It’s interesting to find out that Providence had and still has, a 2000ft tunnel under Lovecraft’s beloved College Hill. In 1914 it replaced a cable-car system, and trolleys (trams) ran through until 1948. It still serves buses today.

There was a serious plan to create a subway system, but the First World War put it on hold. The idea was revived in the 1920s, but never happened.

Apparently there was also a mile-long Providence East Side Railway Tunnel, which likewise went under College Hill. Opened 1908 and stopped carrying passengers circa 1938. Some of the basements on the hill would rumble when a train passed beneath. It’s still there, but boarded up.

Which suggests that the 1926 “Pickman’s Model” could have had a model in Lovecraft’s Providence underground train experiences, as well as those on the New York subway and the short Boston Subway?

Curtis F. Myers is an incredibly tough Lovecraft correspondent to crack. This is the best I can come up with. What we have to work with is…

   “Curtis F. Myers, 70 Clifton Ave, Clifton NJ”

There is a 70 Clifton Ave but no online record for it except some OCR false-positives for the small startup firm Electronic Mechanics, Inc. which was actually a mile away at “70 Clifton Blvd.”, located there from 1935 until around 1945/6. One interesting possibility is that Barlow may have mistranscribed “Ave” from Lovecraft’s “Blv”. That’s a faint line of enquiry, but one worth pursuing.

A small startup electronics company was at that address, developing new types of radio components using the mineral mica: “Electronic Mechanics, Inc., 70 Clifton Blvd, Clifton, N.J.” Delbert E. Replogle was founder and president of Electronic Mechanics Inc. Communications (Vol.25, p.98) reported in 1945…

   “ELECTRONIC MECHANICS CELEBRATES 10th. ANNIVERSARY. Electronic Mechanics, Inc., Clifton Blvd., Clifton, New Jersey, is now celebrating its tenth anniversary.”

This would mean the firm was established 1935. Official documents do indeed say it was formed 20th September 1935. So it was a small startup, and it was…

   “engaged in manufacturing and machining insulating materials composed of mica and glass.” […] “Early in 1938 it became apparent that the New York company required expanded working quarters”

The firm then moved its operation to a factory in Paterson, although seems to have kept its offices at 70 Clifton Blvd. until the mid/late 1940s. The firm made a bundle of money on war contracts, but didn’t pay enough tax and so was pursued by the government for back taxes in 1950. It had made some key buyout purchases in the late 1940s, and became Molecular Dielectrics in a merger in the early 1960s. We also get Replogle’s name from a Quaker journal: “Delbert E. Replogle, Ridgewood, N. J., President of Electronic Mechanics, Inc.” is listed in the Friends Journal, 15th Feb 1961.

The firm was working with bonding mica to glass (to make glass-bonded mica ceramic insulation for radio and radar units, branded until 1942 as Mycalite then renamed Mykroy). So one wonders if they drew on the expertise of Morton, Lovecraft’s friend and mineralogist expert. Morton was only a few miles away at the Paterson Museum.

The American Institute of Electrical Engineers Yearbook of 1944 has one “Shima, Rindgh” giving the “70 Clifton Blvd” address as his address “for mail”, while he lived at an address elsewhere. So Replogle was obviously happy for his workers to get mail there.

So do we have any likely candidates who could have been working there? Kenneth W. Faig Jr. suggests in the Lovecraft Annual 2012 a Curtis F. Myers (b. 1897) as the likely candidate Lovecraft correspondent. He is recorded on the 1930 census at 31 Harrison Place, Clifton N.J. (one block from Clifton Av., one mile from 70 Clifton Blvd.), working as a machinist in a woolen mill. It’s perhaps not too much of a long shot to suggest that this Myers may have made a move to being a machinist in a hot new local startup in 1935, working with mineral/glass fibres. Working with animal fibres and working with mineral/glass fibres apparently requires similar skills.

If that was him, then quite how he came to know Lovecraft is still a mystery. Electronic Mechanics, Inc. were manufacturers not retailers, so it’s unlikely Lovecraft was writing to them to get radio spares (even he could have afforded them in 1936/7, when he could barely afford food). My hunch would be that Myers was simply a fan of weird fiction who had written to Lovecraft, and that Lovecraft had kindly written back. There is no online trace of this Myers as any kind of author or fan writer.

I think I may have discovered yet another lost Lovecraft correspondent, and another Barlow mistranscription of a name on the 1937 correspondence addresses of H.P. Lovecraft…

   “Horatio L. Smith, 36 Dodd St, Montclair NJ.”

This is likely to be Horatio E[lwin] Smith (1886-1946) of Columbia University. Montclair is a leafy suburb some 15 miles from Columbia. He wrote on Poe, and was a literary academic at Brown University 1926-c.1934.

Smith (above) studied under John Erskine (A Memory of Certain Persons, p.141, noted in passing) at John Hopkins, where he took a LL. D. [Doctor of Laws in English].

Horatio E. Smith was the author of the article “Poe’s Extension of His Theory of the Tale” in the 1st August 1918 edition of Modern Philology. This is possibly how his name first came to the attention of H.P. Lovecraft. If so, Lovecraft would have no doubt remarked on a name so strikingly similar to a major writer of Poe’s time…

   “During Poe’s lifetime, one of the most popular English writers of poetry, essays, novels and tales was Horace or Horatio Smith (1779-1849).” (Burton R. Pollin, “Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith”, Poe Newsletter, June 1970).

The history of the French dept. at Amherst College supplies a useful academic biography that confirms my initial research…

   “Horatio Elwin Smith, a 1908 graduate of the College, was hired to teach French literature [circa 1919]. /their footnote: Smith held a doctorate from Johns Hopkins that was awarded in 1912./ He had taught at Yale for the previous six years [living at 837 Orange St] and specialized in the analysis of nineteenth-century texts. He wrote articles on Stendhal, Balzac, Sainte-Beuve and Poe, as well as a book on the literary criticism of Pierre Beyle [his thesis]. In addition, he wrote a textbook on advanced French Composition. Under Smith the curriculum in French would see its first course in “Modern French Criticism,” which was dedicated to the writings of Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Renan. Smith would leave Amherst in 1926 to become Chair of Romance Languages at Brown University [Providence], before assuming the same title a few years later [circa 1934] at Columbia University, where he became the editor of [the academic journal] Romanic Review [the Columbia University journal for the study of Romance literatures, seemingly serving as editor for the 1937-1947 issues].

The move to Brown University in 1926 suggests that, if Lovecraft had not noted Smith’s 1918 Poe article in 1918 or 1919, he could have learned of Smith later via a newspaper or journal profile of the incoming professor.

Smith also published a book in French “La fortune d’une oeuvre de jeunesse de Stendhal en Amerique” (1927). The Amherst College French dept. history notes he was… “named ‘Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur’ by the French government.” Seemingly this was for his work with the YMCA in France during the First World War.

By 1942 Smith was noted as… “Prof. Horatio E. Smith, chairman of the Columbia department of Romance languages”, and was on the Modern Language Association’s Commission on Trends in Education. His widely cited reference work the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature appeared after his death, in 1947. It had notable early research summaries on the writers of Dada and surrealism.

One wonders what happened to Smith’s papers and correspondence in 1946? Still preserved in some dusty boxes at Columbia, perhaps?

Stacy Tolman of Providence (1860-1935):

Portrait of Tolman.

From 1889 Tolman was a teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design, head of the dept. of drawing and painting there until 1905, thereafter teaching the anatomy class. He had his studio in the Fleur de Lys building in Providence from 1895.

The Etcher (c.1887-90), Stacy Tolman of Providence. The man depicted is the printmaker William Henry Warren Bicknell, friend and fellow student:

The Musicale (c.1887), Stacy Tolman of Providence:

Yard View, Providence (undated), Stacy Tolman of Providence:

The Interlude (1890), Stacy Tolman of Providence:

This evokes several Lovecraft stories such as “The Terrible Old Man”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, and “Hypnos”.

His late work, presumably in the 1920s, apparently showed the evidence of impressionism. One presumes that toward the end of his life Providence gave Tolman a major retrospective exhibition, which Lovecraft would have likely seen (unless he was away in New York at that point). I can’t find one, but there was a 1935 list catalogue for a Memorial Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Etchings by Stacy Tolman.

It is quite probable he was a teacher of Lovecraft’s Providence correspondent (and probable local friend) Frederick Allen Wesley, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design as evidenced by the 1903 yearbook (and probably also studied there in later years)…

There is an ink drawing of Wesley by Tolman, not yet available online…

   Rhode Island Historical Society–Graphics Dept.:
   ACCESS RESTRICTED. APPOINTMENT REQUIRED
   1. Ink drawing, “Frederick Allen Wesley” (call# Graphics XXB Painting T652 1)

Given this, one wonders if Lovecraft’s friend Wesley was the model for the artist in “The Call of Cthulhu”…

“who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity”

Note that the last “A.W.” initials of Henry Anthony Wilcox are the same as those of Frederick A. Wesley, and that Lovecraft has a tendency to slip his friends into his stories.

One wonders if the Tolman portrait of Wesley will show something of Lovecraft’s description of Wilcox in “The Call of Cthulhu” as a…

   “thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect”

Articles:

Ralph Davol, “An Appreciation of Stacey Tolman“, Brush and Pencil, an illustrated magazine of the arts today, Vol.7, Dec. 1900, pp. 163-172.

John. I.H. Baur, “A Painter of Painters: Stacy Tolman”, American Art Journal, Jan 1979, pp.37-48. 14 illustrations.

There appears to be an extant portrait picture of the obscure Lovecraft correspondent from Providence, Frederick Allen Wesley of 6 Hammond Street….

   Rhode Island Historical Society–Graphics Dept.:
   ACCESS RESTRICTED. APPOINTMENT REQUIRED
   1. Ink drawing, “Frederick Allen Wesley” (call# Graphics XXB Painting T652 1) [ink drawing by Stacy Tolman]

Source: Unveiled: a directory and guide to 19th century born artists active in Rhode Island, and where to find their work in publicly accessible Rhode Island collections, by Elinor L. Nacheman. (2007).

Stacy Tolman. (1860-1935) [portrait]. “He was an early member of the Providence Art Club, and Providence Watercolor Club. His studio, previously used by Charles Walter Stetson, was in the Fleur de Lis Building, in Providence with Sidney Burleigh, George Whitaker, Chester Dodge, Frank Mathewson, and Gertrude Parmelee (Cady). Tolman traveled to Europe and the Middle East to paint, and exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.”

This would seem to link Wesley in some way with the Providence Art Club? And/or to the art scene of the Fleur-de-Lys Studios building (a building which also features in “The Call of Cthulhu”).

Possibly Wesley was an artist or designer himself. I have found a “Wesley, Fred A.” in Rhode Island School of Design Year Book 1903 – Volumes 25-28 – Page 69, taking a course there…

He appears to be taking the first and presumably foundational course, and so was presumably a junior student. If he had been born 1885 (as Ken Faig has found) then in 1903 he would have been of the right age to be an 18 year old freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design. Tolman was then a leading teacher there. One wonders if Wesley might in time have become an assistant apprenticed to Stacy Tolman or one of the other artists in the Fleur-de-Lys Studios?