Robert Olmstead, in France, reports that he has started a detailed illustrated Web timeline of Lovecraft in France.

He also has a clipping of an article from the Providence Evening Bulletin of 1970 that made Providence aware of the serious French reception of Lovecraft in translation…

Lovecraft did read Moby Dick, it seems, in the spring of 1925. I had assumed Lovecraft had never read the book, since it isn’t listed in S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library (2nd ed.). But here is Lovecraft in a letter (Letters from New York, p.122) stating that he was about to read the book…

   [Lovecraft about to depart for Washington, 11th April 1925] “Kleiner and Loveman will wave tear-stain’d handkerchiefs after the tail-lights of the [train] coach that bears Kirk & me away. I shall probably wear my light overcoat, checking it at the Union Station in Washington, where I shall also check the book which is to beguile my hours of idleness — “Moby Dick, or the White Whale”, by Herman Melville”.

In “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (intended as the final chapter of Lovecraft’s revisory work Well Bred Speech, 1936) he notes… “Of Herman Melville at least Moby Dick deserves a hearing.”

His almost-certain reading of Moby Dick seems fairly interestingly timed, given its ocean monster theme: four months later he wrote out the plot of “The Call of Cthulhu”.

Moby Dick was apparently deemed an obscure and rather neglected work until the Melville centenary in 1919 — and it wasn’t until 1920 that Melville’s own unexpurgated text of the work finally reached a modern audience and triggered “the Melville Revival”. This new text of the book was swiftly followed by the biography Herman Melville, mariner and mystic (1921) and Carl Van Doren’s chapter on Melville in The American Novel (1921). The following year saw publication of Melville’s letters. This scholarly interest led in time to a wider public interest, generated especially by the major Warner Brothers silent film of Moby in January 1926, titled The Sea Beast and starring John Barrymore. Predictably the movie makers managed to add a love interest, as seen in the lavish stills which illustrated Warner’s cash-in reprint of the novel of the book titled “Moby Dick Photoplay”. But this movie tie-in reprint cannot have been the edition Lovecraft took to Washington, since it was released 17th December 1925 according to Catalog of Copyright Entries.

The edition of Moby Dick that Lovecraft intended to read in Washington may instead have been borrowed stock from Kirk’s bookshop, and was presumably one of the early 1920s single-volume unexpurgated editions.

Rheinhart Kleiner, with a New York address of 444 Evergreen Av, Brooklyn, in the mainstream Motion Picture magazine for May 1915…

This is an appearance three months earlier than the commonly cited “Piper for September 1915″ for this poem. Lovecraft replied to “To Mary…” with “To Charlie of the Comics” (Providence Amateur, February 1916) which started a sort of poetic jousting between the two.

Marvel Tales #1, printing Lovecraft’s “Celephais”.

In several of his stories H.P. Lovecraft mentions Bolton, Massachusetts, a small town located about twelve miles west of Boston. Bolton was then remote, and had not yet become a commuter dormitory for Boston. Here are the instances of Lovecraft’s uses of Bolton:

“The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped…” (“Herbert West—Reanimator”). This mention of a circus later prompted the game-story “Freakshow” in the Call of Cthulhu RPG game book Tales of the Miskatonic Valley (1991) in which… “investigators follow the trail of a B-grade circus and its new helpless but monstrous recruit”.

“In college, and during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated…” (“Herbert West—Reanimator”).

“It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton — a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley” (“Herbert West—Reanimator”).

“In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing — with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common” (“Herbert West—Reanimator”).

“Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town” (“Herbert West—Reanimator”).

“Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid woodmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends.” (“The Colour out of Space”).

“My eldest cat, “Nigger-Man”, was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts” (“The Rats in the Walls”).

Yet there appears to be no known biographical connection of the small town with Lovecraft’s life. My perusal of the book History of Bolton 1738-1938 suggests that it was not a factory town, and also that it probably had no great claims on the attentions of an antiquarian tourist like Lovecraft. It did have many woodmills and a few rare minerals, the latter perhaps making it a place known to Morton of the Lovecraft circle. But previous scholars have been stumped…

“Lovecraft mentions the town of Bolton, Massachusetts, in several of his stories; the reason, if any, is something of a mystery” (Donald R. Burleson, 1983)

“What prompted Lovecraft’s use of Bolton remains unknown.” (Peter H. Cannon, 1989)

There appear to be three faint possibilities, other than the minerals:

1) The astronomer Samuel Stearns (1741-1810) was born at Bolton, Mass….

“He was a physician and astronomer of Worcester, New York City, and of Brattleboro [Vermont]. He was the author of Tour to London and Paris; Mystery of Animal Magnetism; The American Oracle; and The American Herbal or Materia Medica“.

Stearns issued an annual The North-American’s almanack, and Lovecraft was a collector of early almanacs. Stearns was a British patriot, like Lovecraft (and was framed for several crimes as a result, and forced to flee to Britain). He returned to America and died in Brattleboro, Vermont, a place which Lovecraft knew well. Stearns’s Tour to London and Paris is an account of visiting Paris in the 18th century (the book has little to say on London) and might have interested Lovecraft, although it was not found in Lovecraft’s library at his death.

2) The town of Bolton was the boyhood town of William Ellery Leonard (1876-1944), a poet and author who taught at the University of Wisconsin’s Dept. of English, and who… “struggled to stave off madness through art”. He wrote eloquently about the town of Bolton in his major psychological autobiography The Locomotive-God (written summer of 1926, published 1928). This book was, however, published well after the use of Bolton by Lovecraft (in “Herbert West” written 1921-22; “Rats” 1923; and “Colour” 1927).

Could Lovecraft and Leonard have corresponded before 1928? There is no evidence that they did. But, like Lovecraft, Leonard wrote antiquated classic poetry, and had a number of bizarre phobias and psychological ailments. Leonard is known to have written a praising review of Frank Belknap Long’s obscure first collection A Man from Genoa and Other Poems (1926), but other than that I can find no linkage between Leonard and the Lovecraft circle. (He did graduate from Harvard 1899, but that probably wouldn’t have given him a connection to Morton — who graduated there in 1892).

Is there a very slim chance that Leonard’s remarkable autobiography (¹) might have been one of the inspirations for the character of the English literature professor Albert N. Wilmarth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930)? For more on Leonard, see the just-published biography by Neale Reinitz, William Ellery Leonard: The Professor and the Locomotive-God, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

3) Five miles to the west of Bolton lies the enormous Wachusett Reservoir (1895-1908). A history of this reservoir is to be found in: Eamon McCarthy Earls, Wachusett: How Boston’s 19th Century Quest for Water Changed Four Towns and a Way of Life, Via Appia Press.

“one of the largest civil engineering feats in New England history” … “The $11 million project drew more than 4,000 immigrant workers from Italy, Hungary and Finland, and a group of African-Americans from Virginia” … “the unskilled workers settled here” … “Building the reservoir meant removing 3,816 bodies from a cemetery on the site in Clinton.”

This last fact may have meant that Bolton suggested itself as a setting for its early use by Lovecraft, in “Herbert West”, where the theme is of course grave-robbing and corpse stealing. But then, why not use Clinton itself?

Note 1: “Jim Stephens, in The Journey Home: Wisconsin Literature Through Four Centuries (1989, North Country Press), likens the events in The Locomotive-God to “the feeling of The Fall of the House of Usher brought to life.” — from James P. Roberts, Famous Wisconsin Authors.

Here’s a poor scan of the article in the New York Evening Post (29th August 1924) which sent Lovecraft to Greenwich Village to seek out the little lost alley… “just off Perry street, past Bleeker”. This setting appeared a year later as the “little black court off Perry Street”, in which the narrator emerges after his ordeal in the Lovecraft story “He” (written 11th August 1925).

Snagged from an eBay auction just ended at $495… a Lovecraft postcard from New Orleans, on 6th June 1932, to Walter J. Coates of The Driftwind Press…

“Greetings! At the far end of one of my annual travel outbursts, & enjoying every minute of it! Shenandoah Valley…. Tennessee…. old Father Mississippi (seen by me for the first time)…. Vicksburg…. Natchez…. & now ancient New Orleans, paradise of the architect and antiquarian. Right in the same class with Charleston & Quebec! Here for over a week, then Mobile, Ala. Have a very faint hope of getting to Charleston. Regards — & hope that spring is getting around to the arctic regions at last! HPL”