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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Night in Providence

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: waiting for the night bus

10 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Picture postals

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Waiting for the night bus, Westminster Street, Providence. Probably the first 4.30am early-service, given what’s on the clock. Or perhaps a tram-car, as the road-rails and cables can still be seen.

Lovecraft often departed or arrived in Providence at odd hours, and not always by train. The ends of his local night-walks may also have entailed waiting at various types of transport stop. Night scenes such as this one in the city’s main Westminster Street seem likely to have been relatively familiar to him.

He also, briefly, worked as a ticket-booth man. Mostly likely at a cinema on Westminster Street, which may have entailed some late working hours.

‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Night in Providence, 1933.

04 Friday Jun 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Night in Providence, Picture postals

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This week, my upscale and colourising of a picture of downtown Providence, as Lovecraft would have known it at dusk on an evening in 1933. This is after the building of the Industrial Trust building. A building whose “blazing” and “winking” tower lights Lovecraft fairly soon came to rather enjoy having on his horizon, though he felt it marred the view from one particular childhood spot.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft – Rhode Island at night set

05 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Picture postals

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Following on from last week’s ‘Providence at Night’ set, I see there was also a series of night postcards that ranged more widely across the island. These had a different format and often a rather more sinister Lovecraftian feel…

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft – Providence at night set

29 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Picture postals

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Inspired by Lovecraft’s choice of a Providence at night postcard (see last week’s ‘Picture Postal’) I found similar cards. They were mostly seemingly issued in the early/mid 1920s.

His choice of card.

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: 17th November 1931

22 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Night in Providence, Picture postals

≈ 4 Comments

Currently up for sale at Abebooks, a lesser Lovecraft postcard. Judging by the 10.30pm postmark, it was likely written on the evening of 17th November 1931, and then posted with others after a night stroll. Assuming he was at home at Barnes Street, this raises the interesting question of exactly where the nearest pick-up mailbox (with a late 10.30pm collection) was and how far he would have to walk from his home?

On the card “HPL” writes a brief note…

He congratulates Coates on the recent edition of Driftwind, and the frontispiece of the frequent little magazine which shows what sounds like a view of Montpelier, Vermont. Lovecraft seems to imply rapid change may be happening there and that the picture may have changed? This is not the view in question, if wide view it was, but it is perhaps indicative…

Lovecraft was at that moment very interested in how small isolated towns might change and perhaps for the worse. On his desk lay the pages that would become the famous story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, set to be complete two weeks later on about 1st/2nd December 1931. This concern fitted well with the mood of the times, as the third winter of the Great Depression began to grip the nation.

On the card Lovecraft then supposes that Paul Cook, fellow amateur and leading collector of weird books, will be visiting Coates at Thanksgiving 1931. Thus implying that Lovecraft has not had any letter recently from either to confirm this point. Lovecraft alludes to his own usual winter hermitage with the final line… “If it were mid-July I’d surely [join?, enjoy?] him!” and thus assumes that Coates is well aware of his aversion to cold… and to a Vermont winter in particular.

The front of the card is not show or described at Abe. But it was published by the Berger Bros. of Providence, suggesting a view of Providence. Indeed it was… a quick search found the front on the seller’s own store as a good scan, and it shows the new Industrial Trust Building at night.

The November issue of Driftwind was 44 pages including a “Check List of Publications of Driftwind Press”, including H.P. Lovecraft’s The Materialist Today, later to become one of the rarest of Lovecraft’s publications. Issues of Driftwind earlier in the year had been the first to publish sonnets from the Fungi From Yuggoth cycle, and more would follow.

Did Lovecraft ever mention Halloween?

27 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Night in Providence

≈ 1 Comment

Did Lovecraft ever mention Halloween as a day of pranks? Well, he knew of its prankish traditions. In his Department of Public Criticism (January 1919) column he gives a few comments on the contents of The Brooklynite for November 1918…

Mr. A. M. Adams is more successful as an essayist, and manages to infuse some real, glowing, and practical patriotism in his colloquial discourse on “Halloween Pranks”. We are glad to see so virile a piece at this particular time…

But no, he doesn’t discuss it in any volume of letters I have access to, either historically or in terms of mentioning that neighbourhood kids had come knocking on the door offering ‘trick or treat’. Though there are headers in a couple of letters. On 31st October 1931 he dated a letter to Cole as simply… “All Hallows”, and two years later he did the same with a letter to Morton.

So far as I can tell the letters hint only twice at any sort of Halloween activity on his part. To Dwyer, on being sent a drawing of Pickman’s Model, he comments (3rd March 1927) that…

At Roodmas and All-Hallows’ shall I view it, and the Objects squatting on nearby coffins or peering monstrously over my shoulder shall shudder as they gaze upon its forbidden revelations.

Remarking to Donald Wandrei (3rd November 1927) on his recent reading of The Aeneid in the 1906 James Rhoades translation, he also comments on his “spectral thoughts” at Halloween…

This Virgilian diversion, together with the spectral thoughts incident to All Hallows’ Eve with its Witch-Sabbaths on the hills, produced in me last Monday night a Roman dream of such supernal clearness & vividness, & such titanic adumbrations of hidden horror, that I verily believe I shall some day employ it in fiction.

And that’s about it so far as I can tell, apart from the use in fiction. No comments in letters on the local tradition of “Halloween pranks”, if such things were even permitted in Providence. Though admittedly I don’t yet have the two volumes of his letters to his aunts, so may be missing some mentions in letters. But I’m sure S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence would have noted any in-person trick-or-treating in company with his aunts (“I’m H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t need to wear a mask…”). Given the evidence above he might have marked the date merely with some “spectral thoughts” and perusal of a few especially shuddersome sketches. Possibly it also often marked more or less a terminal date for his summer walks, and the onset of his usual winter hermitage.

Though he did leave us this March 1926 National Amateur poem, later reprinted in the September 1952 issue of Weird Tales…

If written for Halloween 1925, as seems likely, this would make it a poem from the Red Hook period. A time in which Lovecraft trekked out (often in vain) on what he called “exploring trips” to find relatively unspoiled suburbs of New York City. There he might find a place to walk, often at night, and enjoy for a while a lingering old-time atmosphere and the occasional company of a wide-eyed cat or two. His 1925 Diary seems to confirm my supposition: 28th Oct “Paterson” [he visits Morton in Paterson]; 29th Oct “Start poem”; 30th Oct “Finish poem”.

This doesn’t mean that the ugly suburb of the poem is Paterson, but that the trip there may have sparked the idea of the poem.

A letter adds to the Diary, and suggests why he might have been in the mood to write. Just before starting the poem he had heard that afternoon that Weird Tales had accepted his story “The Horror at Red Hook”. Also, we learn that the landlady had finally put a fire in the furnace of his until-then unheated building.

For Halloween itself the Diary shows he met Kirk and Loveman, and the Kalem Klub meeting that developed broke up at 5am the following morning. Lovecraft wandered back through the darkened streets to his room in Red Hook. The evening appears to have been marked by no special festivities, though it is quite possible his new Halloween poem was read there. So we do have, perhaps, some hints that Lovecraft marked at least one Halloween by penning a new poem.

Perhaps anticipating the acceptance of “The Horror at Red Hook”, a few weeks earlier Lovecraft had been considering how to sprinkle his writing with more convincing occult mumbo-jumbo than that he had briefly used back in the summer in “Red Hook”. In a letter to Smith on 9th October 1925 he remarked…

I have frequently thought of getting some of the junk sold at an occultists book shop in 46th St. The trouble is, that it costs too damned much for me in my present state. [and he then asks Smith for] a more or less brief list of magical books — ancient & mediaeval preferred — in English or English translations.

… presumably to see if the various New York Libraries might have free copies he could make notes from. Or perhaps the list of titles might be passed to those in the book trade, such as Kirk or Loveman, who might know of a reprint.

What of the “46th St.” occult bookstore he mentions? It can’t be the famous Weiser store, as that did not open until 1926. Possibly Lovecraft had been taken to the Gotham Book Mart, and was mis-remembering 45th as 46th? Because the famous bookseller and anti-censorship champion Frances Steloff had opened this in 1920 (a 1921 Publishers Weekly has it at “128 W. 45th St”). According to her biography her shop only sold books she liked — her tastes being almost entirely in the then-emerging modernist literature and spiritual/occultist books. One can imagine which section of the shop Lovecraft headed toward. That the books were all too expensive for him, and perhaps also too ponderous, may have been part of the impetus toward inventing his own rather more lively mythos.

He did, however, later recall seedier New York sellers of such material…

“the mystic bookstalls with their hellish bearded guardians … monstrous books from nightmare lands for sale at a song if one might chance to pick the right one from mouldering, ceiling-high piles”

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: more Providence at night

23 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Picture postals

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This week, more night views of Providence, this time as the young Lovecraft would have known it on night-walks. These two are early 1914 views made by the Providence artist Whitman Bailey (1884-1954). Lovecraft then aged in his early 20s.

Prospect Terrace was, of course, one of Lovecraft’s favourite places in his city. Neither picture is in my Whitman Bailey ebook collection, available here.

‘Picture postals’ from Lovecraft: coffee at night in Providence

04 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Night in Providence, Picture postals

≈ 2 Comments

This was in the lobby of the Butler Exchange in Providence. Lovecraft rhetorically derided the “ugly nondescript” architecture of such “Victorian pests as Butler Exchange” in Providence, the Butler being a large commercial ‘offices to let’ building that had opened in 1873. It had six floors including a floor of shops, and seems to have been inhabited for some fifty years by a multitude of small upmarket trades that included music teachers, portrait painters, and milliners. Lovecraft had his way on the city architecture, for once, and the carbuncular building was demolished in 1925.

Here we see the Exchange’s ‘hole on the wall’ coffee vendor, said to be in the entrance Lobby and possibly tucked into a defunct elevator shaft. Judging by the ‘News Company’ sign above, it was perhaps servicing newsmen who were working through the night to ready the dawn news? The demolition of the Exchange was in 1925, thus the date of this picture is likely to be circa 1920-24.

I can find no evidence that Lovecraft patronised this particular place on his pre- New York night-walks, either alone or with Eddy. But, given its very central location and likely all-night hours and public pay-phone, this would have been of obvious interest to him. Especially after a chill all-night walk or on leaving the train station after a cold journey at a very late hour. Even if he never visited, the picture is still very evocative of small ‘hole on the wall’ coffee vendors in Providence, at night in the early 1920s.

The Exchange building also evidently had a large art show on at least one occasion, and one of these in particular may have been a daytime draw for Lovecraft-al-Hazred…

H. Cyrus Farnum [RSID, Providence Art Club] … painted brilliant outdoor scenes of Africa which were exhibited at the Butler Exchange in Providence. He died at home in 1925. — North Providence

Cyrus Farnum had a large studio in the Butler Exchange, and this was presumably the location of the exhibition. As a leading member of the Providence Art Club, Lovecraft’s aunts would almost certainly have attended his show, since they were fellow Club members. Given the subject matter from Algiers and Biskra in North Africa, one imagines that Lovecraft would have been keen to accompany them — if he was not by then in New York City. I hazard a guess at c. 1920-24 for the show, as a retirement retrospective, but it might even have been staged in the pre-war period. He had certainly been in Algiers in 1905, given the date on one such picture, and he was exhibiting his best Algiers pictures during the war. Without access to local newspaper archives, or a completist database of all known pre-1945 art exhibitions (is there such a thing?), a date can’t be pinned on this show at the Butler Exchange. It would certainly be interesting to know if it was a pre-Christmas 1920 show, as the show would then be a possible influence on Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” (written January 1921).

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the night-view from Prospect Terrace

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Picture postals

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A night-view from Prospect Terrace, Providence, 1930s, as published in the city’s local newspaper.

The twilight is now getting too dim for writing—this [letter] being indited on Prospect Terrace, a small park not far from 10 Barnes [address of Lovecraft’s home], on the crest of the steep hill overlooking the spires & domes of the lower town out-spread to the west 200 feet [below]. The view from here is especially alluring & mystery-suggesting at sunset, & I not infrequently bring my work hither at such—& other—times.”   — Lovecraft letter to Toldridge, 12th August 1932.

There’s a long dot, just to the left of the tower, that I haven’t cleaned away. It could be an airship of the 1930s.

On the 1928 tower, and its effects at night, see the Christmas 2018 Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the Industrial Trust Building.

“The Night Ocean”

09 Saturday May 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Night in Providence, Podcasts etc.

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HorrorBabble has released “The Night Ocean” by Barlow and Lovecraft, as a new one-hour reading for free on YouTube.

S.T. Joshi evaluates the balance of the dual authorship in I Am Providence…

Another literary project on which Lovecraft and Barlow probably worked during his stay in Providence was “The Night Ocean.” We are now able to gauge the precise degree of Lovecraft’s contribution to this tale, as Barlow’s typescript, with Lovecraft’s revisions, has now surfaced. … Lovecraft’s contribution probably amounts to no more than 10%. … “The Night Ocean” is one of the most pensively atmospheric tales produced by anyone in the Lovecraft circle. It comes very close — closer, perhaps, than any of Lovecraft’s own works with the exception of “The Colour out of Space” — to capturing the essential spirit of the weird tale”

Two Gentlemen Meet at Midnight

10 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Night in Providence, Odd scratchings

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New on Archive.org, August Derleth’s Arkham Sampler #4 (Autumn 1948). The journal ran for eight issues. This issue’s highlight, today, is a ‘poem for voices’ by Derleth. Inspired by reading Lovecraft’s letters he imagines the shades of Lovecraft and Poe meeting at last, one night in Providence.

And here’s a picture to set the mood for a reading. It’s not been seen here before at Tentaclii, and is from my late summer 2019 haul of such pictures showing Lovecraft’s 66 College St and its surroundings. The two men are at the Van Wickle Gates at the top of College Street, only a moment’s walk from 66 College Street. In fact, given the timing in the 1940s, one wonders if the picture wasn’t inspired by Derleth’s 1948 poem.

I don’t know who holds Derleth’s copyrights these days, but if they’re sensible descendents then there may be potential here for a musical album. Of soundscape / found-sounds / low-key ‘night music’, combined into tracks evoking Providence at night in the 1930s/40s leading into a dramatised vocal performance of this poem with FX. Perhaps earlier in the album one might also have some of Poe’s more ‘cosmic’ lyrics and then Lovecraft’s churchyard letters/poem, both mentioned in the above poem, done in the same way.

College Hill in the snow

19 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Night in Providence

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An evocative picture of Prospect Street at night, after a snow-storm…

A Lovecraft-alike man seen walking through the Brown University gates…

There appears to have been very light snow or frost in this winter picture of 32 George Street, College Hill, the picture evoking some of the livelier houses that Lovecraft would have passed on his night-walks…

The glowing dials of a clock tower can be seen on the left through the trees.

Also, here’s a heavily over-painted card from out of Lovecraft’s area, but indicative of the trollies (trams on rails) which ran down the residential streets of the city in his time…

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