Category Archives: Odd scratchings

HPLinks #17 – Masonic Lovecraft, Lovecraft as trainspotter, Lovecraft and Science conference, search the Providence Journal archives, and more…

11 Wednesday Dec 2024

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HPLinks #17.

* The journal Fraternal Review, from the Southern California Research Lodge, has a new ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Freemasonry’ special edition. Contents include…

* Harry Houdini and Masonry.
* Lovecraft’s Masonic grandfather.
* Masonic influences on Lovecraft, as well as Lovecraft’s subsequent influences on the occult world.
* Real-life location of the Masonic Lodge that inspired the one taken over in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

A $5 digital edition is available. It’s interesting to think what might have happened had Lovecraft taken a different path… able to break into local journalism, then a local magazine editor (he would have been a cert for something like the Hospital Trust magazine The Netopian, with all its local history) and… thus been enticed to join a local Masonic Lodge. Possibly there’s a “what if” Mythos story in that?

* Deep Cuts looks into Her Letters To August Derleth: Muriel E. Eddy, and there are also a few firmer biographical memories found in the article “Mrs. Hinckley’s Providence”. The latter having an item of data on Lovecraft’s youth that I don’t think I’d seen before…

Dorothy Walter, a member of our Short Story Club, said Mr. Lovecraft used to call on her when she was young. About 20 years ago [circa 1946-47] a stranger came from Baltimore and asked Miss Walter and me [Mrs Hinckley] many questions. I only remember that my father knew Mr. Lovecraft and always spoke to him. When we came from Wickford to go to school, Mr. Lovecraft was usually sitting in the Providence railway station, probably because it was nice and warm there.

Presumably the father was taking the girls to the train for school each day, or meeting them off the train, and thus he said ‘hello’ to the boy Lovecraft. This seems quite plausible, though due to Lovecraft’s avid early interest in trains and railroad-men rather than for the warmth (his adult aversion to cold was later known, which probably coloured memories). Deep Cuts puts this at a time when Lovecraft was perhaps 10-12 year old. So maybe 1901-02? I also note that the article also recalls that at that time, at the back of the railway station there was a “beautiful backwater cove”. Tidal and sweet-smelling as she recalled it, but which was later filled in. This huge water feature can be seen on panorama views of the early city. It’s interesting to hear that it may have been known to Lovecraft as a boy. I seem to recall he was to be found, late in life, doing a bit of ‘urban exploring’ in the same location.

* Deep Cuts also has Three Letters to the Editor, 1909, found via the digital archive of the Providence Journal. The topic of Lovecraft’s letters was Robert E. Lee and the South in the Civil War. Also letters from the young Lovecraft on the stage play The Clansman, something which was also debated among amateur journalists some years later — and as such his opinions on it are already well known.

* I see the (new?) Providence Journal Archives search is free, but then any items found are paywalled via individual pricing or a monthly subscription. I’m uncertain if they can take payments from outside the U.S., since payment is via credit card only. $29.95 gets you a one-month ‘unlimited downloads’ pass. Sadly passes cannot be gifted to researchers, since only the cardholder is allowed to use them.

The search-box supports phrases in quote marks e.g. “Ladd Observatory”. As with many old newspapers, however, the OCR of tiny print leaves much to be desired and there are many false-positives and oversights. For instance a search for “Winslow Upton” of the Ladd, will not find some articles that have his name and can be found with “Ladd Observatory”. Still, there are fascinating free snippets available, and even these may give mythos writers a historical hook on which to hang a story…

Found in a few minutes: Winslow Upton of the Ladd Observatory discussed “life on other worlds” in public in 1907. Whipple graves were opened ‘en masse’, 1910. Lovecraft’s beloved River Seekonk was being totally poisoned by sewage outflows, 1923.

* Newly announced, the dates for the Robert E. Howard Days in June 2025.

* The German Lovecraftians have released dates for their annual get-together, 17th to 20th July 2025. In scholarly activity, note that a Literature Team Leader is now required to take forward their ongoing work… “on a volume of essays from German-speaking countries and a translation project for Lovecraft’s letters and essays”.

* In France, a two-day conference at the University of Poitiers on ‘Lovecraft and the Sciences’. 5th-6th December 2024, so sadly it’s been and gone. But here’s the programme in PDF, and I guess there may be recordings on YouTube and/or a book in due course.

* Skulls in the Stars reviews The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch. Being a “quality edition” of 22 early Bloch stories, published by Valincourt. Has plot spoilers.

* New and free at FantasyBabble (spin-off from HorrorBabble), “A Stroll through the Dreamlands: 13 stories by H.P. Lovecraft”. The reading runs 2 hours 47 minutes, and it has all the Dreamlands stories in audio (except the Randolph Carter tales).

* In early 2025 France’s prestigious comics mega-fest Angouleme will feature a Masterclass with Gou Tanabe, the acclaimed manga adapter of Lovecraft. The event is one of several that will run alongside his large one-man exhibition ‘Gou Tanabe x H.P. Lovecraft’…

The great architect of a mythology which has infused all the world’s popular culture, H.P. Lovecraft has now built a bridge between 20th century New England and 21st century Japan, transcending borders and time, enabling pulp and manga to meet and join hands. This show is an opportunity to verify, once again, how great stories are universal.

* News of another Lovecraft all-night lakeside camp-out near Mexico City. Noctambulante 2025 is a Lovecraft-themed ‘camping and cinema’ event, and this time the organisers also promise that… “Cthulhu will emerge from the depths of Lake Xochimiclo”. Campers are expected to dress in a Lovecraftian manner. Starting on the evening of 29th March 2025, and booking now.

* The well-loved vintage videogame The Thing: Remastered, apparently forthcoming in a new release with… “updated character models, textures, and animations, with the implementation of advanced 3D rendering for updated lighting and atmospheric effects.”

* Also being mooted for a polish, a 40th anniversary Re-Animator edition of the celebrated 1985 comedy-adaptation movie of Lovecraft’s Home Brew shocker “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

* Visualizing Camelot was a 350-item university gallery exhibition surveying the uses of King Arthur in popular culture. The show was developed by subject-expert curators who were able to draw on specialist American and British collections of such material. It’s been and gone but a substantial website remains online.

* And finally, the new online H.P. Lovecraft Translator…

— End-quote —

“I was arrested mainly by the great temple of the Scottish Rite Masons, whose striking architecture lifts it out of the commonplace and mundane into the realm of the cosmick and mystical. Gazing upon it, I could well believe all the vague legends connected with the Masonick order; for here surely dwelt arcana whose sources are not of this earth. I saw it first at night, when only the twin cryptick braziers beside the great bronze door lit up the grim guardian sphinxes and the huge windowless facade. Mystery dwelt there — and I departed full of vague thoughts hinging upon the obscurest of dream-memories.” — Lovecraft on his visit to Washington in 1928.

“The hall retains its pristine impressiveness; its lofty rooms forming the present home of Ionick Lodge, the Masonick branch founded by my grandfather, and of which he was the first Grand Master. It did me good to see his picture there, enshrin’d in proper state.” — Lovecraft visits his grandfather’s Masonic Lodge in 1926.

Public domain in 2025

03 Sunday Nov 2024

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We’re fast approaching the copyright release season, at the start of 2025. Authors who died in 1954, and books and magazines published in 1929. Here are some items I dug up, which may interest Tentaclii readers. Possibly there may be some I’ve missed, and if so please comment.

Writers who died in 1954:

* Edwin Baird, first editor of Weird Tales. Books included…

The City Of Purple Dreams (anon)
The Heart Of Virginia Keep
Fay
Will-O’-The Wisp

In movies, the writers for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse.

Individual unusual books of interest, from authors who died in 1954:

Verse and voice:

Aesop’s Fables Arranged For Voice.
The Poems Of Wales.
The Anthology Of Nonsense Verse. [Reed, 1925].

Potential for graphic-novel adaptations?:

Herodotus, Father Of History. [Presumably a popular biography].
Birth Of A Spitfire. [How they were made, 1941].
The Psychology & Tradition Of Colour.

Activities that don’t age:

Clog Dancing Made Easy.
Shell Collector’s Handbook.

And a couple of local items only of interest to myself, but I’ll note them anyway. Louis Mellard, whose 1920s books included the intriguingly titled Lost Romances Of The Midlands, Tramp Artist In Derbyshire, and others.

Books and other publications of note from 1929:

Some of these may already be public-domain due to the author’s death-date.

* Aleister Crowley

Moonchild
The Stratagem and Other Stories

* Frank Owen

The Wind That Tramps the World

* Maurice Reynard

The Hands of Orlac

* Sax Rhomer

Book of Fu-Manchu

* M.P. Shiel.

The Purple Cloud (revision)

* William Seabrook

The Magic Island (first-hand book dealing with voodoo zombies, though a recent Lovecraft Annual essay convincingly shows that Lovecraft had invented the modern horror zombie)

* Joseph Gaer

Burning Bush (Jewish fairy tales)

* Richard Tooker

The Day of the Brown Horde (neolithic ‘ancient man’ novel, well-known in its day)

* John Taine

The Greatest Adventure (Antarctic horror-adventure)

* Forrest Reid

Walter De La Mare; A Critical Study.

* A. A. Milne

Toad of Toad Hall (from the world of Wind in the Willows).

* Lynd Ward

Gods’ Man: a novel in woodcuts. (proto graphic-novel)

* Anthologies

I see The Great Weird Stories (Duffield, 1929), and Master Detective Stories (Clode, 1929).

Known to Lovecraft:

* Bertrand Hart

His Providence Journal “The Sideshow” columns for 1929, in which he jousted with Lovecraft and others.

* de Castro (Lovecraft revisionist)

Portrait of Ambrose Bierce (1929, actually revised by Frank Belknap Long).

* Myrta Alice Little

“Sweet Christmas Time” (published poem, 1929).

* Everett McNeil

The Shores of Adventure; or, Exploring in the New World with Jacques Cartier (1929, though some chicanery appears to have kept his later novels locked-down, when they should not be).

* John L. Balderston

Berkeley Square (1929 published play, later made into a time-travel movie greatly admired by Lovecraft).

Also note O’Brien’s The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929), which was a book admired by Lovecraft.

The 1929 run of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, and their contents. Note F.B. Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos”. I’m not looking at detectives in this brief survey, but I see Derleth’s first “Solar Pons” detective stories were written in 1929. Apparently they saw in print in the same year, along with the first tales of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade character.

In comics, Buck Rogers and Tintin first appeared in 1929. In cartoons, there’s Popeye the Sailor-man, and apparently the Silly Symphonies(?). Though trademark-trolls may still claim the names.

Finally, in 1929 Gernsback first gave the name ‘science fiction’ to a new literary format. The first science-fiction fanzine appeared, Cosmic Stories. The first continuous science-fiction comic strip appeared, an adaptation of a novel. The first spur for modern ‘sword & sorcery’ also appeared, Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (Kull, in Weird Tales). The anthology Beware After Dark! (1929) put Lovecraft’s horror “The Call of Cthulhu” between hardcovers, and the volume had wide popular distribution. The rest is history…

Some changes at Amazon

26 Saturday Oct 2024

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Some interesting findings re: using Amazon UK.

Have you been wondering where all the ‘Warehouse Bargain’ books have gone? I had mused on the possibility that POD printer Lightning Source now had a new printing plant, and so there were no ‘slightly damaged’ POD returns to be had at nice prices. But… I now discover that only by searching in the new Amazon Resale category will you find (for instance, currently) a £15 copy of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family and Family Friends, Volume 2: 1926-⁠1936, sold and shipped by Amazon in ‘acceptable’ condition. Presumably a warehouse return, after a picky purchaser noticed a slight bump or a greasy mark left by a printing-machine? And even then you have to skim through several pages of shovelware drek to find this item. (And if there are no results then it will silently present you with the normal search-results, which is annoying).

This £15 bargain doesn’t show up in the book’s regular page, even in the lower ‘New & Used’ tab. Nor does it show up in your regular ‘sorted by low to high’ search-results.

Another trick is searching Amazon Resale with one word…

HOVSCO Electric will find nothing.

HOVSCO alone will find a heavily discounted HOVSCO Electric bicycle.

But yes, obviously the old ‘Warehouse Bargains’ are there if you know where to look. They can even be shipped to your local Amazon locker. Good to know, though… I guess that by telling readers about this I may lose out on some bargains myself. Oh well, enjoy your slightly-bumped bargains.

Note also that I find that Amazon has started hiding pages-that-exist from search results. For instance, I have Travel and Communication in Tolkien’s Worlds (1996, and reissued in 2020) on my Wish-List, added a year ago. But this no longer shows in search results — not even when using the simplest form of Travel Communication Tolkien as search keywords. Yet the page for it still exists. Amazon is thus no longer comprehensive, and this problem obvious seriously diminishes Amazon’s use as a bibliographic starting-resource for scholars. The problem will also likely push second-hand book-sellers to eBay instead, when they can’t find the page to list their item on.

Sixpenny Marvels

21 Monday Oct 2024

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The Tearoom of Despair bemoans the lack of Marvels in the corner-shop…

you can’t just walk into a shop and buy a new Marvel comic book anywhere. So there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there. And they really did use to be everywhere…

Yes, I remember that well. Many small shops in the West Midlands of England had a spinner-rack of usually fairly random-but-recent American monthly imports, often visible from the window and priced for the British in pennies rather than U.S. cents. Sometimes they had a big job-lot of ship-ballast comics (cent-priced, U.S. news-stand returns?)… and then there were huge piles of American dynamite to sort through. And they were not sealed in bags for collectors to salt away unread either. Comics were later pre-bagged in the early dedicated comics-shops which emerged across the UK in the 1980s, and the buyer who wanted to peek inside was often treated as a pest. But in your corner-shops a comic was just cheap six-penny trash, and no-one assumed any lasting value. Which meant you could flip through and check out the art. Was that Incredible Hulk #122 one of the Herb Trimpe classics you had only seen in part in the British B&W Marvel reprint weekly? Or a rush-job where they used a fill-in artist? Nope, it was all Trimpe, and in colour…

I even recall encountering a huge ship-ballast hoard, age 10 in the unlikely spot of the newsagents in a tiny village of Banwell near the holiday resort of Weston-super-Mare. I guess the owner had probably got them dirt-cheap at auction in the port of Bristol or suchlike and hauled them back. The problem was, of course, that even if one could sift out a small run of one title, one lacked the pocket-money to buy them all up.

The British weekly B&W Marvel reprints, however (in which you could sometimes actually follow a story arc across multiple issues), were usually laid and layered on a newsagent’s wide horizontal counter. No spinner-racks, due to the difference in size and paper and the need to accommodate a thick stack of 40 or so. Weekly British comics sold well in those days. Often too well, as that week’s issue was often sold out by the time you arrived. Hence the joy of finding a complete story in an American issue. It wasn’t crudely cut up into three or four weekly parts, one of which you’d missed.

As Tearoom points out, it’s ironic that you can often find the cheesy spin-off Marvel merchandise, but not the actual comics. Still, it’s good that all the pre-PC classics are now easily available, albeit as garishly re-coloured and mummified reprints. For instance, £16 will now get you the Kindle ebook In The Hands Of Hydra, 440 pages of the classic 1968 Roy Thomas / Herb Trimpe Incredible Hulk. Whatever you missed and yearned for when younger, can now be had instantly, and perhaps also shared with interested young relatives. Great for getting boys to keep reading outside of school, I’d imagine. And boys do still read comics, even in an age of abundance with videogames, audiobooks, movies and TV shows galore. A robust National Literary Trust 2023 survey showed that 44% of British boys read comics for pleasure at least once a month, with a modest-but-expected 10% tail-off as they move from age 10 to 17. Sadly the huge survey doesn’t seem to have asked where these comics came from. Nor did they ask about any U.S. superhero / Japanese manga divide in reading tastes.

I would query Tearoom‘s statement that…

there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there.

Well, not physically. But if one ventures into the pirate websites, that is the very format. Covers, covers, covers, by date of arrival… and thus mixing new superhero comics, indies, kiddy-humour, and vintage reprints. No walled gardens, no locked-down reader apps. Pretty similar to the old spinner-rack at the corner store, I’d suggest. No sixpences required.

Of course, I’m not condoning piracy here, just pointing out it exists and kids can easily access it. If you have an income to spend, you should be supporting the artists and writers.

Ah, Wilderness! (1935)

21 Sunday Jul 2024

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I’ve at last been able to see the U.S. movie Ah, Wilderness!, 1935’s gentle celebration of the small-town world of America as it was in 1906. Lovecraft saw it late in life (circa Christmas 1935/36) and revelled in its lavish layers of thirty-years-ago nostalgia. Similar to a movie of today being nostalgic for 1994, or one of the 2010s being nostalgic for 1980.

saw “Ah, Wilderness”, which made me home-sick for the vanish’d world of 1906!

“… revelled in it. Yuggoth, but it made me homesick for 1906! [it] gives all sorts of typical 1906 glimpses, including an old street-car, a primitive steam automobile, &c. It was photographed in Grafton, Mass. […] where the passing years have left little visible toll.

“At times I could well believe that the past had come back, & that the last 3 decades were a bad dream. [the world it depicted] having many a value which might well have been preserved had social evolution been less violently accelerated by the war.”

I recall that Lovecraft also remarked that the family sitting room was almost a double for the one he had known as a boy. Also the hallway.

He also seems to imply that the rural newspaper office which published his astronomy articles, was in appearance similar to the office briefly seen in the movie (the young hero’s father owns the town newspaper).

the articles landed, & I also landed others with a rural weekly …. (this was the Ah, Wilderness year of ’06)

Ah, Wilderness! is very well-made and acted, with lavish costumes and scenes. Worth seeing simply for the very satisfying scene of a steam-car ‘scaring the horses’. But (unless I’m missing something, being British) it is perhaps not the all-time classic that some had claimed. Though, as the 1933 play, it does appear to have become a staple of American repertory theatre.

The film usefully gives one a better feel for Lovecraft’s formative environment and sensibilities. Many of us have been subtly trained by agitprop to casually think of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in bleak b&w Dickensian terms, all grimy urchins, grim school-masters, and grinding urban poverty. The movie is a useful corrective. As with the 1930s, the view of which has been similarly be-grimed for political purposes, most people were actually ‘getting on with getting on’, and rather enjoying the novelty of becoming middle-class.

The cynical young hero is somewhat Lovecraft-like, at least in the early scenes. The concerns of creeping socialism and chronic alcoholism, though treated lightly, are the same ones which permeated young Lovecraft’s world. The hero (Eric Linden), at first a ‘going to Yale’ stiff of a teenager, is perhaps the weakest part of the film and perhaps a little too ‘1930s movie star’ in appearance — this makes it harder for the viewer to suspend disbelief. His youngest brother is the firecracker Mickey Rooney. But the young Rooney’s usual gurning and capering is thankfully kept on a very tight leash, in what must be one of his first film appearances.

Even having seen Ah, Wilderness!, I’m still as a loss as to why the strange title was chosen. No-one gets to look at a sweeping vista and proclaim the words, unless I missed something. I would have called it “Bang goes the Fourth!”, since it’s set on the 4th July.

For another Hollywood view of 1906, this time from the post-war 1940s, I’ve found Ah, Wilderness! also inspired the glossy musical adaptation Summer Holiday (1948).

Moon maps

20 Saturday Jul 2024

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Lovecraft the astronomer and Moon-gazer would no doubt be pleased to learn that “Brown University Researchers Develop More Accurate Moon Maps”. A new…

technique is used to create detailed models of lunar terrain, outlining craters, ridges, slopes and other surface hazards. By analyzing the way light hits different surfaces of the Moon, it allows researchers to estimate the three-dimensional shape of an object or surface from composites of two-dimensional images. … advanced computer algorithms can be used to automate much of the process and significantly heighten the resolution of the models.

Some final notes on the Sully letters

18 Thursday Jul 2024

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Some final notes on Letters to Wilfred B. Talman, and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully.

Three small typos toward the end of the book, or at least that is what they appear to be: p. 484, begin = begun; p. 482, how = now; p. 478, had = hard.

Page 459. “The ancient brick building at the foot of the hill [is to go, in RISD modernisation, yet]… it will be some consolation to have the old familiar gable still in place, when one starts upwards from Market Square.” This indicates that, at least in 1936, Lovecraft’s route home from the commercial district was straight up College Hill. That would make sense if he was carrying heavy shopping and library books uphill in bags, since it was the shortest route home.

Page 460. He had been inside the cave system under “Lookout Mountain in Tennessee”. In 2020 I had a ‘picture postals’ post on the visit.

Page 460. Years ago, as a boy, he was fascinated by descriptions of Mount Rainier in the “juvenile books of Kirk Munroe”. The tale in question was serialised in Harper’s Round Table, a juvenile magazine, in summer 1896. Thus it’s not certain that Lovecraft read it in book form as Rick Dale, A Story of the Northwest Coast (1896), though he does recall “books”. Which also suggests he read more than one by the author.

Immediately after the Mount Rainier chapter in Harper’s Round Table is a long article for boys about small sail-boats, and we know the young Lovecraft was later a keen sailor on the Seekonk in such boats. I assume ‘keen’, because the Seekonk was a dangerous river and one would have to be keen to sail it alone and also land on its Twin Islands.

Later in his life his good friend Everett McNeil wrote books in much the same vein as Kirk Munroe.

Page 471. 1934. “Trips […] to certain historic of scenic spots […] leave a permanent imaginative residue which crops out again and again in dreams, waking thoughts, and literary attempts.”

Page 478. “… the giant oak with its brooding overtones of Druidic mystery. I have repeatedly dreamed of vast, night-black forests of gnarled, great-boled oaks, such as one sees in pictures of old England”.

Page 478. Lovecraft on swans. He associates the Northern lore of water ‘nixies’ with them.

Page 484. “I welcome any process which permits of duplicate or multiple creation [in works of art and sculpture].”

Page 486, 485. “Back to 1910″ […] I was a Shakespearean enthusiast and more of a theatregoer than I am now”.

The ‘Hyperborea’ tales by Clark Ashton Smith

15 Monday Jul 2024

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New on Archive.org, a collection of the strongly Lovecraft-influenced ‘Hyperborea’ tales by Clark Ashton Smith. This has the same cover as the early 1970s 95-cent U.S. Ballantine paperback, but this new upload is probably to be avoided. Because I immediately randomly spotted a typo at the start of a story: the German “die” for “the”.

Better, then, to look for these Lovecraft-influenced cycle of tales among the free texts kindly placed online by Will Murray and made from good corrected texts. These are freely available as HTML pages. Although one has to already know the list of Hyperborean titles and then hunt for them among what is an A-Z list.

So, to save people some time, here is my quick linked contents-list. The links lead to the HTML-format stories which make up the Murray-edited The Book of Hyperborea (Necronomicon Press, 1996). The listing below is in the same order as the book’s contents…

Introduction to ‘The Book of Hyperborea’, by Will Murray *

The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

The Muse of Hyperborea [Fragment, not linked in the A-Z, but it is online] *

The Door to Saturn

The Testament of Athammaus

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan

Ubbo-Sathla

The Ice-Demon

The White Sybil

The House of Haon-Dor (Fragment) *

The Coming of the White Worm

The Seven Geases

Lament for Vixeela [Poem, not linked in the A-Z, but it is online] *

The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles

[The Coming of the White Worm (Abridged)] *

Postscript by Will Murray *

Altogether, a relatively short collection by modern triple-decker doorstop standards, at around 70,000 words in total including introduction and postscript.

Audiobook? Yes. The tales above can now be found as a free HorrorBabble audiobook playlist The Hyperborean Cycle on YouTube. Around seven hours. This playlist lacks only the above-starred (*) fragments, poem, and introduction / postscript.

Note that the early 1970s Ballantine book (mentioned at the start of this post) also had…

* Hyperborea (simple map).

* About Hyperborea and Clark Ashton Smith: Behind the North Wind (essay by Lin Carter).

[the core stories, then to finish]

* The Abominations of Yondo (story)
* The Desolation of Soom (fragment)
* The Passing of Aphrodite (fragment)
* The Memnons of the Night (fragment)

Of these additional four however, Carter was unsure if they belonged… “I have the feeling that the short tales which follow are the surviving fragments of yet another such cycle: one which was abandoned, or left undeveloped, for some reason we can only conjecture. I may be wrong in this assumption.”

* Notes on the Commoriom Myth-Cycle (essay by Lin Carter) — I. The Genesis of the Cycle, II. The Sequence of the Hyperborean Stories, III. The Geography of the Cycle.

For further tales by others see A Hyperborean Glossary by Laurence J. Cornford, which is an A-Z and its front page lists the additional sources — tales ‘finished’ later by Lin Carter but apparently based on work or notes by CAS (?), plus various Hyperborea related/set tales by others. Many of these appear to be collected in Robert M. Price’s Book of Eibon along with what looks like an expanded map.

More recently there was also a substantial 2013 anthology, containing the work of some notable modern writers, titled Deepest, Darkest Eden, The New Tales of Hyperborea. I see this now has an affordable Kindle ebook on Amazon.

More notes on the Sully letters

12 Friday Jul 2024

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More notes on the Sully letters, letters from Lovecraft which are to be found in Letters to Wilfred B. Talman, and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully.

The notes open in November 1933.

Page 327. “… decadence is manifest in one form or another over nearly all the Western World [… yet] It is not too late to hope that revivals of spirit may yet take place here and there — each in accordance with the particular national temper of the group concerned. I have my eye on Sir Oswald Mosley & the element of British fascists.”

Page 330. “… remember that to 1908’s crop of intellectuals softness is the supreme vice”.

Pages 331-32. A long and important explication of Lovecraft’s idea of time, and of his techniques of “time-defying” mental time-travel.

Page 330. [In New York City of 1933] “I feel like an explorer among a queer [primitive tribe …] Some of Loveman’s group — persons interested in the theatre & the dance — impress me more in this way than do even Wandrei’s literary-artistic coterie.”

Page 341. Lovecraft had noticed a… “whole cycle of comment having grown up around the alleged denizen of Loch Ness” in Scotland.

Page 343. April 1934. “New England has been through the worst winter within the memory of living man […] which shattered all records since the establishment of the weather bureau.” Page 403. “… the wasting of the greater part of the year [living] in bleak barrenness & shivers seems doubly criminal as one grows old”.

Page 367. “The real raison d’être of [“weird art”] is to give one a temporary illusion of emancipation from the galling & intolerable tyranny of time, space, change, & natural law. If we can give ourselves even for a brief moment the illusory sensation that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been — or could be — suspended or defeated, we acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion. Indeed, religion itself is merely a pompous formalisation of fantastic art. Its disadvantage is that it demands an intellectual belief in the impossible, which fantastic art does not.”

Page 377. At the newly opened Poe house [1842-44] in Philadelphia… “I saw copies of nearly all the magazines containing the first publication of various tales and poems” by E.A. Poe.

Page 379. Mentions that his young friend Barlow has a new 5″ x 7″ camera, and with it had made portraits of Lovecraft in Florida. Barlow also anticipated becoming an expert on trick photography, multi-exposure pictures etc, to “create weird synthetic monsters & landscapes”.

Page 384. A note says that Barlow’s Caneviniana was cut in stencil [duplicator] form but not printed, and was later circulated “through FAPA in the early 1940s”. So, do copies thus exist somewhere today? But possibly (my guess) the FAPA release was not the planned edition of Whitehead’s letters of the same name, but rather just Barlow’s Whitehead bibliography and some biographical notes?

Page 385. When in Nantucket, Lovecraft stayed at The Overlook, which was ‘Veranda House’ until 1930.

The view from the Overlook.

Page 393. “We must save all that we can, lest we find ourselves adrift in an alien world with no memories or guideposts or points of reference […] Hence the natural function and social value of the antiquarian & cherisher of elder things. To them we owe much of our sense of comfortable continuity & appropriate placement.”

Page 395-96. “… the architectural modernists who so painfully ‘strive to express our current machine civilisation’ by means of absently ugly concoctions of rootless steel and glass construction. These fellows think they are representing the present […] but if they would stop to think they would realise that Ictinus [co-designer of the Parthenon] and Wren [1632-1723, London] achieved their effects not by grimly resolving to ‘express their periods’, but merely by creating such forms as appealed to them, without any thought of time or place. Moreover, Ictinus and Wren did not exclude elements from the past. Instead they built upon and modified the main streams of art which they inherited. Hence to my mind all these anti-traditional radicals are up a blind alley. Their products are not art, because they come from theory instead of from feeling. And they do not represent this age, because they do not embody those attributes of the European main stream which this age has inherited.”

Page 405. “My own opinion is that an obviously sterile age like the present ought not to try to create anything new. Conditions are not favourable for the expression of the momentary environment — the environment has nothing crystallised enough or certain enough to be expressible.”

Page 407. Lovecraft took the night train to Quebec, both there and back, and thus was not able to appreciate the scenery from the train windows.

Page 419. In Newport in summer 1935 he visited the home of the philosopher Berkeley, then open to the public. And he also went… “down the 40 steps [and] while down on the rocks there I slipped up & got rather soaked in looking for a sea-cave”. Lovecraft seeking a sea-cave below Newport’s cliffs… a point on which Mythos writers may wish to hang a plot or RPG adventure?

Page 429. August 1935. “Every aptitude which I wish I had, I lack. Everything which I wish I could to formulate and express, I have failed to formulate and express. Everything which I value, I have either lost or am likely to lose. Within a decade, unless I can find some job paying at least $10 per week, I shall have to take the cyanide route through inability to keep around me the books, pictures, furniture, and other familiar objects which constitute my only remaining reason for keeping alive. And so far as solitude is concerned, I probably capture all medals. […] even among my correspondents there are fewer and fewer who coincide with me. […] The newer generation has grown away from me […] in everything — philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and interpretation of the sciences — [and] I find myself more and more alone on an island, with an atmosphere almost of hostility gathering around me. With youth and all the possibilities of glamour and adventurous expectancy, departed — leaving me stranded, with nothing to look forward to.”

Page 439. September 1935. On visiting Wilbraham (“Dunwich Horror” and Mrs Miniter country) one last time to scatter the ashes of Miniter’s mother… “The mountain scenery — with endless outspread miles of purple hills beyond hills, and glimpses of distant villages with white steeples piercing the autumn-touched greenery, is ineffably fascinating and imagination stirring.” New England and Mass. in the 1920s and 30s were far less forest-blanketed than today, and the views would likely have been more open.

Wilbraham’s hills, possibly the 1960s or 70s?

Page 441. December 1935. “The autumn in New England has been phenomenally warm” this year. In October he visited Yale and among others sights he enjoyed the Marsh and Farnam botanic gardens. These are not however vast steampunk Victorian ironwork and steam-heat glass-houses, but rather two low and ordinary greenhouses set in outdoor landscaped botanical gardens.

Page 453. Lovecraft outlines his plans to hoax his friend and geologist Morton, then curator at the Paterson Museum. He hopes to send a “millennially palaeogaean” rock sculpture by Clark Ashton Smith, in the hope of causing some “perplexed head-scratching” about its possible origin in a “pre-human school” of art.

Page 453. He recalls ‘Monk’, a boyhood compatriot and schoolyard mucker… “a huge youth from a distant and seedy region who boasted 17 years as opposed to our 11 or 12, & whose voice had changed. […] I can still see ‘Monk’ McCurdy as he lorded it over his chronological inferiors (but scholastic equals) & over-awed them with his gorilla-like physiognomy.” A little later on page 454 he recalls that the ‘Monk’ swore “resounding oaths”. Sounds like a distant model for Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror”?