In the last weeks of summer, a trip to the beach with Lovecraft.

The old coastal town of Newport was one of H.P Lovecraft’s favourite places, and the place hosted him for one of the last local trips ever made in his life. It was near to Providence, but was still somewhat costly to reach in summer. It became more affordable to him during the Great Depression, and we know from the Cole letters that he often took the cheap and juddering older boat “Sagamore” from the Providence waterfront to Newport, sometimes in the company of cattle on the lower deck (Galpin letters, p. 62). Lovecraft tells us she had been “re-modelled” for the Providence – Newport – Block Island run which she started in 1928. On the lower and presumably widened decks of this formerly sleek little boat Lovecraft encountered “freight and cattle”. We know it was juddering because Lovecraft tells us he could not write on board, due to the vibration.

In the depths of the Great Depression this offered a fare as low as 15-cents for a day’s round-trip, and on one occasion he went for three days in a row. This was the route of the “Newport boat” which features in the famous “The Call of Cthulhu”. This could have been, at the time of “Cthulhu”, the “New Shoreham” passenger boat. As seen below, along with its Providence dockside.

The “Newport boat” landing and departure point, Providence.

Though in 1932 he mentioned to Cole that the upmarket 75-cent “Mount Hope” boat was competing with the far cheaper “Sagamore” (the cattle-carrying boat). With at least one guest, for instance Helen Sully in July 1933, he and his guest would take the better of the two Newport boats. So the Sully trip was very likely on the “Mount Hope”, which was warmer. The cheaper boat came back later and was thus colder on the way back, and there was also the risk of encountering cattle on deck. As can be seen here, the “Mount Hope” was a far more substantial passenger proposition than the small “Sagamore”…

Possibly there were even three services at the time of “Cthulhu”, since the “Mount Hope” seems to have made the run as early as the mid 1900s and was still being photographed on the same run in 1934. So the “Newport boat” at the time “Cthulhu” was written could have been either “Mount Hope” or the “New Shoreham”.

Anyway, enough of untangling the boats. Let’s get to the beach. Emerging from hibernation in spring, Lovecraft would take one or other Newport boat and then might hike out from the town “into the Bishop Berkeley country … some four miles beyond Newport beach on the road to Middletown”, through green fields of what he termed “sportive lambkins”. He enjoyed the coastline, beaches and rocks that lay behind and away from the town and the tourists.

Here we see James A. Suydam’s establishing view of this especially favoured place at the back of Newport, the “Paradise Rocks”. The “Hanging Rock” end of these gives a wide firm cleft for sitting and also views to nearby places named by locals “Paradise” and “Purgatory”. The end rock reminds one of the “sizeable table-like rock” in “The Dunwich Horror”.

A detail from a further painting shows the rock’s relation to the wide beaches and ocean, complete with one of Lovecraft’s “sportive lambkins”…

I once had a blog post on these two places, but sadly it was one of the few to perish when the blog blew up. However, I find that I can now recover the sketch-view from that post. This apparently shows “Paradise” (below the artist) and “Purgatory” (a deep cleft, down in the high headland seen across the beach/salt-grass).

Lovecraft visited many times, but also had at least three extended visits with his rock-appreciating geologist friend Morton. There was a Lovecraft-Morton visit in late June 1930, and again in the hot late August of 1932 when they explored the rocky cliffs and knoll and…

discussed the cosmos with Dean Berkeley’s shade

This being a reference to the British philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, a thinker who had especially enjoyed Newport’s “Hanging Rock” two hundred years earlier in circa 1728-32. Berkeley believed, among other things that “reality isn’t separate from perception” and he was a deep thinker on language who was later compared to Wittgenstein. The “Hanging Rock” being where, as Lovecraft put it…

Berkeley used to sit reading, writing, or meditating

In Selected Letters II Lovecraft gives a correspondent precise directions on how to find the place, once out of the town. One then has to assume that the area was not much signposted, and there would be no-one from whom to ask directions.

Here a detail of the “lip” at the “head” of the rocks, where one might perilously picnic or perhaps write competitive poems (Lovecraft recalls such a contest here, with the ocean-loving Wandrei)…

A rough study in oils by the local macabre and stained-glass artist John La Farge (1835–1910) also usefully indicates the highest-point elevation, of the sort on which Lovecraft might have “discussed the cosmos”…

we looked down from our exalted perch — a perch which 200 years ago was a favourite of Dean (later Bishop) Berkeley as he composed his famous Alciphron … We had splendidly hot weather all along — thermometer around 90˚.

These are my notes of interesting points found in the first third of the book Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei (2019).

The year is 1927. All quoted letters are from Lovecraft unless otherwise stated. This part of the book also gives letters from Wandrei.

p. 26: Among critics of the time, “Their idea of fantasy is the sophisticated snickering of James Branch Cabell”.

p. 29. He gives a short list of the “Utopian things” that he read when young. One of these is named as “Wells’ “The Time Machine””. This is interesting as, according to Letters to Family, The Time Machine was only read by Lovecraft in November 1924. We know now that this 1924 edition was a library copy, borrowed for Lovecraft by Long, and thus did not come from the Wandrei collection of early science fiction. So, did Lovecraft actually read this seminal work when young, forget it, and then re-encounter it afresh much later in 1924? It sound like it.

p. 29. Also on the list of “Utopian things” read when young is “Parry’s “The Scarlet Empire””. This was a satirical novel published 1906. A young socialist tries to commit suicide at Coney Island, but is rescued from the water by Atlantean socialists who secretly dwell offshore. He is quickly shocked into awareness that their socialist city requires a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, severely limiting free speech and also persecuting love as ‘reactionary individualism’. A love interest occurs. Escape from tyranny, and destruction of the underwater city by submarine torpedo. The latter point recalling the fate of the reef off Innsmouth.

p. 32. “The Black Cat used to have some excellent fragments of the macabre”. This national news-stand story magazine was the predecessor of Weird Tales, though it seems Lovecraft did not read it all the way up to the crossover date. A footnote give a line from the letters to Barlow. He “began to notice it” about 1904 [approx age 14] and then would “buy that reg’lar like”. So the period to look for such tales from The Black Cat, would be 1904 onward. The cessation date of his reading is is unknown.

p. 54. “My love of the weird dates from fairy-tale days, my curve of taste running [first] through Grimm…”

p. 63. “To my mind, the only really beautiful life which the decaying world can hope to know in the years to come is that of the small, aloof nations with primitive simplicity and strong nationalist self-consciousness; insular centres of ancient, intensively individual & tenaciously vital cultural impulses like Iceland or Ireland. These places are still alive, enjoying unbroken communion with the creative forces behind them…”

p. 65. Among a wider world ‘if only I had the funds’ travel itinerary, he notes various places in northern Europe which he would especially like to visit. “Old England [of course, but also] Nuremberg [in Bavaria], Ratsibon [old name for Regensburg, in eastern Bavaria and with a Slavic culture], Mount Saint Michel, Chartres [both big ancient religious sites in northern France].” Why Bavaria? His recently written Dexter Ward has Baron Ferenczy’s castle, of course, though the location there is “dark wooded mountains” near Klausenburg (a nod to Stoker’s Dracula). But that’s Transylvania. The likely Bavarian interest surely comes rather from the Voss book The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter which Lovecraft found, though “not weird”, … “makes the wild Bavarian hills and deep woods and hellish lakes quiver with a malign and poignant vitality. … The man who dreamed this scene knew Bavaria from the bottom up.”

p. 67. In 1926 he had acquired the book The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain by John H. Ingram.

p. 77-78. “But still the little ancient lanes lead off down the precipice to the west; spectral in their many-peaked archaism, & dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old [Providence] waterfront recalls its proud East India days […] sometimes I venture down into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces and nameless odours, winding from South Main to South Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers [i.e. the ‘Newport boat’ from “Call of Cthulhu” etc] still touch […] the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen [i.e. large sailing-ships] used to ride at anchor. Just this week there is a genuine old-time sailing ship in port — a rare occurrence now — and I love the sight of its antique masts above the centuried warehouse roofs.” See also page 98.

Heavy cargo, coal and oil docks on the left. Passenger docks and ‘non-messy’ freight on the right. Here we only see half the waterfront, since it ran on until it reached Fox Point which was where the New York boats docked.

p. 100. Charles “Fort is a close personal friend of Weird Tales author Edmond Hamilton, to whom he has suggested several story plots appearing in the magazine.”

p. 126. There is a marvellous extended description of his first visions of the ‘dream New York’. In Prospect Park at dusk… “the bronze lions crouch cryptic beside the marble quays of templed lakelets”. These were western-type lions, not Asian ones. He also gave Wandrei an extended two-page itinerary of things and place to see on a first visit to New York City, including Harlem. “Also walk across the High Bridge, which Poe loved”.

p. 131. He lists the used book shops then in Providence. “You will part with many a shilling at Eddy’s, The Old Corner, Gregory’s, Tyson’s, and so on.” Wandrei eventually spent $50 at such shops, then a large sum, and had to hitch-hike home. This develops into quite a hobo travelogue for Lovecraft from Wandrei, and there is a fine passage describing Wandrei’s entrance into Chicago on a powerful motorbike. Wearing goggles and mistaken for plain-clothes police, they were waved through all the city’s grids and jams.

Wandrei appears to have something of a spending problem at this point, as he later purchases two Clark Ashton Smith paintings, which apparently cleaned him out for the next year.

p. 132. At the Metropolitan Museum, Lovecraft recalled he “revelled in the new Wing K — the Roman garden with the statues. A certain austere head of a tight-lipped old Republican Roman is as much a favourite of mine as that effeminately pretty Antinous-type Hellenic head in the corridor is a favourite of Loveman’s.” Wandrei was then in New York with Loveman, and this seems a fairly clear ‘tip off’ to the lad about Loveman’s amorous inclinations.

The Met has pictures of “the Roman garden with the statues”, made in 1925…

p. 141. Confirmation by one who had visited, that Dwyer did indeed live on the lapping edge of a newly-created reservoir [re: “Colour out of Space”]. Wandrei described to Lovecraft… “a little farmhouse near the edge of the Ashokan reservoir which gives New York City its water.”

p. 147. I’ve just read [Wells’] “War of the Worlds” for the first time, in Amazing Stories. … the best thing of H.G.’s which I’ve ever seen”. This is 9th August 1927, and would be Lovecraft’s first encounter with the Wellsian idea of the ‘creeping red weed’.

p. 146, 150-51. Possible relevant to Lovecraft’s “Plan of Foxfield — for possible fictional use”, though never used. Lovecraft plans to visit “the ancient Deerfield region” with an architecture unlike that found elsewhere. He visited circa 19th-23rd August 1927, when he called it “The summit of my earthly ambition — I’ve gone broke on postcards”. Cook added a note that HPL had spent the then-handsome sum of $5 on Deerfield postcards. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). I’m uncertain if this suggests a link with Deerfield.

Deerfield Burying Ground, with olde style carved face on gravestone.

p. 156. Lovecraft suffered a night in the primitive YMCA at crumbling Newburyport, at the end of August 1927. This confirmed all of Wandrei’s prejudices about YMCAs, and sounds like a precursor to the overnight room in Innsmouth.

pp. 162 and 167. Lovecraft returns to Jake’s on the Providence waterfront, and discovered there was a “Jake”…

Talman enlightened me concerning the identity on “Jake”. It seems there is a real person by this name — Adam Jacques — who actually pronounces his patronymick Jakes. This is the big boss — and you may be able to recall him as the somewhat thick-set man with the moustache. … Domingo, however, is the life of the place.

Jake’s appeared in the Providence Journal, 10th September 1927. Lovecraft sent a cutting. The letter was 11th September 1927, but the letter and cutting are not in the Brown repository. But apparently the newspaper archives for this date have survived.

Incidentally, I read that Lovecraft later had some criticism of Donald Wandrei, to others. But that was surely later than 1927. In 1927 he’s obviously very pleased to have newly discovered the “new Galpin” and to have successfully introduced him to the Circle.

This week on ‘Picture Postals’, back to the city of Providence from New York. A restored and colourised 1971 picture of the sad fate of the site of Lovecraft’s final home, the house at 66 College Street. The roadway is just off-camera to the right.

Though it should be said that his house was at least moved and not destroyed, being slowly rolled through the streets of his city like a ominous rumbling monster. And at least the brutalist late-modernist block (the ‘List Building’ aka ‘List Art Building’, ’64 College Street’) seen here was to be used as an Art History building with an incorporated Gallery and studios. The worthy British art historian Kenneth Clark (Civilization) gave the opening address for the building, another factor Lovecraft might have approved of. Further, the building’s elevation and windows serve to preserve something of Lovecraft’s views across Providence to the west when the leaves are off the trees.

On the right one can see the back of the John Hay Library at Brown, with its back-terrace invisible from this angle. Today this holds Lovecraft’s letters and the Lovecraft Collection.

Lovecraft’s house stood about where the central elevated small block is, as seen here. With a back wing (not seen here) going further back…

As can be seen, by 1971 the quiet 1930s courtyard garden is now a two-part car-park divided by a central wall, but some of the trees and large shrubs on the left may have been retained. They may have once formed a border along which the K.A.T. roamed.

The building’s hilltop position, limited $3m budget and narrow plot required compromises. A page on the Brown website now observes that much of the building often has a dark and haunted feel, which seems most suitable for the site of H.P. Lovecraft’s house. It was largely designed for its incongruous external ‘look’, and was presumably deliberately intended to damage the coherence of the sense-of-place on College Hill. As a consequence…

“Room divisions are awkward and classrooms often artificially-lit … Long empty corridors feel abandoned and ghostly…”

Though a dark and spectral feel is perhaps a good thing. University managements have a tendency to turf out friendless and un-trendy humanities subjects like Art History from fine buildings — especially ones surrounded by leafy and westward hilltop views — for re-use as their own office space. I’ve seen it happen myself, at Birmingham. Monstrosity, gloom and strange angles have their uses, as H.P. Lovecraft could have told the current Art History Dept.

This week on my Friday ‘Picture Postals’, back to Brooklyn and to another type of food “filling station” frequented by Lovecraft. Thanks to the wonders of the Interwebz we can actually go inside the very Automat that was fitted into the space of the former Bristol’s at 3-5 Willoughby Street.

You’ll recall that Lovecraft’s favourite restaurant of “John’s” was next door to this, at No. 7. This Automat wasn’t constructed until after Lovecraft left New York City. The available evidence suggests this Automat arrived in 1933 and lasted until about 1954. This is what it looked like inside and it was fairly typical of the type…

Its big plate-glass windows usefully show us what was on the other side of Willoughby and thus was opposite “John’s”, albeit about a decade later than the 1925-1930 period in which John’s existed at No. 7. The cigar store seen on the Transit Authority glass-plates of 1916 is still there, but by this date has rather incongruously added “Luncheons”. Perhaps there was a demand for places to eat lunch where one could also smoke a cigar? Across the road in the far distance we see the other entrance to the platform on the Elevated railway line…

Lovecraft may not have used this automat, but he patronised plenty of the earlier mid-1920s automats while living in and visiting New York City. Also in the various large cities visited on his travels. This particular automat was part of a chain which had over 150 branches in New York and Philadelphia by the mid 1920s. Here is the card for their Broadway branch, which has the chain information on the back…

Evidently before the vogue for Art Deco they were rather more Gothic in feel. Thus, it would be wrong to imagine an Art Deco background for a meeting of Lovecraft and Loveman at an automat in 1925. A combination of glitzy fairground Wurlitzer and a wall of dispensers resembling a Gothic church organ seems to be ‘the look’.

‘Wurlitzer’ 1910s and 20s

‘Deco’ 1930s

Frank Gruber’s pulp-writer’s memoir The Pulp Jungle explains how they worked…

The Automat restaurants, which are peculiar to the East [of the USA], are just what the name implies. You get a flock of nickels from the cashier, then go down the battery of little cubicles, inside of which repose the articles of food that appeal to you. Pie, sandwiches, whatnot. In 1934 a sandwich was ten cents. You put two nickels into a slot, turned a knob and you were then able to open the little door and take out the sandwich. There were a few things the inventors of the Automat were not able to lick, such as coffee. You put a nickel into a slot, held a cup under a nozzle and got a cupful of black coffee. Sugar and cream, however, had to be on the table.

Lovecraft’s 1925 Diary is peppered with instances of automat meals, especially when meeting Samuel Loveman. I was also pleased to find one of these Diary instances reveals he did visit the Botanic Garden in Brooklyn, a place which was the subject of a Tentaclii ‘Picture Postals’ post a few weeks ago…

April 16. Out early — Mc[Crory?] — meet JR, [at] Zoolog. Park — Botanic Garden — down to Boat — explore &c. — Automat.

For Lovecraft, unlike many others, an automat was also an opportunity for a cash-saving takeout. For ten cents extra at one of these places he could also pocket..

my breakfast supply of cheese and peanut butter sandwiches

Such just-in-time delivery was often useful in terms of preventing “rodent marauders” from visiting his room. In many cheap places Lovecraft stayed, there might really be rats in the walls. Many New York City automats were 24-hour places, so could be visited after a long night-walk through the city. Probably they were also 24-hour in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Another automat favourite was the Hot Chocolate “potion”, as he called it. He found that it and cocoa were unavailable at regular restaurants.

In the above picture of the Willoughby Street interior you can also see the upper balcony on the left. Such places became a haunt of the earliest science-fiction fans, possibly attracted by the Art Deco futurist vibes. Charles Hornig recalls, of the time he was writing to Lovecraft, that…

We had a series of impromptu meetings, mostly on the balconies of automat restaurants, where we would spend hours discussing our favorite topic [science fiction], until we were thrown out by the management.