New interior photos of 169 Clinton Street, at the edge of the former slum of Red Hook, New York City. Sold recently for an amazingly cheap $3m (cheap by London standards, and given the size of the place). The interior is now changed, although Lovecraft might have actually found the ersatz-historical rooms (shown in the sale photos) to his 18th century taste. More interesting to Lovecraftians might be the complete floor-plan.

169 Clinton St., 2014. Judging by the elevation this could even be Lovecraft’s first-floor room. If so, it looks like the owners tried to ‘exorcise’ Lovecraft by reaching back to the earlier history of the house.

Plan: 169 Clinton St.

From 31st Dec 1924 H.P. Lovecraft had a $40-a-month (later $10 a week) first-floor apartment there in the north-west corner, with “two alcoves—one for dressing and the other for washing” (S.T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary, p.211). This room is the 15′ x 16′ front room on what is marked as the “Third Floor” on the above plan (it seems the lowest ‘Garden’ floor on the plan is what was formerly the sculleries/basement area?). He did not have the modern left-hand cupboard-bedroom (added later?), but had access to the small alcove and its walk-in-closet at the rear of the room. His own sketch plan of his room’s layout can be found near the front of I Am Providence.

He made the “shabby-genteel” place as homely as he could, following the lead of Everett McNeil who was his mentor in living-with-poverty in New York. The room hosted some of the meetings of the Kalem Club. But it appears that the whole place was basically fraying into being a slum, and what he thought was “shabby-genteel” was really a “dismal hovel”. It was under-heated and under-repaired, infested with bedbugs and mice, and (according to L. Sprague de Camp) “he found to his horror that he had Orientals as housemates”. Presumably he also had the daytime noise from the street as he tried to sleep (he was often out much of the night with the boys), since his room was directly over the street: there would have been less traffic in the mid 1920s, but probably noisier when it appeared, and there was also much more street life and children playing-out. Lovecraft was one night burgled by youths who had rented the adjacent room, and they stole his best suits and overcoat and Loveman’s $100 radio.

In that room he wrote “The Horror at Red Hook” and “Cool Air”, the complete plot of “The Call of Cthulhu”, the 1925 Diary, typed “He”, and wrote many letters…

“Something unwholesome—something furtive—something vast lying subterrenely in obnoxious slumber—that was the soul of 169 Clinton St. at the edge of Red Hook, and in my great northwest corner room.” (Lovecraft, Lord of a Visible World, p.167)

Picture: Lovecraft in front of 169 Clinton Street.

From The letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932 (1952)…

* Hart Crane [c. June 1922, still in Cleveland], on Lovecraft’s good friend Samuel Loveman…

     “You will like my classic, puritan, inhibited friend Sam Loveman who translates Baudelaire charmingly! It is hard to get him to do anything outside the imagination,—but he is charming and has just given me a most charming work on Greek Vases (made in Deutschland) in which satyrs with great erections prance to the ceremonies of Dionysios with all the fervour of de Gourmont’s descriptions of sexual sacrifice in Physique de L’Amour, which I am lately reading in trans. [translation]”

* Hart Crane [14th Sept 1924, from Brooklyn, NYC], on Samuel Loveman…

     “I have just come back from a breakfast with Sam [Loveman] […] I have been greeted so far mostly by his coat tails, so occupied has Sambo [Crane’s nickname for Loveman] been with numerous friends of his here ever since arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her piping-voiced husband, Howard Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there) kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him …”

* Hart Crane [23rd Sept 1924, from Brooklyn, NYC], Crane feeling hard-done-by and rather catty because Samuel Loveman now spends his time with Lovecraft…

     “Sam is still here, and sleeping in the back room. […] What his present plans are—I don’t know, as I have scarcely had a word with him since last Friday night. He doesn’t evidently think about spending much time with me. […] It is all right with me, because I realize that Sam touches life at very few points where I do, and this even comes into our abstract discussions of literature, quite naturally, of course, because I see literature as very closely related to life,—its essence, in fact. But for Sam, all art is a refuge away from life,—and as long as he scorns or fears life (as he does) he is witheld from just so much of the deeper content and value of books, pictures and music. He sometimes talks about them in terms as naive as an auctioneer would use. Yet he is instinctively so fine and generous that I will always love and pity him, however much my admiration is curtailed. I don’t think he will remain in New York much longer. He is really bound to his family more than we’ve ever realized, although I have thought of that a good deal. He must have the assurance of his mother’s attendance and he fancies that the “quiet” of Cleveland is a more normal environment for him. Well, if he feels that way, it’s so. Feeling, his own feeling, is the only scale there is to use in such a matter, and I shall not urge him to stay here against his will—which couldn’t be done anyway.”

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Many years later…

     “Charles Hamilton, in his Great Forgers and Famous Fakes (1980, pp.198—99), wrote that Loveman “dabbled in forgery.” For instance, he had obtained a supply of bookplates from the late Hart Crane (whom Loveman claimed had been his homosexual lover) and pasted them in books Crane would have been likely to own. Hamilton added. “Nearly every catalogue that Loveman issued was tilled with fabulous ‘bargains’ — books signed by Melville, Mark Twain or Hawthorne — a whole galaxy of great authors. All priced at ten to twenty-five dollars each. The signatures were in pencil and were not, of course, genuine; but it was exciting to study his catalogue and pretend that such bargains really existed.” (Joe Nickell, Real or Fake: Studies in Authentication, University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

     “He [Loveman] had acquired, on the death of Hart Crane’s mother, her entire archive of her son’s letters, books, and papers, a lot that included a large supply of Crane’s unused bookplates. Well into the late 1960s Loveman was pasting these into otherwise valueless books, offering them as books from Hart Crane’s library. At least once, to my knowledge, he slipped up and put a bookplate into a book not published until after Crane’s death. As senility set in, Loveman got more and more careless about signing books, using ball-point pens for signatures of authors who had died before the ball-point pen was invented. His catalogs were an endless source of amusement to those familiar with his wares. To my mind, he reached the peak of his forging career when he offered, for a mere $50, a book on whaling “annotated in pencil by Herman Melville.” I’ve often wondered who bought this treasure.” (Robert A. Wilson, Modern Book Collecting: A Basic Guide to All Aspects of Book Collecting, 1980).

So far as I’m aware, he never produced Lovecraft fakes as well. Such a pity that he didn’t sell his Lovecraft letters, rather than burn them all, if he needed money that badly.

Gorham Silversmiths, Providence, 1906 (Hat-tip: Shorpy). Gorham was one of the biggest local employers, and possible employer of H.P. Lovecraft’s father as a salesman. Although according to S.T. Joshi, the only evidence we have for that is Sonia’s hazy 1948 memories. One wonders if she might have been recalling a tale once told her by Lovecraft about his father’s cousin Frederick (1850-1893) a businessman in jewellery manufacturing in 1890s New York City, and her memory had conflated and confused the father/jewellery references with Gorham? On the other hand, it is possible that Lovecraft’s father had somehow got into the jewellery trade via Frederick.

Providence Public Library, as Lovecraft would have known it…

From The American Architect and Building News, 9th June 1900:

Providence Public Library, complete interior floor plans, 1900 (PDF link). May not display properly in Firefox, but is fine in a normal PDF viewer. Best resolution yet found: at 400% one can just about read the lettered titles for each room).

Postcard via the Providence Public Library website, indicating the colour of the entrance stonework.

* From The American Architect and Building News, 15th September 1900 (pictures were included in International Edition only, not in U.S. edition):

Rear views of the Providence Public Library, 1900.

For more historical pictures, see the Collection of Providence Public Library.

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H. P. Lovecraft and the Providence Public Library

The Providence Public Library membership card records do not appear to have survived from the pre-1914 period, nor the postal mailing list for the monthly bulletin of new books. Yet it seems highly likely that the 9½ year-old H.P. Lovecraft would have joined the new Library as a child member before the grand opening in March 1900. He was probably already a member of the old library, but not to have had him join the new one might have been deemed a very snobbish social misstep on the part of his grandfather and family.

Based on this March 1900 photo and my research on it, my hunch is that Lovecraft (who seems to be third from the left) could have been a founder member of the Library League at the Children’s Library, helping to set the standards of behaviour — as would befit a bookish lad who was the grandson of one of the city’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors.

Picture: Providence Public Library, March 1900. Photo by A. L. Bodwell, the picture taken to document the newly opened new Children’s Library and one of a series to be sent to the Paris World’s Fair. Picture is from the Collection of Providence Public Library.

Lovecraft did not attend school between 1899 and September 1902, and he seems to recall that he had sparse contact at that time with other children. At home he had several substantial and fine home libraries at his disposal. But the new Public Library would have had its enticements, as it evidently also provided exhibitions, summer trips and and lectures for its child Library League members, and so he might have visited when his variable health allowed. A particular enticement might have been the Library’s very large number of current periodicals, unavailable at home. Even from a young age, Lovecraft was always avid for magazines and newspapers. The library took, among many others: Inland Printer; National Geographic; Photo Era; Popular Science; Printing Art; New England Magazine; Punch; Saint Nicholas (popular quality children’s magazine); American Boy (popular boy’s magazine); Typographical Journal; and a handful of railroad magazines. Lovecraft was at this time also an avid fan of various popular adventure and detective fiction books that he probably could not find in his home libraries.

Lovecraft may have started using the adult sections from about age 12, August 1902, if not before. The Children’s Library section had evidently become extremely over-used by 1902, with the Annual Report suggesting some schools had informally offloaded their library responsibilities onto it. This overcrowding may have pushed Lovecraft into the adult sections, something seemingly permitted and even encouraged by the library, even if he had not already made the move. Possibly he was sometimes taken to the Library by his unmemorable private tutors, whom he seems to have suffered occasionally during 1903 and to March 1904.

But I would hazard an educated guess that it was probably from the early summer of 1904 that Lovecraft really began to properly use the adult sections of the Public Library. He was then aged nearly 14, and family calamity had recently and traumatically forced him to move to what he called a “skimpy flat” with his mother. I imagine it was quite pleasant to him to escape to the calm environs of the adult sections of the public library, rather than be shut up with his stifling mother, especially during the winter of 1904/05.

We then skip two years to find the earliest written documentation linking Lovecraft with the Providence Public Library: we have a letter from Lovecraft describing how he became very fond of a Cataloguing Room Messenger boy of his own age, Arthur J. Fredlund. Fredlund is listed as such in the Library’s 1905 Annual Report. Lovecraft later recalled the details for his friend Galpin…

I came across a superficially bright Swedish boy in the Public Library. He worked in the “stack” [Library storeroom for books] where the books were kept and invited him to the house to broaden his mentality (I was fifteen and he was about the same, though he was smaller and seemed younger.) I thought I had uncovered a mute inglorious Milton (he professed a great interest in my work), and despite maternal protest entertained him frequently in my library. I believed in equality then, and reproved him when he called my mother “Ma’am”. I said that a future scientist should not talk like a servant! But ere long he uncovered qualities which did not appeal to me, and I was forced to abandon him to his plebeian fate. I think the experience educated me more than it educated him — I have been more of a cynick since that time! He left the library (by request) and I never saw him more….” (21st August 1918, Letter to Alfred Galpin, Selected Letters I, p.70)

“I was fifteen” dates the start of this friendship to between August 1905 and July 1906, and strongly suggests Lovecraft was a card-carrying member of the Library at that time, and possibly even one who also had a card allowing him access to the “stacks”. The phrase “mute inglorious Milton” is from Gray’s famous poem “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard”, and the meaning is ‘an unregarded peasant genius’. So, by “mute” Lovecraft does not imply that Fredlund rarely spoke.

Lovecraft recalled in a letter that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown (winter ’05-’06)” (Lord of a Visible World, p.32), which must narrow the dates for the Fredlund friendship to Spring 1906 — Autumn 1906, since…

In the September 1906 issue of the Rhode Island Journal HPL [Lovecraft] states that his boyhood friend Arthur Fredlund had taken over as editor of the [his own] Scientific Gazette” (An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p.232)

Fredlund produced no issues under Lovecraft’s guidance, and his name does not appear in the staff lists of the Library’s 1906 Annual Report. The nature of his damning “uncovered qualities” are unknown.

It appears that Lovecraft was still using the Public Library during the early 1910s, and was delving deep into the periodical archives. Citing a Lovecraft letter to Robert Bloch, S.T. Joshi places at circa 1911-13 the date at which Lovecraft…

…read the entire run of the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal (1762-1825) at the Providence Public Library” (S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.135)

Within those dates Lovecraft also evidenced — to a R.I Senator, no less — a startlingly comprehensive knowledge of current political and legislative manoeuvrings, suggesting he was then a frequent visitor to the Library’s periodicals room.

In the absence of Library borrower membership records, the earliest surviving actual official text linking Lovecraft to the Public Library is a record in the 1915 Annual Report, in which the 24 or 25 year-old Lovecraft is noted as having that year donated three “numbers” to the library stock. Presumably these “numbers” were magazines or journal issues.

At some point he presumably discovered and comprehended the Library’s Alfred M. Williams Collection of Folk Lore, standing at a massive 1,909 volumes when catalogued in 1902, and very strong in Irish folklore. The name strikes me as being somewhat similar to Lovecraft’s fictional “Albert N. Wilmarth”, professor of literature and folk lore at Miskatonic University.

In a letter of August 1916 to Kleiner, Lovecraft states…

I intend to spend considerable time at the library searching out the various expressions and conventional proper names used by the classicists, both ancient and English.

Writing to Fritz Leiber about Shakespeare, Lovecraft remarks that he once read one of the bard’s plays…

in an early collection of the sort belonging to the public library.

When Lovecraft first discovered Lord Dunsany he wrote, in a December 1919 letter to Kleiner (Lord of a Visible World, p.71), that…

I have filed recommendations for all his works at the local publick library, and have met with favourable responses.

In a letter to Galpin of April 1920, Lovecraft notes… “I now have from the library both “What is Man?” and “The Mysterious Stranger” [both Mark Twain]”. Also in 1920, to Kleiner in September, he writes…

Saturday I went out for the first time since my journey, visiting the library & picking up an addition to mine own library at a bookstall on the way home. My new possession is entitled “Men & Manners of the Eighteenth Century,” & is by one Susan Hale — who seems to me to have more of industry than of genius.

Doubtless there are more examples of his mentioning the local library in the early letters, but I only have limited access to the letters.

In a letter of the mid 1920s Lovecraft revealed that he carried not only a regular Public Library card, but also a further card that would allow him to access the “stack”, meaning the books storeroom. He was then also well known to the head librarian… “good old William E. Foster”, who had steered the new Library through from its inception in 1900 and who was then still five years from retirement.