler has arrived on Archive.org as a crisp scan. The Arkham Sampler #5 (Winter 1949) was a big science-fiction special. The first 28 pages or so consist of a dense round-table by-mail to determine the most essential starter science-fiction to 1949, novels or anthologies.

I see high praise there for The Amphibians / The World Below (1929) by S. Fowler Wright. On looking him up I was amazed to find him a local lad from the West Midlands. Somehow I had missed learning that fact, over the years.

S. Fowler Wright was born in Holly Street, Smethwick, an industrial town jammed between Birmingham and the even more industrial Black Country, in my own West Midlands of England. He would have come of age in Smethwick and Birmingham in circa 1890, at age 16, and amid the bustle of Empire he took up a mundane but lucrative career as an accountant. Like Tolkien he went to King Edward’s School in New Street, Birmingham. Like Tolkien he loathed the growing car-culture in England, and its many deleterious effects. He was a conservative activist, in the staunchly pro civil-liberties, pro procreation and anti big-business mould which might be pithily summed up as “freedom, family, and fuck off” and which today would more politely referred to as old-school libertarian. From what I read, intellectually he appears to have been one of those rare ‘conservative anarchs’ that so puzzle the pigeon-holers.

A fine verse translator of Dante and erotic verse, and writer of a vast Arthurian poem (lost in a bombing raid, rewritten in old age), he was a founder of the Empire Poetry League, the editor of its journal Poetry and The Play from 1917-1932, and operator of its press. Accounts of his life are scarce and very patchy, but one account says he founded the League, possibly with the support of Chesterton who was a member. He edited a large number of anthologies, including one for children, several for the League, and The County Series of Contemporary Poetry.

He turned to self-publishing his novels from 1927, which paid off when he sold his disaster book Deluge (1927) to Hollywood for a 1933 movie version. J.E. Clare Mcfarlane (linked above) states the book sold one hundred thousand copies via book clubs, and thus “earned him the active animosity of established publishers” and that these publishers were instrumental in the demise of the Empire Poetry League.

He passed away in 1965 and is thus not public domain in the UK. But all his works are now all online for free in good HTML, presumably from one of his descendants who holds the rights. On this site one can find his son talking of Empire League meetings held at “our home in Handsworth Wood” in the early 1920s. In which case his accountancy work must have enabled him to escape grimy Smethwick. Nearby Handsworth Wood is in suburban north-west Birmingham. Although at that time Handsworth Wood was said to be almost as grimy as Smethwick and, long-since denuded of its wood, it would only become leafy again many decades later. This new home appears to have been a product of his second marriage to a young wife in 1920, and once settled in he started writing some wild science fiction with The Amphibians (1924). This became the first part of The World Below.

After 1930, as the Great Depression took hold, he produced a long string of popular crime mysteries under a pen name. These are said to be pot-boilers but it would be interesting to know to what extent he might have used Birmingham as a backdrop. He appears to have had some national fame toward the end of the 1930s, and the list of his books suggests he may have been a part of the debates about the divestment of the British colonies, and perhaps about the state of traditional British liberties. He doesn’t seem to have been the sort of man who would hold back on robust ‘letters to the editor’ or ‘op-eds’, either, of the type found leavening the poetry in his journal Poetry and The Play. He broadcast on the radio, and visited Germany in 1934 to write a series of newspaper articles for The Sunday Despatch. He also wrote for the London Evening Standard and The Daily Mirror. Brian Stapleford noted that The Daily Express called him one of “the ten best brains in Britain” in the 30s, and that was back when the Express was worth something and not the vile gutter-rag it is today.

In 1965 Sam Moskowitz surveyed his long out-of-print works and compared him to Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), though presumably for the libertarian sentiments expressed his fiction rather than for his outright political writing. Moskowitz’s essay can’t be obtained online, but apparently he frowned on Wright’s 1930s concerns about easy birth-control and cars. Though this seems exactly the right analysis of the coming forces that would, in short order, fundamentally change traditional society. That Wright became something of a bore about such matters, and that such forces were triumphant by the time Moskowitz was writing, doesn’t mean that Wright wasn’t both prescient and correct.

What of Lovecraft? Despite Lovecraft’s awareness of the British scene it seems the master only became aware of Wright’s novels in 1933, when he writes in a letter that…

Another gift was the fairly recent scientifictional novel The World Below, by S. Fowler Wright.

Lovecraft would, however, have seen stories like “Automata” and “The Rat” in Weird Tales in 1929, and possibly others elsewhere, and thus must have been aware of him as a story writer. There’s slight later evidence that Lovecraft considered him one of only three ‘masters’ still writing, but I can find no more precise evaluation that that. What posterity would give, to have a few in-depth book reviews of such authors from Lovecraft.

Like most Chestertonian conservative thinkers of the 1930s, as an intellectual Wright appears to have been swept away by the war and forgotten by the late 1950s. Though his key fiction lasted a little longer, with affordable Galaxy Novel reprints in the USA in 1950 for The Amphibians / The World Below, followed by a Panther paperback reprint in the UK in 1954.

An article by his son recalls that during the war his father ran a literary and distribution agency in Fetter Lane, London, but it was soon bombed out and he then opened a large bookshop selling new books, opposite the British Museum. In 1951 this moved to Kensington High Street and lasted until 1954, closed by a fog of post-war restrictions and the mass takeup of television.

After the war he was largely known as a prolific crime mystery novelist. But it seems quite possible he was not entirely forgotten by some as a historical novelist. After the science-fiction classic The World Below (1929) he had published Elfwin: A Novel of Anglo-Saxon Times (1930, re-subtitled ‘A Romance of History’ in the U.S.), a stirring novel of Ethelflaeda of Mercia. Apparently this was his first historical novel, and he drew on his own locality and its most famous female warrior — ancient Mercia more or less maps onto the modern West Midlands, albeit with an extension to Northumbria. The 1930 date suggests a novel written at the height of his powers, and probably side-by-side with The World Below, but the couple of science fiction historians who have considered his works focus on his Wellsian scientific romances and Elfwin goes unmentioned.

Yet a couple of asides suggest Elfwin once gave him the most acclaim from the mainstream, before such books went out of fashion in the 1960s, as a quality and brisk historical novel with what are said to be many heroic supporting characters. Though the central heroine is apparently rather annoying to modern readers for much of the novel. At least Elfwin is also said to lack most of the author’s usual digressive asides and hobby-horse speeches. One thus wonders if the new breed of sword & sorcery historians might find something of interest in this novel, even though it lacks the required sorcery? Also, it seems difficult to imagine that Tolkien did not read the novel circa 1930-33, as he was likewise fascinated by ancient Mercia. Admittedly it had no reprint after 1930, but presumably it must have sold well and could thus be found in used bookshops and public libraries into the 1950s. There is also some evidence that he continued to self-publish his best works as reprints after the war, since Silverberg states he had his signed copy of The World Below direct from England that way.

His authentic Biblical epic novel David (1934), which includes military campaigns and is said to be the best of his historical novels, may also bear some investigation by sword and sorcery historians.

There may be yet another local aspect to his work. Sampling a few fragments of his more local satirical fiction, one immediately catches the wry tone of Arnold Bennett. We might assume that this south Staffordshire author read and admired the best local work of north Staffordshire’s Bennett (Five Towns series, The Card, “Simon Fuge”, etc), as well as the early H.G. Wells. Arnold Bennett was on The Evening Standard, a paper with which Wright was associated and for which he wrote, so there could be a personal connection there.

The only book on Fowler Wright appears to be the short survey monograph that forms #51 in the Milford Series, 1994, and which is not yet on Archive.org. His entry on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia usefully boxes up and signposts his imaginative and detective series for potential readers, though largely steers clear of specifying the politics.

Brian Stapleford published a late novel, The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below (2009), forming a third part after The Amphibians and The World Below. There are hints that this is based on a loose outline by Wright himself, though I can’t find any reviews of The World Beyond that might confirm this. Audible also has The World Below: A Novel of the Far Future as a 9-hour audiobook released in 2012, read from an edition “edited by Brian Stableford”. One thus assumes Stableford went through the text and created a definitive error-free version for the 2012 reading.

Good Kindle .mobi versions of the 1950 Galaxy Novel reprints of The Amphibians / The World Below are free here.