Happy Thanksgiving to American readers of Tentaclii.

For some reason S.T. Joshi does not index ‘Thanksgiving’, this lack possibly being an indexer’s convention. But I’ve picked out a few examples in which Lovecraft mentions it. First, here again is Lovecraft’s celebration of a Thanksgiving meal made by Sonia in New York City…

Enchanted soup — apotheosised roast turkey with dressing of chestnuts & all the rare spices & savoury herbs that camel-caravans with tinkling bells bring secretly from forgotten orients of eternal spring across the deserts beyond the Oxus — cauliflower with cryptical creaming — cranberry sauce with the soul of Rhode Island bogs in it — salads that emperors have dreamed into reality — sweet potatoes with visions of pillar’d Virginia plantation-houses — gravy for which Apicius strove & Lucullus sigh’d in vain — plum pudding such as Irving never tasted at Bracebridge Hall — & to crown the feast, a gorgeous mince pie fairly articulate with memories of New-England fireplaces & cold-cellars. All the glory of earth sublimated in one transcendent repast — one divides one’s life into periods of before & after having consumed — or even smelled or dream’d of — such a meal!

Later, as if to celebrate 18 months of safe ensconcement in Providence following his New York nightmare, Lovecraft feasted mightily in November 1927. As he wrote to Donald Wandrei…

To parallel your Morphean [Morpheus, god of sleep] achievement of last Sunday, I can cite my own performance of last night – when, gorged with a Thanksgiving feast of the utmost peril to my 140-lb standard, I was overcome by drowsiness at 5p.m … & continu’d in a somnolent state till ten this morning! My dreams occasionally approach’d the phantastical in character. tho’ falling somewhat short of coherence.

In an April 1928 letter to Talman (presumably begun in 1927 and then added to slowly) he revealed…

our whole family had a Thanksgiving dinner with the Brennans this year

… by which he presumably refers to November 1927, so the blow-out must have been there. They appear, from his following accent in the letter, to have been of Irish descent. At a guess they may have been childhood friends from the Blackstone Band days, or neighbours. They don’t appear in the index of Letters to Family.

In November 1932 he told Robert E. Howard…

My really favourite meal is the regular old New England turkey dinner, with highly seasoned dressing, cranberry sauce, onions, etc., and mince pie for dessert.

And in 1934 he achieved a long-held Thanksgiving hope, though he doesn’t say exactly where or with whom…

[This] Thanksgiving I did something I have been wanting to do all my life — consumed the traditional feast on this historic soil of ancient Plymouth (less than 40 miles from here), where the whole custom started 312 years ago.

So far as I know he knew no writer or relations in Plymouth, but it’s not impossible that he had fallen into conversation with antiquarians while exploring the place, had expressed his wish and been invited.

Small State, Big History has a long introductory article “The Theaters of Providence, Part 1 – The Early Years”. Not especially focused on the key ‘Lovecraft period’ of 1894-1924, since there is much to say about Providence theatre before that, but at the end there is survey of key sources. Which may interest some new Lovecraftian researchers looking into Lovecraft’s theatre connections and theatre and cinema-going …

The next publication of note was an article that appeared in the Providence Magazine in October 1916. “Popular Amusements – The Drama in Providence” was a fifteen-page account of the theaters of the capitol city [both ancient and modern]. What differentiates this article from both the Blake and Willard books is that it focused less on the performances and the actors and more on the theaters themselves. Numerous pictures of the theaters were displayed. Also much had changed since the printing of Willard’s book in 1891 [History of the Providence Stage, 1762 – 1891] and the appearance of the magazine article in 1916 — drama now shared the stage with vaudeville and some theaters like the Modern on Westminster Street were built more for movies than live performances. [Then] In 1976 Roger Brett wrote Temples of Illusion: The Golden Age of Theaters in an American City. This account brings the story of the theaters of Providence up to the late 1940s and is most useful.

The latter book does not appear to be online, but the 1916 article is online at Hathi and with UK access.

There are a good number of pictures of frontages, but it only gives the modern Opera House a paragraph. The place is especially important because that was where the young Lovecraft had “slung from the stage” great slabs of Shakespeare, and he once recalled…

What a second home the old Opera House used to be to me!” — Lovecraft in Letters to Family.

The details of the Opera House acoustics are then interesting, if only to give a small additional bit of new data about Lovecraft’s performance there.

He would have had perfect acoustics. The remarkable building-time is also notable. Who could build a large opera house with perfect acoustics in 90 days, these days, which could then stand for 60 years and ably serve a city as its best theatre throughout that period? Yet that was what they did in 1871. Today such a project would no doubt take decades to grind through committees, planning offices, obstructionists and red-tape.

Early years of the Providence Opera House.

Researchers should also note that the Keith-Albee Collection is now fully transcribed and publicly searchable. This has the precise manager reports about exactly what was playing at key Providence theatres each week across the early ‘Lovecraft years’ when he was frequenting these theatres, and even how it was received and by which sections of the audience. Entries go along the lines of…

WORMWOOD’S DOGS. 20 mts. Full Stage. Eight monkeys and ten dogs from Great Dane to the tinest poodle, and all well trained. The comedy work of the monkeys got constant laughter. An act for children that could not be surpassed. The finish with the bicycle-riding monkeys and dog race is a scream. KINETOGRAPH [short early cinema film]. A Family of Cats. Rather interesting for the women and children.

These being the openers for a summer vaudeville show at Keith’s in the hot summer of 1908, Lovecraft aged about 17.