I’m pleased to say that I’ve acquired a copy of the Lovecraft Annual for 2015, for which thanks to my Patreon patrons. The volume arrived via Wordery, a bookseller who sent a small-format paperback in a ridiculous oversized ‘won’t fit in a letter-box’ 12″ stiff-card envelope, more suited to a vinyl LP! I doubt I’ll be using them again, for this reason. Booksellers, please take a tip from Amazon and invest in packing machinery which wraps the book such that it slips through a slim normal-sized letterbox.
After finishing it I thought it worth a quick review. This 2015 issue of Lovecraft Annual contains the usual sound Lovecraft scholarship by veteran Lovecraftians, while also offering space to promising newcomers and reviewing selected items. Three or four short filler-notes give Lovecraft news, or capsule overviews of a set of recent releases.
The book runs to 232 pages and articles usefully have on-page footnotes rather than end-notes. Illustrations are in colour, but thankfully this has not increased the list price above normal. The print-on-demand printers Lightning Source have done a good job at a modest price.
The issue opens with H. P. Lovecraft’s “Letters to Marian F. Bonner”, these being his letters to her and given in full. This appears to be the first publication of the letters, and here they are copiously annotated by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. The letters are from late in Lovecraft’s life, and they arose because of his aunt’s illness and convalescence. Bonner had worked in the Providence Public Library, in the Periodicals Room, and she lived in the boarding house at the back of the garden courtyard shared with Lovecraft and his aunt. She was a close friend of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt. Lovecraft gives no hint of having met or noticed Bonner during her Public Library employment. One then assumes that she may have worked behind the scenes, perhaps preparing and cataloguing the periodicals and newspapers for what was by then one of the nation’s leading public libraries. Lovecraft’s letters to her are ‘playfully formal’, and one almost gets the sense that a strange middle-aged flirtation is ongoing by correspondence between two intensely bookish people. One gets hints that Lovecraft was responding to some similar tone in her own letters, but those have been lost. Given that he and Bonner shared a secluded garden, there is much discussion of its furry feline inhabitants and Lovecraft offers delightfully hand-drawn letterheads illustrating these. These headers are faithfully reproduced in colour, and one shows a cat-head produced by a carved rubber-stamp sent to him by Barlow. Lovecraft here usefully confirms my supposition (see my new Annotated ‘Cats of Ulthar’) that he knew of the Greek origins of ailurophile and its meanings. Lovecraft’s library and informal ‘circulating library’ of fantastic literature is also discussed, and some local journals are usefully named (The Netropian, a magazine available to patients and visitors in the local hospitals and which carried illustrated local history articles including one on Benefit St.) and local lectures and art gallery shows (Lovecraft approved of regional marine and sea-shore artist Henry J. Peck).
The letters cease and then we have the all too brief posthumous “Miscellaneous Impressions of H.P.L.” (1945) by Marian F. Bonner herself. This is also available in Lovecraft Remembered but fits nicely here.
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s essay naturally follows, as “Can You Direct Me to Ely Court?: Some Notes on 66 College Street”. Faig’s essay focuses on the history of the house and that of its garden, courtyard and lane, rather than on the interior arrangements. I was interested to learn that 66 was the first house on its site, and only the second house ever built on the street. This explains the need for the little unpaved lane which ran down the side of the Library, this being needed to reach the house from College Street. The later grand event of the ‘moving of the house’ is not addressed, except in passing and in relation to its continuing existence on its new site. Faig goes into great detail on the house history and occupants, both before and after Lovecraft, but the paucity of the materials means that he cannot get a good idea of the look of the gardens and their plantings. He seems unaware of my 2013 “A Note on The Paxton” (in Lovecraft in Historical Context #4) in which I point out that the Paxton/Arsdale resident Sarah Bartlett Bullock (1840-1921)… “kept a diary to 1921, now at the R.I. Historical Society” on microfilm. I there suggested late entries in this diary may have a description of the courtyard and its plantings, or perhaps even some sketches made when she first arrived.
More biographical information on Lovecraft’s Paxton/Arsdale correspondents can be found in Ken Faig’s “Lovecraft’s 1937 Diary” in the Lovecraft Annual for 2012.
David E. Schultz follows with an essay on “66 College Street”. This closely examines both the architecture and the surroundings, and Lovecraft’s own sketches of the house frontage are here reprinted and compared. Schultz discovers that the Paxton was later called the Arsdale, and that it was later a Brown dormitory. I had failed to discovered these two names via online sources in my brief look at the Paxton in 2013, but I can now add a date here: 1946, which Schultz doesn’t have. The Brown Alumni magazine reported that the declining ‘old Arsdale’ at 53-55 Waterman Street became the ‘Hopkins House’ dormitory for males in 1946, when there was a sudden and pressing need to accommodate the large numbers of students suddenly returning to their studies after serving in the Second World War. One other element not noted by Schultz is my 2013 discovery of the nature of the Paxton/Arsdale’s retired residents, who were evidently very bookish and artistic people. Schultz’s essay also has excitingly clear and large photographs of 66 College St. and of some of its surrounding houses. One can even see that Ely’s Lane was still unpaved in 1941. We are also treated to Lovecraft’s outline sketch plan map of his last home, its lane and its environs.
The Lovecraft Annual usually also has a few informative filler paragraphs, where space allows. In 2015 one of these announced David E. Schultz’s annotated Fungi from Yuggoth critical edition for 2016. Yet I don’t recall it having appeared? Perhaps it was a very limited-edition hardback that I missed, and the paperback has yet to appear?
A filler paragraph also notes the new discovery of 85,000 words of new Lovecraft letters to Zelia Brown, then set to be published by the HPL Historical Society. These later appeared (in paper only) as The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop. I see this is now on Amazon, if you want to add it to your wish-list there, yet this paperback is far more affordable if had direct from the Society website.
Donovan K. Loucks goes searching for Curwen’s town-house, and finds it in two good exterior photographs.
We then sail far away from Providence with Brendan Whyte’s “The Thing (Flung Daily) on the Doorstep: Lovecraft in the Antipodean Press, 1803–2007”. This is a detailed account of the results of a search for all things “Lovecraft”, sweeping across the newly digitised Australian and New Zealand press and similar resources. It’s a useful survey that first checks for possible Lovecraft family and then outlines Lovecraft’s early reception in Australia as seen in the press.
S. T. Joshi’s “Charles Baxter on Lovecraft” is a mild title. A casual peruser of the table-of-contents might mistakenly assume it to have something to do with Charles Dexter Ward. In fact it is S.T.’s full response to some dubious congeries of derision that had appeared in the leftist New York Review of Books in 2014. A lengthy review of Klinger’s Annotated had there foolishly attempted to usher back the Edmund Wilson era, in which Lovecraft was to be deemed a pulp hack of no worth and consigned to the outer darkness. Despite having ample space in their oversized newspaper-broadsheet publication, the Review of Books had then refused to print more than a mere 400-words of Joshi’s response to the said review. Here the reader is treated to Joshi’s point-by-point response in full.
Bobby Derie’s short “Six Degrees of Lovecraft: Henry Miller” draws some interesting parallels. Much as I enjoy Miller’s non-fiction memoir The Colossus of Maroussi every 15 years or so, I have no interest in his fiction. Yet this essay is more about their parallel interest in Machen and it also touches on their later roles in helping to break down both the outright literary censorship and the implicit taboos of the 1960s. I was also interested to be reminded that Lovecraft had read The Black Cat magazine from 1904. How long he then read it for appears to be unknown, but I imagine it might have fallen away as a subscription in the breakdown of 1908. By the early 1920s he was amazed that the title still existed and until then he seems to have considered it a lost relic of his boyhood. Sadly The Black Cat was on the last of its nine-lives and it expired in 1922, thus partly opening the road for Weird Tales in late 1922. Given the likely 1904-1908 dates it thus seems unlikely Lovecraft would have seen Arthur Leeds’s “The Man Who Shunned The Light” (1915) in The Black Cat, that being an obvious fore-runner for “Cool Air” (find “The Man…” in my book Historical Context #4). It would be interested for someone to take a look at Black Cat for 1904-08 and see what supernatural items Lovecraft might have been reading there during ‘the lost years’.
David Goudsward’s “Cassie Symmes: Inadvertent Lovecraftian” takes a detailed biographical look at Frank Belknap Long’s aunt. It was she who subsidised the handsome setting and printing, ably accomplished by Lovecraft’s friend Paul Cook, of her nephew’s first volume of poetry. Goudsward uncovers some interesting details on last-minute changes to this and another book, which suggests some previously unknown Lovecraft revision work.
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s “Clergymen among Lovecraft’s Paternal Ancestors” is a partial updating and extension of his previous good work in painstakingly tracking down and documenting Lovecraft’s ancestry. One section usefully briefly summarises Lovecraft’s shifting perceptions of his paternal ancestry.
Todd Spaulding then offers a version of his Masters dissertation, here being titled “Lovecraft and Houellebecq: Two Against the World”. This is part essay and part review, and it offers a summary of Houellebecq’s reading of Lovecraft and embeds this in a set of useful short overviews of the French understandings of Lovecraft over time. The full cultural history of Lovecraft’s reception by the French (and the British/European surrealists with French connections, and related artistic and theoretical circles) is a 600-page door-stopper book that remains to be written, but this essay lays down some useful groundwork in English.
Donovan K. Loucks looks into “Donald A. Wollheim’s Hoax Review of the Necronomicon” and finds and reprints the text.
Steven J. Mariconda has a book review of S.T. Joshi’s Variorum edition of the collected Lovecraft, explaining what this limited-edition actually is, and how Joshi’s definitive texts came-to-be after vast amounts of close textual work. The final review is a scourging of a new biography of Lovecraft.
Overall this is an excellent issue, and is well worth obtaining at its affordable £8 to £15 price.
Picture: Jack Kirby at the board, from Kirby: King of Comics.
