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Tentaclii

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

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Picture postals

Greeks in Boston

27 Friday Jan 2023

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This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, more from Boston. H.P. Lovecraft once recalled the time when he was a lad who was becoming interested in the wider world…

As soon as possible I procured an illustrated edition of Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, and gave all my time to the reading of the text, in which the true spirit of Hellenism [the Ancient Greek world] is delightfully preserved, and to the contemplation of the pictures, splendid designs, and half-tones of the standard classical statues and paintings of classical subjects. Before long I was fairly familiar with the principal Grecian myths, and had become a constant visitor at the classical art museums of Providence and Boston. I commenced a collection of small plaster casts of the Greek sculptural masterpieces, and learned the Greek alphabet and the rudiments of the Latin language.

The ‘old’ Boston Museum.

For Boston this meant the Museum of Fine Arts building on Copley Square, demolished in 1909. It was most likely best known by him in his middle-childhood circa 1898-1902 (age 8-12).

Some of the interior photographs currently available make the displays look extraordinarily dull, especially the painting galleries. What then was the attraction for the lad? Well, we know from the above memoir that the young Lovecraft once had an intense passion for classical sculpture and he was often seen haunting the sculpture hall in his own city. His city’s Museum had an entrance hall and exhibit of Greek sculptures, something I’ve posted about here before. As a boy he was fervent to see this when it opened as…

a recently opened exhibit of Greek antiquities at the Rhode Island School of Design

… and thus he pestered his family until he was taken there in 1897.

Therefore the next logical step for the family would be to take him to what is now known to archivists as the “old museum” in Boston, the pre-1909 Museum of Fine Arts.

before long I was fairly familiar with the principal Grecian myths and had become a constant visitor at the classical art museums of Providence and Boston

The attraction there would have been what was obviously a large and very fine collection of sculpture from Greece. He might have seen it from perhaps circa 1898 and onwards. On my assumption that the local 1897 visit in Providence came first, and then the trip(s) to Boston later.

Here then is a glimpse of what the young Lovecraft would have seen in the museum at Boston…

Entrance doors.

Main sculpture hall.

He must have been rapturous with all this, as he then had an “infatuation with the classical world” as S.T. Joshi puts it. This later fed into the setting though not the sentiment for his breakthrough poem “The City” (1919). Of which I have an annotated version from 2019.

This same Museum had several galleries of sculpture from Ancient Egypt.

Quite possibly Lovecraft also later encountered old favourites in the new post-1909 museum building at Boston, which opened in 1909 as the old one came tumbling down. However, on probable re-visits circa 1919, his sense of exhilaration would not have been the same. Evidently some of the Puritan darkness of New England had seeped into his views by 1918, as seen when he remarked in his essay The Literature of Rome…

The Hellenes [Greeks], with their strange beauty-worship and defective moral ideas, are to be admired and pitied at once, as luminous but remote phantoms.

More cheerfully, he would in later years have been looking out for the work of his own ancestor in the Museum…

Samuel Casey, Jun. — my great-great-great-granduncle — was a silversmith of such art and skill that pieces of his work are in both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

I have a counterfeiter as a great-great-grand-uncle about whom I’ll tell you some time. He was also a silversmith — with pieces surviving in the Metropolitan Museum of N. Y., the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, & elsewhere.

Boston and Boylston St.

20 Friday Jan 2023

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This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, more Boston pictures. Rectified, cleaned and toned.

Firstly another contender for the Boston subway which is depicted toward the end of the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

This is the subway inbound entrance that sat beside the Boston Public Library, seen here in 1915. Suitably gothic and Lovecraftian, more so than the one seen last week. Lovecraft almost certainly knew this Library entrance after 1919.

Then there’s his “Pickman’s Model” (1926), in which the artist depicts a scene in the Boston subway and names the station…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

Here is a picture of the subway station itself. It may have had two platforms, one for the subway…

And another where the Elevated train came down and in, to meet the subway at a wooden platform…

Elevated -to- subway platform.

So take your pick as to which one the “vile things” were emerging from and into. But the older wooden-slats one feels the more likely. Note the news-stand with magazines, albeit some 11 years before Lovecraft was (probably) sitting there and imagining ghouls emerging from the trackway.

Where They lurk…

In Boston

13 Friday Jan 2023

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Friday the 13th, oh no! What better day to dive down into… the Subways of Madness! Many will recall the passage in Lovecraft’s story “Pickman’s Model” (1926)…

There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.

In May 1923 he described his own experience of “things dark and subterranean” in the Boston Subway, writing to Galpin in a letter…

[After a Boston Hub Club dinner I] hit the trail south [through the city]. Instead of rattling to the South Station on the elevated, I chose the subway, (I am exceedingly fond of all things dark and subterranean, and miss the rides up to 96th!) taking a train to Washington-Summer and there transferring to a S.S. train. [And thence to Providence].

Boston subway.

This shows that his usual Providence-to-Boston run, and back, would have taken him into Boston’s South Station, a main above-ground station for the city. An earlier letter confirms this was also the case in 1920…

“At Boston, I bade farewell to the Hubites, refusing overnight invitations & hastening to the South Station. I trod my native heath at 1:30 a.m. I reached home half an hour later”

South Station, Boston, with Elevated train and Elevated platform

This above-ground station also appears in “Pickman’s Model”…

We changed to the elevated [railway] at the South Station, and at about twelve o’clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf.

South Station Elevated platform, 1921.

News-stand window at South Station Elevated platform. Probably carried Weird Tales, in its day.

The “steps at Battery Street” elevated platform, Boston. These feature in “Pickman’s Model”.

“I didn’t keep track of the cross streets, and can’t tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn’t Greenough Lane.” [to reach Pickman’s studio].

Greenough Lane, Boston.

So South Station itself, as well as the Elevated and the Boston Subway, is a setting. While the exterior of South Station is nothing spooky, the interior had a definite Lovecrafty flavour.

Later it appears in “At The Mountains of Madness” via the subway station in its lower depths. When the shoggoth-crazed Danforth recites the stations of Boston-Cambridge underground subway line to try to keep some sliver of sanity…

South Station Under–Washington Under–Park Street Under–

The tentacular tracks at ‘Park Street Under’.

The Boston subway (for there was no Providence subway, and HPL did not yet know New York City) also appears in the dreamlike prose-poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920), in which a column of people…

filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.

Entrance to South Street Under subway station, Boston.

Old Houses, Clinton Street

06 Friday Jan 2023

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Photo of 101-103 Clinton Street, New York City, 1908. Straw hats, ice-cream, cigars. Roadworks ongoing.

And a sketch of “Old Houses, Clinton Street”, New York City. Again looking very typical of parts of the street on which Lovecraft lived, when in the city, and also the shops around the corner. Although here the date is 20 years earlier in 1906. With thanks to the Met Museum.


Some 20 years later, the street had gone downhill when Lovecraft was at 169 Clinton St…

The sounds in the hall! The faces glimpsed on the stairs! The mice in the partitions! The fleeting touches of intangible horror from spheres and cycles outside time. … And what scraps of old papers with Arabic lettering did one find about the house! Sometimes, going out at sunset, I would vow to myself that gold minarets glistened against the flaming skyline where the church-towers were! … It was a queer enough setting, and one which no person of my acquaintance can yet parallel … The key­note of the whole setting — house, neighbourhood, and shop, was that of loathsome and insidious decay; masked just enough by the reliques of former splendour and beauty to add terror and mystery and the fascination of crawling motion to a deadness and dinginess otherwise static and prosaic. I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing — a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, 26th March 1927.

NYC 1933

16 Friday Dec 2022

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This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, another hazy New York City skyline from the 1930s. In this case an early spring 1933 view from Hotel Bossert, by Samuel H. Gottscho. The original negative scan is at the Library of Congress. I’ve here flipped it so the view is correct, cleaned some gunge and colourised.

This is similar to the first view of New York City ‘lit up at evening’ which Lovecraft had from 110 Columbia Heights, near the Brooklyn Bridge. Hotel Bossert was just a short way south of that location. It shows more or less the same view as Lovecraft saw, albeit a little south, not lit up in the evening twilight, and a decade or so later (perhaps a new skyscraper or two).

On the views and relevant addresses see my earlier post on the view from Columbia Heights. I’m still hoping to find a similar ‘early evening + lights coming up’ view from the 1920s or 30s.

A dip in the Reservoir

10 Saturday Dec 2022

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My thanks to Horace, who has left a link in the Tentaclii comments. His link leads to a 2021 YouTube upload of “Providence, R.I. in the 1910s and Early 1920s”, a compilation made by the Rhode Island Historical Society. Here are my notes on it…

[09:12] Good to see there was ginger-ale in Providence!

[static 11:36, static close-up 12:09, moving 21:04] Frontage of Keith’s Vaudeville, a known haunt of the young Lovecraft (then “Keith’s Continuous Vaudeville”, circa 1900). Not a great angle, but the ‘moving people’ third instance adds something. It was evidently a far busier street than static postcards might imply.

[16:43] It’s possible we see Lovecraft’s High School, but very dark and brief? Looks similar.

[17:55, 18:13] The plaza in front of the Post Office has a couple of very distant lookalikes, who vaguely evoke Lovecraft’s walk downtown for stamps and parcels. It’s winter (leaves are off the trees, heavy overcoats on) but it’s also mid-day and very sunny. So it’s not impossible he would have ventured out to the Post Office. So far as I know he had no other more local Post Office option, on or near College Hill. Though there were collection boxes for letters.

[20:49] Weybosset Street. As usual the view is too far down into the commercial centre to see the “Uncle Eddy” bookstore. That store is further up and behind the cameraman.

[20:59] We do see the Crown Hotel though, on Weybosset St. Sonia stayed there when she first came to the city, and she treated Lovecraft to a sumptuous dinner at the Crown in September 1921. So it’s only a few years distant from that moment, given that the footage is perhaps from about 1919/1920 or so.

[22:27] The Hope St. Reservoir, and full of water (it was drained and decommissioned circa 1927-28). Possibly the most interesting bit of the video, as it shows the reservoir that rose opposite Lovecraft’s old High School and Barnes Street (not that he was living there until 1926). Three quick views across the reservoir lip are shown. One with what looks like the State House dome in the distance, but it seems too close… and thus could well be a church with the same type of dome.

This is as good as restoration gets for these three views, with the current state of AI…

These would likely have been streets Lovecraft knew, both from his High School days, and later when living at Barnes Street. Here we can see a bird’s eye view. At Barnes Lovecraft lived just off to the left of the picture, a touch further along Barnes Street.

Through the Hell Gate

09 Friday Dec 2022

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It was through a ‘Hell Gate’, appropriately enough, that H.P. Lovecraft entered New York City for the first time. The Hell Gate. In Letters to Family (p. 420), a September 1925 letter explains that…

[Queens Plaza] was the very first spot on Long Island that I ever saw; being at the portal of the great Hell Gate railway bridge, over which rolled my train on my initial metropolitan advent of April 1922.

Here are two pictures. One indicates and evokes the approach to this bridge, while the other looks down and off to the side of it.

The view has Hell Gate bridge on the far right, and the Queensboro Bridge on the left. The river is out of sight, down below both. Typically, Lovecraft tells his aunt that he recalls that in 1922 he had immediately noted from the train window “a huddle of nondescript wooden houses” down below, and filed them away for some future moment of antiquarian investigation. These later proved to be the “old time Astoria”. So his antiquarian interest in New York City had begun even before he stepped off the train in 1922.

The bridge is also known as Hells Bridge or Hell’s Bridge, Hell Gate Bridge, or the Hellbridge.

Lovecraft’s 1926 letter continues, describing a sight just seen on the same route…

I noticed en route [to Queens Plaza, across the Hell Gate in September 1926] a very attractive sight — the misty skyline of New York all grey and fairy-like as on the first occasion of my seeing it, three and a half years ago. The Queensboro Bridge loomed up deliciously in the middle-distance […] & the whole was glorified by slanting shafts of sunlight […] which dropt from an opening cloud to the vaporous regions of earth.

We actually have a fine mid-1930s National Archives public-domain picture of almost this very view… from the foot of the Hell Gate pilings, looking through the Queensboro Bridge at the grey towers of New York City in the distance beyond. I’ve here cleaned and toned it.

Commonplace #10: ‘Dream of flying over city’

02 Friday Dec 2022

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Here are two U.S. Army Corps of Engineer record-pictures, part of a navigation improvement survey of the Seekonk in Providence. These pictures have inadvertently recorded two of Lovecraft’s places, albeit from a bird’s eye view. I’ve here colorised the pictures.

The first is from 1982 with College Hill on the right edge of the picture. It records the wooded bluff above York Pond, part of the long shoreline Blackstone Park. The bluff was where Lovecraft liked to sit in summer and write letters.

The boat-house can just about be seen. Around here were the sylvan faun-haunted woodland rides of his childhood, that ran down to the river’s edge. Here is a Whitman Bailey pen-sketch of one such, from 1916.

At the present moment I am seated on a wooded bluff above the shining river which my earliest gaze knew and loved. This part of my boyhood world is unchanged because it is a part of the local park system — may the gods be thanked for keeping inviolate the scenes which my infant imagination peopled with fauns and satyrs and dryads!

On a high wooded bluff above a broad river a mile west of my house — a spot unchanged since I haunted it in infancy.

Since I’ve long ago established that the bluff on one side of York Pond was heavily graded in the building of a better road, this can only leave the other side as being the untouched relic of his childhood years. In the 1930s it was likely not so heavily wooded as it was fifty years later in the 1980s, and a c. 1910 postcard and some 1930s WPA road-building pictures at the boathouse seem to confirm this.

The second U.S. Army record-picture is a few years later in 1986. It zooms into the first, and swings around a bit, to record the Twin Islands and the bridge above them…

I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft in a letter to Rimel, April 1934.

The railway bridge seen here was not there when Lovecraft was rowing on the Seekonk. As, according to a blurb in the press, the bridge was only built in 1908 when Lovecraft was 18…

railroad drawbridge connecting the East Side of Providence to East Providence across the Seekonk River … built in 1908 to carry the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad line.

Interestingly, Lovecraft may have crossed the bridge as a passenger, since…

Until 1938, the bridge and tunnel were used regularly by passenger trains travelling from Providence to destinations including Bristol, Rhode Island and Fall River, Massachusetts.

Today the defunct bridge is scheduled to be removed, with demolition pencilled in for 2026-2027.

Below is another picture in which we look back the other way, at an earlier time. Perhaps the time of Lovecraft’s young childhood. Here one can see the Twin Islands on which the teenage Lovecraft would land, and one gets a better impression of the wide sweep of the Seekonk. The sweep of the water would have felt even wider from a low row-boat. In his landings in the sticky mud of the islands, amid the wide waters, there may well be the genesis of the later tale “Dagon” — and thus of the Mythos.

A side view of College St.

25 Friday Nov 2022

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A side view of College St. Seen as part of a rare wide view of the Providence Athenaeum building, which offers an evocative side-glimpse of a spot half-way up the College Street Lovecraft knew so well. The perhaps c. 1900 card is here newly rectified, shadow-lifted and re-colourised.

Here we see the spot marked on the 1918 Plat Book map, with Lovecraft’s last home as the other highlighted spot.

A 1958 record-picture made on a glass plate shows much more detail, though is of course more than two decades after Lovecraft’s time and there’s been some overgrowth of the view. Still, one can see the John Hay Library behind the trees. Again, newly colorised.

Lovecraftian Mythos writers might wish to note the mysterious side-tunnel that this large image reveals…

The Athenaeum claims a connection with Poe dating to 1848, when he “is said” to have met many times with Mrs. Whitman in such alcoves and nooks as the library could provide. Lovecraft adds that Poe “wrote his name at the bottom of one of his unsigned poems in a magazine” there. Thus Lovecraft sometimes included it on his whistle-stop tour of Providence for visitors, though I’m uncertain if that would have involved entrance and browsing or just exterior architectural appreciation. I know of nothing to suggest Lovecraft ever had a subscription or ticket to this private library, though some in the circle of his aunts did (e.g. the lady who catalogued Lovecraft’s library at his death). He used the city’s main Public Library all his life, for free, and also had a stacks card there. Though, late in his life, a letter reveals that he went to The Athenaeum to consult some scarce books on the history of the defunct Nantucket whaling industry.

Views of Providence

18 Friday Nov 2022

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This week in ‘Picture Postals’, part of The Beth Murray collection of Providence photographs. My thanks to the Providence Public Library, which has large scans of the screened postcard version of these Providence postcards, postcards once issued as sets by the city’s Book Shop. I’ve selected the views and places more relevant to Lovecraft.

Benefit Street, Providence.

Thomas Street, Providence. Appears in “The Call of Cthulhu”.

The view from the garden of the Shakespeare’s Head.

“John Carter … His old shop & office, the Sign of Shakespeare’s Head, in Gaol-Lane” (Lovecraft, speaking of Providence)

The John Carter house on Benefit Street.

Along the River Seekonk, Providence. On the way to one of Lovecraft’s favourite places, the wooded bluff above York Pond. The spot is around the corner in the distance. The young Lovecraft used to row on this river, most likely hiring a boat from the boat-house rather than Red Bridge, and would land on the Twin Islands in the river’s stream.

George Street, Providence. City centre and the then-new Industrial Trust building in the distance.

Looking up College Hill toward’s Lovecraft’s last home. The olde left side swept away for new RSID buildings, though somewhat sympathetically done with an old courtyard archway retained.

The Handicraft Club half-way up College Hill. Lovecraft’s aunt lived here for a while.

Another view of the Handicraft Club half-way up College Hill.

One of the entrances to the covered shopping Arcade, Providence. A favourite childhood haunt of the young Lovecraft.

View across to the new State House.

Another State House view.

Street market in the Italian quarter, Federal Hill. Setting of the late story “The Haunter of the Dark”.

I haven’t tried to foist colourising on them, since most of them are too contrasty (which doesn’t take colour well). There are more pictures to be found at the Library’s website and even more if you root around and hang around on eBay. Usually noted there as a “Book Shop” card…

I’ve found that Murray (1913-?) also issued a 34-page photobook for Lovecraft’s favourite local day-tip location, This is Newport: A book of photographs (1948).

Therefore she was also photographing in the mid-late 1940s. Interestingly she also issued the presumably similar title This is Providence: Photographs (1947). These dates suggest the dates of her pictures may well be earlier than the circa 1960 dates of the Book Shop’s postcard-set. We may be looking at Providence circa the mid 1940s, less than a decade after Lovecraft died. This earlier date would explain the somewhat rough ‘immediate post-war’ feel re: the b&w quality of the prints. At that time she would have been limited in materials and camera, and was likely printing them up for cheap reproduction in her books rather than as big art-prints.

There is no trace of either of her books on Archive.org. It’s possible there may be better quality / more pictures in the books, and possibly even some biography. There appears to be no institutional archive with her negatives, from which better prints might now be made.

Notes on ‘Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei’, part four

11 Friday Nov 2022

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The final part of my notes on Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei.

We open in late summer 1935, among the letters sent to Petaja.


Various pages. Both 1935 and 1936 appear to have had cold and late spring-times, which did not help to bolster Lovecraft’s failing health.

p. 450. Lovecraft sees a rare “lunar rainbow” in Florida, cast by the full moon, and describes it as “faint but perfect”.

p. 451. He recalls that he had seen Indians (i.e. native Americans) once “in their native habitat” in 1931. These were Seminoles “who still maintain their tribal organisation”. They had a large camp at Musa Isle in the Florida everglades, and did their best to maintain traditional dress and customs under tribal leadership. The forthcoming book Lovecraft in Florida will likely have more details on such visits.

p. 458. Shows evidence that he is aware of the gay movement in Germany, by October 1935. In a brief discussion of Burton’s 1885 musings on a geographical “Sodatic Zone”, he notes… “at present Germany is said to suffer from such perverted attitudes”. Although by that time Lovecraft was increasingly out-of-date re: the Nazi Party under Hitler (who had seized control of the Party in June 1934).

p. 463. He did not actually own a copy of The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921), and it appears he never had… “I wish I could get hold of it, but it is infernally hard to find”. p. 466 has him stating “I’d give a lot to own a copy”.

p. 468. He would also like to have read the great Finnish epic The Kalevala.. “which I have for years been meaning to read”. Also p. 483, “my long-standing wish to read the Kalevala“.

p. 469. “Choreography [i.e. the dance] is an art I can appreciate even less than music”.

p. 474. Reports that he undertook a “titanic file cleaning” over many days in June 1936, and as a result he has “thrown away a couple of tons of junk”. And among it probably papers and letters that today would fetch substantial sums, and would be of much interest to scholars.

p. 486. Following the letters, a reprint of an article on Howard Wandrei. Wandrei tells the interviewers that he once owned a complete run of the pre-Weird Tales magazine The Black Cat, and Wandrei retails the story that it folded (shortly before Weird Tales appeared on the stands) because it ran one especially gruesome story involving pain experiments on cats and dogs, then a man. The magazine’s circulation vanished as a result, apparently, and it folded. However, the story of that title was actually in The Black Mask in early 1924, and cannot be found in the old The Black Cat. I suspect that a crackly telephone interview allowed the confusion of the two titles. The Black Mask (est. 1920) may well have dipped in circulation as a result, but appears to have run on until July 1951.

p. 488. A dealer-listing of letters from Lovecraft to Wandrei is given. These letters either no longer exist, or else are salted away in a private collection. But the listing does quote a few lines here and there. A 7th November 1935 postcard was sent by Lovecraft from the rooms above the “Julius” bar in New York City, where Lovecraft was staying. Later a long-time and famous gay bar, although its 1935 status is unknown other than it was then the “Julius” bar.

‘Julius’ bar, 155 West 10th St., now No. 159.

Lovecraft assures the recipient of the card that he is “NOT patronising the barroom beneath” his room, although Donald Wandrei is. He had earlier noted Wandrei was living above a “well-known ‘bohemian’ restaurant” in one letter, but that was presumably before his actual arrival. On arrival, and seeing the place, he is obviously more inclined to call it simply a “barroom”. He spent two weeks living there with Howard Wandrei. The address was 155 West 10th St., now numbered as 159 and it has since become one of the most famous bars in gay history.

Lovecraft on a Comet

04 Friday Nov 2022

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A post title like ‘Lovecraft on a Comet’ might seem a nice co-incidence for Bonfire/Fireworks Night. Though here the Comet in question is a train, and not a blazing hunk of ice hurtling through the cosmos.

Many will recall that Lovecraft had a lifelong love of railway trains. This was not only confined to his youth, when he appears to have read the entire run of Railroad man’s Magazine, made scale-model tracks in the old carriage-house, then taken solo journeys in middle-childhood, and even published his own The Railroad Review ‘zine for family and friends (1901, one issue known) — complete with long humorous verse, perhaps his first really successful original narrative for an audience.

Some of his most enjoyable travels were had by train carriage and railway station, especially when fine landscape views were streaming past his window. Sometimes, an alternative view of a place gave him a completely different and more favourable impression, as when an unfamiliar rail route once took him into his friend Morton’s mundane New Jersey town. He also enjoyed the arrivals and departures, such as riding into New York City above the sidewalks on the famous ‘Elevated’, or departing the city for his honeymoon from the mighty gothic/classical Pennsylvania Station.

But what of Providence? We have a few wide pictures of the city station frontage, but what about behind the frontage in the last years of the great Age of Steam? I’ve found this vintage 1932 picture which gives a feel for the sort of mighty steam trains to be found there, on which Lovecraft would have departed and entered his city. Here the train is about to head westward and so presumably reach New York City. With thanks to the Providence Public Library. I’ve here colourised their scan of the picture.

[the pronunciation of ‘Cthulhu’] “is more like the sound a man makes when he tries to imitate a steam-whistle…” (Lovecraft).

Late in his life Lovecraft also managed to get aboard a new Providence ‘super-train’ for a guided tour, when the train first arrived in his city. This was a new super-streamlined tubular-aluminium and air-conditioned diesel train named The Comet…

Early artist’s impression of what the new train might look like.

The service in operation.

Sadly I can’t re-find Lovecraft’s account of the tour he was given, but I recall it filled at least a long paragraph or so. It’s in the published Letters somewhere, probably given to one of his younger correspondents. April/May 1935 appears to be the target date, judging by press photos and news coverage at that time. But I can find nothing in the Bloch or Rimel letters.

Apparently the design was a one-off and it was the only train ever designed by Zeppelin in Germany. Some in the press billed it as a “rail-Zeppelin”. In those pre-war days the Germans and Americans could work on such joint projects. Lovecraft no doubt approved of the Teutonic styling, with the train-ends rather resembling Wagnerian helmets. The Comet went into service in June 1935 on the Providence to Boston (South Station) run, making the run in 44 minutes including a stop at Back Bay in Boston. The train was double-ended for a quick turnaround at its destinations. The livery was “blue, silver, and white”, and was very plush inside for its 160 passengers. It was a great success, and proved itself totally reliable during the following 1935/36 New England winter.

Such a ‘new’ train must have seemed a remarkable change from the grimy and older steam-trains Lovecraft was used to, and quite a harbinger of the future. Steam-trains may have their charms. You could slide down the carriage windows for fresh air, for one, and passengers were not sealed in a “pre-paid suffocation chamber” (as Lovecraft once termed air-sealed public-transport). But they were also heavy and noisy, and one might encounter soots and smoke as one boarded.

I don’t know if he ever actually travelled to Boston on The Comet. He preferred a more leisurely landscape view from his train windows, and even a one-way ticket may have been deemed an expensive extravagance. He did visit the Boston area to see Cole and his family, from 3rd-5th May 1935, as he notes for several correspondents (e.g. Rimel letters, p. 273), and did so again some time later. But he would surely have mentioned it to them if he had ridden on the new Comet to reach Boston.

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