This week, following on from last week’s newspaper focused ‘Picture Postals’, a look at Lovecraft and comic-strips.

Lovecraft did not have a high opinion of the early pre-First World War newspaper comic-strips, which arguably was where mass-market comic art was born. But he may have been sent some as newspaper clippings by his correspondents. We know he did enjoy at least one early comic-strip character from the newspapers, sent to him that way. As he wrote in 1917…

my taste generally rebels at comic-supplement humour; I must confess to many hearty laughs over the particular “Outburst of Everett True” [strip, sent by Moe]. This forms my first acquaintance with that beefy gentleman of pictorial fiction, since the New-England dailies of the first rank do not use the conventional “comics.” […] the humour [found here] is not at all inconsiderable”.

‘The Outbursts of Everett True’ was a strip which featured a portly and rather grumpy looking middle-aged man. He would not put up with the irritations of the modern life, a life then only newly arrived in many people’s experience. Here he tackles a ‘toy’ dog, adored at first and then neglected by its owner…

Barnacle Press has a fine collection of his strips online, though only to 1909. Thus the circa 1916/17 strip most likely to have appealed to Lovecraft and Moe can’t be located. The Scriptorium Daily has an appreciative article on the strip, which explains the approach.

It seems a pity that Lovecraft could not have enjoyed more of this fledgling and lively art-form. But evidently he was early put off by seeing the comics in “the Hearst Sunday papers” in perhaps circa 1910-1915, when he would have been age 20-25 and at last putting aside childish things (he was a late developer, as many Lovecraftians will recall). Perhaps this partly explains his adverse reaction. As he wrote in September 1916…

It is evident that those who depreciate British humour must have taken pains to avoid its perusal, since it has a quietly pungent quality seldom found save among Anglo-Saxons. Personally, we believe that the summit of [American] clumsy pseudo-jocoseness is attained by the average “comic” supplement of the Hearst Sunday [news]papers. These, and not the British press, present the pathetic spectacle of utter inanity and repulsive grotesqueness without the faintest redeeming touch of genuine comedy, legitimate satire, or refined humour.

Ouch. Definitely not appreciating those strips, whatever they were. What then were the “Hearst Sunday papers” at that time? Almost certainly Hearst’s New York Sunday American, U.S. sales circulation nudging one million? Probably taken by one of his aunts, or perhaps seen at the barber shop. The comic artist Winsor McCay (Little Nemo) was with Hearst from 1911, though not it seems doing Nemo. George Herriman (Krazy Kat) was also with Hearst for many decades, though Krazy was barely born by circa 1915 and was confined to a narrow ‘margin strip’ in b&w…

How many pages would Lovecraft have seen? The New York Sunday American had 12 pages of colour comics by 1924, having gone to eight pages of comics in 1922 when it “doubled” its comics pages and introduced colour printing. Therefore it likely only had four pages of comics when Lovecraft perused them, and these pages were in black and white or perhaps two-tone.

23rd April 1916 is said to have been the first full-page Krazy Kat strip, but that appeared in the new Saturday “City Life” supplement of the New York Journal, “devoted to arts and entertainment news”. Thus it was not in the Sunday paper that Lovecraft was reading.

It then seems Lovecraft in circa 1915-16 was a little early to have encountered the mature Krazy Kat of 1922 onwards, and he was anyway reading the wrong edition/title. He was also too late to have appreciated the weird and sublime U.S. Sunday strips surveyed in the book Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1915 (2011). It seems these had petered out by 1915, perhaps partly due to the new wartime mood…

these early fantasies really did get “lost”. And that makes a certain amount of sense: The kind of visionary drawing and thinking here isn’t usually sustainable, and neither is it usually character-based — two things necessary for a long commercial run. Many of these practitioners moved on, or back to, children’s books and illustration.

It is however possible that the rapidly maturing and expansive 1920s Krazy Kat (and Ignatz the mouse) strips were sent to Lovecraft as occasional clippings, by his New York City anarchist friend James Morton along with his regular letters. Since in a letter to Morton of 1924 Lovecraft wisecracks about the inner goings-on at Weird Tales magazine, using the ‘snappy patter’ style learned from his young friend Albert Sandusky (aka “Wisecrack Sandusky”). In doing this he seems to allude to Ignatz the mouse…

Wot a inside corneal circumnavigation(*) I’m getting on Weird Tales! I want you should tell ’em, Ignatz!

(* inside corneal circumnavigation = a close-up inside look at things. The cornea is part of the human eye).

Firmer evidence is found in Lovecraft’s long essay on “Cats and Dogs” (November 1926), where he talks of the blind idiot-love owners have for grotesque dogs, comparing it to…

the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily ‘cute’, which we see like-wise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the “Billiken” or “Krazy Kat” order, found in the “dens” and “cosy corners” of the would-be sophisticated cultural yokelry.

The latter point being perhaps an allusion to the use of full-page Krazy Kat strips in Hearst’s attempt to appeal to the “sophisticated cultural yokelry” via the Saturday “City Life” supplement of the New York Journal, which was “devoted to arts and entertainment news”. If I am correct then this suggests Lovecraft not only knew the strip, but also where it was published. If in New York City his friend Morton was regularly getting this Saturday ‘City Life’ arts supplement, as is likely, then he would have thus had access to the maturing full-page Krazy Kat strips. What’s the betting that he sent at least one of these surreal pages to the cat-loving Lovecraft? But did Lovecraft ever get beyond thinking of it as the weekly “malformed decorative trumpery” of the New York arts set? After all, the strip ran to 1944, so he could have encountered it in its mature form 1927-37. But we can’t now know, since — so far as I know — he makes no other mention of Krazy.

1922, a brief foray into colour.

This week on ‘Picture Postals’, I stay with Lovecraft’s city of Providence, anticipating the city’s coming NecronomiCon / Armitage Symposium later this year. Here I’ve found a rare wide ground-level view of the Marketplace at the centre of the city. Most such views are elevated.

Marketplace looking toward State Capitol

The date is perhaps 1900, Lovecraft then aged 10 and forming an ever-widening picture of his city based around central hubs such as this. The river is below and on the left, and we can see a bit of the bridge across it. In the distance is the State Capitol building. On the far right, the Board of Trade building, seen below ‘head on’ and with College Hill behind it.

Board of Trade looking toward College Hill

The area where the panorama cameraman is standing was the weekly marketplace. Off-camera to the right would have been the ‘Old Brick Row’ (which Lovecraft later tried to save from being swept away) and behind that College Hill.

The Old Brick Row

See my earlier marketplace post for pictures which contextualise the new one seen above.

This 1906 view is also a panorama which looks in the same direction, and it shows the above panorama location in the distance (just left of the chimney top). The docks area (below and out-of-sight of the spot from which this balloon-photo was made) was a place that Lovecraft would later explore with Eddy in the 1920s.

1906 view over the industrial side of the Providence docks

Anticipating the NecronomiCon and Armitage Symposium later in 2024, here’s another ‘Picture Postals’ post on Lovecraft’s Providence.

The Providence Journal daily newspaper played a significant part in Lovecraft’s coming of age. In his youth the paper informed him daily — most likely in its Evening Bulletin form — of his surroundings, in a way that adults would not have; it provided him with a slice of local public opinion in the letters pages; and it eventually offered him an outlet in print. A few examples will suffice. In 1906 Lovecraft used the letters pages to attack the ‘hollow earth theory’ of polar entrances to the earth’s interior, then still somewhat plusible. In 1912, the paper gave him his first published poem, the prophetic “Providence in 2000 A.D.”. In the 1920s he advertised in its pages for the return of his lost Houdini manuscript (whatever happened to that, one wonders)…

MANUSCRIPT — Lost, title of story, “Under the Pyramids,” Sunday afternoon, in or about Union station [Providence]. Finder please send to H. P. Lovecraft, 259 Parkside Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y.

As such, its offices would have been a visual fixture in his early mental map of the city. These offices were new at the time he would have begun to aspire to publication in a newspaper. As we can see here, the offices seen in old postcards date only to 1903, when Lovecraft was around age 13 and would have been becoming increasingly aware of the wider life of his city…

And here we see the offices from the sidewalk…

The lower floor was actually retail, and one card reveals their nature: Hall & Lyon, “the largest drug store in America”. It was one of a city chain of four Hall & Lyon drug stores at that time.

The upper floors were evidently illuminated when the offices were most busy, at night. The offices would not have been empty at this time. Journalism for a morning edition was then a nocturnal affair, and a journalist might work 8pm – 4am. Much of their work would then be reprinted, tweaked and updated, in the evening edition.

In 1918 Lovecraft commented to his friend Galpin re: the unusually large staff and number of pages, compared to a typical U.S. city daily of the period…

dailies hereabouts are inclined to run over that [standard 8-page] size to a considerable extent. The Evening Bulletin has never published less than 18 pages within my recollection, whilst it frequently runs up to 48. 30 is the average number.

He was still reading it 1922, even when away from city. In 1922 he wrote to Kleiner that he would… “read the file of the Evening Bulletin which had accumulated during my absence.” Joshi also states he read it while in New York City…

For the entirety of his New York stay, he subscribed to the Providence Evening Bulletin, [also] reading the Providence Sunday Journal (the Bulletin published no Sunday edition).

At 30 to 48 pages, this would have been a substantial daily read. Though we know he skipped the police reports and court reporting entirely. Given that ‘crime and grime’ can be a substantial proportion of local news focus, this must have reduced the time needed to read the paper.

But he probably read it closely, since he felt the papers were of “the very highest class” for local city papers (they sound like an equivalent of the UK’s Wolverhampton Express & Star in its glory days, perhaps). Indeed, he never discovered one that he thought was a better city paper. However he disliked the “poison of the vilest kind” which they sometimes carried as advertisements (in this particular case those of a “notorious beer-brewing corporation of St. Louis” which promoted an anti-prohibition message via a series of paid-for articles).

The paper must have partially made up for this, in Lovecraft’s mind, by doing something unthinkable for a city newspaper of today. Publishing what a modern newspaper reader would consider the ‘ultimate horror’… poetry. Sometimes he was even a paid contributor and (even more unthinkable today) paid for poetry, as when he had $5 for his lengthy poem “Providence” in the 1920s.

Here we see a good wide view of the 1903 building as the young Lovecraft would have known it…

Another card seems to be later, with a ‘5c & 10c’ store established opposite, changing women’s fashions, and a military recruiting station flying the flag. One feels closer to the First World War in this picture. Could this even be the recruiting station at which Lovecraft tried his best to enlist?

I can’t find any mention that the paper carried a comic-strip, spot cartoons, or even a ‘Sunday funnies’ page. So he would not have been enjoying things like Krazy Kat every day. Indeed, he wrote to Kleiner in 1917 that “the New-England dailies [newspapers] of the first rank do not use the conventional ‘comics’.”

The Journal thrived, and moved to larger offices in 1934. In the 1940s one of its journalists would become, essentially, Lovecraft’s first biographer.

The Library of the Rhode Island Historical association states… “The Library has complete runs of both editions on microfilm.” And for Lovecraftians, “A partial card file index (1915-1934) to the Journal is in the Reading Room.”

Note also that there is online access… “Full-text of locally-written articles from 1829-present can be searched, emailed, or downloaded from the Providence Journal on Newsbank”.

Rhode Island School of Design’s Pendleton Museum was a prime spot on the 1930s ‘Lovecraft tour’ of Providence, given to visiting members of the Lovecraft circle by Lovecraft himself. The Pendleton was an annexe to its main art galleries, one dedicated to colonial life as it had been lived, and it was thus a favourite Providence spot for Lovecraft.

Benefit Street, with the back end of the School of Art Museum and Pendleton House nestled alongside it on the right of the picture.

Pendleton Museum (or ‘Pendleton House’) was on Benefit Street but apparently had long had its public ‘entrance through Waterman St.’, rather than its own front entrance on Benefit. Here we see the arrangement on an early map. The map does not show the museum’s extension, present during Lovecraft’s life, which curved along the steep hillside and around Pendleton…

Public visitors would thus have had to walk through the Rhode Island School of Design galleries in order to reach the House. In “1897-8-9” the RISD entrance gallery at Waterman Street had been “an enchanted world” for the boy Lovecraft, due to the array of Greek and Roman reproduction sculpture.

In 1936, at the other end of his life, Lovecraft appears to have preferred the other end of the walk. Lovecraft told Galpin that he found the Pendleton Museum… “a perfect reproduction of a colonial mansion, containing the finest collection of American colonial furniture in the world.” There appears to them have been a connector in Lovecraft’s time, from the House to the newer art galleries on the slope below…

Attached to the north side of Pendleton House is a tiny arched, columned hexagonal adjunct no larger than a gazebo, with an interior dome. Exquisitely designed in the Neo-Renaissance manner, it provides the vestibule (out of the Pendleton House dining room) for Charles Platt’s stairway connector down the slope, through a (subsequently revamped) corridor gallery, also designed by Platt, to link the house with the so-called Waterman Galleries below.” (Society of Architectural Historians)

There were further additions. The Pendleton Museum was set to be matched with a long-anticipated new Colonial style courtyard garden, the Radeke Memorial Garden, but the project was delayed again and again until finally the plans for it were drawn up in 1933, and the Garden was not eventually realised until 1934. It was the sort of event and project that Lovecraft would have been on hand to support, and he had attended the opening of the Radeke museum extension in late April 1926. But I’m uncertain if he was also invited to the opening event for the garden. I have a vague recollection that he was there for the opening and he remarked that the garden was a little sparse in its initial planting (the opening event was sans plants but they were soon added). But I could be mis-remembering, and I can’t re-find the item.

I’ve now found good pictures of this garden, as Lovecraft would have experienced it in the years before his death as he took friends around the house, and presumably also the new garden. Though the 1934-37 planting was perhaps a little less established than seen in these newly colourised pictures. With thanks to the RISD Archive.

The statue in the niche is Pan depicted as a boy, woolly-shanked, cloven-hoofed and playing pipes. Lovecraft would surely have approved, and recalled his own sylvan boyhood shrines to Pan.

“There were in that Street many trees; elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so that in the summer the scene was all soft verdure and twittering bird-song. And behind the houses were walled rose-gardens with hedged paths and sundials, where at evening the moon and stars would shine bewitchingly while fragrant blossoms glistened with dew.” (Lovecraft, “The Street”)

The Radeke garden was restored to its original white scheme in the 1980s. It appears to be open to the public today (though may be found to be rented for weddings at weekends), and thus could be included on a Lovecraft-related tour of the city.

A fine picture of 257-267 Benefit Street, Providence, perhaps 1940s or 50s? Here I’ve newly colourised the picture. It gives a flavour of the street as Lovecraft knew it. With the NecronomiCon convention and Henry Armitage Symposium set to visit Providence again later this year, I thought a few posts on the sights (such as they can be seen on Google StreetView and old pictures) would be in order,

This was perhaps Lovecraft’s most cherished street, after his birthplace. We see here a better section, just past the Athenaeum and the College Street ‘crossroads’ with Benefit Street. The homes are still there today, although the street is marred by parked cars (sadly the AI that removes parked cars from street photos has not yet been invented)…

The pillared porches are now a painted a dull brown, presumably to hide the staining from the vehicle pollution. The once-fashionable cladding of living vines has been torn down from the brickwork.

By the look of it on the map, this would be the way that Lovecraft would have taken to walk from No. 66 down to the passenger-docks. There to meet Loveman or Morton — or anyone else who preferred to visit by the New York boat rather than by the railway.

A large part of the north section of Benefit Street was becoming slum-like in his time, with weedy and refuse-strewn gardens around rented houses, and tight shutters on un-let houses. Lovecraft would remark on…

northern Benefit street, whose appealing old houses and romantic topography merit a better fate than the slumdom now overtaking them.

This half of the street having been allowed to decay, in 1959 the city and Brown swooped in with plans to bulldoze the top of the hill, including Benefit Street. In favour of grim 1960s modernist tower-blocks. Thankfully the scheme failed. Thus some Lovecraft sites remain.

F.E. Seagrave had kept a substantial astronomical observatory at 119 Benefit Street in Lovecraft’s youth…

Mr. Seagrave, who is connected with the astronomical department of Harvard University, and who is one of the foremost astronomers of the present time, formerly had an observatory on Benefit Street in this city.” (Lovecraft, 1914)

And this was where Lovecraft would have moved into, later in his life. Had the opportunity to rent 66 College Street not arisen, he would have spent his last years alone in a rented room in…

the old Seagrave mansion where the noted astronomer F.E. Seagrave dwelt & had his private observatory until 1914

Instead, from his window at 66 College Street, the treetops of Benefit Street rimmed the sunset views of his city with the darkening cosmos above it.

Possibly Lovecraft had the worrying decline of this northern section of Benefit Street in mind when writing the political fairy-tale “The Street” in 1919. At 135 Benefit Street was “The Shunned House”, also the inspiration for his poem “The House”.

The decline continued, after his death. By the early 1940s the real-life street harboured a “vice palace”, raided by the FBI. A depressing novel of the time, set in a seedy boarding-house in the northern part of the street, provoked While Benefit street was young (1943) and The pageant of Benefit street down through the years (1945), publications which defended the street against the impression that all of its mile length was now a slum. By the 1960s restoration work on the supposedly ‘beyond repair’ houses in the northern section had begun, brick sidewalks were renewed by craftsmen along with the addition of more in-keeping lamp-posts.

Further along the street again, Ken Faig Jr. has Lovecraft’s uncle living and working as a doctor at 186 Benefit Street. Lovecraft’s funeral service was held opposite, at 187 Benefit Street. The grim irony of a funeral parlour facing a doctor’s house would not have escaped the young Lovecraft. What appears to be a city Armory would have been alongside the doctor’s house, adding another layer of irony. Aka the Benefit Street Arsenal, or the Marine Corp Armory. Not to be confused, it seems, with the much bigger State Armory which was also in Providence.

Judging by Google Street View, 186 Benefit Street is now a car-park, but 187 remains…

The Poe-haunted St. John’s Churchyard could be accessed off Benefit Street. His beloved Pendleton House (‘Colonial House’) and the neighbouring RISD Museum were at 224 Benefit Street (on which more next week).

This week on ‘Picture Postals’, Lovecraft’s Hope Street high school, in an (admittedly rather mundane) view I’m fairly sure I’d not seen before…

And his Grandpa Whipple’s school, the East Greenwich Academy, in another more pleasing card…

This gave Lovecraft a very significant element of his own schooling, via a book from his grandfather’s time…

I had always had an ear for rhythm, and had very early got hold of an old book on “Composition, Rhetorick, and Poetic Numbers” […] used by my great-great grandfather at the East Greenwich Academy about 1805.

[As a young boy] for my guidance in correct composition I chose a deliciously quaint and compendious volume which my great-grandfather had used at school, and which I still treasure sacredly minus its covers:

THE READER:

Containing the Art of Delivery — Articulation, Accent, Pronunciation, Emphasis, Pauses, Key or Pitch of the Voice, and Tones; Selection of Lessons in the Various Kinds of Prose; Poetick Numbers, Structure of English Verse, Feet and Pauses, Measure and Movement, Melody, Harmony, and Expression, Rules for Reading Verse, Selections of Lessons in the Various Kinds of Verse.

By Abner Alden, A. M.

This was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence. It was in the “long S”, and reflected in all its completeness the Georgian rhetorical tradition of Addison, Pope, and Johnson, which had survived unimpaired in America even after the Romantic Movement had begun to modify it in England. This, I felt by instinct, was the key to the speech and manners and mental world of that old periwigged, knee-breeched Providence whose ancient lanes still climbed the hill …

The edition is online at Archive.org.

For this week’s ‘Picture Postals’, a few more images to accompany my earlier and more in-depth look at St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Vesey. This was the church where H.P. Lovecraft married Sonia H. Greene, 100 years ago this week on 3rd March 1924.

By Rachael Robinson Elmar.

Most pictures of the place were and still are made in verdant summer. But, as I’ve established with reference to the weather records, the leaves would have been off the trees for the Lovecraft marriage. At the most the newly married couple might have emerged to…

a few hints of the very earliest new leaves on the trees, a sparse first flush of new grass after winter, and perhaps a few early un-opened daffodils.

Inside these two pictures give the best overview I can find. In Lovecraft’s time it appears that a British and an American flag hung down like banners on either side. By the looks of it later these were removed and there was just an American flag, discreetly draped to one side. Today it appears all the flags are gone, and there are only festoons of greenery.

The walk to the altar…

Not much time this week for a long and research-heavy ‘Picture Postals’ post. But here’s a picture that continues last week’s theme of the view from Brooklyn of Manhattan. An early colonist looks across at the growing city, from the Brooklyn side of what would become Fulton Street. The crossing would long be served by a ferry, the ‘Fulton Street Ferry’. The ferry service seems to have been discontinued by the mid 1920s, thus severing the two streets in favour of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Possibly the flat-wide craft in the centre of the channel indicates the steam-powered ferry?

Lovecraft was fond of this sort of view for his own ‘early Providence’, and he would likely have appreciated this similar view from Brooklyn. The picture also reminds one of Lovecraft’s tale of the development of “The Street” from early times to 1919.

The men, busy with labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortably, and more families came from the Mother Land to dwell on The Street. And the children’s children, and the newcomers’ children, grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses; simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights over the doors.

Which might seem all quaint and antiquarian, but this is Lovecraft… so the horror creeps in more and more. Although the final horror is ultimately given only a superficial supernatural gloss, being a horror the inhabitants have made for themselves.