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.

In these unhappy times, a look at a happy moment in Lovecraft’s life. Here are some views of the church chosen for Lovecraft’s wedding on the 3rd March 1924.

As Lovecraft had it…

St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Vesey Streets, built in 1766, and like the Providence 1st Baptist design’d after St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields! [in London] GOD SAVE THE KING!

Neither Lovecraft or Sonia were religious, of course, but in those days a proper olde church it had to be — for a Lovecraft wedding. He appears to have chosen the place not simply for tradition, but also for its Colonial British architecture and family connections. It not only fitted…

most strongly Old Theobald’s traditional and mythological background

… but also echoed (in name only) the St. Paul’s church in Boston where his parents had married.

The cards and photos in this post are a little un-seasonal. March 1924 was famously very dry in New York, with very little early spring rain or snow, and the east coast down to Cheasapeake Bay was “warmer than normal” (Climatological Data for the United States by Sections, March 1924). Despite this and the city’s urban heat-island effect, early in March there would not have been the sort of spring/summer verdancy seen in these churchyard pictures. We might instead imagine 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.

We beat it to the Brooklyn borough hall, and got the [marriage licence] papers with all the coolness and savoir faire of old campaigners [… then ] Eager to put Colonial architecture to all of its possible uses … on Monday, March the Third, [I] seized by the hair of the head the President of the United — S. H. G. — and dragged her to Saint Paul’s Chapel, … where after considerable assorted genuflection, and with the aid of the honest curate, Father George Benson Cox, and of two less betitled ecclesiastical hangers-on [i.e. witnesses], I succeeded in affixing to her series of patronymics the not unpretentious one of Lovecraft.

Here we see the altar, albeit some decades later in time.

There were no friends or relations present…

Having brought no retinue of our own, we avail’d ourselves of the ecclesiastical force for purposes of witnessing — a force represented in this performance by one Joseph Gorman and one Joseph G. Armstrong, who I’ll bet is the old boy’s grandson although I didn’t ask him. With actors thus arrang’ d, the show went off without a hitch. Outside, the antient burying ground and the graceful Wren [designed] steeple; within, the glittering cross and traditional vestments of the priest — colourful legacies of OLD ENGLAND’S gentle legendry and ceremonial expression. The full service was read; and in the aesthetically histrionick spirit of one to whom elder custom, however intellectually empty, is sacred, I went through the various motions with a stately assurance which had the stamp of antiquarian appreciation if not of pious sanctity. Your Grandma, needless to say, did the same — and with an additional grace.

Of course, Lovecraftians now think of it as ‘a doomed marriage’. But perhaps it was not necessarily so. Had Sonia’s ill-advised independent NYC hat-shop been a success (and with the push of ‘the roaring 1920s’ economy behind it), and had her health then not have failed so badly, things might have turned out differently.

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.